The wonderful writer on HIV, Elizabeth Pisani, points me at a BBC radio journalist, Paul Henley's, piece on Russian homophobia.
Without whining, Henley gives a wonderful flavour of what it is to be hated by people who don’t even know that they hate you. For me, the encouraging thing about this story is that the wall of hostility that Henley is obliged to bang his head against in Russia is new to him. Had he been born even 30 years earlier in the UK (and maybe still now in many parts of the United States) the blanket of homophobia would be woven, consciously or not, willingly or not, in to his life and his soul.
Henley's sexuality is relevant to the story and his sexuality brings a flavour to the story which couldn't come from a heterosexual journalist.
He only brings it up because it is relevant. His listeners would not know, for all mainstream media journalists this would be true. Until it becomes relevant no one would guess.
This brings me to the Salon and MSNBC journalist Steve Kornacki, who came out last year in a piece about being the opposite of a stereotype of a gay man. He's a sports nerd and not the world's snappiest dresser.
On the daytime MSNBC show he's part of the team, the nerd who brings up obscure political history. His sexuality is mentioned only when its relevant. MSNBC star Rachel Maddow, who is lesbian, similarly rarely brings it up but like Kornacki never acts closeted, Maddow will mention her partner where relevant.
Schedule changes opened up the weekend morning slot this week, where Chris Hayes has built a crowd for the intelligent and in-depth Up. Hayes moved on, who would replace him?
Kornacki got the job.
I noticed a lot of complaining on Twitter. People instead wanted the job to go to Joy Reid, who is black and has ably stood in before for Melissa Harris-Perry on her show, which follows Up.
Some wanted Reid on her merits (I actually agree, for the format I'd bet she'd do it better) but the argument which made me grind my teeth, even when it was pointed out that he is gay, was that Kornacki getting the job was a blow against 'diversity'.
Since when were white gay men excluded from notions of 'diversity'? If you want the sort of 'diverse perspective' which something like Henley's piece exemplifies, or which you get from a gay or lesbian presence in choosing what stories to cover, then you actually need a gay presence!
You also need more black and brown people and more women. But the argument that Kornacki represents a 'diversity' negative is wrong and ridiculous and needlessly sets gay men up against black women. 'Diversity' has increased! Now if the next job goes to a white, heterosexual man, and the one after that ... no, that is not 'diversity'. This time it is.
The American liberal TV presenter and author Rachel Maddow just did a Reddit 'Ask Me Anything' and it just reinforced my disappointment in her. She got properly criticised on Reddit and that's rare from anyone other than the wingnuts. It's an odd thing, this free pass she appears to have, which I wish I'd read more about.
Maddow has an influential, great show, which covers a lot of territory that mainstream US TV (as opposed to somewhere like Democracy Now!) ignores. It is well-sourced and argued and Maddow herself is smart but also witty and good with the snark.
Her show is mostly US politics and very rarely covers international issues, bar America's wars, but that is hardly atypical for US TV. It does cover military issues a lot, unsurprising since that's what she wrote her book about. It has pretty much campaigned for homecoming parades and done a lot on veteran's issues.
In a US context she's practically a communist, but looked at from across the pond it's pretty safe stuff.
When she first appeared, on Keith Olbermann's MSNBC show, she was a breath of fresh air in cable news. A liberal woman who could argue really well and be likeable whilst doing it.
If you were British and paying attention to the presidential elections, both the last time and the one before, her show stood out from the rest as a very good one-stop to get a briefing from (as I detailed in 2008, the BBC's coverage really was awful, just reciting beltway thinking, as they did again in 2012). But for me, watching her show (and her), one instance piled on another to make me less of a fan and then something happened during the last election which made me start to not like her so much at all.
Remember that $700 billion corporate bailout? Seems that, A/ no one's accounting for it - no one - and B/ it's being spent to do stuff like boost market position. And the auto industry bailout? The fine print forbids strikes.
