plain ol'idiot

(from Palin blames Bush policies for GOP defeat, AP November 10, 2008)
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, amid speculation she'll run for president in four years, blamed Bush administration policies for the defeat last week of the GOP ticket and prayed she wouldn't miss "an open door" for her next political opportunity.

"I'm like, OK, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I'm like, don't let me miss the open door," Palin said in an interview with Fox News on Monday.

Interesting Times

I don't know if it's urban legend or a true curse, but I do believe we are living in some quite interesting times, no?
Here's an excerpt from an AP news story on the current political response to the consequences of excessive and irresponsible deregulation:

A bad day for the GOP on politics, bailout plan
By Charles Babington, Associated Press Writer
Friday, September 26, 2008
...
A White House summit meeting on Thursday meant to shore up John McCain's shaky campaign "devolved into a contentious shouting match." And that's how McCain's own campaign described it.

The meeting revealed that President Bush's $700 billion bid to combat the worst financial crisis in decades had been suddenly sidetracked by fellow Republicans in the House, who refused to embrace a plan that appeared close to acceptance by the Senate and most House Democrats.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson begged Democratic participants not to disclose how badly the meeting had gone, dropping to one knee in a teasing way to make his point according to witnesses.

And when Paulson hastily tried to revive talks in a nighttime meeting near the Senate chamber, the House's top Republican refused to send a negotiator.

"This is the president's own party," said Rep. Barney Frank, a top Democratic negotiator who attended both meetings. "I don't think a president has been repudiated so strongly by the congressional wing of his own party in a long time."
...
Ordinarily a Republican president's problems are with Democrats, especially if they control the House and Senate. In this case, Bush seemed almost over that hurdle.

To be sure, Democrats demanded a number of changes in his $700 billion bailout plan, but administration insiders signaled they probably were acceptable. They included greater oversight, more protections for taxpayers, efforts to head off home foreclosures and piecemeal allocations of the federal money to buy toxic mortgage securities.

What caught some by surprise, either at the White House meeting or shortly before it, was the sudden momentum behind a dramatically different plan drafted by House conservatives with Minority Leader John Boehner's blessing.

Instead of the government buying the distressed securities, the new plan would have banks, financial firms and other investors that hold such loans pay the Treasury to insure them. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., a chief sponsor, said it was clear that Bush's plan "was not going to pass the House."

But Democrats said the same was true of the conservatives' plan. It calls for tax cuts and insurance provisions the majority party will not accept, they said.

At one point in the White House meeting, according to two officials, McCain voiced support for Ryan's criticisms of the administration's proposal. Frank, a gruff Massachusetts liberal, angrily demanded to know what plan McCain favored.

Friday

See I can do that because I skipped Friday last week.

Many people talking politics, presidential politics that is. I follow politics, not so much as an enthusiast but as er, a citizen I guess. My level of interest never struck me as odd until I moved out of Massachusetts. How people in other places I've lived are during presidential campaigns is how most people around where I grew up are in general. At least in my personal experience. Possibly this has influenced my take on voter empowerment. See, I think that presidential campaigns (and elections) are to a truly democratic governmental process as Brittney Spears is to music.

This observation has ripened as I age. As I get older, I find the furor around presidential campaigns has become a bit more irritating. Of course the last eight years have amply demonstrated the kind of hell a president can bring down upon a nation. This shows up most especially with presidential appointments. Consider just Gonzalez and Ashcroft for some excellent cases in point. But with the exception of talk of supreme court nominations, we don't hear much about that in the mainstream big ticket item news. I.e., if not talk of specific picks, then what kind of climate and policies do the candidates believe will be appropriate and right in their FCC, their SEC, their FDA, their Justice Department, their Health and Human Services? How would Hilary Clinton's EEOC and Labor Relations Board picks have differed from Barack Obama's?
Etc.

Since I've been unemployed, I've been in a bit of a bubble. I don't get out much on account of my laying around and eating bon-bons, watching my "stories" and scouring job postings oh about 5 times a day. But today, I was on campus primarily to deal with an amazingly screwball fuckup from payroll (someone accidentally changed my name in a database that communicated with my insurance companies to reflect a mutated form of my (former) married name, the equivalent of which would be a change to PEG-S instead of just plain old legal PFG). For most of the day, I managed to not speak too much to anyone. I scared a grad student who stumbled into the lab where I was trying to troubleshoot a program for my former advisor. I bumped into a former co-worker and plied her for information about possible job leads. But no politics. And then, just when A___ and I were getting ready to leave, we ended up chatting with A___'s office mate R___. R____ was all atwitter about the campaign - specifically the news about McCain's choice of running mate.

