Accidental Blogger

A general interest blog

Recent posts

about

  • The Left Behind

    Gun sales went up in Texas in anticipation of Barack Obama’s presidency. Among all the possible reasons for the spike in sales (ban / price hike on assault weapons) we can safely assume that one may have been the reckless public prounouncements of ignorant elected officials like Sarah Palin (pals around with terrorists) and Cynthia Dunbar of Texas.

    Cynthia Dunbar, an elected member of the State Board of Education from Richmond, predicts that Barack Obama will bring tyranny to America by declaring martial law after his terrorist friends attack our homeland.

    "I shall take no joy in saying ‘I told you so’ if Obama gets elected." she wrote at christianworldviewnetwork.com. "But just for the record, remember, ‘I told you so."

    The electoral map of the 2008 presidential election looks like this. The red states- blue states map looks stark in the winner take all electoral college system. However, that is not the whole picture. Many states which are red on the presidential electoral map and were staunchly Republican leaning in previous elections, have trended Democratic in 2008 in their choice of state and national representatives. To everyone’s utter disbelief, states like Montana and N. Dakota came into play for some time during the evening of Nov 4 although they did not eventually go for Obama. Obama did manage to win in the western states of Colorado and New Mexico as also in the southern states of Virginia and North Carolina.  So it is clear that the disastrous reign of Bush-Cheney has shaken the faith of many otherwise conservative Americans who are now willing to try a new approach to solving the nation’s problems. Conservative states like Texas have voted for majority of Republican lawmakers on the ballots but Texas Democrats too are showing some gains at the state, county and city levels. Many other "red" states have similar mixed results. The GOP has lost big overall and is now anchored pretty much only in the deep south and even there cracks are appearing. But there are some regions in America which remain stubbornly "conservative" and suspicious of Democrats in general and Obama in particular. Among the die-hard  "not-for-Obama" states, Oklahoma leads the pack with a solid red map where Obama did not win a single county. Even Democrats there didn’t trust him to be their president. The state of Arkansas has elected the highest percentage Republicans on the ballot but even it did not go all red on the presidential electoral map. Some Arkansans are thankful to Oklahoma for saving them from that dubious honor.

    A democratic nation need not speak with one voice in electing its leader – no one should have that kind of mandate. But there is definitely something creepy about a whole state bucking the national trend so steadfastly. They would rather be left behind nursing their fears and suspicions while the rest of the country turns the page.

    Speaking of creepy and cultish, here is something odd emanating from the "liberal" media. Charlie Rose was on in our home late Wednesday evening. I noticed that Evan Thomas and John Meacham were guests but I didn’t pay attention.  Several blogs are discussing their weird exchange and Rush Limbaugh was having a field day earlier today when I was driving around running some errands. So what’s going on? Is Barack Obama the Damien of The Omen or is he Rosemary’s Baby?  Could he be the much feared but eagerly awaited anti-Christ – the one who will precipitate the cataclysmic events which will "save" the devout in Oklahoma and Arkansas from earthly woes and Obama’s evil ways while leaving the foolish Obama supporters to suffer the consequences of their reckless choice?

  • Clinton in Kashmir?

    Fellow blogger Namit Arora sent me the link to an intriguing news item reported in the Indian newspaper, The Economic Times. Apparently during a fence mending meeting, a month before the last elections, Barack Obama kicked around the idea of sending Bill Clinton as a mediator to the disputed territory of Kashmir in order to smooth things over between India and Pakistan, two nations which have never quite come to peace with each other since the partition of undivided India in 1947. I was surprised that Obama had India-Pakistan on his mind rather than the middle east. I replied to Namit thus:

    We know that India loves Bill Clinton. Uber-narcissist Bubba Bill might enjoy the adulation he will receive there, now that Obama has stolen his thunder at home. I have heard that Clinton can handle lamb vindaloo (heat index = 4 on a scale of 5) with elan. He may even have a couple of desi girl friends tucked away in some corner of Delhi or Mumbai for all you know.  Since there is no territorial dispute in Antarctica, Kashmir may be the remotest cold place where Obama may like to park Clinton during the early years of his administration. (President Clinton’s capacity for mischief is vast.)

    But seriously, I doubt that this one will sell in the subcontinent. India and Pakistan are now in the midst of some substantive bi-lateral talks regarding Kashmir. Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari recently made some statements that sounded pro-India to the alarmed Pakistani hard liners and the ISI. I doubt that at this time either party would want outside intervention in this sensitive matter which is as old as India & Pakistan themselves. 

