At In These Times, Roger Bybee writes Labor Day 2010: Obama Returns to Milwaukee to Make Case to Working Families:

• • • • •

At Daily Kos on this date in 2005:

Welcome to a Sundae Edition of Diary Rescue. Tonight's Rangers are claude, Got a Grip, dadanation, grog, Purple Priestess and sunspark says, who also is once again running the edit machine.

It's September 5. On this date in 1793 the Reign of Terror began in Revolutionary France. Glenn Beck blamed it on Barack Obama.

Here are some scrumptious desserts somehow overlooked by so many of you but presented in today's Sundae Bar by the DR. Enjoy them and send them all kinds of kudos.

In the Science = Knowledge category:

• NNadir gets deep into the science of Nitrogen, Climate Change, Drought, and Tree Physiology. (claude)
• mem from somerville searches for ways to fill in the gap in the struggle between Science vs. Reporting. (sunspark says)

In the Gimme That Old Time Religion category:

• Radical Realist examines the interference of the religious purity trolls in the lives of those who seek a relationship with their God on their own terms in Pastor Faces Down Fox News Invective Against Inclusive Faith. (Got a Grip)
• DavidsonLoehr provokes and educates with a fascinating Monday Musing #4 -- The Story of God's Birth. (sunspark says)
• SoCaliana examines Christianity & Early Black Americans: Love Story or Necessity? And don't miss the informative discussion in the comment section. (Got a Grip)
• Tara the Antisocial Social Worker, tired of "watching Glenn Beck try to declare himself Martin Luther King Junior-Junior," presents The Gospel According to Glenn. Not. (sunspark says)
• Watch how 8ackgr0und N015e connects the dots regarding a megachurch and its financial shell games, in WARNING: Money-launderers using moslems as red herrings. (grog)

And finally, in the Miscellane-Kos category:

• Something the Dog Said offers up a tasty helping of Sunday Bread - Whole Wheat Sourdough. (Got a Grip)
• Stepping up out of the muck of the universal pie fight, Troubador presents some real thought on framing the Democratic message: Liberty, Equality, Opportunity. (claude)
• Socratic Method personalizes the struggle for the advancement of civil rights in Racism And My Family. (dadanation)

jotter brings us High Impact Diaries: September 4, 2010 and the Week's High Impact Diaries: August 28 - September 3, 2010 and BeninSC has today's Top Comments - RIP, Laurent Fignon.

Oh, and one more September 5 item:

In 1882 the US held its first Labor Day parade in New York City. Happy Labor Day, everyone!

Don't hesitate even for a microsecond to promote your favorite diaries (even your own) in the Open Thread. That's what Open Threads are for. (At least this one.)

Fox lied again.

Okay, so that's not news. And thankfully, Media Matters was there to call them out on part of it. That's not news either. The problem, however, lies in what Fox was not called out on. And it's symptomatic of what could be construed as a messaging failure for the entire progressive movement.

Let's consider the details of the story. Fox and Friends objected to Obama's characterization of the Iraq war as a venture that drove our country further into debt and harmed our economy--by using a deceptive and factually incorrect graph to imply, simply put, that the occupation of Iraq couldn't be that bad, because the stimulus was more expensive.

As Media Matters pointed out, the chart in and of itself is a lie, because it underestimates the cost of the continued mission in Iraq, and overestimates the cost of the stimulus. But Fox News managed to pull off quite a stunner on this one, because they're lying at three different levels of remove--and Media Matters only managed to address the first one. The factual inaccuracies may be the most glaring, but the deeper layers are far more pernicious. Let's consider them.

Ever heard of the so-called Red Herring fallacy? In an argument, a red herring fallacy occurs when a party in an argument seeks to distract the course of the conversation from one topic to another on which the arguer feels more comfortable. Consider this in the context of this argument. Fox took objection to Obama's claim that the occupation of Iraq had thrown us deeper into debt and harmed our economic prospects. But how was it done? By saying that stimulus was more expensive. But so what? The stimulus has absolutely nothing to do with the argument about whether or not the occupation of Iraq was a waste of money. Any argument about Iraq would requisitely hinge solely on whether the hundreds of billions of dollars spent in Iraq contributed to the deficit and harmed our economy or not. Anything having to do with the stimulus is completely beside the point and is irrelevant to that conversation.

Fox and Friends knows this. Fox likes to claim that there is some sort of distinction between its news coverage and its admittedly conservative opinion/entertainment shows, but the fact that Fox and Friends would intentionally use a well known logical fallacy to attack not just Obama's statements on Iraq, but his economic policy as well, clearly shows for the several hundred thousandth time that all of Fox News' programming has a political agenda as explicit as its contribution of one million dollars to the Republican Governor's Association.

So, we've established that the outfit at Fox News is comprised of a pack of mendacious hacks with no conscience. Again, this is not news. But the only thing that allows them to get away with it is a public perception that all government spending is inherently bad and should be judged by its amount only, rather than by its value. As I wrote a few months ago: if progressives want to defend the Keynesian economic structure that makes our liberal democracy function, it has to start by rehabilitating the idea of government spending:

While the price you may pay for goods and services is often negotiable, there's one thing that isn't: the fact that you bought something with your money, and it isn't yours any more, any more than the money I used to pay for my vegetables is still mine. I spent it; and so did you.

Spending does not exist in a vacuum. The taxes we pay do not disappear into the ether, any more than does the paycheck we receive (or perhaps used to receive). Rather, that money is spent on goods and services that we rely on to function as both individuals and as a society. Now, imagine a theoretical argument between two individuals. In this debate, one person chides another for being fiscally irresponsible on the grounds that he wasted a couple of thousand dollars gambling and bailing himself out of jail after a few bar fights when that money could have been going to his children's college fund. And the man responds aggrieved, "How dare you say that's expensive--my mortgage is more expensive than that!" The proper response to this friend is not to tell him that, no, actually, his mortgage is actually not quite so high and that his gambling debt is more extensive than he was making it out to be. What a sensible person would do instead is to chide this idiot severely for taking the insane position that what he spent his money on didn't matter.

For whatever reason, conservatives can understand this point easily on an individual level. But on the collective level of government spending, this concept for some reason becomes inscrutable. In the same way that we pay for food, shelter, clothing and the occasional hobby or pastime, our taxes pay for goods and services as well. Our job as citizens is to ensure that our representatives have the proper priorities for the way our government chooses to spend the money we provide to it. What doesn't help that mission is to have entire "news" outlets on the warpath in an attempt to persuade our citizens of the exact opposite.

Yes. I'm going to vote yes to re-legalize marijuana. I mean, c'mon, seriously.

We've got a chance with this initiative to take a bite out of a propaganda and law-enforcement campaign that kills and otherwise wrecks the lives of millions, costs billions to pretend that "progress" is being made, corrupts tens of thousands of public officials, and creates mobs of ultra-violent, ultra-rich thugs. These latter creatures treat their bloody tribal rivalries the same as do politicians and generals of any modern conflict. They write off "collateral damages," known less euphemistically as innocent bystanders, with a shrug about the inevitable costs of carrying out business.

Our drug laws, including the ban on marijuana, are lethal, unjust, hypocritical, expensive and...don't work. We know this for sure because we've got 73 years' worth of data. The results of the war on drugs that we've recently chosen not to call the war on drugs? Epic Fail. Prop. 19 would inject a tiny bit of sanity into this picture.

For anyone looking to taint anything I have to say on this subject, I'll save you the trouble of research. Yes. I've inhaled. I've gotten high on marijuana. Back in 1966 the first time. Most recently on August 26. And you can be sure I'll do it again. Just like millions of other hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding (except when it comes to pot) Americans. If that fact makes me an unreliable advocate for fundamental common sense in anyone's eyes – Geez, he's been smoking for 44 years, he must be addicted – then they should stop reading now.

Or take another route. All anyone has to do to get me to change my vote is prove that legalizing marijuana and taxing it will produce a worse outcome than keeping it illegal. After three-quarters of a century, that should be pretty easy to do, don't you think? There should be warehouses full of information showing how bad off America would be today had not some racist punks persuaded politicians to outlaw growing, selling and using marijuana in 1937. (California first banned marijuana in 1913.)

In 1933, the re-legalization of another drug, booze, took place. Its illegal period had been short, but during that time, black-market fortunes had been made, gangsters empowered, rivals killed, officials bought off, trust and respect for authority degraded. After re-legalization, the same problems that had always attended drinking alcohol continued. Some drinkers abused the stuff and were spurred by inebriation to act in ways that ruined or ended their lives or the lives of others. Greater numbers of divorce, job loss, lethargy, diseases, accidents, violence all the way to homicide and rape, including the domestic violence that was one of the temperance leaders' original purposes in pushing for the ban were and remain byproducts of the widespread availability and use of alcohol in our society. Alcohol addiction is a scourge.

