1. Is this shirt legal? Scroll down a couple of posts and you'll see a should-be-infamous photo of a young woman wearing an obscene and insulting anti-Palin t-shirt. I am told that this lady (the one within the shirt, not the one depicted on the front of it) wore this item of apparel into the voting booth.Isn't there a law against electioneering on the grounds of a polling place? Doesn't that law cover shirts? Do poll workers have a right to tell young women to take off their shirts? And if they do, how can I become a poll worker?
2. Behold, the mighty PUMA! I received a few childish insults from nearly-illiterate Obots telling me that PUMA was a bust. Oh really? Disaffected Hillary Dems numbered at least 2.7 million. If you think that this number is small -- well, tell that to a couple of guys named Gore and Kerry. They would have appreciated a fraction of that amount.
Of course, increased Democratic registration -- especially among blacks -- was one of the factors that more than made up for the loss of 2.7 million voters. If the economy had not herberthoovered on us, the PUMA stay-at-home contingent might have been much larger. Circumstances forced a lot of Hill people to reach for some extra-strength clothespins to pinch their noses shut as they punched tickets for Mr. O.
The numbers may be misleading. Here's the factor that many analysts (even the ones at the Confluence) have ignored: Those who say that PUMAs were few have measured only those registered Democrats who could not stomach Obama. Many PUMAs resigned from the Democratic party altogether.
How many? We don't know. It can be very hard to find out why some people resign. Just ask Patrick McGoohan.
Besides...if PUMA writers were so bloody unimportant, then why were the Obots so bloody obsessed with us? They went after us with far more zeal than they expressed when they went after McCain.
24 comments:
I thought PUMA was you and me, four or five others and a bunch of sockpuppets?
Those trolls are still busy hating us though, aren't they?
That last is an interesting point, Joseph. If I had been asked (and if I answered honestly) I would have said I was an Independent. Even though I am still a registered Democrat.
How many people who have emotionally left the party could skew the estimates?
What's not obvious yet is that it was a pyrrhic victory. A 6% victory margin in terms of popular vote? Given a 19% incumbent, an economy in the toilet, two unpopular wars going badly, etc., etc., etc., this should have been a colossal landslide. Nixon and Reagan made landslides out of much less than Obama had to work with. All he's managed was a paltry 6% win even though the GOP is a thoroughly discredited party on every major policy issue, and despite having raised $600 million (!) for his campaign...
Unless he and the Dems do something spectacular (passing universal health insurance would be nice, and would certainly earn him my vote), unless the economy significantly improves in the next few years, that margin of victory simply will not be there in four years. And that "something spectacular" needs to happen in the next two years, before the GOP runs against a "do-nothing Congress"... If he doesn't pull it off, the consequences of his fragmenting the Democratic Party, of his driving away so many loyal Democrats, will become apparent.
BTW - Would it be sexist for me to notice that Sarah Palin appears to be in better physical condition than the young woman in the photo?
Sarah is in her 40's and just had a baby a few months ago but the young woman looks a tad "flabbier"
But the young woman probably has accomplished more than Sarah. Did she mention what political offices she holds/has held?
Nice reference to The Prisoner there, Joe. But surely you're not old enough to have seen it the first time around...?
--LandOLincoln
"...if PUMA writers were so bloody unimportant, then why were the Obots so bloody obsessed with us? They went after us with far more zeal than they expressed when they went after McCain."
But not more zeal than they went after Palin with. Some sort of commonality there...
The polling place where I voted is a community center in a liberal area. There was a large 'No More Stolen Elections' sign hanging in front (the 2000 Bush/Gore election still sticks in my craw - but obviously such a sign is not exactly neutral or appropriate in a polling room). I didn't say anything though (both because I basically agree with the sentiment underling the sign, and because I would probably have been drawn and quartered had I complained).
Just another sockpuppet here. A former lifelong Dem who did not drink the kool-aid.
Joseph, I only recently discovered your site - from a link at Darragh Murphy's PumaPac - and it's a revelation. I'm still learning how much I don't know.
Anyway, since I'll be stopping by every day now, I just want to say thanks.
