Sunday Blog Rijsttafel

A little of this, a little of that. Add your own below.

Scott Winship at the Democratic Strategist discusses how to campaign for the politically-ignorant segment of the electorate, which he politely calls "The Uninformed Bloc": "Bennett found that nearly one-third of adults were unaware that the Republican Party is more conservative than the Democratic Party."

His colleague Jonathan Krasno at the Democratic Strategist follows up a discussion of whether re-districting is the one ring to rule them all, with an essay about targeting races vs broadening the field:

A Democrat's odds of winning increase with the percentage of Democrats in their district. The problem is that so many players seem to treat those odds as a cut-off point, so that a Democrat cannot win in a district that is less than 45 or 50 percent Democratic. That's wrong, and Tom Schaller provides a nice example why by identifying Chris Cannon's seat as the most Republican district in the country. It turns out a Democrat held that seat from 1991 to 1997, before Cannon beat him. ... For the present, everyone would agree that the Democrats must make the most of their opportunities by contesting seats where they have a decent chance of winning. What's "decent" and who gets to judge it are the key issues...

The problem, as Mark [Schmitt] neatly puts it, is that the money directed to Patricia Madrid or another really well-funded Democrat goes toward the purchase of the 50th TV spot in a single day or the 15th piece of direct mail, the equivalent of overkill. It would do a lot more good buying the 5th spot or 2nd mailing for another candidate. That seems reasonable enough if we believe a) that the money doesn't really help Madrid, and b) the other candidate who gets it stands a chance. The first is true, even if her opponent is running 100 ads a day, though I certainly don't expect to convince Madrid of that. Her campaign ought to be pushing for more; the DCCC just doesn't have to provide it. The whole strategy really turns on the second question: are there other Democrats who can win?

Eternal Hope at The Voice Of Reason argues that selling out to corporations has undone the Democratic Party's ideals, leaving voters searching for alternatives like the Greens, and that anti-corporate Democrats like Elliot Spitzer in New York and David van Os in Texas are the future of the party:

Now, another candidate has come along in the mold of Elliot Spitzer - David Van Os, the Democratic Attorney General Candidate from Texas. Following in the footsteps of Teddy Roosevelt, who destroyed corporate monopolies in the early 1900's, and Spitzer, he will be the Teddy Roosevelt of the 21st Century.

Van Os has a unique chance to win in an otherwise Republican state because the Republicans in that state have made a monumental political blunder - they propose to seize hundreds of thousands of acres of land to build the NAFTA Superhighway - an expressway that will run from Mexico to Canada, with a Port of Entry in Kansas City.

For the last 20+ years, the Republicans have assembled a coalition of fundamentalists, corporations, America Firsters, and Libertarians who have delivered them victories in all but two of the elections since 1980. In Texas, Governor Rick Perry has made a monumental political blunder by throwing the Libertarian base to the wolves in the name of "progress."

kid oakland at k/o continues to roundup local blogs targeting local races all across the country. (He's now got an email list for bloggers following local races that you may want to sign up for.) He tells us why we shouldn't give up on CA-Gov:

The problem with that mindset is that Arnold is just as bad for working Californians in 2006 as he ever was. That fact is not going to change between now and election day. That fact won't change in the four years following election day, either. Any calcluating and conniving CA Democrat doing the political math and thinking of sitting this gubernatorial race out should realize:

Arnold stinks. He's bad for our people and bad for our state.

Arnold's lies and spin affect every Democrat in every race, state-wide. In my view, when you sell Phil down the river, you are selling out our people, plain and simple.

janinsanfran at Happening Here photoblogs Martha's Vineyard (don't miss the goat shearing), including its immigrants:

Even in a resort playground, somebody has to do the work. In the modern United States, hard, undignified and dirty work is usually done by immigrants, often undocumented. Here in Martha's Vineyard, for the last ten years, many of the immigrants doing the scut work have come from Brazil...

Given the tension over their presence, their demanding lives and the cost of doing business on this island, it is not surprising that Vineyard Brazilians have not created a highly visible cultural enclave. There are Brazilian-oriented businesses, but you won't find a lot of people in any of them in the middle of the day -- folks are working. Here's a tour of a few I found.

Maha at The Mahablog wittily points out a few of the minor technical problems with ethnic profiling at security checkpoints:

Whenever I hear someone advocate racial profiling as part of national security — singling out people who look Middle Eastern for special attention — I think of the 1987 film “Born in East L.A.” In this film Cheech Marin (who was also the writer and director) plays Rudy, a native-born east Angeleno who got caught in an INS raid without his wallet (and ID) and deported to Mexico. ... Anyway, in one particularly brilliant segment Rudy is given the task of teaching English to a group of men planning to enter the U.S. illegally. The men turn out to be Chinese. Instead of English, Rudy teaches them how to pass for Latinos — how to walk, dress, watch girls, etc. And the funny thing is that it works; the Chinese fugitives are transformed into completely believable Latinos...