And yet, though there are still "dry" cities and counties, we have not re-prohibited alcohol. You can buy it legally even in Utah. I can walk a mile and buy a fifth of whisky or drive my car and fill up the trunk with the highly taxed stuff. Marijuana, on the other hand, remains illegal in every jurisdiction, state and federal. True, I can walk or drive that same mile and buy some quality pot on the sidewalk across from the liquor store, but the merchant I bought it from would risk slammer time.

What sane excuse for this disparity can there be?

Let's pretend for just a moment that legal marijuana would generate the same number of extra deaths, the same amount of extra diseases, car and job accidents, bar fights, marital troubles, violent crimes and addictions as alcohol. I know, I know. Ludicrous. But just for the sake of argument, pretend. If someone could prove to a certainty, with psychic powers, say, that re-legalized marijuana would become as deadly as re-legalized alcohol, wouldn't that be a good reason to join Sen. Dianne Feinstein and various others of our leaders in opposing Prop. 19?

It might. Assuming we plan to re-prohibit alcohol, too. Which we will never do.

Let's stop pretending now. No doubt marijuana has a terrible impact on some users. But that impact is nowhere close to the impact of alcohol. How many marijuana-fueled homicides are there per decade? And it is nowhere near the impact of our insane drug policies.

Look at the map of Mexico. U.S. drug demand combined with U.S. drug policy has helped to obliterate the lines between Mexican states and replace them with cartel kingdoms, alternately allying with and warring on each other. The lines between the cartels and the army have been murderously obliterated as well. A group of elite, highly trained army veterans founded one of the cartels. A past chief of the Mexican government's anti-drug campaign made millions helping one cartel destroy its rival. The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates that the cartels get more than 60 percent of their revenue from marijuana sales in the United States.

Then look at Colombia.

And look at what prohibition of marijuana has done to our own criminal-justice system. Forty-four thousand currently incarcerated nationwide for marijuana offenses. In 2008 in California, there were 78,514 arrests for pot offenses. Even though 61,388 of those arrests were misdemeanors punishable by a $100 fine, they all required a booking procedure and a hearing.  Some of those convicted of marijuana felonies – known as growing and selling – are serving time in the state's overcrowded prisons and juvenile detention centers.

Thanks in part to the 1996 initiative that made California a medical marijuana state, pot is now an estimated $14 billion untaxed business here, providing a livelihood for thousands of people, the economic lifeblood of a couple of counties.  

All this makes it hard to tell whether Jerry Brown, the California Democratic Party's candidate for the governorship, was being serious or satirizing the opposition  to Prop. 19 when he recently said: "We've got to compete with China. And if everybody's stoned, how the hell are we going to make it?"

Jerry, Jerry, Jerry.

California State Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, who himself introduced legalization legislation last year, recently offered a far more sensible response:

Black-market marijuana is also a main source of revenue for the vast criminal enterprises that threaten peace on our streets and weaken national security on our borders. ... The simple reality is that resources tied up fighting marijuana would be better spent solving and preventing violent felonies and other major crimes.

Indeed. While those 61,000 people were being arrested in California on possession charges in 2008, 60,000 serious crimes were going unsolved. Instead of continuing that hemorrhage of public funds, re-legalizing marijuana will actually generate revenue. Not enough to cover the state's shortfall, for sure, but hundreds of millions of dollars that don't have to be chopped out of health and education and fire-fighting budgets.

Of course, re-legalizing marijuana in California would not supersede the federal law banning it. That law and the anti-pot treaties the United States is party to will make re-legalization problematic. Getting to real re-legalization – nationwide - is going to take time. But passing Prop. 19 would point us up the right path. Because the way to get rid of the massively bad fall-out from the drug war is to get rid of the drug war.

• • • • •

^{For your reading pleasure: The 8 Most Absurd Excuses for Trying to Defeat Legal Pot}

On the Polling and Political Wrap, I'd argue that (and this is a conservative estimate) a quarter of the comments emanate from some criticism of a particular poll based on the demographics inherent in that poll.

This is a fairly common practice for political junkies like us, and it almost always accompanies data that, quite frankly, forecasts outcomes that the critics of the data really do not like.

Looking at a number of recent polls in the 2010 cycle, we can see an ample reservoir of eye-popping demographic assumptions that could fuel these kinds of criticisms from the Left.

Do these samples have demographic characteristics that are markedly different from previous cycles?

Yes.

Do those palpable differences seem to favor more positive outcomes for Republicans?

Yes.

Does this mean that the "books are cooked" to the detriment of the Democrats in this year's polls?

Actually, I'd doubt that a great deal. Clearly, pollsters are making very clear assumptions about who will comprise the 2010 electorate. Like any assumption, it could be wrong. But they could just as easily be right, and while comparing the demographics of 2010 polling to previous cycles might feel like solid evidence, it is worth remembering that the polls in 2008 and 2006 didn't look like their predecessors, either.

Curious Demographic #1: The Enthusiasm Gorge

Our friends and polling partners over at Public Policy Polling are often described in the press as "Democratic pollsters", because they do have a handful of partisan clients (including Alan Grayson). However, one of the most appealing things about the firm is that it is evident that they play it straight, which has actually led to some pretty hilarious allegations of right-wing bias.

PPP, as a matter of clarifying their samples, asks a question that few pollsters ask, but is incredibly useful: they ask respondents for their 2008 presidential preference.

As a result, we are able to note that one of the most consistent characteristics of the samples of PPP polls in this cycle is an electorate that was far less pro-Obama than 2008.

And, as Tom Jensen spelled out earlier this week:

If the folks planning to turn out this year matched the 2008 electorate:

*Alex Sink running for Governor in Florida and Alexi Giannoulias running for the Senate in Illinois would have double digit leads.

*Elaine Marshall running for Senate in North Carolina and Pat Quinn running for Governor in Illinois would have small leads instead of trailing.

*Ted Strickland running for Governor in Ohio, Lee Fisher running for Senate in Ohio, Joe Sestak running for Senate in Pennsylvania, and Robin Carnahan running for Senate in Missouri would all be within three points rather than trailing by 7-10 as they do now.

This year isn't getting away from the Democrats because voters are moving toward the Republicans en masse. But the enthusiasm gap is turning races that would otherwise be lean Democratic into toss ups, turning toss ups into leaning Republican, and turning leaning Republican into solid Republican.

Despite the best wishes of some Democratic faithful, however, there is absolutely no reason to believe that the 2010 electorate will look anything like the 2008 electorate. When you go from a presidential election to a midterm election, you are shedding about one-third of that leap year electorate. And, as it happens, a lot of that one-third has historically come from demographic groups that would tend to support Democrats. Therefore, assuming that PPP and other pollsters are being unduly pessimistic because they are not asking enough Democrats could be an errant assumption.

That is why comparing sample demographics in 2010 to the most recent election (2008) is probably not the wisest comparison point to make. History tells us that the demographics are going to be different for a much simpler reason than some grand conspiracy: the polling samples are different because the electorate will be different. However, the next curiousity from 2010 polling I noticed not only flies in the face of 2008 polling samples, but previous midterms, as well. Therefore, this next one is worth a much closer look.

Curious Demographic #2: The Older Vote

Anyone that has ever walked a precinct on Election Day knows that the electorate skews far older than the population at large. If your walk sheet has fifty names and addresses on it, it seems as if half of them are over 50 years of age.

That said, a number of polls in this cycle have shown an electorate that has a surprisingly high percentage of older voters, and a considerably reduced number of younger voters.

Nowhere is this distinction more pronounced than in the recent spate of polls in key House races conducted by GOP pollsters Ayers McHenry on behalf of the right-wing think tank American Action Forum. Those polls, which had Democrats flailing quite a bit in 31 key districts from coast-to-coast, have received a ton of media attention. They also have a demographic characteristic that is dramatically different from the exit poll data from prior midterms.

According to the exit polls conducted during the most recent midterm (2006), roughly 63% of the electorate was aged 45 or over. A look at a previous midterm exit poll (1998) suggests that roughly 12% of the electorate is between the ages of 45-49. Doing a little simple subtraction, then, we could make a fair estimate that, in 2006, somewhere between 50-55% of the electorate should be aged 50 or older.

The Ayers McHenry polls had demographics that were, it is safe to say, skewed a tad older than that. Indeed, of the 31 districts surveyed, twenty-six of them had samples in which two-thirds of the sample were in the 50-or-older cohort. In Arizona's 1st district, for example, only 16% of their sample was under the age of 50.

One thing that the 2006 exit polls made clear was that the older the voter, the more likely they were to support Republicans. Even in heavily Democratic 2006, the 65-and-older demographic was split down the middle between Democrats and Republicans. Therefore, Ayers McHenry's older electorate could easily explain at least part of the Democratic underperformance in those polls.

