Category: Current Affairs

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Calling Florida Voters

Kate and I just got back from spending a couple of hours calling registered Democratic voters in Florida; in St. Lucie County, Florida, to be a little more specific. We went down to an office building in West Berkeley were a Kerry-Edwards phone bank had been set up, bringing our own cellphones and chargers. We each got a list of about 50 voters, their precincts, and their phone numbers, along with a script to use. The script was basically, “We need every Democratic voter in Florida to turn out.”

A couple things I didn’t anticipate:
–How positive and engaged people seem to be. I had about eight or ten people tell me they had voted already; all but a couple of the half of the people on the list who answered their phones were interested, were upbeat about voting, and most said they were glad to get the call. I had one person say she was too ill to get out and vote, one who said it just wasn’t a good time to talk, and one person who said she’d gotten repeat calls and was a little tired of it.
–How positive and upbeat I felt: You know, after months and months of taking in the campaign through the media, or getting involved only to the extent of making donations, you get to feel that it’s all an elaborate charade. Going someplace here in Berkeley and calling a bunch of people all the way across the country seemed kind of lame. But talking to people who were actually going to the polls, who were pumped up about voting, who were enthusiastic about the candidate’s chances — hey, it made me feel like calling, or doing a little something to at least try to make a little bit of a difference.

I’ll find someplace to go and volunteer tomorrow, too, I think.

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In Other News …

I actually have a new story on Wired News today: “Space Race Focuses on Money.” It’s the problem that has beset the new space companies for years: So far, few in the investment world are wild about the prospect of space tourism or backing companies that are pushing speculative technology (of course, when the speculation involved dumping hundreds of millions into an online grocery story or pet supply store, the venture capitalists and investment bankers were lined up around the block to get a taste).

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My President Wears a Helmet

GrimesOK, this is by way of a press release. But it’s still interesting. Some Europeans, apparently including Mathias Rust (read about him here, here, and here), the German teenager and perhaps crazy guy who made headlines back in the late 1980s by flying a Cessna from Hamburg to Moscow’s Red Square, have launched a site called Leader of the Free World for anyone, anywhere to choose a candidate in our election next Tuesday.

Yes, it’s frivolous. But it’s also a little sharper than a simple online poll. Voters are asked to agree or disagree to 10 statements. For instance: “Gross human rights violations are a sufficient justification for a country to bring down a tyranny by military force even when there is no consensus within the international community.” Your answer falls on a continuum from complete agreement to complete disagreement with the proposition; you can also vote neutral. After you’ve done that, your responses are tabulated against a list of 65 candidates who appear on ballots somewhere in the United States.

So here’s what I found interesting: I went through the process, and got my list of candidates. So, Number 65 on my list was George W. Bush. That’s reassuring — I really am voting against him. Kerry was Number 40-something. Nader was Number 5. And my Number 1 candidate, the one with whom these 10 statements show I have the greatest affinity, is Jackson Kirk Grimes, whose party is abbreviated on the ballot as “Fasc.” That turns out to be short for “United Fascist Union.”

Grimes’s background includes a stint in the Army (’68-’72), experience as a stockbroker and as an actor in “Shakespearan off-Broadway productions.” He is or has been a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Eagles of Lackawanna County, and the Screen Actors Guild. His earliest listed political experience is from 1967, when he served as a storm trooper for the “Facist [sic] Freedom Front.” He wants to legalize drugs, repeal limits on gun ownership, guarantee the right to abortion, do away with affirmative action, and spend a lot more money on the military and education while canceling spending for homeland security. Also, he likes to wear what looks like a Roman centurion’s helmet with the plume turned sideways (see above). A real maverick.

It’s also interesting to me that of all the Democratic candidates, the one who was listed first on my candidates list was Kerry. Everyone else, whether it was closet Republican Joe Lieberman or ultralib Al Sharpton, ranked between Kerry and Bush on the bottom end of the ballot. Of course, I haven’t really looked into how the rankings are derived.

