WhirledView

Elections 2000 Reporting Fiasco Reprise?

By Patricia H. Kushlis

I certainly hope not, but if this turns out to be another cliff-hanger election, then anything’s possible. I was reminded of the seemingly interminable night that I spent on the 93rd floor of the World Trade Center’s Tower 2 as New Mexico’s State Manager for the now defunct Voter News Service (VNS) when I read a CNN after action report on elections reporting fiasco 2000 earlier today.

I don’t agree with a number of the assertions in the report – most glaringly, its omission of fact that the VNS Exit Polls could have been off because of the large number of Jewish voters who thought they had voted for the Gore/Lieberman ticket but in reality had their vote counted as voting for Buchanan because of the complications of Florida’s “butterfly ballot” that benefited the Republicans and likely cost Gore the razor’s edge election.

No wonder then that there were major exit polling problems in Florida and no wonder that the exit poll results were bad there. But why did the CNN commissioned report ignore this fact entirely when it was widely known to the American public?

The media's source(s) are worse in 2008 than in 2000

Thursday Washington Island Blogging

by Cheryl Rofer

It's been a busy week for me, made more intense and confusing by continuing electorial euphoria, which I am doing my best to control for thoroughly superstitious reasons. But the week is slowing down, and maybe it's time to post a few photos from my Wisconsin vacation a few weeks back.

I stayed on Washington Island for a few days. Washington Island is at the end of that peninsula that contains Door County and defines Green Bay, the city of which name resides at the lower end of such bay.

So here are a few calming photos from a very lovely Wisconsin autumn. The map is from the University of Texas's Perry-Castañeda Library, and, as usual, click on the images to enlarge them.

Time for Granny Griping

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

The article promotes kindness to the animals we eat, but it perpetuates a pathetically outdated human stereotype. Read the following quotes and see what they share:

The first official Proposition 2 video...shows the grisly inner workings of slaughterhouses and other factory-farming operations. By contract, the Humane Society’s brightly-colored animated video features a Babe-like pig signing Proposition 2-related lyrics to the Stevie Wonder song “Superstition” and dancing through barns, releasing pigs, chickens and calves from their cages. It’s the kind of short video you could forward without worrying about its appropriateness, to your grandmother, to your P.T.A. president, to your congregation, to anyone under the redefined big tent of farm-animal welfare.

“We aren’t a bunch of little old ladies in tennis shoes,” [Humane Society President Wayne] Pacelle says, paraphrasing his mentor Cleveland Armory, an animal rights activist. “We have cleats on.”

Old ladies in tennis shoes? What on earth does that mean in the year 2008? Everyone with good sense wears some descendant of the old tennis shoe as often as possible. Kids. Athletes. Men. Women. Middle-aged and young as well as old. Fashion slaves may allow themselves to be coaxed into toe-crushing stilettos, but no one who has to walk or stand for more than a moment can endure them. Might as well go whole hog and bind a woman’s feet as they used to do in China.

And speaking of whole hog, the notion that grandmothers generally are soft-headed, slightly-addled bundles of sentimental sweetness who must be protected from ugly realities is also more than a little ludicrous and insulting. The population of grandmothers starts with women in their thirties and the age range marches right on up to those who are over a hundred years old. Notice I do not say “a hundred years young.” That would be an insult to women who celebrate every year they have lived, loved and learned—and who are increasingly and strongly protesting the use of that condescending phrase whenever it’s so insultingly bestowed. (Smarmy physicians, take note!)

For that matter, would you expect the P.T.A. presidents of most schools to be as reality-averse as that stereotypical granny from neverneverland? And how about the leaders of those congregations who send their flock into battle with pictures of dead foetuses? They would hardly blanch at pix of a little cruelty in the stockyard.

Editors, take note. When phrases that are not only sexist but ageist make a gratuitous appearance, as they do here, it’s time to press delete.

Seeing Red

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Ironic isn’t it that the GOP now garbs itself in red when not wrapping itself in the American flag. That the electoral map of the US pits the red Republicans against the blue Democrats. That Sarah Palin’s $150,000 supposedly-borrowed-designer-wardrobe comes in red and black: red shoes, red leather jacket, black suit, black skirt.

