posted 2010/01/22 at 15:53
Longtime readers know that I have almost always been a fan on Keith Olbermann, dating far back to the pre-.org days when Olbermann was on ESPN, when he and Dan Patrick truly revolutionized the art of the sports recap. The two of them could make watching highlights of any sport, no matter what sport or who was playing, an enjoyable experience, and their reunification on Football Night in America made the show must-see viewing for me. I must admit, though, that I have to ask of them the same question I ask of the Beastie Boys: Does the high quality of their original, pioneering work make up for the wave of poor imitators that followed in their stead? I have been a fan of Olbermann's work on MSNBC as well, even though my politics are firmly to the left of his, and I think Countdown does a good job of balancing serious journalism with opinion and comedy. Even when I get tired of Olbermann shilling for Democrats instead of standing up for the liberal positions he espouses, I still feel compelled to watch his show, for both its informative and entertainment values.
His Special Comment last night on the Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to spend freely on elections, however, went far beyond the pale. I certainly agree with him that Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was not only poor jurisprudence, but sets a dangerous standard for the future of this country. The notion of equating the spending of money with free speech is inherently ludicrous, particularly given our country's notion of corporate personhood. Money, like speech, is a tool that can be used for great good or great evil, but find me one person in this economic downturn who lost his or her house not due to lack of money, but due to lack of words. The only people who could look at our current political system and think that the cure for ails it is more corporate money are people who stand to benefit from the infusion of nearly unlimited amounts of corporate cash into our elections. Unfortunately for we Americans, five of those people are on the Supreme Court right now.
That the court decision paves the way for corporations to tighten their strangleholds on American politics and American people should go without saying. However, for Olbermann to claim on his show last night that the decision was worse than Dred Scott v. Sandford was so hyperbolic as to be just as ludicrous as the decision he was deriding. That Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has the potential to do great, irreparable harm to this country cannot be denied, but to compare it to the most discriminatory decision in the court's history, one that led to this country's bloodiest war and the deaths of over 600,000 Americans, is at best highly paranoid, and at worst an insult to all those in this country whose ancestors toiled in the most inhumane institution this country even enacted, slavery. Olbermann was on the money when he said that American news outlets needed to spend much more time covering this decision and its ramifications, but his rhetoric in his Special Comment last night actually did our common cause a disservice.
It has been painful this past year to see Olbermann descend to a form of self-parody. His repeated setting aside of his principles to defend Democrats started in the aftermath of the 2006 elections, but became legion following Obama's inauguration. Even on those occasions when he does go after Democrats for abandoning progressive beliefs, he does so in a withering tone, giving the camera puppy-dog eyes as if to say, "Please don't stop your party officials from appearing on my show." Perhaps the most galling example of this was the unabashed name-calling he engaged in leading up to Scott Brown's election this past Tuesday, which Jon Stewart pointed out on last night's Daily Show. Again, Olbermann was correct in principle to address many of the concerns he brought up about Brown, but he did so in a manner which was, in a word, juvenile. The worst part is that Olbermann should know better; he has pointed out in the past that Bill O'Reilly is wise to ignore Olbermann's barbs because you never want to be seen as "punching down," trying to hit those underneath you, as Olbermann so clearly is in television ratings and national stature. Olbermann has been punching down at Republicans for some time now, and while this can be effective for right-wing pundits and talking heads -- we all need to laugh at their pompousness, and Olbermann can still be very funny -- when he does it to Republicans, he only reinforces the ludicrous Republican notion that they are the dominant political party in America right now.
I will admit to being very distressed by Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and the potential it has, but for Olbermann to act like Chicken Little because of it was unintentionally hilarious, and requires me to do something I never thought I would do: Go to Olbermann's right and defend capitalism. As much as the spectre of complete corporate domination was made substantive by the decision, the idea that it will lead to a One World Nation is remote at best. Despite its many disadvantages and how they've been repeatedly demonstrated in my adult lifetime, American capitalism has shown that it does have a capacity, perhaps even a natural instinct, to make sure that people of different tastes are catered to. If that were not the case, then right now there would be either Coke or Pepsi on my local grocer's shelves, but not both. There would be no Big Three automakers because one of them would have bought out the other two ages ago. Even if liberals are, sadly, a minority in this country, the idea that corporations would homogenize everything and squelch liberalism, or even criminalize it, is unlikely. That this country's laws will become more favourable to big business as a result of this court decision is inevitable, but to declare it the death of the country is absurd.
That it is a possibility is without question, and if there is a company that could rise to become this nation's Shinra, it is certainly Walmart. They already have a record of using their money to curry lawmakers into helping them become more dominant in America, and that is likely to get even worse in the months and years ahead. However, even Walmart's resources are not always enough to counteract the ability of the American people to realize a bad deal when they see one. I teach in a county where, despite Walmart's best efforts, the people there resoundingly voted against the ability for Walmart to build one of its big box stores there, right next to the very building in which I teach. As much as I worry about how ill-informed Americans are about the forces at work to manipulate them into doing things against their own interest, they have shown that sometimes they can still recognize when to take a stand against corporations and the blight they would inflict upon the land.
That Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission could, potentially, turn America into a country uninhabitable by free-thinking liberals and progressives is, sad to say, real, and it is something that I will be guarding against, and I hope that others will join me in seeking whatever legal means are possible to overturn this unfortunate, uninformed, and undemocratic decision. To declare it worse than a decision sanctifying and legalizing the enslavement of a race of people, however, is not only incorrect, but it is insulting, and Keith Olbermann should know better.
Labels: politics, rhetoric, television
posted 2010/01/20 at 14:40
I wish I could say that the special election of Scott Brown to the Senate last night came as any kind of surprise to me. I watched the news last night, dumbly hopeful that somehow the people of Massachusetts would go with the lesser of three evils (counting the Libertarian candidate), but hearing the tales of his closing the gap with Martha Coakely so quickly in the past couple of weeks, and the repeated missteps of the Coakely campaign, this result was pretty much a given three or four days before the election. The fact that the teabaggers could get a candidate into the Senate in less than a year, while the Green Party has still yet to get anyone to Congress, is the kind of thing that makes me wish I didn't hate the cold so much, because Canada and Western Europe are looking more and more like a better fit for me and my politics.
I spent the night listening to the usual Democratic talking heads making excuses about how elections always trend against the party in the executive office, and how voters see the ruling party as the status quo, and all of that other gobbledybook. They tried to downplay the numerical significance of losing just one Senate seat when the Democrats still command such a huge lead, totally overlooking the symbolic value of losing the Kennedy seat less than a year after his death, as if their caving in on health care wasn't making Teddy spin in his grave enough. Now he's spinning so much he could probably power all the streetlights in Hyannis Port if you hooked them up to his corpse. As usual, the Republicans are reacting even more stupidly, claiming a statewide vote somehow counts as a national referendum and trying to get Obama to surrender the presidency to Rush Limbaugh because "obviously" he is now a total and complete failure.
If Obama and the Democrats continue on their present course, though, a winning Limbaugh-Coulter ticket (or Palin-Beck or O'Reilly-Hannity or what have you) is becoming more and more of a probability. The Coakley campaign encapsulated perfectly what the Green Party has been saying about Democrats for years now: that they think if they're one step to the left of the most moderate Republican, that they're automatically entitled to the votes of everyone to the left of them. I don't know if what Coakley and her staff did should even be called a campaign, given how they took so much time off, seemingly thinking that the seat was theirs, that there was no way the voters of Massachusetts would vote for anyone other than a Democrat. From health care to gays in the military to a host of other issues, Obama and the Democratic Congress have been either putting off meaningful change or cutting it short entirely, under the same assumption that anyone to their left is somehow obligated to vote for them. It has now cost them one Senate seat, and it's likely not going to be the last.
The irony in all of this is that this past month I've been reading The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience, in which author Kirstin Downey shows that, although fraught with poor compromises of its own, FDR and Perkins managed to push through grand, wide-ranging social reforms, reforms that, try as they may, Republicans have still yet to take off the books. If Republicans truly believed that a national health care program would be bad for the nation, they wouldn't be so eager to can it. As with New Deal social reforms, and as with the civil rights advances of the last fifty years, once these programmes are in place, Republicans know that there is no way to kill them because the American people will realize how beneficial they are, and that despite their costs, they will want to keep them in place because they appeal to our better nature, a nature Republicans and the Religious Right spend the majority of their time trying to crush so their donors and benefactors can make more money. Even with majorities in both houses of Congress that rubber-stamped almost everything he did, Dubya couldn't spend his so-called "political capital" from his 2004 election to privatize Social Security. Why Democrats cannot take a lesson from this example both eludes and frustrates me.
If yesterday's election shows anything, it is that fractured as they may be with the whole Tea Party thing, the right-wing in this country is energized, and the left-wing is hopelessly though justly apathetic. If the Democrats want to minimize the chances of another 1994 Republican landslide, this is the time they need to get tough and start behaving like liberals. Don't Ask Don't Tell should have been stopped by executive order as soon as Obama took office, and not only does he need to end the discriminatory policy now, but he needs to rehire all the servicepeople thrown out of the military due to this policy in his presidency, if not all of them altogether. Our operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen would immediately benefit from aignificant influx of Arabic translators. Given that Brown's election puts a likely end to the health care bill in its present state, congressional Democrats need to use every tool at their disposal -- including budget reconciliation -- to push through as much reform as they can get with 218 votes in the House and fifty-one in the Senate, hopefully including a public plan. They need to raise taxes on upper-class individuals and corporations, and they need to do so without apology.
