With Rudy Giuliani, one is never quite sure.

It’s a real ad.

I promise I didn’t rig our informal poll, but I won’t pretend that I didn’t like the results. I would have guessed ahead of time that most of the votes would go to Democrats, and most of those would go to Barack Obama, but the margins in both cases were larger than I had anticipated.

The most amazing thing is that Obama actually has a chance of winning this thing. While Hillary Clinton still has a substantial lead in meaningless national polls, Obama is leading in Iowa among likely caucus-goers, 35% to 29%; he is surging ahead in New Hampshire; tied in South Carolina; and could sweep all four early early contests.

There’s still a lot of time (although Iowa is only three weeks away), many chickens remain unhatched, etc. — standard disclaimers apply. And there is that little thing called the general election (where Obama is handily ahead of the Republican field). Still: there is a realistic chance that Barack Obama could be our next President.

But I don’t think that possibility has quite sunk into the national consciousness just yet. In particular, I think there is a moment yet to come when America sits up and says: “Holy crap, we could have a black person as the President of the United States!” For better or for worse — some people will be exhilarated, some will be appalled, some will be scared, some will cry tears of joy. Many pundits will say stupid things, many nasty smears will characterize the campaign. But regardless, it’s hard to exaggerate how extraordinary such an event would be — twenty years ago, a small percentage of political observers would have suggested there was a realistic possibility for an African-American to be elected President by 2050, much less 2008. The history of blacks in the U.S., with the legacy of slavery and the ubiquity of racism and the persistence of poverty, is almost too sprawling and complicated and emotional for any person to really grasp. It would not be hyperbole to describe the election of an African-American President as one of the most significant events in the history of the country.

There are plenty of valid criticisms to make about Obama, he’s certainly not perfect. It would be nice to have a real mandate for universal health care, for example. And, as historic as it would be, the fact that he is black is by itself not a very good reason to support him — having the first black President be a disaster could set the cause of racial justice back many decades. But even if he were a more typical Democratic presidential nominee — you know, a bumbling white Northeastern male who doesn’t use contractions — he would still be a great choice for President. He combines unusual clarity of vision with impressive legislative chops. The major Democratic candidates are not really that different in terms of policy platforms, so the question rightly becomes one of attitude and judgment — who do you want in charge the next time some completely unanticipated event affects the country? I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to support a candidate.

Who knows? Obama’s campaign could suddenly go up in flames. Or he could get elected President and be terrible; these things are hard to predict. But if he does get elected, the magnitude of the event and what it means for America is difficult to overstate. We’ll have to see what happens.

Just curious about how easy it is to set up a poll. Why not find out toward whom the CV readership is leaning these days? We promise your answers are not binding.

Updates: We are a famous physics blog!

And Ron Paul supporters have perfected a special brand of annoying.

And polls on the internet are useless.

None of which really qualifies as startling new information, I guess.

I find it sad that in American politics any candidate needs to devote time to talking about their religious faith, unless they are apologizing for the intellectual weakness it represents, or explaining why they have decided that the separation of church and state is wrong. And this brings us to Mitt Romney’s “statement on faith”, taking place this afternoon.

In Kennedy’s famous original version (it’s worth reading) his intention was to make faith irrelevant, since it was to be seen as a personal issue that should play no role whatsoever in governing the country. Although I find any such religious faith bizarre, it is true that there have been presidents whose beliefs do not seem to have been driving their decisions, and I can certainly live with that. But in Romney’s case, the situation is starkly different. As Andrew O’Hehir writes in Salon, beginning by quoting the speech

“I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” Kennedy told the Houston ministers, “where no Catholic prelate would tell the President — should he be Catholic — how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference … I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials.”

Kennedy was seeking to take his then-controversial faith off the table by embracing the constitutional and secular nature of the American republic, and by asking voters to judge him on his own words and deeds rather than as a representative of his church. If Romney were trying to accomplish something similar, one could only commend him. But his task is more perplexing and difficult than that.

Romney needs to appease a constituency that conspicuously does not believe in the absolute separation of church and state, that favors public funding of religious education (or at least certain varieties of it) and has frequently sought to impose theological ideas or religious structures in the public sphere. He’s not trying to convince right-wing evangelical Christians that he would govern as a secular president; he’s trying to convince them that his ideas about religion are close enough to theirs, in some general way, that they should overlook the differences.

Read that first paragraph again and then wipe away your tears as you realize how far backwards our politicians have moved.

