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The nature of the undecided

This is a really interesting article on the nature of undecided voters in the US. It shows how talking politics to people could be alienating them. My little sister made the brilliant observation last week that we (leftist USA people) need to stop talking and preaching and just live our lives and focus on genuine connections to other people for a while.

The author says that, by the very fact of you reading this article, or blog I guess, you are showing yourself to be a person who is "into" politics and therefore might not even be able to talk to people who are not. Of course, it's sort of immobilizing, but we need new strategies and this is an interesting jump off point.

I've included the entire article in the more section.

Lessons Learned about Undecided Voters
By Christopher Hayes
The New Republic
Wednesday 17 November 2004

For those who follow politics, there are few things more mysterious, more inscrutable, more maddening than the mind of the undecided voter. In this year's election, when the choice was so stark and the differences between the candidates were so obvious, how could any halfway intelligent human remain undecided for long? "These people," Jonah Goldberg once wrote of undecided voters, on a rare occasion when he probably spoke for the entire political class,
"can't make up their minds, in all likelihood, because either they don't care or they don't know anything."

And that was more or less how I felt before I decided to spend the last seven weeks of the campaign talking to swing voters in Wisconsin. In September, I signed up to work for the League of Conservation Voters' Environmental Victory Project - a canvassing operation that recruited volunteers in five states to knock on doors in "swing wards" with high concentrations of undecided or persuadable voters. During my time in suburban Dane County, which surrounds Madison, I knocked on more than 1,000 doors and talked to hundreds of Wisconsin residents. Our mission was simple: to identify undecided voters and convince them to vote for John Kerry.

My seven weeks in Wisconsin left me with a number of observations (all of them highly anecdotal, to be sure) about swing voters, which I explain below. But those small observations add up to one overarching contention: that the caricature of undecided voters favored by liberals and conservatives alike doesn't do justice to the complexity, indeed the oddity, of undecided voters themselves. None of this is to say that undecided voters are completely
undeserving of the derision that the political class has heaped on them - just that Jonah Goldberg, and the rest of us, may well be deriding them for the wrong reasons.

Undecided voters aren't as rational as you think. Members of the political class may disparage undecided voters, but we at least tend to impute to them a basic rationality. We're giving them too much credit. I met voters who told me they were voting for Bush, but who named their most important issue as the environment. One man told me he voted for Bush in 2000 because he thought that with Cheney, an oilman, on the ticket, the administration would finally be able to make us independent from foreign oil. A colleague spoke to a voter who had been a big Howard Dean fan, but had switched to supporting Bush after Dean lost the nomination. After half an hour in the man's house, she still couldn't make sense of his decision. Then there was the woman who called our office a few weeks before the election to tell us that though she had signed up to
volunteer for Kerry she had now decided to back Bush. Why? Because the president supported stem cell research. The office became quiet as we all stopped what we were doing to listen to one of our fellow organizers try, nobly, to disabuse her of this notion. Despite having the facts on her side, the organizer didn't have much luck.

Undecided voters do care about politics; they just don't enjoy politics. Political junkies tend to assume that undecided voters are undecided because they don't care enough to make up their minds. But while I found that most undecided voters are, as one Kerry aide put it to The New York Times, "relatively low-information, relatively disengaged," the lack of engagement wasn't a sign that they didn't care. After all, if they truly didn't care, they wouldn't have been planning to vote. The undecided voters I talked to did care about politics, or at least judged it to be important; they just didn't enjoy politics.

The mere fact that you're reading this article right now suggests that you not only think politics is important, but you actually like it. You read the paper and listen to political radio and talk about politics at parties. In other words, you view politics the way a lot of people view cooking or sports or opera: as a hobby. Most undecided voters, by contrast, seem to view politics the way I view laundry. While I understand that to be a functioning member of society I have to do my laundry, and I always eventually get it done, I'll never do it before
every last piece of clean clothing is dirty, as I find the entire business to be a chore. A significant number of undecided voters, I think, view politics in exactly this way: as a chore, a duty, something that must be done but is altogether unpleasant, and therefore something best put off for as long as possible.

A disturbing number of undecided voters are crypto-racist isolationists. In the age of the war on terror and the war in Iraq, pundits agreed that this would be the most foreign policy-oriented election in a generation - and polling throughout the summer seemed to bear that out. In August the Pew Center found that 40 percent of voters were identifying foreign policy and defense as their top issues, the highest level of interest in foreign policy during an election year since 1972.