This - Bush's legacy - is entirely the source for the global economic crisis and begs a lot of questions about how the UK bailout is being spent.
"Ninety percent of American's incomes today are smaller than they were in 1973."
"Nothing is being done today, with the initial bailout money, to affect foreclosures. That's what congress said should be done with the money, but that has not been done. The foreclosure crisis is affecting everyone's home value and is at the center of this economic crisis."
Excellent Keith Olbermann piece with law professor Jonathan Turley.
This follows Cheny's out and out admission - possibly begging for a presidential pardon - that he signed off on torture. Whether he will face consequences entirely depends on the 'politics' - meaning public pressure.
Turley said:
“It most certainly is a crime to participate, to create, to in many ways monitor a torture program. What [Cheney] is describing is most certainly and unambiguously a war crime.”
“It’s an interesting question, isn’t it? … If someone commits a crime and everyone’s around to see it and does nothing, is it still a crime?”
Ron Susskind told Rachel Maddow that the record is clear, Cheney was always clear he wanted to invade Iraq no matter what - "it was a matter of simply selling it like a bar of soap".
That goes for Blair too - another war criminal?
Postscript: Andy Sullivan reminds me of the mentality of these pigs.
From a piece of dialogue, recorded at Notre Dame University. In it, John Yoo, Dick Cheney's favorite legal protege, explains the Bush administration's view of the legal limits of the president's power:
"Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty
Cassel: Also no law by Congress -- that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo...
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that..."
The festive scenes of liberation that Dick Cheney had once imagined for Iraq were finally taking place — in cities all over America. Frank Rich
Stars
Nate Silver. And fivethirtyeight.com (it's a trio that does it, not just Nate). Proven with their on-the-money final calls on the electoral vote and percentages. Traffic went through the roof and the MSM came calling. And if he doesn't get a 'Webbie' award, there's no justice. Rachel Maddow. A power butch dyke is now the most respected voice in US TV news. Wow! (as she might put it). Hillary Clinton. Glass ceilings well and truly shattered. Redemption in Denver and, later, Florida. YouTube. Ok, here's Huffpost's round up of the best. As Techpresident pointed out, just Barack's vids alone ammounted to $46m worth of free advertising. Techpresident. By far the best place to follow how the Internet MADE Obama. Cannot emphasise this strongly enough - he would not be President-elect without the Internet - and glad to (finally) see some acknowledgment of this gamechanging fact in the MSM. The web. Not only because without it there would be no Obama, and not just because of the bright light it shone on dirty tricks and lies (Arianna's point), but that the change it's brought will continue on - he himself has said that he wants to continue the momentum after he's elected and use the tools in government, this was in his half-hour infomercial. I'd also note that groups like moveon and sites like dailykos and huffpost will be used as tools to rally support for change. The dems don't have a filibuster proof senate majority so to get things like health care change they will use the web and all the tools. Here was Obama's email to his list post victory: "We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I'll be in touch soon about what comes next."
