Little Black Egg

Palin's Solo Debut

2008-09-11T23:52:00.000-07:00

So, even on the cotton fluff "deferential" terms under which her first interview was to be granted, Sarah Palin still managed to declare a frightening willingness to go to war with Russia, and a notable ignorance of the foreign policy doctrine of the current Republican president.

And yet, the question as always is, beyond people who actually imagine that a world leader should actually have a handle on basic foreign policy and diplomacy, does anyone else, the majority of the American electorate know or care? Do they maybe somewhat cherish the Capraesque, or even Capra-lite-esque idea of an everywoman taking on the entrenched leadership of the world? The unconscious appeal of ignorance defeating expertise - i.e. the subliminal force behind the appeal of Being There and Dave? And with such a dynamic running for her, doesn't someone - especially an older, established, male member of the dreaded "liberal" media elite - daring to press her for actual positions and causing her to get flustered actually reinforce the desire for those supporting her to see her defeat all those smug know-it-alls?

Which is why Sarah Palin frightens me. She literally embodies the desire of every small town no-nothing or no-little Napoleon to take over the world and make it the way they believe it should be made, as if it were the easiest thing in the world for someone, as long as they're "outside the system". Meaning any legitimate criticism made about her lack of preparedness only amplifies her appeal.

But people do wake up from daydreams eventually. And I don't think it will take them two months to get there either.

Wetting the bed

2008-09-11T23:42:00.000-07:00

Whether Obama wins or loses, I'll always have a warm spot in my heart not just for Obama but also for the equally unflappable David Plouffe.

“We’re sensitive to the fluid dynamics of the campaign, but we have a game plan and a strategy,” said Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe. “We’re familiar with this. And I’m sure between now and Nov. 4 there will be another period of hand-wringing and bed-wetting. It comes with the territory.”

Listening to such focus, the sounds of a clear gaze and someone as preternaturally unshakeable as Obama himself, it's hard not believe they really do have confidence in their approach, as if they have somehow mystically figured a way to float above the fear and the escalating "bed-wetting" going on among Obama supporters, including certainly me, but also including much older, wiser folk who've witnessed a few more presidential campaigns than I have.

But reading his dulcimer tones of sweet, quiet confidence always lulls me back into the closest thing to a peaceful, happy slumber I'm likely to see in the next two months... speaking of which...

Water off a duck's back

2008-09-10T23:25:00.000-07:00

I was amazed today watching Obama literally - and quite obviously genuinely - laugh off everything the McCain camp is throwing at him. He really is preternaturally self-composed. It's deeply inspiring to watch. I know everyone wants to see him get rightfully righteous and in McCain's face, Huffington and more writing essays saying exactly that, but I think he realizes that's also what the McCain camp is trying to do, to get into his head before the debates, and he's just beyond giving them that satisfaction. Meanwhile, the press is starting to make a hash of the McCain campaign's non-stop blatant falsehoods and stupid accusations.

And after a fitful but intense night of sleeping and dreaming, I'd let it all go myself by this morning. Since the McCain camp really has gotten well beyond the point of self-parody, I guess the best thing is just to laugh at them, and realize that if the American people are actually going to fall for it again, honestly, after all of the last eight years, then... sigh...

I am going to start making my calls however, next week when we get back from NYC.

You Know and I Know

2008-09-09T23:01:00.000-07:00

The problem with reading blogs and agonizing over the politics, esp. God save us just about the ugliest politics ever, namely Presidential politics (is it just going to get uglier and uglier without end?), is that when a politician does something particularly sleazy, it's like YOU know and I know that it's sleazy, but it doesn't make a bit of difference in the larger universe where people are essentially being charged to believe the way their lizard brain wants them to feel - all freakish and paranoid. There's no battling the lizard brain, the lizard brain will make people do all sorts of counter-intuitive and self-immolating things in the name of the lizard brain, and I can safely say that unless Obama has some master plan for simplifying things to their simplest level for the simple folk in this horribly complex land, this ad is the Willie Horton ad to end all Willie Horton ads, down to the pics they pick to make him look like a sicko frickin perv. And I can throw dishese against the wall, scream my lungs out, pull my hair out by the roots, but it makes not one lick of difference, these twisted bastards are JUST DOING THEIR JOB. They don't have souls, souls would get in the way of business and... ew... souls?

And that's where I cease to be able to understand it. It's warfare I suppose, with the notable exception that wars are ostensibly fought - at least American wars - with some sort of tangible positive outcome, fought to achieve some moral good. While these political wars, these twisted ugly ends-unto-themselves, do nothing but mire this country further in the muck, right at the moment when the country can least handle it. Which also means, McCain - who endorses these ads - is so twisted and lost in himself, that... what? Country first, bullshit. No right-minded individual would stir up this negativity if he believed in country first (not that anyone would suspect it was anything but an empty slogan for him in any case.)

But can Obama recover from this? Would the country surprise me and finally turn away from such attempts in disgust? How much faith do I have in my fellow citizens. Not a lot.

Wake me up when it's over

2008-09-09T22:02:00.000-07:00

Of course I'm going to vote, but if this is what it's going to be like, if McCain is determined to make this the most disgustingly low-brow Presidential election ever (I realize it's a tough contest) then I have to stop paying attention now. (At least until the debates.)

I just handle this much ugly, it's horrible. I mean, McCain, really? This means this much to you? Really? And what are you going to actually do with this power once you have it? Nothing, not with a congress that won't have thing to do with you. Oh lord, maybe it really is time to leave the country.

A Viler Shade of Palin

2008-09-06T00:14:00.000-07:00

This is a late night thought but it's kind of a thorn I want to pull out of my side before going to bed. I guess I addressed it a bit already but I've really been remembering since listening to Palin's speech the sheer ugliness that American politics can get into, and why such an enormous amount of Obama's appeal is his truly steadfast refusal to go there. Throwing an elbow here and there, sure, but Palin's speech, and the reaction it was garnering from the crowd, was of a different magnitude altogether. There was something just a little bit like a cage of pitbulls - lipsticked and not - about that Republican crowd on Thursday. While Obama's speech - and so many of the Dem speeches - were a genuine celebration of possibility, a truly American sense of possibility, Palin was there with a permanent sneer and the desire and the power to throw politics right back into the unholy stinking gutter of contempt, empty vacous character assassination, and policy-free politics of personality that is by far the Republican party's - and its base's - least appealing character trait.

But what got to me really was a real sense that on a deep sense she meant it. With Giuliani's absurd political theater - a long-time mayor of New York railing about urban elitism (as if) - it just comes across as the pure act of a snake oil salesman reveling in his ability to rally the idiocracy. It's annoying, maddening in its sheer audacity of ridiculousness, but ultimately you can tell it's an act. With Palin, I don't feel that. That sneering vindictive spitefulness feels real, hellish and deep.

While there are all manner of reasons (namely an apparently unending stream of unhappy surprises from her past) that Team McCain is protecting the queen bee by shuttling her back to Alaska after a short tour of deep red country, I suspect that part of this is a realization that temperamentally she may simply be more than they had bargained for, and are genuinely afraid what might come up in a direct confrontation with professional journalists.

Barack vs. Bubba

2008-09-04T23:17:00.000-07:00

Since McCain's speech basically left me temporarily assuming Obama victory, I started thinking about something some annoyingly condescending conservative pundit had said about the only reason Obama was so wildly popular among liberals was that he was a "Numinous Negro". And I really, really thought about it. Is it true that the liberal frenzy is just a desire to redress old wrongs by electing a black man President?

In all honesty, there was a little yes but mostly no there's more to the story. Of course there's a great amount of excitement at what this means historically, and dismissive conservatives aside, historically transformative moments are self-explanatory. Of COURSE electing a black man President will be historic, even if, in a way, the noteworthy nature of this moment is simply to negate the idea that it should even be noteworthy.

The mostly "no" part though is this: Barack Obama is clearly a singularly brilliant and talented individual, and the thought that he was merely chosen because of his color is ridiculous on its face. This is proven almost by the nature of the primary itself, when two equally historic candidates were running neck and neck to the bitter end. One had to be chosen, and largely because Obama knows how to create a movement around him, and has the brain, presence, policy wonkery, hidden electoral wisdom, and vocal cords to do it, he succeeded. Even when I step back and realize I'm being taken in by the political theater, the fact is I AM being taken in by the political theater, and I'm thankful, truly thankful, that someone has been kind enough to provide such wonderful political theater in my lifetime! We want to believe, and I truly believe that America functions better as a country when we are provided someone (when they provide themselves) to believe in. There's a reason the American Dream is called the American Dream and not the American Reality. Conservatives miss the forest for the trees when they miss that salient point (which is surprising considering Reagan was a master manipulator of the American Dream beyond compare).

I went a step further and thought about Barack Obama versus Bill Clinton. If Bill would have been in THIS primary, would he have won? And that's a very tough question to answer. John Edwards really never had a chance this time around, and it wasn't just because he was the white guy. I've never been sold on Edwards. I never doubt his sincerity (well...) but there's always just something about him that felt off, and I was never in the least surprised when it came out he'd been having an affair. I think it was this sense about him - sort of a preening self-regard despite the populist rhetoric, that allowed the comments about his $400 haircuts to stick. And Hillary just suffered from a combination of too much baggage and a confused campaign message. I loved listening to her go off on policy, it was wonderful to behold, but ultimately it was clear that she did not have a proper grasp on the necessary theater for the moment. The movement maker was the student of Alinsky, Obama.

So, Bill versus Barack.... My money in that contest would be on Bill, even with the "historic nature" business riding behind such a contest. Mainly this comes down to Bill's ease with "just folks". He doesn't have to force it at all, it just flows out of him like honey. Barack, beyond his indisputable gifts, beyond a certain degree of casual cajolery he can allow himself, doesn't ultimately project ease with folks the way Bill can, or rather sometimes it's there and sometimes it's not. Policy-wise I'd be curious to see how the battle would have gone, although I think it's clear it would have been simply another case of the hair-splitting that went on in this primary. So it would have to come down to personalities. And in that contest - it's tough, but just-folks-but-also-strangely-genius-Rhodes-Scholar-with-golden-tongue- and-hypnotizingly-strange-pointer-finger Bill Clinton I think wins. It's just Bill - as singular and exotic a creature as Barack Obama - and something about him just makes you want to let him get away with everything. Something, no matter how philosophically open-minded he might be, is just that much a little stiff and judgmental about Obama, or at least feels that way.

So I'm curious how Barack will season the actual business of governing. I have little doubt he'll be an effective, enormously conscientious, policy wonk's policy wonk of a President. My main curiosity is how he will work on the national sensibility in the long term. I kind of suspect he'll end up being a sort of distant Woodrow Wilson type - having mastered what political skills he needed to get to where he needed to be and then moving beyond them - but who knows, maybe he'll favor a weekly town hall approach a la FDR... But I somehow doubt that he will be as comfortable in the role as Bill ever was (for better and definitely for worse).

Zzzzz

2008-09-04T22:50:00.000-07:00

McCain's final speech was pretty much a dud, esp. contrasted with last night's side of moose served raw. What he really needed to do tonight was talk specifics, but by the time he meandered his way soporifically to the specifics it was hard to pay attention to them, which might have been the intent since there really wasn't much specific about the specifics.

What I largely got from the majority of the economic stuff was - in code of course - we really like it when people do stuff for themselves so when I become president I'll talk a lot of happy talk to the economically oppressed about bein' a rill Amerkin and pullin' yerself up by the bootstraps. In other words nada there for the folks who are really looking for some kind of plan. The usual straightfaced lie about Obama's tax plan, of course. The educational voucher stuff - really? I guess it gets the base fired up (not like serving up Obama Tartare, but it's a little bit of a red meat to this clearly Palin-hungry crowd). And then "oh my healthcare plan"... which is really not much of a healthcare plan, except maybe in terms planning to let employers off the hook of actually having to provide healthcare... but it's not "national health care"! (And the Sarahcudans go wild... yay! down with the pinko commies who think it's cool for everyone to be covered!)

