kottke.org posts about Politics
You’ve likely seen the famous photo of Richard Nixon with Elvis Presley in the Oval Office. When Nixon Met Elvis is a site dedicated to that short meeting with materials from The National Archives, including the letter written on American Airlines stationery that Elvis personally delivered to a White House security guard, several more photos from the meeting, and the gift that Elvis brought for Nixon (a gun! to the White House!). It’s a really kooky little story. (via hysterical paroxysm)
What the 44th president of the United States should do upon taking his/her oath of office:
President George W. Bush’s successor should renounce his monarchy. It betters the instruction of King George III, which provoked the Declaration of Independence.
Among other things, the 44th president of the United States should do the following promptly upon taking office: Transfer the impending trials of six “high-value” al-Qaida detainees before Spanish Inquisition-like military commissions to civilian courts; repudiate President Bush’s kidnappings, secret imprisonments, and maltreatments of suspected al-Qaida supporters abroad on his say-so alone-a page from Hobbes’ state of nature; denounce signing statements that declare the president’s intent to disregard provisions of bills he has signed into law because he disputes their constitutionality; and end the snobbish custom of former government Brahmins preening in their honorifics after leaving office. The Founding Fathers prohibited titles of nobility to encourage a nonhierarchical culture that honors equality before the law.
According to a poll of 109 historians, George W. Bush is the Worst. President. Ever, hobnobbing with the likes of Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Franklin Pierce at the bottom of the barrel.
This marks a dramatic deterioration for Bush. Previously he wasn’t viewed in the most positive terms, but there was a consensus that he wasn’t the “worst of the worst” either. That was in the spring of 2004. In the meantime, Bush has established himself as the torture president, the basis for his invasion of Iraq has been exposed as a fraud, the Iraq War itself has gone disastrously, the nation’s network of alliances has faded, and the economy has gone into a tailspin-not to mention the bungled handling of relief for victims of hurricane Katrina. In 2004, only 12 percent of historians were ready to place Bush dead last.
That’s the most depressing paragraph I’ve read all day. And it doesn’t even address the Patriot Act and all the other civil liberties restrictions enacted with 9/11 as the excuse.
Despite a common heritage, the social, economic, and political differences between the United States and Britain are, in some cases, great.
Like most west Europeans, Britons tend to have more left-wing views than Americans, but the first chart shows that this is often by a surprising margin. (“Left” and “right” are harder to locate than they were: here “left” implies a big-state, secular, socially liberal, internationalist and green outlook; right, the reverse.) The data are derived by subtracting left-wing answers from right-wing ones, for each country and for each main political grouping within each country. A net minus rating suggests predominantly left-wing views and a positive rating suggests a preponderance of right-wing views.
Compared to Britain, the US is a remarkably conservative nation. The companion chart is a good look at some of the data. (via gongblog)
In the middle of this interview with rapper DMX, it becomes clear that he’s never heard of Barack Obama before.
Q: Barack Obama, yeah.
A: Barack?!
Q: Barack.
A: What the fuck is a Barack?! Barack Obama. Where he from, Africa?
Q: Yeah, his dad is from Kenya.
A: Barack Obama?
Q: Yeah.
A: What the fuck?! That ain’t no fuckin’ name, yo. That ain’t that n***a’s name. You can’t be serious. Barack Obama. Get the fuck outta here.
Q: You’re telling me you haven’t heard about him before.
A: I ain’t really paying much attention.
Q: I mean, it’s pretty big if a Black…
A: Wow, Barack! The n***a’s name is Barack. Barack? N***a named Barack Obama. What the fuck, man?! Is he serious? That ain’t his fuckin’ name. Ima tell this n***a when I see him, “Stop that bullshit. Stop that bullshit” [laughs] “That ain’t your fuckin’ name.” Your momma ain’t name you no damn Barack.
(via ah)
Aesthetics has been at the heart of a lot of political discussions this season. Whether it’s Obama’s choice of font or McCain’s logo, the design web has been full of observations.
Which is why Tyler Cowen’s thoughts about the relative aesthetics of Clinton and Obama caught my eye. He starts by questioning how there can be such animosity between two campaigns when both candidates share such similar views.
Any fan of Dr. Seuss will know that policy similarity hardly matters. The two candidates represent two diametrically opposed portraits of the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Should we expect beauty, grace and universality, or should we derive our feel-good sentiments about politics from righteousness, confrontation, and sheer dogged persistence and feelings of ultimate desert?
