An only slightly less nerdy map, but still…

…who knew that a state’s natural beauty correlated so well with the manufacture of good beer?

Congress Is Weird Looking

Here’s proof.  Norm Dicks (D-Washington) looks like a porcine Huey Long.  I wonder if he uses Brylcreem on that hair, or if he’s a Dapper Dan man.

Carolyn Maloney of NY represents the “Silk Stocking” district on the Upper East Side (does anyone even call it that anymore?  Probably not since NY lost so many seats that they all got bigger in size and this one had to take in Western Queens.  The horror.)  Also a beastie.

Can you imagine trying to connect with Pakistani voters in Jackson Heights while looking like a Cronenberg extra who’s in Upper East Side matron-drag?  Good thing Queens is so Democratic.

Maloney may represent Frank and Estelle Costanza, but who knew that George Costanza’s thinner alter ego Jim McGovern represented Massachusetts?

Squinty, smug, prematurely bald and with bad glasses.  Dork!

Hello!  I played the librarian who got scared in the opening scene of Ghostbusters.  (OK, no.  This is Lois Capps from California and she’s kind of cute in a sweet old lady way).  Her district is probably one of the prettiest in the whole country.

No such salvation for conservative Democrat Dan Lipinksi, appointed to fill his father’s seat in a sneaky act of Chicago-machine nepotism.  Hopefully, some hot liberal of color will primary him out of existence someday.

Bart Stupak of Michigan may have an amazing name, but also a scowl.  And the Trent Lott Barber College has divided his head into quadrants in their pursuit of blow-drying his hairline towards his brow.  He used to be a cop, but he looks like a high school quarterback who went on to make low-quality ads on local TV for his prosperous Buick dealership

You may have noticed that these are all Democrats.  Never let it be said that I only talk shit about Republicans.  However, when you have a 256-189 majority or whatever it is, the pool of ugliness is just going to be deeper on that end.  The proof is that I didn’t even mention Henry Waxman.

Here, however, is Representative Earl Blumenauer, who represents Portland, OR, bikes to work (!) and is very knowledgeable about alternative transportation.  With his bow tie and his crooked smile, he is totes adorbs:

Totes Adorbs!

Totes adorbs!

Nerdy Maps! Of Red and Blue States

The red-blue divide is useful but reductive.  A presidential campaign symbolizes a national party but doesn’t encapsulate the complexity of a given state’s local politics or experience with that party.  For example, California, Hawaii, Connecticut, Vermont and Rhode Island all have Republican governors.  Massachusetts had three in a row until Deval Patrick came along.  Infrared Oklahoma has a Democratic governor.

What follows is a crudely scientific scale, from 1-12, of blueness and redness that dispels the current right-wing meme that this is a “center-right” country (so Obama better govern accordingly, say the very people licking their wounds).  It depends on six factors: a state’s electoral vote in 2004 and in 2008, the party affiliation of its governor, its senators, the majority of its House delegation, and who controls the state legislature.

First, red and blue states as determined by the 2004 election.  Easy.

It looks scary, and it wasn’t very long ago that the country went totes cuckoo-bananas.  So every blue state gets two points, and the red states get zero.  Now the 2008 map.

I still equate Indiana with death and trucking, but it’s harder to hate them after looking at this.  So now nineteen states have 4 points, nine have 2 points and twenty-two have 0.  Looking at Senators, the red states have two Republican senators, the blue states have two Democrats and the yellow states are one each.  (I count Lieberman and Sanders as Democrats, and I’m assuming that both Al Franken and Jim Martin lose, just to be safe).

At this point, fifteen states are 6 out of 6 and thirteen states have 0.  Amazing that Maine is the only state in the entire northeastern third of the country with two Republicans.  (Since they’re both moderates, you could argue that this is where this model is stupid and I should suck it, but I say you should suck it).  Now the states in terms of which party controls the majority of its House seats.

I totally admit that this is the most mathematically suspect one.  New York, for example, has a 29-3 Democratic majority and North Dakota is 1-0, but they’re given equal weight.  As are 1-1 Idaho and 9-9 Ohio (assuming Mary Jo Kilroy loses to Steve Stivers).