But, it doesn't mean that they are wrong, as a cursory look at the 1998 and 2006 exit polls would seem to attest (for those wondering why I am ignoring 2002, please note that VNS recalled their exit polls for that particular midterm).

The electorate may well be getting older. Ayers McHenry polled in eighteen different states. Eleven of those states had exit polls in both 1998 and 2006. Of those eleven, the proportion of voters over the age of 45 increased in nine of those states. While that wouldn't begin to explain the chasm between the Ayers McHenry polls and the 2006 exit polls, it might mute the impact of that discrepancy if the electorate simply got older in the interim, which it almost certainly seems to have done.

Does the size of that discrepancy between the Ayers McHenry numbers and the past electorate matter? Indeed, it matters a great deal. If they are off the mark by a handful of points, then even adjusting the age cohorts to appropriate levels would not change the overall trial heat numbers a whole hell of a lot. However, if they really are off by twenty points or more, than their trial heat numbers could be off by an order of magnitude that would really start to matter.

Of course, the obvious drawback is that we won't know if they are wrong until November.

There are certainly other quirks to be found in polls throughout the cycle. Whether it is SurveyUSA suddenly finding that young voters loves them some Republican candidates (which flies in the face of recent convention), or a California poll which shows Hispanics embracing a GOP candidate who posed for ads in the primary in front of the border fence, there will always be some statistic for those who want to seek to invalidate the outcome.

Understand that this is nothing new, and in fact is a pastime for the party that appears to be on the short end of the polling stick. Consider some very recent history, courtesy of the Washington Post:

There appears to be an undercurrent of worry among some polling professionals and academics. One reason is the wide variation in Obama leads: Just yesterday, an array of polls showed the Democrat leading by as little as two points and as much as 15 points. The latest Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll showed the race holding steady, with Obama enjoying a lead of 52 percent to 45 percent among likely voters.

Some in the McCain camp also argue that the polls showing the largest leads for Obama mistakenly assume that turnout among young voters and African Americans will be disproportionately high.

And that's not even getting into the whole Bradley Effect debate from 2008, although I must confess that the highlight of 2008 for me may well have been Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt on some absurd celebrity talk show explaining that their guy (McCain, of course) was gonna win on Tuesday, because people didn't want to tell pollsters that they wouldn't vote for the black guy. Because, y'know, they don't want the pollster to think that they are racist, and stuff.

Conservatives jumped all over polling in both 2006 and 2008, convinced that they had gone under the hood and found that the numbers were all wrong (here is one such example). Indeed, the one recent poll that was decent news for Democrats was immediately assailed from the Right (and noted by Pollster's excellent Mark Blumenthal, who proceeded to execute a devastating takedown of the critique in question).

Could the polls be wrong in 2010? Sure, they could. Pollsters, as always, make assumptions about who will show up at the polls. Those assumptions could be in error. But hanging hopes that the critical mass of polls are in error because of this demographic quirk or that deviation from 2006/2008 is probably a glorified method of "shooting the messenger." Certainly, there's a great temptation to shoot the messengers this cycle--certainly I am guilty of it, and I'd probably be convicted on multiple counts of doing so.

That said, it is infinitely more likely that the route to avoiding a Republican resurgence lies in being able to change the composition of the electorate (i.e. attract base voters to the polls) or by the ability of the Democrats to change a few hearts and minds between now and November. That's the ticket, because counting on the myriad of polling firms to uniformly be off of the mark is almost certainly a faith that will be proven to be misguided.

• John Kitzhaber is on the air.

• Charlie Crist might think it's politically expedient to avoid committing to caucus with either political party, but the polls suggest otherwise.
• Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke says it's time to end "too big to fail."
• From the author of the Vanity Fair article on Sarah Palin:

  "The worst stuff isn't even in there," Michael Joseph Gross said on "Morning Joe" Thursday. "I couldn't believe these stories either when I first heard them, and I started this story with a prejudice in her favor. I have a lot in common with this woman. I'm a small-town person, I'm a Christian, I think that a lot of her criticisms of the media actually have something to them. And I think she got a bum ride, but everybody close to her tells the same story."

  In the profile, Gross paints Palin as an abusive, retaliatory figure with an extreme ability to lie.

  "This is a person for whom there is no topic too small to lie about," he said. "She lies about everything."

• Remember Republican Congressman Joe Wilson?

  Congressional staff members with detailed knowledge of the probe said ethics investigators are examining Wilson's unusually high number of foreign trips — at least 30 in the past eight years — and his use of per diem expense money while traveling abroad.

  Wilson, a relatively unknown lawmaker until he shouted "You lie!" as President Barack Obama addressed Congress last year, has a reputation among his peers as a frequent foreign traveler, these staff members said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak publicly on the investigation.

• Video games:

  18 months after cutting back on air strikes, NATO is all-but-bragging about killing insurgents from the skies. In a stream of press releases, the military alliance in Afghanistan is boasting about the air-induced demise to 12 insurgents in the past 10 days. It’s the latest move in a spin war with the Taliban about civilian casualties, one that contrasts the air strikes’ "precision" with the insurgents’ "barbarism."

• Robert Dreyfus:

  By now, in much of the mainstream media, it's become part of the catechism that the surge "worked," that the addition of 30,000 combat forces in January, 2007, resulted in a great success. (Obama, like many Democrats, liberals, and some realist-minded Republicans, opposed the surge.) Here are the facts: early in 2006, many Republicans knew that the war in Iraq was a disaster, and they wanted out, before the voters could express their disdain for Bush, Cheney and Co. at the polls in 2006 and 2008. The Iraq Study Group, chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Representative Lee Hamilton, was created to nail down an exit strategy, and they did, proposing a year-long timetable for withdrawing US forces. But the surge prolonged the war, which could have ended in late 2007 or early 2008, at the latest, by three more bloody, combat-filled years. Nor did the surge calm the crisis. The decline in violence, to the extent that it did occur, came for two intertwined reasons: first, because Sunni tribal leaders banded together to fight Al Qaeda and other extremists; and second, because Iran made a strategic decision to rein in allied Shiite militias, halt the supply of IEDs and other weapons to its allies on the Shiite side and convince Muqtada al-Sadr and other Shiite militant leaders to stand down, which they did.

  The very agreement that Obama cited last night, which calls for the complete withdrawal of US forces by the end of 2011, was the result of a deal struck between the United States and Iraq long before Obama's election, and the only reason that the deal worked is because Iran, which opposed it at first, eventually acquiesced. Tehran convinced its many friends and allies in the ruling coalition under Prime Minister Maliki in 2008 to go along with the US-Iraq withdrawal accord in order to weaken American influence in Iraq, and in that they have succeeded. Tehran also brokered an uneasy ceasefire between Maliki and Sadr in 2007, and it has worked hard, though without complete success, to strengthen its ties to the various Shiite and Kurdish factions that dominate Iraqi politics. Because of its proximity, Iran will continue to exert a gravitational pull on Iraq, which no longer has an effective army to defend itself against its larger neighbor. The withdrawal of US combat forces from Iraq—although the 50,000 that remain aren't exactly unarmed—signals just another phase in the decline of American influence in Iraq.

  What Obama failed to mention is that the next sixteen months will be a severe test of his sincerity about withdrawal.

• Chinese bloggers would like to see some WikiLeaks revelations about their country's recent history.
• With spiking prices and shortages caused by droughts and floods, U.N. experts are worried about the wheat supply.
• Thank you, to Florida Democrats.
• Drip, drip, drip:

  A distinct decline in horseshoe crab numbers has occurred that parallels climate change associated with the end of the last Ice Age, according to a study that used genomics to assess historical trends in population sizes.

• Leave it to Melissa McEwan:

  The president's bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform is very white, very male, and very terrifying.

  I just bipartisaned in my pants.

• Tony Blair just released his memoirs, and he went to Dublin for the first public book-signing. Anti-war protesters threw shoes and eggs.
• Paul Waldman:

  You could argue that as a society, we're smarter than we've ever been. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2008, 29.4 percent of Americans over the age of 25 had a bachelor's degree or higher. Compare that to 1960, when only 7.7 percent of Americans over 25 had a college degree. The tech revolution, furthermore, turned nerds and geeks into heroes. Our age has been shaped by brilliant and quirky tech geniuses, from Microsoft's Bill Gates to Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Every day brings new advancements in science, technology, and our capacity to assemble, create, and use data.

  Yet politics still seems so often ruled by the aggressively dumb, a fact that the confluence of forces that swept one thoughtful, educated man to the White House couldn't change. Experts and the highly educated can and do make plenty of mistakes, of course. But the anti-intellectual stance presumes that those with detailed knowledge of things like policy are morally inferior to those who would rather feel things than know things. The economy can rise and fall, elections can come and go, but that sentiment will always be with us.