There may be too many historical forces at work to prevent Democrats from losses in the midterms, but if they want to at least stem those losses, they need to give their base more reason to vote Democratic. I wish I could say they'll vote Green instead, but if history has shown anything, it's that they'll stay at home. If that happens this year, then next year we may have a Tea Party Congress on our hands, and Goddess help us all if that should happen.
Labels: politics
posted 2010/01/17 at 15:15
I know not many of you follow one of my favourite authors, Poppy Z. Brite, but I subscribe to both her LiveJournal and Twitter feeds. Brite has lived in New Orleans for most of her adult life, and was among those who lost their homes when the gulf coast levees failed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. She's quick to point out that the levee failures, not the storm itself, was what caused most of the destruction, and it's hard not to agree with that assessment. She also points out, quite frequently, that that part of the country has yet to really recover from the destruction of four and a half years ago. If you remember back to last August, when President Obama visited the stricken areas, the news networks covered him as he visited areas and gave speeches and pledged support.
Therein lies the problem. When the cameras shut off and the news went back to tea party protests and the like, nearly everyone, once again, forgot how the people of Louisiana still need help. I will shamefully admit to being one of those people; reading Brite's posts and tweets about the damage and need for help does remind me, but within minutes I forget about it and go on with the rest of my life. I have my own needs to meet, and it isn't always easy to balance that with being aware of those who are less fortunate than I am. It's a problem that many of you deal with as well, I'm sure; we can't all be Mother Teresa, but at the same time we wish we could do a better job of taking care of others.
However, I think our culture deserves a lot of the blame for this. It should go without saying that most American news outlets spend too much time talking about the latest celebrity gossip, particularly from reality television shows, and too little time talking about the rest of the world and what's going on outside of our borders. If it's out of sight, then it's out of mind, and certainly there are those out there who like it that way, because it enables them to put so much more focus on "real problems" like stopping same-sex marriages and reducing taxes on millionaires. Most people in this country probably hadn't given more than a passing thought about Haiti since the United States' military presence in the 1990s departed, and it's only now, in the wake of the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, that we're drawn to Haiti again.
As the news reports coming out of Haiti this past week have made clear, the economic and infrastructure problems in Haiti were legion well before the earthquake hit, and Haiti's impoverishment in comparison to other Western countries was so enormous that it demanded much more attention than it got. Given how little attention was paid to how disaster-stricken Haiti was even before this earthquake, it's no wonder that this news comes as such a shock to so many people; quite honestly, I should have known better. As with Hurricane Katrina, there was no way to prevent every death, but if money had been spent on making the region as disaster-proof as reasonably possible, maybe we wouldn't have so many piles of corpses on our screens and in our heads.
The question now is whether we'll remember the problems in Haiti after the news cameras leave and the nightly news goes back to covering the latest celebrity sex scandal, or we'll just go back to not thinking about those less fortunate than us because we're not confronted with the images of them like we are right now. I'm going to try to remember the people of Haiti long after the wall-to-wall news coverage ends, but I know that I'll probably get caught up in the vagaries of my own life at some point and won't keep them, or the people of Louisiana, in mind as much I should. I just wish the American news media would do the role they're supposed to do and spend more time covering the injustice in this world, and less time on the trivia of celebrity drama. It shouldn't have taken this earthquake to get them, or us, to pay close attention to the problems in Haiti. Those problems don't go away when the news cameras shut off.
Labels: politics, television
posted 2010/01/08 at 16:04
I had thought that nothing could happen that would make me blog about, or even give much conscious thought to, the whole Tiger Woods brouhaha. Once again, I underestimated the ability of Fox News to take any situation and turn it into an opportunity to force their beliefs and morals down our throats. If I were to post a picture of the fingernail I broke earlier today and how I clipped it off, someone at Fox News could find some way to turn it into an example of how Obama's socialist policies are destroying America, or write some paean about how the religious right's version of Christianity means I'd never have to deal with another broken nail for the rest of my life.
I've come to expect Fox News personalities to say things so out of place with both reality and rational thought that more civilized countries would institutionalize them. I'm still a staunch believer in the First Amendment, and I still believe that the best defence against lunatic ideas is to allow the lunatics who espouse them to state them loudly, and at every possible opportunity, so people can judge for themselves how crazy they are. Granted, I think this would work a lot better if we could take a pair of scissors to this country and cut off the Deep South (they sound like they'd like that right now, anyway), but all Americans, now matter how misguided or misinformed, deserve a right to have their voices heard and votes counted.
That being said, the presence of Fox News in our culture, particularly when it is so dominant in some areas, complicates this matter a great deal. Fox News has always been a partisan tool for the right-wingers of this country to use to influence public discourse, obfuscating opinion and cherry-picked facts with actual journalism, and anyone in denial of this fact is in need of an intensive course of deprogramming. In the past, though, Fox News would at least put on a thicker veneer of objectivity with its Alan Colmeses and oh-so-rare shows that were actually "fair and balanced," although those shows usually came on weeknights at three in the morning. They still pull good ratings, though, because Fox News' demographic skews so old that at any time in this country, there are probably hundreds of thousands of televisions tuned into Fox News because their owners just died of old age.
That veneer has been steadily thinning since the election of Obama, though. Openly promoting Tea Party protests this past year was a textbook crossing of the line between journalism and advocacy, and although some on the left called Fox News out on this, such protests were nowhere near as vociferous as they should have been. Brit Hume's comments about Buddhism and Christianity were equally outrageous, and in the past even Fox News knew when to apologize when its personalities said something so out of line to defy description. Instead, Fox News has stood behind Hume's comments, even going so far as to have him basically reiterate them word-for-word on Bill O'Reilly's show.
Now, I will admit to not being as well-informed about the intricacies of Christianity as I'd like, but I think it reasonably safe to say that I know more about Buddhism than Brit Hume does. Setting aside the sheer offenciveness of Hume's comments for the moment, the notion that Christianity is somehow "better" at dealing with forgiveness than Buddhism is just patently and demonstrably false. Hume was speaking of what Tiger Woods would have to do to be forgived not by any actual higher power, but by the "higher power" of the religious right. Nothing short of beocming a card-carrying dittohead would redeem Tiger in their eyes, and for many of us, that would be a far greater sin than his affairs.
Worse yet, right-wingers continue to use the co-opt the language of victimization -- something which, in all seriousness, makes me physically ill -- and claim that criticism of Hume's comments are what are intolerant and misinformed, not Hume's comments themselves. Pretending for a moment that I held any actual cultural or political sway (a huge stretch, I know), imagine what would have happened if I'd written about any of the Republican politicians who got caught in affairs and sex scandals these past two years (I've lost count too), and said that what that politician needed to do was embrace Wicca, because Christianity was inadequate when it came to polyamory. My piece would probably be the lead story on The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck's radio shows for at least five days. Ann Coulter and Michele Malkin would be writing columns calling for my assassination. Brent Bozell would be shouting that my claim showed exactly how Christians are discriminated against in America. This controversy isn't about Tiger Woods or Buddhism or anything like that; it's about the religious right and their continuing efforts to make their warped religion the norm against which everything else should be compared.
I've come to accept Fox News and the Bill O'Reillys and Sean Hannitys and Brit Humes of this world the same way I've come to accept the scar I have on my right calf from when I sliced it open trying to climb a chain-link fence when I was younger: A reminder that stupidity exists in this world, and that it usually leads to painful, lifelong consequences. Even in the context of Fox News' laughable definition of "fair and balanced," though, Brit Hume's comments went way over the line, and not just liberals, but moderates and journalists as well should be screaming bloody murder until Hume apologizes and retracts his ill-informed statements about Buddhism and Christianity. If we don't, then we can expect similar comments from other right-wingers every time anyone not of their ilk gets in the news for anything.
Labels: politics, rhetoric, sports, television
posted 2010/01/02 at 21:21
Looking back at the past year, which was easily the most anemic ever in terms of how much I worked on the .org, it's clear that I've lost enthusiasm for a lot of the political stuff I've been so interested in for so long. I entered the year eager to see how Obama would handle himself at the start of his presidency, and I have to admit that I let my hopes get up after his inauguration speech, when he delivered a pretty stinging rebuke to the eight years of Dubya with the man himself sitting not twenty feet away. (I still wonder if Obama would have delivered that speech had Dick Cheney not been wheelchair-bound at the time.) From there, though, things quickly went downhill, either actively (allowing health care reform to become anything but reform), or passively (not repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" even as many of our country's best Arabic translators sit at home unable to serve their country because of entrenched homophobia). Obama was never "my guy," but I still let myself believe that he, like nearly anyone else, would lead the country in a significantly better direction. Things are better now, yes, but not significantly so by any stretch of the imagination.