Similarly, the same Florida that was in the tank for Obama has a decisive 15-10 Republican split and McCain-hearting Georgia, which covers up science textbook pictures of Darwin with stickers saying ‘evolution is a theory,’ is merely 7-6 Republican.  Tough.

Look at Mississippi and Arkansas, which each have 3 Democrats and 1 Republican in the House.  Tennessee also edges out for the Democrats, 5-4.  Bluer than you thought.

Fourteen states are now 8 out of 8, while a mere nine have 0.

Now governors:

This is the GOP’s sole bright spot in New England.  What really fascinates me, though, is the region Nate Silver defined as the “Highlands” (OK, AR, MO, KY, TN, WV).  It not only gave McCain some of his best numbers (Obama lost every state and couldn’t even win a single county in Oklahoma) and created all sorts of hand-wringing over racism’s resilience as Hillary racked up one primary win after another there, but every single one of these six states currently has a Democratic governor.  This proves my underlying point: Democrats frequently do better in their “worst” region (the South) than Republicans do in theirs (the Northeast and West Coast).

And look at the column of Democratic governorships from Montana to New Mexico.  Nothing proves the Democratic resurgence in the West better than how only state in the west with a score of zero is Utah.  There are now five states with 0 overall, and nine with all 10 points.

Lastly, state legislatures, with yellow indicating states where each party controls one chamber:

(Unicameral, officially nonpartisan Nebraska is nonetheless dominated by Republicans, and with the weirdness there I consider Alaska mixed.)

Again, the South is less than solid.  An interesting pattern here is that if you take the blue states plus the yellow states, you have a roughly plausible 2012 electoral outcome map.  Add Florida and Arizona and subtract Alabama and Kentucky, and it’s highly possible.

So: 8 states (WA, OR, WI, IL, NY, NJ, MA, MD) are maximally blue, 4 (GA, SC, UT and TX) are maximally red.  Odd that Wisconsin, an almost archetypal swing state, should be so blue, but there it is.  Below are the scores.  Purple is for newly-blue states at the presidential level.

12: Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Oregon, New Jersey, New York, Washington, Wisconsin
11: Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania
10: California, Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New Mexico,     Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia
9: Iowa
8: West Virginia
7: Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio
6: Arkansas, Indiana
5: Montana
4: Arizona, Mississippi, North Dakota, Tennessee
3: Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, South Dakota
2: Alaska, Alabama, Kansas, Oklahoma, Wyoming
1: Idaho, Nebraska
0: Georgia, South Carolina, Texas, Utah

To tabulate these more finely, we can replace the oversimplistic “2 points to the party that controls the majority of the state’s seats in Congress” with a more accurate percentage score.  I.e., Democrats control 3 of 4 seats in Mississippi so that would be 1.5 out of 2 points, and 11 of 19 seats in Pennsylvania so that would be 1.16 out of 2 points.

That gives this scale:

MA:     12
NY:     11.79
MD:     11.75
OR:     11.6
WA:     11.5
IL:     11.26
WI:    11.25
NJ:     11.23
MI:    11.07
NH:    11
PA:    10.26
MN:    10.25
CT:    10
DE:    10
ME:    10
NM:    10
RI:    10
VT:    10
CO:    9.43
CA:    9.28
VA:    9.1
IA:    8.2
WV:    7.33
OH:    7
NV:    6.33
NC:    6.08
AR:    5.5
IN:    5.05
MT:    5
ND:    4
MO:    3.88
LA:    3.85
FL:    3.8
KY:    3.67
MS:    3.5
AZ:    3.25
TN:    3.1
SD:    3
KS:    2.5
OK:    2.4
AL:    2.29
AK:    2
WY:    2
ID:    1
NE:    1
GA:    0.92
TX:    0.75
SC:    0.67
UT:    0.67

The country is bluer than it is red.  Conservative Democrats may exist in abundance, and liberal Republicans may be all but dead, but voting for one party generally puts that party’s orthodoxy in power.

Some salient points:

There is no state with a zero.  There is, however a perfect twelve–Massachusetts.  That’s particularly impressive considering that it’s a fairly populous state, and the scale is biased towards small states with fewer representatives.  The high number of even 10s shows how many states are a single factor away from total Democratic dominance: either they have a Republican governor or voted for Bush in 2004.  No such equivalent exists on the Republican side.  Sure, Utah is one archconservative Democratic congressman away from a zero, and it’s a fast-growing state, but owing to its unique demographics, it’s still an anomaly–even within the West.