But just because voters were unusually concerned about foreign policy didn't mean they had fundamentally shifted their outlook on world affairs. In fact, among undecided voters, I encountered a consistent and surprising isolationism - an isolationism that September 11 was supposed to have made obsolete everywhere but the left and right fringes of the political spectrum. Voters I spoke to were concerned about the Iraq war and about securing American interests, but they seemed entirely unmoved by the argument - accepted, in some form or another, by just about everyone in Washington - that the security of the United States is dependent on the freedom and well-being of the rest of the world.

In fact, there was a disturbing trend among undecided voters - as well as some Kerry supporters - towards an opposition to the Iraq war based largely on the ugliest of rationales. I had one conversation with an undecided, sixtyish, white voter whose wife was voting for Kerry. When I mentioned the "mess in Iraq" he lit up. "We should have gone through Iraq like shit through tinfoil," he said, leaning hard on the railing of his porch. As I tried to make sense of the mental image this evoked, he continued: "I mean we should have dominated the place; that's the only thing these people understand. ... Teaching democracy to Arabs is like teaching the alphabet to rats." I didn't quite know what to do with this comment, so I just thanked him for his time and slipped him some literature. (What were the options? Assure him that a Kerry White
House wouldn't waste tax dollars on literacy classes for rodents?)

That may have been the most explicit articulation I heard of this mindset - but it wasn't an isolated incident. A few days later, someone told me that he wished we could put Saddam back in power because he "knew how to rule these people." While Bush's rhetoric about spreading freedom and democracy played well with blue-state liberal hawks and red-state Christian conservatives
who are inclined towards a missionary view of world affairs, it seemed to fall flat among the undecided voters I spoke with. This was not merely the view of the odd kook; it was a common theme I heard from all different kinds of undecided voters. Clearly the Kerry campaign had focus groups or polling that supported this, hence its candidate's frequent - and wince- inducing -
America-first rhetoric about opening firehouses in Baghdad while closing them in the United States.

The worse things got in Iraq, the better things got for Bush. Liberal commentators, and even many conservative ones, assumed, not unreasonably, that the awful situation in Iraq would prove to be the president's undoing. But I found that the very severity and intractability of the Iraq disaster helped Bush because it induced a kind of fatalism about the possibility of progress. Time after time, undecided voters would agree vociferously with every single critique I offered of Bush's Iraq policy, but conclude that it really didn't matter who was elected, since neither candidate would have any chance of making things better. Yeah, but what's Kerry gonna do? voters would ask me, and when I told them Kerry would bring in allies they would wave their hands and smile with condescension, as if that answer was impossibly naive. C'mon, they'd say, you don't really think that's going to work, do you?

To be sure, maybe they simply thought Kerry's promise to bring in allies was a lame idea - after all, many well-informed observers did. But I became convinced that there was something else at play here, because undecided voters extended the same logic to other seemingly intractable problems, like the deficit or health care. On these issues, too, undecideds recognized the severity of the situation - but precisely because they understood the severity,
they were inclined to be skeptical of Kerry's ability to fix things. Undecided voters, as everyone knows, have a deep skepticism about the ability of politicians to keep their promises and solve problems. So the staggering incompetence and irresponsibility of the Bush administration and the demonstrably poor state of world affairs seemed to serve not as indictments of Bush in particular, but rather of politicians in general. Kerry, by mere dint of
being on the ballot, was somehow tainted by Bush's failures as badly as Bush was.

As a result, undecideds seemed oddly unwilling to hold the president accountable for his previous actions, focusing instead on the practical issue of who would have a better chance of success in the future. Because undecideds seemed uninterested in assessing responsibility for the past, Bush suffered no penalty for having made things so bad; and because undecideds were focused on, but cynical about, the future, the worse things appeared, the less inclined they were to believe that problems could be fixed - thereby nullifying the backbone of Kerry's case. Needless to say, I found this logic maddening.

Undecided voters don't think in terms of issues. Perhaps the greatest myth about undecided voters is that they are undecided because of the "issues." That is, while they might favor Kerry on the economy, they favor Bush on terrorism; or while they are anti-gay marriage, they also support social welfare programs. Occasionally I did encounter undecided voters who were genuinely cross- ressured - a couple who was fiercely pro-life, antiwar, and pro-environment for
example - but such cases were exceedingly rare. More often than not, when I asked undecided voters what issues they would pay attention to as they made up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if I'd just asked them to name their favorite prime number.

