One of the advantages of living in the Jersey suburbs with your sixty-three year old retired father is that you get to perform all manner of menial tasks in a futile attempt to mitigate his desire to prevent idle hands from lingering about. (It’s worth pointing out that my Internet traffic in recent weeks undoubtedly proves just how Sisyphean his task really is.) Yesterday it was shampooing urine stains left by my now deceased geriatric dog out of the carpet in our living room. Today it was blowing the leaves on my front lawn as my uber-conservative neighbor pounded cold patch into our driveway (did you know that if Obama wins, we can all stop working, and someone will drive a truck around and give us money everyday? Hot damn!!!).

As I was blowing the aforementioned leaves and watching them fly up into the air only to fall back onto some previously cleared patch of grass, I had an epiphany. I noticed that my next-door neighbor’s lawns had also managed to accumulate a fair amount of leaves since they had last been raked, so, rather than establishing a clear boundary between the three properties (a kind of leafless DMZ, as it were—oh snap! You love the subjunctive voice), I opted to clear their lawns as well (ok, just the halves that were contiguous to my parent’s property.) This ostensible random act of kindness was not, mind you, because I am in possession of any kind of highly evolved sense of community, nor was it due to my recognition that my neighbors and I were engaged in a collective struggle to thwart these autumnal invaders; rather, it was because I knew that those same frackin’ leaves would eventually blow back onto the areas I had just cleared. In other words, if I blew the leaves on my neighbors lawn as well as those on my own, it would mean that I would not need to worry about raking up any maverick detritus that might flout the sovereignty of suburban property lines and launch cross-border incursions later on this week.

So what’s the point, you ask. The recent rhetoric being bandied about by the McCain/Palin campaign—the use of epithets like Socialist, Communist and Marxist as part of an attempt to discredit the Obama/Biden campaign—has afforded liberals an opportunity to test new strategies for parrying such attacks and winning over misinformed voters. Unfortunately, the Democrats have largely fallen back on the failed strategy of appealing to the perceived “better angels of our nature,” a strategy which invariably leads to their invoking some manifestation of the quixotic motto “E pluribus unum.” However, the 2000 and 2004 elections (even if they were stolen) reveal the powerful role that an ignorant (dare I say self-centered) electorate can still play in deciding who will lead our country. The trouble, as I see it, is that young voters (let’s say for the sake of argument 18-38) are still highly susceptible to bankrupt political philosophies like Libertarianism (Aw, you’re a Libertarian? That’s adorable! But it’s grown-up time now, so pay your freakin’ taxes and think about how much it would suck if we had to drive on dirt roads all the time. Ingrates!!!) or the hyper-masculine tenets espoused by modern-day Republicans (Wars, whether cultural or military, and tax cuts are always sexy when you aren’t personally suffering their effects.). Thus, when liberals claim that government programs are important to ensure that there is some degree of parity regarding access to affordable education, health care, housing, etc., they are often confronted by a series of unrelated right-wing talking points and political bogeymen that alleged conservatives conjure up as political straw men (we’ve all seen the perverse delight with which Republicans talk about welfare mothers, garbage-pail kids, late-term abortions, etc.).

So, how can we countervail against such ignorant tripe? I’ve found that the only way to talk to rabid ideologues is in terms that they can understand, i.e., failing to take care of those who are struggling will inevitably come back to bite them in the proverbial ass—Don’t want to provide adequate funds for failing school districts? Then don’t complain when people working minimum wage jobs screw up your order at the drive-thru. Don’t want to pay higher taxes to provide health care to everyone? Then don’t cry when your premiums and medical bills rise to offset the costs of clinics and hospitals treating the uninsured. Don’t want to raise the minimum wage? Then stop whining about the fact that no one can afford to pay the costs for your plumbing services and that your business is suffering as a result. Don’t want to live in a country that is ethnically and linguistically diverse? Then move somewhere else, a–hole. You can even pepper your stump-speech with folksy wisdom like, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, or shit flows downhill, or you’re a d—bag. To be sure, Obama has attempted to raise some of these issues when speaking with constituents (watch the video of his chat with Joe the Plumber), but until members of the mainstream media start calling out Republicans for their disingenuous claims about the important role government plays in our daily lives, we all need to take on the responsibility of talking to our misinformed friends and family. The bottom line is that the meme of an evil (read: European) government that redistributes wealth and/or opportunity from hard-working Americans to lazy Americans is total BS, and people need to be called out on it. Our economy is only ever as strong as the men and women who form its base. Now go out and rake your neighbors’ leaves!