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And Now, a Word from God

The New York Times published a special election section today. It’s 10 pages, with two ads. On the back page, there’s what looks like an interesting though endless essay from a number of Korean-American groups. The ad starts by describing Korea’s history since World War II, but it’s really a plea for a peaceful solution to the tensions with North Korea, and, at the very end, criticizes a new law (passed last month, signed by Bush earlier this month) called the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004. The law is an attempt to tie U.S. humanitarian assistance to North Korea to improvements in human rights there; it also provides money for refugee and humanitarian aid, tries to force China to play ball with the U.N. in dealing with North Korean refugees who show up there, and makes it easier for North Korean refugees and defectors to relocate to the United States. Among other things. Kim Jong-Il doesn’t like the law. Also, South Korea apparently lobbied against it because of concerns that encouraging people to leave the North will flood the South with refugees.

But that’s not the ad I wanted to talk about. On page 3 of the special section, there’s a full page of text titled, “Revelation from God/War or Peace?” The ad features God speaking in the first person to Doris Orme of Bonita Springs, Florida (medium for “God Tells New Things to Doris“). God has some hopeful things to say. For instance, He’s getting ready to take some serious action to make the world a better place:

“Do you think that for one moment that I cannot fulfill My mandate to bring you into perfection and into My Image and Likeness and become One with Me? This is the hour when that will be fulfilled, on the foundation of all those who have given unselfishly to bring this hour which is now here with you. … The hour will come very shortly when you will see My hand move. It will be like a mighty thunder … and will be like a thief in the night, but a good thief, ready to fill your heart with joy!”

Maybe most interesting is that God is not a Bush Supporter, and that God holds a Holy Grudge over the Hanging Chads of 2000, and that God has His Holy Dander up over the war in Iraq. As God told Doris on July 24, 2003:

“I asked you to listen to My words very seriously after Mr. Bush became in a leading position here in America. I hesitate to even say he became President, because in My eyes he has never been the President of the United States. He has been a thief. I told you this before — you have a thief in the White House — Barabbas the murderer, and blood would flow in America and around the world, because of this deed. You know, as well as I know, that the election was not an election that was honest. There were many things that went wrong, deliberately went wrong, because people interfered with the rules, in Florida and caused the election to go the way it went.

“… And I told you again that those who live by the sword shall die by the sword. Those who lived in Baghdad had no where to hide, no where to go. I wonder if, the people who decided that, would like to experience that in this nation of America. I am sure they would not. ”

Well, you get the idea. God also discloses that our founding fathers are discussing the situation with Him in the spirit world, that the Bush administration “is leading America down into the pit,” and that salvation for Bush. Tony Blair, and the rest of us lies only in coming clean about our Iraq lies. It’s unhinged and humorous in a way. But also heartrending. And it goes on and on and on.

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What’s On Now

The other morning, we were talking about the election, and our son Tom brought up the testimony of Richard Clarke, the former anti-terrorism czar (why not tsar, by the way?), before the 9/11 Commission. Specifically, he mentioned how Clarke had testified that during the Clinton administration, he had a direct line to the national security advisor (Sandy Berger) and other senior officials; under Bush, he said, his communications were put in a channel through subordinates that often meant it took months for him to get a meeting with the national security chief (Condoleeza Rice) on urgent matters. So, of course I like the fact Tom, who’s a senior in high school and getting more and more engaged with the world, has the specifics of Clare’s testimony at hand. It’s interesting where he got it. The 9/11 Commission hearings are offered free on Apple’s iTunes; Tom downloaded the Clarke testimony because he likes to listen to “spoken-word stuff” when he goes to bed. Interesting. When we were kids, we listened to stuff on records and the radio when we went to bed, too; but not so much “spoken-word stuff,” and not anything like the 9/11 Commission hearings (I guess the equivalent for us would have been a recording of Daniel Ellsberg reading The Pentagon Papers.

(And while I’m talking about iTunes, just let me comment on one of their TV ads. Bono, from U2, is on screen, and he counts off the start of a song in Spanish. “Uno, dos, tres, catorce.” Yeah, that’s “one, two, three, fourteen.” Nice. Listeners have picked up on this and are discussing what it means online. One forum I found includes theories that this is a reference to a character on the old ABC series “Three’s Company”; another is that this refers to passages in the New Testament. )

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More Signs?