O’Hehir then goes on to discuss some of the aspects of Mormomism that will make achieving this difficult for Romney. But the most important part of all this seems to me that Romney should be losing the votes of rational Americans by having brought these issues to the fore himself. That he is one of the many Americans - the religious - who believe in a particular set of supernatural fairy tales should be a strike against him. But that he explicitly seeks to make these irrational beliefs part of his governing philosophy and thereby impose them on others is far, far worse, and should make them fair game. I’d love to see journalists stepping up and doing their part to interrogate Romney and any other candidate on their superstitions whenever one of them decides that those beliefs have a place in the political sphere. Right now that group includes Romney, Giuliani, Huckabee, Obama, Clinton, Edwards, and almost everyone else I can think of.

I have a hard time imagining most of these people making a statement that echoes Kennedy’s own

I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.

Whatever issue may come before me as president — on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject — I will make my decision in accordance with these views, in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise.

But if the time should ever come — and I do not concede any conflict to be even remotely possible — when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office; and I hope any conscientious public servant would do the same.

Over to you, Mitt.

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee is enjoying a late surge in the polls for the Republican nomination, especially in the crucial early caucus state of Iowa. Part of his appeal is a sense of humor, as evidenced by this clever appropriation of the Chuck Norris Facts meme:

Chuck Norris, in addition to his considerable thespian credentials, is a proud creationist who wants the Bible taught in public schools. So it is not surprising to find Mike Huckabee denying the reality of evolution during a televised debate.

But this video, while also quite funny, is pretty scary. Via Cynical-C, it’s a 2004 speech to the Republican Governors’ Association.

A phone call from God! Quite the thigh-slapper. Huckabee artfully includes an assurance that God doesn’t take side during elections — although we all know his preferences, apparently.

I understand that it’s a joke. But there are moments of solemnity during the “phone call,” when Huckabee is being perfectly serious. One of those is at the 2:00 mark, where we are reminded that the President talks to God. And then we receive a list of instructions, including “protecting marriage.” (It needs to be protected from The Gays, for those who don’t have your decoder rings.) George W. Bush himself has occasionally mentioned talking to God, although usually in private meetings where it’s difficult to get objective verification, and admittedly his theology is somewhat unsystematic.

A lot of people who don’t really believe in the old-fashioned supernatural nevertheless think it’s a good idea to appropriate spiritual terminology for their own uses — re-defining “faith” as “any hypothesis that has not yet been proven,” or “God” as “the warm feeling I get when contemplating the universe,” or “religion” as “a nice kind of social club that brings people together to reinforce each other’s goodness.” It’s not a good idea. These are words, and they have meanings when you say them — people think they know what you have in mind. When you say “God,” most people think of the dictionary definition — “the one Supreme Being, the creator and ruler of the universe.” They’re not thinking of “the laws of nature.” And they honestly believe in this dictionary-definition God. And they let that belief affect, or at least justify, how they govern the country. Shouldn’t every non-religious person be deeply alarmed about this state of affairs?

At the Beyond Belief II conference, Stuart Kauffman gave an interesting (although flawed, I thought) talk about complexity and reductionism, and then ruined the whole thing by suggesting at the end that we should re-define “the sacred” as something arising from the radical contingency of the empirical path of biological evolution. Or something like that, it was a bit vague. What an abysmally bad idea. If you want to choose a word that refers to something other than the traditional religious conception of supreme beings and all that, then don’t use religious language. Because there are other people out there — far vaster in number than you — that are using those same words to mean exactly what they straightforwardly denote: a supernatural power with a vested interest in smiting the wicked, especially boys and girls who fall in love with boys and girls, respectively. And they’re running this country at the moment, and their beliefs are enacted into policy.

Of course, arguing with Mike Huckabee and his friends runs the risk that Chuck Norris will come along and kick your ass. That’s just the chance we have to take.

Money spent on energy research vs. the Iraq war. (Via Matthew Yglesias.) Amusingly illustrative graph below the fold.

Continue reading ‘Spending Priorities’

Charts and graphs are always exciting. They add an undeniable aura of quantification to any set of claims. What I like to do, when I see a graph illustrating some news item, is to guess what is being plotted before reading the text or axes labels very carefully. Here, via Ezra Klein, are the results of a BBC/ABC News poll:

The large-type words at the top give away the basic issue being addressed: has the U.S. “surge” of additional forces into the Baghdad area made things better or worse? But you can still get the picture from glancing at the colorful vertical bars, before reading any of the tiny text. Tiny red and yellow outliers flank a rampant baby-blue cohort. So my guess was, red meant “better,” blue meant “stayed the same,” while yellow meant “worse.” That would reflect what I had been hearing in the wake of Gen. David Petraeus’s testimony before Congress, that overall Americans were not in the slightest convinced that the escalation was bringing an end to sectarian and helping to nuture the first flowerings of Iraqi participatory democracy, with checks and balances for all.

