posted 2008/05/06 at 20:12
I had hoped that the NHL would schedule the start of the Red Wings-Stars series for tonight because it would give the Stars little time to recover from that grueling four-overtime game on Sunday. Now I'm wishing they'd scheduled any game for tonight so I wouldn't be stuck watching more primary coverage tonight. I know that I don't have to watch, but this is my normal news-listening time, and for the sake of being able to converse knowledgably with my students about this stuff, I still feel obliged to keep tabs on things. Still, this primary campaign got tiresome long ago, and as much as I'm not going to tell the Democrats how to run their campaigns (even if they tell we Greens to perform anatomical impossibilities in terms of us running for offices), on a personal level I wish we could just get this campaign over with.
I have to admit I'm starting to have doubts about where my vote will go, though. I had gotten behind Nader as soon as he entered the race, even when he decided not to pursue the Green Party nomination, in large part because I didn't feel comfortable voting for Cynthia McKinney. I've still got very strong reservations about McKinney, but the mailings I've been getting from Ralph Nader's campaign have been giving me cause for pause as well. I can't put my finger on it exactly, but there is something about the way the Nader campaign is conducting itself that is making me question my loyalty to it. I think that over my break I'm going to be taking a closer look at McKinney and how she's conducting her campaign, and reevaulate just who I want to support.
What may be bothering me the most about this is the impending sense that this is not going to end well. Not only am I concerned that the protracted Democratic primary campaign is going to give McCain an easy path to the White House, but between the Democrats opposing Green Party ballot access at every turn and the progressive vote already being split between Nader and McKinney, I feel like we're going to be in for another night like we had in 2004, where it's close but the Republicans win, the Green Party loses even more of the gains it got in 2000, and we'll be no closer to reinventing democracy than we were four years ago. I hate to be a pessimist about these things, but I can't help but be a realist, and it's hard enough to be an optimist and a realist at the same time about anything, let alone American politics.
Labels: greenparty, politics
posted 2008/03/04 at 19:09
I was hoping for a distraction from the craziness of Ohio having such a hotly-contested Democratic primary, but this wasn't what I had in mind. Believe me, the last thing I needed after coming home from the hospital after Dad died was to walk by our mailbox and see a full-page flyer from Clinton's campaign sticking out of it. I had thought that the Republican and Democratic primaries were the only things on the ballot today, but there were a couple of funding issues on the ballot here, including funding for our firefighters. The firefighters already had my vote for life, especially after the house fire, but I saw them do everything they could to save Dad in our living room and they have my eternal appreciation for that as well. I was probably the only person at that precinct to come in as a declared Green (or at least as close to one as I can get given how Ohio's laws screw over third parties), but I'll get my chance to vote in the Green primary next month. I'd originally planned to go to the statewide convention in April to vote, but right now I don't want to make any plans like that until the situation here at home gets a lot more settled.
It would figure that immediately after Dad's death I'd get Darren McCarty back on the Red Wings, a snow day, and Ralph Nader in the presidential race. However, as much as I appreciate Nader running, I don't agree with his strategy of running independently and trying to run a campaign "alongside" the eventual Green Party nominee to get progressive issues out there. I think it does help to have more voices talking about the issues that aren't being talked about by the major party candidates, but it's possible to do that without having two progressive candidates out there. I don't think Nader and David Cobb running separate candidacies four years ago was a good thing for either progressives as a whole or the Green Party in particular, given how it split an already small vote and cost the Green Party several ballot lines it won with Nader's 2000 candidacy. Particularly if Clinton manages to win the Democratic nomination through superdelegates, there is a tremendous opportunity for the Green Party to make huge inroads in this next election and make the five percent popular threshold to qualify for federal funds in 2012. Nader running as an independent -- particularly with Matt Gonzales as his vice-presidential candidate (one of the biggest stars within the Green Party) -- doesn't strike me as the best strategy for this year.
As for my plans, I'm going to continue to push for Nader to get the Green Party nomination whether or not he wants it. He already has a huge delegate count, and I think he may actually win the nomination even if he isn't campaigning for it. (If he does win the nomination, I highly doubt he'd turn it down.) If he doesn't get the nomination then Cynthia McKinney will likely get it, and as much as I want to vote for the Green Party candidate no matter what, there's no way I can vote for McKinney over Nader. I guess I'm stuck with Nader now no matter what, and the moment he has volunteer opportunities posted on his Website that don't involve actually talking with other people, I'll probably volunteer to do something for him. At least that should give me another outlet for all the emotions I've been feeling since Dad's death.