John Brekke points me to a Hunter S. Thompson “Fear and Loathing” piece in Rolling Stone. Hunter’s fevers reveal Bush is a goner, “hammered into jelly” by Kerry during the debates. The article is a weird tour de force, actually a little reminiscent of the magnificent opening to Don DeLillo’s “Underworld,” set at the 1951 playoff between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, with Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca, and Russ Hodges brought together at New York’s Polo Grounds with Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, Toots Shor, and J. Edgar Hoover. Hunter knits together his own amazing patchwork of characters and events to put George W. Bush in perspective: Karl Rove and Hitler and the Reichstag fire, Bedouins, Julius Caesar, Nixon, Muhammad Ali, Bill Clinton, Iraq, and the dark spirit of the Bush family’s adopted hometown: “Houston is a cruel and crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It’s a shabby sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West — which can mean just about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch.” Wow. “Super-rich pansexual cowboys.” It’s a nice, nasty piece of fantasy. What astounds is that Hunter can still string so many sentences together.

Rolling Stone’s got another item that may be of more import in how the country is looking at Bush and Kerry. Eminem, whom I’m guessing has a bigger following than Hunter Thompson among today’s youth, has some angry words for the commander-in-chief: ” “I think he started a mess . . . He jumped the gun, and he fucked up so bad he doesn’t know what to do right now . . . We got young people over there dyin’, kids in their teens, early twenties that should have futures ahead of them. And for what? It seems like a Vietnam 2. Bin Laden attacked us, and we attacked Saddam. Explain why that is. Give us some answers.” Obviously, Eminem — who says that at age 36 he’s registered to vote for the first time — wasn’t satisfied with the explanations Bush offered during the debates.

Pissing off Andrew Sullivan is one thing. Pissing off Eminem is another. That could make even Jenna and Barbara Jr. jump ship.

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11 Days …

… (or is it 10?) until the election. How will it go? I haven’t the faintest idea, though I made an impulsive bet during a brief fit of optimism yesterday that Kerry will win. It’s interesting, in any case, to watch the projected electoral vote total sway first one way, then the other; if you look at that, the race looks like it’s balanced on a knife’s edge; a repeat of 2000. And maybe it is, and will be.

But more interesting to me is a brief foray into a conservative blog I’ve long avoided: Andrew Sullivan’s. I’m not proud of having avoided it; but I’ve felt I could do without the aggravation of watching someone clever manufacture clever arguments to explain how what Bush is doing to the United States — the war, the erosion of civil liberties in the name of the state, the fear mongering, the naked embrace of fundamentalist Christianity as a guiding principle for government — is good for us. But today, I hit a link to Sullivan’s site, and was surprised to see that he — and some other thinking conservatives — have turned on Bush because of the Iraq disaster.

Here’s one representative post from Sullivan, in which he first quotes a Thomas Friedman (New York Times) column at length, then adds a brief mea culpa of his own:

“Conservatives profess to care deeply about the outcome in Iraq, but they sat silently for the last year as the situation there steadily deteriorated. Then they participated in a shameful effort to refocus the country’s attention on what John Kerry did on the rivers of Vietnam 30 years ago, not on what George Bush and his team are doing on the rivers of Babylon today, where some 140,000 American lives are on the line. Is this what it means to be a conservative today?

Had conservatives spoken up loudly a year ago and said what both of Mr. Bush’s senior Iraq envoys, Jay Garner and Paul Bremer, have now said (and what many of us who believed in the importance of Iraq were saying) – that we never had enough troops to control Iraq’s borders, keep the terrorists out, prevent looting and establish authority – the president might have changed course. Instead, they served as a Greek chorus, applauding Mr. Bush’s missteps and mocking anyone who challenged them.

Conservatives have failed their own test of patriotism. In the end, it has been more important for them to defeat liberals than to get Iraq right. Had Democrats been running this war with the incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld & Friends, conservatives would have demanded their heads a year ago – and gotten them.” – Tom Friedman, telling it like it is. I’m guilty as well. I was so intent on winning this war and so keen to see the administration succeed against our enemy that I gave them too many benefits of the doubt. Well, I have tried to reassess. I may be proven wrong. I hope I am. But ignoring reality in a situation as vital as this is not an option.

An important intellectual support for Bush and company looks like it’s collapsing. I wonder what effect it will have in the vote.