But no! A glance at the fine print reveals that it was blue that corresponded to “worse,” while yellow meant “had no effect.” (In my defense, why wasn’t “had no effect” put in the middle?) I knew the war and the surge were unpopular, but had no idea they were that unpopular.

It takes a dip into the text in the article accompanying the graph to figure out what is going on: this was a poll of Iraqis, not Americans. So now it all makes sense; as unpopular as our military efforts are here at home, it’s nothing like the scorn that we receive from the country we are purportedly saving. Admittedly, closer scrutiny did provide clues that the poll might not have been sampling Americans: the question referred specifically to the escalation “in Baghdad and surrounding provinces,” rather than just “in Iraq,” a distinction that is rather too fine for most Americans to fret about. And there were six different forms of the question, addressing levels of detail that again would not be foremost of the minds of anyone who saw things in terms of supporting vs. attacking our brave men and women in uniform. Like the President.

The best argument for leaving Iraq is that the Iraqis don’t want us there. (It’s not an argument that is discussed very much, for reasons about which you are free to speculate.) This poll from earlier this year is illuminating. On the basic issue of “Do you support the presence of Coalition forces in Iraq?” we find that 46% strongly oppose and 32% somewhat oppose, with only 22% support, strongly or otherwise. It’s not completely unambiguous; when asked if those selfsame forces should get up and leave, only 35% just say “leave now” — which you will notice is smaller than the number who strongly oppose their presence. A full 63% want the forces to stay until they achieve some goal of improving the political or security situation, even though they are not judged to be doing a very good job at that. (The numbers might look worse, post-surge.) Which goes to show that Iraqis don’t necessarily think any more clearly about these things than Americans do.

Of course, only 1% of Iraqis want American forces to stay forever, which is what our government has been preparing to do. So someone is going to end up being disappointed.

Just a brief note to report that we have escaped from Yearly Kos unscathed. The science panel was a great success; Chris Mooney and Ed Brayton gave sparkling talks, Tara Smith moderated with aplomb, Lindsay Beyerstein snapped pictures, and the whole thing went smoothly due to the organizational skills of Stephen DarkSyde and Jennifer “Unstable Isotope” Thompson. The hot lights of CNN and C-SPAN glared down upon us, but we refused to wilt. Ed has a brief report here, and Chris describes the session in detail at the Huffington Post.

The conference highlight was the Democratic Presidential candidates’ forum, featuring all of the major candidates not from Delaware. (See reports on the forum here, here, here, and a convention overview by Ezra Klein here.) It was a sprightly debate, ably moderated by Matt Bai. Despite (or perhaps because of) the restriction to very brief answers, real distinctions between the candidates did shine through. Bill Richardson, for example, actually volunteered his support for a balanced-budget amendment, essentially removing himself from consideration as a serious candidate. John Edwards was slick and said good things, but that was in part because he ignored all of the questions. Hillary Clinton was, predictably, strong and well-informed, but this wasn’t her crowd. She bobbled a question about accepting donations from lobbyists, claiming that just because she took money doesn’t mean she would be influenced by the lobbying. My own biggest problem with Hillary is that she’s too willing to buy into a dramatically reductive view of how the world works, whether in all sincerity or just as a political stance. She dismissed the importance of anti-American sentiment in the world, claiming it was just anti-Bush sentiment, and claimed that we were now safer because we have to take our shoes off before passing through airport security.

I’m a longtime Barack Obama supporter, and the convention reinforced my feeling. His performance at the forum was careful and specific, not letting his charisma shine through, but he was enormously compelling in a breakout session afterward. Obama gets what it’s like to live in a complicated world, because he encapsulates a complicated world all by himself: American mother, Kenyan father, born in Hawaii, lived for four years in Indonesia as a child, educated at Harvard, trained as a street organizer in Chicago. He has an incremental but ambitious health care plan, and was anti-war from the start. Still, I’d be absolutely thrilled to support any of Obama/Clinton/Edwards against any of the embarrassments currently in contention for the Republican nomination. It’s an incredibly strong Democratic field, which is something I never thought I’d see.

But the really interesting news (to me) at the conference was that Bill Foster is running for Congress. Bill’s name might not be familiar to you unless you’re a particle physicist — he’s played a major role in a number of particle-physics experiments, including Fermilab’s antiproton Recycler Ring. Before becoming a physicist, he became independently wealthy when he and his brother founded a company (while at college) that has become the world’s leading provider of lighting systems for theaters. He’s running in Dennis Hastert’s district, although it’s not yet clear whether Hastert himself will be standing for re-election. It’s a Republican district, but not so much so that we couldn’t imagine taking it in a year when Republicans are as unpopular as they’ve been in recent memory. You can donate here to Bill’s campaign.