"Well I read that she's got the Tina Fey vote tied up" he said. "Huh?" "Because she looks like her...you know?" he said. I think this was supposed to be ironic. "Oh, yeah I saw her. I kind of thought more Julia what's her name, the one from Seinfeld." R____ went on to discuss her record a bit too and give me his analysis on the reasons why McCain picked her. I said I felt McCain and Obama both choose people who seemed to have the aura of just the other side of the center. McCain picked a woman (to show he's a stand up guy who the ladies don't hate for having let rip a stray rape joke) and Obama picked Whitey McWhiterson. I know, I read Biden's bio. But when it comes to presidential elections, it's a show. And for democratic mainstream and a safe, nice, clean articulate white guy who makes the less than liberal center folks feel like everything is in "good hands", I think Biden is the man, so to speak. "Well, there's Dodd too. He's really fucking white." A___ quipped. Yes, Dodd. But Dodd's a dud. He's from CT (ew) and he's recently had some bad press, at least locally, involving special mortgage deals. Anyhow, I said all that and R___ told me that he likes Biden and then went on to say why. I feel like a jaded churl when I hear him discuss Biden as anything other than a PR device which panders to a low and likely racist electorate, but I can't help how I feel.

However, that is the point. It's how I FEEL, not how I think. How I think would reflect research on the potential Vice President picks and since I am just not that enchanted with presidential campaigns, I haven't brought myself to do that research. And without doing the digging, I'll never get real info. I'm certainly not going to get it from the tickerworthy news stories like this one, which was ambitiously titled "Obama says he'll 'fix broken politics'. "Oooh," I thought. "What's he gonna do?" because I really am a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington kind of gal. Term limits? Campaign finance reform? Ethics regulations? What might he be proposing to fix broken politics? I read on. And on. I got near the end still waiting for that crucial bit of information, but knowing who the entertainers were at the convention (Jennifer Hudson (who the fuck is she?) and will.i.am (?)).

Anyhow, because this is how I FEEL and not how I think, I've decided I am just not in the mood to engage in political bullshitting about this particular aspect of the upcoming election. I think instead my full attention would be better spent on the other races and issues that will be decided in the upcoming election. E.g.
The U.S. Senate...
Elections for the United States Senate will be held on November 4, 2008, with 35 of the 100 seats in the Senate being contested. Thirty-three seats are regular elections; the winners will be eligible to serve six-year terms from January 3, 2009 until January 3, 2015 as members of Senate Class II. There are also two special elections: one in Wyoming and another in Mississippi; the winners will serve the remainder of terms that expire on January 3, 2013, as members of Senate Class I.
And the U.S. House of Representatives...
The 2008 U.S. House of Representatives elections will be held on November 4, 2008, to elect members to the United States House of Representatives to serve in the 111th United States Congress from January 3, 2009 until January 3, 2011. All 435 seats are up for election. Democrats, who regained a majority in the 2006 elections hope to retain or expand their control of Congress.

Also, we have state legislative elections this year as well. How important are those? Consider same sex marriage in Massachusetts. An amendment to the Massachusetts' state constitution was proposed which would have defined marriage "only as the union of one man and one woman." The first vote by the state legislature involved a majority against it (yay), but still enough support (61 votes for) for the amendment to warrant another vote in the next legislative session (boo). The next vote resulted in only 45 for the amendment (yay). The required number of votes to pass it was 50 (yikes! just five votes from banning same sex marriage? Holy shit!).

So again, how important is your state legislative election? Rather, I'd say. And yet the news coverage is buried if present at all and the interest is low. My god, am I the only person who remembers Newt Gingrich?