As a teacher of rhetoric, keeping abreast of current news is kind of part of my job; doing so provides me with a wealth of information from which to draw potential discussion topics, and it also helps me guide my students towards paper topics that might actually interest them. All things being equal, it's one of the easier parts of my job, since I also need to stay clued in to things like college football, Taylor Swift, and (gag) the Twilight movies and books. This means catching a fair amount of television news, and also checking news Websites throughout the day, and back when I had more motivation to deal with politics, this wasn't such a problem. Recently, though, I stopped checking for Toledo news stories via Yahoo! News' Toledo portal, because it just felt like a real chore to me that didn't yield much, even with the city changing mayors recently. One of the things I've liked most about this vacation is simply that so much television news is just year-end recycled stuff instead of new stories, and I haven't had to catch Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert for a while. That last bit says something because I really like their shows, but recently I've just wished I could have that time to do something else with my life.
In the past, it's taken things that hit really close to home for me to get back into politics, like when I was at Antioch when the Republicans took over Congress in 1994, and several of my friends were arrested protesting outside of John Kasich's office. You'd think that with all the medical stuff my family has been through these past couple of years that the health care debate would do more to energize me, to get me on my soapbox, but after suffering defeat after defeat this past year, and not knowing if anything will actually ultimately get passed into law, it just seems like there's no use in it. Obama and the Democrats constantly moved themselves away from progressive principles this past year, and yet Republicans are likely to make significant gains in the upcoming November elections. Sometimes I feel like there really isn't a place for me here in America.
posted 2009/12/31 at 20:51
AT&T is latest to end Tiger Woods sponsorship (AP via Yahoo! News)
As hard as I've tried to avoid the whole Tiger Woods thing these past few weeks, it's kind of hard to do that, especially when seemingly everyone, everywhere, is talking about it. After all, it's a perfect distraction from all that health care stuff, and who really cares if people go bankrupt or die because of our health care system if we can spend all our time talking about the umpteenth alleged Tiger Woods mistress and what job she has and whether or not she's prettier than Tiger's wife? Keep in mind, this is the same country that, when faced with the reality that Saddam Hussein did not have a viable WMD progamme in Iraq when we threw him out of power, decided that instead of calling congressional hearings about that, called them instead over Janet Jackson showing her nipple at the Super Bowl.
Speaking of this country's puritanical views on sexuality, while I don't mean to diminish the pain that people across this country feel when a spouse or partner reneges on a promise to remain faithful, our continuing obsession over celebrity love lives is simply absurd. You would think that by now this country would realize that a good handful of celebrity marriages are nothing but shams from the start, designed to boost publicity for the two parties instead of being, you know, for love. For all the rhetoric about same-sex marriage destroying the institution of marriage, or America, or the space-time continuum, or whatever the excuse is this week, I think a convincing argument could be made that far more damage is being done to marriage by these sham pairings. It's like some agent somewhere is shuffling around celebrity names trying to find the next roll-off-the-tongue pairing name like "Brangelina," and once that name is found phone calls are made, dresses are picked out, and writers are called in to concoct a story about how X and Y really met months ago and instantly knew they were soulmates. At least the stories manage to be marginally more believable and entertaining than the garbage Hollywood is putting on film screens these days; perhaps that's the awful truth of it, that people follow these celebrity entanglements because they're more entertaining than any films or CDs out there.
Getting back to Tiger Woods, though, him losing so many endorsements over these alleged infidelities -- I think more women will come out once the holidays are over and the morning shows are no longer being anchored by the third-stringers -- is just completely out of proportion to what Tiger did. After all, this past weekend I saw several commercials for Hanes t-shirts featuring Charlie Sheen, even after he allegedly held a knife to his wife's throat and threatened to kill her. One has to wonder what the public and/or the marketing people who control them see Tiger as having done that's so much worse than what Charlie Sheen did. Anyone who tries to tell me that race and gender aren't playing factors in here clearly hasn't been living in America for very long. Let's face it; if Tiger Woods had skin as white as Charlie Sheen's, would there be anywhere near as much attention paid to him, and would he have ringed up so many endorsements? This is to take nothing away from Tiger's athletic skills, but let's face it, watching someone play golf is only about a step up from watching paint dry. (Keep in mind, this is coming from a self-admitted fan of curling. At least the physics and geometry in curling is interesting.)
This gets me to my solution, simple as it may be, to this whole Tiger Woods thing. Much has been made of the fact that, through his golf winnings and endorsements, Tiger has become the first professional athlete to earn a billion dollars. Going back to that health care thing, nuisance as it is, instead of continuing to obsess over this Tiger Woods things so ridiculously, how about we simply make him pay $900 million to go to health care for uninsured Americans? Uninsured Americans will get health care at his expense, so they'll be happy, and as a country we'll be happier because not so many people will be going bankrupt and dying. Republicans will be happy, because Tiger's contribution will probably mean that they can get rid of the upper-class tax hike in the health care bill. Democrats will be happy, because their health care bill will likely be enacted into law and they can claim a major legislative triumph. Tiger Woods will still have $100 million left over, which is hardly a small sum, and after this act of generosity, I think it would only be fair for him to get his endorsements back and for us to all forget about this whole silly mess, and let him get back to winning hundreds of millions more dollars for whacking a tiny white ball into a hole in the ground.
We would save lives, save families, stop a lot of political squabbling, and get this whole Tiger Woods media mess off of our screens once and for all. I really don't see a downside to this. Better yet, if Tiger gets caught sticking his nine iron in someone else's bag again, we can simply make him pay for universal health care for all Americans, and then this country will really, truly, be a better place. You're welcome.
(Oh, and Happy New Year and all of that.)
posted 2009/12/17 at 21:04
In retrospect, we should have expected that Democrats would wait until this time of year to buckle and cave in on public health care. They were probably figuring that once the Massachusetts ground had frozen up, no one could hear Ted Kennedy turning in his grave as the party that purported to lionize him and his family, once again, turned their backs on the social reforms that defined the Democratic party in the middle of the 20th century.
Were I in a more humourous mood, this would be the part of this entry where I would start a sentence with the phrase, "Now, I'm not the kind of person to say 'I told you so,' but ..." I'm not in the mood to lay on the yuks right now, though, and one of the primary rules of comedy is never to beat a joke into the ground. Democrats retracting from their election promises of progressive reform and instead caving in to big business and big money has become as predictable as the sun rising in the east every day. As inelegantly as Ralph Nader phrased it after the 2008 election -- and I still think he owes Obama, and the nation, an apology for the words he used -- the spirit of his observation has proven true. Obama has become yet another proxy for corporations, and allowed his party to once again kowtow to the power of the almighty dollar, sacrificing the needs of the people in the hope of getting enough money and corporate support to maintaing Democratic power in Washington.
The Democratic party has lost all claims it might have had to calling itself the party of FDR and Kennedy and LBJ. If Democrats had been as obsessed with maintaining power sixty years ago as they are now, you would still see the word "colored" above half the drinking fountains in the South today. I can understand the marriage of the Republican party with big business, and as despicable as Karl Rove's Machiavellian politics were, at least when he got his vaunted "fifty percent plus one," his Republican president and congress passed law after law after law, squashing civil liberties, helping the rich get richer, and screwing the poor and working classes into the ground. The Democrats have larger majorities in both houses of Congress than Dubya ever had, and a president who campaigned saying that he believed in single-payer health care. When it came time to actually reform health care, though, single-payer was not only taken off of the table, but Democrats wouldn't even allow single-payer advocates in on any discussions and debates. The public health care option, and everything spawned from it like the "Medicare buy-in," have slowly withered away, and what we are left with is a huge giveaway to the insurance industry that Republicans are still fighting tooth and nail because of their obsession with destroying Obama by any means necessary.
I have said this before, but as the health care debacle draws to its sordid conclusion, I don't think I can point to a more demonstrative example of my point: It is time for all true progressives and liberals to tell the Democratic party to go compromise itself, and join the Green Party. If people like Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, and Joe Lieberman are the true power brokers in the Democratic party, no well-intending progressive, from the everyday voter all the way up to the Dennis Kuciniches of the country, should continue to lend their name, power, and most importantly, vote, to a party that has repeatedly demonstrated that it will not take progressive concerns seriously. Just as the Tea Party lunacy has shown the divides in this country's right wing, the health care debate has shown that the liberals in the Democratic party are not in the right party. The days of Republicans and Democrats taking everyone's votes for granted because of where they stand on abortion or global warming or X issue have to stop, and they have to stop now. Both parties are sending this country into the bottom of a fetid cesspool, and the only difference is how quickly each party wants to take us there.
Labels: greenparty, politics
posted 2009/08/03 at 21:55
I suppose I should count my blessings that my long vacation from teaching coincides with the congressional recesses, as it means that I can give myself a bit of a break from politics at the same time as I take a break from my primary employment. However, as has been made clear from today's developments at town hall meetings across the nation, politics isn't exactly taking a total holiday this month. (After all, August is the month without any holidays, at least by most Americans' standards.) The disruptions at town halls, particularly those related to health care, provided what would have been a wonderful teaching moment if I had a class to teach. As it is, I have to file today's events in my brain, and hope that at least some of my students for fall term were paying attention to the coverage of town halls as well.