  When the Texas Board of Education was debating last year whether and how to undermine any acceptance of the demonic idea of evolution in their schools, board member Don McLeroy, a young-earth creationist, said passionately that when it comes to figuring out what knowledge to pass on to our young people, "somebody's got to stand up to experts!" Lots of people are standing up these days. On the other hand, McLeroy lost his next election. So maybe there's hope.

They say it's too easy.

According to 48 percent of American voters, it's "too easy" to have an abortion in this country.

Too easy?

Every year, legislatures introduce hundreds of bills to restrict abortion. Every year, dozens pass. This year has been no exception. The Center for Reproductive Rights published a report on the nearly 50 new laws that have already been passed this year: biased counseling, forced ultrasounds, bans on insurance coverage, parental notification... And it's only September.

Louisiana was among the many states to pass new laws restricting abortion. One of them gave the state's Department of Health the authority to shut down any abortion clinic -- permanently -- for health and safety concerns.

And it had its first success: it shut down the Hope Medical Group for Women in Shreveport. According to the Department of Health:

The Legislature gave us this authority because they recognized we must have the ability to stop unsafe practices that place these already vulnerable women in danger.

But closing abortion clinics doesn't protect vulnerable women. And under Louisiana's new law, once a clinic is shut down by the health department, its owners and managers are prohibited from ever operating another clinic, ensuring one less provider for the women of Louisiana and making it that much harder for them to obtain an abortion in that state.

The State of Louisiana just accomplished what the terrorists who attempted to bomb that same clinic in 2005 failed to do, shutting down the clinic.

Too easy?

Consider the challenges a woman in Missouri now faces. There is now only one provider in the entire state, so unless she's lucky enough to live in St. Louis, she will have to travel, perhaps 100 miles or more, to even reach an abortion provider. That is the case for one in five patients at the clinic in St. Louis.

If she's a minor, she'll first need her parents’ consent. Maybe she knows her parents will say no. Maybe she’s afraid she’ll be punished if they find out she wants to have an abortion. Maybe she’ll be kicked out or beaten. Maybe she’ll even be killed. These things happen.

She can go to the court and hope that a judge gives her permission. But judges don’t always say yes. Maybe she’ll get one of those judges who thinks that at 17, she’s too young and immature to make the decision about whether to terminate her pregnancy. Not too young to have a baby, of course, but too young to have an abortion.

That’s the end of the line for her.

If she gets the consent of her parents, or the court, she has to travel to St. Louis. Maybe she has a car. Maybe she takes a bus. Maybe a friend gives her a ride. If she’s lucky.

At the clinic, she is told about the physical and psychological risks of abortion. It doesn’t matter that there really aren’t any. The procedure is perfectly safe. But that’s not the point. The point is to scare her, to make her think she is putting her life in danger.

She is given a brochure that tells her about “the probable anatomical and physiological characteristics of the unborn child.” She will have to look at color photographs and descriptions of a fetus, from conception to full term.

The brochure also says: “The life of each human being begins at conception. Abortion will terminate the life of a separate, unique, living human being.”

That’s not a medical opinion; that’s a religious belief. The state is not supposed to be in the business of promoting religious beliefs, but that’s the law in Missouri now.

If she is 22 weeks into her pregnancy, she will also be told that the fetus “may” feel pain, and she will have to decide whether she would like anesthesia for the fetus. It doesn’t matter that it's not true. What matters is that she believes she is causing pain to her unborn child.      

She will have to decide whether to have an ultrasound so she can see a picture of her fetus, and whether to listen to its heartbeat. It doesn’t matter that there probably is no heartbeat yet. What matters is that she thinks about her fetus -- her baby -- and what it looks and sounds like, and the pain she will inflict on it.

And then she will have to wait at least 24 hours. A whole day. She has to go think about her decision. The government has a vested interest in making sure she really thinks about what she’s doing, about the ultrasound and the heartbeat and the risks and the pain. Sure, it’s legal for her to have an abortion, but first, she has to feel bad about it. Shamed.

And where does she go for 24 hours? Does this teenage girl have the means to stay in a hotel? Does she go all the way back home and hope to return the next day? Maybe she just goes home and never comes back.

Too easy?

Those are the obstacles women face in Missouri. And Oklahoma. And Louisiana. And Nebraska.

In Nebraska, the legislature passed, and the governor signed, a "patient screening" bill. The bill requires doctors to read every single peer-reviewed study on the risks of abortion and to advise their patients of all of the reported risks -- even the debunked ones.

Planned Parenthood immediately sued and obtained an injunction to prevent the law from going into effect. The state's attorney general concluded that it would be too costly for the state to fight the injunction. So women and their doctors are safe from that law. For now. But many legislatures find their laws overturned; it doesn't stop them from re-introducing the laws, again and again and again.

And the women of Nebraska are still subject to many of the same restrictions as the women of Missouri -- parental notification, ultrasounds, waiting periods, false information. And because 97 percent of Nebraska's counties have no abortion providers, traveling to an abortion provider in another part of the state imposes a significant burden.

Too easy?

The State of Oklahoma made it legal for doctors to withhold information from their patients if they think that information may influence a woman's decision to have an abortion. So if her ultrasound shows the fetus has birth defects, the doctor may choose not to disclose that information to the patient if she might be inclined to have an abortion. And she has no right to sue the doctor for failing to provide her with that information. This, in the same state that, at the same time, passed a law requiring women to have a vaginal ultrasound before having an abortion -- all the in the name of "informed consent."

Too easy?

How hard should it be? How many more lies should women be told? How much longer should they have to wait? How much further should they have to travel? How much more should they have to pay? How much harder does it need to be?

Already, we have fewer and fewer doctors who even know how to perform abortions. Only 13 percent of counties even have one abortion provider. The cost of hundreds of dollars is burdensome to low-income women; for minors, who already face the greatest obstacles, it can be prohibitive.

All of that -- and abortion is "too easy"? As if those obstacles weren't enough, there is also the state-mandated shame.

We condemn other societies that publicly shame women. Sometimes we invade them, and we claim to liberate their women. We brag about it. It's what gives us the right to say we are better. It's how we justify acts of war. We're making their lives better. Easier.    

But in this country, the American Taliban engages in its own form of public shaming and punishment. They stand outside health clinics and terrorize women. Sometimes they set clinics on fire. Sometimes they set bombs. Sometimes they assassinate doctors. And those members of the American Taliban who hold elected office are constantly inventing new, burdensome restrictions and new methods of emotional manipulation and shame.

Look at this picture of your baby. Listen to its heartbeat. Look at this picture of a fetus at eight months. Your baby would look like that. Do you really want to end its life? Do you really want to cause it pain? Would you at least like to ease its pain a little before you kill it? Go home and think about it first. Think about your baby. Here, take this picture with you.

Too easy?

If it were any easier, American women wouldn't be able to have abortions at all. But then, that’s the point, isn’t it?

The most successful science educator in America today is a bow tie wearing former mechanical engineer who originally set out to show kids how much fun science can be. He went on to become a house-hold name and is now known to millions as Bill Nye the Science Guy. But Bill is much more than a scientist, he is an engineer, comedian, author, and inventor, and he's a man with a mission: to help foster a scientifically literate society in which everyone understands and appreciates the science that makes our world work.

Bill Nye: I always liked show biz and got to make a few training films at Boeing. Soon after I got the idea of a science show geared toward kids, around ages 8 through 12. Disney picked it up and it was a blast for me; there's a lot of great science and fun to be had playing around with dry ice, fire extinguishers, baking soda and vinegar, stuff like that. But within the first few episodes we found out adults were watching too! That was surprising, but looking back it makes sense, because that's a fun level for science and it's a level anyone can understand. After that the show just took off.

DS: You and I have talked a bit about climate change, where do you publicly stand on that?

Bill Nye: Climate change is happening, humans are causing it, and I think this is perhaps the most serious environmental issue facing us. And we don't have to look too far away to see why. Last week I attended NASA's Venus Exploration Group in Madison, WI, the data presented there was alarming.

There is good evidence that Venus once had liquid water and a much thinner atmosphere, similar to earth billions of years ago. But today the surface of Venus is dry as a bone, hot enough to melt lead, there are clouds of sulfuric acid that reach a hundred miles high and the air is so thick it's like being 900 meters deep in the ocean. It's the closest planet to earth and we can't even say for sure if there are giant active volcanoes on it, because that intense heat and thick air smother everything. Venus is a big science experiment, a real-life demonstration, of what happens when the greenhouse effect spirals out of control globally. So when I meet people who are skeptical of climate change, I have to ask them why? Whose interests do they think that serves? Certainly not ours. Certainly not earth's.

