Month: October 2005

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In looking at the continuing saga of Dame Judith’s promotion to martyrdom in the cause of the First Amendment, I was struck by the vehement defense of the selfsame Dame by the editorialists at NYT.In not one but three separate editorials, the have compared this sleazebag to Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and barely missed canonizing her.

To me that defense and the heavy promotion of the WMD stories without verification by the NYT shows that the Times as an institution either got stuck with Judy’s preposterous claims or was itself part of the enablers for the war on Iraq.This would not be the first time American Press has served as propaganda tools for administrations.

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Eliot Spitzer is runnng for governor of New York. He is the state’s attorney general. In an article in todays NYT Magazine there appears a profile on his chances and a larger discussion of how his chances impact the efforts of Democrats to woo middle class voters back into the big tent, which lately they have exited in droves and pretty much taken the tent poles with them.

In 1996, the average income at which a middle class voter defected from the Democrats and voted Republican was $45,900.*

In 2004, that figure dropped by nearly half to $23,300. *

Al Gore lost the middle class vote in 2000 by 15 points. John Kerry lost the middle class vote in 2004 by 22 points.*

Yet since 1992, another phenomenon has developed: 22 Democratic former prosecutors and attorneys general have been elected either Governor or to the Senate from around the country.*

The theory is that to the great American Middle, Democrats are soft on just about everything which voters fear: crime, white collar crime in particular which damages middle class stock portfolios, terrorism, you name it.

And yet Spitzer leads this former AG charge, which includes the likes of Sen. Salazar from red state Colorado and Gov. Napolitano from deep red state Arizona, from a different place than, say, Hillary or John Edwards: he has an actual record of busting crime, and not just putting away individual perps.

No, what maddens the likes of the Wall Street Journal, who stridently despise (meaning they fear)Spitzer, is his ability to take entire industry segments and force them to clean up or he shuts them down. Investors sleep safer at night thanks to Spitzer, and so the article posits, they will respond to that perception and vote for him.

According to polls cited in the article, men in NY favor Spitzer in much larger numbers than they do Hillary or Shumer.

Men hold one of the keys to the Democrats regaining their national electoral strength. Take away the significant middle class and male votes from the Republican side and you have Democratic landslide victories in 2000 and 2004.

The prosecutor/attorney general angle plays well for Democrats with the Great Middle and for males who respond to strong figures of authority looking out for their interests which they can count. As in their money.

Will the Kossacks here at BMT back a Spitzer presidential candidacy? Take the poll.

* cited in NYT Magazine 10/02/05

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I do not do abortion diaries. I don’t even participate in them other than to say I’m pro choice but this news NYT story caught my eye, so I thought I’d share it with you.

The gist? If Roe v Wade is overturned, there won’t be a return to back alley and coat hanger abortions because there’s a drug for something else on the market that, although no one knows exactly what the side effects may be, can be used by poor women to abort spontaneously. And hey, even if there are coat hanger abortions, the antibiotics we have these days will help women live through the horror. On top of that, rich women can just travel elsewhere to have their abortions so they shouldn’t worry either.

I’m not kidding.

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In my recent diary on cultural differences in interpreting disasters, I mentioned how the traditional Chinese worldview would interpret a natural disaster as a reflection of an imbalance in society and especially a leadership out of touch with both the balance of nature and the welfare of the people.  With this still in the back of my mind, I ran across Tempers Flare in China, which is the cover story this week in Chemical and Engineering News, the weekly news magazine of the American Chemical Society.  The article is a good summary of recent political unrest in China over environmental degradation, also reported in the Western press in stories such as this, this, and this.

According to official statistics, there were 74,000 protests in China last year, as compared to 10,000 in 1993.  The most common cause for the current round of protests is environmental degradation and eviction of peasants from their lands for development (factories or construction of dams).

(More below the fold)

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