In all the coverage of the disruptions at these town halls, only a few have bothered to mention that this is another Republican "astroturf" phony-grassroots movement, being bankrolled and coordinated by big business interests that also ran the teabagging movement earlier this year. None have pointed out, as I do in all of my classes, how American political discourse continues to degenerate to a point where most participants and observers believe that the winner of an argument isn't the person who makes the most logical points, or engenders the most sympathy from the crowd, but who can shout the loudest. (I guess you could call it the Jerry Springer-ization of our culture.) Neither have any broadcasts I've seen compared this to the days of the Bush 43 presidency, when Bush's "town halls" featured nothing but carefully-screened, pro-Bush audience members, and protestors at Bush events were forced into distant, screened-off "free speech zones," out of sight and out of mind of the news media and the general public.
This just underscores to me the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans; they're playing with two entirely different playbooks when it comes to influencing public debate. Republicans have been able to use these guerilla-style tactics to take advantage of the comparative openness of Democratic-hosted town halls and similar events, while they close off their own similar events to opposition voices, to hardly a whisper of protest from Democrats. Being a fierce First Amendment advocate, of course I want to keep the public debate open to as many viewpoints as possible and to let those viewpoints have an equal chance of being heard, but at the same time I think there's something to be said for engaging in civil behaviour whenever possible, and the obstructionists who have been disrupting these recent town hall meetings have hardly been civil. Worse yet, their agenda seems to be to prevent intelligent discourse, not add to it, and I find that kind of galling. At the very least, I think there should be a single playbook for all participants to follow, and Democrats' reluctance or inability to engage these obstructionists at their own level once again speaks to the inherent spinelessness of the Democratic party. The health care debate is too important to be lost because Democrats don't want to dirty the cuffs of their trousers by getting down in the mud with these obstructionists.
I hate having to openly advocate for left-leaning peoples to break codes of civility to deal with this astroturf movement that seeks to derail health care reform. Given what is at stake, though, and given the effectiveness of this movement so far, I don't know that there is any other conscionable choice.
Labels: freespeech, politics, rhetoric
posted 2009/07/11 at 20:34
Coming from the early days of the Internet Age, I'm used to basing my e-mail addresses and other contact information off of my real name (sean@..., sshannon@..., seanshannon@... and so on). Back when I first went to Antioch, my e-mail address, as was all students' there, was based off of my real name, and I couldn't request it be changed to firedancingspirit@... or something like that. When Dad was first able to access the Internet through his old CompuServe account, his address was based off of his CompuServe ID number, which was about as easy to remember as a phone number, without the convenience of area codes. Although the age of vanity e-mails soon came, I guess I'm kind of old-fashioned, and I kept picking e-mail names -- and the domain name for the .org -- based off of my name. More than once I've had people tell me that they'd think someone as imaginative as I am would come up with something more creative. I guess maybe now that I'm in the work world (or at least as close to "the work world" as academia ever gets), though, maybe it's a good thing I stuck with identifications that don't carry any potentially risky baggage.
As I've written before, though, this comes with its fair share of risks. My Yahoo! Mail account is based off of my real name, and it's the one I tend to use whenever I don't want to give my .org e-mail address out for fear of getting a lot of spam. This was before the spam filters on my server and my computer became better than those on Yahoo! Mail, though, so I'm having to rethink this strategy. Unfortunately, I've found that having such a "simple," easy-to-remember e-mail address on Yahoo! Mail means that many other people will also give it out as their e-mail, either accidentally or on purpose. Honestly, I'm beginning to expect it's more of the latter, as my Yahoo! Mail account is quickly becoming unmanageable from all of the spam I'm getting. Even with as much of it as the servers filter out, maintaining that e-mail is becoming more of a hassle than it feels it's worth to me.
Perhaps the worst spam of all I get on there is the political spam. At least one of the organizations I get spam from is because of my own actions -- a particularly beligerent Democratic recruiter coaxed that e-mail out of me in 2004 trying to get me to support John Kerry's presidential bid -- but I also get a lot of junk mail from Republican and conservative and Christian groups that I know I never signed up for. (I'm also on the mailing list of this one Democratic politican in Virginia for some reason.) Ironically enough, that e-mail address is also the same address I use for the political e-mails I want to get, so I have to sort through the e-mails I get from Ralph Nader and the Green Party as well, and Yahoo! Mail sometimes flags those as false positives for spam. (For those of you who were on Obama or McCain's e-mail lists during the campaign, I don't know if you're still getting e-mail from them or not, but Nader's been sending regular e-mails continuing the push for a single-payer health care system.)
The biggest punch line in here, though, is the content of the e-mails I get from all the various political organizations. Setting aside solicitations for donations -- a necessity of our political system in its current incarnation -- my Green and Democratic e-mails are pretty much all about substance, trying to inform me on various issues and get me involved in them. On the other hand, many of the Republican and Christian organizations that send me e-mail also try to sell me stuff, ranging from life insurance to miracle cures. Some organizations send me more sales stuff than political stuff. Ultimately, all politicans are salespeople, trying to sell me on their vision of how the city or country or world should be, but when you use an ostensibly politically-minded organization to try to get me to buy these material items, it just strikes me as absurd. Unfortunately, given the current state of American politics, it probably doesn't seem so absurd to most of you.
posted 2009/06/09 at 14:52
Although I don't live in Monroe County, I make an effort to stay up-to-date on news from the area since I work there, and I try to integrate my students' immediate environment and news into my classroom teachings as best I can. Most of them hate writing -- and after hearing about their high school experiences, I can hardly blame them -- so if they have to write, I try to at least steer them towards topics that they care about, to help them with the difficult task of writing.
This past month, the biggest news story to come from Monroe County was the disappearance of a five-year-old girl by the name of Nevaeh Buchanan. Within the past week the body of a little girl matching Nevaeh's description was found in a shallow grave near the River Raisin. Although autopsy results are still pending to determine whether or not it is Nevaeh's body, the press and others are talking about the matter as if it's already been determined that it is Nevaeh's body. Monroe County is already a tight-knit community as it is, and the recent economic downturn has hit the region very hard. Under ordinary circumstances, Nevaeh's murder would be a county-wide tragedy. With the region devastated in so many other ways already, her death has been nothing short of crippling.
All of this would have been bad enough in and of itself. I can't even begin to imagine how Nevaeh's parents have felt these past few weeks, questioning every little thing they said and did before Nevaeh's disappearance, and trying to come to terms with the possibility that their daughter was dead, a possibility that grew as each horrible day passed and they heard no word on their daughter's whereabouts. The loss of any family member is devastating, but when the family member is so young, it is all the more painful. It is hard to believe that anyone would ever want to compound a grieving family's death by heaping abuse and scorn on them, especially when the loss is still so fresh, the wounds still open.
Unfortunately, it appears that no one told the Buchanans about Nancy Grace, because they went on her show last night, and Nancy Grace ripped them a new one for what she perceived as their "mistakes" that led to Nevaeh's disappearance and presumptive death. That Grace has done this before is not news; in fact, in 2006, shortly after Grace pilloried her on national television for supposedly not being open enough about the recent disappearance of her two-year-old son, Melinda Duckett committed suicide. I don't watch Grace's show, but I heard of the Duckett incident on other news broadcasts, and I can remember thinking back then that Grace's conduct was, to say the least, reprehensible. Now it's hitting home in a way that it didn't back then, and I can't recall being this angry at a public figure in years.
That the parents were already second-guessing their actions goes without saying; in the face of any great tragedy, nearly all of us can't help but question if the tragedy could have been avoided if we'd done even the smallest thing just a little bit differently. It should also go without saying whenever a little boy or girl disappears, the police have to treat the parents as suspects and interrogate them, as best as the circumstances allow, to rule them out as potentially being involved in the disappearance; we have seen it happen enough in the media in the past two decades, and while we recognize that it is a necessary part of police work, that doesn't mean that we have to be comfortable about it happening. That the Nevaeh Buchanan tragedy serves as a lesson to parents of young children to be more careful about monitoring their children and teaching them to be vigilant about strangers also, quite literally, goes without saying; in all the news stories about Nevaeh's disappearance, parents and children have been quick to say that they would be a lot more careful about these things from now on.
I do not know what possesses Nancy Grace to think that she should use these tragedies to shout out the lessons to be learned from them that are so obvious, let alone to do so in a way that abuses and humiliates parents who are just coming off of the worst possible tragedy one can imagine young parents could go through. As much as I desire to understand the human mind and all of its facets, there are simply some aspects of it that are too dark, too sadistic for me to want to understand. What Nancy Grace's motivations for her actions are, I won't dare to guess and won't comment on. What I can say beyond any doubt, however, is that her actions themselves are, to put it mildly, monstrous and inhuman. That Nancy Grace was allowed to continue hosting her television show after Melinda Duckett's suicide is incomprehensible. Now that she has repeated the same actions that led to Duckett's suicide on another grieving family, I think it is the obligation of every American who has even half a heart to demand that CNN pull Nancy Grace off of its airwaves immediately and permanently. Nancy Grace has the right to say whatever she wants to say about the Buchanan tragedy, but that doesn't mean CNN, or any other television network, has an obligation to televise such abusive, disgusting behaviour towards grieving parents.
