From this ad, released today. Good thing McCain isn't trying to differentiate himself from an incumbent with limited command of his native language or anything.


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After apologizing for last week's mailer and firing the person involved, the Pennsylvania Republican Party is sending out a new flyer to Pennsylvania Jewish voters. It reads "History has shown that a naive and weak foreign policy has resulted in tragic outcomes for the Jewish people."


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Some of matrushkaka's friends from back home have been urging her not to vote for Barack Obama because they say he's a socialist. I should start with some background and context. It used to be that you voted for a Republican to keep your taxes low, but that's not true this year. The message has sunk in that Obama's tax plan cuts more taxes for more ( Read more... )

Remember earlier this week when I posted the rundown of fear mongering from the McCain campaign? Obama is finally slinging mud back, using similarly scary music and editing to feed ignorant Americans' fear of 1950s sci-fi robots.

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(Robots may strike at any time. And when they grab you with those metal claws, you can't break free. Because they ( Read more... )

In my previous post about why I support Obama I mentioned that McCain's campaign and the RNC have "not just tolerated but quietly encouraged the worst sort of xenophobia, racism, and fear mongering". I had some back-and-forth on this point over the weekend and I think it deserves more fleshing out; if you haven't actually been paying attention to ( Read more... )

Democracy's incentives are structured to encourage triangulation toward winning the most votes. The conventional rules say that if you can identify the policies that are most popular and get behind them more effectively than your opponent you'll end up winning. Both candidates compete to win as much support as possible and the person who wins the ( Read more... )

My Cambodian lawyer and I were talking about political incentives. The way that the political marketplace causes both parties to produce candidates who converge on the policies most desirable to the largest number of people, regardless of whether the party historically supports those issues ( Read more... )

Ever since the primary there's been this constant refrain that Obama is an "elitist". I was hashing this out with ponsdorf last week and the more I thought about it the weirder this accusation became.

"Elitism" isn't thinking that you're smarter than everyone else is - that's egotism. "Elitism" also isn't just thinking that you're smarter than you ( Read more... )

So there's this thing about how McCain stole his story about a Vietnamese prison guard drawing in the dirt from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. And it seems that the charge is at least partly if not fully BS. It's not necessary for McCain to have stolen the story from Solzhenitsyn because Solzhenitsyn isn't the person who invented the concept of drawing ( Read more... )

So this is interesting. Saturday was the Washington, Kansas, and Louisiana state Republican primaries. McCain lost handily in the eastern states: Louisiana and Kansas. Polls closed in Washington and the votes started getting counted. McCain and Hucabee traded spots as the leader and with 87% of the precincts reporting in... nothing happened. ( Read more... )