Labels: dad, greenparty, politics
posted 2008/02/19 at 22:16
Unless there's been a Red Wings game on, each of my past Tuesday nights has been spent with coverage of the major party primaries on the television behind me. Even though I don't particularly care too much who the Democratic and Republican nominees might end up being, there is still something about the process that captivates me. I kind of need to keep up on this stuff, not only because it does ultimately affect me deeply, but because some of my students have a passing knowledge of this stuff, and I want to be able to give them information. (The other day a student in one of my classes told me that she thought that Barack Obama was a Muslim.) I think I also just enjoy hearing all the political speak and un-spinning it in my mind. I guess it's somewhat akin to how I enjoy watching the television shows of people I can't stand (Craig Kilborn and Alton Brown just to name two) just to figure out every little thing that they do wrong. I'd like to think I'm doing it more to hone my skills of criticism than because I like to complain or because I like being miserable, but I know myself too well to say that for sure.
I'm still trying to figure out Obama's allure. I mean, nearly everyone knowledges that Obama is one of the most skilled orators of our time, but I don't agree with the current strain of thought that states Obama and Hillary Clinton are basically the same on all the issues. I don't think Obama is the Great Progressive Hope that some would like to make him out to be -- his recent support of private gun ownership after the Illinois school shooting particularly irked me -- I think he is one of the most liberal major political figures in my lifetime. Liberalism has practically been a dirty word ever since I can remember, and with the way the religious right has framed the national dialogue over the past twenty-plus years, I would have thought that not even Obama's rhetorical skills could result in him gaining this much support. Obama isn't left-leaning enough for my tastes, but he certainly leans further to the left than any other national political figure I can recall.
I'm particularly taken aback at how so many people who identify themselves as Republicans and even conservatives are supporting Obama, given how drastically Obama's views differ from mainstream conservative thought. Obama getting Oprah's endorsement particularly rattled me; given that Oprah was the person responsible for unloosing such a prototypical conservative like Dr. Phil on all of us, I don't understand how she could just turn around and support Obama in a way that politicized her far more than she had ever been before. Is the American public really so malleable that they can be so solidly swayed to extremes like those represented by George W. Bush and Barack Obama even when the fundamental principles and philosophies of the two of them differ so drastically? I get criticized often for being too inflexible with my principles -- I'll be the first to admit it's valid criticism -- but this election seems to be teaching me just how inflexible I am compared to most people.
Labels: politics
posted 2008/02/09 at 15:32
It says something about this election campaign that the candidate I'm most appreciative of right now is Mitt Romney, as his withdrawl from the Republican nomination means I'll only have about half as many candidate spots on my television to deal with leading up to Ohio's primary next month. Ohio doesn't look to be in play for Huckabee, and by the time Ohio rolls around I think Huckabee's momentum will be completely drained so McCain won't have any real need to buy more but a sprinkling of ad time locally. The Democratic nomination will still definitely be in play by the time of the primary, though, and although part of me feels like I should be excited that there's finally an Ohio primary that might matter, I am not looking forward to a month of dueling Clinton and Obama spots on every show on the dial. I got sick enough of those spots leading up to the Michigan primary (even though only Republicans bought ad time on Fox Sports Net Detroit), and I'm tired of watching the Obama and McCain spots that air on Countdown. Given how tight the Democratic race is right now, and given how close Ohio was in the 2004 election, I'm guessing that any moment now I won't be able to watch a half-hour of any commercial network on cable without seeing a Clinton or Obama ad buy.
I'll be skipping the primary vote, because there won't be anything else on the ballot that day and because I can't vote in the "official" state primaries because doing so automatically registers me as a member of whatever party's primary I vote in. I would much rather see Obama as the Democratic nominee than Clinton, but I'm probably not going to vote for him in the general election anyway. More to the point, I still remember several registered Democrats in my first-semester MA classes who got hassled by Ohio Republicans that year as the Republican Party challenged the voter registration of several people I knew, holding off on submitting the challenges until the legal deadline so that the students couldn't call off of work on such short notice to attend the hearings about their registrations. I can't help but wonder if Ohio Democrats might not try something similar with we Greens this year, given how ridiculous they were last time around in making sure that not even Nader's write-in votes would get counted. (Seriously, if they'd put that kind of effort into promoting their own candidate then Kerry might be in the White House now.)