Labels: politics, television
posted 2009/03/29 at 20:03
GM CEO Wagoner to step down at White House Request (AP via Yahoo! news)
I have the vaguest of recollections of Ronald Reagan firing the air traffic controllers in 1981; I remember it happening, but I had no idea what it all meant. (I was five years old at the time.) I do remember that Dad was deeply upset by it, and it was one of the many things Reagan did that eventually drove Dad to avoid politics and become bitterly cynical about them. I still can't help but wonder, had Dad lived to see the election of Barack Obama, if maybe he might have picked up some of his old enthusiasm again. Needless to say, as my own political journeys and self-discoveries have gone on through the years, I've come to realize what an important event this was in American political and labor history. I know that some on the right will say that Reagan did not, in the strictest definition of the word, "fire" the controllers, and that his actions were legal under the Taft-Hartley Act, but neither of those factors mitigates the fact that what Reagan did was morally reprehensible, and perhaps the single most destructive action in American union history. This was one of the biggest bombs the Republicans have dropped in their open warfare against the lower and working classes, a war that has gone on now for nearly thirty years with little mitigation from the Clinton and Obama presidencies so far.
As the avarice of the upper classes has caused the rapid dismantling of the foundations of our economy, I haven't been able to stop myself from daydreaming about a president -- the daydreams usually involve a President Nader, since I know Obama is both incapable and unwilling of doing so -- who comes out to deliver a nationally televised speech on the lawn of the White House, saying that all of the bank and financial and automotive and other CEOs whose greed caused this financial collapse -- were fired, effective immediately, and ineligible to serve in management jobs for the rest of their lives, just as Reagan barred the striking air traffic controllers from serving in other federal jobs. Granted, there are no laws on the books enabling a President to do this, but that doesn't make the proposition any less absurd than what Reagan did under Taft-Hartley. If nothing else, the fact that we, as a country, now have an 80% stake in AIG, should mean that we get to pick who runs the company.
It sickens me to hear pundits say that we need to keep the executives who ran the banks and financial markets into the ground in their current positions because "no one else is capable of running the companies." If they were capable of running their companies, then why have they all cratered, taking the rest of us along with them? Say what you will about the responsibilities air traffic controllers have for making sure that planes don't crash into one another, but already this financial crisis has hit middle- and working-class America in a nearly catastrophic way, and we're probably not yet at the worst part of this crisis. This country's universities churn out MBAs at an alarming rate because if there has been any growth industry in this country since the Reagan days, it's in unnecessary corporate bureaucracy. Don't tell me that we don't have enough people who possess the skills needed to run these companies.
The problem is not a deficit of skills; it is a deficit of morals. No matter how many studies are done to debunk the myth of supply-side economics being good for all classes, the upper classes, and the venal politicans they help elect through their massive infusions of cash and distortions of the public dialogue, continue to push through this idea that helping the rich get richer benefits everyone, despite all of the empirical and anecdotal evidence of how it crushes the wallets, the homes, and the spirits of the working class. If we are going to rebuild our economic foundation, if we are going to climb out of this very deep hole that the upper classes have dug this country into, then we need to take the shovels away from the people who dug the hole (and made themselves plenty rich doing so), and put in charge people who aren't going to build themselves mansions off of the money they could make charging us for ladders to climb out of the hole. We need moral, responsible executives in finances, banking, and every other industry, who will put the needs of their workers, their customers, and their country, above the needs of their families, their boards of directors, and their shareholders. The executives still in charge of these failed companies have already proven that they cannot do that, so we should throw the whole lot of them out.
posted 2009/02/13 at 23:42
I caught President Obama's address to the Lincoln Society Banquet last night, and amid Obama turning the address towards his efforts to get the stimulus bill passed -- something that I thought was kind of risky and unnecessary -- it was hard not to be struck by his mention of how after the Civil War, Lincoln ordered that no Confederate soldier should be punished. The parallel with liberals' feelings about prosecuting the possible crimes of the previous administration didn't need to be said, and like clockwork a number of allegedly liberal commentators dropped their recent insistence on charging Bush and his administration members with crimes, and gushed over how great of a speech Obama gave. It was a tremendous speech, yes, but on this particular point about how Lincoln pardoned Confederate soldiers, Obama's logic is flawed.
As many commentators have pointed out in the celebration of Lincoln's 200th birthday, as dire as the crises our nation faces now may seem, they are miniscule in comparison to what Lincoln faced in his presidency. The attacks of 09.11 may have brought the horrors of foreign hatred of the United States to our soil, but the Civil War killed about two hundred times as many Americans over a much longer period of time. The war eviscerated this country -- North and South alike -- in a way that none of us could even hope to imagine, and to further punish the Confederate soldiers who had lost so many of their brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, would have been abject cruelty. The Confederacy and Union alike had suffered enough, and the important business of rebuilding the country and assisting the newly-freed slaves needed to be done.
As bad of a drubbing as the Republican party might have taken in the last election, and as unpopular as Bush and Cheney might be right now, there has been no real suffering, either on their part or on the parts of the other people in their adminstration who were responsible for everything from the gutting of civil liberties to lying us into a war that killed thousands more American soldiers. For all their unpopularity, these men and women still have their supporters, particularly in big business, and will be able to lead cushy jobs sitting on the boards of Republican think tanks and companies, and giving speeches, for the rest of their lives. Contrast this to the misery that millions of American families are going through right now in the wake of the global economic crisis, brought about in large part by their mishandling of government and the role it should take in helping to regulate the market to prevent catastrophes like the one we find ourselves in now. Perhaps we should not worry about punishing the Bush/Cheney "soldiers" -- congressional Republicans and the propagandists who advanced the Bush Doctrine on television and the radio -- but for the Bushes and Cheneys and Rumsfelds whose actions led to the deaths of so many Americans, and so many innocent Iraqi and Afghani civilians, for the profit of companies that gave right back to the Republican party, justice must be served. If these men and women have committed crimes, then for the sake of our collective moral conscience as Americans, then we must not give into the Obama rhetoric of "looking forward instead of getting mired in the past," and bring those who have committed criminal acts to justice, so that future leaders of this and other countries will not be tempted to repeat the malfeasance of the previous administration.
I still remember after the invasion of Iraq, when the Weapons of Mass Destruction were not found, and voices began to be raised about the conduct of the invasion, and support for the invasion began its precipitous drop. At a time when Congress should have been investigating the war, its eyes were focused on the Super Bowl halftime show that featured Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction." At a time when our American soldiers were giving their lives in the deserts and streets of Iraq, Congress instead inflated a relatively benign and altogether stupid MTV-influenced visual into a national moral outrage. I don't question that it was great politics -- it played well to their base and helped energize them -- but it was an obvious and nauseating diversion from what was unquestionably more pressing and relevant business for this nation. After the nipple slip wore thin on everyone, instead of turning to the war, we got congressional investigations of steroids in baseball, which served to again divert us from the questions that should have been asked about the invasion of Iraq.
As the first hundred days of the Obama Administration tick away, and little is done to investigate not just the previous adminstration but also the corporate fatcats who were equally (if not more) responsible for crashing our economy, let's look at who is being investigated by the authorities right now. Perhaps the most scrutinized public figure right now is Michael Phelps, as South Carolina police have arrested and questioned several people to try to press charges against Phelps for the bong hit he was photographed taking. Ignoring the futility and stupidity of putting this much effort into trying to nab someone for smoking weed -- I could understand this much effort to punish him for his drunk driving, but trying to put potheads in jail is possibly the biggest waste of law enforcement resources of this generation -- do they really think that they're going to find someone to narc on Michael Phelps? Whoever drops the dime on Phelps is going to have nearly every Hannah Montana fan in the country saving up their allowances to put a hit on him or her. In addition, instead of going against all the corruption on Wall Street, the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether or not Apple lied about Steve Jobs' health to try to shore up Apple's stock price. In addition to being wasteful of SEC resources, at a time when we desperately need to root out those people responsible for this economic crisis and get rid of them, I think this is also highly disrespectful of Jobs and his fight to stay healthy. Fans of Jobs and Apple should be on the streets protesting this action, even if the protestors' signs are likely to cost twice as much as other signs, and not work nearly as well, but they'll still get lots of praise for being so ergonomic and pretty.
I realize that President Obama and his administration are not behind either of these diversions, but they're still diversions from what should be the single most important government investigation since Watergate. Just as those of us outside of the political and media mainstream were responsible for getting the media and some brave politicians to finally ask the questions that needed to be asked about Iraq, we must be vigilant in making the mainstream media and politicians of all stripes answer the questions that need to be answered about the conduct of the previous administration and their big business friends, and to bring to justice those who have commmitted crimes. Reconciliation and forgiveness are noble concepts, but for those who have lost their jobs and homes in the economic crisis, and friends and family members in Iraq, justice demands that those who have wronged this country be held accountable for their actions.
Labels: politics
posted 2009/02/10 at 16:20
Feinstein joins Senate majority in excluding arts from stimulus package (Mike Boehm/Los Angeles Times blogs)
I'm not sure I quite believe that we are already in the worst financial crisis in my lifetime, but if we aren't there yet, we're damn close to it. At times like this it becomes hard for artists like myself to push for increased arts funding, especially those of us who live in the part of the country getting hammered the most by the collapse of the automobile industry. People in the arts community are used to being undervalued by society at large, from the moments our negative teachers/parents start telling us "there's no money in art" when we show our first serious interests in it, to when we get out in the real world after completing our education and learn that lesson first-hand. Although we may complain about this, though, we try to pursue the arts to the best of our ability because it is, in every sense of the phrase, a labour of love. We're used to the hardships, so when another group that's used to comparatively stable conditions gets hurt, many of us feel that the right thing to do is to rush aid to the other groups first, and hold off on asking for support until a time when our pleas are more likely to be heard.
