Spent part of Saturday setting up a new fish tank.

It appears that we got it for the cat…

So the latest Quinnipiac University poll is out in Connecticut.

And I’m shocked, simply shocked at the results.

Among Democrats, Ned Lamont is spanking Joe Lieberman 63 to 35. A huge margin.

A huge margin in a small subset of the voting population, that is..

Independent voters overwhelmingly support Lieberman and Republican voters are abandoning their candidate for Lieberman.

The telling result is the favorable/unfavorable numbers – 46% fav / 30% unfav among likely voters for Lieberman and 25% fav/ 30% unfav for Lamont.

Back in July, I said:

Ask yourself this, if you’re all excited at the notion of Lieberman running against Lamont as an independent. Who do you think is going to be sitting in the Dirksen Building in February of ’07? Lamont? In a state that was — in 2004 — 44 percent unaffiliated, 34 percent Democratic, and 22 percent Republican. Come Election Day, what exactly do you think is going to happen?

And when Lieberman is sitting in his Senate office next year, do you think the Democratic Party will be stronger or weaker for his departure?

So let’s see how kickass the netroots Democrats are at winning elections.

And when they show that they aren’t, what exactly will happen then?

And let’s note a telling statistic as well – among likely voters, 53% think he deserves reelection, and 40% think that he deserves the boot. Among the 40%, 24% oppose him because of his stance on the war.

That’s 10%. The antiwar vote…over to you, Markos. Ms Hamsher, any comment?

When John Robb, of Global Guerillas, isn’t busy tooting his horn, he often comes up with insightful points about the situation we’re in – it’s a site worth bookmarking.

Which, I guess, entitles him to toot his own horn.

Today, he’s got a post up that crystallizes something I’ve been noodling with about the ambiguous relationship we in the West have with war.

He calls it “Playing With War“

The western way of war in the 21st century is a pale shadow of the warfare it waged in the 20th. The reason is simple: for western societies war is no longer existential. Instead, it’s increasingly about smoothing market flows and tertiary moral concerns/threats. As a result of this diminishment of motivation, western warfare is now afflicted with the following:

…and he proceeds to list the ways that we are newly casual in our conduct of warfare.This is keeping with my last factslapping of Juan Cole – it’s cheap fun, but fun nonetheless – in which I point out what ‘wiping a city off the map’ really looks like.

Robb’s response to this artificial barrier is to suggest that we must conform our goals to our means.

Ultimately, western societies will need to learn to live within the limits of this new framework. It is not possible for us to reverse the clock on this trend. Any mass mobilization for war that lifts existing limitations will be severely punished by both global markets and opinion (both domestically and abroad) if it ever was attempted.

Right there is the $64 million question.

Will we conform our goals and policies to the social restraints we have placed on the conduct of warfare – or will we drop the restraints?

Robb doesn’t believe that we can drop the restraints (as above). I know that we can, and wonder if we will choose to. That’s a discussion well worth having.

I’m working on a project in Hollywood (it’s going badly, which is one reason I’ve been so inattentive to the blog, thank you for asking), and yesterday left the building and headed up Argyle to the Hollywood freeway when a pink Corvette pulled up in front of me, with the iconic “ANGLYNE” license plate, and a bubble of frizzled blonde hair visible over the driver’s headrest.

If you’re not an Angelino, you may not know about Angelyne, a weird local phenomenon – a huge-breasted woman of no known talent who managed to take some mildly provocative photos of herself on billboards around town and build it into a weird kind of celebrity.

It’s a pretty odd phenomenon.

But somehow, sitting on my bike in traffic, seeing her car in front of me was strangely reassuring. When I moved back to Los Angeles in 1981, her billboards were all over Sunset Strip and she was a kind of a local legend. It’s nice to know that she’s still around – whoever and whatever she may be. She’s managed to insinuate herself into the fabric of the place and become a part of the city that I love.

I watched her drive away toward Franklin and as I turned onto the freeway and throttled up, felt kind of like Jim Carroll, waving fondly at Salvador Dali after Dali had stolen his cab…

I just raised my hand, with half-parted lips, and waved “Bonjour, Monseiur Dali,” I muttered. “Bonjour et adieu.”

I tend to try and test ideas against facts as much as I can. Which is well and good until new facts come up that undermine the original assumptions…

Back in March, writing about the boneheaded coverage of the mine disasters early in the year, I cited a study done of the contractor building the new Bay Bridge here in California, suggesting that a new cooperative, rather than adversatial approach to safety monitoring and accident prevention might be paying off.

A newspaper article today suggests that the numbers may have been fudged.

The contractor building the Bay Bridge’s $1 billion replacement segment concealed worker injuries behind a sophisticated curtain of bonuses, pliant medical workers and a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy of handling workers’ compensation claims and safety conditions, a review of state records shows.