    In any case, why Kashmir? Have the Israelis and Palestinians made peace already? The last I heard, they are not even talking to each other. As president, Clinton came very close to a resolution in that arena with Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat until the latter nixed the whole idea. Bill was supposed to have been very good as a mediator – knew the map of Jerusalem and the West Bank like the back of his own hand, I have heard. Send him there.

    I realized after sending out the message that I had pre-emptively criticized Bill Clinton for something that he hasn’t even done. With Bush-Cheney fading fast out of the picture and the Republican guard defanged in the past elections, am I being paranoid about potential Democratic enemies? Am I in an angry groove after three years of critical political commentary? Am I feeling like this? 

    It does feel strange not to be venting against Bush after three years of ranting.  I could of course  shift gears and concentrate on cultural and literary posts or I could turn my ire against old style Dems like the Clintons. I didn’t realize until now that I may be a Hitchensian contrarian.

    Let’s see how it feels in a few months, after Obama takes office and the new congress is sworn in. If it is all sweet and peaceful, we can always turn A.B. into a site for incessant navel gazing and recipe exchange. We’ll see.

  • Saturday Morning Linkery (Sujatha)

    A Lightbulb goes on

    Ever wonder what the US Supreme Court might have made of what the Prez-Elect might have said? It’s lucky he didn’t enunciate it.

    Obama roasts Rahm Emmanuel in 2005

  • Give credit where credit is due

    Anna pointed out in a recent post that the Obama campaign benefited from the vision that DNC Chairman, Howard Dean first formulated for the Democratic Party when Dean himself was a presidential candidate in 2004. Obama’s successful 50 state strategy, fashioned after Dean’s bold vision, which bore fruit with wins in Indiana, N. Carolina, Colorado, Nevada and to some extent also Ohio and New Mexico, has put new spring in the steps of the old Democratic Party. While we are celebrating Obama’s historic victory and admiring his streamlined campaign, let us also remember Dr. Dean, an honest and hardworking party chairman who is a far cry from previous chairmen like Terry McAuliffe who were more political fat cats than visionaries.

    It makes me sad that the DNC and Howard Dean have received few public kudos from the media and other Democrats for the D-party’s success in Tuesday’s elections. A DNC memo reminds fellow Democrats that Dean’s quiet hard work behind the scenes played a significant role in boosting Obama’s already impeccable organization and strategy. The old establishment Democratic Party has ignored and even derided Dean’s devotion and zeal. Now with the stunning success at the ballot box, may be they will take him more seriously. Also, I am hoping that the Obama administration will turn to progressive, cutting edge, serious and idealistic Democrats like Dean for advice rather than engage the help of opportunistic, ego driven triangulators of the Clinton era.

    Howarddean

  • The Obama Presidency: What Others Are Saying

    Indian journalist, Manoj Joshi  analyzes the possible impact of the upcoming Obama presidency on India and the rest of the world.

  • Republican Navel Gazing

    Smarting under Tuesday’s blow at the ballot box, the Republican leadership has hunkered down to analyze the verdict of the voters and to figure out a new winning strategy. Representative Thaddeus G. McCotter (R- Michigan) said:

    "We’re rock bottom. We are now free to start thinking again, acting again, and doing the right thing by what our constituents and our country need."

    What? You mean the Republicans had stopped thinking for the past few years?

  • Direct Democracy and Prop 8 (Joe)

    As we all know by now, Prop 8 passed in California. This could be considered the one real defeat that liberals suffered on election day. The voters of California, in a direct vote on the issue, by a bare majority amended the California Constitution to eliminate the state constitutional right to same-sex marriage. As Ruchira and Anna discuss in the comments of Andrew’s post, Connecticut refused to amend its constitution in a similar (substantive) fashion after its supreme court issued a similar ruling: that gay people are entitled to equal rights, including the right to marry a person of their choosing.

    One important difference, which I don’t think has been discussed in the press (or on the blogs) nearly as much as it should be, is the structural political difference between California and Connecticut. The question on the ballot in Connecticut was, Should we have a constitutional convention to amend the state constitution? The question on the ballot in California was, Should we eliminate the right to same-sex marriage? Arguably, only California offers direct democracy with respect to constitutional issues in any meaningful way. Moreover, it does so by a simple majority–51 percent of the voters can directly take away a constitutional right.