Ohio's Green Party will handle its primary at their convention in April, although people who won't be attending can mail or e-mail a ballot before then. I think I may actually go to the convention, though, even though it's all the way across the state and there's no way I could reasonably make a daytrip of it. I'm still hoping that Nader gets in the race again, because I don't like the prospect of Cynthia McKinney winning the nomination; I'm still not getting a good vibe off of her. If Nader doesn't come in then I'll probably vote in the primary for Kent Mesplay, but I think the Greens need Nader more than ever now. Particularly if Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, people are going to need an alternative to the spectre of four or eight years of DLC neoliberalism, and even if there isn't a realistic chance of winning the presidency, at the very least we might stand a chance of getting that magical 5% of the popular vote that would give the Greens tens of millions of dollars of federal matching funds in 2012. I haven't been too directly involved with the Green Party itself since I first registered to vote, but more than ever now I feel compelled to do what I can to help the party along.
Labels: commercials, greenparty, politics, television
posted 2008/01/24 at 19:49
Democrat Kucinich quits White House race (AP via Yahoo! News)
I had heard that one Democrat was mounting a challenge to Kucinich's House seat a while back. Now there's four, and as much as I wanted Kucinich to repeat his performance from 2004 (staying in the race until it was mathematically impossible for him to win the nomination), I can't blame him for pulling out like this. The mainstream media silencing him at every turn (pulling him from debates being only the latest example of this) was making it impossible for him to gain any real momentum, and it wasn't like he had much of a chance of winning the nomination from the onset anyway. Yes, I wanted him to stay in as long as possible, but the man has to put food on his table, and I can't fault him for focusing his energies on retaining his House seat in this climate. Still, the fact that all of these challengers would suddenly pop up strikes me as dirty politics, and I'm fairly convinced that someone in the Democratic Party is likely behind this.
As if this isn't bad enough, Kucinich saying that he won't endorse another candidate, when he'd previously given a tacit endorsement to Obama by telling his Iowa caucusers to pick Obama as a second choice, is rather chilling. The only reason I can see for Kucinich to do this is that he believes, as so many others do at this point, that Clinton is going to win the nomination for the Democrats. I still can't say that I believe Obama to be the true progressive that so many say he is -- I think that's the same kind of wishful thinking that made Howard "balanced budget hawk and lifetime A ranking from the NRA" Dean the so-called big name progressive of 2004 -- but I'd rather have him as the Democratic candidate by a long shot. I know the old saying goes "better the devil you know than the devil you don't know," but in the case of the Clintons I'd just rather they disappear entirely from the face of American politics.
I suppose now is as good a time as any to mention that a couple of weeks ago, knowing full well that Kucinich stood next to no chance of winning the Democratic nomination, I signed the Draft Nader petition to try to get Nader into the Green Party primaries. It's looking more and more like the Green nomination is Cynthia McKinney's to lose if Nader doesn't enter, and even though I'd vote for McKinney in a heartbeat if the next best alternative out there is Clinton, I still have a lingering distrust for McKinney, and I don't think she's the person who the Green Party should be putting out there as the face of its principles. This whole campaign just seems to be headed straight down the crapper, and it's making it all the more painful for me to realize that this is the last presidential campaign I'll be too young to run in. Do I have to fix everything around here?
Labels: greenparty, kucinich, politics
posted 2008/01/14 at 21:11
Judge grants Kucinich entry to NV debate (AP via Yahoo! News)
If you were watching Countdown tonight, then Keith Olbermann did, in fact, inform you of this decision, as well as the fact that NBC was going to appeal it. However, in the resulting discussion Olbermann had with Chuck Todd, Kucinich's presence at the debate was never mentioned again. Todd even went so far as to ludicrously claim that tomorrow's MSNBC debate would be the first debate where the "Big Three" of Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama would be "seated down" and talking about the issues, when the most recent debate on ABC -- the one from which Kucinich and Mike Gravel were excluded -- featured the Big Three and a fourth candidate who wasn't polling as well, in this case Bill Richardson, sitting and discussing the issues. MSNBC wouldn't even change their graphic advertising the debate during Countdown, either by adding Kucinich's photo to those of the Big Three or by simply scrapping the photos altogether.