Tina Fey. Who? You'll know soon enough. Here's her best SNL comedy sketch. Jon Stewart. Yes, he's a funny guy but his clip compilations were absolute political genius and skewered consistently throughout the campaign. Web news. Now the main source for the young and, as Pew just showed, now bigger than newspapers overall. Mike Gravel. Mad, mad, mad. Brought a touch of Dada to the campaign. Bless. Doris Kearns Goodwin. The historian always ready with an anecdote. The Onion. For their perfect satire of network news. Guiliani's drag. Remember that? And then he had the nerve to attack 'cultural elites' in Minneapolis? David Axelrod. "The past is not prologue we've shattered that". Romney's dog. Remember this? The one he tied to the car roof? Red State Update. Just crawl-on-the-floor funny pisstake on 'Appalachia', here they go on the dog:
Doofuses
The BBC. And it all came to a ignominious end on election night itself. Did anyone watch? I have documented how, frankly, biased the coverage was but it was all to one end, the traditional one of pretending it's closer than it is just to make a story where there isn't one. In the primaries it was 'Clinton still might win' - when she had no statistical chance. In the general it was 'McCain still might win' - when the polls said otherwise. One of the key things i spotted was just who BBC America editor Justin Webb linked to - the MSM, consistently. This isn't the sort of approach the beeb has preached about. "Here's the deal". The 'go to' line for far too many. Clinton. She redeemed herself but the depths she and her supporters lowered themselves to needs recalling. This included her extensive gay following. Oh, and Bill. The MSM in general. Keith Olbermann made this point well, if you look at McCain's gaffes vs Obama's it is clear that a different standard was being held. If Obama had made anything like as many (remember Lieberman wispering in his ear when McCain stuffed up to a camera in Iraq about who the enemy was?) he would have been toast. Joe the plumber. Simply an idiot. Matt Drudge. At the end he was touting his number's - but they'd been beaten months before by the web's new stars, led by Huffington Post. His major league screw ups and blatant bias can only damn his chief selling-point: that the MSM follows his lead. PUMAs. Clinton's 'loyalists' damned and screwed by Clinton herself. Until September they screamed the same anti-Obama rubbish as McCain ended on (see image, right). Capitalism. McCain condoms? Lieberman. And now comes the reckoning. Reverend Wright. When the shit hit the fan I actually listened to his speeches and he made a lot of sense. When he took his show to the national Press Club he was nothing but an egotistical showpony. Green screens. As in McCain's weird appearance in front of one. Should. Be. Banned. Voter suppresssion. Americans can but hope something will change but it likely won't, Robert Kennedy Jnr and many others leveraged the web to shine a spotlight on this year's suppression efforts. Plus Obama's teams were right-on-it. As I predicted, it counted for nothing in the end but it shouldn't take overwhelming numbers to just about win. (Plus to get on the ballot in the first place). Six hour waits. For a Brit, this is madness. But Americans haven't yet done anything about what is actually an international shaming Robocalls. Some reported getting literally dozens a day, more if you were unfortunate enough to live in New Hampshire. They got worse as McCain's campaign got more desperate and were the hollow centre to any claims he ran a 'decent' campaign. Holograms. CNN's election night tecnowizzadry just highlighted for me the emptiness of their core content. The journalism I watched? MSNBC. Plus they were actually tomograms and the presenters couldn't see them. Ralph Nader. There is always a space to the left of the Dems but Nader proved he's not it with his narcissistic final (?) run this time. To see how broke his political space has become check this interview where he calls Obama an "Uncle Tom". Palin. n'est-ce pas, and all she represents for the future of the GOP. As the bloodletting begins on the right, former speechwriter David Frum has a very interesting piece 'Republicans face fraught choice between two roads to revival' and the parallels with 1997 and the Tories are ripe. The argument is that they need to ditch the social conservatism. One good thing though? Because of her we met the brilliant Muckracker and his Mudflats bog - and now we now lots more about the weird and wonderful world of Alaskan politics.
And finally ...
Rachel Maddow's brilliant take on the funniest moments of the campaign:
And some of my posts from the past (arrrrgh .. ) year and a half:
Robert Kennedy Jr. on Rachel Maddow talking about the systematic and nationally organised blocking of the right-to-vote almost always from Democrats and poor people.
Gary Younge did a very good roundup of all the bad stuff which has been reported in The Guardian today:
In short, come next Tuesday, the issue may not so much be who votes for whom, but who gets to vote and whose votes get counted. A recent CNN poll showed that 42% of voters are not confident their vote will be accurately cast and counted - almost three times the figure four years ago. With the record numbers of newly registered voters will be a record number of lawyers on both sides. If it's close, the courts may once again pick the winner.
This is a joke from the Simpsons, but it's actually happened.
Says Younge:
In Jackson County, West Virginia, people have been hitting the touch-screen for Barack Obama and finding they have voted for John McCain.