Finally he gets a little actually excited about the energy plan, pushing once again the falsehood that Obama's against drilling and nuclear, when in reality there isn't much daylight between the two plans... the only difference I really sense is that Obama seems to be obsessively focused on it and therefore capable of actually achieving something with it, while McCain just seems mildly more interested in it than he is about the other policy stuff, which is to say "at all" as opposed to "not at all". He attempts to seem "enthusiastic" about it, but one can feel the quotes.

By that point frankly I'd drifted away and missed what was apparently the best part of his speech, the part about his biography as a POW, which clearly seems to be the only tangible remaining reason (since his maverick credentials are out the window) to vote him into office. I caught the very end of it, which was touching, but he also struck me as almost pleading... I know I'm just reading this into it - but his tone was one almost of, please, this is my last shot... An approach that totally works on me... fortunately I've got Sarah Palin to keep me strong.

Overall, meh. Even the offensive stuff was so unconvincingly delivered, or hopelessly oblique, that I didn't even care. I think he may very well have extinguished the Palin frenzy. Some commenter at TPM suggested that it won't be long before Palin pushes McCain off the ticket. And if independents were looking for inspiring or encouraging policy specifics, unless they were leaning so far toward McCain so as to topple in the breeze of anti-national health care fever or just have this thing for stale Republican boilerplate, I really doubt they would have been sold.

So maybe, whew..... But give it a week.

OK, maybe I over-reacted

2008-09-04T10:56:00.001-07:00

But that particular line of conservative attack-doggity gets to me, because frankly I grew up believing in it. So I immediately assume that it has a mass appeal that it probably, in the end, doesn't. And the reactions from independents in the focus groups I've read seem to indicate the fact that she over-reached with the negative stuff in a big way.

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The Dread

2008-09-03T23:46:00.000-07:00

The more I think about her, the more Sarah Palin fills me with the worst feeling of dread. McCain on his own I could handle as President. I'd be crushed, especially after this campaign when I lost whatever real respect I used to have for him, but y'know I'd be able to handle it ultimately. Sarah Palin erases that comfort level completely. Forget the fact that she really has no idea about governance on a national scale, she scares me on a biblical level. She is my worst nightmare of a conservative, self-righteous, self-confident, deeply spiteful but with a perfect smile, absolutely convinced about her personal correctness while blissfully capable of floating over personal cotradiction, and completely willing to spout whatever lie flashes by her eyes on the teleprompter without compunction - because it's falsehood for a higher cause. It's Christianity on steroids and acid, and it freaks the hell out of me.

I never bought that Bush was actually Christian, it always felt like positioning, same as with McCain - I could be wrong admittedly - and Obama is the kind of Christian-of-doubt that I can fully sympathize with. But Sarah Palin feels like the real (scary) deal, and if it's true that she's an adherent to end times theology, I have to admit, the idea that she might end up in the White House stirs up all my freaky childhood beliefs about the apocalypse a bit as well.

I wish I were kidding. When does the Mayan calendar end? Thank you Google: December 2012 (same end date as X-Files, I think).

So please, let's not let it happen.

Sexist double-standard?

2008-09-03T23:20:00.000-07:00

Looking out at the ocean of buttons saying things like "The hottest VP from the coldest state" and "Hoosiers for the hot chick" I couldn't help but think, Biden was accused of being sexist for saying that she was better looking than him?

But then this was the same evening when Mitt Romney was raving about the problems of "promiscuity in the high schools" while the pregnant, unwed seventeen-year-old daughter of the VP nominee sat in the front row. Republicans are so blissfully free of the effects of cognitive dissonance.

It almost makes me wish I were a Republi... no, no it doesnt.

I am afraid

2008-09-03T22:17:00.001-07:00

Coming from exactly the kind of place filled with exactly the kind of people to whom Sarah Palin will appeal - truth or the lack thereof in her speech be damned - I am seriously at this moment dreading the onset of another Republican administration.

She really is a pitbull in lipstick, and frankly while I was liking her early in the speech, by the end I had a serious bad taste in my mouth. Other pundits were saying that would probably be a general reaction, of really walking away thinking she's not really so much charming as actually mean-spirited with a pretty smile. I hope, but doubt, that is true. I know where I come from, and this kind of shiny red poison apple feels like exactly what the good people of these United States love to swallow on down.

A Tale of Two Cities

2008-09-02T23:39:00.001-07:00

Just realized that the main problem with the RNC this year, besides the fact that it has the curse of being Republican in an anti-Republican year, is that the DNC last week had so much pre-packaged drama. How would Michelle Obama come across? Would the party be "unified"? Would Hillary pull a convention shocker and attempt to take over? Would Bill stick to the program during his speech? Would Obama be able to actually pull off justifying an acceptance speech before a stadium of 75,000?

And some kind of miracle happened that really went beyond something that could be choreographed. First Teddy Kennedy provided a stirring reminder of the Kennedy blessing on the house of Obama, then Michelle Obama gave a wonderful and heartfelt biographical piece, ending with the "Wizard of Oz" appearance of Barack Obama on the huge screen talking to his family spontaneously on the DNC stage. Then the next night, following a fantastic crowd-warmer from Brian Schweitzer, Hillary blew everyone away with what some considered her best speech ever, and a quote-unquote "full-throated" endorsement of Obama that started about the fifth sentence in. Then the next day the actual nomination - which I remembered liking watching when I was a kid but hadn't seen since - had this really genuinely joyous sense of the best kind of political theater, the best because everyone feels genuinely in the moment and inspired, and it was capped in a delirious crescendo by Hillary's short but sweet request to stop the count and declare Obama the nominee by acclimation. Then the next night, when everyone was just thinking about Bill's speech, there was the surprise star turn by Kerry who enjoyed fully his moment to stick it to the Republicans. And then Bill reminded everyone what they always forget to remember - that he can deliver a speech that goes right to your spine and you don't even know it's happening. And throughout the week, the complaints that there weren't enough hits on McCain slowly dissipated.

But still there was the final big show.... trepidation ran high... were the columns too much? Would they give the McCainiacs fodder for more celebrity ads? Would the sheer size and spectacle feed into the celebrity meme? Would he get lost in one of his lofty speeches, the kind of speeches his followers swooned over but that the people he needed to appeal to were starting to complain were too airy and not filled enough with specifics? Would Obama really be able to deliver? Would he be able to put the "high" in "Mile High"?

And then, after a day filled with people trying to make their way through the long lines, so's not to miss Stevie Wonder singing "Signed, Sealed, Delivered" and a few preliminary speeches, followed by the obligatory (and pretty good) biopic, narrated by David Straithairn (impeccable taste in the Obama camp as usual), Obama walked out to the strains of a U2 song that I love, "City of Blinding Lights". And then, he delivered, to an audience not of 75,000 but nearly 90,000, and really, to a record televised/internetted audience of at least 38,000,000 and quite probably closer to 50,000,000. And he delivered a speech filled with specifics, a "grounded" speech as they called it - which disappointed some, but was exactly what he needed to do, along with bringing the fight directly to McCain, as in, in McCain's face.

.... and the point is, how could anyone - esp. a party on the popular outs, but really anyone - compete with an event like that? St. Paul is just guaranteed to disappoint.

Instead, the main drama is 1) will Sarah Palin deliver a decent enough speech to not completely tank on a political level in the non-koolaid drinking public's eyes? and 2) will McCain make it through his acceptance speech without laughing that creepy little nervous laugh of his or uttering a patently insincere "my friends"... And really all of this is subsumed by Hurricane Sarah in any case, the ever-burgeoning pile of Palin data, from the frivolous to the silly to the scandalous to the slightly weird to the genuinely incriminating. Maybe McCain took a gamble that there would just be so MUCH stuff that people would just end up paying attention to none of it. Not kidding.

All the rest, all of the wholly predictable dittohead posturing at the convention, isn't going to register on anyone's radar, and why should it?

Yes, Waterloo, but not just for McCain

2008-09-02T11:25:00.001-07:00

I think the main effect of the choice of Palin, besides hastening McCain's rapid descent in the polls and final loss in November, will be essentially the entire Republican Party and all of its spokespeople irrevocably tossing their credibility in the flames. Fantastic! It really couldn't happen to a better bunch of folks.

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Is Palin McCain's Waterloo?

2008-09-02T02:00:00.001-07:00

While the original announcement, after Obama's historic acceptance speech Thursday (which somehow already feels as though it occurred weeks ago), certainly had it's intended effect of throwing the news immediately off of the wholly successful Democratic convention, it's difficult to see how McCain's campaign is going to survive the choice of Sarah Palin for the VP nominee in the long term.

Even beyond the fact that she now seems to be the gift that keeps on giving to the Obama campaign in terms of eye-opening revelations from the political to the personal, the fact that the move from the start was perceived as a desperate gambit - a "Hail Mary pass" as I think everyone liberal to conservative has described it - creates a perception both that, first off, McCain's position is more desperate than I think was generally perceived, and, secondly and more importantly, that he is more than willing to make rash, unexamined moves with very little forethought - a quality I think even the American electorate can process after the last eight years as one that we would be much better avoiding in our next President.

But, of course, after the last eight years, trying to process the inner mental workings of the American electorate is clearly an impenetrable task. Still, from poll results and the results of focus groups run gauging the reaction to McCain's choice of Palin, it does seem as though the Hail Mary pass is eventually going to be looked at as more of a punt.

Wow.

2008-08-06T21:34:00.001-07:00

I'm not one to go goo-goo gaga over web technology, but Flock, despite my initial hesitation, is pretty damn cool. Including this auto-blog function...

Audiobooks, my new best friend

2008-07-29T23:47:00.000-07:00

One thing for which I'm discovering a new-found appreciation is audiobooks. Since I commute by train, and wear my ipod at the gym, and wash dishes with the headset on, I'm learning that that time adds up to a whole lot of book listening that can be going on. So far I've made my way through Obama's narrations of his own two books (albeit abridged) and right now I'm listening to Jeremy Irons' recording of The Alchemist, which I'm liking a whole lot more than I expected to.

The plus is that - if the reader is good, and both Obama and Irons are not surprisingly fantastic - I can "read" books like I haven't been able to read them before and really want to pay attention in a way that's been difficult with parenthood. The negative is that the eye reads a whole lot faster than the voice, so that for a very large book, for example Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, the total running time is a prohibitive 38 or so hours of listening time. The then-positive is that that is probably a book that I will NEVER read if I try to make my way through the hard copy. So I might just give it a shot by audio after all.

On my mind

2008-07-29T23:34:00.000-07:00

Commenting on this entire political cycle just feels beside the point somehow. I'm sick and tired of it, I just want it to be over, but it's still got three months to go and I completely fail in my desire to look away. At least unti the Democratic convention, what is the point? Obama's going to continue to take his "victory lap", McCain is going to continue to toss any insane accusation at him that crosses his campaign's mind, the polls are going to hover in the "close but in Obama's favor" range, everyone's going to argue about why Obama just isn't doing better, one outlier poll will indicate a runaway victory for McCain, the tensions will mount, the tempers will flare, the pundits will declare one or the other the obvious choice, while other pundits talk about how until the conventions none of this matters. Lather rinse repeat. And yet I STILL CAN'T LOOK AWAY. As if the minute I stop looking some fundamental campaign-changing event will suddenly take place and suddenly McCain's new found momentum will vault him and his scary smile into the White House for another four years of a president that is wholly ineffective, that no one likes all that much not even the Republicans, and that everyone crings and tunes out whenever he speaks.

And part of me - beaten down by eight long years of the mind-numbingly relentless constitutional debauchery of the Bush Administration - simply can't let me believe that it's actually possible Obama could win. Everyone blissfully forgets who's making our voting machines, among other things. And Ohio - Diebold land - still seems to have the power of being a decisive state yet again. Oy. It's going to be a long 98 more days...

