Friday night smiles

Friday night smiles: "Pretty dreary day. Here are some links to try and perk you up:

---Larry Sabato on twitter:

If Sarah Palin is the 2012 GOP nominee for President, the Republican party platform will be the longest suicide note ever written.

--Rush Limbaugh on Joe Sestak:

During a three-hour tirade about Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to transfer five detainees from Guantanamo Bay to the United States for criminal prosecution, Rush Limbaugh attacked the 'dangerous' 'ideologue' Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA), who in a Fox News interview that day discussed his support of Holder's decision.

---Blue Dogs on deficits

--If Democrats do lose a significant number of House seats in 2010, the chamber as a whole will shift to the right. However, given who will lose, the Democratic caucus will actually shift significantly to the left.

--Yey, there is lots of water on the Moon! That's great and all, but if you want something that will really excite you about potential human colonization of space, check out the new VASIMR rocket--it can travel to Mars in only 39 days! Best of all, it was actually designed to ferry people and goods back and forth to a permanent Moon base, and is already being tested on the international space station. The pieces are really falling into place...

--New Stargate Universe tonight-and the premier of the Prisoner on Sunday. Woo-hoo

--Our fundraiser is up to $13,782.99!

What's making you smile tonight?

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Alcohol-Based Hand Sanitizers Fight Flu Best

Alcohol-Based Hand Sanitizers Fight Flu Best: "

By Deborah Franklin

There was a time, not long ago, when squirting gelatinous goo into your hands after every cough and before every meal would have seemed absurd. No more. Thanks to the flu pandemic, hand sanitizer has made its way into nearly every home, office, and school.

What's in your bottle, Anne Schuchat? (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

The germ-killing ingredient in most of the stuff is alcohol. Any product that is more than 60 percent alcohol quickly punches holes in the membranes of most harmful bacteria and viruses (including H1N1) and quickly 'kills them dead,' as the insecticide ads say, without damaging the skin. But what about the versions sold as 'alcohol-free?' Do they work?



'Depends on what's in them,' says Allison Aiello, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan who has studied hand hygiene.

Several years ago, Aiello looked into the safety and effectiveness of various antibacterial soaps and hand sanitizers for an FDA advisory panel (start here, go to p53). The alcohol-based products did the best job in all the studies she reviewed, she says. That's why she, the CDC, and other public health experts encourage their use when you can't get to soap and water. The CDC actually has published a chart comparing the effectiveness of various 'hand-hygiene antiseptic agents.'

Gels containing 'quaternary ammonium compounds' (benzalkonium chloride is the best known) work against most worrisome germs too, Aiello says. But -- unlike the alcohol-based sanitizers -- they leave a residue on the skin that at least one study has hinted could foster antibiotic resistance.

What about 'thymus vulgaris oil' or other products that advertise themselves as safer and just as effective as the alcohol-based sanitizers?

'I'd be very skeptical,' says Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease researcher at Vanderbilt University Medical center.

There's also a slew of products that make claims that FDA says are bogus. You can check the FDA's list of 'fraudulent 2009 H1N1 Influenza Products,' but remember that the list isn't exhaustive.

Also remember, alcohol-based sanitizers can't cut through dirt and grime, nor are they likely to kill one particularly nasty gut bug, C. difficile. Best protection of all, Schaffner says, 'Wash your hands frequently with soap and water.'

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Cigarette-Smoking Rate Rises In U.S.

Cigarette-Smoking Rate Rises In U.S.: "

By Maggie Mertens

Uh-oh. For the first time in 15 years, more Americans are smoking.



Some 20.6 percent of U.S. adults were smokers in 2008, up from 19.8 percent the year before, according to estimates by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

A higher proportion of American adults is smoking. (Owen Humphreys/AP)

Even that small uptick worries anti-smoking advocates. 'Clearly, we've hit a wall in reducing adult smoking,' Vince Willmore, spokesman for the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, told the Associated Press.

That move in the wrong direction won't help the feds meet an already ambitious goal--reducing the proportion of adult smokers to less than 12 percent by 2010. The uptick marks the first increase in smoking in 15 years.

The data come from the National Health Interview Survey, given by phone to almost 22,000 American adults. The results and an explanation of how the CDC arrived at them appear in the current issue of theMorbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Smoking rates continue to correlate with education level and were lowest among adults with a graduate degree--just over five percent.

Efforts to keep young people from picking up the habit appear to be working. Since 2005 rates of smoking in 18- to 24-year-olds have decreased. The group used to have the highest rates of smoking, but now it trails 25- to 44-year-olds and 45- to 64-year-olds.

As for the overall rise, the CDC researchers says rates might be going up because many states have cut funding to their campaigns to control tobacco. Also, cigarette makershave lowered prices in response to tax increases on tobacco, the Associated Press writes.

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Water Found on Moon, Scientists Say

Water Found on Moon, Scientists Say: "The discovery, which came out of a mission a month ago, confirmed scientists’ suspicions and could help explorers.