DS: You're now serving as Executive Director of the Planetary Society, how do you feel about the future of US space exploration, commercial crew, or unmanned vs manned?

Bill Nye: NASA is an engine of innovation and inspiration as well as the world's premier space exploration agency, and we are well served by politicians working to keep it that way, instead of turning it into a mere jobs program, or worse, cutting its budget. Part of the agency's mission is to inspire students and boost them into careers in science, technology, engineering, and math. NASA's education funding comes from its science and technology budgets. With the technology budget cut, there's not enough money for these educational programs. That money needs to be restored.

I've written at length in support of commercial crew. Right now I don't think congress really understands the issue, so we need to do a better job explaining it. If NASA is to reach beyond the Moon and someday reach Mars, it must be relieved of the burden of launching people and cargo to low earth orbit. To do that, we must invest more in commercial spaceflight. The proposed House-Senate authorization bill would spend $900 million on buying seats on Soyuz rockets, while giving $450 million to develop commercial crew launchers and cargo rockets. These funds need to be reallocated.

On manned or unmanned, well, both! Robotic probes are like scouts, the science they return is invaluable. But unmanned programs are at risk when money is being diverted to underfunded programs like Constellation. If we're serious about advancing exploration of our Solar System and sending humans to other worlds, that money must not only be be restored, it should be increased.

Bill Nye has won 18 Emmy Awards and is a frequent guest on cable news programs, where he often defends science against political spin or common misinformation. Making science entertaining and accessible is something he has been doing most of his life and plans to continue. The statements above represent my notes and best recollection of our phone interview. Any errors are solely mine. Bill may be available to respond to a comment or two below, time permitting.

Glenn Beck is a charlatan. A clown. A buffoon. He belongs on a second tier stage in Vegas, and he very well may end up there, some day. He is not dangerous, but his ability to exploit the legitimately angry dispossessed reveals something that is dangerous. Decades of right wing economic policies have undermined unions, the middle class, the social safety net, and the sense that we are all in this together, moving into a better future. Few believe their children or grandchildren will inherit a better world. People are afraid, and they don't understand why they are afraid. And while Glenn Greenwald is correct that by not seizing the mantle of populism, the Democrats have created a void that was ripe for exploitation, that inevitable exploitation has come to be personified by the likes of Glenn Beck. He disseminates lies and disinformation, preying on the vulnerable, distracting them from even beginning to be able to grasp the real reasons why their dreams seem more and more illusory, and their ability to maintain even a basic sense of security and comfort more and more tenuous.

Dana Milbank is about to publish a book on Beck, and the poor guy did his research. Presumably, afterward, he had to sterilize himself with turpentine and kerosene. In an article in the Washington Post, over the weekend, he provided a brief summary of what he has learned about Beck. And he began by recounting an anecdote from Beck's 2003 memoir. Beck admits to having been strongly influenced by Orson Welles, who used to travel around Manhattan in an ambulance. The sirens were screaming not because Welles was ill, but because it was a good way to beat traffic.

Milbank:

Most of us would regard this as dishonest, a ploy by the self-confessed charlatan that Welles was. Beck saw it as a model to be emulated. "Welles," he writes, "inspired me to believe that I can create anything that I can see or imagine."

But as Milbank points out, Welles was an admitted charlatan. First and foremost, he was a showman, one of the rare filmmakers about whom the word "genius" legitimately applied. Welles was the master of illusion, making magic of manipulation. For the most part, he used that genius and mastery to entertain and create art, although it famously got well out of hand with his War of the Worlds radio broadcast. But Beck casts himself as something genuine. He cries as if he's capable of genuine sympathy and empathy. But his manipulations and machinations are not merely for entertainment, and they're not even merely for self-aggrandizement. First and foremost, they are used to enforce and reinforce the very political and economic structures that subjugate the people whose alienation and disillusionment find false solace in the theatrical rantings of people like Beck.

Milbank:

I was reminded of Beck's affection for deception as he hyped his march on Washington -- an event scheduled for the same date (Aug. 28) and on the same spot (the Lincoln Memorial) as Martin Luther King Jr.'s iconic march 47 years ago. Beck claimed it was pure coincidence, but then he made every effort to appropriate the mantle of the great civil rights leader.

King, the peacemaker. The adherent to the principles of Gandhi. The man who wrote and lived "Strength To Love." And then, there's Beck, who says he chose the date of his rally without even knowing its historical significance, attributing the coincidence to "divine providence." And the most disturbing part is that some people apparently believe him.

As Beck attempts to turn the world inside out and upside down by claiming the mantle of a movement he probably would have opposed, and whose means he is too small even to begin to comprehend, Milbank lists some of Beck's greatest moments as a champion of civil rights.

• As a radio host, performed an on-air skit that mocked a stereotyped Asian accent, forcing his station to apologize.
• On CNN, while interviewing Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, demanded proof that Ellison isn't working with "our" enemies.
• Called President Obama a "racist" who has a "deep-seated hatred for white people."
• Claims Obama was elected because he isn't white.
• Claims Obama is moving us into slavery.
• Asserted that the president's very name is Un-American.
• Claims Obama seeks reparations from white America, to "settle old racial scores."
• Has claimed Obama is tied to or influenced by "radical black nationalism" and "Marxist black liberation theology" and the New Black Panther Party, which Beck claims is part of Obama's "army of thugs."

It would almost be funny if so many didn't take it seriously. And if their taking it seriously wasn't part of a deeply disturbing hidden agenda. As Frank Rich explained, last Sunday:

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.

Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.

All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.

And Rich referred to the chillingly essential article on the Kochs, by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker.

As their fortunes grew, Charles and David Koch became the primary underwriters of hard-line libertarian politics in America. Charles’s goal, as Doherty described it, was to tear the government “out at the root.” The brothers’ first major public step came in 1979, when Charles persuaded David, then thirty-nine, to run for public office. They had become supporters of the Libertarian Party, and were backing its Presidential candidate, Ed Clark, who was running against Ronald Reagan from the right. Frustrated by the legal limits on campaign donations, they contrived to place David on the ticket, in the Vice-Presidential slot; upon becoming a candidate, he could lavish as much of his personal fortune as he wished on the campaign. The ticket’s slogan was “The Libertarian Party has only one source of funds: You.” In fact, its primary source of funds was David Koch, who spent more than two million dollars on the effort.

Many of the ideas propounded in the 1980 campaign presaged the Tea Party movement. Ed Clark told The Nation that libertarians were getting ready to stage “a very big tea party,” because people were “sick to death” of taxes. The Libertarian Party platform called for the abolition of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., as well as of federal regulatory agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Energy. The Party wanted to end Social Security, minimum-wage laws, gun control, and all personal and corporate income taxes; it proposed the legalization of prostitution, recreational drugs, and suicide. Government should be reduced to only one function: the protection of individual rights. William F. Buckley, Jr., a more traditional conservative, called the movement “Anarcho-Totalitarianism.”

That November, the Libertarian ticket received only one per cent of the vote. The brothers realized that their brand of politics didn’t sell at the ballot box. Charles Koch became openly scornful of conventional politics. “It tends to be a nasty, corrupting business,” he told a reporter at the time. “I’m interested in advancing libertarian ideas.” According to Doherty’s book, the Kochs came to regard elected politicians as merely “actors playing out a script.” A longtime confidant of the Kochs told Doherty that the brothers wanted to “supply the themes and words for the scripts.” In order to alter the direction of America, they had to “influence the areas where policy ideas percolate from: academia and think tanks.”

Of course, legalizing drugs and prostitution and opposing gun control appeals to many, across partisan and ideological bounds. But it's not a stretch to assume that the brothers aren't helping fund organizations such as NORML. They are, however, helping fund climate denialism, which is what you would expect from oil industry billionaires. And while eliminating income taxes and campaign finance laws would greatly benefit billionaires, it would spell the end of the government's ability to check abuses by rapacious industries such as oil, health insurance, and banking, and it also would mean the end of even a semblance of a social contract. It also would mean the effective end of democracy, the new royalty and aristocracy being corporate plutocrats such as Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers.

Little wonder, then, that the brothers are helping fund phony movements now fronted by the likes of Glenn Beck. Because people like Beck wouldn't be capable of mobilizing masses of the manipulated, if not for the power of a propaganda shop disguised as a cable news network, and the financial backing of meticulously calculating billionaires whose real goals are mostly about coalescing their own wealth and power at the expense of the very people they are attempting to manipulate into serfdom. Beck is the front. The clown. The distraction. Behind Beck and his ilk lies the money trail. As Mayer concluded her article:

The Kochs have long depended on the public’s not knowing all the details about them. They have been content to operate what David Koch has called “the largest company that you’ve never heard of.” But with the growing prominence of the Tea Party, and with increased awareness of the Kochs’ ties to the movement, the brothers may find it harder to deflect scrutiny. Recently, President Obama took aim at the Kochs’ political network. Speaking at a Democratic National Committee fund-raiser, in Austin, he warned supporters that the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the Citizens United case—which struck down laws prohibiting direct corporate spending on campaigns—had made it even easier for big companies to hide behind “groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity.” Obama said, “They don’t have to say who, exactly, Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation”—or even, he added, “a big oil company.”