Given how much big corporations, big media, and conservatives have tried to dumb down our political and social discourse over the past thirty years, given how they have tried to make everyone lower their expectations about the behaviour of anyone else but themselves, it is all too ironic that, when faced with a court order to actually make their debate fully informative and to let people know that there are still more than three Democrats actively campaigning for their party's presidential nomination, NBC would act like a petulant child. MSNBC not only continued to ignore Kucinich's campaign by failing to make any mention of him on tonight's Countdown except for the parenthetical about the court order, it not only continued to abandon its role as a journalistic organization by arbitrarily deciding which of the candidates deserve to be mentioned on its broadcast, but it went so far, even after the court order, to still talk about and promote its upcoming debate as if Kucinich weren't even there. The closest analogy there is to this situation is to a group of bratty kids, who decide that the best way to not have to deal with the "brain" of the neighbourhood is simply to ignore him or her, treating that child as if he or she were visible and didn't exist.
That there has been no great national dialogue, either in this presidential campaign cycle or the previous one, over the media's role in determining which presidential candidates do or do not get airtime to have their voices heard, is a sad testament to just how thirty years of rule by misanthropic Republicans and Democrats have affected this country. Perhaps Dennis Kucinich doesn't have Mitt Romney's Reaganesque hair or Barack Obama's boyish grin or Hillary Clinton's breasts, but his campaign is trying to provide an alternative for Democratic voters who are tired of a party that has sold its soul for the past sixteen years, abandoning all the social justice issues it stood for in a misguided effort to retain its own power and relevance at any cost. Kucinich not only provides that voice to Democrats and like-minded independents, but polls in which voters are asked to judge candidates based on issues, not names or money, have shown time and time again that, if this primary were to be decided on the issues themselves, Kucinich would not only be a front-runner but he would stand a damn good shot at being the eventual candidate. With money comes power, though, and just as the financial machines of the Clintons and Obamas and Romneys allow them to down out the Kuciniches and Gravels and Pauls, NBC and its team of highly-paid lawyers look set to silence Kucinich from tomorrow's debate, all for the ratings the "first debate between the Big Three" might provide.
That's what this is all really about, is ratings. Keith Olbermann has often said that television news got it all wrong a long time ago, back before even his youth, when it was decided that television news would be commercial, that the companies of this nation would so easily be able to exert control over the newscasts with the threat of pulling advertising and cutting the newscasts from the funds they needed to survive. On this point I could not be in fuller agreement with Olbermann, but perhaps now Olbermann needs to reexamine his own adherence to this statement. For years now Olbermann has profited quite handsomely as being the alleged voice of the left in the mainstream media, as the one who would not only stand up to the wrongs perpetrated by Republicans in all branches of office, but who would stay true to his principles no matter what. If Olbermann truly believes that the influence of corporate interests in television news is one of the great ills of our society, then he needs to look at NBC's actions in trying to silence the one candidate who most embodies the positions Olbermann posits in his "Special Comments," and at his own role in that silencing. Until then, all of Olbermann's talk about the evils of corporate media will ring distinctly hollow.
Labels: kucinich, politics, television
posted 2008/01/13 at 19:31
Last month when I was so sick, I really didn't pay attention to politics as much as I normally would, since I didn't feel up to taxing my mind so much. On the plus side, this did get me to stop reading the Huffington Post, which I had basically just come to "accept" as a site to keep me marginally informed on certain issues but I'd always openly loathed for caving in to the political centre time and again. Doubtless I'm missing all number of anti-Ralph Nader blog entries right now as everyone there at once bemoans the Democrats potentially nominating Hillary Clinton for President while simultaneously warning readers that a vote for the Green Party is a vote for the Republican candidate. I've since tried to make due with other Websites to get the pulse of the American left (as well as those who continue to falsely claim to be liberals), but apart from the Green Party's own Website, I'm not having much luck.
Countdown with Keith Olbermann is another of those outlets that I think is portrayed as being far more left-leaning than it really is, but I continue to catch it on a regular basis. Not only does it help keep me informed on certain aspects of the political scene, but I've been a fan of Keith's from his days with Dan Patrick on ESPN, and I like his wit. That being said, I was somewhat shocked late last week when Olbermann announced that this Tuesday's Democratic presidential debate on MSNBC would be the first debate that was between just Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards. Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel are both still in the race, of course, and a quick trip to Kucinich's Website reveals that both had been invited earlier, but that NBC News, specifically Chuck Todd, recinded that invitation last week, presumably for the sake of being able to market this upcoming debate as the first between the "Big Three" Democratic candidates.