Ron Paul ’08!!!

I’m waiting for the Republicans to bring their game.  The Democrats have an intelligent, well-educated candidate [elected editor of Harvard Law Review -- no gentleman's C's here!] who’s the most inspiring orator since Lincoln.  He’s got a detailed plan to try to drag our economy out of the sewer where it was left by Bush and like-minded rich guys after they took all the money out of it and an incredibly well-coordinated grassroots operation run by volunteers that has raised record-breaking amounts of money from combining tiny little donations from a LOT of tiny little people like me.

The Republicans, on the other hand, have as THEIR “strategy,” lawsuits attempting to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of newly registered voters in swing states by trying to force the states to search for typos in new voters’ names and information and then send them the lists of dubious voters.  [Remember Dred Scott?] Colorado and Ohio and Florida.
A high point of this “strategy” is trying to disenfranchise Michigan voters whose homes have been foreclosed on, and who therefore might vote Obama, by having the state send them lists of foreclosed homes so they can see whether the people still live where they’re registered, or whether, luckily for the Republicans, in the chaos of their lives’ crashing around them, they forgot to update their registration.
This is not some random, tenuous, deniable connection — this is the White House trying to get the state attorneys to do their dirty work for them.

They also have:

a VP cadidate who routinely whips up their rally crowds into a lynch-mob type frenzy,

a candidate who can had to be coached through two debates before he could look his opponent in the face and call him “Senator,”

a plumber whom they asked to go to an Obama rally and ask questions based on false information — Joe doesn’t really make $250K a year — who’s not really a plumber [or does it without a license], and doesn’t belong to the plumber’s union.  The plumber’s union said Joe is full of sewage: plumbers in Ohio make less than $50K a year.  The plumber’s union  endorses Obama

and a weirdo who claimed she was attacked by a black guy who carved a backwards B into her face.  This is yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater.  Lynchings still happen — see previous post, plus remember James Byrd, and the poor kid who got run over and dragged to death by his white aquaintances in Texas last week.

Oh, and they also have a grassroots organization of people sending out emails claiming that Obama is the anti-Christ, claiming that he’s a Muslim, and claiming he’s a socialist [Socialist? how 'bout that Republican-authored bailout?].

All I can say is, Is that the best you got?

I can’t make this stuff up.

Cindy Jacobs, a self-proclaimed “prophet who travels the world ministering not only to crowds of people, but to heads of nations,” made October 29th “National Pray for Your 401(k) Day.”

Cindy is calling for a Day of Prayer for the World’s Economies on Wednesday, October 29, 2008. They are calling for prayer for the stock markets, banks, and financial http://12apostrophes.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/greenspan.jpginstitutions of the world on the date the stock market crashed in 1929. They are meeting at the New York Stock Exchange, the Federal Reserve Bank, and its 12 principal branches around the US that day.

“We are going to intercede at the site of the statue of the bull on Wall Street to ask God to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the ‘Lion’s Market,’ or God’s control over the economic systems,” she said. “While we do not have the full revelation of all this will entail, we do know that without intercession, economies will crumble.”

http://www.cbn.com/700club/guests/bi…

So, let me get this straight. What you’re saying is, let’s gather around a bronze statue of a bull and pray [to it] for money? Um, wasn’t that addressed in the Second Commandment? And the Old Testament?