Don't worry about Glenn Beck. Popular history will forget him. He's not a significant political player, and he's not a memorable entertainer. But the people hiding behind Beck and his ilk must be raised to public consciousness. Because so many of the Tea Party faithful don't even know who is promoting what they have been duped into believing is their cause, and certainly don't know the real cause they are being duped into promoting. Most of them are being played for suckers. To the financial backers of Beck and his ilk, most Tea Partiers are but another demographic group to exploit. It would be good for them and for the nation and the world if they ever figured that out.

Sunday round-up, pre-labor day musings. Summer's over tomorrow.

NY Times:

As Democrats brace for a November wave that threatens their control of the House, party leaders are preparing a brutal triage of their own members in hopes of saving enough seats to keep a slim grip on the majority.

In the next two weeks, Democratic leaders will review new polls and other data that show whether vulnerable incumbents have a path to victory. If not, the party is poised to redirect money to concentrate on trying to protect up to two dozen lawmakers who appear to be in the strongest position to fend off their challengers.  

Brutal is the word. And no, we are not an ATM.

Frank Rich:

What was so grievously missing from Obama’s address  was any feeling for what has happened to our country during the seven-and-a-half-year war whose "end" he was marking. That legacy of anger and grief is what "Freedom" mainlines to its readers. In chronicling one Midwestern family as it migrates from St. Paul to Washington during the 9/11 decade, Franzen does for our traumatic time what Tom Wolfe’s "The Bonfire of the Vanities" did for the cartoonish go-go 1980s. Or perhaps, more pertinently, what "The Great Gatsby" did for the ominous boom of the 1920s.

Maureen Dowd:

The Economist’s review of "A Journey," the new autobiography of the former British prime minister, says it sounds less like Disraeli and Churchill and more like "the memoirs of a transatlantic business tycoon."

Yet in the section on Iraq, Blair loses his C.E.O. fluency and engages in tortured arguments, including one on how many people really died in the war, and does a Shylock lament.

He says he does not regret serving as the voice for W.’s gut when the inexperienced American princeling galloped into war with Iraq. As for "the nightmare that unfolded" — giving the lie to all their faux rationales and glib promises — Tony wants everyone to know he has feelings.

Joan Vennochi on Boston harshness:

Losing politicians can retreat for a while to Harvard’s Kennedy School, but they do not launch many successful second careers from here. Michael Dukakis did it once, long ago. After losing a governor’s race, he plotted a successful return to office. But when Dukakis lost the 1988 presidential contest, local voters who had embraced him quickly turned on him. Twenty-two years later, Dukakis can still count on getting whacked if he speaks up.

John Kerry is still a senator after losing the 2004 presidential race, and Martha Coakley is still attorney general after losing this year’s Senate race to Republican Scott Brown. But neither is celebrated, and their defeated status still subjects them to scorn.

Brown is currently the most popular politician in Massachusetts. But who knows when the tide of popularity will begin to turn on him, too?

Boston sports figures who are less than perfect do even worse than politicians. But the depth of anger over those who put Wall Street over Main Street has yet to be plumbed.

Jim Kessler with 5 ways 2010 is not 1994:

Even so, there is a model for Democrats: Ronald Reagan's triumph in 1982. What can Obama and the Democrats learn from the Great Communicator? Plenty. Reagan understood that the economy was so bad that to tout his "accomplishments" would be laughable. But though he couldn't sell the electorate on where the nation was at the time, he knew he could sell them on where he planned to take it. With the country shaken by a series of recessions and foreign policy setbacks, he rallied Americans behind his optimism ("Don't let anyone tell you that America's best days are behind her") and faith in American exceptionalism ("the last, best hope of man on Earth"). Things might look bleak today, he told voters, but blue skies lie ahead.

How about an economics "this is how we got here, this is where we're going" speech? Hello? Is this mike on?

Joe Klein:

So why doesn't Obama transform his blue-ribbon budget commission into a deliberative-democracy exercise? Let his 18 commissioners — who range from a conservative budget wonk like Congressman Paul Ryan to former Service Employees union leader Andy Stern — prepare a briefing paper for 500 Americans selected by Fishkin's team and then make themselves available for close questioning. Let them lay out the most vexing budget choices we face. Let the whole process be televised. It doesn't have to be binding. I'll bet the kleroterion would produce results bolder and more credible than anything Obama's commission will recommend. "People are tired of the elites telling them what to do," says Fishkin. Perhaps it's time to turn that process upside down.

Sasha Abramsky on Nevada:

Rancho versus Agassi Prep. The underresourced versus the opulent. The collapse of the state sector despite the resources available via the private. The sense of possibility versus the sense of impending doom. It is, in many ways, a metaphor for Nevada as a whole these days.

When it comes to ink spilled on states in crisis, California, which has seen its budget contract from more than $100 billion to about $80 billion over the past three years, has been getting the lion's share of attention. Yet some of the country's smaller states are seeing revenue shortfalls that, as a proportion of their total budget, far exceed California's.

State level pain is national anger. That's why people are tired of the elites telling them what to do.

On Tuesday night, President Obama addressed the American people from his newly-redecorated Oval Office to declare an end to combat operations in Iraq.

And in true Orwellian fashion, Obama failed to credit his should-be BFF with having the guts to avenge 9/11 by launching a war against a country that wasn't involved.

But I guess that's to be expected from a President who's just not that into America.

Tonight's Rescue Rangers are watercarrier4diogenes, mem from somerville, HoosierDeb,  sunspark says, and srkp23, with vcmvo2 editing as well as reading.

The rescued diaries are:

• Crashing Vor comments on an important film spawned by a hurricane in "Low and Behold": Still the Best, and Now You Can See It! (mem from somerville)
• Dbug puts together a quick, but informative, historical piece on the suffrage movement and the results of perseverance 100 Years Ago: WA Women Get The Right To Vote. (HoosierDeb)
• elfling discusses potential educational change we can believe in from Arne Duncan: a new kind of standardized test. (sunspark says)
• ManfromMiddletown reports on how the Basque area of Spain is turning into a renewable energy powerhouse in From the Basque Country to Bangladesh: A Climate Change Solution? (vcmvo2)
• "Sometimes there's value" in stating the obvious, Byron De Lear says in a comment in his well-written reminder that Glenn Beck is a profiteering demagogue masquerading as populist prophet. (sunspark says)
• rserven brings us some poetry to contemplate in Clutter - Three Poems. (vcmvo2)
• workingmansblues reminds us that There Is No "Center" Between Right and Wrong. (sunspark says)
• Eddie C writes about another foodie adventure in Photos from the Manhattan "Outstanding in the Field" Dinner. (vcmvo2)

jotter with High Impact Diaries: September 3, 2010.

emeraldmaiden gathers the Top Comments - 9/4/10 - Going Batty.

Enjoy and please add your own favorite diary from the past twenty-four hours to this Open Thread!

Quite a bit of data for a three-day holiday weekend, and most of it isn't pleasing to the eye of those rooting for the Democrats. SurveyUSA is extremely bearish on the Dems out West, and the numbers out of Illinois from the Chicago Tribune aren't much better.

We also have some primary numbers out of New Hampshire, which is less than two weeks from heading to the polls.

All that (and more!) in the weekend edition of the Wrap...

THE U.S. SENATE

CA-Sen: SUSA shows Boxer trailing to Fiorina in Golden State
Even traditionally blue California is thinking about seeing other people, according to a new poll out at the close of the week from SurveyUSA. The poll puts Republican Carly Fiorina at 48%, with Democrat Barbara Boxer at 46%. One of the things causing pain for Boxer--she is only getting 79% of Democrats, while Fiorina has much better cohesion (91% of GOP) on her side.

DE-Sen: Tea Party Express gunning hard for Castle in primary
On the Wrap a while back, I observed that the impact of the Tea Party Express in Delaware (where they are supporting longshot Christine O'Donnell over GOP frontrunner Mike Castle) might be muted by the short timespan running up the primary there on September 14th. Well, if nothing else, the teabagger contingent is going all-in in the brief time that they have. The Express is planning a total of five ads between now and the 14th. Castle, for his part, is also running almost $200K worth of ads in advance of the primary, trying to prevent being Vic Rawl'ed.