My anger at Kucinich (and to a lesser extent Gravel) being excluded from yet another debate should go without saying. However, after Olbermann has campaigned so hard against keeping our troops in harm's way in Iraq, after not only ripping the current administration's Iraq policies but also lambasting the Democrats for caving in to last year's Iraq funding bill -- going so far as to compare Harry Reid's explanation for his vote to Neville Chamberlain's "peace in our time" proclamation -- the question begs to be asked of just where Olbermann's voice is now, now that his own network is excluding from their debate the only two Democrats who are promising to pull our troops out of Iraq in their first term of presidency. For all of Olbermann's legendary personality clashes with his places of employment, he has always prided himself on showing backbone, and not just because he was born with an extra lumbar vertebra; in one famous instance he wrote a one-thousand word memo to his employers to complain about the poor treatment of lower-paid workers at that network. If Olbermann does not now take his own network to task for excluding the two demonstrably consistent anti-war candidates from their debate for the sake of marketing, then my viewing of Countdown may well go the same way as my reading of the Huffington Post.
Labels: kucinich, politics, television
posted 2008/01/05 at 19:10
Kucinich files complaint on ABC debate (AP via Yahoo! News)
I wish I could say that this comes as a surprise to me. A little over four years ago, though, before any primaries had taken place for the 2004 nomination campaign, ABC announced that it would be withdrawing its reporters from the campaigns of Kucinich, Carol Moseley-Braun, and Rev. Al Sharpton. No one believed it was a coincidence that ABC happened to choose the three progressive candidates then, and I doubt anyone believes now that ABC is choosing to remove the two most left-wing candidates (Kucinich and Mike Gravel, whose exclusion from this debate isn't garnering as much coverage as it should) from tonight's debate because of some set of standards that we're mysteriously just hearing about now. I haven't seen any recent polls from New Hampshire, but I remember that just before I got sick Kucinich had actually moved into a tie with Richardson for fourth place in New Hampshire. Perhaps that has changed since then, but the fact that ABC is only inviting the candidates whose campaigns ABC contributes to, for lack of a better word, stinks.
I know that Kucinich sent a bulletin out via his MySpace to have his supporters gather outside the soon-to-start debate in protest, which reminds me of 2004 again. When the Federal Election Commission decided to make the 2004 debates the usual two-party affair, both the Green and Libertarian candidates protested outside the debates, and both were arrested, which I thought showed great courage on both their parts. If only the mainstream media paid attention to the importance of this matter, instead of beating the ignorant "Nader spoiled 2000" drum they've been reskinning over and over again these past four years. I can only hope that this year the Olbermanns of the mainstream media shines more than a laser pointer on the third-party campaigns this year, as I think this year, more than ever, the American voting public is going to want something more than the same-old same-old from the Big Two candidates.
Fox News excluding Ron Paul from their upcoming debate may be as egregious as ABC's actions, too. I make no secret of my disdain of Paul, particularly among so-called "liberals" who should have the sense to realize that Paul's bedrock principles are directly opposed to true liberalism, but I won't deny that the man has a very strong, very vocal following, and his strong showing in Iowa should give him an automatic in for all the remaining debates. Given that Paul's social libertarianism goes against the social conservatism blathered every night by Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, though, perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that Fox News would try to silence Paul by any means possible. As much press as fiscal conservatives' attempts to silence Mike Huckabee are getting now, I think the Religious Right's antagonism against Paul is a far more important story for our democracy. As much as ABC's anti-Kucinich/Gravel tactics stink, at the very least ABC can point to Kucinich and Gravel's poll numbers as a way to weasel out of serious debate of the role of the press in presidential campaigns. Fox News has no such way to weasel out of a similar debate regarding Paul, which just goes to underscore all the more how Fox News is not a real press outfit.
posted 2008/01/03 at 20:09
As much as I've written in the past about how the media puts way too much focus on the Iowa caucuses, sure enough I've pretty much braced myself to watch MSNBC from right now until whenever I go to bed. (I'm getting too old to try to outlast the coverage, especially since the results will likely be nebulous into daybreak.) I guess I just like to fixate on the mechanics of things like this. I don't watch college football, and I'm fairly uninterested in the NFL (at least until the Bengals get their act together again), but I absolutely love watching the NFL Draft in the spring even when I hardly know what is going on. I've always compared the NFL Draft to a giant 32-person game of chess, and I guess that I'm getting a similar vibe right now off of the Iowa caucuses. This is about as close to the machinations of Big Two politics as I care to get -- I dislike all the spinning and such intensely -- but watching them unfold is strangely intriguing. At least I know a lot more about the candidates here than I do about the players in the football drafts.