Several newly blue states at the presidential level do not appear to be flukes.  Colorado, Virginia, New Mexico, Iowa–and to a lesser extent, Ohio, North Carolina and Nevada, have solidly Democratic tendencies.

In 2004, almost all the fast-growing states went for Bush (AZ, NV, NM, TX, FL, GA, NC, VA, UT, CO).  This was ominous because they stand to gain seats after 2010.  Ignoring Arizona because of McCain’s home state advantage, most of the fast-growing states went for Obama and, as stated just above, they have seen Democratic gains at all levels.

Texas, Florida and Georgia are the only populous Republican-dominated states, and the three of them could gain as many as 12 seats after the census.  Florida is already turning blue at the presidential level, its Republican governor is kind of a moderate, and it may have a second Democratic senator after the next cycle.  Both Georgia and Texas redistricted mid-decade to ensure GOP dominance in Congress, and it worked for a while.  Texas’s State House is a mere 76-74 Republican majority and is trending the way the New York State Senate did; Obama only lost by 9 points, as well.  He lost Georgia by 5 points and the Republicans edge out the Democrats only by 7-6, in seats in the US House.  I think this means that the Republicans have squeezed all they can out of these two states, and the addition of more seats may result in disproportionate Democratic pickups, particularly in Texas.

Spiral Jetty

Promontory Point, Utah. September 2008.

This was sort of the culmination of our road trip, the capstone of remote and gorgeous Americana. Robert Smithson’s 1970 earthwork sculpture has only been exposed from the Great Salt Lake for a few years after a decades-long period submerged. As we were there at the end of the summer, the lake’s edge was actually two hundred yards beyond the sculpture. What looks like whitish water here is deposits of salt. The border between lake and shore is more indistinct than any other sizeable body of water that I’ve seen; the shore is pure crystalline salt, strange underfoot, and gradually becomes more more and more moist as you approach the lake proper. I guess the lake is probably super-saturated and exists beneath the salt along the shore. Amazing.

We had the site to ourselves for the entire two hours we were there, and passed two vehicles arriving as we were on our way out. It was a hot afternoon, our water was hot in our bottles, and the weird and silent terrain was magnificent. It takes forever to drive there–at least an hour from Golden Spike National Historical Site, 12 miles away–because you have to keep below 10 mph on roads that are not only unpaved but have basically been cleared only of boulders. There was no sign of human civilization, not even a radio tower, to be seen. You get a good grasp of why the original Mormon settlers could have felt convinced of their relationship with the Israelites. That part of Utah looks like Judaea, by the Dead Sea.

I picked up a small rock from around the Jetty and threw another one from the hillside to balance it out. Elliott took a naked Polaroid of me and I actually like it. Trying to think of a more ambitious place to reach by car, there’s nothing that comes to mind. After the shithole that was Salt Lake City (where I was yelled at in a motel parking lot by a woman pushing a shopping cart out of her room) it couldn’t come at a better time.

Carhenge

RoadsideAmerica.com is seriously indispensible when driving across the benighted continent of North America.  Where else would you learn about Salem Sue, the World’s Largest Holstein Cow (who faces I-94 from a rocky outcropping near New Salem, North Dakota)?

It’s kind of a crappy website in terms of design, although not as singularly irritating as Evite.  A lot of the content is duplicated and not sorted chronologically, and it can stretch back to the 1990s, which is like the Egyptian Old Kingdom for the internet.  It was when no one could has cheezburger but Manhattanites could use kozmo.com to courier anything they wanted to their dangerously edgy Loisaida shitholes.

Anyway, anyway, here is Carhenge, which I vaguely knew about but used RoadsideAmerica to determine that is in fact in Nebraska.  Along with Chimney Rock, it was the only reason for us detouring back east from Cheyenne instead of driving straight to Denver.  Both the terrain and the weather that day were decidedly English, so it looked well fit.

Alliance, Nebraska. September 2008.