Let's do this thing

2008-07-09T00:29:00.000-07:00

I've decided to live up to the slogan finally. Maybe this can save me from fixating...

Not bloody likely....

As for Wall-E

2008-07-09T00:10:00.000-07:00

Worth every minute that Wall-E is on the screen, but I hate to admit it but I was a little underwhelmed. Maybe I was just tired, or I mean, I was tired, so maybe that affected my viewing.

But that weird thing with using a combination of real actors and shapeless Pixar pseudo-people just was a break in the fourth wall that my mind couldn't get its way around. And since the eco-message was hardly a stunning revelation for me, that part was, eh, okay, glad to see the dystopian message is being spread to the masses but, y'know, here comes the deluge of Disney produced Wall-E toys...

But I liked the love story, and there was something so compellingly innocent and childlike in Wall-E, things that made me get misty-eyed thinking about Juliana, that I certainly liked, edging on loved, a good part of the movie. I just feel like the first 40 minutes, yes! And then the second half just felt a little stitched on and compulsory, minus the dance in space, Wall-E's original flight in space, and... hmmm.... that's about it! Ratatouille still wins my favorite Pixar movie award! Yay Remy! And Juliana can't wait for Desperaux...

Okay, I admit it, I'm addicted

2008-07-09T00:02:00.000-07:00

November can't come too soon. Every day, it's like drugs, my need to get on the web and look at Five Thirty Eight, or Andrew Sullivan, or Kevin Drum, or TPM, or Politico, or the Corner if I want to get my blood boiling, or etc. etc. And I realize it's all just some weird psychological thing, it's gone beyond rationality, it's gone beyond the issues, I fully admit that to a certain degree it really is about the cult of personality, though my very strong caveat on that particular statement is that I would be vehemently behind whoever was the Democratic candidate, it just happens to be the case that this time around the Democratic candidate happens to be one of the most compelling presidential candidates of all time. And on the one hand I suppose it's a profound and wonderful miracle that he's ahead of the game at all (think fifty years ago... think ten!) but the historic nature of his run, combined with the fact that he's just flat out brilliant, combined with the fact that the Republican alternative is about as compelling as molding cheese and as likely to make effective change from eight years of Bush, combined with the fact that the polls are just way to close (albeit in the right direction), and it all adds up to four more months of godless agony.

But I have to figure out how to disengage, it's starting to freak me out a little. Politics and food - I just can't stop myself. It sucks.

Mike TV

2008-05-09T23:54:00.000-07:00

One way I've started trying to avoid politics is, it's brilliant really, by watching TV online instead. Because that's much more important in the end, right? Specifically, I've been watching the free HD versions of Lost on ABC.com. They look great, and all seasons are free. Free! In HD! It's like some insane gift from the gods. (Granted with the connection I've got at home it's slightly less than HD, but who cares? It looks great and no one is looking that gift horse in the mouth.) Figuring it can't last long I'm trying to suck them down as quickly as possible, which of course for a working full time parent who's also attempting to do something constructive with his off time is not really that quickly at all. (Although somehow I have managed to put away four episodes this week.)

I've been kind of studying it while I watch it. Trying to figure out the keys are to its impossibly addictive nature. I'm too tired to lay out all the theories here but one of the brilliant things they did was setting up the formula with the stories in the past. Also, just deciding to go there with the implausibilities and then running beyond. And when I'm a little more awake sometime I want to talk about why... but it's been a long hard day.

Politics

2008-05-09T23:36:00.000-07:00

I realize I've been avoiding writing about politics really. That doesn't mean I've kicked the habit, though I wish I could. I wish I could limit it to: I'm going to vote in November, I know who I'm going to vote for, full stop, move on. But I just can't help myself. I have to read the news obsessively and political blogs obsessively even though I know it has very little to do with me and very little to do with life in general frankly.

One thing I've noticed that makes it easier this year is just simply knowing that George W. Bush is not going to be running again. My respect for McCain has taken some serious hits in the last eight years but he comes nowhere near the level of distaste that I've always felt towards Bush, and frankly I doubt he ever could. (Well never say never.) But I have a very good feeling about Democratic prospects this year, Obama's proven himself a formidable candidate, and probably most importantly versus McCain an exceedingly cool and calm one (which at some point is guaranteed to unnerve a man notorious for his temper).

Clinton meanwhile seems to want to burn down her entire reputation on the way out, which is just sad more than anything. I just can't get my mind around that "working Americans, hardworking Americans, white Americans" statement. It would be one thing if she were stating the fact that she does better than Obama among whites, sure, I mean it's a fact. But to phrase it like that, oh my God, stupid and offensive and just frankly impolitic at its core.... Do we even somewhat conceivably want that kind of potential "misspeaking" going on in the White House? Also the "obliterate Iran" comment. And the "sniper" comment. And the whole thing with undermining her opponents credentials and putting the Republican nominee on a higher pedestal. It's just, as she put it, "a pattern emerging". And it's a pattern that frankly is going to be a stain on her future political career.

But like I said, I'm trying to emotionally divest myself of politics... trying, failing yes, but trying... at least trying to be conscious about it's lack of actual importance to me. Or at least it's relatively low degrees of actual importance.

But man I do love Obama.

Music

2008-04-17T00:45:00.000-07:00

Is something I've been rediscovering for the past year and a half. I'd kind of sucked myself into a black hole of all my favorites from the past and sealed off the progress of music in history, hoping it wasn't true that there were actually people making music past say 1992 that was worth listening to.

That's complete hyperbole of course. I'd listened to at least two albums recorded after 1992 before my recent rash of listening.
Turns out in any case I was completely wrong and music just keeps growing and growing, despite the fact that no one can make a legitimate living from recorded music anymore, it doesn't seem to be stopping anyone in the least.
While my ignorance of music post-1992 is largely a hyperbolic fiction, the fact is that while I thought I had some idea of the music out there, in truth every time I thought I'd even begun to see the tip of the iceberg, I realized that that was really just an icechip at the tip of the tip of the iceberg.
Which leads me to wonder, how do people ever find enough damn time to listen to that much music? Bob Boylen or whatever his name is with All Songs Considered, Nic Harcourt, sure they're paid to do nothing but listen to music all the time and bully for them. But what about the average schlump with a day job? Add wife and child?
So thank god for shared iTunes libraries at work. Thank God for music-obsessed friends with a lot of money and nothing else they want to do with their time. Thank God for All Songs Considered and Radio Paradise and Pandora and KCRW.
No purpose is being served by this enumerated list, but, eh, whatever.
Is this actually my first post on music on a blog named after a song?

Which leads me to want to maybe focus on this for a while? Or, y'know, the miracle and wonder and misery and crushed dreams of creativity in general.

As for politics

2008-04-17T00:26:00.000-07:00

Obama. Can I say, of course? Especially lately Clinton has suddenly made me realize why people could ever have disliked the Clintons so much. I never really understood the crazed, feverish tone of Clinton-haters, and now suddenly I'm thinking, "Hmmmm..."

I read Audacity of Hope a few months ago (or really had read to me by the author by virtue of the modern miracle of the recorded voice captured by spinning disc borrowed from the local library, transplanted into the pure binary audioverse of the Ipod and played back mostly in a vehicle moving between home and work) which just struck me as unhealthily honest for a book written by a politician, and that was it, I was hooked. That he has even made it this far, to me, slightly staggers the imagination.

But that said, I'm seriously attempting to shut off that part of my head. I've realized that politics is an unhealthy obsession, one that I've wasted far too much time on in this life, and one that in the real world will only bring a sensitive soul unnecessary torments, when there are so many genuine, real, personal torments available by the bucketload that one should be using ones meager supply of seconds on this planet to deal with and grapple with and write endless screeds about. I'll vote and do my part and all that and break down and blog about this in the future again because I'm weak, but for the moment I just want to acknowledge a truth of which I've become cleanly aware, before going there again.

Weird Internet Twins

2008-04-17T00:09:00.000-07:00

About the same time a month ago when I actually looked at this thing again and realized, whoa, it was still here, I stumbled on another blog (thelittleblackegg as opposed to littleblackegg) and found a like-minded soul - I guess not surprisingly considering the choice of blog names - only far better read and listened and generally evolved, right down to the fact that he's making a terrible go of it as an independent writer and copyeditor and basically doing anything he can to keep it together and not have to retreat back into an office ever again. He's not really doing very well at it, but the salient point is that he has this brain going a million miles an hour to my hundred and he really is obsessed with music and books in a way that I used to be (and dream of still being). Admittedly I was never quite as eloquent with my obsession as he is, or if I was I've forgotten, but in any case here I am, harried, overworked, overtired, extremely parental, and that state of being is one which I am now currently in the process of re-establishing as my ideal, but am far from reaching as my actual.

And then Kelley just let me know that I guess I let ownership of robbfritz.com lapse, and some Broadway junkie, maybe an actor?, gobbled it up to start a now six-month outdated blog on the Broadway strike, which is like some quantum mechanically generated other-worldly weird ghost of my high school self out there wandering the streets and getting all feverish over Broadway and writing a blog about it. So there they are, two strange internet twins. Kelley mentioned after finding the robbfritz.com site that there's a term she read for it, "googlegangers", which, yeah, there it is.

Now what was I talking about?

2008-04-17T00:05:00.000-07:00

I've been wanting to do this again, but just didn't want to get back into the political thing, and didn't know how else to start and basically just got all confused and balled up and stopped thinking about starting all over again.

Eels song Going Fetal.... yessir. The blogging fetal position. Current politics and a lack of creativity in general are going to drive me there.

Wow

2008-03-13T02:59:00.001-07:00

This is still here.

The reason

2006-08-19T01:43:00.000-07:00

Among many, for starting over, is that while I have endless reasons to feel blessed over the past year and a half or so - namely Juliana Miles and the new job - there is that corrosive feeling that I've started to get, the danger alert, that life is flying by with no proper recording of the events and though I'm keeping a diary, at least sporadically, perhaps spasmically, something about a blog, namely it's accessibility from work or anywhere, but also it's possibly though not actually public nature, lends a certain vitality and openness and also tendency toward brevity that is all a good thing.

The longer time goes on without writing, "real" writing whatever that might mean, the more terrified I become of being consumed by the ocean of unordered information, impressions, history, memory, nostalgia, endless unmarked fathomless depths of whatnot and who can say? And especially now that I am actively involved in a form of willfully transient writing for a living, putting all of my time and mental energy into producing work whose maximum shelf life is one day and one day only - the spiritually void cousin of a Tibetan sand mandala - I have to forcibly stand back and attempt, however psychologically daunting the attempt, to get my mind straight and keep things in context and remember there once was this thing I'd heard about called the "bigger picture". And that's what this is about.

America Waking Up?

2005-03-30T11:08:00.000-08:00

Albeit a good four or five months too late. But though I can't really believe my eyes, the confluence of his Social Security nonsense and the Terry Schiavo idiocy seems to be taking its toll. The lowest rating of his presidency, what more does a person need to say? Only this, that the most interesting thing about these poll results is that the very people who the Terry Schiavo move was supposed to appeal to - i.e. the Christian base - were exactly the people whose support dropped out the hardest. It's reassuring to know that even they have a breaking point for acceptable levels of political pandering...

p.s. Call me nuts, but I have a crazy feeling that there's a terrorist alert of some sort coming on....

Finally, Backlash in the GOP

2005-03-30T10:49:00.000-08:00

This op-ed essay by John Danforth in the New York Times today is a perfect statement of what is now, after the Terry Schiavo debacle, going to become a far more pronounced source of division in the Republican party. Unfortunately, I've been saying the same to my parents for years, that this brand of "Conservativism" has nothing to do with the small government principles of a true Republican, but since my parents ARE the Christian Right, well this direction of the Grand Ol' Party is just fine with them.... Fortunately, the remaining sane and rational and truly conservative (as opposed to theocratic)Republicans are finally getting sick and tired of their enslavement to a group that has nothing to do with their core political beliefs.