Keith Olbermann's been talking a lot these past couple of nights about Dennis Kucinich asking his Iowa caucus-goers to go for Barack Obama as a second choice, just as Kucinich asked them to go for John Edwards in 2004. I remember when that happened in 2004, though, and there are a couple of important things that Olbermann hasn't mentioned about 2004. First of all, in 2004 Kucinich was campaigning a lot more in Iowa than he did in this campaign; I don't think Kucinich is even in Iowa right now. I think his campaign is putting much more emphasis on New Hampshire, which is kind of logical given that the "15% threshold" rule in Iowa really works against the second-tier candidates. Secondly, Kucinich's agreement with Edwards was reciprocal, and really helped both candidates out a lot; Kucinich placed way better in Iowa than anyone thought he would, and Kucinich's support may have helped Edwards leap above Howard Dean to second place. I haven't heard of a reciprocal agreement between Kucinich and Obama this year, but then again I doubt there will be any precincts where Obama will drop below threshold. I kind of wonder if Kucinich may be angling for the vice-presidential nomination, since he's closer to Obama ideologically than the other candidates.
This brings up an interesting point, because one of the things I need to do over the next couple of weeks is to research the current crop of candidates for the Green Party nomination. From a glance, though, it looks like Cynthia McKinney may be the frontrunner at this point, and, well, I don't get a good vibe off of her. Between some of the things she did while a member of Congress and her strange switch to the Green Party just before announcing her candidacy, I just don't feel like she's the person the Greens should be nominating. I've still got an uneasy feeling about Obama as well, but if I were forced to choose between Obama/Kucinich and McKinney/someone else, I think I would vote for Obama. I'm hoping that this doesn't happen, though, and that someone I feel easier about voting for captures the Green Party nomination. Where's Ralph Nader when you need him?
Labels: greenparty, kucinich, politics
posted 2007/12/23 at 20:39
I've been sick for close to two weeks now, and it's only been in the past day or two that I've felt well enough to resume what I consider to be normal activities for me. It's almost as if my body was trying to make up for how I didn't have a serious illness for close to two years there, and shut down almost completely when this bug really hit. As it is I'm still not feeling well enough to resume exercise, and I continue to use television as a way to distract myself for how lousy I feel (thankfully there was a MythBusters marathon earlier today), but I'm no longer feeling like I was earlier when I basically had to save up my energy so I could tend to work stuff, then come back here and basically collapse either in front of my computer or, more likely, on top of my bed.
It's amazing just how out of it I continue to feel right now. I've kind of been taking things easy so that I didn't tire myself out with other things, but now I feel kind of disconnected from the world around me. For example, I haven't been following the news that closely for a couple of weeks, and I don't even have my Google Sidebar on my computer now because it was hurting my head trying to keep up with all the information on it. I recognize that this is a natural response to being sick, and that in the long run this is probably a healthy thing for me to be doing, but at the same time we're getting very close to the first primaries for the "big two" parties and I don't feel all that informed as to what's going on here. Just from the cursory glances I've gotten of the news lately, it looks like Ron Paul's come out of nowhere in terms of coverage devoted to his campaign, and once again Dennis Kucinich is getting the short end of the straw. Without being able to delve deeper into the news, though, I don't feel like I can make a good blog post about the campaign, so I'll probably need to take an afternoon here after Christmas just to get caught up on the news.
I also haven't been on instant messenger that much lately, when I'd been doing such a good job of making myself available on it once I downloaded Trillian and got it installed. Normally this wouldn't be such a big issue for me, but a couple of my friends seem to have been going through some tough times recently and it kind of stinks that I haven't been around to help them. I suppose it would help if I were better about talking on the phone, but I haven't had a landline connection in my room since we got our cable modem, and I only really use my cell phone for emergencies and business purposes. I'm kind of an insulated person to start with, but this cold just made things ten times worse for me in that regard, and just like with the news, now I find myself needing to catch up on stuff with my small circle of friends that I missed these past couple of weeks.
There have been some other important developments in my life here, but I'll get to those in another post; right now I must play catch-up with yet other things. Gee, I thought things would slow down once I was on vacation here. Silly me.
Labels: internet, personal, politics
posted 2007/12/09 at 22:37
I wish I could say that the news of the mall shooting in Omaha this past week shocked me, but I'm kind of surprised that it took this long for something like this to happen. Granted, I don't go to that many malls (over the past five years the mall I visited the most was the one in Westland, Michigan, back when they had a good arcade in there), but whenever I go to malls I always look at all the different inventory loss control systems set up in the front of each individual store, and I can't help but think to myself that it would be a lot easier if the stores could come to some sort of standard, and then to just have the inventory loss/metal detectors set up at all the entrances and exits to the malls. I don't know that much about how those devices work, so maybe it would be difficult to get them all standardized, but when you see so many of them as you walk through a mall, it's hard not to think that there's probably a fair deal of waste there. More to the point, given the kind of traffic that malls get, it just makes zero sense that there's no kind of metal detector at each entrance just to catch the most obvious stuff.
