Presidential Poll Quickie: Sep. 28, 2008

I have an irrational love of numbers. The only numbers people interested in politics get to obsess over without reservations are polls. So here’s a brief summary of the latest national presidential election polls and polls in states that John McCain and Barack Obama appear to think are in play.

Recent national polls appear to more clearly favor Barack Obama over John McCain that has previously been the case. A Gallup poll has Obama ahead at 50% to McCain’s 42%, a Rasmussen poll has Barack Obama ahead at 50% to McCain’s 44%, and a Hotline/FD poll has Obama ahead at 47% to McCain’s 42%.

Current electoral vote totals put Barack Obama at 286 electoral votes and John McCain at 252 electoral votes, a gain by Obama of 13 electoral votes over last week.

In Florida, John McCain continues to hold on to the slightest of leads over Barack Obama, at 48% to Obama’s 47%.

Iowa appears to have gone from a battle ground state to solidly for Barack Obama, with all more recent polls putting Obama ahead of McCain in that state, and the most current Iowa poll putting Obama at 51% to McCain’s 43%.

Michigan no longer appears to be a battle ground state. The newest poll there puts Barack Obama 13% ahead of John McCain, at 51% to 38%.

Missouri appears to edging towards a toss-up, with John McCain’s lead over Barack Obama there melting to 48% to 46% in one poll and to 47% to 46% in another poll.

In hotly contested Nevada, John McCain holds on to a slim lead of 46% over Barack Obama’s 45% in the most recent poll.

After John McCain pulled ahead in New Hampshire earlier in the week by two points, four successive polls have shown Obama in the lead, with the most recent one putting Obama at 48% and McCain at 44%.

In the usually solidly Republican North Carolina, Barack Obama now leads John McCain at 49% to 47%, according to the latest poll, following two polls that had tied the two candidates at 45% each and at 46% each.

John McCain seems to be currently ahead in Ohio, which has been back and forth frequently. A poll earlier last week had reduced Obama’s lead to a tie at 46% to 46%, and the newest poll gives McCain a slight lead at 47% to Obama’s 46%. Unless something drastic happens, Ohio will, as usual, add suspense to the presidential election until election night and make its 20 electoral votes a deciding factor.

Barack Obama continues to hold on to his lead in Pennsylvania, with 47% to John McCain’s 43% in the most current poll and 49% to 45% in one the day before.

Virginia, which has voted Republican since the end of the Dixiecrats, now appears to have tilted in Obama’s favor at 50% over McCain’s 45%. The polls in Virginia have been going back and forth frequently, so nothing is settled yet — it looks like this state might be one of the ones to watch election night. Virginia has 13 electoral votes.

After only showing a one-point lead in the Big Ten Battleground poll two weeks ago in Wisconsin, Barack Obama is now once again clearly in the lead in that state, at 49% to John McCain’s 43%.

At What Time and On What Channel is the Vice Presidential Debate on Oct. 2?

In case you were wondering about when the vice presidential debate is taking place and on what television channels it is showing:

The October 2nd vice presidential debate between Democratic VP candidate Joe Biden and Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin on the Washington University campus in St. Louis, Missouri, is scheduled to take place at 8 pm Central Time (9 pm Eastern Time, 7 pm Mountain Time, 6 pm Pacific Time). The debate will be aired on television channels ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, PBS, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and BBC America.

When And On What Channel is the Presidential Debate?

In case you were wondering about when tonight’s presidential debate is taking place and on what television channels it is showing:

Tonight’s presidential debate between Democratic candidate Barack Obama and Republican candidate John McCain on the Ole Miss campus in Oxford, Miss. is scheduled to take place at 8 pm Central Time (9 pm Eastern Time, 7 pm Mountain Time, 6 pm Pacific Time). The debate will be aired on television channels ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, PBS, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and BBC America.

Apparently, tonight’s presidential debate will take place whether or not John McCain decides to show up.

According to the National Review’s Rich Lowry, the Ole Miss community is seriously peeved with McCain’s attempt to postpone. A presidential debate event is costly for the university and takes a great deal of planning. Look for the crowd to be more hostile than usual towards McCain.

In Preparation for Tonight’s Debate: Two Fact Checks

Since these questions might come up in tonight’s debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, this just in from the Fact Checker over at the Washington Post. As the scouts say, “Be prepared!”