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Public Focus on Climate Change Slow to Develop, Hard to Sustain

Public Focus on Climate Change Slow to Develop, Hard to Sustain: "

The date was August 4, 1977, and Congressman Peter Rodino inserted, in the Congressional Record, an article from the New York Times that had run a week earlier. The Times article reflected on the Carter Administration’s effort to encourage the greater of coal as a power plant fuel. The Times said:

“The National Academy of Sciences flashed a warning light this week at plans to rely on coal as a major energy source in coming centuries. Not that oil or natural gas, for which coal is being substituted, are much better for the environment…If the industrialized nations continue to burn significant amounts of any fossil fuel for the next 200 years, the consequences could be catastrophic…The increased carbon dioxide might cause the average global temperature to rise six degrees centigrade by 2150, an amount roughly comparable to the temperature difference between our era and the last ice age. Such major climatic changes could disrupt agriculture and fishing, alter deserts and semi-arid regions, and cause the sea level to rise by 20 feet as ocean waters expand and ice caps slide into the sea.”

Ten years later, Al Gore announced his candidacy for President of the United States on a platform that focused on global warming, ozone depletion, and the ailing global environment. Five years after that, he published his book, Earth In the Balance, that addressed these concerns in detail. It would be yet another 15 years before Gore and the International Panel on Climate Change would win the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to elevate public attention to the need for a concerted effort to mitigate the effects of global warming.

The public response that was missing for so many years was sudden and stunning. In an April 2008 poll conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 71 percent agreed that there was solid evidence of global warming, and about half of the respondents attributed this phenomenon to the effects of human activity. No doubt, surveys of this type supported a call to action by the Congress.

More recent Pew polling results suggest that public concern has subsided almost as quickly as it had grown. According to polling results published last month, belief in the existence of solid evidence supporting global warming has dropped from 71% to 57%. Perhaps more significantly, now only 36% see this problem as the result of human activity.

How could people, who were once so certain, change their minds so quickly? Opinions do tend to break down along party lines. Seventy-five percent of Democrats see solid evidence of a problem, while only 35% of Republicans do. But concern has faded across all sectors. Pew says that 91% of Democrats saw solid evidence in 2006, as did 59% of Republicans. Independents have fallen from 79% to 53%.

Maybe people can only worry about a limited number of things at any given time. The economic downturn and the Congressional focus on health care have grabbed the attention of many. But while that factor might change the relative ranking of problems (is the environment more important to people than health care, etc.), would this alone cause people to change their opinion about whether global warming is real?

It could be that people began to understand the problem only when there was a consistent high-volume flow of information in the press and on the air. The evidence may have seemed convincing, but the particulars were hard to retain. Now, with the public dialogue shifted to domestic problems, it is harder to remember why everyone was so worried.

If this is the case, there is reason to expect that public support for action will build again when the climate bills take center stage. However, the slow recognition of the problem over the years and the roller-coaster changes in the last 12 months suggest that the need for a high-level and persistent public discussion of the issues remains unabated.

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'EAT: Los Angeles 2010' hits the shelves soon

'EAT: Los Angeles 2010' hits the shelves soon: "

Finding not just good food but the right food for the moment in this sprawling multicultural city can be enough work to make me stay home and eat oatmeal for dinner. Or go to the same spot over and over. So I, for one, am happy that "EAT:Los Angeles 2010" is scheduled to hit stores Dec. 1.

The second edition of the guide has more than 1,200 listings, from food trucks to fancy restaurants, all over the city, with 250 new listings. "I really was surprised that we had more new places than had closed," says editor Colleen Dunn Bates.

The 2010 guide also has a new section of a dozen tours of top food-loving neighborhoods such as Little India, Abbott Kinney Boulevard and Boyle Heights. The book was written by a group of food writers, including Linda Burum, an expert on international foods who writes for The Times; Amelia Saltsman, author of the "Santa Monica Farmers Market Cookbook"; and Pat Saperstein of Eating L.A.

Bates says there's been an increase in neighborhood gourmet markets such as the Larchmont Larder and the Oaks in Hollywood. She also took note of the food trucks trolling the city, found via blogs and tweets. While "EAT: Los Angeles" includes some of them, she says they're not so easy to keep track of.

-- Mary MacVean

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4,000 have died from swine flu, CDC will say

4,000 have died from swine flu, CDC will say: "

Researchers at the centers for Disease Control and Prevention are recalculating the number of people who have died from pandemic H1N1 influenza and its complications and are expected to announce next week that the total is more than 4,000, not the 1,200 figure that is currently used, according to the New York Times.

The new estimate, which will actually be a range of deaths, will be calculated to reflect the number of deaths that are actually triggered by swine flu, even though the ultimate cause of death may be bacterial pneumonia, other infections, or organ failure. The calculation method is the same that is used to produce the 35,000 figure that is associated with deaths in a typical flu season, and the recalculation is meant to give a more direct comparability to that number.

The new figure does not mean that swine flu is more severe than researchers previously thought--simply that they are producing a more realistic total for the number of deaths caused by it.

-- Thomas H. Maugh II

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2008: Latino Electorate - Increasing Influence

2008: Latino Electorate - Increasing Influence: "When Reagan was first elected, only one percent of voters (and six percent of the population) were Hispanic. Just five years previously, jurisdictions with Hispanic voters had been added to the list of areas covered by the Voting Rights Act.

