Nevada is one of those states, common in but not exclusive to the West, where conventional partisan politics often have more to do with local loyalties than political ideology. In broad terms, you can see this in returns from prior elections: even in relatively good years for the Democrats, looking back at county-level elections shows even sparsely-populated Mineral County returning better results than than urban Storey and Washoe Counties, and Clark voting for the Democrat come hell or high water.

In this election, this shifted massively; while Obama only did marginally better at the polls in Clark than John Kerry or Al Gore, even having one of the country’s strongest rates of urban growth couldn’t account for the 14-point blowout in what would normally be an intensely divided state - a state which had favored McCain in the polls for most of the year and which had never been more than five points out of reach.

It has been common to suggest that the Republicans stayed home or refused to stand by McCain, but did not actively support Obama. This, too, is seriously difficult to defend: states like Nevada and Montana (which saw a similarly dramatic shift this year without actually changing colors) would be a natural lock for the Barr campaign - especially Nevada, where Paul came in second to Romney in the Republican caucus well before Romney reinvented himself as Reagan Junior. But the third-party vote was minuscule.

What has happened in Nevada is twofold:

1. The fall of the house of Bush
Nevada is, with the exception of a few issues like gun control and taxes, extremely middle-of-the-road politically. This has created an enormous problem for the local Republican party, which lacks the tradition of local independence that kept the GOP alive in New England a generation after its time. Between that and the uniquely distant relationship the local theocrats have with the national religious right (oppose Utah, where the local Republicans are strong enough and have enough power over politics that they could push the electorate to vote for Jack Chick), the last four years have been absolutely brutal on the state Republican machine.

2. The Generational Swing
As far as I’m concerned, the factor in John McCain’s loss of the Reno metro is the incoming generation. Unlike their parents and grandparents, they were born and raised in a Reno which played cultural and economic second fiddle to Vegas. The Faustian pact with the largely rural, right-wing and Mormon east no longer had the gravity that got it formed in the first place; Reno’s movers and shakers, who have been faced for the whole of their generation with the binary choice between fleeing the Carson City ship or going down with it, have accepted that the Democrats are much more likely to benefit them as members of the urban middle-class.

Between these factors, we saw not just a slight uptick in Clark’s Democratic margin, but a violent, sudden shift by Washoe and Story to the blue. What remains to be seen is whether a new coalition will form, producing a state governed by an urban cordillera in competition with its exurbs and rural hinterland - or whether this election is a fluke. In the latter case, a good Republican candidate might just get Nevada close; in the former case, it might just be as accessible to the GOP as Vermont.

Bono: Upcoming Election Great Opportunity To “Relaunch Brand USA”

“The whole world has a stake in how things turn out,” the Ireland native told thousands of Starbucks Corp. employees in New Orleans for a leadership conference. The coffee company and Bono’s (RED) label, which helps raise money for AIDS awareness in Africa, also announced a partnership Wednesday.

The singer talked about brands and what they stand for. In Starbucks’ case, he said some might see it as a place to hang out and get coffee — but that brand can also signify social responsibility.

The way the U.S. is perceived — “Brand USA” — also means something, he said. And it’s never been so closely watched, said Bono, who didn’t endorse either candidate for president.

Regardless of who wins, “it’s a great chance to relaunch Brand USA,” he said.

I have been sitting here desperately trying to figure out something funny to say about St. Bono talking about Brand USA at a Starbucks leadership conference in New Orleans while piously avoiding anything so worldly as a political endorsement, but I confess I find myself at a loss.

“Mister President, count back from a hundred for me,” said the fat woman. “One hundred,” said the fat man, “ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety.”

John McCain had a number of severe health problems, all aggravated by his experience as a prisoner of war for the bulk of the conflict in Vietnam. Downed after his twenty-third bombardment mission against North Vietnam, he could do little but cheer as Nixon, elected on the promise to end the war honorably, stepped up the bombardment of Vietnam, extending it quietly to Cambodia.

Some wiseass knew they could count on her when the old man went under, and it hadn’t been fifteen minutes before Belya Revolutsiya had sent out texts to all of its members. The leak, who would remain anonymous to history, honestly thought something good would come of this; that freedom would be spread and the Bear’s iron heel caught in a steel trap. Read more »

Carney had a wry sense of humor. He was fond of joking that he’d graduated from Wasilla High School in the “top 20 percent”–by which he meant he was valedictorian of his five-person class. Sometimes Palin was the only colleague who didn’t get his jokes. “I don’t think he had too much patience for her lack of understanding,” says John Stein, then the town’s mayor. In internal discussions, Carney would be relentlessly logical while Palin was vague and intuitive. “Nick had a way of being direct and to the point, something that Sarah was uncomfortable with,” recalls Chase. Which is to say, when it came to garbage removal, what Palin seemed to have chafed against was less the substance of Carney’s position than what she felt was his elitist, Ivy League bearing. And, over the next few years, she found ways to get him back.