    The problem is that voters, as a rule, don’t have sufficient information to accurately express their preferences on the specific legal consequences of the ballot–at most, they have broad ideas of their policy preferences and very general thoughts on the subject-matter of the proposed ballot measure. For example, anecdotal evidence suggests that a fair number of California voters thought that voting No on Prop 8 would have required teaching young schoolchildren about gay marriage. I actually don’t even know if this is true–I don’t know what would have been taught in the schools, although I certainly don’t recall learning about family organizational structures when I was little–but I think it’s safe to say that if I don’t know, neither did a fair number of these voters, who largely rely on information shortcuts to establish voting preferences (which work much worse in direct democracy than representative democracy). Similarly, the exact extent of associated civil rights removed beyond the label "marriage" was surely unclear to a significant number of voters.

    Maybe instead of just talking about what this means with respect to social attitudes about LGBT issues, people should start talking about what it means with respect to California’s broken political system.

  • The Community Appears to be Organized (Andrew)

    6760335
    Two points to reiterate within the maelstrom of commentary and punditry regarding Obama’s victory:

    1) The Tactics — However brilliant a traditional, top-down campaign he ran with the help of the two Davids, the organizing act of going up to someone and challenging them to change their lives by getting involved with the political process is the basic cell structure of the Obama movement.  As the Alinsky-ites taught him when he was a young man, good intentions don’t matter unless you gain power to bring them to fruition.  It seems like Mr. Obama has grown up to be the toughest and smartest politician of our time — without wholly losing his idealism.  He got us to donate our money and our time — not just to help him — but to help us.  It would be hard to overstate how exciting this is, as a means to make our country more democratic.

    2) The Substance — There is a rumor afoot, spread by the likes of Jon Meacham over at Newsweek, that the U.S. is inherently a "center-right" country, and that any attempts by Obama to implement progressive policies like universal health care reform or a carbon tax, are D.O.A.  This is not really true — the U.S. has "left" periods (like abolition or the rights revolutions of the 60s) and "right" periods (like the last 8 years of militarism, more regressive taxation, suspension of civil liberties, etc).  It is true that Americans from the right to the left are far more individualistic than European democracies, and therefore tend to be suspicious of public programs and collective solutions to problems.  But the examples of popular programs like Social Security and Medicare show that Americans can be convinced.

    We are at a rare point where one man — Barack Obama — has the mandate and the Congress to really bring change to the U.S. in terms of health care, foreign policy, financial reforms, and a host of other areas.  The question is — what will he really lay it all on the line to accomplish? I’d love to hear some speculation about his agenda in the comments…

  • Yobama!

    Yes, we did !!!

    I was a young girl in India looking from afar in awe when the civil rights movement in the US was under way. Today as a middle aged woman and an American citizen, I am equally thrilled to be a participant in the logical grand finale to those distant events of forty years ago. There was a certain inevitability to Barack Obama’s historic win. I am glad it has happened in my lifetime and my children’s.

    Obama is the winner in an American presidential election. But this was also a world election. No matter what happens internally in the US regarding the economy, jobs and the "war on terror," with the election of Obama to the highest national office, we have cleared a stubborn cultural hurdle that desperately needed to get out of our way. The whole world was watching. Beginning this morning, US prestige world wide will begin to be restored after being in the dumpster for eight long miserable years of ignorance, ineptitude, aggression, corruption and divisiveness.

    I am a bit woozy after a late evening spent with like minded friends when some good red wine and champagne flowed freely. I will end with my congratulations to the disciplined Obama campaign staff, tireless volunteers, donors, bloggers and voters who did their bit to bring about this much needed change in the country’s mood and aspirations. Also, best wishes and the best of luck to Senator Obama and Senator Biden for their upcoming tenure at the helm of the nation’s tilting ship….  Peace!

  • Gobama!

    Obama_yes_we_can_2Can we or can’t we?

    Whatever is on your schedule today, be sure to vote, if you have not done so already. It is an important election and an exciting one. Make certain that you are a player in the outcome.We at Accidental Blogger, hope that you will vote for Senator Barack Obama and other Democratic candidates on your ballot. As I have warned before, nothing is yet decided. We really do not know how things will turn out at the end of this evening. So, if you are an Obama supporter, please don’t be complacent. Remember 2000 and that every vote counts.