In its attempts to rebut charges by The New York Times that campaign manager Rick Davis was until recently involved in business with (and receiving money from) Freddie Mac, the McCain campaign has been ducking the question by making false allegations against the New York Times. This is called “working the refs” (or “blaming the messenger”), where a contender attacks the media source that publishes true but embarrassing information in order to discredit the information. Rick Davis’ association with Freddie Mac is factual and gives the lie to McCain’s claim that he is aggressively going after those who caused the recent economic crisis. Read the full debunking here. Watch for McCain repeating tonight that he is going after Wall Street bigwigs and/or defending Rick Davis against “unfair attacks” that are actually true.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama’s running mate Joe Biden has run into some major trouble explaining his statement at a recent Pennsylvania rally that McCain’s tax plans will represent a tax increase by more than a trillion dollars for middle class voters. In fact, McCain’s proposal includes a full overhaul of the tax and insurance system that includes tax credits and lower insurance costs. Biden’s numbers come only from the cost of the insurance plan as established by the estimates of the Office of the Management and Budget. However, according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, Biden omits that if seen in context of all the reforms, middle class tax payers will at least break even under McCain’s proposal. Read the full debunking with a video clip of the speech by Biden here. Watch for Barack Obama claiming tonight that John McCain wants to raise taxes on middle class voters by exorbitant amounts.

Does anyone have similar things to add? (Please document your claims from objective sources. Thanks.)

Ladies and Gentlemen… Mark “Bad Boy” Twain

Tomorrow is the beginning of Banned Books Week. Banned Books Week is when those of us believe in freedom of speech, the freedom of the arts, common sense, and the ability of people to use their brains celebrate those authors whose books fanatics of all stripes try to ban from libraries, school reading lists, book stores, and what have you. (Go check out the list of the 100 most banned books, be surprised how many of them you know and like, and then go to your local independent bookstore and buy one. You, too, can capture the Spirit of 1776.)

Who still bans books, you want to know? Isn’t that something dictatorships do? Well, a lot of people would like to in this country as well. The American Library Association tracks banning requests/demands librarians receive, usually at public libraries or at school libraries. Book ban requests come from all sorts of zealots who can’t stand to have whatever doesn’t fit their own agenda be something that others are exposed to — on religious grounds, political correctness grounds, partisan political grounds, cultural grounds, matters of taste, or whatever. People who want to ban books come from all backgrounds, from the far right to the far left.

What all book banners have in common is that they seem to think if someone reads a book of fiction and if there’s material in the book that isn’t how the fanatics want to see the world, the minds of the readers will melt and the readers will be forced to do what the characters do, be like the characters are, and think what the characters think. Because books are sort of like demons that will possess readers and bend them to their nefarious wills.

I’m only half kidding. It’s really that idiotic. These are people who are so scared of the fragility of all that is good and right in the world that they don’t understand that any halfway intelligent reader – even a halfway intelligent reader of six or seven years old – knows that just because someone in a book does something, that doesn’t mean they should like what the person does or do it themselves. Reading about gays doesn’t make you gay, reading about sex doesn’t make you have it, reading about someone who has issues with God doesn’t make you hate religion, and reading about someone who uses the n-word doesn’t make you use racial slurs. Or how many kids have you seen recently growing green fur and stealing Christmas or tricking the neighbor’s kids into whitewashing the fence?

What attempts to ban books do is backfire. They teach kids that adults think they’re too stupid to think critically. Worse, they teach kids that if they disagree with someone, the best thing to do is to silence that person and never refer to the person again except in ominous murmurs and whispered hisses. They make the authors of the banned books proud of themselves and spike those authors’ book sales. They enrage the librarians, who will encourage more teachers to teach the book in question.

So spare your breath, Mistress Umbrages of the world! Better to sit down with your kids and explain to them the difference between a character thinking something’s okay and your kid thinking the same thing. That’s called teaching your kids ethics, discernment, and common sense. Which makes you a good person, instead of a stupid, unpleasant, and narrow-minded one.

I also like Banned Books Week because the list of the most banned books always includes on of my favorite people and the baddest boy of American lit ever — Mark Twain. The man has been dead for 99 years and still raises hackles with books like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. So, at least figuratively speaking, my man Sam is still right when he writes, “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

And then there is that other quote attributed to him that we may want to take to heart: “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”

Lessons in Logic: Validity

I think it might be a good idea to remind ourselves now and then about how to be a good thinker. One of the basics for that is, obviously, logic. So I’m going to start making some excerpts available here from an excellent book by Graham Priest titled Logic: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press). It is excellent, brief, concise, and accessible. Everybody should buy a copy, preferably from your local independent bookstore, which you can locate here if you don’t know where the closest one to you is.