No worries, Cindy didn’t just come up with this on her own:

[T]he Lord spoke to her, “Cindy, the strongman over America doesn’t live in Washington, DC – the strongman lives in New York City! Call My people to pray for the economy.”

The Lord also revealed the true cause of the 1929 crash:

The Lord further said, “October 29 was Black Tuesday, the day the stock market crashed, and Satan wants to do it again.”

That dastardly Beezlebub is planning to strike down the economy again! Hey, does he happen to look like Alan Greenspan?

http://wonkette.com/403920/jesus-peo…

(Thanks, sis, for finding this article!)

I received an alarming e-mail on Monday morning entitled “Choose wisely my friends!!!” It included a startling revelation – that Obama is…the Anti-Christ! That’s right folks, right here in River City, Satan with a capital “S”:

According to The Book of Revelations:

The Anti-Christ will be a man, in his 40’s, of MUSLIM descent, who will
deceive the nations with persuasive language, and have a MASSIVE
Christ-like appeal….the prophecy says that people will flock to him
and he will promise false hope and world peace, and when he is in power, he will destroy everything.

My first thought was, dude, if Obama is the Anti-Christ, we got bigger things to worry about than the election. Because according to that movie “The Omen”, things are figgin’ to get bad – REAL bad. When the Anti-Christ shows up on earth, whoa, look out. There’ll be fire raining down, everyone will have 666 tattooed on their forehead, and “American Idol” will be cancelled – forever!

And what are we going to do with “Obama the Anti-Christ” after the election? Even if he isn’t elected president, he’s still a Senator. Then we’ll be stuck with the Anti-Christ sitting in the U.S. Senate – on the Foreign Relations Committee, no less! Wait a minute, I thought the Anti-Christ was already on the Foreign Relations Committee? Oh, I guess that’s just Dick Lugar. My bad.

Luckily, one of the e-mail recipients replied with a powerful bit of information – that the Book of Revelation (that’s one Revelation, not “Revelation-S”) was written 400 years before Islam was a religion. And that there is not one single reference to the Anti-Christ in it, nor does it contain any description of the Anti-Christ.

The author then continued:

And now:
For the award winning Act of Stupidity Of all times the People of
America want to elect, to the most Powerful position on the face of the
Planet — The Presidency of the United states of America … A Male of
Muslim descent who is the most extremely liberal Senator in Congress
(in other words an extremist) and in his 40’s. (emphasis mine)

Hmmm, so being “extremely liberal” makes you an “extremist”? Then what does being “extremely conservative” make you? Well…an “extremist”, right? It goes both ways, doesn’t it?

The author closed with this:

Have the American People completely lost their Minds, or just their
Power of Reason ???

Peace in Christ,
Mary Alice Cantrell

Well, Mary Alice, I have to say, that last question is definitely a valid one. In fact, as I was reading your e-mail, I was asking myself the very same thing. And let me tell you, it’s a tough call. But I have to believe, “Peace-in-Christ” Mary, that you are not representative of the majority of Americans. The majority of Americans have lost neither their minds nor their power to reason, and can see straight through this ridiculous tripe.

This has got to be one of the most amazing things I have ever read.

The meat of it is this:

Referring to his free-market ideology, Mr. Greenspan added: “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.”

Mr. Waxman pressed the former Fed chair to clarify his words. “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Mr. Waxman said.

“Absolutely, precisely,” Mr. Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

Well, the entire economic meltdown hasn’t shocked me. When you believe everyone will just act nicely for no good reason, it shouldn’t be shocking when everything isn’t rosy in the end. What is shocking to me is that the architect of all this modern deregulation (along with Milton Friedman) came out and admitted that it was wrong. I guess he should get a small degree of credit for not gnashing his teeth and blaming poor people and the media, but given his responsibility in this that credit doesn’t go too far in my book. It is fair to say that Greenspan’s realization should (it won’t, but it should) put any pure free market argument to bed for the rest of my life.

