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Pfotenhauer Insults Virginians: ‘Real Virginia’ Is Only Where McCain Is Winning

By Faiz Shakir on Oct 18, 2008 at 2:17 pm

On MSNBC this morning, McCain adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer asserted that “real Virginia” does not include Northern Virginia:

I certainly agree that Northern Virginia has gone more Democratic. … But the rest of the state — real Virginia if you will — I think will be very responsive to Senator McCain’s message.

MSNBC host Kevin Corke gave Pfotenhauer a chance to revise her answer, telling her: “Nancy, I’m going to give you a chance to climb back off that ledge — Did you say ‘real Virginia’?”

But Pfotenhauer didn’t budge, and instead dug a deeper hole.

Real Virginia, I take to be, this part of the state that’s more Southern in nature, if you will.

Corke ended the segment noting that Pfotenhauer was appearing via satellite from Northern Virginia. “Nancy Pfotenhauer, senior policy adviser for the McCain campaign, joining us from Arlington, not really Virginia.” “Alright, I’m just gonna let ya– you’ll wear that one,” Corke responded. Watch it:

The McCain campaign’s hostility towards progressive areas of the country was also witnessed by recent remarks from Sarah Palin. The Washington Post reported this week that Palin told a crowd in North Carolina that she “loved to visit the ‘pro-America‘ areas of the country.” “No word on which states she views as unpatriotic,” wrote Juliet Eilperin.

FLASHBACK: During his 2006 campaign, former Sen. George Allen called an Indian-American staffer working for his opponent “macaca,” a racial slur. Allen then told him, “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia!”

Update

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports:

An early October Times-Dispatch poll by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc. showed voters in Southwest Virginia preferred McCain to Obama, 54 percent to 39 percent, with 7 percent undecided.

Statewide, recent polls have shown Obama running anywhere from statistically even with McCain to 10 points ahead.


Update

,John McCain owns a house in the “fake” part of Virginia. His campaign is headquartered there. And he was holding an event in that area today.


Update

,Steve Benen notes, “This comes just two weeks after Joe McCain, the senator’s brother and campaign surrogate, referred to Virginia’s two most northern counties as ‘communist country.’“

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Yglesias

The All Important “Or”

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 18, 2008 at 1:14 pm

Studying formal logic turns out, it seems to me, to be of great use in understanding rhetoric. Take, for example, this from Jonah Goldberg (emphasis added):

Lots of folks on the right object to government intervention in the economy, even during a crisis. I had a mini-spat with Glenn Beck about this on his show earlier this week. I understand the objection, particularly given how often the left tries to create or exploit crises for the purpose of creating another New Deal.

As Professor Goldfarb taught me, “a or b” is true if and only if either “a” is true or else “b” is true. Thus, if it’s true that the left often tries to exploit crises, then it’s also true (a fortiori, as they say) that the left often tries to create or exploit crises. And since it is true that all political movements try to exploit crises to advance their policy agendas, it’s true that the left tries to do so. Thus it’s accurate, in extremely tendentious sense, to say that “often the left tries to create or exploit crises.” Thus, through a little bit of artful wordplay you can smuggle in the smear that American liberals often try to deliberately engineer crises and that, in particular, the current crisis — despite having unfolded entirely during an era of conservative governance — was deliberately engineered by liberals.

It’s all pretty clever.

Politics

Bush administration ignores Palin’s objections, puts beluga whale on endangered species list.

By Amanda Terkel on Oct 18, 2008 at 12:36 pm

beluga-whale.jpg Yesterday, the Bush administration placed beluga whales that live in Cook Inlet in Alaska on the endangered species list, rejecting Gov. Sarah Palin’s (R-AK) efforts “against increased protection.” During the 1990s, these whales declined by almost 50 percent, and have struggled to recover. In an August 2007 written statement, Palin said she was “concerned” that listing the species as endangered would “unnecessary,” doing “serious long-term damage to the vibrant economy of the Cook Inlet area.”

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Media

The Trouble With Character

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 18, 2008 at 12:14 pm

David Brooks was very high on Barack Obama for a while. Then he got very upset at Obama for a while, slamming him as “Fast Eddie Obama.” Now he’s back to mostly praise:

He doesn’t have F.D.R.’s joyful nature or Reagan’s happy outlook, but he is analytical. That’s why this William Ayers business doesn’t stick. He may be liberal, but he is never wild. His family is bourgeois. His instinct is to flee the revolutionary gesture in favor of the six-point plan.

This was not evident back in the “fierce urgency of now” days, but it is now. And it is easy to sketch out a scenario in which he could be a great president. He would be untroubled by self-destructive demons or indiscipline. With that cool manner, he would see reality unfiltered. He could gather — already has gathered — some of the smartest minds in public policy, and, untroubled by intellectual insecurity, he could give them free rein. Though he is young, it is easy to imagine him at the cabinet table, leading a subtle discussion of some long-term problem.

I just wonder about this approach to thinking about politicians. Suppose Obama really is “Fast Eddie” and the main difference between now and when Brooks didn’t like him is that he’s gotten better at lying? After all, Brooks says that key elements of Obama’s character were “not evident back in the ‘fierce urgency of now’ days” but now they are. But maybe “Fast Eddie” is just turning it on and off to suit his schemes. I feel pretty confident as a well-informed, skeptical person with Google at my finger tips that I can figure out when politicians are lying to me about policy or about their records. But a lot of this genre of punditry seems based on the idea that journalists can discern when politicians are and aren’t misleading with their presentation of self. But I have no reason to believe I’m especially good at this, and plenty of reason to believe that big-time politicians are unusually good at misleading about this sort of thing. There’s something to be said for just analyzing politics as a rigid ideologue and not trying to wade into these waters at all.