    The tracking polls, the mood and most other indicators point to a possible Obama victory. So why am I not counting my chickens? Why the nail biting? Well, like most other "twice bitten, thrice shy" Democrats, I am not at all sure that things will really go our way this time. Even some pro-Obama columnists are joking nervously. One of them (Ellen Goodman) writes:

    BOSTON — Have you noticed that the spookiest colors of the season are not orange and black but red and blue? As Halloween slips into Election Day, the race for the White House has scared more grown-ups than any trip to the haunted house.

    I’m not talking about John McCain’s farewell fright tour, although it is sad to see the senator trade in his superhero costume for that of fearmonger. After trying on assorted masks, he’s settled on profiling his opponent as “Barack the Redistributor” who will take money away from hardworking Americans, “coddle criminals” and, no doubt, ask Bill Ayers to be secretary of state.

    With all the infighting in the coven around the maverick and the fair maiden, it’s tempting to call the McCain campaign the Gang That Couldn’t Fly a Broomstick Straight.

    But the striking thing is not how the Republicans are trying to scare undecided voters. It’s how spooked the most committed Democrats are.

    The closer Obama comes to victory, the more terror strikes deep in the (blue) heartland. The better things look, the more they worry that it’s “trick or trick” time. The election, like that dollar bill on the sidewalk, will be whipped out of their hands….

    Every optimistic scenario for Obama is countered darkly by pre-emptive conspiracy theories explaining how it could turn into bad news….

    Do you remember when the Obama rallying cry was “Yes, we can”? Now we are in the scary season and here’s the new mantra: The only thing we have to fear is hope itself.

    Also some bloggers are having a bit of post-Halloween fun at the expense of the white- knuckle Dems.

    I guess we have a right to be nervous. Not much has gone our way for a long time although the 2006 congressional races turned things around a bit. Perhaps 2008 will break the jinx more decisively and put the White House too on our side of the ledger. I am not crunching favorable numbers and statistics. I am worried about a somewhat more iffy factor.

    Go Obama … and Bob Barr!

  • Turning the ocean into a thing that kills the ocean (Joe)

    So apparently there’s some other CO2 problem that doesn’t get talked about as much as rising temperatures.

    CO2 forms carbonic acid when it dissolves in water, and the oceans are soaking up more and more of it. Recent studies show that the seas have absorbed about a third of all the fossil-fuel carbon released into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and they will soak up far more over the next century. Yet until quite recently many people dismissed the idea that humanity could alter the acidity of the oceans, which cover 71 per cent of the planet’s surface to an average depth of about 4 kilometres. The ocean’s natural buffering capacity was assumed to be capable of preventing any changes in acidity even with a massive increase in CO2 levels.

    And it is – but only if the increase happens slowly, over hundreds of thousands of years. Over this timescale, the release of carbonates from rocks on land and from ocean sediments can neutralise the dissolved CO2, just like dropping chalk in an acid. Levels of CO2 are now rising so fast that they are overwhelming the ocean’s buffering capacity.

    In 2003 Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, and Michael Wickett at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, both in California, calculated that the absorption of fossil CO2 could make the oceans more acid over the next few centuries than they have been for 300 million years, with the possible exception of rare catastrophic events. It was in their Nature paper that the phrase "ocean acidification" appeared in the scientific literature for the first time.

    The potential seriousness of the effect was underlined in 2005 by the work of James Zachos of the University of California at Santa Cruz and his colleagues, who studied one of these rare catastrophic events. They showed that the mass extinction of huge numbers of deep-sea creatures around 55 million years ago was caused by ocean acidification after the release of around 4500 gigatonnes of carbon (New Scientist, 18 June 2005, p 19). It took over 100,000 years for the oceans to return to their normal alkalinity.

    Around the same time as the Zachos paper, the UK’s Royal Society published the first comprehensive report on ocean acidification. It makes grim reading, concluding that ocean acidification is inevitable without drastic cuts in emissions. Marine ecosystems, especially coral reefs, are likely be badly affected, with fishing and tourist industries based around reefs losing billions of dollars each year. Yet the report also stressed that there is huge uncertainty about the effects on marine life.

    "On the one hand the chemistry of ocean acidification is very certain," says James Orr of the Laboratory of Sciences of the Climate and Environment (CEA-CNRS) in France. "On the other hand the biological and ecological impacts are very complex. The consequences for ocean life are far harder to predict."