IL-Sen: Tribune poll has key Senate campaign all knotted up
It is dead even between Democrat Alexi Giannoulias and Republican Mark Kirk, according to a poll released at the end of the week by the Chicago Tribune. Both Giannoulias and Kirk are sitting on just 34% of the vote, with third-party candidates LeAlan Jones (6%) and Mike Labno (3%) well behind. In a sign of how fluid the electorate is in the Land of Lincoln, nearly a quarter of voters in this high-profile race are still undecided.

NH-Sen: Ayotte leading primary, but not locking it down
According to new polling numbers from GOP pollsters Magellan Research, GOP frontrunner Kelly Ayotte is not running away with the Republican Primary to replace Judd Gregg in the Granite State. The survey has Ayotte at 34%, with Ovide Lamontagne (21%), Bill Binnie (17%), and Jim Bender (13%) chasing her. Ayotte's saving grace may well be that all three of her suitors have remained viable, meaning that any anti-frontrunner vote may be too divided to cost her the lead.

THE U.S. HOUSE

AK-AL: Young holds solid double-digit edge in PPP poll
In addition to being among the first pollsters to hit the McAdams-Miller Senate race, the team at PPP also polled the lightly-surveyed House race between longtime veteran Republican Don Young and Democratic challenger Harry Crawford. PPP sees it as a double-digit lead for Young (55-36). Crawford, a state legislator, was considered a potentially strong recruit for the Democrats, but has struggled to raise cash.

KY-03: Yarmuth up only within the margin, according to SUSA
Only a month or so after a Braun Research poll implied that John Yarmuth was sitting on a very comfortable lead over Todd Lally in the blue-leaning Kentucky 3rd district, SurveyUSA begs to differ. SUSA stakes Yarmuth to just a two point lead (47-45) over Lally.

NH-01: One time GOP frontrunner now trails free-spending challenger
The Republican primary to take on Democratic Rep. Carol Shea-Porter promises to be a hot one, and a new poll out at the close of the week by Cross Target implies that the one-time NRCC star recruit, former Manchester Mayor Frank Guinta, is now trailing a free-spending challenger in the race. The poll (sponsored by the GOP friendly Americans for Prosperity) has self-funder Sean Mahoney at 32% of the vote, with Guinta at 26% of the vote. Rich Ashooh runs third, but well behind the leaders at 10%.

PA-07: GOP winning streak ends as teabagger allowed on ballot
One of the more underreported stories of the 2010 cycle has been the ability of the Republicans to successfully challenge and exclude third-party conservative candidates from ballots all around the country. One place where their efforts proved unsuccessful is in the Pennsylvania 7th, where GOP nominee Pat Meehan will have to contend with teabagger Independent candidate Jim Schneller on the ballot. Meehan's challenge to Schneller's candidacy was denied late in the week by a Commonwealth Court judge. Meehan's camp had argued that the petitions for the third-party candidate came with undue assistance from Democrats.

VA-09: SUSA poll says Boucher still leads, but by a reduced margin
SurveyUSA has some good news for a Democratic candidate. Well...kind of. The newest SUSA poll out of southwestern Virginia gives longtime Democratic Rep. Rick Boucher a double-digit lead over Republican contender Morgan Griffith. If there is any bad news there, it is that the SUSA lead is incrementally smaller than one earlier in the summer. The current lead for Boucher is ten points (50-40).

WA-02: SUSA poll shows incumbent Dem trailing by four
The reasonably close numbers in the Washington 2nd district during the open primary last month has raised GOP hopes of an upset. This new poll from SurveyUSA should bolster those hopes. SUSA has Republican contender John Koster up four on incumbent Democrat Rick Larsen (50-46). The combined Dem total outstripped the GOP total by 53-47 in the late August primary, though Koster narrowly outpolled Larsen individually.

THE GUBERNATORIAL RACES

AK-Gov: PPP gives Parnell a wide lead over Berkowitz
Defying the traditional conventions of PPP as a "Democratic" pollster, they poll Alaska, and have incumbent Republican Governor Sean Parnell doing markedly better against Democratic Ethan Berkowitz than any other pollster (including the House of Ras). PPP has Parnell at 55%, with Berkowitz sitting at 37% of the vote. Unlike many incumbent Governors in both parties, Parnell actually has decent approval ratings (50/36), far better than a certain ex-Governor (Mrs. Palin is sitting at 37/55).

CA-Gov: Whitman up seven, according to new SUSA poll
The folks at SurveyUSA also polled the governor's race, and they echo some other recent polling in showing Meg Whitman opening up a little daylight between her and Democrat Jerry Brown. SUSA puts Whitman at a seven-point edge (47-40) over Brown. While the partisan demographics look legit, there were a couple of eye-openers under the hood: for example, the Democrats are truly dead meat if Meg Whitman is really drawing 32% of the African American vote (pretty small subsample there, though).

IL-Gov: Brady leads by five, according to a new Trib poll
Incumbent Democrat Pat Quinn is not politically dead yet, but it is a sign of general campaign ugliness when one can say that it is progress that the incumbent is down by only five points. The new Chicago Tribune poll puts Republican Bill Brady at 37%, with Quinn at 32% of the vote. Three Independent candidates split 8% of the vote, with a quarter of the vote still waiting to be claimed.

RI-Gov: Chafee grabs another union endorsement in Little Rhody
This is becoming something of a trend, and one has to wonder if the Democratic standard-bearer, Frank Caprio, needs to be a bit concerned about it. Carpenters Local 94, repping over two thousand workers and retirees in-state, endorsed Democrats for November almost exclusively. One key exception: the Governor's race. Former Republican Lincoln Chafee, now running as an Independent, got the nod from the local, less than two weeks after the National Education Association did the same. The other major teachers union in the state, the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals, backed Chafee in July.

THE RAS-A-POLL-OOZA

The House of Ras was more prolific to close the week than they have been in a while. Nevada is more than a little ugly, but if there is one Democrat team Ras-sie is feeling right now, it is rookie Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who is laying waste to the GOP triumvirate in New York.

ID-Gov: Gov. Butch Otter (R) 52%, Keith Allred (R) 36%
MA-Gov: Gov. Deval Patrick (D) 39%, Charlie Baker (R) 34%, Tim Cahill (I) 18%
NV-Gov: Brian Sandoval (R) 58%, Rory Reid (D) 33%
NV-Sen: Sen. Harry Reid (D) 45%, Sharron Angle (R) 45%
NY-Sen: Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D) 51%, Bruce Blakeman (R) 32%
NY-Sen: Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D) 51%, Joe DioGuardi (R) 31%
NY-Sen: Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D) 53%, David Malpass (R) 27%

I'm sure there are exceptions, but it's generally the case that while girls will read books and watch movies about boys, boys don't return the favor. And they're missing out on so much.

Growing up, I spent so many hours with stories of other little girls growing up in different times and places.

The Little House books obviously have to come toward the top of any list of books in this category. The Ingalls family's journey from the Big Woods of Wisconsin through Kansas and Minnesota and ultimately to South Dakota is a window onto so many aspects of life in the woods and prairie (obviously), in small towns and on homesteads. Hunting, farming, making clothes, getting an education -- and having fun as a child and a teenager -- it's all in there, in vivid but not pedantic detail.

In Understood Betsy, another little girl learns many of these same skills living on a Vermont farm. Orphaned Elizabeth Ann arrives in Putney a sheltered city child feeling abandoned and aghast at her life having been turned upside down and becomes Betsy, self-reliant and resourceful.

In Understood Betsy, Betsy essentially takes a step back in time. Her relatives in the country have never seen a paved road being put down, which is a familiar sight to her (though she hasn't observed closely enough to be able to tell them how it's done). Where butter comes from is in turn a mystery to her, but she quickly learns to churn it.

That quick change in the technologies in use and the lives being lived by people in different areas is so striking in these books. Roller Skates and the Betsy-Tacy books take place not so very long after the Little House books, but the lives lived in them are a world away. Lucinda in Roller Skates is a wealthy New Yorker given the freedom of the city for a year she spends living with a teacher while her parents are in Italy. Wandering on her roller skates, she misbehaves and makes friends outside her restrictive class boundaries. It's a gorgeous picture of a girl who wants more than she's allowed and the social world she creates around her deisires -- and of 1890s New York City.

The Betsy-Tacy books start out just before Betsy's fifth birthday and carry through to the early days of her marriage. Set in Minnesota (Mankato, more or less), the series shows her lifelong ambition to write, her high school crushes, the arrival of cars (and the endless pain in the ass of flat tires and breakdowns in those early days), and most of all her sustaining friendships with Tacy and Tib (the latter of whom shows up in the second book). For the anti-immigrant crowd, Betsy in Spite of Herself has Betsy visit Tib's German-speaking family in Milwaukee.

I don't know if children lose themselves more intensely in books than adults do, but the worlds these books conjure for me are still so, so vivid, dozens of re-reads later. What childhood favorites still move you as an adult?