Validity: What Follows from What?

Most people like to think of themselves as logical. Telling someone ‘You are not being logical’ is normally a form of criticism. To be illogical is to be confused, muddled, irrational.

But what is logic? In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Alice meets the logic-chopping pair Tweedledum and Tweedledee. When Alice is lost for words, they go onto the attack:

‘I know what you are thinking about’, said Tweedledum: ‘but it isn’t so, nohow.’

‘Contrariwise,’ continued Tweedledee, ‘if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be: but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.’

What Tweedledee is doing — at least, in Carroll’s parody — is reasoning.

And that, as he says, is what logic is about.

We all reason. We try to figure out what is so, reasoning on the basis of what we already know. We try to persuade others that something is so by giving them reasons. Logic is the study of what counts as a good reason for what, and why. You have to understand this claim in a certain way, though. Here are two bits of reasoning — logicians call them inferences:

1. Rome is the capital of Italy, and this plane lands in Rome; so the plane lands in Italy.

2. Moscow is the capital of the USA; so you can’t go to Moscow without going to the USA.

In each case, the claims before the ’so’ — logicians call them premises — are giving reasons; the claims after the ’so’ — logicians call them conclusions — are what the reasons are supposed to be reasons for. The first piece of reasoning is fine; but the second is pretty hopeless, and wouldn’t persuade anyone with an elementary knowledge of geography: the premise, that Moscow is the capital of the USA, is simply false.

Notice, though, that if the premise had been true — if, say, the USA had bought the whole of Russia (not just Alaska) and had moved the White House to Moscow to be nearer the centers of power in Europe — the conclusion would indeed have been true. It would have followed from the premises; and that is what logic is concerned with. It is not concerned with whether the premises of an inference are true or false. That’s somebody else’s business (in this case, the geographer’s). It is interested simply in whether the conclusion follows from the premises. Logicians call an inference where the conclusion really does follow from the premises valid.

So the central aim of logic is to understand validity. You might think this a rather dull task — an intellectual exercise with somewhat less appeal than solving crossword puzzles. But it turns out that this is not only a very hard matter; it is one that cannot be divorced from a number of important (and sometimes profound) philosophical questions. We will see some of these as we go along. For the moment, let us get a few more of the basic facts about validity straight.

To start with, it is common to distinguish between two different kinds of validity. To understand this, consider the following three inferences:

1. If the burglar had broken in through the kitchen window, there would be footprints outside; but there are no footprints; so the burglar didn’t break in through the kitchen window.

2. Jones has nicotine-stained fingers; so Jones is a smoker.

3. Jones buys two packets of cigarettes a day; so someone left footprints outside the kitchen window.

The first inference is a very straightforward one. If the premises are true, so must the conclusion be. Or, to put it another way, the premises couldn’t be true without the conclusion also being true. Logicians call an inference of this kind deductively valid.

Inference number two is a bit different. The premise clearly gives a good reason for the conclusion, but it is not completely conclusive. After all, Jones could simply have stained his hands to make people think that he was a smoker. So the inference is not deductively valid. Inferences like this are usually said to be inductively valid.

Inference number three, by contrast, appears pretty hopeless by any standard. The premise seems to provide no kind of reason for the conclusion at all. It is invalid — both deductively and inductively. In fact, since people are not complete idiots, if someone actually offered a reason like this, one would assume that there is some extra premise that they had not bothered to tell us (maybe that someone passes Jones his cigarettes through the kitchen window).

Inductive validity is a very important notion. We reason inductively all the time; for example, in trying to solve problems such as why the car has broken down, why a person is ill, or who committed a crime. The fictional logician Sherlock Holmes was a master of it. Despite this, historically, much more effort has gone into understanding deductive validity — maybe because logicians have tended to be philosophers or mathematicians (in whose studies deductively valid inferences are centrally important), and not doctors or detectives.

We will come back to the notion of induction later in the book. For the present, let’s think some more about deductive validity. (It is natural to suppose that deductive validity is the simpler notion, since valid inferences are more cut-and-dried. So it’s not a bad idea to try to understand this first. That, as we shall see, is hard enough.) Until further notice ‘valid’ will simply mean ‘deductively valid’.

So what is a valid inference? One, we saw, where the premises can’t be true without the conclusion also being true. But what does that mean? In particular, what does the can’t mean? In general, ‘can’t’ can mean many different things. Consider, for example: ‘ Mary can play the piano, but John can’t'; here we are talking about human abilities. Compare: ‘You can’t go in here: you need a permit’; here we are talking about what some code of rules permits.