Speaking of Republicans and Terry Schiavo, my parents and I did well during their visit last week. Terry Schiavo only came up once, while mom was (I think pointedly) reading about it on the (of course) Fox News website. That's when I started hearing for the first time all about these accusations that her husband had tried to kill her (this accusation from a former caregiver of Terry Schiavo's that even her parents wouldn't allow to testify in court), among other Fox-induced extravagances. Can someone please tell me when people finally lost their minds and decided that The Star and The National Enquirer set the watermark for journalistic excellence in this country? Because it's frightening contemplating the hallucinatory haze enveloping all of the Fox News watchers in this country (a rapidly growing number I'm afraid). And now CNN and the rest of the gang are clearly beginning to decide that one has no choice in this fucked up day and age but to stoop to conquer...

Without Delay

2005-03-24T14:10:00.000-08:00

Maybe the writing really is on the wall. Tom DeLay is sounding more and more desperate these days, which makes this speech he gave to the Family Research Council, in which he compares his own embattled condition to that of "lucid" Terry Schiavo (both according to poor Tom are being "killed" by some kind of liberal gestapo in this country), sound not just loathsome but kind of confused and pathetic.

In any case, you too can become a part of that liberal gestapo. Go and sign up here to go help pull the Hammer down.

What politics is really about

2005-03-14T11:33:00.000-08:00

This depressing little piece by David Broder in the Washington Post says oh so much about the state of politics in Washington, concerning policies which will start to more and more effect all of us, most notably those of us on the lesser end of the American financial spectrum. The cynical of course will say, "It was ever thus." But if you start to look at how the income gap between rich and poor has been growing over the past twenty years - google around, you can find these stats - it becomes clear that, no, in fact we seem to be entering a new age of oligarchical feudalism. And it will all happen (is happening) before anyone will ever begin to really be aware that it's taken place. By all indicators, it feels as though we're just at the beginning of this wave. Anyone who has serious misgivings about a lot of things taking place in our society right now are probably tapping into this... Just call me Cassandra...

Okay I'm Posting Already

2005-03-09T17:00:00.000-08:00

In order to quiet the masses screaming for fresh entries (ha!) I'm linking to Kevin Drum on this extremely enlightening bit of new tax legislation in Texas. You can use it to silence your Republican friends who would like to pretend that the Republican party is about ANYTHING besides making the wealthy wealthier at the expense of the lesser fortunate... And the Republican author of the bill, apparently emboldened by what he considers Republican hegemony in Texas, doesn't even choose to lie about this, or even spin it in any way whatsoever! Hey, at least he's honest!

In fact that's all I'm going to do now is tell people on this blog to go read Kevin Drum, daily. Too busy to do any original thinking lately at least politically.... If I do blog it's just going to be regurgitated from some other blog I've been checking out. Hey at least I'm honest!

One thing I'd really wanted to link to was a Paul Krugman article from a couple of weeks ago that was all about how we must always keep in mind that when the Bush White House is making a big circus out of something like Social Security, half of what they're doing is creating a smoke screen for a thousand other things that they are doing below the radar.

Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana put it slightly differently last week when he was non-plussed by Bush's attempt to sell Social Security privatization at a meeting of the US Governors in the White House:

But Schweitzer compared Bush's promotion of Social Security changes to a magician with a hat in his right hand that he is waving around with "wide gestures" to distract his audience.

"Today we're talking about Social Security, something that might happen 20, 30, 40 years from now," Schweitzer said. "But guess what's really happening, over in the left hand? We're cutting Medicaid. We're cutting programs in the heartland."

Everything I read about Governor Schweitzer makes me think (as I can tell someone somewhere wants me to think) that this man is the man to watch for a Presdential bid sooner rather than later. Could he be the next Clinton?

Catch-22, W Style Part II

2005-02-10T16:04:00.000-08:00

The New York Times has a fantastic(ally damning) editorial about Bush Administration budget math gymnastics, that as involved and absurd as it might be, doesn't really begin to capture fully the nightmare of deception that is the current White House Budget (for a more thorough thrashing I would recommend this bit from Salon's War Room).

Catch-22, W-Style

2005-02-10T13:54:00.000-08:00

Okay, this little quote from our illustrious Harvard MBA “CEO” President attempting to describe the whys and wherefores of Social Security “reform” is by now infamous and blogged to death:

THE PRESIDENT: Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those -- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be -- or closer delivered to what has been promised.
Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the -- like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate -- the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those -- if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.

Okay, better? I'll keep working on it.

At the moment, I happen to be reading Catch-22, and the following passage struck me as strangely appropriate. I’ve edited it somewhat to clarify its relevance to our current “dialogue”:

Yossarian was still puzzled, for it was a business matter, and there was much about business matters that always puzzled him.

“Let me try to explain it to you again,” (Bush) offered with growing weariness and exasperation, jerking his thumb toward the (red-stater) with the sweet tooth, still grinning beside him. “I knew he wanted the (guaranteed benefits) more than the (Social Security privatization). Since he doesn’t understand a word of English, I made it a point to conduct the whole transaction in English.”

“Why didn’t you just hit him over the head and take the (guaranteed benefits) away from him?” Yosarrian asked.

Pressing his lips together with dignity, Milo shook his head. “That would have been most unjust,” he scolded firmly. “Force is wrong, and two wrongs never make a right. It was much better my way. When I held the (Social Security privatization) out to him and reached for the (guaranteed benefits), he probably thought I was offering to trade.”

“What were you doing?”

“Actually, I was offering to trade, but since he doesn’t understand English I can always deny it.”

“Suppose he gets angry and wants the (guaranteed benefits)?”

“Why, we’ll just hit him over the head and take them away from him,” (Bush) answered without hesitation. He looked from Yosarrian to McWatt and back again. “I really can’t see what everyone is complaining about. We’re all much better off than before. Everybody is happy but this (red-stater), and there’s no sense worrying about him, since he doesn’t even speak our language and deserves whatever he gets. Don’t you understand?”

But Yosarrian still didn’t understand either how (Bush) could buy eggs in Malta for seven cents apiece and sell them at a profit in Pianosa for five cents…

Some black & white about Social Security privatization

2005-02-04T15:14:00.000-08:00

It's great to see the kind of person conservatives will listen to (i.e. a successful businessman and investment guru) cutting through the crap about Bush's planned Social Security "reform" and pointing out where the real problem lies - with the budget deficit - a real problem that Bush pays lip service to each year during his State of the Union addresss and then promptly drops like a hot potato.

May there be much more of the same commentary coming from the same quarters...

Remember when Kenny Boy was Junior's Bestest Friend?

2005-02-04T09:59:00.000-08:00

Remember when Enron was the biggest contributor to the Bush campaign, and Ken Lay was giving Bush a plane to fly around the country and campaign? Remember when Schwarzenegger, among other Republicans, was meeting in secretive sessions with Ken Lay? Remember when former members of, or consultants for, or those otherwise financially indebted to Enron populated the Bush administration? (One of them has just now been voted our Attorney General.) One of the many many things that make the Bush Corporation so happy that America has the collective attention span and memory of an ant.
Anyway, here are tapes from Enron, and this time there's no dancing around the fact that they were intentionally rigging power outages in California. That sentence actually deserves multiple exclamation points, but I resisted... Welcome to the state of our country today. Long live Freedom!

For those of you confronted by rabidly preening conservatives, post-Iraqi election

2005-02-04T09:56:00.000-08:00

Perhaps this article by Arianna Huffington might help somewhat. Whatever you might think about Arianna personally (if you think anything at all whatsoever about Arianna personally) this is a particularly concise and clear-eyed summary of everything the Bush administration hopes the Iraqi election will make everyone forget...

Train Wrecks Past and Train Wrecks to Be

2005-02-02T09:18:00.000-08:00

This essay by James Carroll in The Boston Globe strikes me as scarily dead-on, especially his predictions for how the Iraq debacle will play out in the long term.

And of course, the elections are perfectly timed to lead in to Herr President Bush's hour long commercial for Wall Street that will be this State of the Union address. The logic of course is that, well sure the reason we actually went to Iraq didn't exist at all, but now look at the happy results. So, sure, Americans really aren't buying wholeheartedly that there actually is a Social Security crisis, but privatization will work out just like Iraq see? At least the RNC is hoping this is how it will play out... At this point however, since Harry Reid has declared that there will be absolutely no Senate Democratic support for the President's plan for privatization (or personalization or warmfuzzyation or cuddlyteddybearation or whatever the RNC has decided to call it) of Social Security, it would appear to be dead in the water in any case. And some members of congress, such as Gene Taylor from Mississippi, are producing wonderfully lucid justifications for their opposition. One can only hope and pray that Dems follow his lead en masse and take this as an opportunity to parade the domestic debacle of fiscal policy that Bush has gotten away with now for four years. Apropos of this, this report by the GAO, entitled The Long Term Fiscal Challenge, one hopes would be a wake up call of some sort for someone in power in Washington, not to mention the rest of the country.

Is this idea, that someone in this country will start to wake up to the fact that the "crisis" right now is not Social Security but is in fact Bush's fiscal policy, simply laughable on its face? Some of the survey results in the report would seem to indicate that Americans are catching on to the idea that the current DC spending spree is not such a hot idea. Even if Rick Santorum has decided to describe the $1 to $2 trillion needed to fund Social Security applepiezation as "prepayment" instead of "deficit spending". The next time you use your credit card remember - you're not going into debt. Uh-uh, you're PRE-PAYING! Sweet!

Rock the Inaugural

2005-01-26T16:27:00.000-08:00

If Bush's Speech Had Rocked as Hard as His Inauguration.

If the inaugural speech is going to be meaningless and absurd and have everyone including the President's own father telling us he didn't actually mean anything by it, well, then, it might as well be entertaining...

Short but sweet - Bull Moose on the President's inaugural

2005-01-21T09:44:00.000-08:00

I forget to read Bull Moose aka Marshall Wittman as much as I should. A Teddy Roosevelt Republican as blunt and to the point as his hero and assumed namesake.

Heck, even Peggy Noonan didn't like the speech...

The Unfeeling President

2005-01-20T13:17:00.000-08:00

I know I've linked to this essay by E. L. Doctorow before, but it seems particularly appropriate today. With all of the analysis spent on Bush, doesn't it just as often come down to the fact that when you look at the man, when you watch him give a speech or interact with others, this sensation of dullness, of emptiness, of absolute disconnect from the gravity of his office, and of a lack of simple basic human empathy, emanates from him in depressing waves. Paul O’Neill in his comments about working with Bush seemed to confirm this from close-up. The truth of course is that a person and their motives are ultimately unknowable - we can only intuit what is going on inside from what we see on the outside - but this essay seems to hit very accurately on the palpable lack of genuine human warmth and empathy that follows this President like a stench. And Doctorow’s castigation of the President’s talent for mouthing empty platitudes in speeches with a sincerity casually donned for the occasion is a perfect skewering of exactly the kind of speech that Bush delivered today: a predictable gruel of a speech filled to the teeth with a constant stream of exactly the kind of rhetoric that, while on the surface expressing sentiments that every American should be proud to support, has instead, through endless Pavlovian repetition and through the shadowy, misleading, sometimes straightforwardly dishonest acts of his own administration over the past four years, been rendered entirely devoid of actual meaning and moral force.

Happy Inauguration Day!

2005-01-20T11:22:00.000-08:00

To help you celebrate, here are some fascinating facts and figures about today's Inaugural Celebration. What better celebration of the Bush Administration's misbegotten reinstatement than a bloated, excessive paean to the wealthy contributors that got him there in the first place? You can still take care of the needs of the disenfranchised and our under-equipped soldiers in your acceptance speech... much more important than such things as emergency relief or body armor.... ah yes, our faith-based President...