The majority of undecided voters I spoke to couldn't name a single issue that was important to them. This was shocking to me. Think about it: The "issue" is the basic unit of political analysis for campaigns, candidates, journalists, and other members of the chattering classes. It's what makes up the subheadings on a candidate's website, it's what sober, serious people wish election outcomes hinged on, it's what every candidate pledges to run his campaign on, and it's what we always complain we don't see enough coverage of.

But the very concept of the issue seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to. (This was also true of a number of committed voters in both camps - though I'll risk being partisan here and say that Kerry voters, in my experience, were more likely to name specific issues they cared about than Bush supporters.) At first I thought this was a problem of simple semantics - maybe, I thought, "issue" is a term of art that sounds wonky
and intimidating, causing voters to react as if they're being quizzed on a topic they haven't studied. So I tried other ways of asking the same question: "Anything of particular concern to you? Are you anxious or worried about anything? Are you excited about what's been happening in the country in the last four years?"

These questions, too, more often than not yielded bewilderment. As far as I could tell, the problem wasn't the word "issue"; it was a fundamental lack of understanding of what constituted the broad category of the "political." The undecideds I spoke to didn't seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as political grievances. Often, once I would engage undecided voters, they would list concerns, such as the rising cost of health care; but when I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums, they would respond in disbelief - not in disbelief that he had a plan, but that the cost of health care was a political issue. It was as if you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into December.

To cite one example: I had a conversation with an undecided truck driver who was despondent because he had just hit a woman's car after having worked a week straight. He didn't think the accident was his fault and he was angry about being sued. "There's too many lawsuits these days," he told me. I was set to have to rebut a "tort reform" argument, but it never came. Even
though there was a ready-made connection between what was happening in his life and a campaign issue, he never made the leap. I asked him about the company he worked for and whether it would cover his legal expenses; he said he didn't think so. I asked him if he was unionized and he said no. "The last job was unionized," he said. "They would have covered my expenses." I tried to steer him towards a political discussion about how Kerry would stand up for workers' rights and protect unions, but it never got anywhere. He didn't seem to think there was any connection between politics and whether his company would cover his legal costs. Had he made a connection between his predicament and the issue of tort reform, it might have benefited Bush; had he made a connection between his predicament and the issue of labor rights, it might have benefited Kerry. He made neither, and remained undecided.

In this context, Bush's victory, particularly on the strength of those voters who listed "values" as their number one issue, makes perfect sense. Kerry ran a campaign that was about politics: He parsed the world into political categories and offered political solutions. Bush did this too, but it wasn't the main thrust of his campaign. Instead, the president ran on broad themes, like "character" and "morals." Everyone feels an immediate and intuitive expertise on morals and values - we all know what's right and wrong. But how can undecided voters evaluate a candidate on issues if they don't even grasp what issues are?

Liberals like to point out that majorities of Americans agree with the Democratic Party on the issues, so Republicans are forced to run on character and values in order to win. (This cuts both ways: I met a large number of Bush/Feingold voters whose politics were more in line with the Republican president, but who admired the backbone and gutsiness of their Democratic senator.) But polls that ask people about issues presuppose a basic familiarity with the concept of issues - a familiarity that may not exist.

As far as I can tell, this leaves Democrats with two options: either abandon "issues" as the lynchpin of political campaigns and adopt the language of values, morals, and character as many have suggested; or begin the long-term and arduous task of rebuilding a popular, accessible political vocabulary - of convincing undecided voters to believe once again in the importance of issues. The former strategy could help the Democrats stop the bleeding in time for 2008. But the latter strategy might be necessary for the Democrats to become a majority party again.

Purple States

This is a really interesting graph my friend Stu Crawford made after reading our lively Fuck The South conversation.

He graphed the percentage of voters in each state who voted for Bush and found that, in the vast majority of states, even the blue ones, it was pretty evenly split between Bush and Kerry.

Stu says: "No matter what state you look at, Bush got about half the vote. All this going on about the conservative states and the liberal states, it looks to me like every state is just about 50:50. There are a couple outlyers, Utah being one with 70% Bush support, and Massachusetts being another with 37%, but other than that it is pretty homogenous. I stuck it into Excel, and the 95% confidence limits are only +/- 2.3% (with an average of 53.3%). It is interesting that the rift in American politics is so evenly spread out and doesn't have more of a geographic component."

So it seems as though there's a lot more work to be done locally to evolve political views, rather than just tromping to warmer climates to pass out Darwin and economics textbooks.