I will say that as much as I saw something like this happening, though, I wasn't expecting that the violence would be gun-related; I expected that there would be some sort of bomb attack, perhaps even a suicide bomber. There wasn't much strategic value to al-Qaeda in hitting the World Trade Centre, but there was a lot of symbolic value to them because, for them (and others), it represented the evils and excesses of American capitalism. American malls are nearly as much of a symbol of our capitalist economy, and particularly in the days leading up to Christmas they get a tremendous amount of traffic. I don't recall if there was an increase in mall security after the 09.11 attacks, but every time I've been to a mall since then I can't recall seeing more than the odd rent-a-cop walking around. My heart goes out to those who lost loved ones in the Omaha shooting, but at the same time I can't help but hope that this episode will lead to the country re-examining how lax mall security is, and that maybe at least some steps will be taken to lower the future possibility of someone armed with a gun or a bomb being able to waltz into a mall unhampered and kill lots of people.
On top of this, earlier today a gunman opened fire at a megachurch in Colorado Springs, killing someone before an armed guard shot and killed him. On the one hand I'm glad that the gunman was stopped before he could kill anyone else, but at the same time I can't help but wonder what it says about our society that churches now have their own armed security forces. I'm not questioning the logic of it (particularly given that those megachurches can have more people in them than all but the biggest of malls), but it's still one of those things that makes you despair a little more for our society as a whole.
Labels: politics
posted 2007/11/25 at 21:53
Giuliani's "Kucinich-Size" Crowds Disappoint In New Hampshire (NBC News via huffingtonpost.com)
The Huffington Post, as usual, chose their own headline for the story, and much like the Drudge Report before them, they picked a headline that targeted the HuffPo base and framed the meat of the story in the best terms possible for their goals, mainly to assist the mainstream Democratic candidates towards next year's Presidential elections. (Also note the unflattering photo of Giuliani they use in the story; as much as I dislike Giuliani, I don't think it's fair of HuffPo to do that.) Mind you, in just the short excerpt of the story featured in the link above, HuffPo had another way to frame the story, comparing the size of Giuliani's crowd to the size of the crowd Ron Paul garnered. That comparison would have worked just as well to slam Giuliani, plus it would have stuck it to another Republican, but instead HuffPo went with the Kucinich slam.
I've written before about how upset I am that HuffPo has made itself a shout box for the centrists who continue to stink up the Democratic Party, paying a small amount of lip service to Obama but otherwise playing the same "Clinton doesn't represent us but don't you dare vote Green" game that the Democrats played last time with John Kerry. It simply boggles the mind that there are so many on the so-called left here in America who are pushing hard to make Ron Paul an alternative to Clinton simply because he opposes the war, given that he also opposes pretty much everything the Democratic Party has traditionally stood for. I'm not saying that the war isn't an important issue, but it's almost as if Democrats are willing to throw away their very identity in order to try to spite Clinton in some sick, twisted way.
What has made this situation all the more maddening for me in recent weeks has been the sudden surge of Mike Huckabee in polls, both in the early primary/caucus states and in the nation as a whole. Huckabee's rise in the polls doesn't particularly surprise me, because he represents the values that the religious right so desperately want to keep in the White House. We can argue Huckabee's electability later -- I think he's far more electable than anyone in the mainstream media has argued -- but the point I am trying to make is that Mike Huckabee is living proof that a party can play to its traditional values instead of running to the centre and create a viable candidate. Huckabee's example should have all true Democrats rushing to put their money into the campaigns of Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, and yet both of them continue to be treated as "joke" candidates, not only by the mainstream media but by the Democratic Party establishment itself.
I'm pretty much resigned to voting for the Green Party candidate next year and taking whatever abuse people want to give me for it. That's not my primary concern right now, though. Right now I want nothing more than to take Dennis Kucinich softly by the shoulders, give him a warm smile, and then shake the heck out of him and yell "Why on earth are you still a Democrat?" I understand Kucinich's historical ties to the party and his desire to work within the party to try to transform it, but I don't think at this point that any reasonable person can expect that the big money centrists that have so thoroughly ruined the Democratic Party will be taking off any time soon. More than ever, 2008 needs to be the year that the Green Party establishes itself as a viable alternative for true progressives, and we start to chip away at the two-party hegemony that is so clearly leading this nation right down the crapper.
