tinac's blog

In a Yale study by Donald Green and Alan Gerber on the effects of doorknocking in local elections, they concluded that a conservative estimate was that "12 successful face-to-face contacts translated into one additional vote."

This figure, moreover, is a conservative estimate. When calculating the effects of actual treatment, we regarded any conversation with a member of the household as a "contact."
Only about half of these conversations occurred directly with a subject in the treatment group; the remainder involved urging a housemate to vote and requesting that this essage be passed along to the intended subject.  Had we restricted the definition of contact to direct conversations with the subject, the apparent effects of canvassing would have been much greater.

Although the study aimed at local elections, the principle is sound.  Face-to-face contact is the single most important effort a volunteer can contribute to his or her candidate.

by Deepak Chopra

Sometimes politics has the uncanny effect of mirroring the national psyche even when nobody intended to do that.  This is perfectly illustrated by the rousing effect that Gov. Sarah Palin had on the Republican convention in Minneapolis this week. 

On the surface, she outdoes former Vice President Dan Quayle as an unlikely choice, given her negligent parochial expertise in the complex affairs of governing.   Her state of Alaska has less than 700,000 residents, which reduces the job of governor to the scale of running one-tenth of New York City.   By comparison, Rudy Giuliani is a towering international figure.  Palin's pluck has been admired, and her  forthrightness, but her real appeal goes deeper.  

She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and turning negativity into a cause for pride.   In psychological terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides out of sight, countering our aspirations, virtue, and vision with qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of "the other."   For millions of Americans, Obama triggers those feelings, but they don't want to express them.   He is calling for us to reach for our higher selves, and frankly, that stirs up hidden reactions of an unsavory kind.  (Just to be perfectly clear, I am not making a verbal play out of the fact that Sen. Obama is black.  The shadow is a metaphor widely  in use before his arrival on the scene.) 

 From the Oregoniam

By Steve Novick

On Tuesday, Bill Sizemore's measure to allow an unlimited deduction of federal taxes on Oregon income tax returns -- a repeat of a measure Oregon voters defeated in 2000 -- qualified for the November ballot.  Sizemore's measure will join, among other things, Kevin Mannix's measure to impose mandatory minimum prison sentences for certain property crimes.  What the two ballot titles won't tell voters is what impact either measure would have on education, health care, senior services and child protective services in Oregon.  But, in fact, the measures will divert money that would otherwise be spent on those services.

Sizemore's measure would reduce the amount of money in the state general fund -- by $550 million in the 2009-11 biennium and by $1.75 billion in the 2011-13 biennium.  The bulk of that money would go to the wealthiest people in the state.  The average tax cut for people in the top 1 percent of earnings would be more than $15,000, while the average for people in the middle 20 percent would be $1.

Mannix's measure would increase spending on prisons by $250 million to $400 million a biennium.  Since Mannix's measure is an unfunded mandate, that increase would have to be paid for by reducing the amount of money that would otherwise be spent on other general fund services.

From Tom Dispatch
Tomgram: 12 Reasons to Get Out of Iraq
 

12 Answers to Questions No One Is Bothering to Ask about Iraq
By Tom Engelhardt

Can there be any question that, since the invasion of 2003, Iraq has been unraveling?

And here's the curious thing: Despite a lack of decent information and analysis on crucial aspects of the Iraqi catastrophe, despite the way much of the Iraq story fell off newspaper front pages and out of the TV news in the last year, despite so many reports on the "success" of the President's surge strategy, Americans sense this perfectly well.

Imagine what might happen if the American public knew more about the actual state of affairs in Iraq -- and of thinking in Washington.  So, here, in an attempt to unravel the situation in ever-unraveling Iraq are twelve answers to questions which should be asked far more often in this country:

1. Yes, the war has morphed into the U.S. military's worst Iraq nightmare:

This Post contributed by MoveOn 

1. John McCain voted against establishing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Now he says his position has "evolved," yet he's continued to oppose key civil rights laws.1

2. According to Bloomberg News, McCain is more hawkish than Bush on Iraq, Russia and China.  Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan says McCain "will make Cheney look like Gandhi."2

3. His reputation is built on his opposition to torture, but McCain voted against a bill to ban waterboarding, and then applauded President Bush for vetoing that ban.3

4. McCain opposes a woman's right to choose.  He said, "I do not support Roe versus Wade.  It should be overturned."4

5. The Children's Defense Fund rated McCain as the worst senator in Congress for children.  He voted against the children's health care bill last year, then defended Bush's veto of the bill.5

6. He's one of the richest people in a Senate filled with millionaires.  The Associated Press reports he and his wife own at least eight homes!  Yet McCain says the solution to the housing crisis is for people facing foreclosure to get a "second job" and skip their vacations.6