Not that I imagine that anyone's expecting regular posting from me at this point (ha!)—and it seems a little pathetic that one of the handful of recent posts here should be a post about how there won't be any posts for a week or so. On the other hand, I'm surprised and grateful that a few people are still interested, even after all these months of silence, in whatever remnant activity Reading A1 exhibits, and I owe y'all at least that much of a heads-up. So I'm off for an extended Thanksgiving holiday, and will be entirely away even from the temptation to post until the middle of next week. At which point I should probably buckle down a bit and talk about what's been going on with me and what, if anything, I think might be made of this blog.

And much thanks to anybody that's still hanging around here.

posted by michael  1:56:59 PM  
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Congratulations to our good friend Liz Bumiller, who (via James Wolcott) has won Mike Taibbi's hotly contested Wimblehack competition as the country's Worst Campaign Reporter.

Not to brag, but Reading A1's been showing Lizzy Boo the love since just the third day of its existence, when we noticed her wetting herself over our Leader's announcement of the Great Leap to Mars. Funny, but I don't recall her following up on that story of late ...

posted by michael  4:03:40 PM  
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It's gonna take a lot of fireworks to clean this place up. That's what Homer says, in a Simpsons episode I watched last night, when he and Bart have just blown up Lisa's VCR, along with most of her room, to dislodge a stuck tape.

And, thinking about Fallujah, I had to wonder: just who the hell made Homer Simpson our chief military planner in Iraq?

posted by michael  12:45:04 PM  
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Meet the new war, same as the old war. I have no doubt that we'll be greeted by the Iranian people as liberators.


posted by michael  12:20:21 PM  
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What part of "no" don't you understand? Of course, we all know that Dear Leader has nominated his very own personal attorney/co-defendant to be the next Attorney General. No need to rehearse here the various ways in which this is about the foulest available choice: though I'll just add that, when I told people before the election that a vote for Bush was in effect a vote for torture, I really didn't imagine that I'd see the proposition literalized, and right out of the box. (A genuinely amazing aspect of this administration: it's always going to be worse than you imagine, no matter how much experience you get imagining the worst.)

And we're all aware that Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden and the ACLU have decided to roll over and play dead for the appointment. On at least one of the Internets, the notion appeared that this was an effort to "save powder" for the upcoming battles over Supreme Court nominations.

And my question for the Senate Democrats and the big-money liberal Beltway orgs: what about being out of power do you guys still need to learn at this point? You are in opposition. You have no power; you have no purchase within this government. Acquiescing on Gonzalez buys you nothing that you can use when the next vile right-winger is submitted for confirmation. The only thing you can do is oppose, and oppose, and oppose again, in the certain knowledge that outrages will multiply. You have no "strength" that could be husbanded for future battles. You must contest everything, from now until this criminal regime finally goes down—and any contest you fail to join only diminishes you, and emboldens them, further.

Jesus, I'm tired of hearing the sound of Democrats caving. Get a fucking spine, or get out.

posted by michael  3:44:07 PM  
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The post-democracy era. Stephen Freeman, a professor of organizational dynamics at U. Penn., has a PDF article on the validity of 2004 exit polling data here. Go read it. I'll quote his conclusion:

I have tried to demonstrate that exit poll data is fundamentally sound, that the deviations between exit poll predictions and vote tallies in the three critical battleground states [of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania] could not have occurred strictly by chance or random error, and that no solid explanations have yet been provided to explain the discrepancy. ...

The unexplained discrepancy leaves us with two broad categories of explanations: the polls were flawed or the count is off. ... Given that neither the pollsters nor their media clients have provided solid explanations to the public, suspicion of fraud, or among the less accusatory, "mistabulation," is running rampant and unchecked. That so many people suspect misply undermines not only the legitimacy of the President, but faith in the foundations of the democracy.

Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature conclusion, but the election's unexplained exit poll discrepancies make it an unavoidable hypothesis, one that is the responsibility of the media, academia, polling agencies, and the public to investigae.

And while we're on the subject, check out this piece of evidence, from the Libertarian campaign, of the apparent "disappearing" of votes during the course of election night.

Yep, today I'm pinging back toward my "the bastards stole it" position. From which position it's vastly harder to have any hope that we haven't already entered the post-democracy period of American history.

posted by michael  12:37:43 PM  
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The last fair election. I've been pinging back and forth in the week since Kerry conceded the election, between my gut, which keeps insisting that the Republicans just stole the presidency for the second time in as many chances, and my head, which won't accept that at this point there's any real way of knowing.

My head, of course, is right. Many of the irregularities that have been turning up so far—I mean, irregularities in the vote count, rather than the documented and multiple GOP voter-suppression "irregularities," which would be causing sustained outrage in any media less lap-dog than our own—offer only ambiguous testimony to a possible, concerted effort to rig the election. Even the data point that most has my gut in a knot—the anomalous Bush gains from the NEP's late 16-state exit poll—is at best only very incomplete information, and it might in fact be plausible that there'd be an asymmetry between Bush and Kerry voters in their willingness to answer exit interviews. (A campaign predicated on free-floating suspicion and fear is, perhaps, less likely to induce cooperation with voter surveys in its supporters.) My trust, such as it is, is that any widespread tampering would leave statistical traces—though statistical analysis can only be a forensic exercise; it would never happen in time, or have sufficient political impact, to end up invalidating the results of a hacked vote.