I've yet to see anywhere which is tallying up the likely electoral effect but going on the voter purge numbers suggested it's not actually enormous in a likely 130 million vote election. Significant, dirty and illegitimate - but not enormous.
The other demon to raise its head - all the time in BBC coverage, a meme so strong Ian Hislop smugly repeated it on Have I Got News For You on Friday as received wisdom - is the 'Bradley effect'.
The actual Bradley campaign reality bears no relationship to the meme. The reason Bradley lost was because a supposedly 'anti-gun' proposition turned out massive numbers of rural and small town voters not expected through polls.
This sort of 'wedge' tactic has been perfected since by numerous politicians, from John Howard, who used immigration, to George Bush, who used gay marriage. It drives the faithful to the polls, sometimes literally.
Mori's Bob Worcester demolished the idea that in 2008 it's a real effect when yet another BBC journalist raised it on 'Today' this morning, pointing out that there's no evidence from the last US elections in 2006 (and quoting Nate Silver that Obama has a '95.7% chance of winning'). Crankily responding to another question about it he said:
rather than instinct I'd actually prefer to go on what's actually happened.
If I was American I would be somewhat offended by the BBC's ignorance on race in the USA. Maybe they should do this story?
Prodded once again, Silver statistically dismantles 'Bradley' again today saying: Bradley Effect? Or Elephant Effect? — responding to an article by Republican consultant Bill Greener at Salon.com. Like Worcester, Nate also focuses on those 2006 elections.
Very, very little reported but even scarier is Naomi Wolf's belief that America is in the beginnings of a coup.
Yes, a coup.
Here she explains it more but basically she's looked at how all coup d’état start and America ticks all the boxes: secret prisons, mass surveillance. Plus following a typically rushed and secretive 'War On Terror' move, Bush has acquired legal rights to deploy US troops in mainland USA. There have been troop deployments in black ghettos like Oakland.
So some people think it's all going to end in tears and torture in 'black sites'....
However the real argument is will any of this dirty stuff work?
I think not, simply because Obama's lead is too great.
The traditional polls count things like likely voters and often, like Gallup's, base this on whether people have voted before. They are usually not taking account of either new voters or even people who use a mobile phone and not a land line.
But despite all these problems, which Nate Silver's excellent fivethirtyeight.com squeezes out, Obama still leads and leads by big numbers in the popular and electoral vote. It's obvious.
It is hard to imagine anything, even a terrorist attack or a Bin Laden video, eroding those numbers.
The sort of voter purge tactics being pursued only really work in much closer elections like the 2000 one - where 57000 people were removed from Florida's rolls - and in 2004 in Ohio.
Again, as Nate Silver has pointed out, the electoral map is such that Obama starts 2 electoral votes short of the number needed with enough solid, double-digit lead, 'blue' states.
Also, Republicans have en masse been fleeing the sinking ship. Particularly fiscally conservative and socially liberal ones - today he got the Financial Times endorsement. Even Palin has been breaking with the campaign tacticians, perhaps because she fears being blamed for a huge loss.
Against all the doom and gloom, which is not based on nothing, are a whole lot of other factors which have to be weighed.
Nothing leads me to think that the US will not have a black president in a week's time. It may well be a bit closer than some think now and the evidence suggests but it will still be a victory.
Postscript: been reminded by readers that 'in 2004 Kerry was polling strongly, right?'
Actually no. Here's Daniel Sinker:
Looking at polling results from the final days of the 2004 campaign paints a very different picture: With only three exceptions, Bush held the lead in 22 out of 25 polls going into election day. Those leads, which averaged 2.23% for Bush, very closely mirrored the final election outcome: a 2.45% margin of victory.
Sinker also discovered a - perhaps surprising - mirroring between Google Trends numbers for Obama/McCain and the actual poll numbers.
Forget the BBC - I may have mentioned the pointlessness of them as a news source before ...
Here are some bookmarks I have, if you're interested:
memeorandum - brings all the news and blog sources together in a nice, tidy cascade. We definitely need something exactly like this in UK politics coverage.
