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I think the Republicans have gotten their wish. By continuing to hammer so called “Elites” they have slowly turned the party into a party of the stupid. The  conservative intellectual tradition is now DOA and Sarah Palin has nailed the coffin shut.

The WSJ sums up why I have slowly but surely turned away form the Republican party in recent politics. I beg the party: drop the attacking of “elites” Stop dumbing down the party in order to try & get votes. We need smart people to run the country.

If nothing else, electing Obama may be good not only for those who supported him (I voted for him) but also for the Republican Party. Maybe now a more mature party that returns to it’s traditional conservatism will rise.

People don’t have faith in plumbers when the economy is in the tank. They want to hear from real serious thinkers about how their country can be saved. Or at least they used to, before the GOP programmed its followers that the uininformed opinions of people like Rush & Hannity, whom are more likely to spout “talking points” and insults than actual fleshed out policy from trusted sources.

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Finita la commedia. Many things ended on Tuesday evening when Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States, and depending on how you voted you are either celebrating or mourning this weekend. But no matter what our political affiliations, we should all — Republicans and Democrats alike — be toasting the return of Governor Sarah Palin to Juneau, Alaska.

The Palin farce is already the stuff of legend. For a generation at least it is sure to keep presidential historians and late-night comedians in gainful employment, which is no small thing. But it would be a pity if laughter drowned out serious reflection about this bizarre episode. As Jane Mayer reported recently in the New Yorker (”The Insiders,” Oct. 27, 2008), John McCain’s choice was not a fluke, or a senior moment, or an act of desperation. It was the result of a long campaign by influential conservative intellectuals to find a young, populist leader to whom they might hitch their wagons in the future.

And not just any intellectuals. It was the editors of National Review and the Weekly Standard, magazines that present themselves as heirs to the sophisticated conservatism of William F. Buckley and the bookish seriousness of the New York neoconservatives. <b>After the campaign for Sarah Palin, those intellectual traditions may now be pronounced officially dead.</b>

What a strange turn of events. <b>For the past 40 years American conservatism has been politically ascendant, in no small part because it was also intellectually ascendant.</b> In 1955 sociologist Daniel Bell could publish a collection of essays on “The New American Right” that treated it as a deeply anti-intellectual force, a view echoed a few years later in Richard Hofstadter’s influential “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” (1963).

But over the next decade and a half all that changed. Magazines like the Public Interest and Commentary became required reading for anyone seriously concerned about domestic and foreign affairs; conservative research institutes sprang up in Washington and on college campuses, giving a fresh perspective on public policy. Buckley, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Peter Berger, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Norman Podhoretz — agree or disagree with their views, these were people one had to take seriously.

Coming of age politically in the grim ’70s, when liberalism seemed utterly exhausted, I still remember the thrill of coming upon their writings for the first time. I discovered the Public Interest the same week that Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and its pages offered shelter from the storm — from the mobs on the street, the radical posing of my professors and fellow students, the cluelessness of limousine liberals, the whole mad circus of post-’60s politics. <b>Conservative politics mattered less to me than the sober comportment of conservative intellectuals at that time; I admired their maturity and seriousness, their historical perspective, their sense of proportion.</b> In a country susceptible to political hucksters and demagogues, they studied the passions of democratic life without succumbing to them. <b>They were unapologetic elites, but elites who loved democracy and wanted to help it.</b>

<b>So what happened? How, 30 years later, could younger conservative intellectuals promote a candidate like Sarah Palin, whose ignorance, provinciality and populist demagoguery represent everything older conservative thinkers once stood against? </b>It’s a sad tale that began in the ’80s, when leading conservatives frustrated with the left-leaning press and university establishment began to speak of an “adversary culture of intellectuals.” It was a phrase borrowed from the great literary critic Lionel Trilling, who used it to describe the disquiet at the heart of liberal societies. Now the idea was taken up and distorted by angry conservatives who saw adversaries everywhere and decided to cast their lot with “ordinary Americans” whom they hardly knew. In 1976 Irving Kristol publicly worried that “populist paranoia” was “subverting the very institutions and authorities that the democratic republic laboriously creates for the purpose of orderly self-government.” But by the mid-’80s, he was telling readers of this newspaper that the “common sense” of ordinary Americans on matters like crime and education had been betrayed by “our disoriented elites,” which is why “so many people — and I include myself among them — who would ordinarily worry about a populist upsurge find themselves so sympathetic to this new populism.”

The die was cast. Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders’ intellectual virtues — indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. <b>But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. </b>They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

<b>Back in the ’70s, conservative intellectuals loved to talk about “radical chic,” the well-known tendency of educated, often wealthy liberals to project their political fantasies onto brutal revolutionaries and street thugs, and romanticize their “struggles.” But “populist chic” is just the inversion of “radical chic,” and is no less absurd, comical or ominous. </b>Traditional conservatives were always suspicious of populism, and they were right to be. They saw elites as a fact of political life, even of democratic life. What matters in democracy is that those elites acquire their positions through talent and experience, and that they be educated to serve the public good. But it also matters that they own up to their elite status and defend the need for elites. They must be friends of democracy while protecting it, and themselves, from the leveling and vulgarization all democracy tends toward.

Writing recently in the New York Times, David Brooks noted correctly (if belatedly) that conservatives’ “disdain for liberal intellectuals” had slipped into “disdain for the educated class as a whole,” and worried that the Republican Party was alienating educated voters. I couldn’t care less about the future of the Republican Party, but I do care about the quality of political thinking and judgment in the country as a whole. There was a time when conservative intellectuals raised the level of American public debate and helped to keep it sober. Those days are gone. As for political judgment, the promotion of Sarah Palin as a possible world leader speaks for itself. The Republican Party and the political right will survive, but the conservative intellectual tradition is already dead. And all of us, even liberals like myself, are poorer for it.

Source: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781453.html

Check out the article on how the votes will be counted that I posted over on the Bayonne Public Advocate.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Voting for president and having your ballot be the deciding one cast - statistically, that is like trying to hit the lottery. The odds for the average person are 60 million to 1 against it, a study shows.

In some states, the odds of being the vote that tips the election to your candidate are much better. In others they are astronomically worse.

The study by three prominent statisticians used millions of computer runs of polling data to examine the likelihood that a single vote will carry a state and that that particular state will tip the balance in the Electoral College. The statisticians were trying to answer the question: “What is the probability your vote will make a difference?”

The answer is very low. You are far more likely to be hit twice by lightning.

Read the rest here

This afternoon, the United Nations rejected a call by “Jedi Knights” in England for recognition of the Jedi faith as an official world religion, RAW STORY has found.

A story today in the English tabloid The Sun reported an appeal to departing Secretary-General Kofi Annan by the Jedi worshippers for official recognition of their religion. The Sun reported that 390,000 people listed “Jedi” as their faith on the 2001 UK Census. The Sun added that the Jedi believers wanted today’s UN International Day of Tolerance changed to an “Interstellar Day of Tolerance.”

But today in New York, the spokesman for the Secretary-General of the United Nations said that Mr. Annan would not make any such move. “The UN is not in the business of certifying religions,” said Mr. Annan’s spokesman, Stephane Dujarric.

“With or without light sabres,” he added.

When pressed for further clarification, Mr. Dujarric added “If I could be transported to another planet right now, I would.”

Link to full story with video

A poll worker at the United Auto Workers hall on Fern Valley Road was arrested after he was accused of assaulting a voter, said Lt. Col. Carl Yates, a spokesman for the Jefferson County Sheriffs’ Office.

The worker, whose name has not been released, has been charged with interfering with an election and fourth-degree assault, said Yates, who had not other details.

Paula McCraney, a spokeswoman for the Jefferson County Clerk, said the poll worker was accused of choking and pushing the voter out of the door. Election officials called the police and when an officer arrived, the voter wanted to file charges, McCraney said.

“That about tops off the day,” McCraney said.

Story Link

I know that I don’t talk politics too much here, but the political process is important. Please make time to vote today, here is some more inside politics wisdom from ABC’s the Note:

Eight Simple Note Rules for Election Day:

1. The exit polls are fully embargoed and quarantined until 5:00 pm ET.

2. There are no pooled exit polls in House races.

3. IF, if, if, the Democrats take control of the House, the key moment of the night (or morning) will be when President Bush calls Leader Pelosi. Note prediction: You will be stunned by what he says to her (and, perhaps, what she says back).

4. There are no pooled exit polls in House races.

5. Cautiously: NY2X, IN2X, CT, PA2X, CO, FL, AZ, IA, NC, NH, OH2X.

6. 4/5 MO, MT, RI, TN, VA, plus holds.

7. There are no pooled exit polls in House races.

8. There is no way to know the level of national or state turnout with any certainty today.

If I have not said it before, I strongly advise anyone who has an interest in following elections results to watch MSNBC. They have the best most evenly balanced coverage of the 3 cable news networks. MSNBC comes alive at election time. My personal favorite is Chris Matthews & Hardball. Here is what ABC’s the Note is saying about election eve today:

All politics is local, except when it is national, and elections are always about the future, except when they are about the past.

With those two matters cleared up . . . .

What Republicans have:
The ground game (read this super-mega-must-read Los Angeles Times story now LINK, and then come back to The Note); Gallup; Ken Mehlman; the practical and psychological power of the Bush-Rove five-election winning streak; Vice President Cheney off the trail for the last 48 hours; FLOTUS; “we might not be perfect, but have you gotten a load of them!?”; Dr. Dobson.

What Democrats have:
Iraq; change versus more of the same; anti-Bush feeling; the everything’s-relative steely discipline of Dean/Pelosi/Reid; the sixth-year itch; well-recruited candidates who have followed Rahm’s and Chuck’s First Rule (”Don’t f—k this up.”); John Kerry off the trail; Bill Clinton on the trail; scandals (which the White House will be sure to tell you on Wednesday cost their side a dozen House seats); Rumsfeld and the Army Times.

This is a very important article published by Arstechnica. As a technologist I have always found the issue of electronic voting interesting, but I have also found that the way the US is rolling out electronic voting is alarming in it’s inconsistency and loack of technical oversight. Unfortunately there have been one too many political opinions clouding the real information that exists out there on the subject of evoting. This article really cuts through all of that:

What if I told you that it would take only one person—one highly motivated, but only moderately skilled bad apple, with either authorized or unauthorized access to the right company’s internal computer network—to steal a statewide election? You might think I was crazy, or alarmist, or just talking about something that’s only a remote, highly theoretical possibility. You also probably would think I was being really over-the-top if I told you that, without sweeping and very costly changes to the American electoral process, this scenario is almost certain to play out at some point in the future in some county or state in America, and that after it happens not only will we not have a clue as to what has taken place, but if we do get suspicious there will be no way to prove anything. You certainly wouldn’t want to believe me, and I don’t blame you.

So what if I told you that one highly motivated and moderately skilled bad apple could cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to America’s private sector by unleashing a Windows virus from the safety of his parents’ basement, and that many of the victims in the attack would never know that they’d been compromised? Before the rise of the Internet, this scenario also might’ve been considered alarmist folly by most, but now we know that it’s all too real.

Thanks to the recent and rapid adoption of direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines in states and counties across America, the two scenarios that I just outlined have now become siblings (perhaps even fraternal twins) in the same large, unhappy family of information security (infosec) challenges. Our national election infrastructure is now largely an information technology infrastructure, so the problem of keeping our elections free of vote fraud is now an information security problem. If you’ve been keeping track of the news in the past few years, with its weekly litany of high-profile breeches in public- and private-sector networks, then you know how well we’re (not) doing on the infosec front.

Over the course of almost eight years of reporting for Ars Technica, I’ve followed the merging of the areas of election security and information security, a merging that was accelerated much too rapidly in the wake of the 2000 presidential election. In all this time, I’ve yet to find a good way to convey to the non-technical public how well and truly screwed up we presently are, six years after the Florida recount. So now it’s time to hit the panic button: In this article, I’m going to show you how to steal an election.

Now, I won’t be giving you the kind of “push this, pull here” instructions for cracking specific machines that you can find scattered all over the Internet, in alarmingly lengthy PDF reports that detail vulnerability after vulnerability and exploit after exploit. (See the bibliography at the end of this article for that kind of information.) And I certainly won’t be linking to any of the leaked Diebold source code, which is available in various corners of the online world. What I’ll show you instead is a road map to the brave new world of electronic election manipulation, with just enough nuts-and-bolts detail to help you understand why things work the way they do.

Along the way, I’ll also show you just how many different hands touch these electronic voting machines before and after a vote is cast, and I’ll lay out just how vulnerable a DRE-based elections system is to what e-voting researchers have dubbed “wholesale fraud,” i.e., the ability of an individual or a very small group to steal an entire election by making subtle changes in the right places.

So let’s get right down to business and meet the tools that we’re going to use to flip a race in favor of our preferred candidate.

Read the full article here

(CNN) — If presidential elections were held today, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton would likely have a comfortable edge over Sen. John McCain, but take away her maiden name and McCain has a better shot of landing in the Oval Office.

So say the results of a CNN poll released Friday by Opinion Research Corp., which asked 506 adult Americans whom they preferred among potential 2008 presidential candidates. The margin of error for the survey is plus or minus 4.5 percent.

Asked if they preferred Hillary Rodham Clinton to McCain, respondents gave the Democratic New York senator and former first lady a 51 percent to 44 percent advantage over the Republican Senator from Arizona. Remove “Rodham” and McCain had a 1 percentage point advantage, 48 percent to 47 percent.

The results fall within the sample’s margin of error, so there is a “good chance, but not a statistical certainty” that Clinton’s maiden name would help her in a matchup against McCain, said Keating Holland, CNN’s polling director.

The results are consistent with earlier testing that indicated Clinton’s favorability rose when her maiden name was included in the question, Holland said.

However, using “Rodham” seems to cut into Clinton’s edge if her opponent is former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Though Clinton has an advantage over Giuliani with or without her maiden name, using “Rodham” closes the gap. Asked if they prefer Hillary Clinton or Giuliani, Clinton has a 4 percentage point advantage, 50 percent to 46 percent.

Add “Rodham” to the equation and the former first lady’s advantage over the Republican former mayor drops to 1 percentage point, 48 percent to 47 percent.

Holland notes that the results are moot for two reasons: The election is still 2 years off and no poll will accurately predict a race that far in advance; and Clinton has always appeared on the ballot using her middle name, and there is no sign that she intends to abandon it in future elections.