Speaking of which, his inaugural speech was certainly monumentally forgettable. Everyone I've talked to who listened to it or read the transcript is just kind of saying, "Huh, wha?" And apparently the fires on Social Security are cooling as not one word was spoken about it, as had been the reported plan. I guess when ranking members of your own party in Congress are saying that your plan is a "dead horse", it's time to let it die a quiet death...

Four More Years! As this NYTimes poll indicates, Bush is facing it with a populace clearly unconvinced of his ability to do anything very well at all... and we elected him because...?

Republican mutiny over Social Security?

2005-01-12T09:52:00.000-08:00

It sounds like it might happen. I can only hope that W/Rove exacerbate this problem with their flim-flam about how all "serious-minded" individuals know that there is a dire crisis on hand... clearly a lot of Republicans would not agree.

National Security, always our President's top priority... mm hmm....

2005-01-11T13:36:00.000-08:00

From Talking Points Memo via the Washington Post comes this little gem: our President, elected because he is somehow perceived as superior on security matters, or more to the point, who got elected because of obscenely cynical politicization of the worst tragedy in modern American history, is forcing Washington DC to divert millions from their homeland security efforts in order to help fund his massive inaugural (which has already been getting plenty of bad press for being so oversized when that money could easily be used elsewhere, for example, hmmm... Iraq? Thailand? Naaahhh...) The poetic awfulness of this President shaking down DC's security fund for his inaugural is just somehow perfect in its badness (like just about everything in his Bizarro world). I mean, Washington DC, they act like they have some reason to be a PRIME TARGET or something... Get a grip, you pussies, and fork up!

Britain's (Lack of) Success with Private Accounts

2005-01-11T10:55:00.000-08:00

In the American Prospect, they examine Britain's experimentation with privatization that took place in the eighties. The conclusion: Britain really, really wishes they had our Social Security system, and are looking on it as "a model of reform". Talk about living in parallel universes.

Of course, actually examining the lack of success for social security privatization around the globe would smack of something like (gasp) the use of empirical evidence - the kind of thing those Godless liberals use... Lord knows we can't have that...

Social Security Insecurity

2005-01-04T10:06:00.000-08:00

A seriously great and thorough editorial about the straw man issue that Bush is taking on with Social Security.

And another from Krugman.

The long and short of it is this: Wall Street and the already wealthy and invested are the only conceivable beneficiaries from this pointless change. With W at the helm, color me shocked...

Xmas in Greenville

2005-01-04T09:52:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year! Virtually forgot about politics for two weeks while at the Republican in-laws. The only time it really came up was when my mother-in-law and I had a short, very brief tiff over Iraq, and then when Kelley and I were walking around her neighborhood in Greenville, NC and easily 19 out of 20 cars on the road in her hood was a frickin' SUV!!! !@#$@#$!@#$!!!! I was staggered to see that driveway after driveway was filled with three or four of them at a time! Granted, Kelley pointed out that this was because sons and daughters and other family members were home for the holidays, but okay this just means everyone in the family has a frickin' SUV that is normally stationed elsewhere! And generally speaking the more obscenely oversized the more prevalent these ungodly things were. As if it weren't bad enough being bombarded with the gas-guzzling monster trucks of the SUV Terrorist Support Fund network - a good half of which were (of course) sporting Bush Cheney '04 stickers, there was a UPS driver who kept tearing down these "quiet" residential roads at freeway speeds, apparently trying to make his time no matter what the cost. Needless to say, our attempt at a peaceful winter walk (there was an unusual snow in Greenville that even more unusually stayed on the ground for days) was a wash. Fortunately, this walk was the exception to an otherwise wonderful relaxing computer-free stay in Greenville.

Happy Holidays

2004-12-20T15:06:00.000-08:00

Taking off for a week, but in the meantime, here's a good piece by Krugman on the success of Social Security privatization around the world. And here's Bush defending Social Security reform apparently by just accusing reporters of trying to change his mind...??? Glad to know he's really put a lot of deep consideration into the issue...

In case you needed more reasons to fear Bush's economic plan

2004-12-17T11:54:00.000-08:00

How about the abysmal track record of one of the few remaining economists who give it the thumbs up, now appearing at Bush's 'economic conference' (aka Kill Social Security Now For No Rational Reason gathering)?

Bill O'Reilly takes it on the virtual chin

2004-12-17T11:50:00.000-08:00

David Brock of Media Matters takes Big Bad Bill to task for being a big spineless hypocrite and coward. But will O'Reilly take the bait....? (The link links to a page that's nice and easily emailable to all yer friends...)

Senate Democrats plan to roll over for Gonzales

2004-12-16T10:28:00.000-08:00

It appears that, for whatever political reasons, there will be no serious opposition to the appointment of Alberto Gonzales (lover and defender of torture, indefinite imprisonment of US Citizens, indiscriminate and unreflective use of capital punishment, and secret government) to the position of Attorney General. While everyone seems to agree that anyone (even, as Pat Leahy says, Attila the Hun) would be better than John Ashcroft, it is hard to understand how Gonzales is really substantially better. If anything, the fact that his fingerprints are all over so many of the most troubling aspects of the Bush Administration makes him far more frightening than the almost cartoonishly self-righteous Ashcroft.

The Nat Hentoff article is a good one, and this quote(from late Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas) is particularly apt:

"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air—however slight—lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."

Brooks on Bush's "Economic Conference"

2004-12-14T10:00:00.000-08:00

David Brooks usually drives me up a wall with his frustrating pseudo-analyses that always read like insipid, transparently lame conservative apologia. I figure if the New York Times is going to go through the effort to have token conservatives on their staff, they can actually be strong ones, and by that I don't mean LOUD ones, a la Coulter or Limbaugh (or maybe it's asking too much to have someone who can actually in all honestly intellectually defend current conservatism). Safire, God knows, shot his credibility out of the water years ago, and is now stepping down in any case. And Brooks far too often, on the Times op-ed page, seems to be the conservative version of the liberal role Allan Colmes plays against the gale force of blowhard Sean Hannity on Fox.

So an article like this from Brooks is encouraging to say the least (of course, am I just saying that because he's being somewhat disparaging of politics in general?.... hmmm....)

By the way, if you're wondering what a "loya jirga" is (I did), you can find out here.

Privatization's track record

2004-12-10T15:51:00.000-08:00

Very not so hot. I'm glad Kevin Drum is all over this issue.

The fix is in

2004-12-10T10:02:00.000-08:00

Bush has apparently one thing in mind and one thing only at the moment: Social Security privatization. Which means that we are about to get faced with a debilitating flood of misinformation guaranteed to scare the bejeebis out of Mom and Pop Applepieamerica and open the floodgates for the trillions of dollars of debt that will accrue from a change that DOESN'T NEED TO TAKE PLACE IN THE FIRST PLACE. This is Bush's second term Iraq, and we all know what happened the first time around.

Forget the hype. Here's what it's all about. Right here.

Krugman is on the case, and both of these articles, part I and part II are clear, easy to follow and to the point.

Soon enough, we're going to be hearing more and more from "men on the street" like "common man" Tom DeHaven.

Be A Deadbeat at Any Cost

2004-12-09T13:25:00.000-08:00

This is an extremely interesting investigative report on the credit card industry by PBS. Who ever knew a deadbeat was a GOOD thing to be? (Read the article and you will understand...)

Mr. Mxyzptlk, or Nothing But Clear Skies

2004-12-09T10:03:00.000-08:00

I realize now the gut sensation that I get from the Bush Administration as a whole. It is the sensation that I used to get when I would read about Superman’s evil doppelganger Bizarro, living in the Bizarro World where everything is what everything here is not. Perhaps this administration is just the result of a visit from Mr. Mxyzptlk.

I realize I’m once again accusing Bush of being evil, but in a world where evil is good, am I not instead Bush of being good? You see how this works…

Rumsfeld, certain to learn what he knows that he does not know what he would know when he knows what he does not know

2004-12-09T09:47:00.000-08:00

Rumsfeld, once again proving himself more than ready to serve on a Bush Cabinet for four more years.

Isn't it reassuring to know that in a war that has been going on now for nearly two years, they have been working on the shortage of armor problem "for months"? Yes, reassuring as always...

Snow Job

2004-12-08T14:25:00.000-08:00

Well, John Snow is going to stay on as Treasury Secretary after all. So it's good to refresh our memories about the capable staff that Bush is keeping in place, and we can start with this inspiring piece by Arianna Huffington.

Connecting the Dots

2004-12-08T09:25:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while, when I get a chance to step back from the absurd Orwellian nightmare that is the current Presidential administration, I realize that with all of the smaller atrocities that they perform on a regular basis, and all the political games that they are constantly playing, it becomes increasingly difficult to see the forest for the trees, to understand the bigger picture that is what induces (or should induce) terror in the heart of any well-meaning American citizen. When they are planning on creating an illusory $1 TRILLION DOLLARS in order to pay for unnecessary Social Security reform, when they are planning to pay for what they have no money to pay for by destroying corporate incentives to help employees get health insurance, when they are talking about their great plan for democracy in the Middle East while in fact causing our standing in the eyes of the citizens of the Middle East to plummet through the floor, it gets more and more difficult to look at the WHOLE thing and try to figure out – what in the hell are they doing anyway, and why are they doing it? Because the sum total of the Bush agenda is no less than the demolition of the federal government and the social safety net as we know it. "Ownership society" means nothing except "every man for himself" and more specifically "government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich" with no recourse for the weak and the poor, and it doesn't take much imagination to picture the outcome of a modern oligarchy run entirely on unrestrained social Darwinism. So it helps when someone comes along to simplify matters, to put them in perspective, and to give a good idea of a bigger picture.

Ed Kilgore provides a good rant about this here, and a good meditation on why good, honest Republicans, and yes they do exist, are allowing the current cynical, hypocritical bunch to run this country into the ground. This article by Molly Ivins is a good micro-macro picture, wherein she describes the Texasification of America (and she should know, good Texan that she is). And this article by Paul Krugman gives a good clear picture of the monstrosity that is the planned privatization of Social Security, and the trumped-up "Social Security crisis" that is being invented by the Bush Administration to justify it.

For the bigger picture, I think it's good to keep in mind as well the Economist article cited below (in my post called The Falling Dollar). If we think the financial picture is bleak now, largely because of the massive amount of debt we're bending under, imagine if the government just randomly decided to create a fictional additional trillion dollars - i.e. took out another trillion dollars in debt - to fix a problem THAT DOESN'T EVEN EXIST. Put this together with the fact that - as depicted in the Ivins article - our government is apparently becoming nothing more than an endless series of cover-ups for cynical bastards whose highest aspiration in life seems to be finding out just how much bilking of their fellow citizens they can get away with before getting caught. If you can find another driving motive, please, help me out...

This ain't no Michael Moore documentary

2004-12-07T10:30:00.000-08:00

You'd think that a document this incriminating regarding America's (and specifically the Bush Administration's) abysmal failure in the war for the hearts and minds of the people in the Middle East would have to be from the hands of an "America-hating" liberal like Michael Moore. Maybe the CIA, that bastion of Bush-bashing. The fact that it is really the product of the Pentagon makes it downright staggering.

DailyKos gives a good selection of bits, plus a link to the entire document. More can be read about it in this scathing article by Sidney Blumenthal at Salon (do the Salon Day Pass for non-subscribers).

The falling dollar

2004-12-07T09:36:00.000-08:00

Here is a painful report from The Economist about the falling dollar. The Economist is no liberal rag full of Chicken Little Cassandras, it's a strongly fiscal conservative British magazine (it will be noted for example that Bush is never brought up by name in the article). Reading an article like this in The Economist makes me particularly nervous about having no control while the lunatics are running the asylum.