Also on my favorites list:
Emily of New Moon appears to be more difficult to get a copy of, but I always preferred it to L.M. Montgomery's more famous Anne of Green Gables books.
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, by Joan Aiken
A Girl of the Limberlost, by Gene Stratton-Porter

I have to start out by saying that I'm really, really not trying to pick a fight on this one. But again, it bugs me. In the lefty mini-argument over whether the core premise of Markos' book, American Taliban, is compelling rhetorical device or merely horribly offensive, the central debate is almost entirely between different political and rhetorical styles.

Tristero points to this brief piece by Matt Yglesias that registers displeasure at the "American Taliban" label. Yglesias says:

So, yes, the Taliban is misogynistic and so are most religious traditionalists. And, yes, the Taliban is nationalistic and so are right-wing political parties in most democracies. And, yes, the Taliban is enthusiastic about war-fighting as a way to achieve policy aims and so is Bill Kristol. This is all true and somewhat important. But it’s also true that American progressives and American conservatives are  peacefully coexisting in a functioning republic, whereas the Taliban is waging an extremely violent military campaign against its ideological antagonists. Even though that’s only a “difference of degree” between two strands of religiously inspired populist nationalism, it’s actually a lot more important than the “difference in kind” between secular cosmopolitan Americans and are religious nationalist antagonists.

Tristero emphasized the first sentences: I'd like to emphasize the last. In arguing precisely against comparisons against the two movements, Matt says:

"Even though that’s only a “difference of degree” between two strands of religiously inspired populist nationalism, it’s actually a lot more important than the “difference in kind” between secular cosmopolitan Americans and are religious nationalist antagonists."

Well... but there it is, then, isn't it? Matt is indeed willing to state directly that both the Taliban and the American movement are "two strands of religiously inspired populist nationalism." He managed, himself, to come up with a terse, precise and quite meaningful phrase that describes the very political/sociological similarities Markos and numerous others have been talking about, and why comparisons between the two movements may be compelling.

That said, I don't think his cited examples are quite grasping the hypothesis here, a hypothesis which puts more emphasis on the religious and rhetorical similarities between the two groups and which would put, say, the pro-war, anti-Islam statements of national American religious figures and their followers (not to mention self-proclaimed Godly politicians and military officials) above those of a Bill Kristol or other right-wing-secular-but-merely-warmongering pundit -- but that's an argument for another day. The central premises of misogyny (or explicit criminalization of homosexuality, or other sex-based obsessions), of right-wing religiously-premised nationalism, and a desire to militarily remove or dominate unbelievers or apostates explicitly because of their supposed moral inferiority? Those are indeed decent starting points for describing both movements.

To make a short point of it all, Matt seems in one paragraph perfectly willing to cede the ground that (1) there are similarities between the two groups, which he can name, that (2) those similarities are grounded in conspicuously similar ideologies, the whole point and premise of the book, and that (3) there's "only a 'difference of degree between'" the two: his phrasing, not mine. From an intellectual standpoint, he has no apparent quarrels with any of those central rhetorical premises, and is not too shy to openly state them himself.

He, like other liberals uncomfortable with the labeling, instead bases his objection on the "differences of degree" part rendering the overall rhetorical comparison too weak or insulting -- when even he himself can rattle off those very obvious comparisons with hardly any effort. Well, I don't think anyone on the planet is arguing that there aren't differences in degree. We're making the point that the core ideologies of the two religiously inspired, populist, nationalist groups (that hate the identical things and similarly demand the delegalization of social behaviors that are contrary to their rigid moralities) are so similar that in many areas they only differ in expressed degree, and arguing that that's a damn interesting and scary thing to contemplate.

You could go farther still, of course: the "American Taliban" movement, after all, engages in successful, organized violence. Abortion clinic arsonists and bombers have long structured themselves in "cells", offering up mutual support and coordination for their actions. Websites celebrate religion-justified assassinations of doctors. There are paramilitary training camps scattered throughout America that are based on explicitly right-wing religious and conservative views and the notion that those views may need defending by force, even (or rather, especially) against their own government and their own fellow citizens. The anti-abortion domestic terrorist who successfully did what foreign terrorists could not, planting a bomb at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, was widely suspected of receiving help from like-minded Americans during the five years he continued to elude capture -- during which time he was able to bomb three more locations (two clinics and a lesbian nightclub.) Even difference in degree therefore needs qualification; perhaps difference in scope is slightly more accurate. The difference is that the Taliban succeeded in writing the laws for their country, and thus could take any action they liked "legally", by definition: the far-right American movement does not have the same luxury. And we should ensure it does not, by fighting constant attempts to nationally criminalize or "officially" stigmatize behaviors that the movement deems, via the interpretations of their own particular religious subsect, to be immoral.

But is the American movement attempting to enforce their particular sub-strain of morality on the rest of the country by explicitly criminalizing contrary behaviors? Oh, absolutely. That's a whole stated platform of the movement, right? Is the American movement explicitly framing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in a religious context, and declaring the other religion itself to be the primary enemy? Of course. The entire point of opposition to the "(not) Ground Zero Mosque" and other mosques throughout the country is that Islam, even Islam practiced by American citizens in their American cities, is inherently wicked, violent, and primitive. Mere moral scolding is one thing; attempts to nationalize one particular religious code, to the exclusion of all others, is another, and examples of attempts to legislate hard-right morality even when the state has no apparent logical interest in doing so abound. Religious groups put substantial funding and pulpit-thumping into efforts that saw Californians vote to criminalize same-sex marriage, in a campaign that the judge himself declared devoid of anything but bare moral disapprobation. More troublingly, the mounting extremism of violent rhetoric among the religious far-far-right is hardly a new or controversial discovery: journalists like David Neiwert have been charting that national trend for years.

No, the Islamic Taliban and the "American Taliban" counterpart are not the same movement. If they were, we'd call them the same thing, not different things. But are the similarities interesting enough, and specific enough, to be informative? Even in passing Matt seems to identify some that are, arguing instead mainly against the rhetorical label associated with that comparison. Fair enough; it's a difference of opinion. But I don't think it's fair to note the broader similarities and then declare a deeper discussion of those very similarities too uncouth or unserious to be explored.

The object of the "American Taliban" label isn't simply to insult the far-right -- although the cover art of Markos' book is a clear and pointed hit at Jonah Goldberg's profoundly silly Liberal Fascism, and although I personally have exactly zero sympathy for scolding about too-harsh rhetoric after having endured a decade of hearing how liberalism was "traitorous", "anti-American", "in league with terrorists", "against the troops" and so forth. And Markos is hardly the first or only person to use the American Taliban label: even the American Prospect itself has previously used it, upon which it caused no apparent devastation. The label is intended as a rather valid, if alarming, rhetorical device to make the reader seriously contemplate the underlying, equally alarming implications. If you have multiple groups of religious nationalists who vow that the other religion needs to be wiped off the map, that unbelievers are the enemy, that contrary behaviors should be criminalized, that the military of a nation needs to be more specifically religious, that government should be explicitly based on far-right interpretations of religious law, and that violence against other nations (or potentially, apostates in your own nation) is an acceptable path towards furthering those goals, than it seems more than reasonable to ask whether or not the ostensibly dissimilar groups in fact represent a wider phenomenon. It should not be a question delegated solely to the Sinclair Lewises of the world.

What feels wrong about this particular debate is that it feels, once again, like the usual Sensible Liberal debate. That since liberals are "above" such things, harsh rhetoric or harsh accusations from our side needs to be instinctively looked down upon as being unserious, or unhelpful, or not properly liberal-ish, i.e. in the mold of that particular well-known bent and well-worn format. And that the better and more noble path, therefore, is the same sort of intellectual above-the-fray non-engagement of the other side's worst impulses, actions and rhetoric that our own political movement so frequently celebrates as the height of sensible-person moderation. We seek to look forward, not backward, or we prefer to engage on the issues, or we prefer to_not dignify such behaviors with a response_. I think we all know exactly how much that works, mind you, but that doesn't stop liberals and Democrats alike from the exact same behaviors every single time, under the remarkable supposition that this time, non-engagement will be rewarded. On the contrary, however, it seems at least as reasonable to believe that extremist behaviors should be met with appropriately bell-ringing warnings of those behaviors, especially when those behaviors show significant signs of increasing in scope, hostility, or frequency.

I think it's perfectly fine and rational to say that the American Taliban label for American far-right religious or pseudo-religious extremism is not one that you, personally, would use to describe the phenomenon, but I think it's less sincere to declare that the whole rhetorical ground is unserious and off-limits, which is by and large the main ground that critics of the label have gravitated towards, having not themselves spent much time reading either this particular book or other, similar invocations of the term. If proponents of the global comparison fail to make their case, so be it. But I think it is a case with merit enough to at least be taken seriously.