PUMA
Okay, I googled and found almost 26,000 hits on that slur. The earliest reference I could find dates from September, 2003 and was written in reference to Ann Coulter. It seems that overwhelming majority of the usage of this obscenity occurred during the time period 2007-2008 although, according to Uncylopedia.wikia.com, it was created in 1990. I looked at about thirty or so sites that used this and, in almost all cases, it was written by someone who was/is pro-Obama. Nice. Just another thing that makes me so proud of the New Democratic Party.
Another Prisoner fan here (and yes, I saw it and The Avengers their first runs).
As a matter of fact, in most states (not sure if all), one cannot wear clothing like that within a certain distance (100 feet is common) of a polling place. The person would have to leave the polling place and would not be permitted to vote.
In Texas, one woman temporarily was stopped for wearing a shirt that just said ALASKA. They decided that was not political speech and not a problem. The shirt in your picture, however....
djmm
Actually, the PUMAs were not offset by the extra registrations (BO got about 1 million more votes than Kerry in 2004). 6 million GOP-ers that voted W in 2004 stayed home - more than we PUMAs could offset.
Charles Lemos of By the Fault continues to hate on the PUMAs at his website. I haven't been there in nearly a month but went over today because I just KNEW he had something to say. He called out the Confluence as one of the deranged hate-monger sites even though I haven't seen anyone at the Confluence talk about him in a long time. Some people have an irrational hate towards the group they originally belonged to once the economic crisis scared them onto the Obama bandwagon.
I hope that PUMAs have the last laugh when the PUMA haters are thrown under the bus by the Messiah.
while it does appear that Ann Coulter is the first to be honored with that term, it has in fact been around since 1990 and it has even been used in titles for tv films, in political cartoons, as well as used as a band name. the term has been used predominantly to describe the party as a whole- and on special occassions individuals have been bestowed the title.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Republicunt
http://shelleytherepublicunt.wordpress.com/
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=185397103
http://www.zimbio.com/Moonbats+and+Liberal+Nonsense/articles/20/Yet+ANOTHER+Republicunt+Pedophile
http://maruthecrankpot.blogspot.com/2007/11/honoring-veterans-republicunt-style.html
http://www.deadrabbit.com/repub0101.html
http://voenixrising.wordpress.com/2007/06/27/republicunt/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0825088/
http://classifieds.thestranger.com/seattle/ViewBand?oid=oid%3A148055
http://www.zimbio.com/Fed+Up+American/articles/32/YEEEEEHAW+Another+Republicunt+Goes+Down
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_03/008482.php
As far as being allowed to wear political insignia tshirts, it really depends on the local laws:
http://www.scrantontimes.com/articles/2008/10/22/news/sc_times_trib.20081022.a.pg1.tt22electioneering_s1.2022980_top3.txt
At least 10 states -- Delaware, Kansas, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Vermont -- explicitly prohibit the wearing of pins, buttons, stickers, labels, or other "political insignia."
The timing, specificity, and emphatic tone of this email suggest it was prompted by recent events in Pennsylvania, where the interpretation of a law prohibiting electioneering has long been left up to individual counties, resulting in its inconsistent application across the state. After citizens in some localities complained that they were prevented from voting or were asked to remove articles of clothing because they wore political-themed buttons or t-shirts, the ACLU requested a clarification of the law.
In response, Pennsylvania elections commissioner Chet Harhut sent a memo to county elections boards in September 2008 declaring that wearing buttons or t-shirts is not sufficient grounds to prevent anyone from voting. However, the law still leaves it largely to the discretion of local officials, some of whom have stated they will not change their criteria.
At last report, the Republican Party was petitioning the state to enforce a statewide ban on passive electioneering. The Democratic Party declined to join the effort.
http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/government/a/electioneering_2.htm
demholdout,
The Lemos thing - It's really hard to stand by yourself. The need to be part of a tribe (and "to believe") runs deep. I went to his site after seeing your comment, and saw where Lemos talks about crying (with positive emotion) when he saw that Obama had won.
There's a good book called Sour Grapes, by Jon Elster, on the cognitive distortions that people engage in, including to achieve congruence (the name of the book is taken from Aesop's fable).