In 2008, after a rapid increase in participation, the Latino proportion of the electorate had increased almost tenfold (in part because of immigration) to 9% (compared to 15% of the population). Here's a comparison of 2004 and 2008:

Click to enlarge.

The most striking feature of the map is the increase in the Latino electorate in the South and other areas outside the Southwest.
Ten Second Summary

The Latino electorate is growing around the country, not just in the Southwest. Again, we see that we are not all alike, and more demographically uniform communities are more uniform in voting behavior as well.

The Usual Suspects

In 1848 the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo ending the war with Mexico provided for Mexican citizens living in territory ceded to the United States to become US citizens and vote. Most did indeed become citizens, and various states wasted no time in denying them the right to vote.

In 2008, seven states had more than 10% of the exit poll respondents describe themselves as Latino. Among them, there was essentially no change between 2004 and 2008 in Texas and Florida, and a slight decrease in California. The rest of the Southwest showed dramatic increases: from 8% of the electorate in 2003 to 13% of the electorate in 2008 (+63%) in Colorado, 10% to 15% in Nevada (+50%), 32% to 41% in New Mexico (+28%), and 12% to 16% in Arizona (+33%). The states without much change had the same status in 2004 and 2008 - uncompetitive for TX and CA, battleground for FL. The states with large increases, however, became fierce battlegrounds on the presidential level in 2008 - except for Arizona, which had some attention at the last minute - implying that campaigning and organizing likely played a large role in increasing the Latino electorate in this region.

The New South

A sixty percent increase in the share of the electorate that is Latino as we see in Colorado is damn impressive.

But how about a more than 400% increase? That's what we saw in Mississippi, which went from less than 1% Latino in 2004 to 4% in 2008.

Now, since we're looking at such small numbers, maybe we just see a statistical burp in Mississippi. Let's look elsewhere - we see a 300% increase in West Virginia, South Dakota, Montana, and Alabama. A 250% increase in Maryland. A 200% increase in South Carolina, North Carolina, Arkansas, Iowa, and Minnesota. A 100% increase in Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, North Dakota, Alaska, and New Hampshire.

These are all states that had a 0-3% Latino share of the electorate in 2004 and 2-7% in 2008. While that's small, it's enough now to be critical in close elections - such as the North Carolina race for president.

The interesting bit is that most of these states with dramatic growth have a geographic sweep, from the Deep South up to the Northern Plains (skipping the Southern Plains and most of the Midwest). Latino voters are clearly one important component of the New South.

Confirmation

All these single digit numbers still make me a bit twitchy, so I pulled up some 2000 Census data to look for some confirmation. It turns out there is a relationship between states with a rapidly increasing Latino share of the electorate and states with a high Latino growth rate, especially those with a high proportion of Latinos who say they moved to that state within five years preceding the census. It's a rough relationship, as we would expect when dealing with small numbers, but it looks real. We can conclude that the Latino vote is indeed increasing rapidly in large portions of the country. LINK GRAPH

The Votes

Here's how various Latino and Hispanic communities voted at the presidential level in 2008. Brazilian, which would not typically be considered Latino, and Guyanese are included simply because of geography.

Click to enlarge.

Support for Obama ranged from high to overwhelmingly high - except for the Cuban community in Miami-Dade county. This year, a nationwide Latino exit poll (conducted by email) by the William C. Vel?squez Institute (WCVI) showed nearly the same results as the National Election Pool exit poll - about 70% for Obama. (In 2004, the National Election Pool had some problems, such as oversampling the Cuban community.)

If we weight each Latino community by its proportion in the Latino electorate, we would come up with about 85% for Obama nationwide. This means the communities used to derive support levels for Obama were more Democratic than the nationwide Latino electorate. We see good evidence for this in the Mexican-American community. In Starr County and select precincts in Los Angeles, more than 95% of the population is Latino, and almost all of them are Mexican-American. Support for Obama in these two locations ran about 10 points higher than support among Mexican-Americans nationwide in the WCVI poll.

We can also see, as with African-Americans, that approval of President Bush in 2005-2006 was greater among Latinos who lived in states where Latinos made up a small proportion of the population, although the trend is much weaker than among African-Americans. Once again, it appears that people tend to vote more uniformly in more ethnically uniform geographies.

Click to enlarge.

Note on names: current exit polls use the term "Latino," so that is what I am using for current data, simply because the data under discussion results from those willing to check a box that says "Latino." As far as I know this is not a term with universal approval from those to which it is applied.

________________________________________________

This diary is the tenth in a series taking a close look at the 2008 electorate and exploring three themes: diversity within demographics, progressive feedback loops, and demographic change.

Previous diaries:

Looking Back

Alternate History

Why Republicans Should Be Really Scared

African-Americans - We Are Not All of Us Alike

East and South Asian Americans - Diverse and Growing

West Asian Americans - Rapid Change

Native Americans - Increasing Participation

Islander Americans - In Need of More Representation

Alaskan Natives - An Economic Factor?

Tomorrow: The European American Electorate: Tribal Politics Persist

Cross posted at DailyKos.

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