It is natural to understand the ‘can’t’ relevant to the present case in this way: to say that the premises can’t be true without the conclusion being true is to say that in all situations in which all the premises are true, so is the conclusion. So far so good; but what, exactly, is a situation? What sorts of things go into their makeup, and how do these things relate to each other? And what is it to be true? Now, there’s a philosophical problem for you, as Tweedledee might have said.

These issues will concern us by and by; but let us leave them for the time being, and finish with one more thing. One shouldn’t run away with the idea that the explanation of deductive validity that I have just given is itself unproblematic. (In philosophy, all interesting claims are contentious.) Here is one problem. Assuming that the account is correct, to know that an inference is deductively valid is to know that there are no situations in which the premises are true and the conclusion is not.

Now, on any reasonable understanding of what it is to be a situation, there are an awful lot of them: situations about things on the planets of distant stars; situations about events before there were any living beings in the cosmos; situations described in works of fiction; situations imagined by visionaries. How can one know what holds in all situations? Worse, there would appear to be an infinite number of situations (situations one year hence, situations two years hence, situations three years hence, . . .). It is therefore impossible, even in principle, to survey all situations. So if this account of validity is correct, and given that we can recognise inferences as valid or invalid (at least in many cases) we must have some insight into this, from some special source. What source?

Do we need to invoke some sort of mystic intuition? Not necessarily. Consider an analogous problem. We can all distinguish between grammatical and ungrammatical strings of words of our native language without too much problem. For example, any native speaker of English would recognize that ‘This is a chair’ is a grammatical sentence, but ‘A chair is is a’ is not. But there would appear to be an infinite number of both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. (For example, ‘One is a number’, ‘Two is a number’, ‘Three is a number’, . . . are all grammatical sentences. And it is easy enough to produce word salads ad libitum).

So how do we do it? Perhaps the most influential of modern linguists, Noam Chomsky, suggested that we can do this because the infinite collections are encapsulated in a finite set of rules that are hard-wired into us; that evolution has programmed us with an innate grammar. Could logic be the same? Are the rules of logic hard-wired into us in the same way?

To be continued.

Preachers and the IRS — A Question of Free Speech?

Over at Ocular Fusion, Mike discusses the newest move by the Alliance Defense Fund to encourage preachers to concertedly break the law on Sep. 28th.

According to the Washington Post, the ADF has decided that it’s time to challenge rules by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that grant churches and preachers tax exempt status in return for keeping certain rules, such as not endorsing a political candidate from the pulpit.

Under a 1954 law, the IRS can revoke the tax-exempt status of religious and charitable groups known as 501(c)(3) organizations if they “participate in, or intervene in . . . any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.”

The idea of the early Civil Rights era law was to prevent churches and charities to act as fundraising and campaigning groups for pols who wanted to funnel funds through churches and charities rather than proper channels. It was also intended to prevent them from using churches, charities, science organizations, sports clubs, etc. — all of whom fall under the 501(c)(3) exemption — to organize their political base.

That is not to say that preachers have to be silent on all things political. These tax-exempt organizations may advocate any issues they want and agitate against any topic they choose — abortion, gay rights, gun control, poverty, civil rights, the death penalty. They can support or oppose laws being debated in Congress. They just can’t endorse or oppose specific candidates or parties, whether on the local or the national level.

As most church-goers know, pastors frequently break this law — either blatantly, or by qualifying that they are “speaking for themselves only,” or by speaking euphemistically about one candidate or another (such as the mocking reference to Barack Obama as “The One” currently popular in evangelical circles who have convinced himself that Obama is some version of the Antichrist, or winking references to war heroes who’d bomb Iran in some of the more left-leaning denominations).

In accordance with its very clear instructions to churches, the IRS has, in the past and recently, gone after such pastors, whichever candidate they might endorse, and has revoked their tax exemption.

The ADF now wants to encourage preachers to break the law any way they choose to provoke the IRS into action once more, giving the ADF an opportunity to challenge the law in court — on free speech grounds.

“For so long, there has been this cloud of intimidation over the church,” ADF attorney Erik Stanley told The Washington Post. “It is the job of the pastors of America to debate the proper role of church in society. It’s not for the government to mandate the role of church in society.”

Other religious groups told the Washington Post that they think it’s more a matter of keeping politics out of religion so that the government does not interfere with churches who disagree with it, and are preparing to sue the ADF and in return revoke its tax-exempt status.