Right now, however, is no time to be silent on this issue. The Republican assault on the arts began long before I was born, but I was in high school when schools began en masse to eliminate arts classes (music, the visual arts, dance, and so on), and then Newt Gingrich and congressional Republicans began a sustained campaign to bankrupt the National Endowment for the Arts and destroy PBS when I was 18. Under the iron fist of Republican rule of the legislative and executive branches earlier this decade, PBS was forced to carry right-wing propaganda like Journal Editorial Report. George W. Bush was undoubtedly a zeitgeist of the post-Clinton years, as he has been described from people of all persuasions as a profoundly incurious man, the most dominant politician from a political family where, as has been noted so many times, introspection is seen not as a healthy part of rational decision-making, but as a character flaw. Even now, efforts to restore arts programmes in schools are often stillborn, while we artists clench our teeth as the National Football League and its behemoth of a marketing arm flood the airwaves with commercials to stop physical education programmes from meeting the same fate. This is the absolute worst time for the arts community to have our needs stymied by Democrats in Congress and the White House, no matter how well-aware we were that their promises of handling things differently were no more than the usual Democratic lip service to progressives and liberals.
That funding for the arts would be verboten in the stimulus bills is, by itself, hardly newsworthy, and not entirely unexpected. However, to call funding for the arts "wasteful" and "non-stimulative," and to lump in it with gambling establishments, is a profound insult to the arts community. The financial merits of a strong arts community have been debated for generations, and I doubt any arguments I might make will swing popular opinion on the subject in one direction or another. However, when we, as a community, are so deeply insulted and belittled, particularly by those who pledged to make things better than they were for the previous eight years, we must respond. President Obama may have removed his campaign platforms from his Website, but his campaign pledges to resuscitate the arts community are archived forever. More than ever before, the arts community must speak up, to politicians in Washington and to the American people, and stand up for the good things we do for this country, and the resources we need to keep doing those good things. We cannot afford to remain silent when we are so insulted and denigrated. If we do not speak up now, when we are already so enfeebled from the last decades' assaults on the arts, will we ever have the opportunity to speak up again?
posted 2009/01/23 at 17:56
Because the majority of my students fall between the ages of eighteen to twenty, I spend a fair amount of time on YouTube and Websites oriented towards that young adult demographic, so I can get a bit of a handle on what is popular in that age group. I'd watch television, but I just can't stomach American Idol and its ilk, and the radio on my stereo -- like so many parts of it -- just isn't working that well right now. I really need to catch up book-wise, though; I still haven't read any Harry Potter, and so many of my creative writing students are fans of Chuck Palahniuk that I feel obligated to read at least a couple of his books. Anyway, on the balance I find myself more aware of certain Internet fads than my students -- I had to explain to one class last semester what LOLcats were -- which is probably a sign that I shouldn't spend so much time researching this stuff on the Internet. (Hey, it's free, it's readily available, and I have an itchy mouse finger if I ever find something truly revolting.)
I had certainly taken note of rickrolling when it started a while ago, and yes, I've been hit by it more times than I care to count. It had seemed that it was a fad that had run its course long, long ago, but when Cartoon Network rickrolled the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade last year, all of a sudden I heard people who had declared rickrolling blasé long ago say it was the greatest thing ever. Since then I've been wondering just why so many Internet people switched tunes on the Thanksgiving rickroll; certainly it was rickrolling on a scale that no one could have ever anticipated happening, but there was something more to it than that. Perhaps Cartoon Network gets a pass because of their image thanks to stuff like the Adult Swim block and their other cult shows (Powerpuff Girls' tenth anniversary, anyone?), or because rickrolling such a huge event as the parade was truly unexpected, or because they actually brought Rick Astley out instead of just cutting to the "Never Gonna Give You Up" video. Whatever the case, none of my students last term brought it up, so I never mentioned it to them; the last thing I need is to seem even less cool than I already am (which is to say, not cool at all).
That being said, Nancy Pelosi rickrolling everyone on her YouTube account ... no. Just no. This is why you leave political comedy to the masters like Stephen Colbert and Rick Mercer; very few politicians know how to make jokes, particularly in relation to their own work and images. President Obama manages it well, which may make his presidency more bearable to watch these next few years, but he is one in a million here in America. (Seriously, everyone should watch Canadian political comedy television shows and see how much better both the comedians and the politicians are up there.) Pelosi inserting a rickroll into an already banal video smacks of a bad joke told months after everyone stopped caring about the joke in the first place. I know the Democratic press ate this up with a spoon, calling it yet another sign of good change in Washington, but I just shook my head when I heard of it and wondered if we could President Obama to write the Democrats' jokes for the next four years. He's got more important stuff to do right now, though.
Labels: internet, politics, teaching, work
posted 2009/01/20 at 20:41
I believe that I have watched every inauguration that featured a transition between presidents in my lifetime. (Okay, my memory's fuzzy on 1977, but I was less than a year old then.) I'm sure that I didn't catch Bush in 2005, but I remember watching him in 2001. Although my interest in politics has certainly waxed and waned over the years -- to be honest, I feel it waning now -- there is something about these transitions of power that I guess I feel obliged to watch. Obviously, this inauguration was more special than any of the ones that came before, with the historical significance of this one magnified for this family by the fact that Dad didn't quite live long enough to see this moment. Even though Dad got disillusioned by politics after Walter Mondale got blown out of the water in 1984, I believe that he would have taken great pride in what happened today. I never asked him if he thought that we would break the colour or gender barriers in the presidency in his lifetime, but I suspect that his pessimism when it came to politics would have caused him to say no. This would be one instance, though, when he would have been glad to have been proven wrong.
Although I caught most of today's proceedings up here in my room, I did go downstairs to watch the pivotal moments with the rest of the family. I never had the crying jags that I had on election night (and later watching clips of that night's celebrations on YouTube), I did tear up a few times; Mom got emotional seeing a lot of old faces there, including Ted Kennedy, Muhammad Ali, Aretha Franklin, and Itzhak Perlman. It seemed like for all of us, our normal business got put on hold for the whole day, as we watched the inauguration festivities and talked about what will happen in the next four, possibly eight, years.
I did not vote for Obama; long before he secured the Democratic nomination, I knew that his opinions and worldview were too different from mine, particularly compared to more progressive candidates like Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader, and Cynthia McKinney. I was worried that the progressive rhetoric we heard from him early on would soon give way to the same stultifying Democratic centrism I've seen from my teenage years and the rise of the Democratic Leadership Council, and so far, given how he's pulled back on topics from drilling to prosecuting the last administration for war crimes, I fear that I am bring proven right. Unlike with our last president, though, I can look at President Obama -- there is still something surreal for me in using that phrase -- and believe that he is, deep down, a decent man who truly wants nothing but the best for each and every person in this country he now leads. I can only hope that in the weeks, months, and years ahead, he will prove my fears wrong.
Labels: politics
posted 2008/11/20 at 21:14
At the risk of sounding like even more of a dork than I usually do, I think that this past week I've been experiencing election withdrawl. The fact that we had so many Senate races take so long to get resolved kind of helped a bit, but there was a certain fascination I had with looking at poll numbers and electoral projections and trying to figure out how the big races would be resolved. Now, with Saxby Chambliss likely to retain his Senate seat in Georgia (I just don't see Jim Martin getting the turnout he needs to overtake Chambliss, especially without Barack Obama on the ticket this time around), the only real question mark is Minnesota, which is at least providing some interesting numbers to crunch. I also have to admit that in spite of the fact that we're not exactly on the same page politically, I have a bit of a personal shine to Al Franken and I'd kind of like to see him in the Senate, if only because it would make Bill O'Reilly head explode. I'm still watching that race, but I'm only now really able to put the election behind me.
That being said, as much as I like Barack Obama on a personal level and I want him to succeed, so far his transition is doing nothing to earn my confidence. I'm not sure if I fully buy in to all the Team of Rivals talk when it comes to Obama -- so far he's got fewer Republican appointees named than either Clinton or Bush 43 had in their first cabinets -- and the appointment of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State is particularly troubling. As others have pointed out already, it's pretty much the worst position for her to take in terms of an Obama cabinet (if she had to be in the cabinet, Health and Human Services would have been a much better fit), and I fear that she's basically getting the post so she can position herself to succeed Obama in 2016. I realize we're still early in the process here, but so far the only good appointment I think Obama has made is Rahm Emmanuel for his chief of staff, and that's only because Emmanuel has the right temperament for an Obama administration, not because of his politics.
To cut to the quick, even if Obama has a number of "rivals" in his cabinet, so far they've all been rivals to his right. I understand the strategy of running to the middle of the political spectrum, but ever since Obama gained the Democratic nomination, progressives have had plenty to worry about, from his vote to give criminal immunity to the telecoms for whatever role they played in spying on us for the current administration, to his backing off on previous promises regarding Iraq troop withdrawls and offshore oil drilling. Now it appears that Obama's definiton of "rivals" is one-sided, and there's no hope of a Dennis Kucinich or a Carol Moseley-Braun being appointed to his cabinet. I'm not saying that Obama can't get a lot accomplished with the team he's choosing, but all the promise and hope that some progressives had in Obama seems to be fading fast.
