One of the single most revealing infographics to emerge post election was this one, displaying US population density vs. Republican votes for the top of the ticket.
So, if your nearest neighbor lives about 30 miles “down the road” (not that there is anything wrong with that) you were probably more likely to vote for Mitt Romney.
City dwellers? Well… not so much.
No wonder the GOP’s get out the vote effort sucked so badly… And it’s only going to get more difficult next time!
Via the map’s maker, Tim De Chant, at his Per Square Mile blog:
There are lots of reasons why the 2012 presidential election broke the way it did, but one that’s not often reported—but particularly germane to Per Square Mile—is the divide between cities and the country. I’ve been thinking for a while now about this split as a driving force behind the polarization of U.S. politics, and I know I’m not alone.
But I was curious. Can we actually see the divide between cities and the country in the electoral map? In short, yes, but I’ll let the maps to the rest of the talking.
Click through to Tim’s website for an interactive version of this map to see how population density relates to each candidates’ electoral vote tally.
If you really want to burrow deep into the brain-damaged Bizzaro World rabbit hole of the most “out there,” batshit crazy conspiracy theories currently making the rounds, “Agenda 21,” is zooming to the top of the charts with a bullet among the tin foil hat set… and beyond.
That’s right, Agenda 21 is going mainstream, baby!
Agenda 21 is actually (sort of) a real thing, a non-mandatory proposed declaration pertaining to sustainable development first introduced at the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro. It has never been ratified by the US Senate, but despite this, lunatics on the fringes of the far right (and at least one group identifying itself as a Democrat-leaning subset) think it is the most nefarious globalist plot ever hatched to steal away our American birthrights and freedom and shit. Or something.
Agenda 21 is a fairly fluid, one-size-fits-all conspiracy theory, like HAARP, and can be called upon to enforce imaginary, at zero risk of happening things like mandatory birth control and involuntary sterilization (and sometimes just the opposite), Soylent Green-style euthanasia of old people and the forcible rounding up of country folk who will be made to live in cities and give up their cars.
To the fruitcakes propagating these theories—Glenn Beck and Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, come to mind on the right, as well as less ideologically categorizable sources such as David Icke and Alex Jones—“sustainable development” is just some BS “New World Order” code-word for “UN control” and of course, the bogeyman of Socialism (or at least whatever that term currently means to folks on the right).
Where an unsophisticated, buffoonish belief system like this becomes a problem is when a gang of aging low IQ baby boomers—the kind who believe in ACORN plots, birtherism and tax cuts for oligarchs—get riled up by Glenn Beck and decide that anything dubbed “sustainable,” mentioning “smart growth,” “climate change” or god forbid, cutting down on pollution or trying to preserve the environment, must mean it’s a plot against freedom, the Founding Fathers and Jeebus and so they turn up at local zoning hearings to shout down rational discussion with their paranoiac drivel and drown out sane people.
Ecologically sustainable development = NWO “they’re coming to take our freedom away” dog whistle. But of course! Of course!
Even worse the same dum-dums who joined the Tea party and who think Glenn Beck’s “eureka!” moments represent profound moments of deep undercover revelations about the evil leftwing puppet masters who want to destroy America—and not just some asshole shooting his mouth off shilling shit to the rubes—are getting themselves elected to local and state positions in growing numbers in red states. The state legislatures in Alabama, Kansas and Tennessee have approved resolutions blocking Agenda 21—which was never ratified, I remind you—from ever being implemented in their states. Not that there’s much of a danger of that ever occurring…
President Obama is using a Cold War-era mind-control technique known as “Delphi” to coerce Americans into accepting his plan for a United Nations-run communist dictatorship in which suburbanites will be forcibly relocated to cities. That’s according to a four-hour briefing delivered to Republican state senators at the Georgia state Capitol last month.
On October 11, at a closed-door meeting of the Republican caucus convened by the body’s majority leader, Chip Rogers, a tea party activist told Republican lawmakers that Obama was mounting this most diabolical conspiracy. The event—captured on tape by a member of the Athens-based watchdog Better Georgia (who was removed from the room after 52 minutes)—had been billed as an information session on Agenda 21, a nonbinding UN agreement that commits member nations to promote sustainable development. In the eyes of conservative activists, Agenda 21 is a nefarious plot that includes forcibly relocating non-urban-dwellers and prescribing mandatory contraception as a means of curbing population growth. The invitation to the Georgia state Senate event noted the presentation would explain: “How pleasant sounding names are fostering a Socialist plan to change the way we live, eat, learn, and communicate to ‘save the earth.’”