So...(I say that a lot, how about "thus"?)
Thus, while I certainly do believe who the next president and vice president and presidential cabinet and federal executive appointments will be is terribly important, I can't help THINKING when I hear people around me all riled up and wanting to gab about the latest media mangled presidential campaign PR/news that they are sort of johnnie come latelies to the realities of their power as members of an electorate. And I am just not going to be a part of that bullshit. I care, I really do, but I'm not going to let that concern divert my attentions into what is a essentially side show extravaganza. I know the political icons are the elephant and donkey, but I THINK that perhaps at this point they should retire those fellows and replace them with the dog and pony.

Ferraroh-no

While searching for some kind of context for Ferraro's comments, I came across this, in a piece delightfully named "Ferraro: 'They're attacking me because I'm white'", Ferraro apparently had this to say.
....[Ferraro] told a FOX News interviewer: “I got up and the question was asked, ‘Why do you think Barack Obama is in the place he is today” as the party’s delegate frontrunner.

“I said in large measure, because he is black. I said, Let me also say in 1984 – and if I have said it once, I have said it 20, 60, 100 times – in 1984, if my name was Gerard Ferraro instead of Geraldine Ferraro, I would never have been the nominee for vice president,” she said.

Oh. I see. Well there's a very simple response to Ferraro's sentiments. Actually, there are several responses from recent history:
*Al Sharpton
*Carol Moseley Braun
*Alan Keyes
**L. Douglas Wilder
**Lenora Fulani
*Jesse Jackson
*Shirley Chisholm

This is a nice set, isn't it? I think it pretty handily tears Ferarro's point down. In her defense, she may have just been ignorant that other women had run for president before her. But even granting ego centrism fueled ignorance, she'd still have to have noticed Jesse Jackson since she ran against him, right?

I am always annoyed when my choices, attitudes, and principles are called "PC". It's such a dismissive and invalidating term. It suggests the person who holds such views did not arrive at them each individually through a process of reasoning, rather that she picked them up as a package off the shelf at "Philosophies R Us". And I kinda get the feeling this is what Ferraro is implying. That if I'm a liberal feminist, I'd vote for a woman because she's a woman. That if I'm a liberal and apparently more racially motivated than sex or gender motivated, I'd vote for a black guy because he's black.

Here's why I didn't vote for Clinton in my state's democratic primary (which I declared a party affiliation simply to vote in). Clinton is an old boys' girl. She has all the proper hand stamps, ones which the feminists I came of age with were expected to embrace simply because they came attached to someone a bit more estrogeny than your average good ol' boy. I don't want more of that shit. If I had, I'd have voted for Gore in 2000 (yeah, I'm one of those "assholes" who voted for Nader mostly because I wanted something ELSE). I was on the fence for a while, seeing most people who get as far as Clinton and Obama do in party politics with a very large degree of skepticism. I looked over both of their position statements on their websites the week before the primary and from what I saw, they looked pretty damned similar. The details were slightly different. Experience has taught me that expecting a politician to stick that rigidly to a set of campaign promises is foolish so I decided the minor detail differences which were likely to be most of them swept away in a tide of people and party pleasing further down the road were not going to be enough to sway me one way or another. Truly, what did it was disability law and the fact that the Obama campaign had seen fit to even bother addressing it (that the ADA needs to get some teeth put back in it after how federal courts have handled it) and the Clinton campaign didn't.

To me, this reaffirmed my already brewing view of Clinton as more old boysy than Obama. People whose lives have been so insulated that they never had to think about how shut out someone can be based on physical factors are not people I am going to support as policy setters or leaders. And that is that. Not race. Not sex or gender. Health and equal access and disability.

All that said though, I'd be a liar if I tried to claim that Clinton's apparent pandering to a certain kind of feminine quality (presumably either shared or expected by her possible voters) didn't annoy me on a personal level also. My guess is if I were black I might feel similarly about Obama when it came to constructs of race.

So back to Ferraroh-no. My search for context dug up this quote from her in 1988: "If Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn't be in the race."
From the same reference, Jackson punted back with his own below the belt (or bodice as it were): "Some people are making hysteria while I'm making history."

I guess while it's still fair (pardon the pun) to say she was talking about race and racism in her recent comments, I need to update my reaction to her February 2008 commentary. I'm naive when it comes to shit like this. It seems in context, her later comments (above) and much, much earlier comments (more immediately above) do make it clear she was indeed saying something along the lines of "black people get it easy because they're, you know, black..." That she included in her recent comments that she was nominated as VP primarily because she was a woman, to me, makes her seem more an apologist than anything else. I guess chalk it up under another woman with (an overblown case of) imposter syndrome.

