The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Popular vote counts could take weeks

Ever the Pollyanna, Nate Cohn lays out the nightmare scenario:

With the West Coast providing the margin of victory for any Democratic candidate in a close election, Republican presidential candidates outperform their eventual share of the popular vote until the West Coast reports its results. In 2008, California, Washington, and Oregon voted for Obama by a 4 million-vote margin, representing nearly half of his national popular vote victory.

But the time zones are not alone in delaying results from Washington, Oregon, and California. In most eastern states, the overwhelming majority of votes are counted by the end of Election Night, since only a small share of absentee or overseas ballots arrive after the election. But elections in Washington and Oregon are now conducted entirely by mail and 41 percent of California voters voted by mail in 2008.

If Obama performs as strongly in California, Washington, and Oregon as he did in 2008, he could trail by several percentage points in the national popular vote while giving his victory or concession speech and ultimately seize the lead in the popular vote in the following days and weeks. Even a more middling performance out West, closer to Kerry's, would still allow him to make considerable gains. Unless Election Night ends with Obama holding a lead in the popular vote or Romney holding a large enough advantage to withstand the possibility of a predictably strong showing in late ballots, we may not know the winner of the popular vote for weeks.

But on the other coast, some good news. The New York subway map looks a lot better than it did Thursday morning:

Polls open in 45 hours

I expect I'll have a thing or two more to say about the election this week. Today, let me just highlight a couple of things I'm watching:

The election matters. Whether you believe that every person should stand or fall on his own, or instead that governments are formed to promote the general welfare, this election will be a referendum on your philosophy. I have a clear bias: I believe public governments do many things better than private concerns can possibly do—and some things that private concerns absolutely should not do. Police powers, for example, I believe absolutely must remain public powers. And yesterday's New York Times provides a stark example of what happens when people stop paying for the police:

The shrinking of Sacramento’s police force has been extreme; the department has lost more than 300 sworn officers and civilian staff members and more than 30 percent of its budget since 2008. But at a time when many cities are curtailing essential services like policing — the Los Angeles Police Department said last week that it could lay off 160 civilian employees by Jan. 1 — the cutbacks in this sprawling city of 472,000 offer a window on the potential consequences of such economizing measures, criminal justice experts say.

In 2011, [Sacramento Police] Chief [Rick] Braziel said, the cuts, in his opinion, went past the tipping point. While homicides have remained steady, shootings — a more reliable indicator of gun violence — are up 48 percent this year. Rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults, burglaries and vehicle thefts have also increased, though in smaller increments.

Complicating matters, the cutbacks have coincided with a flow of convicted offenders back into the city as California, heeding a Supreme Court ruling, has reduced its prison population. Once released, former inmates have less supervision — the county’s probation department also suffered cuts.

The right won't take defeat like grown-ups. For the past week or so, I've noticed right-wing pundits saying things that imply the president's re-election would somehow not be legitimate. James Fallows has a concrete example from the Fox propaganda machine:

Imagine going to vote for your presidential candidate and pushing the button on a touch-screen voting machine -- but the "X" marks his opponent instead.

That is what some voters in Nevada, North Carolina, Texas and Ohio have reported.

Fox News has received several complaints from voters who say they voted on touch-screen voting machines -- only when they tried to select Mitt Romney, the machine indicated they had chosen President Obama. The voters in question realized the error and were able to cast ballots for their actual choice.

"How can we be sure our votes are not being stolen electronically?" asked [one voter].

The irony, of course, is that there was evidence of inaccurate counts—towards McCain—on Diebold voting machines in 2008, which looked especially bad because Diebold's CEO had been an outspoken McCain supporter. And the actual incidents of actual voting malfeasance that we've seen this year have been perpetrated by Republican operatives. Which brings up my last point.

Authoritarians do not go quietly. The U.S. right wing has a deep authoritarian streak, a deepening attitude that ends justify means, and a justifiable, existential terror at the increasing diversity of the United States. They've spent the last 15 or more years building up a cocoon around themselves against the harsh reality of, well, reality. (And what happens in a cocoon? The caterpillar dissolves itself and emerges weeks later as a pretty but short-lived being whose only goals are to reproduce and die.)

As the Republicans' deepening insanity has become apparent to more and more voters, they've become even more unhinged. Remember, they invented modern dirty tricks under Nixon's CREEP. Their entire electoral and governance philosophy has become to win, not to govern. Mitt Romney can invent new stories like Scheherazade (and for similar reasons) because he truly doesn't care about what he's saying, only that he win.

