Brown students are getting smarter

Grade distribution at Brown University

I feel smarter—do you?

Schports

From this week’s Indy:

Rich with Fallacy

Notice the way Frank Rich sculpts the political landscape of the election: he doesn’t credit the democratic campaign with doing any ideological work.

When David Letterman said that the 10 G.O.P. presidential candidates at an early debate looked like “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club,” he was the first to correctly call the election. On Nov. 4, that’s roughly the sole constituency that remained loyal to the party — minus its wealthiest slice, a previously solid G.O.P. stronghold that turned blue this year (in a whopping swing of 34 percentage points). The Republicans lost every region of the country by double digits except the South, which they won by less than double digits (9 points). They took the South only because McCain, who ran roughly even with Obama among whites in every other region, won Southern whites by 38 percentage points.

The GOP, as he casts it—a gerontological racist white men’s association—has merely been out of touch with real Real America for an unspecified amount of time. While I wish it were the truth, that logic recklessly glosses over the 58,279,894 Americans who aligned themselves with the Republican vision of the country (an exclusive golf resort, Rich would have you believe). He continues to misunderstand how cultural and electoral politics work. I can only assume that in his mind, if the equality-loving american culture is the superstructure, then the base must be the political correctness-obsessed punditocracy, because these guys don’t seem to think the way Rich does.

No War for Oil

Petróleos de Venezeula, the nationalized energy company.

Now that the election is over, Sullivan is back to his Libertarian hi-jinks:

The oil industry does make big profits, but they are also already one of the most heavily taxed industries. And their tax payments to governments increase along with their profits. There has been a lot of coverage given to the record profits being made by the oil companies, but much less to the record windfalls in the form of taxes that governments have received over the past few years as a result.

Saying a windfall tax punishes humble the entrepreneur who was just following the rules assumes the taxes were made fair and square. And even if his profits were made technically by the rules, you’re deluding yourself if you think his company had no role in making those rules. Mother Jones (among others) has exposed the collusion of the Project for a New American Century (think tank of Cheney, Wolfowitz, etc.) and big oil. If nothing else, the silly graph above shows that the Bush misadventure provided a new theater for profit-making.

Thus the current discourse around energy reform pointlessnessly pits consumers against producers. This lets politicians take a convenient pass on the issue. Chávez’s solution is clearly the sober way to deal with it. Energy, like the postal service, should serve the people, not a group of powerful plutocrats. It would be cheaper and have more effective planning.

It’s sad how many sharp thinkers have been hoodwinked by the neoconservative discourse on taxation.

Ten bucks to anyone who can get me a copy

Plus the cost of the album, obviously:

[Fox News:] In Venezuela, they’re singing along with Hugo. Chavez, that is.

The Venezuelan president is lending his voice to a couple of revolutionary tunes — literally — on a new collection of songs and poems released by his United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). It’s what every youngster in Caracas will want on his iPod.

The album is called “Musica Para la Batalla” — Battle Music — and it’s coming out less than two weeks before Venezuela holds state and municipal elections that analysts predict will deliver Chavez a number of defeats across his South American country.

Snaps to Krugman

Paul Krugman on President Obama’s likelihood of being the next F.D.R.:

In short, Mr. Obama’s chances of leading a new New Deal depend largely on whether his short-run economic plans are sufficiently bold. Progressives can only hope that he has the necessary audacity.

And as my Grandma Freida—who was there—always says, “FDR could have done more for black people.” In otherwords, go big or go home, Barack.

I Feel Like Stanley Motss

The people, however, were [...] well ahead of the Beltway curve in fleeing Palin. Only after polls confirmed that she was costing McCain votes did conventional wisdom in Washington finally change, demoting her from Republican savior to scapegoat overnight.

—Frank Rich

Rich misses that by the time “the people” turned, the “punditocracy” had long since sunk their teeth into Palin. How else could the Samuel Wurzelbachers of the world have changed their minds about a Republican nominee for Vice President? It’s not as though the McCain-Palin ticket had much of a ground game. If it weren’t for Barack’s rope line blunder and the media frenzy around it, Joe the Plumber would still be under the impression Obama is a socialist.

To hear Rich’s version of history, you’d think a melancholic American electorate was moping under a cherry tree till they heard Obama’s call to return to their really real real American values—values repressed by eight years of Rovian pscyhology in cahoots with “press enablers.” We’ll pretend, for a moment, we don’t remember who the enablers were.

In real reality, the Obama campaign has spent two years redefining what it means to be a real American, doorstep by doorstep, county by county. The press has variously challenged and amplified that message. Let’s not forget “the people” at the Palin rallies calling for Obama’s head.

So before anyone gets too carried away praising the American electorate, recall those enlightened Obama supporters in California—California!—who just adumbrated the difference between pro- and anti-American Americans using the colors of the rainbow.

In Case You Though There Were Only Two or Three of These Guys Left—

(SOUTH PLAINFIELD, NJ, 11/07/2008) – The New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-NJ) today condemned the burning of a cross on the lawn of supporters of President-elect Obama in that state.

According to media reports, a Warren County family of Indian descent discovered the burned cross on their front lawn Thursday morning. The family’s homemade cloth sign celebrating Obama’s victory was draped over the fallen cross.

—welcome back to America.

A Bridge Over The Troubled Caribbean?

from the New York Times

Anyone looking for signs of the sea-change in international politics Obama was supposed to affect should be able to see those waves beginning to lap in the Caribbean. Only a few weeks ago, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela expelled our Ambassador. Yet today, Chávez is offering a rhetorical olive branch to the President-Elect:

[Obama] said that he is willing to talk, and from now on, 48 hours before the black man of African descent, a young man of humble origins, becomes the next president of the United States, I say that I am willing to sit down and talk on equal and respectful terms.

Chávez, an actual socialist, knows Obama will not be pandering to wingnuts like Jim Pruett of Houston, who  today said President Obama will “create a socialist society policed by his own police force.” Freed from always walking eggshells around a dying Right, Obama has the opportunity to design a foreign policy beneficial not only  corporate interests, but to labor and capital, North and South.

Chávez’s opponents on the right say the Venezuelan president’s overtures merely betray his fear of declining profits in the Venezuelan oil industry. Chávez might just be asking “el negro” for a hand, but he also knows there’s something to be gained from working with the US leader who’s closest to a populist likely to be seen in a lifetime. As Chávez said, “This historic election of an African American to lead the most powerful country in the world is a sign that the era of change which has taken root in South America could be reaching the doorstep of the United States.”

You might quip, as the New York Times seems to, that it’s preposterous for a South American politician to imply his own politics influenced the United States’. I like to look at it differently As opposed to the way the Times has never given Chávez the benefit of the doubt (inexplicably they tack to a Bushist line about all things Venezuelan), maybe Chávez is willing to give the Obama presidency a chance:

The Venezuelan National Assembly "congratulating the people of the United States ... for choosing Barack Obama as President."

Mutts Like Me

You have no idea how refreshing it is to think you’re not the only person who exists between the categories society gives us. Finally, we have a President who embraces America’s complicated heterogeneity. A President, moreover, who is not afraid to mock the racist language used to talk about mixed people and people of color in general.