Labels: politics
posted 2008/11/09 at 13:30
On Tuesday I cast my vote for Ralph Nader quite quickly; there was no line at all at my polling place when I got there. Then again, every time I've gone there in the past I've had women who were old enough to be my grandmothers running the show; this year the poll workers couldn't have been older than twenty. I'm guessing that they were Obama supporters who volunteered to make sure that things ran smoothly there. Anyway, obviously there was no worry about Nader "spoiling" Ohio this year (although Missouri may be another matter entirely, and ironically may cost me a perfect score on my election projection last week). I was feeling really good about that vote, up until Nader used the words "Uncle Tom" in reference to Barack Obama. Not that I don't agree with the worry that Obama will put corporate interests above the interests of the American people -- that was the primary reason I couldn't vote for Obama -- but you just don't use those kinds of words, no matter what kind of an analogy you're trying to make. I'm beginning to wonder if I should have voted for Cynthia McKinney instead.
In between my two illnesses last month I had an opportunity to do some research about the Green Party and the turmoil it's been through since the 2000 election. I think I had formed some incorrect assumptions about McKinney earlier, although there is still something about her that rubs me the wrong way. In a way, I might have expected Nader's idiotic comments, given how much more I know now about his relative clumsiness and lack of concern when it comes to social issues. I'm also worried that voting for Nader isn't helping to develop a third party as much as voting for McKinney would have, but that's the same kind of tactical decision that makes many liberals and progressives vote Democratic in spite of Democrats not representing their beliefs as well as other candidates, and if I disagree with other people engaging in that kind of voting strategy then I shouldn't employ it myself. Still, after reading about the struggles of the Green Party in 2004, and being aware of some of the struggles in 2008, it makes it hard for me to want to get involved with the party directly, because it seems like I'd just be entering the middle of some huge infighting that I don't want to be involved in.
Needless to say, when the election was called for Obama I did a fair bit of crying. Since then I've been watching videos of people's reactions to the call on YouTube, and for a while there they were causing me to cry as well. At first I thought this was simply because I was sad that Dad didn't quite live long enough to see an African-American elected president, but after some thought I believe there's something else at work here. I've always been interested in fighting for equality -- in high school the only club I was involved in all four years was the African-American Club -- and during my college years I did a lot of work for GLBT rights. I don't think I expected that we would elect an African-American president in my lifetime, and now that we have, I guess it fills me with hope that even now, in the wake of Proposition 8's passage in California and a Republican party that appears to think that the reason they lost so much ground this year was that they weren't being nasty enough, there is more reason to believe that we can change more minds and enact more laws to ensure the fair treatment of GLBT people.
I'm not even sure that the election has sunk in for me yet. I made sure to watch Obama's press conference Friday afternoon, and even after watching that, and reading all of these news stories about his plans these past few days, there is still a small disconnect there. Even though I was certain he was going to win the election long ago, there is still some awe and disbelief at the thought that this man is going to be my president in a little over two months. I don't think that he is going to transform the nation in quite the way that his strongest believers think he will, and no president will stop this coming year from being a hard one in terms of our economy and employment, but there's little doubt in my mind that he's going to be a lot better than Dubya was. It's also gratifying to see the reaction from other countries to our election; I don't think I've seen that many non-Americans waving out country's flag since the aftermath of the 09.11 attacks.
Of course, all of this does bring up one interesting point. In 2012 I'll be thirty-six years old, and thus finally constitutionally eligible to run for president. Who wants to start my exploratory committee?
Labels: greenparty, personal, politics
posted 2008/11/03 at 21:49
I'm already on the record with my students with this, so I figure I might as well embarrass myself in front of the world.
I was on the fence with Indiana and Missouri, but I think that Obama's grandmother dying will give him enough of a "sympathy vote" to get those two.
Possible McCain flips: Missouri and Indiana
McCain dark horses: North Carolina and Florida
Possible Obama flips: Montana and North Dakota
Obama dark horses: Georgia and Arizona
Given that Obama will get 73 guaranteed electoral votes at 2300 Eastern when Washington, Oregon, and California all close their polls, I think that will be the moment when most news networks declare him the winner. In my model it's theoretically possible for Obama to win before then, but I think enough states will be too close to call before then. He'll definitely be at 200 before 2300 Eastern, though. (Given how likely an Obama victory is at this point, I think the networks will call states much more quickly than they did in 2004.)
Yes, I'm still voting for Ralph Nader, thanks for asking.
Labels: politics
posted 2008/10/21 at 20:00
Back before the financial crisis exploded into the national conscience, I did an electoral projection based on how I saw the states breaking at that time. Going off of the 2004 electoral map, I gave Barack Obama all of John Kerry's states as well as Iowa, New Mexico (the two states that flipped red in 2004), and Colorado, and didn't think John McCain could turn another state in his favour. If the election broke down that way, Obama would win the electoral vote 273-267, and thus the presidency. You can imagine my surprise, then, when late last night word broke that the McCain campaign was giving up on all of those states. This would be election suicide, were it not for the fact that apparently McCain is figuring on being able to give up on those votes by stealing Pennsylvania's 21 electoral votes. However, not only does Obama have a double-digit lead in Pennsylvania in most polls, but even if McCain sees something in Pennsylvania that no one else is seeing and he takes the state, he would still have to hold on to all of the Bush 2004 states, and he's trailing right now in Nevada, Missouri, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida, and in many of those states by significant margins. I just don't see how that could possibly happen, barring an October or November Surprise of epic proportions.
The only thing that troubles me about the Obama campaign's approach right now is that instead of shoring up their leads in those states, they're expanding their reach into states like West Virginia and Kentucky. I don't want to discount the possibility of Obama taking any of those states, but his positions in some of those states is not ironclad; some polls have McCain well within the margin of error now in Florida and Ohio. There are a lot of factors that we just can't take into account right now -- undercounting of youth voters in polls, the Bradley effect, the tendency of young voters to not show up in the numbers that they appear they'll show up in before the election -- but Obama can't afford to take any state for granted at this point, and it feels like that's what his campaign is doing by concentrating ad buys in states where he's still down more than five points with just two weeks to go until the election.
I'm still curious as to how the Senate race will go. Assuming the Democratic candidates win in Alaska, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Oregon -- where they're leading, albeit by small margins -- and get the four that they're pretty much assured of having, they'd only need to steal one more seat to get a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, which would really facilitate getting legislation passed in the next congress. There are three seats where the Democratic candidates are in striking distance -- Kentucky, Georgia, and Mississippi (Roger Wicker's seat) -- and if McCain's fortunes continue to diminish, I have to believe that the presidential candidates might turn attention to those states, and possibly Minnesota if it remains close, to try to influence the Senate election. I'd imagine that the Democratic party leaders are probably even more interested in retaking the old Max Cleland seat than the old Paul Wellstone seat, so maybe it shouldn't be a surprise that the Democrats and Obama might be putting more resources into Georgia for the next two weeks.
Labels: politics
posted 2008/10/16 at 23:39
In addition to being sick, and just plain busy with a hundred things, it's been hard for me to come here to write because most of my spare time has been spent following the election, and I just don't have that much to say about the election. I've got the worst case of election burnout I can ever remember having, and instead of doing the smart thing and taking a break, I'm just going to tough it out for the next nineteen days. It's not that long, and even though there's a growing perception that the presidential election is over and done with (I agree that McCain's chances of victory are diminishing but it's not over until the fourth of next month), the growing possibility of the Democrats gaining a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate is providing a bit of intrigue. As much as I have mixed feelings about Al Franken, I'm really pulling for him to win that Senate seat in Minnesota because it's the old Paul Wellstone seat and I really don't want that in Republican hands any longer.
I guess I got a bit of a break these past few days when I got to watch the Canadian elections. The difference in campaign commercials (I'm glad Hockey Night in Canada is back on, although the new format and new song do nothing for me) was refreshing, and watching CBC's approach to the returns was refreshing from the usual political coverage I'm used to here in America. Of course, I still found plenty to get ticked off about because the Green Party got shafted up there as well, although at least the media and party leaders up there take the Greens a lot more seriously than they do here. I wasn't that happy about the Conservatives gaining seats, but even with as little as I follow Canadian politics I knew that Stephane Dion was not about to lead the Liberals to retake government. Perhaps the unhappiest part is that because Canadian elections only run for five weeks, it didn't provide that much material for Rick Mercer, especially since he was off for the first couple of weeks after Parliament was dissolved.
Of course, all of this Joe the Plumber business now has Toledo back in the spotlight for another completely insignificant episode. I know Holland well because that's where the family lived after the fire while the house was being rebuilt; in the eighties a big strip mall called Spring Meadows was built down there, at the intersection between I-475 and the main road that leads out to Toledo Express Airport. Out hotel was on the other side of I-475. I still go down there sometimes -- the smaller of our two Best Buys moved into Spring Meadows lately (the bigger is in a nasty part of town I try to avoid), and there's also a Target there -- but the mall as a whole is dying because of the office park a couple of miles south of there, and then further south are our two lifestyle malls, the Shops at Fallen Timbers and Levis Commons. I'm surprised that Obama spent so much time in the Toledo area this week, given that the votes he needs to get are in the southern, more conservative part of the state, but the economic crisis is probably enough to shift enough cultural conservatives over to Obama's column to let him carry the state easily. Again, though, this isn't Election Day, and a lot can change in the next nineteen days, so I don't feel comfortable making any solid predictions. (Except that Nader won't win, I know, but I'm voting for him anyway dammit.)