Every now and then some rightie will wonder why New York subway security doesn’t single out Middle Eastern persons for backpack searches. I always want to take the rightie by the hand and gently lead him to, say, some high-traffic spot in the Union Square subway station, and tell him to point out all the subway passengers who might be Middle Eastern. Eventually it should dawn even on the densest of righties that a majority of the thousands of people he sees might be Middle Eastern. It would be a lot easier to single out those passengers who definitely are not Middle Eastern, and even then he most likely would make some mistakes. And if your purpose is to identify Muslims, don’t forget there are African Muslims and Asian Muslims, and the occasional person of European ancestry who converts to Islam.

If airport and other security were to put people wearing Muslim dress through special security, it wouldn’t take long for the enterprising terrorist to figure out how to dress and act so as not to arouse suspicion that he is Muslim. He might even rent “Born in East L.A.” and get tips on passing as Latino.

Revere at Effect Measure on the latest news in a good week for sharing data about the DNA sequences of avian flu virus isolates from around the world:

A new initiative on sharing avian influenza data has just been announced, called the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID)... Last month Indonesia gave permission for sequencing laboratories in Hong Kong and at CDC in the US to release data collected from its isolates. Two days ago US CDC released some 650 US influenza sequences (human subtypes from seasonal influenza) it had been sitting on for a considerable periods....

As far as we understand it, on the basis of a quick read and without the kind of clarification that will be forthcoming in the next few months as it is put into operation, scientists who join the collaborative will be required to place their sequences in a secure database as soon as possible after producing and validating them. Collaborating scientists will thus see everyone else's data immediately as it is produced, but in return, agree to publish collaboratively or jointly. As soon as the data is analyzed it is to be deposited in one of the three publicly available databases participating in the International Sequence Database Collaboration (EMBL, DDBJ and GenBank) -- irrespective of whether it had been the subject of a publication, and in no case later than 6 months after submission.

Finally, David Neiwert at Orcinus favors us with 10 min of personally recorded whale songs, complete with boat motors. It reminded me of this report summarized in the Times this week saying that ocean noise levels have increased 10 decibels in the last four decades. From Orcinus:

I've been listening to them through my hydrophone so I can get a handle on what the southern residents are trying to cope with in their native habitat, sound-wise. Killer whales' chief sensory capacity is through their echolocation -- they can only see about twenty feet underwater with their eyes, but hundreds of yards with echolocation -- and the presence of manmade sound is, after a paucity of salmon, one of the real survival issues they face. The sound interferes with their ability to hunt and to generally communicate. As you can hear, they are very social animals, and vocalize a great deal even while traveling.

One of the samples gives you an idea what they're up against: In the middle of a relatively quiet set of vocalizations, a boat motor fires up and takes off -- completely drowning out any orca sounds at all. It's worth noting that this was not a whale-watching boat -- it was just a fisherman with a 20-foot recreational boat who was watching the orcas for awhile and got bored.

Comments

[DemFromCT]

thanks for including revere's piece. I've been too busy to blog on flu. That will need correction after labor Day.

[emptypockets]

yeah I'd noticed you'd been slacking, only turning out 10 or 12 posts a day lately.

[DemFromCT]

something happened in CT this Aug... forgot what it was, though it'll likely come to me in a minute...

[Mimikatz]

I really recommend the discussion at Democratic Strategist on tageting vs broadening the field for all true junkies.

This time around, as I have said often, the Dems, pushed by activists and the Netroots, are finally broadening the field. There are races all over the country where the Dems barely mounted an attack in years past, letting the R cruise to victory with 60%+ of the vote. But this year a serious candidate has emerged and raised a ton of money. The GOP incumbent is in the race of his or her life.

One example is CA-11, held by Richard Pombo. No one filed last time, so Jerry McNerney ran in the primary as a write-in and in the general, with almost no money, got 39% of the vote. Over the last 2 years Pombo has been in the news over and over trying to sell off the National Parks, gut the Endangered Species Act, taking Abramoff money and touring the parks with his family at taxpayer expense. McNerney filed this time, but the DCCC supported a corporate type. McNerney won the primary, and with NO HELP FROM DC, has raised over $500,000 and has an army of local and neighboring (Bay Area) volunteers working on his behalf. The latest poll has him leading Pombo.

There are races like that all over the country--40 competitive races at least beyond the "big 10 or 15" that everyone anticipated. The GOP can't defend them all, not with donations down and Bush sunk on the bottom of the barrel. Krasno was right.

[Dismayed]

Hurray for the anti-corporate Democrat. A sense (and discomfort with) the fact that corporations are the true rulers of our current democracy, cuts across all social and economic boundries. People want this government back for the people. Can't go wrong running against corporate America.

[freepatriot]

about "Born In East LA", it was based on the actual experience of a 12 year old American born boy who was wrongly deported because he didn't speak english

and the Chinese in the movie, they're OTMs

Other Than Mexican