In the end, what a weird year. I thought I would see an African American elected President before I saw the ideologue of ideologues, who basically turned this country into a deregulated mess, admit that he was wrong. Guess he figured he only had a few days left to prove me wrong…

I dislike baseball. But if you like Obama, cheer for the World Series to go six games. Obama will be giving his prime time message right before game six of the World Series (if there is one). His audience on October 29 on Fox (not exactly an Obama strong-hold) will either be huge — or he’ll be followed by re-runs of something like “So you think you can dance”…

So while it’s fair to not care who wins between the Phillies and Rays, we should all be cheering for whomever does to win slowly…

Not only did he give a resounding, persuasive endorsement, but he said exactly everything I wanted to say. Just, you know, much much better.

After a false start — www.eisenstadtgroup.com seems to be a hoax — I can’t definitively link Joe Plumber to Charles Keating.  True, his name is Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, and Robert M. Wurzelbacher, Jr., was Keating’s son-in-law who served prison time after his conviction in the Keating scandal. But for all I know, Wurzelbachers may be as common as Smiths up there in Toledo.

Still, after watching his interview with Katie Couric right after the debate, I do wonder who found him and how.

Joe sounds like he works for McCain, saying things like “We’ve seen who McCain is — we don’t know who Obama is” [in other words, "he ain't from around here"].

Joe also calls Obama “well-spoken, better spoken than I am.”  ["How dare he be better spoken than I am?  He's black!"]

He makes fun of Obama, portraying him as a performer who just fed him a memorized response [For a memorized response he should review McCain's response to a question about Russia's invading Georgia.  For his "answer," McCain simply recites a list of all the countries in the area].

Finally, Joe gets really ugly.  He says “he’s almost better than Sammy Davis, Jr.”

Now that’s just insulting. Who trained Joe?  Apparently he took a logic course in plumber’s school; note his appropriate use of the concept of slippery slope in the transcript below of his October 16 interview with Diane Sawyer: “I mean, $250,000 now. What if he decides, well you know $150,000, you’re pretty rich too. Let’s go ahead and lower it again. You know it’s a slippery slope. When’s it going to stop?”

Last night’s presidential debate turned out to be about Joe the Plumber.  An interview has been making the rounds online in which Obama talks to an Ohio plumber, who is considering buying the business he’s been working 12-hour days for over the past years.  Joe says he would be dissuaded from buying it under Obama’s economic plan, where Joe’s tax rate, on his profit above two hundred fifty thousand dollars a year, would increase from 36% to 39%. Or maybe Joe is predicting that, under Obama, he might not be able to borrow money to buy the business.

Check out the original interview here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFC9jv9jfoA&eurl=http://www.google.com/reader/view/

I like the way Obama talks to the guy, admits that his tax rate may possibly increase, and gets specific about exactly where it could go up.  He also points out that if his proposed tax breaks for actual working class people had been in effect, Joe might have been benefited – and been in a postiion to buy the business before now, instead of working 10- to 12-hour days all these years for somebody else.

This morning I found this story that said Joe had now decided to vote Republican: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/10/15/joe_the_plumber_the_video.html?hpid=topnews

And I thought, well, of course, I could see why he might vote Republican: Joe is rich.  He makes more than twice what my husband and I earn combined. We are way older than Joe, but we put off entering the work force while we were earning Ph.D’s, and we don’t work in nearly as lucrative fields as plumbing.  I’m an English professor.  [P. S.: Good for Joe! I work hard, but I bet I don't work nearly as hard as he does].

Of course, Joe is rich, but he still might be afraid to vote Republican because, unless he has no 401K invested in anything based in stocks or credit,  but keeps his retirement money in gold bullion under his bed, he might be afraid to keep the financial deregulation that just caused a stock market crash, banking panic, and incipient recession.  But I digress.

This morning, I decided to check Joe’s math.  First of all, he’d have to NET MORE THAN $250K to pay higher taxes on any of it, and as Obama clearly explained last night, his tax raise would entail a rate shift from 36% to 39% — ONLY for what Joe netted OVER $250K!