Look, whether or not the President gets re-elected on Tuesday, the United States will continue in relative peace and prosperity for at least a couple of centuries more. A Romney win, I really believe, will amount to a rear-guard victory by a losing side. Almost nothing can prevent the U.S. from becoming more diverse and more tolerant over the next few decades, though the Republican Party, with even a little more power, can seriously sabotage us until they're finally expelled at the polls.

If you're a U.S. citizen, vote, if you haven't already. If you're not a U.S. citizen, then on behalf of the People of the United States, I apologize for the insanity. Sometime on Thursday morning we'll stop fretting about the 2012 election, and then you'll have at least a week off until we start the 2016 campaign.

Quote of the Day

From Krugman, on why the GOP hasn't seemed to get much for its billions in ad spending:

[W]hat if we’ve been misunderstanding Rove? We’ve been seeing him as a man dedicated to helping angry right-wing billionaires take over America. But maybe he’s best thought of instead as an entrepreneur in the business of selling his services to angry right-wing billionaires, who believe that he can help them take over America. It’s not the same thing.

Also, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority has a map of subway outages that suggests just how bad things are for New York commuters.

I used to live in the dead zone of that map. And then I moved to Hoboken.

Bloomberg endorses Obama

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an independent now but formerly a Republican, has endorsed the President for re-election, largely on the basis of their shared belief in anthropogenic climate change:

Our climate is changing. And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it might be -- given this week’s devastation -- should compel all elected leaders to take immediate action.

We need leadership from the White House -- and over the past four years, President Barack Obama has taken major steps to reduce our carbon consumption, including setting higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks. His administration also has adopted tighter controls on mercury emissions, which will help to close the dirtiest coal power plants (an effort I have supported through my philanthropy), which are estimated to kill 13,000 Americans a year.

Mitt Romney, too, has a history of tackling climate change. As governor of Massachusetts, he signed on to a regional cap- and-trade plan designed to reduce carbon emissions 10 percent below 1990 levels. ...

He couldn’t have been more right. But since then, he has reversed course, abandoning the very cap-and-trade program he once supported. This issue is too important. We need determined leadership at the national level to move the nation and the world forward.

Meanwhile, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced via Twitter that Lower Manhattan could have its power restored by tomorrow night.

Oh, and Mitt Romney suddenly believes in FEMA. Talk about going where the wind blows...

Report from Chelsea

Josh Marshall checks in from the disaster:

What I found so surreal about this storm is that in Manhattan at least there really was barely a storm at all. For whatever reason, through the period when there was the worst part of the damage the ‘rain’ never got worse than maybe a slight drizzle. Really no more than that. It got windy. But not all that windy either — though there were definitely gusts that were quite unlike anything normal. So through Monday night everything was pretty normal — just a wet and dreary Fall evening. Except for the fact that if you walked into certain parts of the city, you walked into the ocean.

It was a vaguely carnival-like atmosphere. Certainly it was the topography. But the water had stopped right at the eastward edge of 10th Avenue, almost like the cops had told it: this far, no further bub. A scattered crowd of people were out just taking in the sight. Cars who apparently hadn’t heard we were in the midst of a Hurricane kept coming up only to be turned around by two or three NYPD cars there to block off the area. Oh, then there’s that woman riding up the avenue on her bicycle. Over the bullhorn the cops let her know that that probably wasn’t a hot idea since the water can be electrified.

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman wonders why the right wingers hate FEMA:

So let me just take a moment to flag an issue others have been writing about: the weird Republican obsession with killing FEMA. Kevin Drum has the goods: they just keep doing it. George Bush the elder turned the agency into a dumping ground for hacks, with bad results; Clinton revived the agency; Bush the younger ruined it again; Obama revived it again; and Romney — with everyone still remembering Brownie and Katrina! — said that he wants to block-grant and privatize it. (And as far as I can tell, even TV news isn’t letting him Etch-A-Sketch the comment away).

There’s something pathological here. It’s really hard to think of a public service less likely to be suitable for privatization, and given the massive inequality of impacts by state, it really really isn’t block-grantable. Does the right somehow imagine that only Those People need disaster relief? Is the whole idea of helping people as opposed to hurting them just anathema?