* = Two sources (1, 2) list these people as recent candidates for the US presidency.
**However, the above two sources do not give fully equivalent sets in that one names L. Douglas Wilder and not Lenora Fulani. The other names Lenora Fulani and not L. Douglas Wilder.
Thus, here are some extra references for Wilder 1, 2 and for Fulani 1, 2.

(Super) Tuesday Poetry

Down to the Ark by The Mountain Goats

The candidates met up in North Dakota
And they donned their black robes there in the chapel hall
They said a brief invocation to their cloven-hoofed prince
And they signed their names in blood on the vestry wall

In Christ you know there's neither high nor low
And the void will claim all creatures small or bright
Seal up the borders or let everybody in
In the order of the serpent, there'll be neither left nor right

And we pull down our blindfolds
And we reach out for the lever in the dark
Get a sticker for our shirts as we head into the sun
Proudly bearing the mark
Headed down to the ark

The applicants went down to Oklahoma
And they hired an accent coach to teach them the western twang
And several post-born babies learned the hard way:
Vampires only kiss you if they've sharpened up their fangs

And as Minnesota fell, so went Missouri
We met at VFWs in the snow
And we voted down the tax codes, and we voted down the war
So many names to choose from, just one way to go.

WWTF

Much of where I travel in Connecticut is a no man's land for radio signal. The already slim pickings for radio broadcast you could listen to without wanting to ram the car into a tree narrows even further as I wind my way down the quaint, deadly country roads. The road dips and there goes the signal, Punk Rock Jukebox dissolves into a hiss of static punctuated by bands of some top 40 shit - played at a handful of stations by live djs and played at an increasing number by a radio robot (seriously - they don't even have a human to give the play list, just a prerecording referring listeners to a website).

Last night I found myself listening to a muzak version of Mrs. Robinson on a station way down the low end of the dial. It was damned funny. I found myself wishing they would announce the artist because I deeply feel I need to add this to the next CD I make for cjblue.

I mention the muzak so you'll have the proper context for the shit I will listen to simply to listen to the radio. Some people are radio people. When I drive, I am.

So with the exception of a few college radio stations (god love 'em), which can't compete with the massive, sloppy signals on the corporate dial, there's not much to listen to. And even the little stations let me down now and then. Take their tendency to carry NPR programs....please.

Last week, I think it was exactly a week ago, I came up out of a valley and paradoxically lost the station I had been listening to. I scanned and a blurb of talk caught my attention. I forget now what exactly was said that held the promise for something interesting to come. I paused, letting the dialog sink in. It was one of the NPR women, one of the ones who sound exactly the same to me but who lately have taken to adopting a new (apparently hip?), more casual style of speech than what I am accustomed to hearing those clone voices uttering.

The clone was talking to a man who was talking about politics. During the time I listened, the close never disclosed who this man was or why they were speaking. However, what I did hear was the clone and this man stating then agreeing with their statements that issues are not what makes a difference between a Clinton voter and an Obama voter.

The reason for this conclusion they had whipped themselves up into was singular as far as I could tell. The man mentioned that exit polls hadn't shown a discernible difference in issues that people who said they voted for Clinton cared about and issues that people who said they voted for Obama cared about.

Have you ever done an exit poll? They suck! Oh god they suck so much. First, some exit polls are conducted by news agencies, not research foundations. I don't the source of the data cited in this show because Mr. Smary McSmarterson on NPR did not address the point and the clone didn't bother to follow up. She was too busy breathing heavily into a microphone and blithering in a way which I truly have come to dislike.

My god, I think, is this what other people think all liberals are like? No wonder they hate us.

Back to my point. My point is, NPR what the fuck? I listened as the interviewer and interviewee went on to make still more conclusions based on that one conclusion from the poorly presented exit poll data. I had to change the station to keep myself from getting too ramped up.
I guess if I want intelligent radio, I will wait until Democracy NOW comes on (at noon on one of my beloved college stations, one which has little to no NPR and the like). Until then, it's the the transient signals of college stations doing independent and local programming (along with the occasionally and accidentally great moments like Mrs. Robinson) to break up miles of top 40 radio for the robots.