So say Joe improved his profit margin and went from netting $250K to $275K.  That’s ten percent, a big jump for one year.  Under the current 36% rate, he’d be paying $9K tax on that $25K.  Under Obama’s plan, Joe would pay $9750 on that top $25K.

So, because he’s going to pay an extra $750 on twenty-five thousand dollars extra profit, Joe is not going to buy the business? Is Joe claiming that the extra $750 tax bill is going to prevent him from getting credit?

Has Joe been working so constantly that he has somehow not heard that the stock market has crashed, banks are terrified to lend money even to each other, and so credit is already much, much harder to get and will be for who knows how long?

I’m skeptical, because I can’t see a puny $750 tax increase on income over $250K dissuading me.  Credit is going to be harder to get anyway.

Somebody please explain this to me.

A.  Her being reprimanded for abusing her power as Alaska governor after holding that office less than two years?
B.  Her view of herself as on a divine mission from a fundamentalist god?
C.  Her unabashed whipping crowds into a frenzy by repeatedly chanting that Obama is a terrorist?

I’m going with D.  When John McCain asked her to be Vice President, she boasts, “I didn’t blink.”

Watching Palin in the VP debate with Joe Biden, I had a strong gut reaction I couldn’t explain: sheer terror at what might happen if this person were President — if McCain (AKA “Other foot on a banana peel”) were elected and anything happened to him.  Today, however, I understand why I was and am so frightened.

I would expect a person who understood the seriousness of the job to “blink” indeed — to pause to think about it, and to ask herself, “Could I be ready in Jan 2009 to potentially serve as the leader of the free world?”  Palin seems proud of the fact that she did not pause to think, even for a moment, and to wonder if she were indeed up to the enormous responsibility being VP would entail.  Her naive pride makes me quake in my shoes.

Here’s why I’m so scared.  In 1999, researchers at Cornell experimentally confirmed what I had long suspected — that the worse people perform at a task, the more likely they are to overestimate their competence.  It gets worse: not only do incompetent people overestimate their level of skills, but also the worse someone is at a skill, the more grossly she overestimates her own ability at it.

The New York Times reported the on this experiment shortly after it was published [link below].  It used two complex tasks: a test of recognizing grammatically correct standard English, and a test of recognizing what was funny, for which subjects rated the humorousness of thirty jokes on a scale of one to eleven.  (The jokes had been rated by a panel of comedians which included Al Franken).

Then subjects estimated by percentile how competent they thought they were at each skill.

The researchers found that people whose competence was below the 60th percentile would overestimate their performance  — and the further their scores below the 60th percentile, the more grossly they would overestimate their skills, to the point where “bottom-quartile participants were nearly 4 times more miscalibrated than their top-quartile counterparts” (page 1131).

Why?  Because, unsurprisingly, the skills necessary for competence are also necessary to recognize and rate competence.  (The researchers also list many previous studies that also suggest this conclusion).
People whose performance rated at above  the 70th percentile, however, would err in the opposite direction: they would tend to underestimate their own performance, and the higher they ranked, the more severely they would underestimate it.

Both these findings matched what I have observed in my years of teaching writing: While strong performers are uniformly  modest in their self-assessments — I can’t count the number of really talented writers I’ve met who have told me, “I know I need to work on my writing” — the ones with the lowest scores are the ones most willing to tramp into my office demanding to know why their essays were awarded a D [a question whose only truly honest answer would be, "Because I was feeling generous that day."]

So no wonder the fact that Palin would so blithely offer that she “didn’t blink,” as if that somehow qualified her for the leadership of the free world, scares me to death.  Her apparently baseless confidence signals to me that she doesn’t understand what a huge task being Vice President would be — and is clueless that intellectually she simply may not be up to it.

The NYTimes covered this experiment.

Original article: Kruger, Justin, and David Dunning.  “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own
Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1999), Vol. 77, No. 6. pages 1121-1134.  <http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf>