Beacon Broadside

David W. Moore: Likely Voters and Mid-Term Elections, Part I

August 26, 2009

Today’s post is from David W. Moore, author of The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls (out in hardcover now, paperback with a new afterword available this fall). Moore is a senior fellow of the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire. A former senior editor of the Gallup Poll, where he worked for thirteen years, Moore also served as professor of political science at UNH and is the founder and former director of the UNH Survey Center.

It would be a political miracle if the Democrats did not lose seats in the 2010 Congressional elections, yet the polls so far suggest that scenario is doubtful at best. I think it’s because most polls are providing a rosier picture for the Democrats by reporting voting intentions of the general public, or registered voters, rather than the much smaller segment of “likely voters” that will ultimately turn out to cast a ballot.

That the Democrats will almost certainly lose House seats in 2010 is attested to by several factors. The most important, of course, is that since the advent of the current two party system (Republicans and Democrats), the party of the president almost always loses seats in a mid-term election. The best theory for this phenomenon is that disgruntled people (i.e., those who identify with the “out” party) are more motivated to cast a protest vote than the relatively satisfied people (i.e., those who identify with the party of the president) are to cast a vote of support.

The second factor is that, in the wake of the protracted war in Iraq and the sagging economy, Democrats won many seats in 2006 and 2008 that would “normally” go to Republicans. In 2010, with Bush gone and a Democratic administration in charge, Democratic House members in those “normally” Republican seats are going to be quite vulnerable.

The final factor is that as a general rule, Republicans are more likely to turn out than Democrats, because Republicans tend to be higher on the socio-economic scale – generally more educated, with higher incomes, and more actively involved in politics than Democrats.

So, if all of these reinforcing factors suggest the Republicans are likely to gain seats, why aren’t the polls showing that? After the jump, some interesting recent poll results (see pollingreport.com).

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Stacy Mitchell: An Overlooked Strategy for Fighting Global Warming

August 25, 2009

Stacy Mitchell is the author of Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses. A senior researcher with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance,she chairs the American Independent Business Alliance, Mitchell regularly contributes articles and commentaries to magazines and
newspapers, and produces an acclaimed monthly email newsletter, The Hometown Advantage Bulletin. This post originally appeared on Grist.

What I find most striking about my mother-in-law’s memories of the neighborhood where I live, and where she spent her childhood in the 1940s, is how many businesses our little residential section of town once boasted. Back then, there was a grocery store, hardware store, barber shop, two drugstores, a tailor, and several corner stores.

Those businesses all disappeared in the following decades, as the streetcar lines were dismantled, families acquired cars, and shopping migrated out to supermarkets and, later, malls and big-box stores. At the low point, my neighborhood hosted little more than a lone convenience store, great for snacks and beer, but not much else.

Recently that began to change: first a restaurant opened and then a tea shop. And then, in what many of my neighbors greeted as nothing short of a gift from heaven, a small fresh food market opened. Stop by at 6 in the evening and you’ll find a row of bicycles out front and the store’s narrow aisles packed with people pondering their dinner options.

This little store is one of hundreds of new neighborhood businesses that have opened in the last few years in what might be both the beginnings of a revival of small retail and one of the more important strategies we have for countering global warming.

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Link Roundup: Gender and Jobs, Ramadan, Deportations of U.S. Citizens

August 24, 2009

In gender-panic news, a world champion runner comes under scrutiny and a trans woman is asked to prove her gender with visual aids for a temp job.

President Obama shares a Ramadan message.

Two great Killing the Buddha posts, one about Ramadan and the other about women and Islam: Hunger is God's Food (which was featured in Believer Beware) and an essay about the search for the New Muslim Woman.

Thomas DeWolf posts about his cousin, Katrina Browne, who had an article on CNN.com discussing why the U.S. should apologize for slavery, for a start.

Jay Matthews at the Washington Post takes a very favorable look at Write These Laws on Your Children.

Even U.S. citizens can be deported.

The Takeaway asks Mark Hyman (and others) about what kids learn from team sports.
Observation Post by Philip C. Winslow: Evictions in Sheikh Jarrah

August 21, 2009

Today’s post is the latest in a Beacon Broadside series: Observation Post by journalist and foreign correspondent Philip C. Winslow. Over a career that has spanned more than twenty-five years, Winslow has reported on world events for the Christian Science Monitor, the Toronto Star, Maclean’s magazine, ABC radio news, CTV News, and CBC radio. He also served in two United Nations peacekeeping missions and worked for the UN in the West Bank for nearly three years. He is the author of Victory For Us Is to See You Suffer: In the West Bank with the Palestinians and the Israelis and Sowing the Dragon’s Teeth: Land Mines and the Global Legacy of War.

In occupied East Jerusalem just north of the Old City, the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah for years has been the crucible of the struggle by radical Jewish settlers to “Judaize” Jerusalem, as the common term goes. As a word, “Judaize” is slightly less cumbersome than “de-Palestinianize” (the latter is my term), but the intent and the effects are the same.

Although settlers’ organizations, facilitated in various ways by Israeli governments and protected by the security forces, routinely have taken over Palestinian property in other parts of East Jerusalem and in the West Bank, the symbolic heart of the struggle is here, for ownership or enforced control of the old stone homes on Sheikh Jarrah’s tree-lined streets.

On August 2, following an Israeli court decision, 53 Palestinian men, women and children were evicted from their homes in a nighttime raid. The Palestinians are classed as refugees who lost their homes in 1948. Shortly after the families and their furniture were on the street, security forces ushered Jewish settlers into the homes. A friend of mine and long-time Jerusalem resident said: “It was one of the worst things I witnessed in all my years here. It was bad enough kicking out women and children from their homes, but heavily armed police escorting settlers into the homes within half an hour in front of the distraught families, and obviously proud of their actions – that was really something.”

If you have a strong stomach, you can watch the evictions and the aftermath in this series of videos, after the jump.

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Jay Wexler: Cape Cod Hullabaloo: A Prayer Parking Space?

August 20, 2009

Today’s post is from law professor and humorist Jay Wexler, author of Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars. He studied religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School and law at Stanford, and worked as a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Wexler teaches at the Boston University School of Law, and he blogs at holyhullabaloos.typepad.com, where this post originally appeared.

As a couple of local Boston area papers have reported, the board of selectmen in the town of Falmouth, Massachusetts, recently voted to allow one parking space at the Old Silver Beach to be used from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day by a group of local churches. The churches can set up shop in the parking space and talk to people who come and talk to them first, but the churches are not allowed to proselytize to people who just want to come and get some sun and surf.

Understandably, this decision has raised some concern that the town has violated the First Amendment's Establishment Clause, which prohibits the government from making any law "respecting an establishment of religion." This is the part of the Constitution that typically people mean when they talk about "separation of church and state." Well, the use of the prayer parking space, without more, does not itself violate the First Amendment. It's weird–maybe even, as we like to say in Boston, wicked weird–but not unconsitutional. What would be unconstitutional, however, would be if some other religious group–say a Jewish group or a Buddhist group or a Satanist group–asked the town if it could also set up shop in the parking lot, and the town said no.

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Link Roundup: Women in Combat, Veterans in Jail

August 19, 2009

Helen Benedict responds to a NY Times two–parter on women in the military.

Penny Coleman looks at the plight of veterans suffering from PTSD who are now behind bars.

Susan Campbell ponders the power of cursing.

Enter to win a copy of Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-TradingDynasty in U.S. History (because you’ve read all of Thomas DeWolf’s posts here, right?).

Feminist Review likes House of Secrets: The Hidden World of the Mikveh, even if the reviewer has mixed feelings about the ritual itself.

The Boston Examiner talks about the “cacophony of faith” in Believer, Beware.
Nancy Polikoff: July Produces a Trifecta for Lesbian Couples Having Children

August 19, 2009

Today’s post is from Nancy Polikoff, author of Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families under the Law. Polikoff is a Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law, where she teaches Sexuality and the Law and has taught Family Law for more than 20 years. This post links to many items at her excellent Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage blog.

July was quite the month for lesbian couples having children. There were groundbreaking developments in three states, two through statutes and one through case law. I’ve written individually about each of these, but here is a review of the three.

The most sweeping reform came in the District of Columbia, where, under the new law, a person (of any gender) who consents to a woman’s insemination with the intent to be a parent is a legal parent of their child. The couple puts their intent in writing, and the city issues a birth certificate with the name of both parents. We lawyers still want the couple to get a court order – of either parentage or adoption – so that if the couple winds up in a gay-unfriendly state their dual parentage is secure. But their status in DC and for all federal government benefits is set from the moment the child is born.

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Kath Weston: The Homeless Readers of Tokyo

August 18, 2009

Kath Weston grew up working-class, dreamed of becoming a writer, put in time on the street, and trained as an anthropologist on scholarship at the University of Chicago and Stanford. She has taught at Arizona State, Harvard, Wellesley, Brandeis, and Tokyo University. She is the author of Traveling Light: On the Road with America’s Poor.

Remember that old party game in which everyone has to grapple with a deceptively simple question: If you were stranded on a desert island, what book would you take with you? In the working-class suburbs of Chicago where I grew up, answers ranged from the classics (The Souls of Black Folk, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare) to the religious (the Bible, the Qur’an) to the voluminous (War and Peace) to the cliché (Robinson Crusoe, ha ha ha!). It was a question meant to entertain and perhaps to reveal something about a person’s values. Who would have thought that, thirty years later, the same question would be posed in earnest by people caught in a global economic meltdown?

Dispossession in a place like Tokyo has come to be symbolized by the archipelago of blue-tarp tents that dot the city, islands of homelessness tucked away into the recesses of parks like Ueno and Yoyogi. Around the city’s train stations people who have lost their jobs patch together even more makeshift lives, heading to the underground arcades for warmth and shelter, then heading out again in search of work or small change. Many of these scenes would be familiar to people who have watched the rise of inequality in the United States. As the sun descends behind Shibuya’s skyscrapers, men fish aluminum cans out of trash barrels to redeem for cash. Women scrub vegetables for the evening meal in public water fountains. Bedrolls spread out on the grass. A recent flurry of news reports professed shock at discovering such islands of need in the midst of plenty. In truth, these tent cities have been occupied for quite some time. And there are some scenes that never seem to make it into the coverage of financial crisis.

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Kai Wright: The Birthers and Jim Crow 2.0

August 13, 2009

Today's post is from Kai Wright, author of Drifting Toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay, and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York. Wright is is a writer and editor in Brooklyn, NY, whose work explores the politics of sex, race, and health. He contributes to several publications, ranging from The Nation to ColorLines magazine. This post originally appeared at The Root, where Wright is senior writer.

If ever there was a "teachable moment" about race in modern America, now is it. With the birthers and the reparations conspiracy theories and the Nazi imagery at health care meetings, someone's gotta explain why all these white folks are wilding out. We need an articulate, impassioned race man to clarify things. But not Al Sharpton; I say pass the mic to Jim Webb.

Remember way back when Webb, a Democratic senator from Virginia and the voice of Appalachia's neglected white yeoman, was sniffing around a veep nod? In the midst of that media moment, he hit on an idea we'd do well to dwell upon. "Black America and Scots-Irish America are like tortured siblings," Webb patiently explained to Pat Buchanan in a May 2008 Morning Joe appearance on MSNBC. "There's a saying in the Appalachian mountains. . . 'If you're poor and white, you're out of sight.'"

Webb went from there into a bizarre attack on all the nonwhite and nonblack people who he believes have hijacked affirmative action. But his core message is deeply relevant to today's tumult. Poor whites have always gotten screwed in America, Webb told us, and they're terribly angry about it. Whoever directs that rage harnesses a powerful political tool.

Which brings us to both the profiteering right-wing media and the aimless Republican Party stuck in its tail wind. Both have decided their survival in America's new multiracial reality depends upon a very old playbook: pursue narrow financial and political gain by exploiting the justified anxieties of working-class whites.

As a result, we all feel like we're living through a Saturday Night Live skit. Each day brings another twisted punch line. More than half of Republicans aren't convinced Obama's a citizen? Huh? Fox host Glenn Beck actually attracts viewers by proclaiming Obama has "a deep-seated hatred of whites"? Health reform as Holocaust? Really?

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Stone Prairie Farm: Swimming the Midsummer Prairie

August 11, 2009

Today’s post is from Steven I. Apfelbaum, author of Nature’s Second Chance: Restoring the Ecology of Stone Prairie Farm. Apfelbaum is founder, president, and senior ecologist of the firm Applied Ecological Services, known for its international science-based ecological design and restoration work. He lives in Juda, Wisconsin, on Stone Prairie Farm. You can read all of Apfelbaum’s dispatches from the farm here.

I now understand the stories about pioneers having to stand up in their saddles on the backs of their horses to get oriented in a prairie. From my vantage, the vegetation over Stone Prairie Farm looks like a silky-smooth, blowing and swaying mass of varying shades of green, punctuated every here and there with diffused patches of yellow and lavender flowers. Those flowering stalks are tall enough to rise above the sward of moving, blurring grass. Compass plant is one such, which sends its tight clusters of three-inch-wide, sunflower-like flowers up from within the grass sea, into the light and air above.

Yesterday I walked the trail through the prairie here at the farm. A few months ago, in early spring, these same individual grass plants were the height of a mowed lawn, but now many are well over ten feet in height. The mowed trail offered a perspective and route through the wildness. It wasn’t long before I wanted to inspect the status of the several Turks cap lilies, which I photographed a few weeks earlier before the grass bolted. I was off the trail, into the soup.

I swam through the prairie, a cross between a breast stroke and freestyle crawl, the most satisfying way to move through the sway and motion of the dense vegetation. When I stopped directing the stems they came crashing in. Blocking the assaults was necessary to see the direction indicated by the sun, and to orient myself so that I could find the lilies.

From Stone Prairie Farm: August 2009

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