‘nuclear’ is a fairly recent word (its origins are older, but it’s only been a common feature of American English from around the time my parents were born), but it’s one old enough to have an established consensus on how it’s pronounced.

That consensus, generally speaking, is new-cle-ur. Not nu-cu-l[ea]r. New-cle-ur.

This is the way it is used in the neutral American accent, although like many recent or strongly regionally marked words its pronunciation is ultimately likely to be a matter of who is speaking.

The common perception in the popular media is that the b-pronunciation - nucular, as it is usually transcribed - is uneducated. It is often even used as a sort of shortcut for unpolished stupidity in a way that ain’t is no longer suitable for and few other largely Southernisms are politically correct for. I’m not sure if I’ve addressed this here, but if so I’ll happily do so again: ‘nucular’ was and still is in common use among nuclear physicists, nuclear naval engineers, and other experienced reactor and policy personnel. It’s declined sharply - ‘nuke’, common to the nuclear and nucular zones, reinforces nuclear rather strongly - but the distinction is one of region rather than erudition. Carter, Clinton, and Truman each used it.

I’ve long harbored the suspicion that Bush favoring nucular - in spite of having been brought up by a New Englander in a primarily Midwestern political circuit - was just a bit of dumb-hick theatrics, something you do to impress the papers with how very populist you are. Bush, no doubt, has at least once in his lifetime congratulated himself for pronouncing the word ‘nuclear’ in a way foreign to his constituents, believing it makes them more willing to sit down and have a beer with him. O’Doull’s please. Can’t forget that the Lord is with us and drinking’s against the Bible. Like so much else about the man, political theater mingles in more generous proportion than anyone wishes to admit with any other cause.

Governor Palin - who was raised and educated in the Northwest, worked in a Middle-American-obligatory field (broadcasting) before going into politics, and lives in a state whose dialect is an approximate mixture between Iowa, upstate Washington, and western Canada - has no reasonable excuse for pronouncing ‘nuclear’ as ‘nucular’. If she wishes to, that is of course her call, but it’s a particularly obvious and glaringly artificial call - one made evidently under the apprehension that that is how idiots pronounce it and we Americans, the illiterate Heartland hillbillies especially, are slack-jawed morons.

Palin, more than Bush ever wanted to, has settled into a political persona which is more aggressively patronizing than any sane observer ought to tolerate. She’s taken her complete inability to form a coherent sentence about anything that concerns people beneath her and made elitist lemonade, condescendingly changing her diction and register to the disjointed, surreal Ozarkian pastiche every untrained European and left-coaster aiming for the bourgeois American evangelical immediately latches onto. She’s jes’ folks, the McCain campaign assures us, not a fancy lie-ber-ul e-lite what reads books or brushes her teeth.

It’s a pity that the media fell out of love with Palin fairly quickly; otherwise, I wonder if she’d get to the point of affecting a pot belly and a ramrod-straight family tree before anyone actually called her on this shit.

Nuuuh! We’d Americaahs judt laak yeew! No Osama! Nuuuuuh! USA first! Yee-haw! Dale Junior ‘n’ Tyler too!

http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/12297.html

The Overton Window is an interesting phenomenon. I tend to think it’s accurate as described, but as befits their surly, self-obsessed politics, the right-wingers who like to hang on it like it’s the Second Coming of Aryan Jesus get it terribly wrong, and every once in a while you see the direct consequences for that.

‘Look as extreme as you possibly can be,’ counsels Overton, ‘and treat the only alternative as being only slightly bug-fuck insane.’ It only works if only one political actor does it; the countervailing force, if given any significant coverage, tends to cancel it out. (The current political climate aside, Italy - a country without the stable political machines necessary to produce an ideological frame for national politics - hosts large numbers of both fascists and communists with relative nonchalance.)
The problem is that most people who read this from the right immediately conclude that this is an excellent way to get everything they want, right now now now!!! They no more have an adult concept of internal or external negotiation than they do an adult concept of other human beings’ thoughts and desires. In a supportive enough community, they wind up brushing against Sensible Moderates fairly rarely, and the poles of the debate are set in a way that automatically excludes almost all of the population from it.