No, I have no way of knowing that the election wasn't by and large fair. The problem—the real, permanent problem—is that I have no way of knowing it was.

And for that fact, my head has no answer. It should be a national scandal that, four years after the last disputed (and undeniably stolen) presidential election, it cannot be demonstrated to an acceptable standard, much less to the satisfaction of reasonable people on the losing side, that this election was conducted fairly, or produced a fair result. (In a democratic system, that's the very definition of a crisis of legitimacy.) It should be an even worse scandal that, given what we know already about efforts to throw out Democratic registrations, to reduce the vote among minority populations (both by intimidation and by statute), to keep electronic voting and vote tabulation audit- and scrutiny-free, a reasonable person would be unwise even to grant the presumption of fairness to the American electoral process.

And mark my words: if it doesn't become a scandal, then the game's up. I have not the slightest doubt that the worst, most radical elements in the Republican party—hell, let's save time and just say, the Republican party, since it's the same damn thing—envision and desire an America in which they function as a gringo version of Mexico's PRI. That is, they envision the United States as a sham-democratic, one-party state. The GOP is in the hands of the true believers, people who have been screaming for years now that their opponents are godless traitors, a threat to the very survival of the country, people who fantasize about leading a national purification puchased with the elimination of any "liberal" tendency from American life. It may be they didn't steal it this time. Conspiracies are hard to manage, and secrets are hard to keep: and the wide dispersal of vote-counting responsibility still offers a good measure of protection against large-scale, top-down tampering. (But keep a close eye on those optical-scan central tabulating PCs—networked Windows boxes are inherently insecure, and if there's any place where the fix might have been in, that's where you'll find it.) Can there be any question, though, given the ideology and the evident willingness to use any means to advance it, that the GOP will steal it by vote-rigging one of these days, and sooner rather than later?

Forget all the "values" bullshit. The Democratic party must become, right now, the party of electoral reform. They must beat the Republicans over the head with their unwillingness to promote free, fair, and verifiable elections. They must insist on a single, comprehensive national standard for accuracy, accessibility and transparency in voting, and on the fiscal means to implement it, and must make it clear that opposition to such a standard is prima facie evidence of a desire to tamper with elections. (What problem could an honest person have with it?) They must make a relentless campaign, and do so in the face of the supine complacency and cluelessness of the national media. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the electoral survival of the party—and with it, in our system, of any genuine political opposition to the institutional right—depends on it.

Bottom line: Either we will have a national movement for voting reform before 2008, or we may well have seen (in 1996, if not this year) the last fair election of our lifetimes.

posted by michael  3:51:10 PM  
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Best comment about "moral values" as a determinant in the election is from Atrios:

All the talking heads talking about the role of "moral values" ... know that what that really means is "fag hating," but they won't say it.

Big amen.

posted by michael  2:08:39 PM  
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My Iraq prediction. Based on no particular information beyond the Bush administration's ineluctable tendency to find its advantage in making the worst of bad situations, here's what I expect will be the endgame in Iraq:

A draft is politically inconceivable. In the absence of a draft, and without substantial international troop commitments (which will now certainly not be forthcoming) our sustained occupation of Iraq is all but impossible. So Fallujah will be rased, and possibly another Sunni city or two, in the next several weeks. Military victory will be declared (again). "Victory" will allow the U.S. to gin up a sham Iraqi election in January, on schedule, to parallel the sham transfer of sovereignty that went off on schedule in June. In the immediate aftermath of which, before the inevitable chaos and civil war have time to establish themselves (and register in American minds), the bulk of our contingent in Iraq will be drawn out.

At which point, Iraq becomes Afghanistan. But nobody here will particularly notice, because the media will have the shiny new toy of Bush's re-coronation (imagine the hosannas to be sung in the Times!—I'll bet Todd Purdum is polishing his adjectives even now) to keep them busy while Mesopotamia burns.

posted by michael  1:29:13 PM  
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To the Bush voters. Remember the naked prisoners in heaps, the prisoners beaten to death, the prisoners menaced with dogs? Remember the image of the hooded, electroded prisoner at Abu Ghraib? Stitch it to the flag: that's what you voted for. For now and for the foreseeable future, that's the image our country will bear in the world.

Study Texas. Get to know it, because that's where you voted to live. You voted to reduce this country to the level of its nastiest, most brutish state—its cronyist parody of capitalism, its death-pervaded mockery of justice, its official and unofficial contempt for anybody poor, or dispossessed, or nonwhite.

You had the chance to opt for a restoration of decent, moderate government. You chose an injection of poison instead. I wish you joy of the worm.

posted by michael  11:57:57 AM  
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