Why the public option is a gay rights issue

Some of my gay friends are really, really mad at Obama for not prioritizing gay issues like "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and gay marriage in his first year in office.

While I understand the impatience, I have to say that probably the most important gay issue in this country is our lack of universal health insurance.

If you are straight and married to an employed person, you probably have the option of getting on your spouse's health insurance plan. In some liberal states gays have this option with their partners.

But throughout most of the country, gays and gay families don't have this option. They are basically shit out of luck if they don't have a way to get health insurance for themselves.

I would love to see gays have the right to marry or serve in the military sooner than later.

But with a limited Congressional calendar and only so many laws that can be passed at one time, I would rather see them have access to doctors, dentists and hospitals.

Isn't the real crime the hair?

Condoleeza Rice: EPIC FAIL

Have you noticed how Condoleeza Rice keeps talking and talking lately? As if anyone is listening? As if she isn't part of a failed, dying administration? As if she weren't an advocate of an utterly wrong-headed ideology and policy so morally bankrupt that it inflamed the world, damaged the United States and almost destroyed the world?

Israelis now have a verb, lecondel, meaning running around and having lots of meetings, accomplishing nothing.

It's like she thinks she can make up for the political and moral failings of the last eight years with some piano playing and tough talk.

Hello, Condi. GOODBYE.

STFU [Name] the [Occupation]

Oh look! Joe the Plumber has a book deal! Although there is definitely a market for crybaby sour-grapes Republicans, I doubt that Joe the Plumber (who along with Sarah Palin, represented most of what went wrong with the McCain campaign) is poised to tap it.

But the fameball cycle has started, and old Joe seems drunk on his own sense of self-importance, even issuing a vague threat to our President Elect:

We wish our new president blessings of wisdom and good judgment, and we pray he hearkens to our voice if ever we feel our American Dream is being threatened. It will be a loud voice, so good luck trying to ignore it.

For a good chuckle, check out the new (retro-web designed) Joe the Plumber website. Once.

Call the waaaaaambulance

So there's this right wing dipshit named John Ziegler who's very upset that Barack Obama won the presidency, so he's determined to explain to the American people how dumb the 53% of them who voted Democrat this year are.

To this end, he commissioned the notoriously unreliable Zogby polling outfit to conduct a survey, of sorts, of self-described Obama voters and test their awareness of a bunch of Fox News-generated B.S. about Obama. You see, if you aren't aware that Barack Obama "started his political career at the home of two former members of the Weather Underground", you aren't just skeptical of the right-wing echo chamber, you're ill-informed!

Or if you thought the candidate who said she could see Russia from her house was Sarah Palin, you're wrong! It was actually Tina Fey. You see, Palin said that "you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska". It's such a shame that Obama supporters were so ignorant of the important issues in this campaign.

Anyway, recently, our hero Nate Silver called foul on this nonsense and characterized the whole exercise as a "push poll", or a poll intended to sway the opinion of the person being polled.

Well, big, bad right-wing John Ziegler wasn't going to stand for this so he gave this wonderfully infantile, expletive-laden interview to Nate (via FiveThirtyEight.com):

An Interview with John Ziegler on the Zogby "Push Poll"

Manhattan went 85% for Obama

Yes we did (via cnn.com):

It's been real, Republicans, whatever

By the way Missouri and North Carolina...

Hai! Totes hope you figure out who you voted for. Don't really give a shit either way!

Still in (joyful) tears...

YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!! YES WE DID!!!!!

In Tears....

Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can!

Fivethirtyeight.com: Final Election Projection

Today's Polls and Final Election Projection: Obama 349, McCain 189

More wisdom from Nate Silver

Nate Silver over at fivethirtyeight.com has ten reasons to ignore exit polls tonight. Basically, they tend to be inaccurate and overstate support for Democrats.

Ten Reasons Why You Should Ignore Exit Polls

Definitive, concise election watching advice from Nate Silver

Nate Silver is the smartest person in the world right now. He has run his election polling aggregate site fivethirtyeight.com for months now and has developed some seriously pointy-headed algorithms for averaging dozens of polls to produce overall numbers for the presidential contest as well as congressional races.

I don't understand half the stuff on his site, but here's his easily digestible take on how it goes down tonight (via fivethirtyeight.com):

It appears almost certain that Obama will capture all of the states won by John Kerry in 2008. Pennsylvania, while certainly having tightened somewhat over the course of the past two weeks, appears to be holding at a margin of about +8 for Obama, with very few remaining undecideds. Obama also appears almost certain to capture Iowa and New Mexico, which were won by Al Gore in 2000. Collectively, these states total 264 electoral votes, leaving Obama just 5 votes shy of a tie and 6 of a win.

Obama has any number of states to collect those 5 or 6 votes. In inverse order of difficulty, these include Colorado, Virginia, Nevada, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Missouri and Indiana. Obama is the signficant favorite in several of these states; winning any one of them may be fairly difficult for John McCain, but winning all of them at once, as John McCain probably must do, is nearly impossible.

There you have it folks. Get your tequila ready. It's gonna be a hell of a night...

The McCain-Palin Gossip Challenge

Okay, so we are learning (again) that "facts" and "issues" don't really resonate with a great number of American voters. If you look at the last two presidential elections, they resemble this one in that the facts and issues were clearly on the Democrats' side, but the Republicans successfully diverted voters' attention to mischaracterizations of the candidates' personalities.

In 2000, it devolved into which candidate we would most like to have a beer with (or in Bush's case a Shirley Temple, I suppose). In 2004 it was framing Kerry as a French, flip-flopping windsurfer.

These tactics are highly effective in swaying American voters because in general the electorate is woefully uninformed and is trained to consume media based on an Us Weekly type personality profile format. This format has two modes: poignant, regular-person fawning and gossipy freak mongering.

So far the Republicans have been very effective at propping Sarah Palin up as a "just like us" angry small town mom and deriding Barack and Michelle Obama as sly, deceptive political insiders.

Our challenge as liberals is to forget about the issues and go for the gossip. The people who vote on issues and facts made up their minds months ago and are voting Democrat. The hardcore Republicans were never going to vote rationally anyway. It's the uninformed/undecided/independent voters that are up for grabs. These people really don't hear issues or facts. That stuff is, like, really boring. Independents liked the People Magazine profile of the Palin family with its whiskey-tango-friendly, messy baby drama. This helped Sarah Palin gain a 90% name recognition within like a week.

We can't win this election relying on Americans' sober analysis of the issues, obviously. So the challenge is, liberal bloggers, go out and find the freaky dirt about McCain and Palin and repeat it over and over.

The following have been tried and not worked:

• Cindy McCain was a drug addict
• The McCains are really rich (only Democrats aren't allowed to be rich because that makes them - gasp - hypocrits)
• Sarah Palin is a scary Jesus freak (that's a plus in the United States)

New and new-ish stories the outcome of which is unclear:

• Track Palin was a drug addict
  
• Bristol Palin smoked pot
• Sarah Palin used a (now hacked) personal email account to conduct state business to cirumvent public disclosure laws
  

But we need something really, really freaky. Did Sarah Palin have sex with her teenage daughter's baby daddy? Did John McCain, Larry Craig, and Ted Haggard have a meth and Viagra-fueled threesome? Did Cindy McCain let her dog die due to neglect?

Come on liberals, you do gossip better than anyone. Take your sights off of Britney and Mylie for a minute and set them squarely on McCain-Palin.

UPDATE:

• Sarah Palin's Other Man