The plan to kill incentives for employee health insurance

2004-12-06T17:18:00.000-08:00

Chris Ferris at The Gadflyer has a very good breakdown describing Bush's plan to eliminate business tax deductions for providing employee health care, describing what it is, and why it would be very bad indeed.

So Rummy stays on

2004-12-06T10:13:00.000-08:00

So, sooner rather than later, John Snow gets shown the door. Reading this article by Arianna Huffington from a short year and a half ago, one marvels (and yet doesn't, this is the Bush League after all) that he was ever chosen to be Treasury Secretary in the first place.

Staggeringly, and yet absolutely not worthy of raising an eyebrow if you think about it (this is the Bush League after all), the cabinet member who made the most notable hash of his job the first time around, Donald Rumsfeld, is going to survive the current round of house cleaning. Bull Moose has a brief commentary here.

I've figured it out. If Bush has figured out how to get away with the most mind-bogglingly bad choices he possibly could, he will (see his current plan to fund the new addition to the tax cut by taking away business incentives to help with employee health insurance). I think it has something to do with keeping liberals (and anyone else paying attention) in a constant state of paralyzed disbelief...

The proverbial picture worth a thousand words

2004-12-06T10:02:00.000-08:00

This picture is just so perfect in so many ways, it speaks for itself...

Speaking of Moral Values - the "DeLay Rule"

2004-11-23T09:48:00.000-08:00

Everything you could possibly want to know and more about the Delay rule can be found at Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo. He's been fairly obsessive about the whole thing, to the point of doing individual posts for every congressman who has come out with whether they were for or against the new rule.

What I've been wondering is how long it would take before the DeLay thugs started going whole-hog smearing the Texas DA, Ronnie Earle, who started the proceedings that have led to the indictment of two DeLay cronies, and is threatening to lead to the indictment of DeLay himself. Fortunately, Ronnie Earle has lobbed a wonderfully concise and eloquent preemptive strike, in the form of this editorial in the New York Times. Among other things, it's kind of hard to accuse a man of partisanship against a Republican when the vast majority of the elected officials that he's brought to justice over the years have been Democrats. But the article goes far beyond that. A very good read.

More on the Moral Right

2004-11-23T09:42:00.000-08:00

This is a long transcript from a great interview on Now with Bill Moyers with, among others, Sister Joan Chittister, a brilliant, liberal Catholic nun. My favorite quote, a great condensation of an enormous hypocrisy that I've questioned my parents on countless times over the years:

But I do not believe that just because you're opposed to abortion that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking. If all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed and why would I think that you don't? Because you don't want any tax money to go there. That's not pro-life. That's pro-birth.

The Moral Right

2004-11-23T09:36:00.000-08:00

Meanwhile, I’ve been holding off on sending a missive I’ve been compiling for my parents comparing the “moral” red states with the “amoral” blue states. Sick and tired as I am of them reading these damn stupid books by the likes of Tammy Bruce detailing the pagan scourge that is the “liberal elite agenda” in this country, I found it curious that Massachusetts, the state which is such a notorious bastion of “activist judges” who are trying to undermine marriage in this country by making it available to homosexuals, strangely enough has the lowest divorce rate in the country, and has for a long, long time. Meanwhile, the rest of the top ten states with the lowest divorce rates are also liberal blue states, while all of the worst states for divorce rates are conservative red states, mostly planted right in the Bible belt. Which makes me understand why they don’t want those damn liberal activist judges “devaluing marriage”, since they’re having such a damn hard time valuing it themselves… Domestic violence rates and homicide rates follow a similar trend. The only statistic I saw that gave credence to the moral righteousness of the moral conservative half of this country was the fact that they do give a sizably higher percentage of their incomes to charity – a lesson from which we blue-staters could learn.

William D'Antonio has written a fantastic article about this subject...

Fun with Republicans

2004-11-23T09:34:00.000-08:00

I needed to take a break from politics for a while (not that I did, not really) and step back – start reading “real” books again – and in whatever manner get a little perspective again. Also, I was curious to see what would happen this go around, and possibly just let myself be entertained by the absurdity of it all. Thus far, only three weeks post-election, the Republicans have not disappointed. Kevin Drum has a good summation of recent congressional hijinks here.

For Bush’s part, the antics haven’t been quite so free-spirited. Mostly so far we’ve seen Colin depart to make room for Condi (a switch that most are eying with a great deal of skepticism), and Rummy not making any moves to leave. Ann Coulter, of course, suggests that liberals who talk about their misgivings with Condi are just “typical racist, anti-feminist liberals”. While she’s just doing her “shocking” thing, I wonder how this accounts for liberals (and not-so-liberals) who have even graver problems with Rummy staying on as Defense Secretary. I guess not only do we have problems with black women, we’re apparently not so keen on white men either. Time to bring in the Asian eunuchs…

No longer so reassured

2004-11-08T13:25:00.000-08:00

Apparently, evidence has mounted that maybe the elections weren't so free and clear of gaming after all...

Some words of wisdom from Thomas Jefferson

2004-11-05T10:27:00.000-08:00

Thank you Richard for sending me the following:

"A little patience, and we shall see the reign of
witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the
people, recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in
the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and
incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of
enormous public debt......If the game runs sometimes
against us at home we must have patience till luck
turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of
winning back the principles we have lost, for this is
a game where principles are at stake."

Thomas Jefferson, 1798, after the passage of the
Sedition Act

I feel reassured somewhat

2004-11-04T21:28:00.000-08:00

Call me crazy, but knowing Bush won legitimately makes me feel better. I read this article by Farhad Manjoo in Salon, and it did have some reassuring statistics. So I'll let the black box voting thing go for the moment. I know one of my conservative friends thinks I enjoy blaming Bush's wins on "the evil gaming of the system" but frankly that isn't the case - win or lose, I'd like at least the reassurance that our basic democracy is intact. The state of voter's brains is another issue entirely....

Reaching out to the red states

2004-11-04T21:18:00.000-08:00

I realize from a lifetime of "reaching out to the red states" - i.e. to my parents - the apparent impossibility of making a dent in obstinate minds, so while I always hold out hope, there's always a realist to bring be back into line. Here's Janet Sullivan from Salon (through the free medium of The Gadflyer) reminding us all what we're up against if we imagine we're going to work our well-meaning way into the heart of the heartland.

Black box voting

2004-11-04T16:58:00.000-08:00

One thing that has mystified me is that no one, nobody at all on a national level, is addressing the issue over electronic voting. Here's a small taste I found, but this is it.

It would be one thing if, while there was no paper trail, there was at least an electronic trail of the votes. But in many counties, there isn't even an electronic trail! So what would stop anyone, anyone at all, from entering any damn number they chose? Um, the answer to that would be...NOTHING, NOTHING AT ALL. And we call this a democracy?

Before 2006 rolls around we need to hit this and hit it hard. The problem is that no one in the media wants to be labeled a (horrors!) CONSPIRACY THEORIST. But dammit they need to get over it, or else nothing of any value in this administration is going to get reported at all over the next (I hope only) four years. Look at it this way, and put it this way to scoffing Republicans: if Dems had won the election and there was any question about the vote at all, you know Republicans would be all over this, Fox would be talking about how Dems "mysteriously stole the vote" (they say that anyway of course, even when we lose), and on and on, and no peace would be had until we'd finally put a locked-in standard into place that made sense. But as long as the Republicans are benefiting from this mysterious gap in a rational electoral system, do you think we'll see substantial change in the system? That's a rhetorical question by the way.

From a friend of a friend

2004-11-04T09:54:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine in NYC sent this around in an email from a friend of his and I asked if it would be possible to post it because I thought it spoke eloquently for a lot of us. She wrote back and okayed it, adding the extremely interesting November 4th entry...

November 4, 2004.

I feel as though I should premise what I wrote below with the fact that, though I am ashamed of it, it was my first year voting. I’m 34 and for various reasons I had not voted before. Some of the strongest reasons are probably that nobody in my family had ever registered or voted themselves. My parents are immigrants who barely escaped a communist regime and who have lived their entire lives with the hopes of steering clear of the government’s radar, even after we immigrated to America and became citizens. Though I was raised in suburban America, when the doorbell rang, we were taught to lie down in the dark, away from windows so that nobody would know we were home.

I thought this background info might help give more context to my reaction to this year’s election. Maybe it was especially devastating for me because it was my first time out and I had hope pumping through the veins of my wobbly new voting legs. Perhaps in my greenness I felt more was possible when I only really had a 2-dimensional view of how all of this really works. In any case, it was a big deal for me. And though I was still a little shaky after pulling that lever and crying after I heard the results, I guess in the end, I still accomplished something if not in the outside world, then at least in my own little private world.

Many are saying that we’ve a lot to be proud of. Many are encouraging me to look at the upside… almost half the country dissents. We’ve mobilized and have organized in a new and useful way that can only help us in the future. I want to agree. And I hope once my shock and disappointment wear off, I can feel again optimistic. I do want to believe we are all really the same… with the same vulnerabilities, with the same suffering, and with the same possibilities. But for now I’m still gravely disappointed and in some odd way hurt. I think I will emerge from this soon though and be able to believe and hope again.

Today, November 3rd, 2004.

I had a dream last night that Kerry lost a tooth. I guess that was the omen.

Today, I woke up in a foreign country. In a way, my greatest fears came true. I was right. Most of America is not like me. People ultimately vote for the person they are most comfortable with, someone with whom they can identify, even if they know the person isn’t making any logical sense. It’s like in relationships where people gravitate towards those who meet their emotional needs even if their politics or lifestyles don’t seem compatible. I am realizing as I get older that people for the most part are not logical creatures. After today I am convinced that most of America is not like me. Most of America looks and thinks like Bush. They want “family values” more than they want civil rights or an economy that works. I have awoken to a rude reminder that this is not Europe. I know living in NYC I often forget this and think because I live in this liberal bubble, I am in Europe or somewhere similarly idealized in my head. Today I woke up to discover what my mother always told me... NYC is another country. I don’t know why after having driven across America more than three times I haven’t realized that I do not belong here... that what I think of as America, is only in my head or is actually only made up of a few liberal cities in the U.S. Last night and most painfully this morning I realized that most of what is geographically America is not like me.

My boyfriend thinks that people will see the mistake they’ve made once they realize how they’ve been lied to. But I don’t believe it. I think that people may or may not be dumb to the lies Bush tells. But it doesn’t matter. He represents what they want to cling to. What they prioritize as most important to them. They want the country they voted for. People are vain. They want something in their image to represent them. Most Americans want a marriage of church and state, a religious fundamentalist right wing country because they are for the most part, a religious fundamentalist right wing, conservative people who believe in imposing their exclusive morality on others.

I wanted to believe like the others who voted for Kerry that if only enough people had the chance to freely vote, they would choose Kerry. I even refused to go canvassing for Kerry on the principle of “free will” and that people are aware enough and have the responsibility to themselves to discover the better choice. I felt uncomfortable trying to cajole someone into voting a certain way. I wanted to believe, like the Kerry camp did, that the American people were intelligent enough to see the consequences of not voting for Kerry. I, like the Kerry campaign, was gravely wrong. It is against my beliefs to treat people like children when they are not. America is choosing a path that they want. I feel like I, along with other Kerry hopefuls, have deluded myself and been out of touch with the reality of the country I live in.

Now more strongly than ever, I realize I cannot leave NYC or that I can only live in a few cities that are like NY. I feel lost today. But in a way, I am found in that I know who I am not, and that not everyone is as much like me as I so crave to believe. On some basic philosophical level, I want to believe that we are all essentially the same. But today the differences are so glaring they are blinding my better vision. I want to be more optimistic than I can be today.