Why should this concern us?

Well, for one, it really does matter which organizations candidates can use for their campaigning and what sort of organizations parties can make their own. Whatever talk there is about ministers just exercising their right to free speech, most ministers may be thoughtful people, but let’s face it — they take their political talking points from news outlets, election ads, and party-related propaganda. It is the parties that form what the ministers say, not the ministers who influence what the parties say. It’s a short step from allowing ministers to endorse candidates from the pulpit to party representatives setting the topic agenda at the church and turning the preacher into just one more election ad outlet. Add fundraising to that, and you create a gigantic loophole in the already corrupt campaign financing system. Taxpayers should not have to subsidize party parrots with tax exemptions or allow candidates to hijack houses of worship.

Secondly, critics of the law have a very myopic view of what it takes call yourself a preacher in this country and start something you call a church and then claim tax exempt status. The criteria are extremely loose. In fact, anyone at all can become ordained. Trust me. I am. And I’m ordained by a recognized Christian denomination — not by internet through some spiritual hoax group. It would simply be too easy for political candidates to call themselves Reverend Something (we shall not name any real-life examples on this blog, as they are obvious on both sides of the aisle), rent a building with a sign in front of it that reads “Church,” and go tax exempt rather than abide by the laws that govern political fundraising and advertising. Any real ministers would have to live with an even larger army of imposters on the good standing and trust that is so crucial to their vocation. Accountability matters — and it’s accountability to a higher power than political power.

The ADF is misguided on this issue. The 501(c)(3) laws are not there to constrain religious leaders in their exercise of free speech; they are there to protect their status as respectable members of public discourse by keeping them from being hijacked by sleazy pols. And if a minister wants to advocate for or against a candidate, he can still do so, as a private citizen. Not from the pulpit. From there, we want to hear about Jesus.

What to Do With the Bail-Out Execs

My friend Ben at The Private Intellectual deserves all the credit for finding this suggestion from an unnamed lawmaker in Washington on how to deal with the business execs responsible for the current crisis. I don’t care one damn bit that this is probably from Dave Obey, a very liberal Dem, or that the source that got its hands on it first is rabidly leftist — this is hilarious and the best suggestion I’ve heard yet.

I quote:

I also find myself drawn to provisions that would serve no useful purpose except to insult the industry, like requiring the CEOs, CFOs and the chair of the board of any entity that sells mortgage related securities to the Treasury Department to certify that they have completed an approved course in credit counseling. That is now required of consumers filing bankruptcy to make sure they feel properly humiliated for being head over heels in debt, although most lost control of their finances because of a serious illness in the family. That would just be petty and childish, and completely in character for me.

I’m open to other ideas, and I am looking for volunteers who want to hold the sons of bitches so I can beat the crap out of them.

Where do I sign the petition?

Sunday Worthy Reads (Sep. 21, 2008)

Here are some newspaper and magazine articles that I found insightful about topics I may not have time to blog about, but that are definitely worth reading:

U.S. Politics

- Madison Gray at Time about whether the housing market is about to receive another jolt in the low-income sector

International Politics

- Omar Waraich at Time about whether the Pakistani government can afford to sustain its tenuous support of the U.S. “war on terror” after the Marriott bombings

- Christina Lamb at The Times of London about how the U.S. military effort in Waziristan compares to those the British attempted to use to pacify the area during the last years of the British Empire

- Daryl Lindsey at Der Spiegel International about German press reactions to the new likely Israeli prime minister-to-be, Tzipi Livni and how she might change the Mideast peace process

- Gerald Traufetter at Der Spiegel International about the battle for the natural resources at the North Pole

- Fred Weir at The Christian Science Monitor about how Moscow’s new foreign policy is being shaped by the rabidly nationalist intellectual Alexander Dugin’s thought

- Jean-Arnault Dérens at Le Monde Diplomatique International about the problems facing Bosnian authorities now that Islamic radicals who arrived in the tiny European nation from other Muslim countries to fight in the 1990s war are active Bosnian citizens

Religious Perspectives

- Yassin Musharbash at Der Spiegel International about the debate among Islam scholars whether the Prophet Muhammad ever even existed (in case Christians were worried they’re the only ones scholars subject to the historical critical method)

Economic Perspectives

- Gerald F. Seib and Sara Murray at The Wall Street Journal about how John McCain’s rhetoric to be a small government candidate is weirdly at odds with his suggestions on how to confront the current economic crisis.