Yglesias

Occupational Licensing

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 18, 2008 at 11:04 am

Via Tyler Cowen, a new paper from Morris Kleiner and Alan Krueger takes a look at occupational licensing. The paper ends on the rather dull note that it would be smart for the federal government to start trying to collect better data on this phenomenon. It’s dull but, to me, quite convincing. There’s no real political constituency for better federal data-gathering practices, but it’s actually pretty important. People study what it’s feasible to study.

Media

Hannity To Glenn Beck: ‘You’re A Perfect Fit’ For Fox News

By Ali Frick on Oct 18, 2008 at 9:47 am

hannity-beck2.gif On Thursday, Fox News announced that CNN’s Glenn Beck would join the network next spring, hosting the 5 p.m. daily news program. Yesterday on his radio program, Beck read a congratulatory e-mail from Fox’s Sean Hannity, welcoming him to “the Fox family”:

Glenn,
Welcome to the Fox family. I can honestly tell you working with Roger [Ailes] has been one of the BEST things to ever happen to me in my life. You’re a perfect fit, a great addition to family. I look forward to seeing you.
Sean.

Listen here:

It’s true that Beck will be a “perfect fit” at Fox News — and with Sean Hannity especially. With Beck on the network, Hannity’s radical right-wing views will get a whole extra hour of exposure, as the two share nearly identical perspectives:

ON STARTING WAR WITH IRAN

– BECK: War with Iran is no longer a question of “if.” I believe it’s a question of when. … Now we have no longer any other options but to go into Iran. [10/9/07]

– HANNITY: Mission: Iran Showdown. The objective: destroy and disable Iran’s top nuclear facilities, impact its ability to process and enrich uranium, delay its ability to manufacture and deploy nuclear weapons, all while crippling the ruling regime. [9/25/07]

ON APOLOGIZING FOR TORTURE

– BECK: You need to torture, I mean, within reason. … You do what you have to do to get the information if it’s pressing. [12/21/07]

– HANNITY: If we have enemy combatants and they have information that can save the lives of innocent Americans or troops, I’m not saying — we have to use very tough techniques. … I want to torture them to the limit. [11/10/06]

– BECK: Waterboarding is torture now? You’re dead wrong! [1/15/08]

– HANNITY: KSM spilled the beans as a result of waterboarding gave up not only his role of 9/11 attacks but several ongoing terror plots hence saving lives. … So if that’s the price we pay for our security is it really that bad? [11/11/07]

ON OBAMA

– BECK: With his rock star persona, celebrity fan club, a socialist point of view, Obama feels a lot like he’s running for king over president. … I think this man is actually dangerous. [8/13/08]

– HANNITY: Joe the Plumber actually went out there on “Good Morning America” this morning and he said Obama holds the socialist view. For the next 19 days of this campaign, I think America has got a choice. And that is European socialism. [10/16/08]

ON DISMISSING ABU GHRAIB

– BECK: I was against Abu Ghraib and I said, because it didn’t look like it was done by professionals, what was that, stacking people in a pyramid. [11/1/07]

– HANNITY: There was underwear on the head of one of them. We’re not raping and killing anybody. [6/8/05]

Yglesias

The Placebo Solution

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 18, 2008 at 8:10 am

“I’m not suggesting that doctors start secretly prescribing sugar pills at their discretion,” writes Ezra Klein “or treating angina with a chest incision rather than an angioplasty.” But maybe we should take that option a bit more seriously. Here’s a chart Ezra borrowed from Peter Orszag:

placeboangina_thumb_490x343.jpg

One way of reading this chart is as evidence that “internal mammary artery ligation” doesn’t actually work very well at relieving chest pain. Indeed, I think that’s the conventional way of reading a placebo result. But it’s not really the right way. The ligation gets impressive results. Those results are just undermined by the fact that the placebo chest incision gets results that are almost as good. And since the incision is dramatically cheaper than the “real” surgery, you could do the incision and spend the money you saved vaccinating children and reap substantial public health benefits and long-term savings.

The only real problem here — and admittedly it’s a big one — is that it seems unethical to tell doctors to secretly give their patients a placebo. But does it really make sense to let a failure of language and imagination prevent us from making a switch that could be hugely beneficial? What if instead of something designed to be a placebo it turned out that there was some cheap to implement traditional Chinese medical practice that, like the incision, got results almost as good as the full-scale surgery at a fraction of the cost? Would it be so crazy to say that we ought to incorporate the traditional Chinese technique into the Western medical cannon? Would it really be so unscientific to let our medical practice by guided by the evidence about what works, rather than by our a priori notions about what kinds of treatment “really” work and which are just placebos? It seems to me that when we discover cost-effective, efficacious treatments we ought to be exploring ways to implement them.

Climate Progress

15 EU countries on track to meet Kyoto targets

By Joe Romm on Oct 18, 2008 at 8:02 am

The AP reports:

The European Union’s 15 original member nations are on target to meet Kyoto treaty commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the bloc’s environment agency said Thursday.

The countries pledged by 2012 to reduce by 8 percent their emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases thought to contribute to global warming.

A few laggards aren’t going to meet their targets but the cuts from the European climate leaders more than compensate:

Read more

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