Wearing the little blue tag that identified me as a speaker at Yearly Kos, I was warned on multiple occasions to be on the lookout for Fox News and other nefarious media outlets, who were said to be lying in wait to ambush the innocent Kossacks, hoping to record them saying outrageous things for later broadcast. I was really looking forward to being thus ambushed, but it never happened. I spent hours lurking in the public areas, doing my best to look vulnerable and yet potentially outrageous, but no luck. My inevitable on-air showdown with Bill O’Reilly will have to wait for some other day.

p.s. It’s true, we did have non-YK fun while in Chicago. I’ll report later on our restaurant exploits, but I’d be remiss not to mention the trouncing at poker that was administered by Jeff Harvey on Friday night, thus falsifying (or at least offering one data point against) my conjecture about string theorists. Jeff had been dominating the local game since I left for California, and he proved on Friday that his success was no fluke. Or maybe it has been a fluke, but it’s a consistent one. Until next time, anyway.

In a few hours Future Spouse and I will be hopping on a plane for Chicago. All sorts of fun things are planned, but the nominal excuse for the trip is to attend the second annual YearlyKos convention, where perhaps we’ll score some party invitations. On Friday afternoon at 2:30 I’ll be speaking on the science panel, along with fellow bloggers Chris Mooney and Ed Brayton. The moderator will be Tara Smith of Aetiology, and we’ve even corralled Lindsay Beyerstein to be the official photographer; Stephen Darksyde, who put it together, unfortunately won’t be able to make it, but we hope to do him proud. Unconfirmed rumors suggest that the panel will be taped by C-SPAN for later broadcast, so don’t be shocked if you tune in hoping for some hot congressional-subcommittee action and catch science bloggers instead. It’s also supposed to be broadcast in Second Life, although I don’t know that means. Tara will also be moderating a science bloggers caucus on Thursday afternoon. Any CV readers who are at YK should certainly drop by and say hi.

Politics is a funny thing. Like last year, I anticipate being moved by the sincere passion for effecting political change in evidence among the participants, and also being a little creeped out by the attitudes of the less reasonable among them. Among the latter we are currently faced with the spectacle of Mike Stark, who decided it was a good idea to harass Bill O’Reilly at his house, putting up signs and stuffing reports of O’Reilly’s sexual-harassment lawsuit into his neighbors’ mailboxes (via Balloon Juice). This was Stark’s idea of a clever response to O’Reilly’s ludicrous attempts to smear Kos as a “hate site” by trolling thousands of diaries and millions of comments for outrageous remarks. Now, reasonable people can all agree that Bill O’Reilly is an obnoxious twit. But even twits shouldn’t be bothered at their homes, and that’s even true if they themselves have engaged in the tactic. “Two wrongs…” and all that. So it was depressing to read so many of the comments at Kos coming out in defense of Stark (although there were also many that took him to task).

Nevertheless, I have not given up my ambitions to someday be a big-shot A-list left-wing blogger. From my close readings of The Poor Man Institute and other sites, I gather that the accepted strategy is to post YouTube videos of progressive rock bands. All I can say is, if that’s the game you want to play, then don’t mess around.

Don’t. Mess. Around.

Today has been a good day for smackdowns! First up, Simon White in New Scientist, punching up his previous argument:

We need to apply a hard-nosed cost-benefit analysis to dark energy projects. We must recognise the cultural differences between high-energy physics and astronomy, and be willing to argue that astronomical discoveries - that the universe expands, chemical elements were built in stars, black holes exist, planets orbit other stars - are no less significant for humanity than clarifying the underlying nature of forces and particles.

Any large new astronomical project should be designed to push back frontiers in several areas of astronomy…

If we don’t do these things, we may lose both the creative brains and the instruments that our field needs to remain vibrant. Dark energy is a Pied Piper, luring astronomers away from their home territory to follow high-energy physicists down the path to professional extinction.

Next, Pope Benedict (via Atrios and Cynical-C), putting the hurt on those nefarious splitters:

The Vatican reiterated Tuesday that the Catholic Church is the one true church established by Jesus Christ and that other Christian denominations are defective, although they have elements of truth and sanctity.

In a brief document, “Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine of the Church,” the Vatican’s doctrinal office, with Pope Benedict XVI’s approval, reiterated controversial assertions made in its 2000 document, “Dominus Iesus,” that Christian denominations that do not have apostolic succession — the ability to trace their bishops back to Christ’s original apostles — can’t properly be called churches.

And finally, Senator Patrick Leahy, via Matthew Yglesias and a dozen other blogs:

A powerful elixir of sarcasm and high dudgeon mixed into a few sort sentences! Awesome.

Vote for your favorite.