- Peter S. Goodman at the New York Times does a thorough analysis of the $700 billion bail-out plan for Wall Street (by the way, the full text of the bail-out bill is here) and David Stout explains it in simple terms here.

- Daniel Gross at Newsweek portrays treasury secretary Henry Paulson and his efforts to combat the economic crisis

Educational Perspectives

- Anand Gopal at The Christian Science Monitor about how schools for Buddhist monks in Burma help shape a new generation of dissidents there

- Jonathan Mahler at the New York Times about how Auburn University became an attractive school for philosophical talent through the hard work of Kelly Jolley

- Deborah Salomon at the New York Times interviews Charles Murray about why college really isn’t for everybody

Book Reviews

- Christopher Hitchens in The New York Times Book Review about Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism

- Peter Baker in The New York Times Book Review about Asne Seierstad’s The Angel of Grozny: Orphans of a Forgotten War, which serves as a grim reminder of what Russian “humanitarian” interventions actually look like

Feel free to add your own favorite reading from the news.

Note: While some of the publications I cite here are based in non-English speaking countries, all the articles are in English, unless noted otherwise. Please note also that these are traditional news media only. This week’s reading favorties from blogs proper will be posted Tuesday, as I think it’s smart to let bloggers react to the strong journalistc work that becomes public over the weekend.

David Foster Wallace on the Meaning of Life

This is a commencement address author David Foster Wallace held at Kenyon College in 2005. The Wall Street Journal published it on Friday as an essay. In it, Wallace explains his view of life and that what makes a person mature is taking responsibility for himself, his attitudes, and his actions. The essay is all the more poignant because Wallace committed suicide a few weeks ago. Everybody should read it.

(Thanks to: RB & Crunchy Con)

Presidential Poll Quickie (Sep. 21, 2008)

I have an irrational love of numbers. The only numbers people interested in politics get to obsess over without reservations are polls. So here’s a brief summary of the latest national polls and polls in states that the candidates appear to think are in play:

A national poll by Rasmussen has Barack Obama at 48% and John McCain at 47%, a Gallup poll has Obama at 50% and McCain at 44%, and a Hotline/FD poll has Obama at 45% and McCain at 44%.

Current electoral vote totals appear to put Barack Obama at 273 electoral votes over John McCain’s 265.

A Florida poll by the South Florida Sun Sentinel has John McCain at 46% and Barack Obama at 45%, with Obama’s recent gains putting the pivotal state into play. A Miami Herald poll also puts McCain’s lead of 47% to Obama’s 45% within the statistical margin of error.

An Iowa poll by the Quad City Times shows Barack Obama at 53% and John McCain at 39%. Iowa voted for George W. Bush in the 2004 election and is considered one of the crucial Big Ten battleground states.

A Michigan poll has Barack Obama at 43% and John McCain at 42%, a statistical tie.

A Missouri poll by Research 2000 has John McCain at 49% and Obama at 45%. Missouri, traditionally a Republican state with slight swing tendencies, is considered in play because of highly popular Democrat Claire McCaskill’s success in the senatorial race there in 2006.

A North Carolina poll by Public Policy Polling shows the two candidates as even at 46% each. North Carolina hasn’t been considered as pivotal to win as other states, but it’s been a traditionally Republican state that is newly in play, mostly because Charlotte, NC is a quickly growing metropolitan area that has attracted many young and educated voters from beyond the South, who appear to tend to support Barack Obama.

An Ohio newspaper poll shows John McCain at 48% and Barack Obama at 42%. Ohio is one of those states that usually determine the election. Note: This poll was taken before last week’s Wall Street debacle, which might influence the numbers, one way or the other.

A South Carolina poll by Rasmussen shows John McCain at 51% and Barack Obama at 45%. South Carolina is traditionally a deeply Republican state, with Jimmy Carter being the only Democrat to carry the state since all the Dixiecrats jumped ship in 1960. However, the Obama campaign has had high hopes for the large African American population there.

Do Conservatives Scare More Easily?

The Times of London reports today that a university study suggests people’s political leanings may not just be formed by their experiences, but also by their biology.

Apparently, scientists at the University of Nebraska asked 46 experimentees a number of questions about their core political beliefs, and then showed them a series of pictures while monitoring their physical responses. Three of the 33 pictures were particularly distressing — a large spider one someone’s face, a dazed person with blood running down their face, and maggots in an open wound. A second test included a loud, startling noise and measured involuntary blinking responses.