Workers for KFM, A Joint Venture, were routinely fired when their injuries were too severe to hide, according to official interviews with workers, foremen and safety officers, as well as a state Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) review of injury logs and medical records.

That’s completely scummy if true.

I’ll see if I can dig a bit more and see where this leaves the notion that working cooperatively with regulators lowered the rate below the norms – even if not extraordinarily below the norms. But there’s no way this doesn’t challenge the point I raised in my post (while leaving the main point, which was that the journalists covering mining were looking at fines rather than deaths).

And I’ll stand by my final point from March:

…there’s a good post-millenium Democratic issue – how do we take the regulations that got us from the polluted, deadly 50’s to today and make them smarter? How do we make them effective, not at fining or delaying or harassing industry, but at meeting the goals we set when we established the regulations in the first place?

Let’s track deaths and injuries and pollution instead of violations. And let’s fight for policies that lower them – rather than those that track revenue from violations.

There’s an interesting piece to do on the intersection of the media world – made-up, filtered, and framed – and the ‘real’ world as it exists away from the lens.

It would discuss the role of media in amplifying the effectiveness of terrorism, the impact of agenda and sensationalism on media choices. And all kinds of relatively serious things. Because it is, for-real, a serious issue.

But I just tripped (via the great Global Voices blog) over something a little more whimsical – the internal conflict over the role of the character Borat, invented by the comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen (better known as Ali G) – within the Kazakh government.

As a recent piece in New York magazine points out, there may even be a split in the Kazakhstani elite over Borat and his role (both positively and negatively) on the image and name recognition of Kazakhstan in the United States. The short article also suggests, however, that the real test of the tenuous relationship between Borat and the Kazakhstan government will emerge in the upcoming weeks as the public relations blitz being planned by the Kazakhstan government to publicize the country in the U.S. in the run-up to President Nazarbayev’s long awaited trip to Washington clashes with the advertising blitz ongoing to promote Borat’s new film, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan“.

I mentioned Pierre Rehov’s film “Suicide Killers” a while ago when I talked about ‘Violence, Suicide, and Bad Philosophy‘.

Well the film is in a short-run theatrical release in New York and here in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Grand in downtown Los Angeles…

And there’s no way I’m going to miss it. The first time I can go see it is Monday night.

It’s playing at 5:45, at a pretty inconvenient time. But I’ll make it – and I’ll extend an invitation to Los Angeles area readers to come see it with me, and then go out for dinner and a discussion afterwards.

So if you’re interested, just show up at the Laemmle Grand, at 345 S. Figueroa St. at the corner of 3rd Street (in the Sheraton complex). We’ll probably go have dinner afterward at Cuidad down the street, so you may want to go park there.

Got a trackback and email from an interesting blog post. Over at ‘Eteraz’, blogger Ali Eteraz is asking who in the West liberal Muslims should ally with…

Should American-Muslims like me just become Democrats? How does being a Democrat jive with the things I am most active and capable in: 1) exposing Muslim extremists, 2) not being in bed with Muslim tyrants, 3) engaging the Muslim world with the underlying assumption that Enlightenment thinking whether through intellectual smuggling or through blatant polemic needs to be made part of the Muslim discourse…

Go read the rest. He points out the problems that someone like him – a liberal Muslim – faces in picking sides in the current political puzzle.

I’d pay attention to what he says; I’ll bet there are more people like him, and that when we win them all over we’ll be doing a whole lot better.

I’ve got a new piece up at the Examiner – on e-voting. They even spelled my name right this time!

Chad-free voting machines can be hacked.

Yes they can, in fact.

I’ll have some more in the next week, including some suggestions. But the issue isn’t just the machines – although they’re a good indicator of the care that’s (not) being taken with the whole system, from end to end.

What’s required is a systems approach to voting – not looking at the links, but at the chain.

Thanks to Captain Ed, for picking up on this and the kind words.

You know, it just effing blows my mind that self-styled ‘progressives’ get a pass on this stuff…

Late Nite FDL: Faster, Pantywaist! Shill! Shill!

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Dan Gerstein, Joe Lieberman’s director of media relations and Public Enema No. 1.

…a post at Firedoglake about a gay political aide to the Lieberman campaign.

I don’t know if it’s an ‘I’m such a hip white person that I’d show you by being transgressive, nigga‘ kind of thing, or just TBoggian assholery. But I’ll tell you the simple truth: if a key supporter of Lieberman (or Bush, or any of the other candidates the Netroots froths at the mouth over) posted something as offensive to gays as that it’d lead the news cycle.

TG is phonebanking for gay marriage at a GL center here in Los Angeles. I’ll ask her to pass this around and see what they think next time she goes.