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Going Along with the Script

I don’t want to join in the national whine about mainstream media’s coverage of the presidential elections — how shallow it is, how devoid it is of really tough questioning of the candidates. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But there is something I’m hearing on the radio just about every day, nearly every hour — I don’t watch any of the national TV news shows anymore, though sometimes I hear PBS’s “News Hour” — that’s annoying as hell. On both NPR and CBS — where I have the dial tuned 90 percent of the time most days — the networks are making a habit of running straight-up reports on Bush’s and Kerry’s perambulations around the union, complete with soundbites of their boilerplate stump speeches, and treating the appearances as if they are news unto themselves, as if the thing listeners really need to know is where the candidates are today and the inflections in their voices as they repeat for the ninety-ninth time all the ways they are fit for the presidency and their opponent is not. The items go something like this: “President Bush was in Ottumwa, Iowa, campaigning for votes in this crucial swing state. [Bush soundbite: “Can you imagine being more liberal than Ted Kennedy? He can run from his record, but he cannot hide!” (Sound of cheering.)] Tomorrow, the president will campaign in Ohio, another crucial swing state.” The same thing — and the items from the Kerry campaign are largely the same — day after day after day.

What a waste of time. What a sad pretense of conveying useful information. Once you’ve reported that “he can run but he can’t hide” line, or Kerry’s “it’s the wrong war at the wrong time” line (though Kerry is actually talking about an issue, what’s the point of repeating it ad nauseum? Of course it’s easier to stick to the scripts the campaigns provide. It’s easier than trying to find something happening somewhere in the 50 states that’s really campaign news — I don’t care what it is: a speech from Nader or the Libertarian or other candidates, news on local disputes over voting machines, new poll numbers in the battleground states or Dick Cheney or John Edwards or some wacky senator of congressperson going spastic out there (actually, NPR in its latest hourly news update did have an item on Christoper Reeve’s wife campaigning for Kerry in Minneapolis. That was better than they usually do.)

If I were putting together a newscast or a news roundup, I’d say skip the empty theater the campaigns are presenting; make them actually say something real and meaningful if they want to get their message out on the public airwaves. Otherwise, use news of real substance and shrink the sterile, meaningless tidings from the campaign to an itinerary item: The president’s addressing preapproved, prescreened crowds of loyal Republicans in Ohio and Pennsylvania today. Challenger John Kerry will be talking to duck hunters in Oregon.

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The Scariest Thing …

… that arrived in my inbox today was the following, from a former colleague and journalist who often irritates the hell out of me because of his indiscriminate email distribution of what I view as paranoid, hysterical conspiracy-mongering from the left. Sometimes I delete his messages without reading them. Today I opened the email and read this:

"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the
White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen
Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the
White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I
didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of
the Bush presidency.

"The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based
community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge
from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured
something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off.
‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re
an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re
studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again,
creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things
will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be
left to just study what we do.’ "

–"Without a Doubt," by Ron Susskind (or Suskind, when you spell it correctly), NY Times Magazine 10/17/04

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html?pagewanted=1&oref=log
in

Pass it along…   Maybe people will wake up.

That’s the note. "Reality-based community." To indulge in what might sound paranoid and hysterical, it smells like something from people who think they’re building their own version of the Reich — enlightened, based on their interpretation of liberty and pursuit of all the best principles. And they’d love it if people just stood by and watched them do it.

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Out There in the World

What am I doing sitting inside instead of doing things like, for instance, riding in the Davis Bike Club’s fall century (looking at the site, I had the first twinge of regret that I’m not out there on my bike). Well, here are a couple of things:

–Listening to a great edition of “This American Life” from Chicago. This week, it’s all about a Chicago Public School that, with leadership from a great principal and imaginative work from a bunch of great teachers, turned around a failing school on the West Side, and how the arrival of new top-down thinking in the district has been killing the progress that’s been made. Heartbreaking stuff, and so similar to what Kate is going through in Oakland right now.

–Marveling at the spectacle, which led one of the local news shows here last night and is on the Chronicle’s front page this morning, of hundreds and hundreds of senior citizens lining up to get flu shots. So, yes, one of the manufacturers screwed up. But even so, how is it that the Number One wealthiest nation in the world (thanks, Visa and MasterCard and bond buyers in Japan and China!) forces its citizens to beg for such a basic treatment. The big local scandal, as the TV news reported, was the death of an older woman who fell and hit her head after waiting in line outside a drugstore for hours the other day. I also liked this bit: A credit-union manager in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, who had to turn seniors away after flu vaccine ran out handed out cans of chicken soup and packs of Kleenex instead.