    So what progress has been made since the report came out? How serious an issue is acidification given all the other threats to the oceans, from overfishing and pollution to warming waters and changes in currents?

    The sea creatures most likely to be affected are those that make their shells or skeletons from calcium carbonate, including tiny plankton and massive corals. Their shells and skeletons do not dissolve only because the upper layers of the oceans are supersaturated with calcium carbonate

    Acidification reduces carbonate ion concentrations, making it harder for organisms to build their shells or skeletons. When the water drops below the saturation point, these structures will start to dissolve.

    Now, I’m no scientist. But I feel like the world’s oceans being turned into giant vats of carbonic acid might have problematic side effects for human beings–even for those non-"tree huggers" who don’t care about things like plankton and coral for their own sake.

  • A November Surprise That Wasn’t!

    A couple of McCain supporters and GOP hacks can’t quite believe that Barack Obama can think his own thoughts and put them together in complete sentences. So they tried to launch an investigation using the expertise of an Oxford philosopher to "prove" that Obama’s autobiography, The Dreams from My Father was actually ghost written by the dreaded terrorist he "pals" around with – William Ayers! (via Leiter Reports)

  • Palin Pranked (Sujatha)

    Last night, I came across this while checking out blogs and forums and thought it was almost unbelievable:
    Sarah Palin getting pranked by some French-Canadian guys on the phone.

    This was later confirmed by all news agencies. Yes, that was indeed the one-and-only Sarah Palin being fooled by a pair of French Canadian impersonators.

    Two well-known Canadian pranksters tricked Republican vice presidential
    nominee Sarah Palin into thinking she was on the phone today with
    French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The conversation, captured on a
    Montreal radio program, was, in a word, embarrassing. (Politico’s Ben Smith was among the first to pick up on reports from The Canadian Press.)

    The fake Sarkozy buttered Palin up by telling her he hoped she would
    become president some day. "Haha, maybe in eight years," Palin replied.
    Then the conversation turned to helicopter hunting, with a mention of
    Vice President Dick Cheney’s infamous bad shot.

    "One of my favorite activities is to hunt, too," the fake Sarkozy
    said. "Oh, very good, we should go hunting together," Palin replied,
    adding, "I think we could have a lot of fun together as we’re getting
    work done. We could kill two birds with one stone that way."

    "I just love killing those animals! Taking away life, that is so fun," the Sarkozy impersonator said.

    Palin laughed.

    It’s headline news all over the world today, so Palin is not only a national, but international laughing stock as well. Ouch, it must not be nice to be in her shoes right now!

  • Texas Election Fever

    Even though John McCain’s presidential campaign is struggling in large parts of the country, he has a comfortable lead in the Lone Star State. Texans don’t like Barack Obama. They are suspicious of him…

    WASHINGTON — A University of Texas poll to be released today shows Republican presidential candidate John McCain and GOP Sen. John Cornyn leading by comfortable margins in Texas, as expected. But the statewide survey of 550 registered voters has one very surprising finding: 23 percent of Texans are convinced that Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama is a Muslim.

    Obama is a Christian who was embroiled in a controversy earlier this year about his two-decade membership in Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ. Yet just 45 percent of those polled identified the Illinois senator as a Protestant.

    The Obama-is-a-Muslim confusion is caused by fallacious Internet rumors and radio talk-show gossip. McCain went so far at one of his town hall meetings to grab a microphone from a woman who claimed that Obama was an Arab.

    The Texas numbers are unusual because most national polls show that just 5 to 10 percent of Americans still believe Obama is a Muslim — less than half the number of Texans who buy into the debunked theories.

    … and they are worried about an Obama presidency. They are buying guns. 

    DALLAS – This morning, guns sales in Texas are on the rise. Sales for some assault rifles have tripled. Gun shop owners say the reason is the presidential election.

    Gun shop owners say customers are afraid if Barack Obama gets elected he will ban assault weapons. Obama said President Bush made a mistake when he let the ban expire. Now gun shops are seeing more business.

    Hmm. Just worried about a ban on guns or organizing a well armed militia?

    Two elderly bloggers, one of them from Texas, are fighting back (link: Sujatha). These ladies won’t have any of this fear & suspicion nonsense. They take up from where Molly Ivins left off.