A friend of mine had a brother-in-law who served in Vietnam (special forces - actually went into Cambodia, etc.). Apparently he had shot children (thought they were armed), etc. - he was tormented over Vietnam for years. Then, apparently, something shifted, and he began saying that the U.S. was right to go into Vietnam, needed to combat Communism, and all the actions taken were appropriate. He wasn't tormented anymore. Emotional congruence. It's just how people are.
By the way, to one and all: Yeah, I recall seeing "The Prisoner" on its original run.
On one day in 1968, it was possible to watch the first airing of "Fall Out," the final Prisoner episode, and then shoot down to Hollywood to see "2001: A Space Odyssey" in Cinerama. The one known individual to do so, Clete Proxilanis, began to shoot rays of golden light out of his eyesockets just before he collapsed into a puddle of purple goo. True story.
OK, being a liberal at heart, I have a compulsive need to be fair. I looked further at Lemos' blog. Though he ultimately favored Obama, describes crying with joy when Obama was elected, and seems to have developed a hatred of all things PUMA, he does retain some distance from Obama, and continued to express skepticism and reservations about him, even in recent blog posts.
Charles Lemos went from being a PUMA to hating PUMAs so fast I'm surprised he didn't get whiplash.
If you speak your mind and tell the truth you're gonna upset people. I would rather be right than win, but I don't care if I'm popular, and I hope I never let love letters or hate mail affect my beliefs.
Being an asshole works for me - it's part of my manly charm.
;-)
PUMA had significant numbers of people at first, and it still boasts some truly excellent bloggers. But as a movement, it doesn't seem like they've cohered too well.
PUMA was inherently negative--a group united largely by disapproval. We lost coherence as the campaign went on and the Clintons continued to campaign for Obama. Some of us joined the Republican Party, some became independents or third-party folks, and (presumably) some reconciled themselves to the nasty new Democratic Party.
(Texas went with McCain, so I was able to write in Cynthia McKinney. I love Cynthia, and it felt great. And of course, I'm partially protected against charges of racism. I am so very clever.)
I believe the REAL factor in Obama's victory was that the mainstream media didn't take up the PUMA story and clobber him with it. I totally didn't foresee the MSM's fondness for Obama. That's my official story about why I was so wrong about Obama's chances. Without the media boosting them, what chance do Republicans have?
Where does Lemos get off calling the Confluence a hate-mongering site? It's one of the fairest and best-written of the anti-Obama sites. I could see if he was raving about NoQuarter, which has unfortunately attracted large numbers of hate-mongering crackpots, but the Confluence? I think I know who's hatin' here.
Too depressed to blog, too tired to comment. The Prisoner balloons already have me... wait is that Emma Peel over there? Beam me up, Picard. There's Borg down here.
It wasn't just the media; it was the economy most of all helping Obama.
By rights Obama should have lost in a 50-blowout by McCain. Only the economy saved his bacon.
But for Democrats this is NOT good news at all. The GOP is waiting for a major screwup and they believe they will return with Mitt or, God forbid, Jeb at the helm.
The people that I know who voted for Obama fell into two categories: those who felt that another four years of a Republican presidency would completely destroy the economic foundation of this country and those who had misconceptions about what Obama the candidate had promised. The latter category included my intelligent, well-educated brother-in-law who thought that Obama had promised universal health care (he is unemployed - no jobs in IL - and w/o health insurance). He was aware of and repelled by the O's campaign tactics, but thought that he was a somewhat better choice.
Another relative who had always voted for the Democrat in past presidential elections cast her vote for McKinney.
No one I know was a strong Obama supporter. I'm pretty certain that, if the Obama campaign had been proven to be corrupt prior to the election (I'm thinking of those highly questionable contributions), many of the Obama voters would have stayed home. It'll be interesting to see how many of them will vote for him in 2012.
My college-aged son, who might be expected to be an Obot because of his age, can't stand Obama. To my pride, he can't gut the way Obama and his campaign used misogyny and cries of racism when none existed in order to get the nomination.
old dem
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