Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day.
-- Benjamin Franklin
This week's featured posts are "Vote. It's not nearly enough, but it's something." and "The Case for Voting Democrat".
And this is what I did during my week off.
This week everybody has been talking about the election
In case the non-stop TV ads haven't gotten through to you, the election is tomorrow. In many states you can vote today. Control of the Senate is up for grabs, there are a lot of cliff-hanging governor's races, and everybody has a House race. My case for voting is in "Vote. It's not nearly enough. But it's something." My more detailed case for voting for Democrats is in "The Case for Voting Democrat".
Normally, I do a viewer's guide for watching the election returns. But this year has so many weird Senate races that are close for their own unique reasons that I have no idea what's going to happen. The Democrats need an upset somewhere to hold the Senate, but there are a lot of places where that upset could happen. If the election had been held two weeks ago, when the nation was suffering a mysterious epidemic of fear, I think Republicans would have won easily. Since then, the stock market has recovered to a new high, ISIS has mostly been out of the headlines, and the news about Ebola has been more good than bad. So I think fear has receded and we're back in anything-can-happen territory.
Anyway, here's Daily Kos' map of poll-closing times.
and Ebola
The big story this week was the symptom-free nurse in Maine fighting Governor LePage's effort to quarantine her in her home. A court sided with the nurse. An NBC/WSJ poll says that 71% support quarantining health-care workers who come back from Ebola-afflicted areas. There's no reason to think such a quarantine is medically necessary, and it will intimidate American doctors and nurses who might otherwise take a month or two to go to Africa and fight this virus on the front lines. But people like to respond with decisive action when they're scared.
and you also might be interested in ...
The Sift's claim that Rand Paul had called for cuts in the CDC budget back in 2011 drew the attention of Politifact. (That's the first time my name has appeared in that column.) They judged the claim to be True. So I guess I can tell people that my Politifact score is 100%.One of the stranger Tumblr pages is "Women Against Feminism". In the manner of "We Are the 99%", it consists of pictures of (mostly) young women holding up pieces of paper explaining why they don't need feminism. The fact that some young women feel that way isn't what's weird; it's a big country, a few people are bound to think almost anything. But here's the weird thing: Many of their self-described philosophies could be definitions of the feminism they say they don't need. Like:
I don't need feminism or masculism because the only thing that should determine my life is my own potential, not my gender (or race). We are all human and we should all be equal.
If you replace "I don't need feminism or masculism because" with "I am a feminist because", the quote makes perfect sense. I read this whole page not as a comment on feminism, but as a measure of just how successful the Right has been at tarring the word feminist. Women who by any reasonable definition are feminists have been convinced that they're anti-feminists, because feminism is ... some other damn thing.
The best counter I've heard -- not specifically to this Tumblr, but to similar stuff from celebrities like Shailene Woodley -- is this YouTube by marinashutup.
In what Jonathan Chait says may be "the craziest idea ever proposed by a Fox News personality", Fox' resident psychologist Dr. Keith Ablow called for "an American jihad". Because our constitution is a "sacred document" and our nation's founding is a "miracle", we have a "manifest destiny not only to preserve our borders and safety and national character at home, but to spread around the world our love of individual freedom and insist on its reflection in every government." That might mean fighting a bunch of wars, but they'd be justified, "Because wherever leaders and movements appear that seek to trample upon the human spirit, we have a God-given right to intervene — because we have been to the mountaintop of freedom, and we have seen the Promised Land spanning the globe."
Liberals have been saying for a while that the Right -- especially the Religious Right -- resembles the Taliban. But now at least one of them seems to be embracing that comparison himself.
The only possible thing I can follow that with is satirist Andy Borowitz:
President Obama is coming under increasing pressure to apologize for a controversial remark that he made on Tuesday, in which he said that the nation’s Ebola policy should be based on facts rather than fear.
and let's close with some wonderful Halloween costumes
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