The meeting consisted of a PowerPoint presentation followed by a 90-minute screening of the anti-Agenda 21 documentary, Agenda: Grinding America Down. It was emceed by Field Searcy, a local conservative activist who was forced out of the Georgia Tea Party in April due to his endorsement of conspiracy theories about the president’s birth certificate and the collapse of World Trade Center Tower 7. The presentation also featured a special video cameo from conservative talking-head Dick Morris in which the former Clinton aide warns that Obama “wants to force everyone into the cities from whence our ancestors fled.”
About 23 minutes into the briefing, Searcy explained how President Obama, aided by liberal organizations like the Center for American Progress and business groups like local chambers of commerce, are secretly using mind-control techniques to push their plan for forcible relocation on the gullible public:
“They do that by a process known as the Delphi technique. The Delphi technique was developed by the Rand Corporation during the Cold War as a mind-control technique. It’s also known as “consensive process.” But basically the goal of the Delphi technique is to lead a targeted group of people to a pre-determined outcome while keeping the illusion of being open to public input.”
Superb!
Mother Jones also had a simply marvelous screen shot from Field Searcy’s Powerpoint presentation:
Georgia Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers hosts a public meeting of top GOP Senate leaders to discuss Obama-related conspiracy theories.
Glenn Beck explains “Agenda” 21 in his very special way:
Oh wait, what’s this?Only the most fucking genius commercial of all time: It’s for Glenn Beck’s new novel, Agenda 21, and I haven’t seen a version, yet, that wasn’t videotaped off a television screen, so I’m wondering if it’s meant to look like this? I think it’s much better if that was intentional…
When Hugh MacDiarmid died in 1978, his fellow poet Norman MacCaig suggested Scotland commemorate the great man’s passing by holding 3 minute’s pandemonium. It was typical of MacCaig’s caustic wit, but his suggestion did capture something of the unquantifiable enormity of MacDiarmid’s importance on Scottish culture, politics, literature and life during the twentieth century.
Hugh MacDiarmid is perhaps best described by a line from his greatest poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), in which he wrote:
‘I’ll ha’e nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be whaur
Extremes meet - it’s the only way I ken
To dodge the curst conceit o’ bein’ richt
That damns the vast majority o’ men.
It explains the contradictory elements that merged to make him a poet.
Born Christopher Murray Grieve, on August 11, 1892, he changed his name to the more Scottish sounding Hugh MacDiarmid to publish his poetry. He was a Modernist poet who wrote in Scots vernacular. One might expect this choice of language to make his poetry parochial, but MacDiarmid was a poet of international ambition and standing, who was recognized as an equal with T. S. Eliot, Boris Pasternak and W. H. Auden.
In politics, MacDiarmid had been one of the co-founder’s of the National Party for Scotland in 1928, but was ejected when he moved towards Communism. He was then ejected from the Communist Party for his “nationalist deviation.” He maintained a Nationalist - in favor of an independent Scotland - and a Communist throughout his life.
As literature scholar and writer Kenneth Butlay notes, MacDiarmid was:
..as incensed by his countrymen’s neglect of their native traditions as by their abrogation of responsibility for their own affairs, and he took it upon himself to “keep up perpetually a sort of Berseker rage” of protest, and to act as “the catfish that vitalizes the other torpid of the aquarium.”
In 1964, the experimental film-maker Margaret Tait made short documentary portrait of Hugh MacDiarmid, which captured the poet at home in Langholme, his sense of childish fun, his socializing his the bars and public houses of Edinburgh (the Abbotsford on Rose Street).
More on Hugh MacDiarmid, plus poetry and reading, after the jump…
The joyful hedonism of the 1960s was in part a response to the trauma to the Second World War. The same way the twenties swung after the first great conflagration. And like that decade, it was primarily the white, upwardly mobile, metropolitan, middle class that enjoyed the sex, the drugs and the rock ‘n’ roll.