At the end, Tyler shifts the conversation away from aesthetics toward the relationship of power and politics, but of course, power has a relationship to aesthetics. It’s simply a question of how it is wrapped.
Can John McCain, born outside the 50 United States in the Panama Canal Zone, hold the office of President?
Mr. McCain is not the first person to find himself in these circumstances. The last Arizona Republican to be a presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, faced the issue. He was born in the Arizona territory in 1909, three years before it became a state. But Goldwater did not win, and the view at the time was that since he was born in a continental territory that later became a state, he probably met the standard.
In an NY Times op-ed piece, Michael Bloomberg says that he’s not running for President but will support a candidate with an “independent approach”.
The changes needed in this country are straightforward enough, but there are always partisan reasons to take an easy way out. There are always special interests that will fight against any challenge to the status quo. And there are always those who will worry more about their next election than the health of our country.
These forces that prevent meaningful progress are powerful, and they exist in both parties. I believe that the candidate who recognizes that the party is over - and begins enlisting all of us to clean up the mess - will be the winner this November, and will lead our country to a great and boundless future.
The conventional theories in economics and politics contend that people act rationally. Elizabeth Kolbert reviews a pair of books that suggest that’s not really the case.
Some of these heuristics were pretty obvious — people tend to make inferences from their own experiences, so if they’ve recently seen a traffic accident they will overestimate the danger of dying in a car crash — but others were more surprising, even downright wacky. For instance, Tversky and Kahneman asked subjects to estimate what proportion of African nations were members of the United Nations. They discovered that they could influence the subjects’ responses by spinning a wheel of fortune in front of them to generate a random number: when a big number turned up, the estimates suddenly swelled.
Fixing Democracy, answers to the following question:
It’s the morning after the election. The president elect calls you up and says, “You know, after this grueling, absurd campaign, I now see that the state of our democracy is something we have to grapple with right away. What should I do?”
Respondents include Bill Bradley, Hendrik Hertzberg, and Dahlia Lithwick. (via snarkmarket)
A list of ten things that won’t Change no matter who get elected President.
10. The primary system: Sure, the early primaries give a handful of white, rural voters disproportionate influence over the election and state caucuses make Tammany Hall look like a golden age of democratic participation, but they’re an entrenched part of party politics at this point and it’s not wise to mess with them. Just ask the Democrats in Michigan or Florida.
Do We Really Want Another Black President After The Events Of Deep Impact?
Related: the latest episode of This American Life leads with a fascinating piece about how the funny happens at The Onion. In a lovely paradox, it turns out that the process of making funny things isn’t all that amusing…the sound of silence following the recitation of a funny possible headline in the writers’ room is deep and unnerving. (thx, marshall)
John Allen Paulos has 12 irreligious questions for the candidates. Among them:
Is it right to suggest, as many have, that atheists and agnostics are somehow less moral when the numbers on crime, divorce, alcoholism and other measures of social dysfunction show that non-believers in the United States are extremely under-represented in each category?
How would you suggest that we reason with someone who claims that his or her decisions are informed, shaped, even dictated by fundamental religious principles, which nevertheless can’t be probed or questioned by those who don’t share them?
(via 3qd)
Super Tuesday Surprise: Leading Minsk Newspaper Endorses Candidates in US Presidential Race.
The Democrats have now only two candidates who stand to chance against this powerful phalanx: Barack Obama, senator of City Chicago and nephew of Saddam Hussein; and Hillary Rodham Clinton, organizer of popular solidarity-building women’s breakfasts for discussion of hair-hygiene and of place of woman in American politics, and only official wife of number-one enemy of Serbs and all Slavic peoples, Bill Clinton.
Also: “The Woman: it is also Person!”
Eugene Mirman reports from the New Hampshire primaries in front of Wal-Mart’s, Burger Kings, and other live locations.
I saw Mitt Romney speak yesterday and at the time I was, like, I don’t really like this and then when I woke up, I HATED it.
(via mr john hodgman)
The Star Wars Guide to the 2008 Presidential candidates featuring Grand Moff Giuliani, Obi-ron Paul-obi, Hillando Clintrissian, and Wicket Huckabee.
Man, I tell you what…you read Admiral Akbar’s resume, take a look at his long career, his credentials, and it’s amazingly clear how qualified he is to run a major government. What about his prescient snap evaluation…”It’s a trap!” We sure could have used that in Iraq.