The scientists concluded that, “physiological responses to generic threats and political attitudes on policies related to protecting the social order may both derive from a common source.”

Three observations on my part:

- Any scientist remotely worth anything will tell you that from a statistical point of view, a sample size of 46 is non-representative (i.e. useless) if one looks to extrapolate the results on all of human kind. All 46 would still fall well into the statistical margin of error. In other words, this study makes great headlines, but from a scientific standpoint it verges on bunk.

- Of the three “shocking” images the only one that would have bothered me, a committed conservative, would be the one with the maggots. I’ve helped treat people with maggot-infested wounds in l’Afrique, and it’s pretty darn gross, especially the smell. As a soccer player, I’ve seen plenty of bleeding headwounds that bled heavily but were otherwise not serious, so that wouldn’t shock me. And I’m not afraid of spiders. On the other hand, one of my most liberal friends — an ex-body builder and magnificent risk-taker, apart from being a really good person — squeals like a little girl at the sight of a spider the size of a fingernail.

So I would have flunked the conservatives-are-ninnies test.

- Having instincts to protect the social order is a good thing. It’s called civilization, it’s fragile, and it’s precious. It’s generally anarchists (a very liberal position) who are afraid of taking responsibility for it. And it’s generally liberals who are afraid of taking responsibility for themselves.

So let’s drop the name calling backed up with pseudo-science, please.

UPDATE: Why Russia’s New Foreign Policy is a Real Threat

This is an update on my earlier post.

The New York Times appears to have gotten its hands on cell phone recordings (and has authenticated them) that show that Russian troops had moved into position in and around South Ossetia a full day before the Georgian troops made their ill-fated move to restore control over their separatist region.

As I said, the Russian invasion was planned well in advance.

UPDATE: Hold On A Second, Sister Palin

Here’s an update on my earlier post about Sarah Palin’s flexible relationship with the truth.

It appears that the Alaska governor may have said no thanks to to bridge, but she sure did build the road that goes to the bridge that goes to nowhere — a road that serves no other purpose now than to run through the woods and end in a cul-de-sac. Built with $26 million of taxpayer money from federal earmarks. That’s even worse waste than if the bridge had gotten built in the first place.

For a good Christian, that woman sure shows all signs of being a pathological liar.

The full story is here and here.

Hold On A Second, Sister Palin

That John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate went over well with social conservatives – about that there is no question. In fact, Palin at times seems to have energized that base so much that it’s not always clear whether she is running as a vice presidential candidate or for the presidency itself.

One major factor in that enthusiasm has been Palin’s enormous popularity among religious voters. Palin has declared herself on the right side of many issues religious voters care about: She is pro-life, supports prayer in schools, advocates abstinence-only sex education for teens, opposes gay marriage, and so on.

As her rationale for those positions, Palin often cites her Christian faith. She has suggested that this faith is what leads her to be a person of higher integrity than the average Washington insider and that it makes her someone voters can trust to be honest. And that’s a good thing.

But that claim also means that Palin is accountable for what she says in ways that those who don’t claim a religious influence on their life aren’t. Religious people are big on personal accountability and hate hypocrisy. They care about what’s called “walking the talk.”

As such, Palin needs to dispel some doubts about how truthful she has been with some of her recent stump slogans. They appear to be, well, lies.  And if Palin wants to claim that the Bible guides her moral compass, then she knows the biblical standard is a higher one: You Shall Not Lie – not even a little bit.

Specifically, Palin will need to explain the following claims:

“I told the Congress, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ on that Bridge to Nowhere. If our state wanted to build a bridge, we were going to build it ourselves.”

Palin repeats this line in nearly every speech. Yet, Palin is on the record in support of the project until Congress had already effectively killed it. In fact, she told residents of Ketchikan Island, where the bridge would have led, that she didn’t consider their island Nowhere and that critics just didn’t understand how Alaska works, and has angered many of them with her claim that she opposed the project. Palin only put a formal end to the project when she knew the money was not going to come and after the GOP let her know it was hurting their reputation nationally. Contrary to what Palin suggests – that she turned downed the $233 million Congress was prepared to pay for the bridge and sent it back to Washington – Alaska kept the earmark money and spent it on other projects. What is more, as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Palin secured almost $27 million in Congressional earmarks and as Alaska’s governor requested $160.5 million for 2008 and $198 million for 2009.

Palin’s statement about how she handled federal earmarks at best a half-truth, and her self-portrayal as someone who refuses them is blatantly misleading.