Democrat from Ohio

As a presidential candidate, Representative Dennis Kucinich interests me. (It's koo-SINN-itch I think - I get more of my news in print than TV so I had to look it up to get the pronounciation)

I know he's got a bit of a rep, but I'm not sure this is deserved (and I'm not sure how much of it is based on western stereotypes like the ones which link personal power and competency with physical attributes). We'll see. I just started researching him. Background-wise he seems interesting, and he's one of the few who isn't equivocal on gay marriage (and wasn't even back in the last presidential election). Oh, and he voted against the PATRIOT act (senate roll call, house roll call).

I am not a single issue voter. But a candidate's position on a topic, if too far from what I consider reasonable (and also if not outweighed by other attritubes) can break support for me. Lack of support for ensuring safe, funded, and effective reproductive freedom and for protecting the privacy of reproductive health decisions is a definite deal breaker for me. So I looked the candidates up on the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL).

NARAL presents a selection of statements from each candidate on abortion and reproductive freedom policies in the US.

Kucinich:
"What the Supreme Court did was quite invasive of that very sacred sphere of a woman's health and privacy… But if our society is truly committed to life, then all of us need to close ranks behind a program which will show real concern for life. And that includes prenatal care, postnatal care, child care, a living wage, universal health care -- and the end of war,' he said. 'Then we will have achieved a much more tolerable expression of support for life than the Supreme Court did.'"
[Carla Marinucci, Abortion Ruling Puts Candidates on the Spot, San Francisco Chronicle, April 22, 2007.]

One thing which struck me in reading the statements is that I don't see anything in the Kucinich collection which evokes the necessity of god and religion as part of this particular health choice. I noticed the lack of this in his statements after I noticed the presence of it in the statements of the two media and money favored candidates (Clinton and Obama).

Clinton:
Abortion "should be a constitutionally protected decision made not by the Government, not by the majority … but between a woman, her doctor, and her faith in God."
[152 Congressional Record S35-07, January 25, 2007.]

Obama:
"You know, I think that most Americans recognize that this is a profoundly difficult issue for the women and families who make these decisions. They don't make them casually. And I trust women to make these decisions in conjunction with their doctors and their families and their clergy."
[Transcript from Democratic Presidential Debate in South Carolina, MSNBC, April 26, 2007.]

Whatever happened to the notion of "keep your rosaries off my ovaries"? That wasn't just a catchy protest chant. It had a point. This "and god" shit annoys me - and I find I am consistently more tolerant of religious belief than most people in my particular age, education level, socio-economic class, and region cohort. I think religion is a kind of principle and value system. It is a tool for exploring and developing applications of moral reasoning, principles of human interaction with one another, with other organisms, and with the non-animate environment. It's not nothing and I am not dismissive of religion or religious people, not out of hand at least. But what drives me right up a tree (and down the other side) is the tendency in a religion-saturated society to reverse this relation. That is, rather than view religious belief and study as a type of value system, the tendency becomes to see value systems as a whole as a kind of religion. And that's just fucked up.

The candidate statements on reproductive health choices include god and the ministers of god. On one level, this inclusion rather innocuously (in and of itself) suggests to the public that the candidate believes in god or at least understands a great number of the public believe in god. On another level, the one I see it on, it is a pandering to the notion that someone might not be able to make this decision without appealing directly and specifically to a higher moral authority than their own. Again, keep in mind that for those people who are religious, that individual religious belief is part of the personal moral authority.

Having to say it, putting it in there explicitly, is at best redundant. At worst, it suggests the candidates who have to include it are using it as a subtle qualification which is meant to resonate with the religious among the voters - the qualification being "I support a woman's right to choose a path which is correct based on what her religion tells her". And this is tacitly empowering religious leaders and institutions with a say in not just the choices of the women who CHOOSE to follow that particular religion or who CHOOSE to involve that religion's teachings in this choice, but a say in how and what all women decide.

We sure don't need more of that. At least I don't.

I know Kucinich does not have a career long history of pro-choice ideology. But his statements on the issue of abortion access and abortion as a procedure in general simply strike me as relatively sincere and considered.

(here's a discussion on Democracy Now involving Kucinich, among others, on the war in Iraq)