Stupid people

Fuck San Francisco

A few weeks ago I posted a link to "Fuck the South" because it is funny and made me feel good about the fact that "we" did not elect W, "they" (the South) did. Plus it made some good points and, really, it's quite funny. But it started this whole blog war (see comments from "Fuck the South" below) and one dilligent Southern commentor (John) posted the following from some other site:
____________________________________________________________

San Francisco constantly struggles with itself to solve the question of how many ***holes it's possible to fit into a square mile. How many cybersissies can you cram into a phone booth? How many Gaia-peddling belly-floppers? How many self-absorbed monkish Nerf balls of ideological irrelevance? How many dayglo lemon-meringue fashion tarantulas? How many gaunt, cellophane-wrapped nipple-tweakers? How many prune-twatted hipster debutantes?

It's a star-lit ballroom full of elitists masquerading as egalitarians. Of snobs pretending to be socialists. Of petty backstabbers who appoint themselves as, moral crusaders These creeps can't get along with the other 99% of the country -- s***, most of their time is spent quarreling among themselves -- yet they try to fist-**** you with Universal Brotherhood. Almost down to the very last shaved anus, San Franciscans are a xenophobic breed, If you don't speak, look, and act like a San Franciscan, their policy is one of Zero Tolerance. They're totalitarian in the sense that they insist on controlling the thoughts and lives of others through forceful statist intervention. In doing so, they align themselves with the establishment which they pretend to be overthrowing. They're a buncha urban supremacists. Unyielding. Humorless. Stuffed to the gills with an unwarranted sense of their own cultural/ moral superiority. I call them "Bay Aryans."

Surely I must be kidding, that I don't mean to compare such twinkle-toed West Coast coolness-mongerers to the TEETH-CHATTERINGLY SINISTER ATROCITIES of the Nazi pork-butchers. After all, Hitler killed six million Jewboys! That's enuff goldurned Heeb-a-ross to fill eight San Franciscos. You may be right, tootsie-pop, but are you aware that non-racist, peace-licking, universal-personhood-touting communist governments have slaughtered ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY MILLION PEOPLE this century? The commies beat Hitler 20- 1. Their unbounded love for "humanity" didn't seem to put a check on an even stronger love for controlling and killing human beings. So much for your murky notions of government-mandated humanism. Better a Nazi than a commie, I guess. And either one's better than a Bay Aryan. Being born in San Francisco is excusable, provided that you evacuate within 30 days of reaching adulthood. But moving TO the Bay Area is unforgivable under any circumstance. Based on an unfortunate long-term trend of Freak Relocation, the town has become a sort of Kurdish tent village of refugee wierdlings. A once-pretty city with flap-happy seagulls has degenerated into an island of white-breads-in-exile who've all fled from hometown persecution. San Francisco's foggy hills have become America's largest support group, a Jonestown for people who were socially traumatized in high school. Within city limits, I think, San Francisco's fine as a cultural sanctuary for oversocialized misfits. Its danger lies in an apparently insatiable drive to vengefully impose its values on everyone outside the fortress. I think it's good that you people should have your own ghetto. I just think we should build a fence around it. Among most humans, the need for social approval seems stronger than the need to know the truth. Rejected by the Uberclique, the Bay Ayrans form cliques of their own. Blind puppies in a cardboard box, they crawl over each other looking for 'scene' status. So weak as individuals, they truly believe that 'scene status' is a worthy goal. They howl about 'fighting facism' yet they exhibit a strong urge to feel a part of some 'community' which is the first flash of the facist impulse. You all need a crowd. You all need a movement. You need to be surrounded by the wool of a million other sheep before you start to feel warm. You all have social consciences because you're zeros as individuals. Your 'compassion' for others is ironically founded on your own self-hatred. You swim with 'the movement' because you're lost on your own. I don't care about your precious personal lifestyle choices. I really don't. And your entire dingbat philosophy, the whole tectonic plate on which San Francisco rests, is based on the false presumption that people such as me are upset with the manner in which you flap your genitals around. Egads.

It isn't what you do, it's the way you do it. Not the meat, but rather the motion. It's not what you're saying, it's your lousy voice. It isn't your private ****-slurping, it's your public megaphone-mouth. It ain't how you move beneath the sheets, it's the way you wave the picket signs around. The problem isn't your self-consciously "decadent" personal lifestyle, it's your warped social instincts. It has nothing to do with the widespread sidewalk display of ***-rimming ... or the women who look like Lou Costello ... or even the concept of white people who hate the concept of white people. In fact, those are some of the things I LIKE about SF. It's the attitude. The vantage point. Cloistered in a cultural Presidio, the Bay Aryans see fit to cast judgment about the millions of peasants who live out on the Plains. The Bay Aryans prove that they aren't truly compassionare by consistently showing a flagrant hatred for America's white rural limpenproletariat.