The Overton-mongering of the hard right has completely failed in fixing public opinion to the right. If it has, it has done so no more radically than eight years of Eisenhower or six of Nixon - human societies, and governments dependent on them, can only endure so much stress from sudden ideological shifts. Meanwhile, they have taken a lot of people who (under a normal Overton scheme) might well have accepted a place within the new frame of debate and completely alienated them. Any Overton scheme does this; the trick is to keep the number of people who are suddenly Outside The Mainstream to, you know, numbers approaching the number of people actually outside the mainstream. When your radical-left positions on the minimum wage, the safety net, and executive power are to the right of the dwindling Republican rank and file, you’re going to find it impossible without the kind of state resources normally limited to totalitarian states to convince someone who has political and social experience before the Eternal Ideological Crisis that they’re a dangerous radical.

You’re not going to convince their friends or coworkers of it, either. You’re not going to convince 80% of the population that they’re too hard to the left on wage controls; you’re not going to convince the majority of the country that actively hates the man that the worst we can think of Bush is that he’s just slightly worse than Saint Reagan.

That and, you know, they cannot resist making the fight about their petty political fetishes. They’re intensely self-defeating in that way - they’ve reified all of the grounds for canned hysterics (sex education, school prayer, flag burning, Support The Troops merchandise) and invested billions of dollars into getting the American public to accept their worthless kitsch as tasteful and beautiful. What can you say to a candidate who invests equal amounts of time, money, and energy into convincing the public that (a) his opponent is a danger to all good upstanding pedophiles and (b) his shit smells like roses? Besides, you know, ‘Thanks, flower-ass.’

Between their natural constitutional inability to actually do what the Overton schema requires - they’re too goddamn greedy, too goddamn petty, and too goddamn vain - and the serious effects of insularity, we wind up with a sort of perfect storm of causes leading to a singular effect: the window falling out of its rails and plummeting outward. Katrina was simply the best example of this; watching the federal government treat the poor of an entire state as if they had brought a hurricane on themselves, watching right-wing icons beg for federal troops to shoot people in a disaster area over drinking water, and watching the Beltway treat this as not just reasonable but the winning side of the debate drove Republican voters away by the hundreds of thousands. An electorate that forgave Bush a thousand lives and a half trillion dollars in Iraq could not forgive the odious slimeball Rove, and could not condone him quietly having his measurements taken to renovate Liberty Island.

We have the same thing happening now, just in more subtle ways. The Republican hate machine has largely succeeded in convincing low-information voters that Obama might be a secret Muslim, that McCain is a butch hyper-cowboy, and that the War on Terror will be decided by Reagan impressions at dawn. The telling thing - and what might just be the fatal blow for Republican Overton politics - is that they don’t actually seem to give a shit. You got ‘em singing along to Toby Keith, you fucking assholes, and now they’re voting for the towelhead. Hope you get along great with the neighbors in your gated community.

John McCain has, as you are no doubt familiar, recently cut an ad framing efforts to educate children on inappropriate touching as ’sex education’. This is not a popular position - in fact, most Republicans will unreservedly support programs like the one Obama voted for.

Why?
Read more »

And four months ago, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor’s career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to hear an assistant to the governor on the line, she said.

“You should be ashamed!” Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. “Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!”

A heartbeat away from the Presidency if McCain should win is a woman who is mostly a shameless thief; her instincts are a bandit’s and her loyalties are a mobster’s.

She deliberately destroyed the world’s largest sockeye fishery for no better purpose than the profit margins of some Goddamn mining consortium; she likes to pretend that she’s a loyal Christian but she’s got that same evangelical fixation on her own petty, ridiculous issues - treating a pipeline like an object of saintly veneration, conscripting children (who Jesus of course admires more than anything, so long as they’re white) to pray with her (TV cameras rolling - Heaven forbid we not be noticed in our piety, good Philistines we are) for a fucking pipeline.

I like to say pat things about the terrible mick fuckers who squint on their million-dollar TV programs to convince the audience they’re extra special pious, but they at least have a concept of piety divorced even conceptually from their own bottom line. Palin literally believes God is smiling on her petty graft.

In the course of doing so, of course, she scammed money from the government. The gesture means more than the amount - $600 would seem pathetic to someone like her - after all, she doesn’t share the daily difficulties of the working class, and for her $600 is not a month’s rent but pocket change to be spent on a flight and a lunch; she’s stolen much larger amounts, but they all follow the same basic logic.

