Margin Notes: Lefties, Radicals, and even Len

TORONTO, ONTARIO - The next President of the United States will be left-handed. I don't know how I managed to miss this until the final debate, but both Barack Obama and John McCain are left-handed. This seems to be a modern trend--Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton were all left-handed, whereas before the 38th president, only James Garfield, Herbert Hoover, and Harry Truman had been left-handed, the rate to that point being consistent with the percentage of left-handed people in the general population. What changed in the 1970's?

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The best Freudian moment in the last week's Presidential debate in the United States had to be John McCain referring to Barack Obama as "Senator Government". I was almost disappointed Obama didn't return the favor by calling McCain "Senator Military."

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In his weekly radio address this week, John McCain stated that "of Americans... more than 40 percent pay no income taxes right now." This seemed like an absurd statement to me, but none of the fact-checking sites seemed to have vetted it yet, so I tried to do some research on my own. I found nothing definitive, but economist Mark J. Perry states on his blog that 62 million people will not pay income taxes in 2008. That's 37% of an estimated 170 million taxpayers, though considering that the population of the US is about 300 million, I'm not certain 170 million is really the right total to be using. I am surprised at this number, even if it's not more than 40% and McCain is at best exaggerating. McCain's conceptual point that Obama's tax cut really amounts to a tax credit for a substantial number of people is true, though it misses the fact that non-income taxes (like Social Security and other payroll taxes) are paid by these individuals. Furthermore, he seems to be missing the point that 62 million Americans are so poor that they are not required to pay income taxes. Isn't their economic status the real problem, not the tax rate (or lack thereof) that they are paying?

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While spending time as a scrutineer during the Canadian Federal Election last week, I noticed a surprising number of people walking out stating "I didn't realize there was a Radical Marijuana Party." I knew there was a Marijuana Party, but not a Radical Marijuana Party. It turns out some of their candidates didn't know this, either. According to the Abbotsford News, candidate Tim Fegler had not known of the name change until election day. Was he too busy smoking you-know-what?

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The best recent speech in my opinion did not come from a politician, but from John Walcott, the Washington bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers who accepted the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence on 7-October. Read Walcott's speech, entitled "The Truth is Not Subjective," here.

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The ongoing world financial crisis has brought out some previously-fringe ideas to the mainstream. One that hasn't gotten there is this thought from activist David C. Korten: "...capitalism's relationship to democracy and to the market economy is much the same as the relationship of a cancer to the body whose life energies it expropriates. Cancer is a pathology that occurs when otherwise healthy cells forget that they are part of the body and begin to pursue their own unlimited growth without regard to the consequences for the whole. The growth of the cancerous cells deprives the healthy cells of nourishment and ultimately kills both the body and itself. Capitalism is doing much the same to the societies that it infests." How does the body normally keep cells from forgetting they are part of a larger whole? Regulatory proteins and signaling pathways. Hmm.

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French President Nicolas Sarkozy was recently quoted as saying "a person who believes is a person who hopes." (Note that he didn't say that religious belief was a prerequisite for hope.) Unfortunately, in many cases, I think he left out an adverb. A person who believes naively is a person who hopes naively.

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In the unnoticed musical connection category, I heard "More, More, More" by Andrea True on the radio last week. This 1976 work had some remarkable musical similarities with "Steal My Sunshine" by Len, a 1999 minor hit. Listen to the beat in each song and it will be obvious.

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Elizabeth May apparently has more influence on the Canadian economy than we thought. Less than a week after the Green Party leader did a variety of interviews calling for an exchange rate between the currencies of about 80 US cents per Canadian dollar, the Canadian dollar briefly collapsed to that level before stabilizing at about 85 US cents. The next time she makes a statement like that, look out!