Here and There

I brushed off your endorsement when I got wind of it early in the day. But damn you, you made me watch your speech.

And now I copy the embed code with wet eyes. Yes we can!

Just got done taking a Zogby poll. Setting aside questions of the pollster’s reliability, I like taking these surveys from time to time.

Something I had been thinking about as I was wandering the streets near my work the other day came up on this poll. It comes up frequently on Zogby’s, as I’m sure it does on others. It’s where the poll asks you to name what issues are most important to you (choose only two), and there’s a list of things like Taxes, Education, Economy, Space Exploration.

It seems more than a meaningless exercise to me. Because no one can solve all problems, and it’s best to have your priorities at the ready, I thought I’d share what I told the pollsters.

If I were allowed to choose five issues important to this country, they would be, in this order: Environment, Economy, Diplomacy, Education, and yes, Defense (thanks to the mess we’ve inherited).

Environment gets top billing because we’ve simply got to start, really start, making an effort now. Environmental damage is the farthest reaching and most potentially intractable. The economy trends up and down over time. Left alone, our climate is headed toward a condition in which no of us could live here anymore.

Economy because, frankly, it sucks. It sucks bad. Taxes are too low on the top earners, and too high and complex for the rest of us. It’s been seven years of skew, and it’s time to recognize that the experiment failed and get back to something more fair and sensible. A subsection to this issue is jobs, which can be created in areas concerning the environment, from cleanup to renewable energy, etc. Health care is tied in here, too. It should get its own topic, but there’s no lack of good healthcare in this country. There is, on the other hand, a telling lack of affordable healthcare.

Which kinda sorta leads to diplomacy. We’ve simply got to get our good standing back. Not launching unilateral wars for falsified reasons is a good start, but we’ve got to go so much farther. Helping struggling peoples where we can, but staying out of sovereign nation’s affairs is a safe bet, too.

Education is fourth, sadly. It should be first. But the world is fucked right now, so those others get 1-3. We’ve simply got to clamp down on education, from pre-school to college. Quality education needs to be made available at all levels. And affordable college, with reasonable loans in place, needs to be there, too. It will take a dramatic shift of emphasis, because at the current rate of school and student failure, this country is headed down the drain.

Defense because there are people who want to fuck shit up. We should be ready to stop them, but a true effort in these other areas might also reduce the threat. It’s all so wonderfully intertwined.

Do not give a misbehaving child what (s)he wants.

And with that implicit analogy, this blog now turns its full attention toward taking down John McCain. Reader submissions are accepted.

The aim will be to expose John McCain for what he is — an old-school politician, beholden to special interests with deep pockets who play by their own rules. The arguments about approach to government are tired, but must be hashed out. The real question is who these candidates are, what they represent, and how they will lead and represent the United States of America at home and to the world.

Given these tenets, the choice should be pretty clear, methinks.

Srsly.

But I have to give props to the Master. Now, if only I could ride those coattails …

I’d read about this on Craig Newmark’s blog a few months ago, and was pointed to a Today Show clip from … today, featuring Stephen Colbert. Colbert was discussing a straw poll being conducted at DonorsChoose.org, in which voters from around the country can give directly to schools and educational endeavors in the name of their preferred Democratic candidate.

No matter whom you support, think about giving to children in need of a good education.

The Clinton smear team was (need I say?) falsely claiming that Barack Obama had been a senior lecturer, not a professor, as he claimed, at the University of Chicago Law School.

Today, the school confirmed that:

From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per year. Senior Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure-track.

It’s amazing. Seattle artist Chris Jordan makes art of truly mesmerizing detail, and every bit, zoomed at every level, offers commentary on who we are and how we live.

I’m speechless.

I’m reading and hearing more and more that Barack Obama lacks substance, that people don’t know what he stands for, other than the played-out cliché, “change.” Funny, but no one seemed to question this until it appeared he was a contender. I guess that’s to be expected, now that people are taking a closer look at him. But that’s what I can’t understand. Are people taking a closer look, or are they latching on to a desperate tactic employed by the ever apparently vulnerable Clintons?

Anyone watching any debate that wasn’t simply a petty rehash of candidates’ past sins would have been keeping score. Obama’s controversial (in that it doesn’t mandate, and therefore cannot guarantee universal coverage) health care plan has been pored over perhaps more than any other of his policies. His stance on the troops in Iraq is simple enough. His energy and education and tax policies have been laid forth for the electorate time and again. He weaves some policy into his stand-alone speeches, and definitely covers it well in debates.

I certainly didn’t come to support him by letting myself get carried by his so-called poetry. I admit the man can speak, but to me, he’s even more of a policy wonk. Funny, but I remember the exact same thing being said about a certain former president whose wife is running for the nomination now.

So, really people, what’s the problem? Or are you already grasping at straws?

Does this solidify Huckabee as the conservative’s conservative?