On some level I want to agree with my boyfriend that the pendulum will have to swing the other way. That most of America will have to learn their lesson and live out the ramifications of their decisions. They will get what they want and have to live in it. And perhaps my boyfriend is right, the tide will then turn after reaching a critical mass and most of America has changed fundamentally in their hearts. But today, I don’t feel like I want to suffer through that long process and spend all my energy and days fighting or trying to navigate through the system that is in many ways determined to damn me. Today, I want to live in the America in my head. The United States of My Own Illusion. I want to believe that NYC is my own little America. I want to live in a country that struggles to embrace diversity and tolerance, and to tell the truth. I want to live in a community that is not afraid to admit to the messiness of life and that, more often than not, the right answers are usually not so simple. I want to live in a country for whom compassion is not just a campaign slogan and only for the select few that are chosen by me, and where the social welfare of the greater public is a higher priority than individual power and vanity. I want to live in a different America than the one I woke up in today.

Accountability

2004-11-03T11:59:00.000-08:00

Another thing to keep in mind is that Kerry would have had a hell time as President, with the hard right blaming him for everything going wrong as a result of Bush's foibles. Bush has no choice now but to face up to the messes he's created. Sully goes into that in this entry:

Here's an email with which I concur entirely:

I didn't vote for Bush for lots of reasons. But it seems to me that maybe the result, much as it was not what I wanted, will be good for the country. We are in the middle of a war whose outcome is very much in doubt. We have a fiscal policy that may or may not prove successful. Issues that have seemed remote to many like abortion and the Patriot Act's definition of rights and privacy are likely to become more immediate over the next few years. Had we changed leadershop now, it would have been difficult to assign accountability, for good or bad, for these policies and decisions. I always feared, in fact, that Kerry would have had little chance of success in the face of a conservative chorus of "everything was going in the right direction in Iraq when we handed it over to you". Whatever the result, over thee next few years we all will be better able to asses the success or failure of many things that are unfinished now, and hold one team accountable.

Exactly. My main fear with a Kerry victory was that the hard right would never have given him a chance in the war, and would have savaged him as commander-in-chief in order to pave the way for a victory in 2008. Ratcheting the country back to fiscal sanity would also have been a thankless task. Now, Bush will face the consequences of his own policies and we will be able to judge him on that. He has no excuses any more. I hope he succeeds in Iraq, in reforming social security. But no one should give him an easy pass if he fails.

Not the end of the world

2004-11-03T10:56:00.000-08:00

Everyone on the left feels a little gutted today, I think that's a given. Not only did Bush win again, but the Senate and House both got filled with yet more and more right-wing ideologues, and anti-gay marriage amendments passed in 11 states. And of course there's the little matter of the Supreme Court. So yes, pretending things don't look bleak on the national level is ridiculous. But I think we have to keep some perspective - against the odds - and continue the uprising that's occurred over the past couple of years. And I really think that it's time for us to become severely informed as to what goes on in the middle of this country. As distasteful as it is, as painful as it is, to lend an ear to a Sean Hannity or an Ann Coulter or god forbid a Rush Limbaugh, it's time for liberals to learn to take three breaths and just listen - without arguing - to everything they have to say. Listen to understand what it is in what is being said that appeals as much as it does to those on the Right.

I was listening to Ron Silver last night - a Hollywood actor and producer who has helped Bush during this campaign - and he was talking about how impossible it is to sit down for a peaceful conversation with a liberal in Hollywood. My first reaction was to groan and say, "Oh God, here comes these stupid accusations of liberal intolerance again...", and to think, oh yes, I'm sure an evening spent talking to Ann Coulter is a peaceful, civilized way to pass the time for a liberal. But then I thought, the only possible way to turn this thing around is to actually withhold our distaste and actually... listen... to what it is that appeals to middle America. Not just our prejudiced version of it, but the thing itself. And then to engage them, peaceably, on their own level with their own language. The way my brother, who knows his Bible, loves to invite Jehovah's Witnesses in because he knows he can work them on their own ground.

Which brings me to another possibility: if we ever want to engage the middle of this country, I think it's time for all of us to know the Bible, better than the Christian Right knows it themselves... It's just one book, albeit a big frickin dull-as-dirt book, but it's THE Book, the Book that every social conservative politician holds by their side as they're wending their way to the White House, and if we're serious about engaging this increasingly hard-right country, it's imperative that we learn how to engage them on their own terms, terms which are largely drawn from the Good Book. Maybe this is a crazy suggestion, but I really don't think so. We need to listen, and learn, and not let these failures turn us into sputtering Tourette's ridden lunatics... after all that's what they expect from us apparently...

And Lord we have to figure out a way to wean people off of Fox....

Citizen of the country of California

2004-11-02T22:32:00.000-08:00

Well, it's over. Years of good political superstitions down the tubes. (What are they going to do the next time the Redskins win or lose before an incumbent election? That one is dead. So sad...) Months (okay, years) of anxiety for not, with more years of same on the way. I don't like those Florida numbers, meaning I don't believe those Florida numbers, but however they were achieved (and we'll never know as a good many of the votes that comprised them are no longer going to exist soon enough thanks to the glory of the touchscreen voting machine) there they are. There's no getting around them, as there is apparently no getting around the immovable rock which is reactionary social politics in this country. I'm almost more depressed about the eleven state constiutional amendments that passed banning gay marriage.

So for my sanity, I'm officially declaring myself a citizen of the country of California, soon to be once again a member of the country of New York, with occasional stop-offs in my native country of Minnesota. All smart, safe, blue countries. I have to realize, though it is hard, this is still America, I'm still free to pretty much be however I want to be, I mean things are just not that oppressive here in the country of California. I have to remember that. Sensitive artists have lived in countries with oppressive, corrupt governments from the beginning of time and did they sit around fucking moaning about what an asshole the king was, how he was always lying out his ass and the peasants were never calling him on it? Yes, they probably did, but they probably had far more cause to do so because the living conditions were probably a thousand times worse, and they probably had about forty years in which to dot their political bitching. I have to remind myself on occasion that I lived in Prague and I know firsthand how the other half lives, and especially past tense lived. And yet my old friends from Prague - who have lived through Communism and Communist repression - can stand our President even less than I can. So what does that say? Tonight I'm not going to there...

One thing surprised me - I was a little amazed to find out that Kelley was actually more depressed than I was. I was bucking HER up. I guess I've just had longer to be resigned. A week ago this is exactly where I imagined I would be so the only real disappointment is that it was looking so damn good the last few days. The other thing - and I just read this on Daily Kos - is exactly this: whatever happened in this election, there is nonetheless a much stronger, much more energized progressive community happening. And there is now a President who is going to have no choice but to deal with the messes he's made over the past four years. Hopefully (and I mean this, I know you don't believe me but I do) the economy will suddenly go full-blown, maybe Iraq will turn around magically and become a solid democratic Mideastern state, maybe the budget will balance, maybe people will stop dropping into poverty and homelessness, maybe new jobs that pay decent wages will actually start appearing in this country. The campaign is over, it's out of our hands now. I have to start meditating again (no this is not a non sequitir). While I don't meditate with namh yoho renghe kyo - "I believe in the law of cause and effect" - it is something I need to start concentrating on again. The Christian version is, "It's in God's hands." And there are times when it's good to remember that ultimately it's true. I'd love to forcibly change a hundred million minds in this country, two hundred million - not just to vote for a different president, but to live differently, to think differently, to be genuinely more open-minded and kinder and less victims of stupid fears and prejudices. But it's not going to happen and I would just end up making myself insane in the membrane or at the very least unbearably smug and self-righteous if I tried.

I actually feel okay right now. And I live in the beautiful, peaceful, kind, forgiving country of California. Where unlike in the equally wonderful but for different reasons country of New York I can resign myself to four more years of a Bush presidency, have time to write about it post-mortem, and still be able to go to bed at a decent hour.

2 More Days

2004-10-31T17:42:00.000-08:00

Things look good for Kerry... and then they don't look as good... and then they look good again... and then they don't... Every blog I go on (pro-Kerry) sounds extremely optimistic, while Bush blogs sound frankly downbeat and as though they were preparing for the worst. All of the polls show a stastical dead heat, and with Bush not breaking 50%, as everyone likes to point out, as an incumbent that is all very bad news. Zogby shows Kerry ahead in Florida. Let's pretend we live in a world where the vote can't be gamed and I too am feeling very confident that Kerry is going to win this. But then there's the real world, the one we live in, where the vote can, and is gamed, and... it's one of those things that zen master Rumsfeld describes as either one of the things that you know you don't know, or one of the things that you don't know that you don't know...

But there is that anxiety, palpable amongst Bush followers, and as I was reading one article about this in the Washington Post, I came upon a very curious quote that makes me realize all the more how important it is that Kerry is elected - because there are honestly those among the Bush flock who have somehow elevated him to some kind of religious iconic status, a sort of latter day Christ holding back the final days:

But Young is not blinkered; she reads the newspapers, knows how hair-thin a margin Bush has in Ohio. Only this week she began to consider the impossible, that Bush could be right and still lose -- and put that together with her conviction that God knows what He's doing.

"If that happens, the Lord must want Kerry to be in there," she says. "If that happens, it must be the Lord is telling us we're living in the Last Days, and we'd better prepare."

This is just a beautiful sight

2004-10-29T01:12:00.000-07:00

The Boss and Kerry in Madison. DailyKos links from this page to Althouse, a Bush supporter who attended and took more photos. DailyKos's point is spot on - you'll notice Bush supporters with Bush posters in attendance - no one bothered them, they weren't required to sign "loyalty" pacts in order to be allowed in to a Kerry event. It's almost... hell, it's almost democratic!

Wow

2004-10-28T23:57:00.000-07:00

The Spanish-speaking community apparently gets the BEST POLITICAL ADS.

Don't lose yer head

2004-10-28T23:36:00.000-07:00

Yes, okay, maybe it is time to take a little time off...

Kerry Haters for Kerry

2004-10-28T22:52:00.000-07:00

I've heard this line again and again from Republicans, "Y'know, most democrats don't even like Kerry that much." (Unstated is how many Republicans don't like Bush all that much either...)

I'm like, HELL IF I CARE if they don't like him, as long as they vote for him! We're an inclusive people! And here's just the site for that grouchy, unhappy but Kerry-voting lot. As for me, sure, I'd love a straightforward charmer like Clinton who just seems to live and breathe the charm of a natural born pol. As we all learned, that charm had its downside. Personally, call me nuts, I like Kerry. Maybe it's personal, because he reminds me of an old very good friend from high school, in so many ways(actually, my old debate partner). But when Kerry hits it, I think he's extremely powerful. (Granted, as a supporter, one certainly wishes he could hit it on a more predictable basis...)

And please, anything, anything at all, to see an actual human with a real tangible soul dancing behind his eyes in the White House again, who - to put it in its most cynical terms - can at least convincingly ACT as though he actually gives a shit about anyone or anything beyond his personal power and his reputation. I'm willing to grant that my fear and loathing of nearly the entirety of Bush's whole being, essence, and manner comes from a blood level, something pre-verbal or pre-rational, but when the Pope worries that Bush is the anti-Christ, I honestly only scoff with HALF my brain...

What DO people see in Bush? I honestly wish I could comprehend it, to see him through eyes that honestly imagine him to be a man of steadfast integrity and boldness and blahdiblahdiblah... All I ever see is a massively underequipped used car salesman with some enormous pain in his soul willing to take it out on the world... and don't ever tell him that he's wrong OR ELSE. Four years along and my initial instincts about the man have gotten nothing but thorough confirmation again and again and again. To me he's little more than a bully and a thug, and the worst kind - the kind that always sends out others to do his dirty work and never ever takes responsibility for his acts. A man who has no problem allowing the worst smears and lies to cover all those who might stand in his way. A man who has no concerns about making sure that his own following is as misinformed as possible, as long as it helps him at the polls. How can you respect, much less like, a man like that? (And much, much less, allow him to govern this great country?)