“That luxury jet was over the top. I put it on eBay.”

Palin uses getting rid of the gubernatorial jet as an example for her penchant to cut ridiculous spending. That part is true, and Palin has used the move to suggest to voters that this sort of hard-nosed folksy attitude is what she will bring to all excess spending. What Palin does not mention, however, is that she did not sell the plane on eBay. In fact, it was not Palin, but the speaker of the Alaska House of Representatives who arranged for the sale, and at a $600,000 loss to tax payers.

Some might call that a “white lie,” lying by omission, but being the model mom she is, it probably wouldn’t fly with Palin if one of her teenagers told her that they’d spent the evening hanging out at a friend’s place doing their homework when really they spent five minutes there, then handed the homework to the friend’s younger sister and moved on to a party somewhere else. White lies are still lies. Especially when they’re about something worth $2.1 million.

Drilling in ANWR would have minimal impact, covering only “2,000 out of 20-million acres.”

Alaska has gotten rich off oil drilling, and Palin has repeatedly argued that drilling should be extended to the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve because the drilling would only cover a tiny area. Technically, the numbers she cites are accurate. However, she omits to mention that these 2,000 acres aren’t all in one place, or two, or three. They would be spread out like patchwork all over ANWR and would require many more acres of connecting roads, pipelines, airstrips, and gravel mines. The existing drilling area, which technically takes up 12,000 acres, ends up actually sprawling industrial infrastructure over 640,000 acres. That’s a proportion of 1:53. If the same ratio applies to the new sites, the true extend would be 106,000 acres. That might not seem like much out of 20 million, but then why hide it?

For someone who touts herself as an honest accountant, shrinking the true cost of something 53-fold isn’t exactly acceptable.

In the same vein, Palin should account for her claim that she led the way to energy independence by creating an Alaska oil pipeline stretching more than 1,700 miles from the North Slope of Alaska to the lower 48 states. Palin said, “When that deal was struck, we began a nearly $40 billion natural gas pipeline to help lead America to energy independence.” The trouble is, the project is far from beginning. In fact, the project exists only on paper, oil companies have been backing out, and the pipeline may never be built. Instead, it could end up costing taxpayers $500 million in subsidies for what amounts to a nice idea.

Thinking about doing isn’t the same thing as doing, and to claim having done something when one hasn’t is called lying.

On the same topic, Palin has claimed that “America needs more energy; our opponent is against producing it.” This is also patently false. Whether or not one agrees with him, Obama has said that he does not oppose drilling for more oil, and he has suggested a $150 billion program to develop more clean energy.

“Listening to him speak, it’s easy to forget that [Barack Obama] is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or even a reform, not even in the state Senate.”

Depending on one’s standard for what counts as major, that could be accurate. However, Palin touts her own moves to restore ethics to Alaska politics as a major qualification, and Obama cosponsored an even more extensive ethics reform as an Illinois senator and did so again in Washington. He also worked with GOP senators on important anti-corruption laws and on a law to track and reduce weapons of mass destruction.

Of course, it’s common for candidates to downplay the other side’s accomplishments, and Governor Palin has certainly suffered her share of equally distorting attacks. But a double standard for oneself and others is dishonest nonetheless, and if Palin advertises herself as someone who rises above Washington dishonesty, she needs to actually do so.

“To the families of special-needs children all across this country, I have a message: For years, you sought to make America a more welcoming place for your sons and daughters. I pledge to you that if we are elected, you will have a friend and advocate in the White House.”

Religious people put great stock in caring for the helpless, so Palin’s promise certainly resonates with them. But as governor of Alaska, Palin actually reduced funding for schools that serve children with special needs by 62% in her 2008 and 2009 budgets from her predecessor’s 2007 budget. In those same budgets, Palin cut health care spending by more than $4.5 million and funding for seniors by $600,000.

Since she has also championed states’ rights on education and health care issues, she cannot reverse her record once she is a federal executive without clearly having lied about one of the two issues.

This list goes on, unfortunately, and it’s beginning to scare the social conservatives who would like to trust Palin and support her as one of their own. Saying she is bringing the integrity of her Christian values to her candidacy is admirable. But then turning around and being loose with the truth, hoping her base won’t notice or won’t care, gives it the lie. It’s patronizing and downright contemptuous of the religious vote.

It is time for Sarah Palin to explain her misstatements and to assure anyone who wants to take her by her word that their trust in her is not wasted. Or else, she may cost John McCain the very base he put her on the ticket to win.