When, in late 2000, it started to become apparent that an entire nation was turning logic and decency on their heads and was about to install George W. Bush as its president, I trembled not for any short-term damage he would do to this nation and its standing in the world. Of course I never would’ve dared to predict the devastation of the World Trade Center/Pentagon attacks. I did have a hint of war with Iraq, when, in a presidential debate with Al Gore, candidate Bush cited Saddam Hussein as the first threat to the U.S. What?

But it’s the long-term damage that truly saddens me. There’s the possibly irreversible damage done to the environment by tree-huggers-be-damned business deals the administration has fostered, in secret, of course.

Then there are rulings handing down by the Supreme Court, which Bush has managed to solidly pack with right-wing judges bent on turning the clock back on history. One today effectively rides the Way Back Machine to a time before desegregated schools, making all sorts of legalish justifications for denying schools the right to racially balance themselves and provide minority children more of an equal opportunity to education.

I am further saddened to be an American today.

Many of us can agree on the damage that has been done on the world and domestic stages in the last six or so years. Odds are roughly 2-1 that you think George W. Bush and his administration hasn’t been good for the United States of America.

Then there’s what to do about it.

Not a lot will be feasible in the next two years. The Congress will continue opposing the administration, perhaps effectively, on matters of oversight. But when it comes to legislating change, their task will prove more daunting. Both houses lack veto-proof majorities, and the opposition party will rightly read public polls to show tha White House spin will affect their votes to override. It’s already being set up to happen on the war-funding bill going to Bush’s desk. On the one hand, he’s right to deride Congress’s pork-barrel parcels. But that’s what Congress does. I think it’s ludicrous, you think it’s crazy, history is pretty much okay with the whole thing.

Still, stalemate at this point is as good as reversing the damage. If the administration’s hands are tied, it can’t shit on the country’s reputation anymore than it already has.

But important questions will begin to emerge in national politics, most notably with the well-under-way presidential campaigning for 2008.

As with the nature/nurture question, I think correcting the Bush mistakes will require a disciplined mix of undoing and moving forward. Taxes rise and fall, so raising them can be seen as merely going with the tide, not undoing.

Abstractly, I think most of us just want a government that gets things done, one that doesn’t act the bully on the world stage, doesn’t thumb its nose at the idea of a world court or flip the bird to climate change treaty negotiators. A government that respects diversity of opinion, that encourages debate over important issues for which there is no consensus. A government without a hidden agenda.

Sorry to be so serious on a not-so-serious day. I just think it’s appropriate, of all days, to start thinking about the future.

Can’t find a link, but I’m just about finished reading “The Castaways” by Mark Singer, published in the Feb. 19 issue of The New Yorker.

It’s a stranger-than-fiction tale of a group of Mexican fisherman who end up stranded on their fishing vessel in the Pacific Ocean. There is survival, comraderie (or lack thereof), Catholicism, marine biology, international trade routes, Mexican presidential politics, poverty, education (or lack thereof), and more.

I recommend you either pick up a copy of the magazine, or find someone who has it and borrow or Xerox it and read this story.

It is so on. We’re gonna do this, and fuckall.

In direct contradiction of statements made yesterday by someone who may actually have insight into the matter (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace), President Bush today said the following:

• “We know that.” (referring to Iranian involvement in supplying arms to Iraqi insurgents)
• “What’s worse? That the government knew, or that the government didn’t know?”
• “There’s no contradiction,. I can’t say it more plainly.”
• “I intend to do something about it.”

Now, except for that last statement, all of the above aren’t really true. Bush may truly believe them as the words leave his mouth, but they aren’t certainties. At the very least, such statements and bold declarations demand rigorous scrutiny by the best and brightest minds in the military and intelligence communities.

But the transitive action statement is the one he means. It translates roughly as, “It’s on motherfuckers.”

Amazing. Bush’s final two years in office may be his most dangerous in terms of far-reaching, thorough disaster. It could easily bump him down beyond Millard Fillmore and his ilk as the worst president in the history of this country (which may see its “last throes” with a guy like Bush leading the show).

I don’t think this administration sits around in a room with a Risk board game in front of them saying “Hey, dude, let’s see how much of this we can totally destroy and render hopeless.” That’s the scary part. They really think they’re bringing about a fundamental bettering of the world. Delusion is more hazardous than malevolence.

Endnote: In a rare, captured exchange of actual journalism, CNN’s Ed Henry stuck to his guns in question White House press secretary Tony Snow yesterday about the Bush/Pace contradiction. Video here.

Just when I think I’ve heard it all, along comes the story of this “proud” Washington state parent of seven (read: irresponsible breeder).

He’s outraged that one of his thousands of children will be shown An Inconvenient Truth at public school. First, what is an evangelical Christian doing sending his kids to public school? And second, what’s the big deal?

Well, the big deal, according to Frosty Hardison, is that global warming isn’t caused by humans, and that humans shouldn’t be trying to abate the so-called crisis (I, for one, hereby declare it a crisis). No, to Hardison’s mind (faith?), warmer weather is merely a sign that the messiah is coming back to save us.

Translation: Let the world go to hell. Jesus will sort it all out, for believers and non-believers alike.

PS Third question: Is his name really Frosty?