After a bitter, polarizing election, the gift of entertainment can be such a comfort. This weekend, Americans of all persuasions are sure to come together at a special film event. I’m talking, of course, about Alfie. Bush’s base can clearly identify with a priapic European in New York, wearing designer clothing and bedding everything in a skirt. And as a temporarily despondent liberal, nothing can lift my spirits like watching the handsome and suave Jude Law pad around for ninety minutes like a fucking gigolo tomcat. Let the healing begin.

Sigh.

Here’s the thread: post a link that makes you laugh. I’ve got a few under the break.

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The left and right hemiblogospheres are presently linked – if at all – by a corpus callosum of profound mutual contempt. Countless linky axons of aggravation transmit negative affect side to side. I won’t bother demonstrating this obvious fact with links, though I discuss it a bit here.

And so, in the interest of entente – or at least to preclude the need for split-brain surgery to prevent the equivalent of a interwebs-wide grand mal epileptic seizure, as the storm moves left to right and back – I propose … a contest! Awards! For outstanding and meritorious achievements in the field of contempt. I think we will call these awards … The Contumelys! (I imagine sort of a golden turd-looking thing on the head of an human figure, on a pedestal.) I haven’t really worked out all the details because I haven’t worked out any of them. There must be awards for Left and Right. And I think, though I can’t imagine how I could enforce this, that lefties should nominate righties and vice versa. I’m certainly not prepared to be judge, jury nor executioner. Except for executioner. I’m more than prepared to delete comments to this thread mercilessly. Because mostly your contempt isn’t worth much to me. Unless you find some way to profit yourself, or others, by it.

UPDATE: Apparently there are problems with comments not showing, even after waiting, even after multiple attempts to post. Sorry about that. What can I say? Be aware there’s a problem and try again later. Maybe it’s temporary. Kieran?

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I put my post about “how to best represent county-level election data”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002820.html on “my own weblog”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000943.html#000943 as well. Yesterday it got linked to from “this thread”:http://www.jouster.com/cgi-bin/guntalk/config.pl?read=15832 on the “CSP Gun Talk Forum”:http://www.jouster.com/cgi-bin/guntalk/config.pl. Apparently, trying to present the data honestly is a problem:

Re: Don’t let “them” get away with it!
Posted By: those Sore Losers
They are rewriting history as we speak …….. !!!
Look at the map below >>>
then Go to the link below the map for the real shock >>>

Then they provide their own analysis:

bq. The only reason New Mexico and Colorado have any blue counties is because of all the idiot Kalafornicators that moved there. The only reason south Texas is blue is because of all the illegal mexicans that live there. It is sad the dimocrap city slickers want to force their pitiful way of life on the rest of us country folks…….maybe we need to wall off the large metro areas of the country…..chris3

David Frum “sinks even deeper into the Mariana trench”:http://www.nationalreview.com/frum/diary102904.asp#043872.

bq. Speaking of media bias, here’s a question you won’t hear in our big papers or on network TV: Does Yasser Arafat have AIDS?

bq. We know he has a blood disease that is depressing his immune system. We know that he has suddenly dropped considerable weight – possibly as much as 1/3 of all his body weight. We know that he is suffering intermittent mental dysfunction. What does this sound like?

bq. Former Romanian intelligence chief Ion Pacepa tells in his very interesting memoirs that the Ceaucescu regime taped Arafat’s orgies with his body guards. If true, Arafat would a great deal to conceal from his people and his murderously anti-homosexual supporters in the Islamic world.

via “Bookslut”:http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2004_11.php#003526.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been hearing speculation that the Bush administration was going to use the “nuclear option” to get judicial nominations through the Senate; that is, to junk the rules that allow a large minority of senators to filibuster judicial candidates.