I never thought too much about the color significance before – but once upon a time in Europe and elsewhere, red represented, and still represents, the color of the Communist Party – the GOP’s particular whipping boy – even though far too many Republicans fail to understand the ideologies of and differences among the hated “left” preferring to paint the Democrats in sweepingly and erroneous extremist terms.

When I lived in Moscow in the late 1970s, the banners that festooned city streets on the weeks leading up to “election day” or decorated Red Square on major Soviet holidays were red. Red served as a splash of life against a landscape of dead mud brown streets and filthy black-specked snow. Only in summer did the late leafing green trees and their signs of life provide a much needed relief and respite from the starkness of the long winter.

When I visited Vietnam in 2003 during Tet, the red banners of the Vietnamese Communist flanked the doors of the local party headquarters while Chinese Red trimmings and candy wrappers dominated the food stalls on Hanoi’s streets.

The importance of color in politics

Color is important in the heat of the political debate. Identification of a particular color with a particular political faction dates at least as far as back as the Byzantines who divided into three political groupings: red, green and blue. Don’t ask me to explain it, but even today in modern Greece, the reds are the Communists, the green represents PASOK - the Social Democrats - and the blue is claimed by the center- right New Democracy.

The Logic of Zero: Toward a World Without Nuclear Weapons

by Cheryl Rofer

Foreign Affairs is the voice of the foreign policy establishment. So it is as remarkable to see it publish a call for the United States to move toward zero nuclear weapons as it is to see such a call in the Wall Street Journal.

The Soviet Union took a lot of steam out of the popular denuclearization movement in 1989 by discarding the theory of class warfare as its basis for state-to-state relations. The great conflict that had threatened worldwide nuclear destruction was gone. But nothing much changed in the nuclear establishment. Bill Clinton temporized, and George Bush actually seemed to like them nukular weapons. The almost-agreement between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev on eliminating nukes by the year 2000 was forgotten in Republican triumphalism.

Congress just recognized last spring that the world has changed and insisted on a statement from the administration on why they want to build new nukes. The Departments of Defense and Energy have responded. State was with them early on, but disappeared in the final report.

The Fab Four of nuclear disarmament, now plus two
Two Democrats and two Republicans, from the Cabinet and the Legislature, have now advocated nuclear abolition in two op-eds in the Wall Street Journal (2007, 2008). Stanford University’s Hoover Institution held a conference on the topic in October 2007, and a number of people, not including either of the authors of the Foreign Affairs paper, signed on.

Ivo Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Jan Lodal, immediate past president of the Atlantic Council, also come from both sides of the aisle: Daalder was in the Clinton administration and Lodal in two Republican administrations as well as Clinton’s. Their article carries the program of the Wall Street Journal op-eds a few steps further.

We Know the World and We Support Obama

By Peter Bridges, Guest Contributor

Peter Bridges, who has sent the following message to friends and relatives, was born in New Orleans and raised in Chicago. After two years as an enlisted man in the U.S. Army, Bridges entered the U.S. Foreign Service in 1957. He served in Washington in the State Department, Treasury Department, and U.S. Arms Control & Disarmament Agency, and overseas at our embassies in Panama, Moscow, Prague, Rome, and finally Mogadishu, where he was the American ambassador to Somalia during the Reagan administration.

Dear Friends and Relations,

A friend and former colleague of mine in the Foreign Service, Kevin McGuire, some time ago drafted a short statement of support for Obama and began to ask retired Foreign Service officers if they would sign it. So far 334 of us have done so, including by my count 66 former American ambassadors.

If you would like to know why we have done so and who we are, you can find our reasons and our signatures at Foreign Policy for Obama.Com: Declaration of Support by Over 280 Former Diplomats. (Ed. note: the number is now over 330.)

If that is too long a link, you can go to Foreign Policy for Obama.Com and click on the link in the left hand column.

I will remind you that the Foreign Service of the United States is our country's career diplomatic and consular service. We staff both the State Department in Washington and our embassies and consulates abroad. Usually two-thirds or more of our ambassadors are Foreign Service officers, although both Democratic and Republican administrations have made a number of ambassadorial appointments for political reasons. Some of these Republican appointees and, by my count, two former career officers, have come out for McCain.

Our Service has sometimes been criticized by Republicans who label us a bunch of liberals. I cannot speak for my former colleagues, but as I said in a recent essay, if we must use labels I want to be considered a liberal conservative. I am a conservative because, among other reasons, I believe in a prudent course for the country, including a conservative fiscal policy and conservation--two old Republican virtues that present-day Republicans have forgotten.

Silly Season or Desperate Times?

by Bill Stewart

Two weeks to go until the election, and we are either in the silly season or in desperate times. Both, I should think. The financial crisis has torpedoed Sen John McCain’s campaign, so he plays on the wilder shores of politics. First, he and Gov Sarah Palin accused Sen Barack Obama of “palling around” with William Ayers, a former domestic terrorist turned professor. When that didn’t work, the charges flew that Obama’s economic plans are “socialism,” so Americans beware. Both tactics were bad choices, as Obama continues to rise in the polls in the battleground states, especially in Virginia and North Carolina. McCain remains a victim of circumstance and his own bad judgment. His campaign still lacks a consistent theme. Moreover, he has been unlucky, and in politics that is often fatal.

Bipartisan, But Fully on the Side of the Hawks - Updated

by Cheryl Rofer

Just as it seemed we could start breathing easier with Ehud Olmert's saying Israel should not attack Iran, we get yet another blast of intransigence from Washington.

First, an Islamic Republic of Iran with nuclear weapons capability would be strategically untenable. It would threaten U.S. national security, regional peace and stability, energy security, the efficacy of multilateralism, and the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) regime.
....
Second, we believe the only acceptable end state is the complete cessation of enrichment activities inside Iran. We foresee no combination of international inspections or co-ownership of enrichment facilities that would provide sufficient assurances that Iran is not producing weapons-grade fissile material.
....
Third, while a diplomatic resolution is still possible, it can succeed only if we negotiate from a position of strength. This will require better coordination with our international partners and much stricter sanctions. Negotiations with Iran would probably be ineffective unless our European allies sever commercial relations with Tehran.
....
Fourth, so that Israel does not feel compelled to take unilateral action, the next president must credibly convince Jerusalem that the United States will not allow Iran to achieve nuclear weapons capability.

Fifth, while military action against Iran is feasible, it must remain an option of last resort.

Well, thank heavens for that last. But going into any negotiation with the first four expectations pretty much sets the stage for the fifth.

Who are these people?
The report from which these conclusions come is a project of the Bipartisan Policy Center, the directors of which are former Senators George Mitchell, Howard Baker, Tom Daschle, and Bob Dole.

Happy Mole Day!

by Cheryl Rofer

Traffic has been brisk all week on my last year's greeting.

I can't really add a lot to that one, except to suggest that science is part of the liberal arts, and that the chemical mole is such a basic concept that it's like knowing where the major countries of the world are located.

Chemistry is all around us. When you cook, you're doing chemistry. When you make art, you're using chemistry. Driving your car depends on the chemistry of oxidation, carefully controlled by the car's computer system. The word chemical has acquired the bad connotations that chemicals are the dreadful things that non-organic farmers add to their produce. But that produce itself is made up of chemicals: cellulose, water, sugar, and starches, along with trace chemicals like vitamins and minerals. Everything we see, smell and touch is made up of chemicals, along with the air that we breathe.

So today, 10/23, from 6:02 this morning to 6:02 this evening, think about that number: 6.02 times ten to the 23rd. That's the number of molecules in a mole, or the number of atoms in a gram-atom.

Vantaa

by Cheryl Rofer

The New York Times reports that Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is meeting his counterpart, Gen. Nikolai Makarov, just outside Helsinki, on the Vantaa River. That's good news in some big ways; Russia and the United States need to be talking more, particularly on military matters.

It's good news in little ways, too. It gives me a chance to post some beautiful northern scenery (photo from Vantaa's website), and it's nice to see that the Times is using diacritical marks again.