The main circle of cars (all of them American-made) is matte gray, so this side sculpture (called The Fourd Seasons) which represents wheat and its stages of growth, is really the only colorful component.  It’s also decidedly less creepy.  Not that the overall effect is mysterious or Druidic–and the extraordinarily chatty woman in the gift shop attested to that–but it’s pretty prescient now that the extinction of US automotive manufacturing is here.  Dead, gray painted-over windshields in cars half-buried in a remote field kind of sums of GM’s management style.

I love that it was made in 1987.  For some reason that year and the low-to-middlebrow-cultural trends (stock market crash, ailing American industry, widespread ignorance of sushi or lattes or radicchio) and films that have a lot to do with cars (Harry and the Hendersons, Adventures in Babysitting) make it pitch-perfect.  It’s too self-aware to be kitsch but not airy enough for camp.

Idaho is O’Boisterous

When we got there it was closed, but it really exists:

Blackfoot, Idaho. September 2008.

It reminds me, then as now, of O’Boisies, whose tagline was “O’Boisies Are O’Boisterous.”  Seemed like it was tough to fail with a campaign that merges memories of the Irish potato famine with the spud-studded home of the Aryan Nation — plus a healthy dose of inane hyperbole.  But they’re gone, along with Keebler’s Tater Skins, which I remember being pretty thick.  Almost like salty Milano.

Did the two chips poach each other’s demographic?  Fall victim to the public’s burgeoning lust for kettle chips?  Or did people feel insulted that Keebler felt the need to insert an extra i into O’Boisies so that consumers wouldn’t feel intimidated by the pronunciation?  (Which is still wrong, since Boise is “BOY-cee.”)

I think people were asking for the “oh-BWAZ-es” during the beta test, torpedoing the entire campaign.

Picture It: San Francisco, 2008…

Here in Bernal Heights, a high concentration of Latinos and a history of lefty politics can only mean one thing: murals! Naturally, they cluster on the walls of schoolyards and other public areas where children can be exposed to the thriving, pre-literate tradition of pictographic pedagogy. Here is a nice one from some elementary school or some shit where you can hear a lot of screaming during the day:

San Francisco. November 2008.

Since it doesn’t seem to be about Oz, I can only conclude that it’s the dead who are in sepia. A closer look bears this out. Estelle Getty is depicted as Sophia Petrillo.

San Francisco. November 2008.

There she is, clutching the pickax with which she would be ultimately be murdered on July 25, 2008 after a long struggle with it. Hopefully, she and Sal are having manicotti at the early-bird in that big Shady Pines in the sky. I have never been so upset with a celebrity death.

Thank you for being a mural!

Democrats: the 60 Party, including Traitor Joe (ID-CT)

Now that Mark Begich has beaten Ted Stevens for real, I hope the two remaining Senate races go for the good guys — Al Franken in Minnesota (quite possible) and Jim Martin in Georgia (who knows?). But that hope is tempered by the crushing reality that the Democrats’ chief principle remains, as it basically has been for 25 years, stabbing progressives in the back to keep Republicans from having power. That they stand for little else is made painfully clear by their welcoming Joe Lieberman back.

This of course is the apostate who backed The Other Guy with a combination of Hillary-esque “x and y intellectually dubious points ‘raise questions’ about Barack Obama” and the invective that won big for the Republicans in 2002-04. The guy whose own party dumped him for Ned Lamont and who only won because of crossover GOP votes and who would probably lose if that election were held today. (Where did Ned Lamont go, by the way?) The guy who grandstands on Fox about how shitty the party that nominated him for Vice President is.

This clip says it all:

Media misrepresentations in search of a juicy internecine party battle might lead regular people to believe that there are Democrats, among them Barack Obama, who wanted to kick Joe Lieberman out of the Democratic Party. This is not only not true, as the debate was whether or not to strip him of a committee chairmanship. It’s also impossible because by ignoring his primary loss and creating his own party, Joe Lieberman did it himself.

As to whether or not to boot him out of the caucus, they of course shouldn’t. There’s no need. When the dust settles, he’ll wind up a cantankerous backbencher like Zell Miller was and will probably go down to defeat in 2012. End of story.