She has a basically fascist concept of society - it doesn’t seem at all out of place for her to requisition money to pray for a pipeline in public, nor to spend $400,000 campaigning against common sense or campaign actively against her own government on the basis of its incoherence with her private worldview. She’s been doing it since she was a small-time operative; before she became a fearless Duce for Alaska, she played the same role in Wasilla, waging a D’Annunzian war against a local librarian whose insufficient zeal for censoring moral turpitude revealed too little support for the mayor - in her own words.

Her speeches since she became nationally prominent have all been great fulminations against civil society - grand proclamations of the uselessness of community organizing, the inefficacy of private society and the transcendent beauty of the state. Small wonder she has an Objectivist fan-club devoted to scouring every black mark on her character from the public record - no human being has been as shameless about their political bankruptcy since Rand sang and danced for fascist Italy. She has no concept of power unless it be divorced from the power of life and death; no concept of good unless it be enslaved to the crusade against evil; and nothing but contempt for any people decadent enough to refuse any power to their rightful Leaders.

This is not just another rant about the inexplicable rise of the Basileus of Wasilla, however hilariously it lays bare a truth about the American right too terrible to explain directly. Her fascism - and here the word is so literal I actually feel ashamed for using it on people who simply exhibited surreal enthusiasm for power rather than openly worshipping it - is not so much a governing principle as a malignant worldview, a festering, evil rotting of the soul. Like any other aspiring autocrat, she has no power over the demoniac pull of her ink-black spiritual abyss - she simply feels its compelling claw, understands beyond understanding that eternal urge to triumph through faith.

No: the one thing Palin can understand, the one emotion she can be counted on to exhibit, is contempt for things outside of her domain. Like the nearly erotic terror the idea of art and culture divorced from tradition aroused in the Nazis and their sympathizers, anything that she cannot clump into her own stilted, corrupt experience - the Pinochetian cosmos of greed, grasping Nietzchian wills and impossibly complicit victims - is an impossible beast, something to be set alight and trampled underfoot. Anything that is not part of the rat-race must become fuel for that which is.

This is the common theme we see in what she does where there is no clearly understandable profit motive. We can exercise the benefit of the doubt and suppose that her militant contempt for ANWR might just be the hand of big oil up her ass, and we could similarly paint her willingness to rip her own state’s future as a tourist haven to shreds as the impossible desperation of a miner’s whore in an incipient ghost-town.

But we cannot by these means explain the wolves.

Like that filthy monster Reagan - dead before the public ever knew his name and shambling about even now these four years after his mouldering body at last followed his conscience and memory in giving up the ghost - she hates the world in a way functioning human beings find impossible to understand. Reagan insisted that the redwoods and other precious parts of our nation’s most populous, diverse, and essentially American state were interchangeable logging stock; even that had some surreal, warped basis in economic impulse. But Palin goes beyond this.

She offers men who think of themselves as hunters, responsible men of the world, a hundred and fifty dollars each to destroy wolves. She has been warned by people who understand ecology, even those - like the Republicans for Environmental Protection mentioned by Dolan - who share her culture’s insistence that the place of nature is under the dominion of man. Unlike any other hunters in the first world, the methods she favors - methods that shameless thief’s thief spent $400,000 of the state’s money to encourage at the polls - are mechanically efficient. We are not dealing with boar-stickers or deer-slayers; these women and men are intimate with the idea of death and share a kind of spiritual concern for the animals they destroy. They are often not the most ecologically-minded of people, but they are united by a vague idea of sport.

Palin, aiming to correct their ludicrous inefficiency, suggested they machine-gun the wolves by Cessna. To her, not only is the idea of the wolf repellant but so is the idea of the wolf meeting a human end. She can understand humans preying on big game - even if she does not understand, as ecologists now do and as sport hunters always have, that their fellow predators play a vital role in weeding out the weak and sick and keeping the big game strong - but the idea of something hunting out of hunger is alien to her, and so is the idea of competition with mercy. Wolves must be destroyed; the strong must destroy the weak even when forebearance serves them just as well.

Here, thus, we can record the only principle Palin has ever exhibited in any of her forty-four years: that God put us on Earth to strafe the wolves. I am no Christian, but I’m not sure what Christ would say about this.

I’m Sarah Palin and I’m here to say
Eskimos are terrible
In every way
Bow now now
Bow now now
A is A