London may have been swinging in 1967, but for the rest of the country not a lot changed. It would take until the 1970s for most of the country to get a hint of what London experienced. The most important changes, apart from pop music and American TV shows, were the legalization abortion and de-criminalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults - both of which set the scene for bigger and more radical changes in the 1970s.
Yet, as so many of the media are Baby Boomers, the love of all things sixties ensures TV fills its schedules with documentaries on that legendary decade. 1967: The Summer of Love is better than most, as it covers the cultural, social, and political changes that the decade brought. With contributions form Germaine Greer, Donovan, Nigel Havers, Bill Wyman, John Birt and Mary Quant, together with some excellent color archive, this documentary is a cut-above the usual retro-vision.
Breitbart has a legitimate scoop today, one that may have deeply pained them to report on: The staggering technical incompetency of Mitt Romney’s ground game.
A source within the Romney campaign shared his thoughts about “Project Orca,” the campaign’s massive get-out-the-vote digital infrastructure—which failed completely—with Breitbart News:
It’s easy to point fingers after a loss and I wouldn’t normally do it, but consider what happened.
Project Orca was supposed to enable poll watchers to record voter names on their smartphones, by listening for names as voters checked in. This would give the campaign real-time turnout data, so they could redirect GOTV
resources throughout the day where it was most needed. They recruited 37,000 swing state volunteers for this.
I worked on the Colorado team, and we were called by hundreds (or more) volunteers who couldn’t use the app or the backup phone system. The usernames and passwords were wrong, but the reset password tool didn’t work, and we couldn’t change phone PINs. We were told the problems were limited and asked to project confidence, have people use pencil and paper, and try to submit again later.
Then at 6PM they admitted they had issued the wrong PINs to every volunteer in Colorado, and reissued new PINs (which also didn’t work). Meanwhile, counties where we had hundreds of volunteers, such as Denver Colorado, showed zero volunteers in the system all day, but we weren’t allowed to add them. In one area, the head of the Republican Party plus 10 volunteers were all locked out. The system went down for a half hour during peak voting, but for hundreds or more, it never worked all day. Many of the poll watchers I spoke with were very discouraged. Many members of our phone bank got up and left.
I do not know if the system was totally broken, or if I just saw the worst of it. But I wonder, because they told us all day that most volunteers were submitting just fine, yet admitted at the end that all of Colorado had the wrong PIN’s. They also said the system projected every swing state as pink or red.
Regardless of the specific difficulties, this idea would only help if executed extremely well. Otherwise, those 37,000 swing state volunteers should have been working on GOTV…
Somebody messaged me privately after my email and told me that North Carolina had the same problems—every pin was wrong and not fixed until 6PM—and was also told it was localized to North Carolina.
Mind-blowing, isn’t it?
The reichwing is still trying to wrap their heads around, not just why Romney lost, but why he failed even to match John McCain’s tallies in 2008. I tell ‘em: HEY, IT WAS GOD’S WILL.
And then I laugh in their faces. (Actually that’s not true, I don’t know any fucking Republicans).
Orca: How the Romney Campaign Suppressed Its Own Vote (Breitbart News)
Remember the Republican primaries? The last time election coverage was at all fun? You didn’t actually have to worry about an evil crazy person becoming President, just a glorious parade of crazy people unfit to run a lemonade stand! Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could re-capture that? Well, there might be a chance, because Herman Cain is back, baby!
Yesterday on Bryan Fischer’s radio program, Cain dropped this magical bomb,
“I never thought that I would say this, and this is the first time publicly that I’ve said it: We need a third party to save this country. Not Ron Paul and the Ron Paulites. No. We need a legitimate third party to challenge the current system that we have, because I don’t believe that the Republican Party … has the ability to rebrand itself,”
There are three reasons why this is what America needs right now. First of all, it would be hilarious. Second, political diversity is healthy for a country; a super-right wing party would necessitate further radicalization, creating a party to the left of blue dog Democrats. Third, it would be hilarious. Between Pokemon quotes and sexual harassment and the most idiotic tax plan ever dreamed up, it almost makes me sad that he can’t politic his way out of a wet paper bag! Oh well, we can always dream…
I don’t imagine listening to a smirking lib’brul lezbean school them is exactly what distraught reichwingers want to hear right now, but Rachel Maddow’s post-election wrap-up rant is a stone classic:
Ohio really did go to President Obama last night. And he really did win. And he really was born in Hawaii. And he really is legitimately President of the United States. Again. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month. And the Congressional Research Service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy. And the polls were not skewed to oversample Democrats. And Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad. Nate Silver was doing math. And climate change is real. And rape really does cause pregnancy sometimes. And evolution is a thing! And Benghazi was an attack ON us, it was not a scandal BY us. And nobody is taking away anyone’s guns. And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually. And Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. And the moon landing was real. And FEMA is not building concentration camps. And UN election observers are not taking over Texas. And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as Communism.
Listen. Last night was a good night for liberals and for Democrats for very obvious reasons. But it was also, possibly, a good night for this country as a whole. Because in this country we have a two party system, in government. And the idea is supposed to be that the two sides both come up with ways to confront and fix the real problems facing our country. They both propose possible solutions to our real problems. And we debate between those possible solutions. And by the process of debate, we pick the best idea. That competition between good ideas, from both sides, about real problems in the real country should result in our country having better choices, better options, than if only one side is really working on the hard stuff. And if the Republican party, and the conservative movement, and the conservative media is stuck in a vacuum sealed, door locked, spin cycle of telling each other what makes them feel good, and denying the factual, lived truth of the world, then we are all deprived, as a nation, of the constructive debate between competing, feasible ideas about real problems.
Last night the Republicans got shellacked. And they had no idea it was coming. And we saw them, in real time, in real humiliating time, not believe it even as it was happening to them. And unless they’re going to secede, they’re going to have to pop the factual bubble they have been so happy living inside, if they do not want to get shellacked again. And that will be a painful process for them, I’m sure, but it will be good for the whole country - left, right, and center. You guys, we’re counting on you. Wake up.
There’s real problems in the world. There are real knowable facts in the world. Let’s accept those and talk about how we might approach our problems differently. Let’s move on from there. If the Republican party, and the conservative movement, and conservative media are forced to do that by the humiliation they were dealt last night, we will all be better off as a nation. And in that spirit, congratulations everybody. Big night.
Here are some interesting election factoids: Romney predominated only among older white men; Obama won 55% of womens’ votes, 93% of African Americans’, 71% of Latino ballots and 60% of voters ages 18 to 29.
The GOP is fucked.Well and truly fucked. It’s only going to be worse for them in 2016 as more of the old farts who make up the Republican Party shuffle off this mortal coil and more and more young Latinos join the voter rolls as Democrats.
Admit it, Obama voters, this is the kinda thing you expected Mitt Romney to do if he got into office. What did this take, all of around 36-hours, to get floated to the press?
Maybe I should have voted for (unimpressive) Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson (I probably agree with him on about 25% of the issues, around the same percentage as I agree with Obama, anyway). On election day it was more appealing to me to record a “fuck you” vote to the Republicans than to make a different sort of protest vote, but Obama is already making me regret that, as tiny a protest as that would have been, just TWO DAYS later!
Votes making Colorado and Washington the first U.S. states to legalize marijuana for recreational use could be short-lived victories for pot backers because the federal government will fight them, two former U.S. drug control officials said on Wednesday.
They said the federal government could sue to block parts of the measures or send threatening letters to marijuana shops, followed up by street-level clampdowns similar to those targeting medical marijuana dispensaries the government suspects are fronts for drug traffickers.
“This is a symbolic victory for (legalization) advocates, but it will be short-lived,” Kevin Sabet, a former adviser to the Obama administration’s drug czar, told reporters.
“They are facing an uphill battle with implementing this, in the face of ... presidential opposition and in the face of federal enforcement opposition,” Sabet said.
—snip—
Ian Millhiser, senior constitutional policy analyst with the left-leaning Center for American Progress, said the federal government, even if it sues to challenge the Colorado and Washington initiatives, cannot force police in those states to arrest people for marijuana infractions.
“If I were Barack Obama, I would look at this and say I would rather have young voters with me,” Millhiser said.
Damn, straight, Ian. I’d take it a step further and say that NO ONE was waiting to hear how Obama was going to crack down on… states’ rights.
If his DOJ does nothing about this, no one will even notice (Keep in mind that the Bush administration did very, very little to curb the explosive growth in California’s cannabis trade). Now they’re just going to get mad. Fuck Obama. What’s so “Forward” about this shit?