The only thing that makes sense is, there's a lot of profit in helping disaster victims, isn't there?

Sandy

The storm's destruction in the Northeast is mind-blowing. I lived in Hoboken, N.J., for about a year and a half; the entire city is in the flood zone.

Just a link round-up for now; thoughts later:

More later.

(Water floods the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel in lower Manhattan. Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images.)

There is no time to 'splain. Let me sum up.

If we re-elect the President, then four years from now everyone in the US will have guaranteed health care—more than just the basic system we've had since 2009. If not, in four years no one will. (Note, also, that the President got us a health care system that ensures people don't die because they have pre-existing allergies or because they're somehow less lucrative for private insurance companies to cover.)

If we re-elect the President, then four years from now we'll have taken all our troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq, and we'll have forced Iran to give up its nuclear weapons program without firing a shot. If not, in four years we'll be at war with Iran, and we'll still have troops in the other two countries. And we'll be paying for it, whether in higher taxes or in a weaker dollar. (Note that the President has lined up support around the world to force Iran to capitulate, almost completely, on this issue.)

If we re-elect the President, then four years from now, taxes on the rich will be at least the same as on everyone else, and they'll have fewer loopholes to use to avoid paying their fair share. If not, in four years taxes on the middle class will be higher, and on the rich, lower.

I'm not making these things up. These predictions come from a plain reading of the stated positions of the two campaigns.

President Obama believes in a strong middle class, in making sure that Americans don't starve or go without basic health insurance, and that evidence is the best way to learn about the world.

Mitt Romney believes...well, I mean, who knows? Because in the last three weeks, Romney has changed from a radical right-wing Republican to endorsing the President's views on just about everything. His only goal in life is to become president, and he'll say and do anything to get the job. But for six years, since leaving the state house in Boston, he's campaigned on a platform so right wing that only the hardest-core Republicans supported him in 2008. (Against John McCain, too—hardly a liberal.)

If you're rich, or you're a Christian fundamentalist, then you should vote for Mitt Romney. If either the rich or the fundamentalists make you nervous, you should vote for the President. More precisely, if you want at least to stay where you are despite the rich guys trying to take your money, or if you worry about ever having to go to a hospital, If you're none of the above, you have 11 days to decide whether you believe in a United States governed by reason, or a United States ruled by fear.

This isn't the most difficult election the U.S. has ever faced; but it is the clearest choice presented in the last 50 years. Somehow, though, I think very few people will understand or accept the results this time. So we'll get to make the same choice in 2016. I only hope that then, we can have an election without the idiotic distractions we're seeing this time. I also hope to win the lottery. We shall see.

Baby steps in U.S. rail transport

Amtrak today will run a train from Chicago to Pontiac, Ill., at speeds up to 175 km/h:

The time spent traveling at 175 km/h will be relatively brief, lasting for only 24 km on new rails and new concrete ties between Dwight and Pontiac along the 457 km Union Pacific Railroad corridor from Chicago to St. Louis.

Dwight is about 130 km southwest of Chicago and Pontiac is about 30 km further to the southwest. The train will then continue on to Normal at top speeds of 125 km/h before heading back to Chicago Union Station, officials said.

For comparison, on Monday morning I'll be on a bog-standard train from London to Cardiff that will average 125 km/h, including stops, and between them toodles along at the pokey pace (for the U.K.) of 150 km/h. That's a slow train in Britain. The fast trains in Britain, like the one I took in March, go considerably faster. And don't even get me started about Shanghai...

Someday I hope the U.S. will have a modern transportation network. Someday.

Second court overturns DOMA

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional on equal-protection grounds:

This is a really big deal. [George H.W. Bush-appointed Chief Judge Dennis] Jacobs is not simply saying that DOMA imposes unique and unconstitutional burdens on gay couples, he is saying that any attempt by government to discriminate against gay people must have an “exceedingly persuasive” justification. This is the same very skeptical standard afforded to laws that discriminate against women. If Jacobs’ reasoning is adopted by the Supreme Court, it will be a sweeping victory for gay rights, likely causing state discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation to be virtually eliminated. And the fact that this decision came from such a conservative judge makes it all the more likely that DOMA will ultimately be struck down by the Supreme Court.

The 1st Circuit already found the law unconstitutional. One hopes we can dispense with the law without going through all 12 circuits in order...