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I can still recall my surprise when I happened upon a volume in a second-hand bookshop by Maurice Maeterlinck, author of Pelleas et Mellisande and one of history’s most famous Belgians, only to discover that it was all about the natural history of bees. If “James Meek’s piece in the latest LRB”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n21/meek01_.html is anything to go on, I’m in good company:

bq. Not long after the First World War, the movie baron Samuel Goldwyn set up a stable of Eminent Authors in an attempt to give silent screenplays more literary weight. One of the recruits was the Nobel Prize-winning Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck. Initially, neither party seems to have been troubled that Maeterlinck spoke no English, and the great Belgian set to work on a screen version of his novel La Vie des abeilles. When the script was translated Goldwyn read it with increasing consternation until he could no longer deny the evidence of his senses. ‘My God!’ he cried. ‘The hero is a bee!’

Further on in Meek’s review of Bee Wilson’s _The Hive_ [1] he claims that Jean-Jacques Rousseau asserts somewhere that nations which eat honey are natural democracies but those which use sugar as a sweetener are fit only for tyranny. I guess I can see what the argument might be — something about honey-gathering being a suitable activity for free citizens whereas sugar came from large plantations worked by slaves — but does JJR _really_ say it anywhere?[2]

fn1. One of the names we canvassed for this blog before we launched was “The Grumbling Hive”, I’m glad I lost that argument.

fn2. Montesquieu makes explit the link between sugar and black slavery at _Spirit of the Laws_ I.15.v.

Jim Henley “expresses some skepticism”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2004_10_31.html#005612 about the post election analysis saying that the Democrats need to do more about “moral values”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002811.html if they want to win the next election:

[I’m] calling qualified bullshit on the suddenly popular notion that liberals need to come up with “a plausible spiel on morality,” essentially dressing their existing beliefs in the language of religion so as to reach Christians who currently vote Republican … Among other things, this will raise conservative-Christian comfort levels with liberal politicians and make liberal policies attractive in the terms with which said voters view the world.

This is naive and even condescending. Conservative, values-minded Christians aren’t looking for validation. They’re looking for specific policy outcomes that their strongly-held beliefs entail – among them, the prohibition of abortion and the marginalization and if possible elimination of homosexuality. They are not empty urns waiting to be filled with liberal policies dissolved in honeyed words about faith.

… Bush and Rove’s faith talk may be every bit the “spiel” Kieran Healy says it is. Doesn’t matter. The question for evangelicals and what Sullivan calls “religious moderates” isn’t the sincerity of politicians, it’s whether those politicians deliver on their issues.

This is fair enough. I wrote that phrase, “a plausible spiel on morality” in a bit of a rush the morning after the election, and Russell Arben Fox and others picked up on it in the “comments thread”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002811.html. I think my original post ran together a few different and half-formed thoughts. So, uh, here are some more.

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A National Guard F-16 “strafed an elementary school in New Jersey”:http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=227410 last night with 25 rounds from its “M61-A1 Vulcan Cannon”:http://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/arm/arm8.htm:

bq.  A National Guard F-16 fighter jet on a nighttime training mission strafed an elementary school with 25 rounds of ammunition, authorities said Thursday. No one was injured. The military is investigating the incident that damaged Little Egg Harbor Intermediate School shortly after 11 p.m. Police were called when a custodian who was the only person in the school at the time heard what sounded like someone running across the roof. Police Chief Mark Siino said officers noticed punctures in the roof. Ceiling tiles had fallen into classrooms, and there were scratch marks in the asphalt outside.

I take it this is an early warning of the attack on the Blue States that will be launched early in the new year, after Colin Powell makes a presentation to the U.N. demonstrating the existence in New Jersey of large “research”:http://chemeng.princeton.edu/html/home.shtml and “production facilities”:http://www.conocophillips.com/global/na/bayway.asp most likely devoted to the manufacture of lethal chemical weapons.

Many thanks to guest poster Bill Gardner for his on-the-ground posts about the scene in Columbus. If the bug hits him and he decides to start blogging on his own, we’d be glad to give it some attention.

Just tying up a few loose ends as the US election fervour comes to an end … I bet nobody else was planning to audit this one so I might as well …

After all the brouhaha and kerfuffle over the Guardian‘s Clark County Project, it turns out that the citizens of Clark County voted exactly the same way as the rest of Ohio: 51% Bush, 48.5% Kerry. You might possibly argue that there was a slight “anti-Guardian effect” because last time round Clark was slightly more Democratic than the rest of Ohio (50-46 for Gore when the state was Bush by half a percentag point), but if you did, I think I’d say you were data-mining.

Update I promise I wrote that sentence before I saw someone had done it.

Via “Pandagon”:http://www.pandagon.net/mtarchives/003885.html I see that Michelle Malkin “smugly presents us”:http://michellemalkin.com/archives/000792.htm with a map (from “USA Today”:http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vote2004/countymap.htm) showing the apparently overwhelming predominance of Bush-supporting counties in the United States. That’s the top panel in the figure below. Looks like the GOP is overwhelmingly dominant, eh? Well, no, of course. It takes about ten seconds on Google to find the bottom panel of the figure, which shows you about how many people live in each county. The comparison is instructive. Of course, there are still a bunch of well-populated areas that Bush carried, but we know that already because, you know, he won the election.

Note also that the USA Today map has quite a few missing observations, shaded in grey, presumably because the final results weren’t available when they drew the map. Missing observations seem predominantly to be counties with large urban populations. Most of these (like Cook County, IL, and Palm Beach County, FL!) should probably be colored blue, as a comparison with the “2000 results”:http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vote2004/countymap2000.htm shows. CT readers are probably too sensible to fall for invidious comparisons like this to begin with, but it does seem that the likes of Michelle Malkin think that complete dominance of the Prairie Dog and cowpat vote is what really matters. She should check to see how “Leroy Chiao”:http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/astronaut_vote_041018.html voted — maybe the GOP can claim the Solar System vote, too.

*Update*: Thanks to some pointers in the comments, below the fold I’ve included two other figures. The first is a cartogram from the New York Times that scales the states by their electoral college votes, and the section is a terrific map from “Robert Vanderbei”:http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/ that gives a continuous rather than a binary representation of the county vote data, allowing us to see that “purple America” is more common than red or blue America.

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Judging from the comments to yesterday’s post on religion and politics, people seem to be quite interested in the topic. So I thought I’d post a pointer to this NYTimes article that discusses a paper by three economists about “Why Republicans and Democrats Divide on Religious Values”.[1]

fn1. I’d say more, but I have a flight to catch.

Since 9/11 American nationalists have not been shy to tell us about the marvellous things that the United States have brought to the world. And I agree with them. The US Constitution, the struggle against slavery, the struggle for civil rights, the greatest city in the world (New York), the blues, jazz, soul. I could go on and on. I might even, on a generous day, include Hollywood. I love those Americas, and I always will. I’d like to thank them for standing against the strident nationalists and George W. Bush.

— The thirteen original states that brought us the Constitution voted overwhelmingly for John Kerry. [1]
— The states that didn’t secede and which fought against slavery voted overwhelmingly for John Kerry.
— Black America which brought us in Martin Luther King, one of the greatest moral exemplars of modern times as well as the blues, jazz and soul voted overwhelmingly for John Kerry.
— California, home of the modern motion picture industry, voted for Kerry.

These are the great American achievements: the United States’ lasting contribution to freedom, culture and progress. Sadly, that America, the America of which Americans have the most reason to be proud and foreigners have the most reason to admire, just lost. Again.

fn1. UPDATE This is ambiguous and, on one resolution of the ambiguity, false. Since some commenters are incapable of doing charitable disambiguation themselves, let me do it for them: an electoral college based on the original 13 states would have voted in Kerry by an landslide.

Most of the post-election discussion I’ve seen has focused on the impact of religion, and quite a few commentators have suggested that the Democrats need to shift their policies to appeal more to religiously-motivated voters. This approach would entail some fairly substantial compromises in the search for marginal votes.

If we’re the mood for pragmatic populism, there’s a policy option that might well have delivered the Democrats the election, without the risk of fracturing the Democratic base as an appeal to the religious right would have done. That option is protectionism, of the kind espoused during the campaign by Gephardt[1]. Gephardt had his electoral problems, but I think he could have carried Ohio and his home state of Missouri, as well as having a good chance in West Virginia and even Indiana. He might have lost some coastal states but overall he would have had a better chance of a majority in both the popular vote and the electoral college.

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