From Chris Orr at TNR’s The Plank

Scientific proof that it is no longer possible to satirize the GOP:

This study investigated biased message processing of political satire in The Colbert Report and the influence of political ideology on perceptions of Stephen Colbert. Results indicate that political ideology influences biased processing of ambiguous political messages and source in late-night comedy. Using data from an experiment (N = 332), we found that individual-level political ideology significantly predicted perceptions of Colbert’s political ideology. Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements.

So when I’m pretending to be Pat Buchanan or Noam Chomsky in class to get a response from students, the ideological ones think I’m serious?

Racial musings from Byron York at the Washington Examiner

Byron York:
Obama’s sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.

Go read the article…it’s a laundry list of policy areas where Blacks think Obama is doing a better job than do Whites. Ergo, Blacks support Obama’s policies because of some unreflective groupthink that reasoned, critically minded White people do not suffer from (sheesh)! What is it about this issue that makes otherwise reasonable conservatives like Byron York get a case of the knuckleheads? Do we have to repeat the same statistics over and over again. African-Americans are overwhelmingly LIBERAL DEMOCRATS! The decidedly un-black John Kerry got over 90% of the Black vote in 2004? Let’s reword York passage from above:

Byron York:
John Kerry’s sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.

or, let’s try this one:

Byron York:
Ronald Reagan’s sky-high ratings among White people make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.

Seriously, is there even any evidence that there’s a policy incongruence between Obama and the vast majority of the African American electorate?

I could spend a few paragraphs detailing my view on Arlen Specter’s party-switch bombshell today, but Nate Silver summarizes it perfectly in one pithy sentence:

Why should the Democrats settle for a Liberdem when they can probably get Pennsylvanians to elect a mainline Democrat along the lines of Bob Casey?

Seems the Dems are calculating that Arlen Specter as an independent (which would probably have been plan B) is too formidable an opponent in their efforts to flip the seat, so if ya’ can’t beat ’em….

But as Glenn Greenwald aptly points out:

(1) The idea that Specter is a “liberal” Republican or even a “moderate” reflects how far to the Right both the GOP and our overall political spectrum has shifted.

Consider Specter’s most significant votes over the last eight years, ones cast in favor of such definitive right-wing measures as: the war on Iraq, the Military Commissions Act, Patriot Act renewal, confirmation of virtually every controversial Bush appointee, retroactive telecom immunity, warrantless eavesdropping expansions, and Bush tax cuts (several times). Time and again during the Bush era, Specter stood with Republicans on the most controversial and consequential issues.

Edit: As rkatclu (one of our frequent commenters) points out, The Corner at National Review has a different take:

RE: Arlen Specter [Mark Hemingway]

I read that he was switching parties, but I was disappointed to learn he’s still a Democrat.

With the GOP in freefall is this the right time for the Dems to be playing defense?

Death is common to us all; torture is a choice,” – Maggie Gallagher.

From Andrew Sullivan’s Blog

What does this comparison between California’s prison spending and it’s spending on higher education say about the state’s current and future priorities?

So a developing meme about our current president is that he’s not kickin’ enough “evil doer” butt….let’s call it the “politics of wuss.” He bows to the Saudi kings, he proclaims respect for the Persian empire, he’s going to allow my abuelita to visit her Cuban birthplace without restrictions, and he receives lefty books about colonialism in Latin America from dictators without using the text as a blunt instrument to beat Chavez for his insolence.

The right-o-sphere is appoplectic about this “politics of wuss.” They view it as a confirmation of an underlying relativism and moral ambiguity on the part of the president that will lead him to capitulate to, or be manipulated by, the dark forces in the geopolitical order. The left-o-sphere sees it as a “politics of dignity” welcome change in foreign policy towards a more cosmopolitan worldview where you respect other differences and listen to their concerns.

I see it as the politics of capacity building. The right is generally more enamored with a foreign policy in which you signal your intentions through force or the possibility of force, not through capitulation or admitting past wrongdoing. Critics on the right have criticized Obama’s approach to admitting past U.S. mistakes for not yielding immediate results from European allies during the latest G-20 summit.

Many on the right act as if foreign policy is a “one off” interaction rather than a set of repeated games in which actors learn from the interaction how to gain concessions from each other. Whereas the Bush administration’s approach to power was a “power over” approach where they sought to use their hegemonic world status to generate compliance from other state actors (see Pakistan, Turkey, etc.). The Obama administration is using a “power to” or “social production” approach where you distribute carrots in the hopes of building trust relationships with strategic actors that allow you to accomplish future goals. I’d argue that in a complex, hazy world where nations can form effective alliances without the United States, you’re better off going with a “power to” view of the world.

The interesting thing Obama is doing is that he is using “symbolic benefits” to build coalitions –“”power to.” While perhaps not as effective a “glue” for building relationships as material benefits, symbolic benefits are important. If nothing else, because it sets the conditions for other countries to go to their public for concessions that might be in the U.S.’ interest. The best part of symbolic benefits is that they are free…they cost nothing monetarily.