Labels: canada, greenparty, politics, toledo
posted 2008/10/02 at 19:53
I've had a hard time figuring out just how I should write about the current national/global financial situation, which has, for good reason, been the main topic of most of the news shows I catch. It's hard for me to avoid a guttural, personal reaction to this, not just because my bank is one of the ones that's been reported as being the next to go, but because I've had to take on so many new financial responsibilities since Dad's death. I know that our family financial situation is secure and unlikely to be affected much by all of this stuff that's going on, but with Michigan's economy faltering ever since I started teaching up there, I've seen the effects of bad economic policy in my students for over a year now, and I know that things aren't likely to get better for them any time soon, especially since Michigan's economic infrastructure is so vulnerable to globalization.
I do think that the sense of panic that's been pervading the talk of politicians on both sides is overblown, but at the same time it's hard to deny that the current economic situation is one of the biggest challenges to face this country since 09.11. Something needs to be done about this, and soon, but none of the proposals that have been officially pushed out there, from the administration's first $800 billion blank cheque to the bill that goes before the House tomorrow, strike me as helping people like my students. Every bill so far has been geared towards saving companies first when it's the American people who need saving now more than ever. I know a lot of people are saying to wait a few months when the Democrats should have control of the executive and legislative branches, and then hope that they will "fix" what's wrong with the current bill, but I've heard that since Bill Clinton gutted welfare and I'm just not that confident that it'll happen.
I do think that the election has, barring a complete game-changer like another terrorist attack or something of that nature, swung to Barack Obama for good. A couple of weeks ago I finally did my own projection for the election, which had Obama winning 273-265. There's no doubt he'll win Iowa, and I felt that he had New Mexico and Colorado in the bank as well. After this past week, though, John McCain is clearly stuck, rightly or wrongly, shouldering the blame people are placing on Republican economic policy. I don't know if states like Virginia and North Carolina will go blue, because I think for lots of voters there the "culture wars" will still trump any other concern, and McCain may still get enough of those conservative Christians to eke out victories in Ohio and Florida, but he will have to spread his resources pretty thin just to hold onto those states. Obama's campaign has twice the money McCain's campaign has, and even if McCain somehow holds all those states (and Nevada), he still loses 273-265. Even in a best-case scenario where he snatches New Hampshire back, that only gets him to 269-269, and the next House would almost certainly elect Obama in that case. There could still be an October surprise or a colossal slip-up from the Obama campaign -- these are Democrats we're talking about, after all -- but I think Obama has the election in the bag now.
Labels: politics
posted 2008/09/04 at 18:16
I'm glad that Hurricane Gustav did not wreak as much havoc on the Gulf Coast as so many of us feared it would, and I thought it was quite classy for the Republican Party to alter their convention plans this past Monday like they did. By Tuesday, however, things were back to normal for them, and trying to sit through their convention has been one of the most painful things I've done in a long, long time. Fred Thompson's speech reminded me of exactly why I love him so much as an actor -- his wonderful bass voice, his ability to switch between learned determination and folksy metaphors, his knowledge of just when and how to raise his voice at just the right moments -- and why I hate him as a politician. I also have to question the wisdom of putting on Fred Thompson -- by all acounts to throw the conventioners the "red meat" they had been so longing for -- right before Joe Lieberman, who has all the excitement of hardened Silly Putty. Why does Ralph Nader get all the blame for 2000 when the Democrats put up this guy and Al Gore back when Gore still had that redwood tree lodged firmly up his sphincter?
Last night, though, I think may have been the Republicans' undoing. I twitted last night that it would be the night that cost the Republicans the presidency, but I don't think I should have gone quite that far. For one thing, I seem to be the only person on the face of the planet who was not impressed in the slightest with Sarah Palin's speech. Eugene Robinson pointed out how the speech seemed to be a mish-mash of two different speeches, but he should have gone further and said that neither speech was good at all. On the one hand, you had the carefully-crafted applause lines, likely written by John McCain's camp, that Palin delivered in a pedestrian manner at best. On the other hand, you had the part of the speech that was likely written by Palin's camp, and it was so full of incomplete and jagged sentences, and irrelevant thoughts, that Palin wound up sounding like a small-town politician. She didn't even sound gubernatorial, much less vice-presidential or presidential. I know she's only had a week or so to prepare for national-level politics, but unless McCain steps up her training here in a hurry, Joe Biden is going to systematically dismantle her at the vice-presidential debate, and I don't think anyone in McCain's camp is expecting him to best Barack Obama either tonight in his acceptance speech or at the debates. (Oh, and the fact that Palin wants to ban books makes me even angrier at the Republicans than I already was.)
In addition to Palin underwhelming me, I think Rudy Giuliani may have sowed the seeds of demise for the whole party this November, and not just by him and Palin pooh-poohing Obama's work as a community organizer. (The difference isn't that Palin had responsibilities as a mayor; it's that Obama actually worked with disadvantaged people. Don't even get me started on the covert racism at work here.) I know that the recent hikes in gas prices have caused more people to be in favour of expanding American oil drilling, but this is still a nation with some environmental values; most of the people who are changing sides on this issue right now are doing so with heavy hearts, believing that expanding drilling is a "necessary evil" in the face of the current world oil situation. When Giuliani not only pointed out, but encouraged, a chant of "Drill Baby Drill!" during his speech last night, he cast the Republicans not only as enemies of the environment, but as people who take sheer delight in raping the earth. Just like Pat Buchanan's virulent homophobia in his convention speech sixteen years ago caused even people who weren't all that comfortable with homosexuals to go, "Wow, those Republicans really have too much hate in their hearts," I think that "Drill Baby Drill!" moment is going to come back to haunt the Republicans, from McCain and Palin all the way down the ticket, come November.
I'm not in the business of telling the Democrats how to run their elections -- I'm still not voting for Obama no matter how anyone tries to convince me otherwise -- but between the "Drill Baby Drill!" chants, the party platform that says even rape survivors shouldn't be allowed access to legal abortion, and all those photos of Bush and McCain hugging each other, there's enough material there for several rounds of hard-hitting commercials that should net Obama the lion's share of the political centre. Given how bad the Republicans are screwing up, if the Democrats somehow can't get Obama elected this year, it will be through no one's fault but their own. Just like it was in 2000.
Labels: politics
posted 2008/08/28 at 16:40
For all the possibilities I had in mind for how yesterday's session of the Democratic National Convention would go, I never thought that I would end up feeling sympathetic for Hillary Clinton's supporters, and that the sympathy would be engendered by the actions of Nancy Pelosi. The MSNBC anchors I was watching didn't make much of it -- not that they would, of course, but Pelosi refusing to pause even for a millisecond between asking for nay votes on Obama's acclamation and closing the vote was one of the most galling displays of Democratic power I have ever seen. I make no secret of my disdain for the Clintons and how they moved the Democratic Party, seemingly irrevocably, to the political centre and marginalized true liberalism within the party. That being said, there were a lot of delegates in Denver who came to show their support for Hillary -- I'm guessing they got a lot of face time on Fox News -- and they deserved to have their voices heard in that acclamation vote. There was never any danger of them making the one-third threshold to force the state-by-state tally to continue, and denying them the opportunity to make that one final clarion shout against Obama's nomination was unconscionable.
It's bad enough that the Democrats work so hard to silence the Green Party and Ralph Nader's campaign, but now the Democrats are turning this undemocratic, un-American behaviour on themselves like they never have before. I realize there is something to be said about a political party presenting a unified front, but when the leaders of a party act so overtly to silence its own members, it betrays the fears and the ill intentions not only of the party leaders, but the party as a whole. If Barack Obama wins this election -- and I do not believe that John McCain will be able to hold as close to Obama as he has these past couple of weeks, especially if Gustav hits New Orleans in the middle of the Republican National Convention -- then, just as the Democrats adopted Democratic Leadership Conference centrism after Clinton's election, the Democratic party will move even further to stifle dissent in the future. Political parties are supposed to be about ideas, not people, and the Democrats remolding their party so completely around Obama these past couple of months bodes poorly for the future of American democracy.
There have still been some moments of levity these past forty-eight hours, though. For a while there I thought that convention attendees were applauding Bill Clinton for so long and so loud last night because they were trying to keep him from talking before his alloted time had expired. I especially like Keith Olbermann taking the piss out of Joe Scarborough and Chris Matthews live on the air; I think Olbermann, better than anyone else at this convention, understands the ludicrousness of the news networks using the convention to promote themselves and their talking heads more than actually talk about what is going on at the convention and what it means for the country. Olbermann is aware that he's one of those talking heads, and he brings the smarminess when it's expected of him -- he knows who signs his cheques and why they're so big -- and he'll be the first to admit that he has an oversized ego. Still, I appreciate that he's called Matthews and Scarborough when their pomposity has gotten out of hand. After how depressing the convention itself has been, Olbermann's provided me with a little chuckle every now and then to help keep me sane.
Labels: politics
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