Though San Franciscans may mince through the streets in protest of hate speech, they sure as shootin' despise dem trailer trash. Although their hearts are opened like dilated (something to do with the lower alimentary canal) for poster kids halfway around the world, they disowned the homebound hillbillies a long time ago. I wonder what would happen if the hillbillies were to disown the Bay Aryans? Maybe if all the redneck farmers just decided to stop growing crops for a year. Perhaps if all the white-trash truckers agreed to halt delivery of all goods into this hostile enemy area. Maybe if all the EVIL WHITE MALE PIG COPS decided to ease up on Oakland and let black people really express how they feel about their brethren in Frisco and Berkely. That's all it would take. A puff of wind and they'd all fall down. It's a good thing the rest of your country sees your city as a harmless Fruitcake Palace. The rest of America is too busy trying to put food on the table than worrying about your neurotic socio-libidinal peccadilloes. The rest of America could get along fine without San Francisco. The reverse is hardly true. You should thank Goddess that there are a few Nazis in Idaho and a smattering of Klansmen in Kentucky, because what else would you talk about at the weekly gatherings of the collective? Never mind that you all live in a much more AFFLUENT place than Idahoans or Kentuckians do. Personal finances don't often factor into your idea of what constitutes oppression, do they? You claim to identify with the poor and downtrodden, yet you're miraculously able to pay some of the highest rents in America. How do you do it? Maybe if you took the silver spoon out of your mouth, I'd be able to understand what you were rumbling about empowerment.

Modem American Leftoidism, a Volk religion epitomized in places as the evil SF/Berkeley vortex, is almost exclusively the purview of upper-middle-class white kids who've never breathed a fleeting gasp of true oppression in their lives. This must be why the Bay Aryans don't seem nearly as concerned with America's widening class disparities as they are with its fashion mistakes and verbal boorishness.

Though the Bay Aryans fancy themselves as revolutionaries, they're actually little more than a left-wristed inversion of Miss Manners. An area that prides itself on the Free Speech Movement is now gung-ho in favor of legal restrictions on terminology which it doesn't deem proper or sensitive. The Bay area teems with tattletales and stool pigeons and hall monitors and snitches. Since they don't have any REAL problems in their lives, these mushy bananas worry about getting their feelings bruised.

Perhaps it hasn't occurred to you. but human history is not entirely summarized by the bold struggle for the "right" to poke your (you can guess what) through disco-bathroom glory holes. Not every act is political. Some are just silly and ugly and stinky.

Are you all high on crack? Does some municipal law require you to either have a glass pipe or a **** in your mouth at all times? Who else would seriously try to argue that rape has nothing to do with sex or that racism has nothing to do with economics? The holes in your logic have been stretched wider than your sphincters. Any honest overview of African, Asian, and Hispanic cultures would reveal more sexism, homophobia, and ethnic strife than you could shake a white **** at. Everyone is born corrupt. White males were simply better at it. You can show your sincere opposition to whitemale imperialism by giving your city back to the Injuns. Maybe we could help San Francisco realize its multicultural dreams by immediately shipping a million or so Third World indigents there. Let them take your jobs while you starve for awhile. We could forcibly relocate all the white-hipster undesirables out to Alcatraz, where they'd perform bloody gladitorial feats to the delight of Kenyan tourists on paddleboats.

I'm glad you've all gathered together in one place. Makes it easier to aim the missiles. Aren't you due for another natural disaster or something? Exactly what year are you scheduled to slide into the ocean? I want to take pictures. No offense, but I have a higher opinion of the runny, worm-filled dogs*** I scrape from my boot with a popsicle stick than I do of your fair city. You gave us OJ Simpson, but what have you done lately?

San Francisco, America's B-movie imitation of Paris. San Francisco, the city that ruined punk rock. San Francisco, the most intolerant place in the country. Second to Berkeley, of course. Berkeley's so bad, it's too painful to talk about. Tony Bennett left his heart. I took a dump. I'd tell you all to go to hell, but you already live there.

Observations on Canadian couples

It is hysterical how people like to let you know they're in a relationship here. Ever so subtly, one solo person will slip in a "we." As in, "we loved that movie" or "yes, we have been to New Brunswick." With zero prior knowledge as to what or whom they could be referring. No no no, this is not the Royal "we," but rather, the Canadian way of letting you know they have pair bonded. These are the same people who will later refer to their "partner." They say it proudly. It is their job to shame you into oddity, least they tempt themselves with the world of options. No, they are a "we." They have successfully merged into one. Like a red dot on their Canadian foreheads, that "we" is a warning both to you and themselves.
"I am a we"
Literally attached.

What to do now?

looking for a glimmer of hope?

The Complacent Organization presents:

An Abbreviated History of trueAmerica
http://www.complacent.org/trueamerica

Stay free email is super fab:

WORLD VIEW: MARKETING NEWS AND OTHER SICK STUFF

Patients undergoing cardiac surgery can now look forward to hearing new age music and calming voices while under the knife. Doctors at prominent hospitals are increasingly recommending the use of guided imagery tapes, which are played through earphones while patients are under anesthesia. A calm female voice beckons patients to "feel new strength flowing through you, through arteries that are wider and more open . . . than before."

To assure patients that their doctors are reliable, the voice coos that medical devices "will be removed by wise and sure hands at just the right time, when your body is ready, no sooner, no later." While there is no real evidence yet that the tapes have any effect, they are marketed as a way of improving patients' recovery. Audio samples of these tapes can be found on the Ohio-based Health Journeys website, including affirmations for other conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, depression, and menopause. (Wall Street Journal, 2/10/04)

* * * *

The photo developing departments at several national chain stores routinely censor customer orders. A Walgreen's in Ohio, for example, removed a photo of a shirtless man wearing a nipple ring from customer Calvin Johnson's roll--and threw away the negatives.

An assistant manager told Johnson that film developers are under no obligation to print photos they deem offensive, "If someone doesn't approve of the subject matter," he said, "each employee has the right [to discard photos] as they see it."

CVS, Eckerds, and Rite-Aid have similar policies. Wal-Mart's policy is even more sweeping: if employees come across any photographs containing nudity of any kind--kids in a bathtub, for instance--they are required to call the police. (Clevescene.com, 4/14/04)

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DIEBOLD & ELECTRONIC VOTING

Today I got bored with myself and posted a few links about electronic voting up at Deebold.com (a domain I registered a while back). One noteworthy item is a video excerpt of MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," which does a hard-hitting roundup of voting inaccuracies in last week's election. Several counties in Florida and Ohio, for example, had more votes than voters! See http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/diebold/ (aka deebold.com)

.....

TIRED JAPANESE BUSINESSMEN

Neato photo archive of overworked Japnese business men sleeping (or passed out) on trains, sidewalks, and even staircases.

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Fuck the South

I'm really quite depressed and feeling cut off from everything. But my brother just sent this to me and it's making me feel a lot better:

www.fuckthesouth.com

Also, this is worth checking out. If it is true, it means that almost every single state voted against the economic interests of it's majority.... So much for Adam Smith...

mechanical sex

You knew it had to happen. Hell, I guess it's been in the works for a while.

The URL really says it all:
http://www.fuckingmachines.com/meetthemachines/

I don't know why I find the above so obsurd and the idea of vibrators so liberating...Women really get the benefit of the double standard on sex toys these days.

Here's a link back to the fascinating and terrifying days when we didn't:
It's the Antique Vibrator Museum.
Supposidly, women who were being treated for "hysteria" would be cured by treamtments with these machines by altrusitic doctors with *only* the best of intentions. "Never mind the corset, a death by slow asphyxiation, and sexual respression you silly girl. Here, I can cure you with my calming wand of vibrating medicine." Actually, that sounds sort of hot....well, maybe it would be if the women's innards didn't sometimes get squeezed right out of them like a horrible abortion simile from the tight lacing of corsets...

It's funny to look around and think of current social customs that people in the future will look back on and be like "What in HELL were they thinking?!?!?!" Circumcision comes to mind: plastic surgery...for babies!

Bush totally stole it.

I know, I know, how predictable. But how could you imagine otherwise? I don't know, honestly, I'm just trying not to believe that most of the people in my country are that moronic.

CNN article on how a voting macine in Ohio was caught giving 4,000 votes to Bush. Which is really a brilliant idea, a few thousand here, a few thousand there, no paper trail to think of....

And more from Greg Plast on strategies for rejecting Democratic voters.

I spoke with a man from Wisconsin who was part of MoveOn's "get out the vote." He said his wife was accosted by thugs who got all up in her face and then reported her on their cell phones in cars with tinted windows. OK, so it's sort of funny that republican vigalantes are pretending to be FBI operatives...but still.