The general feeling on the right is that these symbolic appeals do cost something. It makes the U.S. appear weak or timid, as the very coiffed and masculine Mitt Romney opined. For these critics, there are only interests and at the end of the day, the way you appeal to leaders is to appear strong and stoic. Unbending. Unyielding in your position. Manly, if you will. No “power to” allowed, or the “evil doers” will pursue their interests of world domination or something of that ilk.

In my view, it is more naive to think that you are a hegemon when you aren’t than to admit mistakes and move forward on seeking common ground. Does Venezuela change its stance towards the US because Obama accepted a book from Chavez? Maybe not. But if the president’s response was to excoriate the dictator for deigning to bring up the subject of colonialism in the president’s majesterial presence, what exactly would that gain? Reactions like Newt Gingrich’s or Mitt Romney’s to the Obama/Chavez exchange are not some heroic call to steadfastness in the face of evil. Rather it is based on some intrinsic and dangerous sense of moral rectitude on the part of the right (don’t get me wrong….the left has it’s own moral rectitude problems). It’s an impulse that I can’t say I fully understand. It’s the impulse that drives fundamentalist parents to abandon a gay child because they are “sinning in the eyes of god.”

Personally, I think we’ve had a good long run of foreign policy being dictated by a “power over” approach. Let’s see how the “power to” works. Does tilling the field with “symbolic benefits” bear fruit by the end of Obama’s first term? Maybe not, but I’m pretty sure it will be better than where we’ve been.

What Nick Carr thinks of Twitter:

The great paradox of “social networking” is that it uses narcissism as the glue for “community.” Being online means being alone, and being in an online community means being alone together. The community is purely symbolic, a pixellated simulation conjured up by software to feed the modern self’s bottomless hunger. Hunger for what? For verification of its existence? No, not even that. For verification that it has a role to play. As I walk down the street with thin white cords hanging from my ears, as I look at the display of khakis in the window of the Gap, as I sit in a Starbucks sipping a chai served up by a barista, I can’t quite bring myself to believe that I’m real. But if I send out to a theoretical audience of my peers 140 characters of text saying that I’m walking down the street, looking in a shop window, drinking tea, suddenly I become real. I have a voice. I exist, if only as a symbol speaking of symbols to other symbols.

I’d buy his argument if the majority of the activity in the blogosphere was taking place among atomized, yearning individuals lost in the anomie of consumer culture. But in my experience, on-line communities augment, rather than replace off-line interaction. Facebook research is still in its infancy, but what’s emerging is that Facebook uses extend their existing off-line networks on-line (see Danah Boyd’s work on this question).

We are “symbol(s) speaking of symbols to other symbols:”

Insert speculation du jour:

HT: Matt Yglesias

Personally, I’ll go with Nancy Birdsall’s useful distinction between destructive and constructive inequality:

inequality is constructive when it creates positive incentives at the micro level. Such inequality reflects differences in individuals’ responses to equal opportunities and is consistent with efficient allocation of resources in an economy. In contrast, destructive inequality reflects privileges for the already rich and blocks potential for productive contributions of the less rich.

That large of an accumulation of wealth at the top is destructive because it can buy that much more privilege for those associated with that wealth.

Jon Stewart’s piercing analysis of the cable news media’s coverage of the “tea-party/bag/kettle protests”

Fox News = Pacifica Radio
CNN = Fox News
MSNBC = The sexual innuendo channel

George Will attributes the decline of Western civilization to 501’s.  While the blogosphere this he’s “havin’ a laugh” (as the English say), I give Will credit for offering a provocative argument about how our norms of dress affect our social conduct.

Denim is the carefully calculated costume of people eager to communicate indifference to appearances. But the appearances that people choose to present in public are cues from which we make inferences about their maturity and respect for those to whom they are presenting themselves.

For a conservative, Will’s doing some serious critical analysis here!  I’m partial to jeans and a dress shirt as my professional uniform.  I have been since my mid twenties.  As I near my 40’s, I do feel a pressure to reach for the dress pants over the jeans, particularly if I’m going to be interacting with peers.

I don’t think I wear jeans to signal “indifference to appearances,” although do we ever fully know ourselves 😉  I think I do it to convey a sense of approachability and informality.  As a university professor, and maybe as a person, I’m uncomfortable with conveying a sense of elevated status through wardrobe.  Through wearing jeans, I’m critiquing received power structures and signaling to students that authority should be earned through interaction and not “read” through wardrobe.

But, let’s give George Will some props here.  Dress is a form of text and we’re becoming increasingly detached from our cloting choices. A few years back it was trendy for students to wear t-shirts with the words “porn star” enblazoned on them.

I remember one of my best and most courteous students wearing a “porn star” shirt to class one day. Did that student give though to how her wardrobe would be read as a signifier? Is the “porn star” shirt signifying rebellion? irony? insecurity? What?

What do you think?  Do you think dress establishes norms?  What would be the consequences of reverting back to formal dress as a marker of status.