Mike Birbiglia:
I kind of feel like Rudy [Giuliani] thinks 9/11 is his birthday. He gets that excited look on his face and buys himself a cake and lights two candles and watches them burn down. And then he looks around and says, “What do I get?” And his advisors are like “$15 million in speaking fees!” and he’s like, “That’s even better than last 9/11!”
(via emdashes)
A depressing story about the media’s coverage of Al Gore during the 2000 election.
Eight years ago, in the bastions of the “liberal media” that were supposed to love Gore — The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, CNN — he was variously described as “repellent,” “delusional,” a vote-rigger, a man who “lies like a rug,” “Pinocchio.” Eric Pooley, who covered him for Time magazine, says, “He brought out the creative-writing student in so many reporters… Everybody kind of let loose on the guy.”
I want to believe that news outlets are in the business of news, not entertainment, but it’s just not true in most cases. Even more depressing is that blogs, especially political blogs, are even worse in this regard.
An interesting take on the state of politics in the US:
There are very serious social problems to be addressed, but the poor, pathetic, liberals simply haven’t a clue. Conservatives, on the other, are political sophisticated and hold clear visions of what they want. It is too bad that what they want does not include caring about the poor and the otherwise afflicted, or dealing with our natural environment. Politics in the USA is no longer Elephants and Donkeys; it is now conservative Pigs and liberal Bonobos. The pigs are smart but only care about what’s in their trough. The Bonobos are polymorphous perverse and great lovers, but will be extinct in short order.
(via marginal revolution)
Michael Frumin’s grandfather passed along to him a campaign poster from when Norman Mailer ran for mayor of NYC in 1969. The scans of the poster are wonderful.
I’m about as far from a knowledgeable design critic as you can get, but this thing is an undeniable work of art, especially in the eye of any native New Yorker.
Does anyone know who designed the poster for Mailer?
Half of the NYU students polled for an NYU journalism class survey said that they’d give up their right to vote forever for $1 million.
Jackson, Mississippi’s Frank Melton is the worst mayor in America. He carries concealed weapons without authority or permit, shuts down businesses without cause or warrant, and, my favorite:
He once bulldozed an elderly woman’s house, promising to build her a better one. He then forgot to build it.
NYC’s Chinatown is Hillary Clinton country.
In April, a single [Clinton] fundraiser in an area long known for its gritty urban poverty yielded a whopping $380,000. When Sen. John F. Kerry ran for president in 2004, he received $24,000 from Chinatown.
“The full Ginsburg” is the term for appearing on all five of the big Sunday morning political shows: This Week, Meet the Press, Face the Nation, Fox News Sunday, and Late Edition. The term is named after William Ginsburg, Monica Lewinsky’s attorney and the first person to complete this political Pokemon collection. According to Wikipedia, four individuals have completed the full circuit: Ginsburg, Dick Cheney, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton. Source: Brouhahaha, The New Yorker.
In his latest opinion piece, 9/11 Is Over, Thomas Friedman leads off with a description of an Onion article and then gets in some zingers of his own:
We don’t need another president of 9/11. We need a president for 9/12.
9/11 has made us stupid.
Guantanamo Bay is the anti-Statue of Liberty.
Those who don’t visit us, don’t know us.
Fly from Zurich’s ultramodern airport to La Guardia’s dump. It is like flying from the Jetsons to the Flintstones.
David Remnick on the current state of Russian politics and the head of the tiny anti-Putin movement, former chess champion Garry Kasparov.
In recent years, Putin has insured that nearly all power in Russia is Presidential. The legislature, the State Duma, is only marginally more independent than the Supreme Soviet was under Leonid Brezhnev. The governors of Russia’s more than eighty regions are no longer elected, as they were under Yeltsin; since a Presidential decree in 2004, they have all been appointed by the Kremlin. Putin even appoints the mayors of Moscow and St. Petersburg. The federal television networks, by far the main instrument of news and information in Russia, are neo-Soviet in their absolute obeisance to Kremlin power.
There’s also an audio interview of Kasparov by Remnick.
The Lonely Candidate blog is tracking political candidates who attempt to differentiate themselves from their opposition by claiming things like “I am the only candidate with the experience to get things done for our community”.
Over at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok is advocating a game show called So You Think You Can Be President? instead of debates to better educate voters about presidential candidates. “Presidential candidates have 12 hours to get a bitterly divorcing couple to divide their assets in a mutually agreeable manner. (Bonus points are awarded if the candidate convinces the couple to stay together.)” Awesome.
George Bush is searching for answers to account for his failed Presidency. “The reality has been daunting by any account. No modern president has experienced such a sustained rejection by the American public.”
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