But since this is the Democratic party, with arch-capitulationist Harry Reid at the helm, it’s quite amazing to behold the lengths they go to nurture and protect the backstabber in their midst just because he represents one possible path to that magical number of 60 filibuster-proof votes. The Republican Party is understood by all but the innermost cabal of true believers to be intellectually bankrupt, but the Democrats are truly something else. Reid dismissed Lieberman’s critics by saying “he’s with us on everything but the war,” as if the war (and there are two) were merely one issue among many and not, as Reid would like, a convenient shorthand for what is an enormous and very public gap between Lieberman and nearly every other Democrat plus the majority of the electorate’s sensible conclusions about Iraq, torture, extraordinary rendition, etc.

The same milquetoasts who let Bush steamroll all over them while they issue sternly-worded letters will naturally accept Lieberman’s petulant demand to continue as chairman. He did nearly nothing to rein in the Bush Administration; isn’t it totes obvious that he will be a gadfly to the Obama Administration as they pursue policies concordant with the party platform and the wishes of the electorate?

Reid just wants to grease his wheels. A leader so weak as to permit this will wind up losing other Democrats here and there, and will not be able to pick up endangered Republicans or the seemingly untouchable Ladies From Maine, so maybe it’s actually his only option. But even the Chris Dodds of the world supported Lieberman. I can just foresee crucial votes falling to Republican intransigence, 58-42 or so, irrespective of Lieberman’s vote.

(I also remember a time when the “bipartisan” “Gang of 14” virtually outlawed the Democrats’ use of the filibuster in exchange for absolutely nothing from the Republicans, but as soon as Republicans owned the minority’s arsenal, use of the filibuster became routine and expected, just part of the complex mechanics of the chamber.)

The only silver lining is if Obama is planning to elevate to his Cabinet at least two Republican senators who hail from states where there’s a Democratic governor to appoint their successors–which means that the state has to permit those seats to be filled by the opposite party. Arizona, anyone?

But on the balance, this is still terrible news. A caucus that lets someone like Lieberman control a committee responsible for determining what’s a terrorist threat and what isn’t is not a caucus intent on ending the war any time soon. I want to move to Nevada and primary Harry Reid.

Barack “Hussein” Obama

Here is an irritating development within journalism, buried within an article detailing yet another stupid Republican exercising his right to terrify voters in our theocracy:

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A South Carolina Roman Catholic priest has told his parishioners that they should refrain from receiving Holy Communion if they voted for Barack Obama because the Democratic president-elect supports abortion, and supporting him “constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil.”

The Rev. Jay Scott Newman said in a letter distributed Sunday to parishioners at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Greenville that they are putting their souls at risk if they take Holy Communion before doing penance for their vote.

“Our nation has chosen for its chief executive the most radical pro-abortion politician ever to serve in the United States Senate or to run for president,” Newman wrote, referring to Obama by his full name, including his middle name of Hussein.

“Voting for a pro-abortion politician when a plausible pro-life alternative exits constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil, and those Catholics who do so place themselves outside of the full communion of Christ’s Church and under the judgment of divine law. Persons in this condition should not receive Holy Communion until and unless they are reconciled to God in the Sacrament of Penance, lest they eat and drink their own condemnation.”

How delightfully coy.  I love that referring to the president-elect by his full name has become journalistic shorthand for “this person’s nuts.”  His name is Hussein.  I understand that referring to BHO that way is designed to rile up your xenophobic parishioners’ hatred of the other and to delegitimize Obama in some way.  But the media is beginning to treat Obama’s middle name like it’s some crazy aunt in the attic that must never be mentioned lest one be grouped in with the psychos.

The phraseology is passive-aggressive and contributes to this emerging taboo.  I’m in no way a fan of catering to the crowd that screams “left-wing bias in the media!” but this is objectively a bad technique.  However, to put this issue in context, Republicans have truly lost it.  Someone needs to remind this priest that the campaign is over.

The Ghetto in the Sky [sic]

Minneapolis, September 2008

I wouldn’t say it offends me, but the word ghetto just isn’t in my working vocabulary except in the strict sense of the word or some ironic application, but this is the Most Fabulous Ghetto in the World: Riverside Plaza.  Built in 1973 by Ralph Rapson and once the home of Prince, it’s probably a local eyesore/laughingstock but I couldn’t get over it.  (As a rule of thumb, almost anything with the world plaza in it is going to be a bit dumpy or corporate, but whatevs.)  Several buildings make up the complex, including the tallest building in the city outside of downtown–def my fave.