Kerry Vindicated

2004-10-28T21:36:00.000-07:00

Thank God this happened before the end of the week when news gets ignored. David Kay comes on CNN and completely annihilates the White House story on the missing explosives at Al Qaqaa, and then adds some enormously damning observations of his own. I can't wait to see the White House try to paint yet another of their own as partisan...

How the hell is this so close?

2004-10-28T21:17:00.000-07:00

This editorial from Newsday captures my sentiments exactly: how the hell, with an incoherent bumbler like Bush in the White House, with a shambles of a war with endless and gorwing evidence of abysmally bad planning, the first record of job loss in seventy years, a massive and growing deficit, increasing poverty, decreasing wages, more people losing their health care, and on and on - why is there even a chance in HELL that he could get re-elected? And it really comes down to the fact that the Republicans have done a massively effective bit of voodoo on the middle American mind. I was listening to a woman explain why she was voting for Bush yesterday and she said it was because she didn't like the way Democrats spent her money. I had to explain to her that contrary to her ideas, government has grown under Bush more rapidly than under any president since Johnson, and that Bush had turned what had been a sizeable budget surplus into a series of deficits that keeps breaking its own record year after year. But would she believe me? Not when Fox had told her differently... It's like some weird brainwashing - no, not like, it IS some massively strange brainwashing. And standing on the outside of it, I'm sorry, but has sanity actually become a partisan issue?

Frankly Kerry should have seen this coming

2004-10-28T13:11:00.000-07:00

My favorite new Republican hypocrisy is the combination of Bush accusing Kerry of the infamy of blaming the missing explosives from Al Qaqaa (say it with a straight face) on the troops -which Kerry didn't of course, he was accusing Bush of bad war-planning - combined with Giuliani - with the blessing of the Bush campaign team - BLAMING IT ON THE TROOPS! Ya gotta hand it to Republicans, they really truly are devoid of all shame. It's really kind of an inverse purity...

Which is yet another reason I wish Kerry would have hit far more, FAR FAR MORE, on the domestic situation this last two weeks. The whole reason that Republicans want focus on "national security" and the "war on terror" is because it's a huge ruse to obscure their absolute failures on the domestic scene. (This is why, in the Eminem video for Mosh, the shot of Osama bin Laden turning into a cardboard cutout hiding Rumsfeld and Cheney talking is so brilliant.) While no one in America really has a grasp of these realities in Iraq, and how the Bush team bungled the planning - everyone can understand LESS JOBS, ENORMOUS DEFICITS, INCREASED POVERTY, LESS PEOPLE WITH HEALTH COVERAGE. Etc. No one understands this more than the Bush-Cheney team. Why Kerry didn't force domestic issues to take a far more prominent place in the dialogue, why he let the Republicans dictate the direction of the dialogue, is something that frankly bothers the hell out of me. I'm not saying he'll lose necessarily as a result, but he sure as hell would have done himself a favor casting a more constant light on these obvious failures, as opposed to the murky, obscure ones overseas.

Pope fears Bush is Anti-Christ

2004-10-28T11:47:00.000-07:00

As a lapsed Catholic whose very Catholic parents are adamant Bush-supporters, I have to say this article - as questionable as it might be - was an interesting little head-scratcher... I guess if I were going to accuse any Prez of being the anti-Christ, the apparently soulless W would be the one. But still...

Win or lose

2004-10-28T11:39:00.000-07:00

we have to keep the game in play. Harold Meyerson, in the LA Weekly, talks about the tremendous ground swell amongst progressives that has occurred in 2004. We have to keep it going. In fact, if Bush wins (God forbid) it's likely that he will run ever further to the right and further toward the same disastrous policies that he's followed the last four years, which can only mean that eventually - when people wake up to the fact that the approach simply isn't working (to say the least) - the progressive movement will be ready and fully operational to move on in and start amassing an actual base of power.

In any case, this is a very encouraging article, and I think it's good to keep in mind that no matter how much it might FEEL that way, the world does not begin and end next Tuesday.

Now it begins

2004-10-26T14:11:00.000-07:00

News item from a secret memo taken from Republican campaign headquarters in Florida. The voter intimidation begins.

Dishonest Dubya

2004-10-25T23:36:00.000-07:00

And yet more dumb brilliant fun - The Dishonest Dubya Doll. Awesome.

Lie Girls

2004-10-25T23:33:00.000-07:00

And here's some dumb, brilliant fun... You've found the Weapons of Mass.... Seduction...

Blindfolds for Bush

2004-10-25T23:21:00.000-07:00

In honor of the PIPA findings, I think this This Modern World cartoon is dead on (do the Salon Day Pass, it's worth it).

Republicans Really DON'T Know What They're Talking About

2004-10-25T23:09:00.000-07:00

Not that we really needed this confirmed, but it is now statistically proven that, yes indeed, Republicans (not all of them of course but way too damn many) don't know what the hell they're talking about. Not that Dems are completely on the ball either, but the differences in these statistics is striking.

Is there some reason a law can't be passed insisting that a certain level of public knowledge must be demonstrated before a person is granted the right to vote? I'm just sayin....

Wolf Packs for Truth

2004-10-23T11:08:00.000-07:00

The wolves in the latest Bush-Cheney ad are a little pissed off at being used, so they've started their own website.

As anyone who's ever seen the great, beautiful movie Never Cry Wolf knows, the wolves's reputation for being mankillers is completely false and unjustified - which makes it kind of perfect that they're the primary image in a Bush-Cheney ad, doesn't it?

Making the calls

2004-10-23T10:46:00.000-07:00

I'd love to be able to write more in here but lately there's just too much good stuff to read - among them plenty of pieces by conservative writers stating very succinctly why Bush is the wrong choice to make for principled conservatives. (You can read a couple here (Pat Buchanan's mag) and here (just do the Salon day pass, it's free, and this article is great) and here.)

Also, I spent yesterday making calls to swing states to get people out to canvass for Kerry. I'd rather be there doing it myself, but if this helps at all, it's worth it. I suspect a lot of people are making these calls, because it was almost impossible to get a list of people to call who weren't in Washington state, which is not really in play as far as I can tell from the polls. I wanted to be calling Wisconsin, Florida, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania. (I did pull callers from Florida a couple of times, and Wisconsin once, but that was it.) In any case, I hope it helps. What I really wish I could is personally hand out the massive amount of sane, rational information I've got at the ready to every independent or undecided voter in this country. If anyone knows anyone who can be swayed, I'm willing to send this stuff out to them. I've got the goods, and a lot of it is written by conservatives. So just let me know.

I'm just a little disturbed that Minnesota is in play at all - whatever happened to the state of Hubert H. Humphrey, Paul Wellstone, and Mondale? Hopefully, Jesse Ventura's surprise endorsement of Kerry might shake this up a little bit. Granted Jesse the Body didn't exactly leave the office on a high note, but I figure this veteran and ex-WWF wrestler still has pull among the independents, undecideds and even, as they've become affectionately known during this election cycle, "the NASCAR crowd".

SUVs

2004-10-20T22:46:00.000-07:00

Tonight sitting at a neighbor's while they waited for the new season of West Wing to start (we're three seasons behind because we're restricted to whatever is on DVD or video...) we were talking about the fact that, likely as not, with the polls as deadly close as they are, we may be looking at (take a deep breath, calm, focus, breathe) four more years of George W. Bush - a four years that will likely be far uglier than the first given the fact that he will have been given a "mandate" and that he will have nothing to lose. So I thought - you know what - something is starting now - clearly this election is mobilizing liberals and it's about damn time, and we're not going to let a little thing like a lost presidential election get in the way of continuing to stir things up. And one thing that people forget is that politics begins at a local level. As misguided as I've always believed my parents might be, they've always understood this one thing.

So this got me thinking about something I had mentioned to another friend a few weeks ago, that I really, REALLY REALLY wanted to make a bumpersticker that said "I SUPPORT TERRORISM" that could be slapped on random SUV's parked on the street. Well, she thought that was a bad idea for a number of very good and wise reasons and I guess I was forced to agree. But she mentioned that in fact there is a great site called www.runningonempty.org that has tickets that you can order or just print out that can be placed like a real ticket under someone's windshield wiper - they're civil, informative, well-made, and pointed, and best of all if you start papering SUVs with them you can't get arrested for vandalism (or beat up by pissed-off SUV owners).

SUV's by the way are a perfect metaphor for people's belief in this current administration. People have a conception, because SUVs are BIG and threaten by the simple assertion of their mass to roll over everything in their path, that they are therefore safer on the road, but nothing could be further from the truth. They are in fact badly designed for the most part, are far more likely to rollover than smaller cars, and worst and most dangerous of all, because of their weight, are almost impossible to stop quickly when sudden unexpected obstacles place themselves in the drivers way. Accident statistics prove again and again that they are nothing but death traps let loose on the road compared to smaller vehicles. So people psychologically imagine that they are better off, when in reality - just like with the Bush administration - they are actually far more likely, driving an SUV, to end up in an accident, and far more likely, in case of an accident, to experience and/or induce worse injuries and/or fatalities. They just don't make sense, safety-wise, ecologically, economically, politically. It's time to stop supporting a bad habit... And in any case, whatever kind of vehicle we drive, we have to start remembering that oil is a gift, a gift with a time limit, it is not a birthright, and we have to start treating it as such. And we have to begin to remind others about this as well.

Oh yes, it's KERRY who's running a campaign of fear...

2004-10-20T14:56:00.000-07:00

This is just a wonderful summary of everything you need to know about the Republican convention.

The question of Bush's faith

2004-10-20T11:35:00.000-07:00

This is a very clear response by Ayelish McGarvey to the Ron Suskind article from this past Sunday's New York Times Sunday Magazine. It pretty much hits my attitude about Bush's faith on the head. In a way, it's odd how much in regards to this administration rests on the question of Bush's faith, since it's almost always what he relies on for policy decisions - either his "gut" or his "faith". (God knows he doesn't rely on the rational testimony of his military or science advisors, unless of course they already agree with his bowels or his interior monologue with God (if this is in fact what it is)...) Journalists in general take Bush's testimonies of faith verbatim and don't question him on it; perhaps because a person's true heart is actually unknowable, questioning a person's word is essentially worthless from a journalistic perspective. But pieces like the Suskind piece, while shocking in themselves, are slightly meaningless to me because I've never really believed that his "faith" was any more than a shill to the social conservative right. No politician on the right is dumb enough to think they're going to get anywhere without reeling in their Evangelical base, and Bush saw what happened to his father with a base that was insufficiently convinced of Bush Sr.'s Christian conviction. So what better than a rebirth of the pagan prodigal son into Christianity through no lesser vehicle than Billy Graham? Certainly on a personal basis, Bush post-rebirth has done some mightily unChristian acts, or at least supported them, and on a political basis of course the mind reels at the moral relativism implicit in just about every aspect of both his campaigning and his policy-making. If what he represents is indeed Christianity, then I have to kind of wonder, what isn't?

In any case, you either have:
a)a man who wraps himself in the cloak of Christianity in order to put a lock on the Christian base of his party, and allows him to do whatever he wants policy-wise, Christian or unChristian as it might be.

or

b)a man who in fact does operate "on faith" with little concern for rational, expert-based discourse. And still engages in policy-making that bares little or no resemblance to any kind of Christianity I can recognize.

Either way. It's frightening.

Not to be cynical but...

2004-10-20T10:39:00.000-07:00

apparently babykissing is alive and well in the 21st Century. Not for those with weak stomachs. Once again, a Bush expression meant to be profound and sincere (or God knows what) just frankly disturbs me. (I can't help it. It's beyond politics with him - that mug of his quite honestly (and literally) gives me nightmares.)

I read yesterday that this was the biggest political ad buy in history, $14.2 million.

The real killer is that giving a contribution to "get Ashley's story around" or whatever the pap they say, is actually a contribution to the far-right wing Progess for America voter fund. Not that it's a mystery which direction the ad comes from or anything...