Labels: greenparty, kucinich, politics, rhetoric
posted 2007/11/07 at 19:56
Poll: 70 percent of LGBTs support noninclusive ENDA (Planet Out via Yahoo! News)
I don't know what pisses me off more right now: the fact that there's so little news coverage of Kucinich introducing Articles of Impeachment against Cheney, or that there's so little news coverage of the machinations of the ENDA. For all the talk out there about this huge left-wing media conspiracy, the fact that the media is burying stories like these in favour of things like the President of France cozying up to the current administration and Pat Robertson endorsing Giuliani just goes to show, as far as I'm concerned, how centrist Democrats have managed to squeeze truly progressive politics and politicians almost completely off of the American radar.
That the GLBT community would leave trans people high and dry on a matter like this is hardly unprecedented. Although the GLBT community made great strides towards public recognition and acceptance in the 1990s, it was really only gays, lesbians, and bisexuals who got the benefits of that wave. Remember the images of gay men and lesbian women from that time period: the couple from that Ikea commercial, Will from Will and Grace, and so on. Not only were trans people completely left out and overlooked at the gay, lesbian, and bisexual communities fought for more acceptance, but in order to try to make themselves look more appealing to the public at large, the GLBT community gave into the other kinds of quiet discrimination in the media at large. Even today, all it takes is a casual glance through the pages of big GLBT magazines like The Advocate to see that this trend is still continuing today: nearly all the people portrayed in articles and advertisements are thin, clean-cut, young caucasian males. People of colour, people of size, women, and trans people are nearly as unpresented in the pages of GLBT magazines as they are in the media at large, and you would think that a community that claims to be so concerned about diversity and acceptance would actually, you know, show that in the image they portray of themselves.
Even the rhetoric being used by people who claim that this "compromise" bill is the best option we have right now is painfully familiar, as it calls to mind Hillary Clinton so laughingly trying to defend her husband's barring of same-sex marriage in his administration by claiming that it was the best political solution at the time because at least it wasn't a Constitutional amendment. The notion that the civil rights of a group of people, whether it's discrimination against trans people or the marriage rights of same-sex couples or the atrocities the Chinese government continues to inflict on its people, should never be considered some kind of political bargaining chip. How different would this country be if LBJ was more concerned with preserving the power of the Democratic Party in the south than with granting civil rights to non-Caucasians? How different would we be if Gandhi had been concerned with the practicality of his non-violent protest of colonial British rule? At a time when this country is aching for massive change in the way our government is run and the business it conducts, all of what is so ludicrously called "the left wing" in America today just wants to give us a slightly-retooled version of what has so failed this country for these past six and a half years.
Let us name this rhetoric for what it is: capitulation. Congressional Democrats talked a big game last year around election time about changing Washington, but all we have gotten from them is the smallest bit of bluster, followed by flaccid fealty to the current administration. They promised an end to the war in Iraq, but they've continued to capitulate to Bush's funding requests. They talked of taking care of lower-class Americans, but the rich continue to get richer while more and more Americans have a harder time making ends meet. Every time when the talk of standing up to the administration falls to a whimpering, simpering ascension to Bush's desires, we are told the same old story of how the "compromise" -- when Bush has yet to substantially compromise on a single issue in these so-called negotiations -- is the best that we can expect under the current political climate. The notion that Bush has somehow become a lame duck is patently false, because Congressional Democrats have simply replaced Congressional Republicans in enabling the Bush doctrine across the political board.
It is now more evident than ever that the centrists who have been allowed to claim the left wing of American politics are more concerned with self-preservation than they are with actually tending to their constituents. From the exclusion of progressive voices in the political talkies, to the poo-poohing of Kucinich's presidential campaign, to the sweeping of trans people under the rug in the ENDA, to the fear-mongering that goes on whenever the words "Green Party" or "Ralph Nader" are mentioned, it is clear the Democratic politicians and their friends in business and the media are just as bad as the current administration when it comes to latching onto power for the sole sake of preserving that power and fattening their own pockets at the expense of this country's well-being. If Congressional Democrats are too concerned with their image to grant civil rights to all people, or to impeach a Vice President with an 11 percent approval rating, whose political machinations are responsible for the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and several times more Iraqis, then they should at least have the decency to own up to their own venality and impeach themselves ... or do something else to themselves.
Labels: glbt, kucinich, politics, transgender
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon