I've been quiet about politics this election cycle for two chief reasons:

1) As I've said before, I'm not going to vote in the Democratic primary. None of the candidates support gay marriage, not supporting gay marriage is bigotry, I will not vote for a bigot. Therefore, I won't vote.

2) I've not been sure who I would vote for, even if (1) weren't an issue. You all know I was a Johnny E fan back in 2004, and even more so in 2006.

2007 changed that because a) it became clear that he would not win and consequently he began to sound more desperate and opportunistic and b) because, you know what, experience does matter. And while I appreciate him pulling the Democratic party to the left with his policy proposals, he's barely got mroe experience than Obama does, and I don't think Obama has a quarter enough experience to run the country. So, Johnny E was out (and we'll see later why he won't ever get back in). And I've never been an Obama supporter. His empty rhetoric and default position of compromise bother me.

(Say a guy wants to punch you in the face and you want to resolve this issue. Obviously you don't go in saying "Well, both sides have good points, so why don't I accept being punched in the face just a little? Is that an acceptable compromise?" Maybe that's what you end up with, but that's not where you fucking start. How about you start from the position of "I don't want to be punched in the face at all." How about that? That seems like a good starting place. And this is what the Democrats as a whole have done with settling for civil unions (separate but equal) rather than demanding gay marriage. And it seems to be Obama's default position, bargaining from the position of only wanting to get punched in the face a little.)

So Obama's out. Also: my favorite part of the ABC Democratic debate last Saturday was when Obama defended the usefulness/power/importance of rhetoric with... that's right, more rhetoric. (And due to the Ancient course I just took, he reminded me of some people: Sophists.)

But that debate was also the first time I felt like I had seen genuine political discourse on television, which was a welcome change. Obama said very little, Johnny did better, and Hillary kept pounding on the fact that she has a record of creating change. And that's when I accepted the fact that I had become a Hillary supporter months ago. That was just the final nail, as it were.

//

All this makes the events of the three days that followed even more interesting. Now, I was caught up in World of Warcraft all weekend so I didn't see much of this happen live (and, as I don't live in New Hampshire, didn't need to see it all play out live).

Apparently Hillary got choked up a little about how much she wanted to make this country a better place. Which, when I saw the footage, made me like her even more. But that's neither here nor there. There's been a lot of talk about the media reaction to Hillary's "crying" or "breakdown" or whatever. (It wasn't really any of those things, if you watch the tape.) And talk about how the media tried to bury her with it. And even was trying to bury her before that, too. Which I just accepted as a given: it makes a good story and good stories are what they want. (People forget how self-interested journalism is.) Anyway, I just accepted it, because mostly I saw the commentary on the Daily show about it and wrote it off. I've known for a while that Chris Matthews was a loud asshole, so I wasn't surprised that he was a loud asshole to/about senator Clinton.

But that's mostly because I didn't understand the extreme degree of Matthews' assholery. And so I give you Miles Davis for President's very first embedded video, because it's important that you actually see this for yourself:

(Or, well, because that's not working, go watch it on YouTube and come back. I'll wait.) 

So... yeah. He said that. Now I understand what people say when they tell me that people voted for Hillary because they were voting against Matthews and misogyny. Anyway, here's the article I culled that video from, an interesting compendium of related media-bits.

Also, remember how I said that Johnny E was out and we'd soon see why he'll never be back in? Well, in the Salon article on this whole thing (which is excellent, by the way, but will sound a little hysterical until you see what Matthews and others actually said/did) gives us this little nugget:

Such joy was there at Clinton's devolving journey from the front of the pack back to the primordial stew of high-strung, overwrought femininity that even her opponent John Edwards, a man who built his candidacy in part with the support of progressive women, felt free to get in on the fun, reacting to Clinton's show of feeling by telling reporters that a president needs to demonstrate "strength and resolve."

What senator Clinton showed was not a lack of resolve. It was strength of passion. Something I once saw in you, senator Edwards. Now, though, it's clouded through with opportunism and seething indignation. You sir, kind of suck. 

BB: Public radio station won't air Ginsberg's HOWL because of fear of FCC fines.

America makes me sad. 

A good primer on the current state on SCHIP.

Ed Gillespie lies--just lies!--to Robert Siegel and then gets the smackdown, NPR-style. 

Fire him. Excommunicate him. Make it clear that you do not agree, Catholic church.

You've got to. 

italisizy:
http://www.cnn.com/.../09/27/pace.gays.ap/index.html
Hooray America!

Sir Turley: Im not even going to open the link, because it is probably about General Pace

italisizy: Yep.

Sir Turley: what an ass

italisizy: Completely.

Sir Turley: at least he is retiring?

italisizy: Nope.
That's no help.

Sir Turley: is it irony that he dropped a bomb like that and now is cutting and running to retirement?

Apparently, there's a 50/50 chance we're all members of an ancestor simulating computer.

There's no fucking reason gay people shouldn't be able to get married and any Democrat who says otherwise is either gutless or retarded.

Which leaves me with Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel for president.

Unfortunately, they're the two morons that would take troops out of Iraq today.

The positions of the candidates.

Now in handy selector form.

But still: how is it acceptable in any way, shape or form for people to oppose gay marriage?

When we come of age and start participating in politics, everyone who opposes gay marriage right now is going to look like Strom Thurmond looked for the past forty years: almost comically bigoted.

Exhibit A: Last year, nutritionists presented data from a study of middle-aged Americans. Participants were asked to classify themselves as underweight, normal weight, overweight, or obese. Then they were weighed. Only 15 percent of obese people, compared with more than 70 percent of normal and overweight people, classified themselves correctly.

Exhibit B: In a 1985 survey by the NPD group, 55 percent of U.S. adults agreed that "[a] person who is not overweight is a lot more attractive." By 2005, only 24 percent agreed. The firm concluded, "Perhaps Americans have found that the easiest way to deal with their weight is to change their attitude."

Woah. These are amazing facts.

I've not written a lot about my struggle with my weight (coming up on nine months maintaing my weight-loss) but these two studies look to quantify some things that I feel, intuitively, as someone with a little experience with the subject, to be true.

Pulled from the most recent Human Nature column by Will Saletan at Slate. The article to which it is an addendum was pretty good to begin with.

I sat there, wondering if I'd at least get my wife back after this. Then 20 minutes passed, and nothing. Thirty minutes. Forty. Forty five. I started to get worried and thought all sorts of horrible things that I will not put words to. Mainly, then, I start to think about the abortion debate. About pro-lifers, in particular. I think about all those meddling politicians that would want to interject themselves into everything that just happened to me, interject themselves between me, my wife, and her doctors.

On abortion and a 'health' exception, though personal experience.

via kottke 

Every last story I read about Obama shows him doing something bone-headed.

I mean, seriously?

Also: he hates Dems and the left. Or, he thinks he can win if he slams them.

If that's the case, then I'm sad for him, for me and for American political discourse and most particularly the state of the Democratic party, because you know what? No one ever says a goddamn good thing about us. And we just want to help. We just want to make things better. We want to see people stop suffering, we want to give people the ability to get out of bad situations, to improve their living conditions, to be able to pay for health care and to not incite even more people to want to kill us and to stop cold those who do.

I am not saying that the right doesn't want these things, I'm sure they do. I don't agree with how they want to go about it, or the specific ideals they use to prosecute these things, but, I mean, my goodness--how is it that day after day after day after day we can keep hearing about how liberals hate America and aren't proud of every amazing thing this nation has accomplished and how liberals want to lose the war... it makes no sense. And every time anyone refrains for saying it doesn't make sense, they are making it worse.

I don't care about how you think you're supposed to be fair or balanced: don't say or let it be said unchallenged that liberals don't love America, don't want to see it be safe and strong, don't want to try and improve the lives of its people, don't want to do what is in its best interest, don't want to see it be the very, very best that it could possibly be and what it has been: the strongest, richest, most-free civilization in the history of man--those people who imply that liberals believe otherwise, and allow that implication to be made, cannot be believed or trusted, no matter their party affiliation.

Today, on NPR's Day to Day, in honor of Vonnegut, they played him reading the following passage from Slaughterhouse Five:

Billy Pilgrim padded downstairs on his blue and ivory feet. He went into the kitchen, where the moonlight called his attention to a half bottle of champagne on the kitchen table, all that was left from the reception in the tent. Somebody had stoppered it again. "Drink me," it seemed to say.

So Billy uncorked it with his thumbs. It didn't make a pop. The champagne was dead. So it goes.

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this :

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

And people wonder why I want to study philosophy of history. The film read forwards is jingoistic claptrap (probably) but read backwards, it's moving and solemn and beautiful. This simple transposition changes so much beyond just the order and causality of the events.

I don't dispute that sometimes 1115.org comes off as sounding hysterical in response to the idea of Senator Obama being the Democratic presidential nominee. But no one else has been doing any examination of what an Obama candidacy would mean for Democratic politics, and, indeed, the nation in general. And they're right, he is getting to be Kerry-esque.

Most others just seem to take it as fait accompli that he'll be the Democratic nominee. That, or that there's no one better. Democrats are painting themselves into the same corner they did in 2004 with John Kerry--assuming the senator's the best man for the job, for some reason, despite a good deal of what he says and does--or assuming that there's no one better. Well there is. His name is John Edwards. He's a man whose campaign isn't based on 'hope' like the Obama campaign and has actual, substantive policy initiatives already prepared.

Don't buy my assessment? Compare the health-care issue pages from Senator Obama's website and Senator Edwards'.

Some things to consider about the two of them: Obama's is longer. It's also a laundry list of things he did before. Most of them, it looks like, are bills he introduced, not bills he got passed (where's the consensus building now?). Now take a look at Edwards'. It's shorter but more substantive on what he would actually do to fix the problems Americans face. Oh, and there's a link there to a comprehensive, 8 page pdf expanding on each of those points and explaining why it matters and how to get it done.

How is this even a contest? 

Senator Obama has said that the American people shouldn't want someone with a plan as President, because plans fail, but instead should want someone with the skills to build consensus. Two thing about that stick with me: 1) wasn't that the bill of goods we were sold with George "a uniter, not a divider" W. Bush? And 2) it's a false choice. We can pick someone who has both substantive policy ideas and the ability to get compromises implemented, we don't need to pick a candidate who has explicitly said that he won't envision a policy plan at this point.

Senator Obama talks about hope, but that's rhetoric of failure, I mean, lets look at it: he doesn't trust himself to come up with the best--or even an almost-best--possible solution. He doesn't trust that even if he had that solution, he could get others to buy it. Doesn't that sound like giving up before you've even started?

I'd like a leader that will lead. I'd like a leader with a strong will, strong coalition building skills and a strong mind, full of ideas and plans. And anybody who tells you that any one of those things isn't important is either a liar or a chump.

Remember: donations help.

Because no one's mentioned it in the past two weeks, I think it's my duty to point out that Alberto Gonzales has always been a fuckup.

Remember now?

How about now?

Maybe now?

Sir Turley: In India, a woman dies every seven minutes in childbirth.

italisizy: Well, sure. But you make any population large enough you get all kinds of gaudy statistics.

Sir Turley: yep

italisizy: The real meat is that 301 in every 100,000 dies from pregnancy related complications.
That's a reasonable statistic.
Where reasonable = useful.

Sir Turley: I think so

italisizy: Here's what's stupid about the AP. There is no context in the artice. We get told about the different provinces, but not how that compares to the west.
Wikipedia on Maternal Mortality Ratio
See, AP, how hard was that?
It's the third result in google for: deaths per 100000 births.

larsitron: The next three years are going to be awful.

italisizy: Remember Lars, they're lifetime appointments.
italisizy: The next thirty years are going to be awful.
italisizy: Give the man his due.

larsitron: Right, that's fair.

italisizy: But also think of it this way, Reinquist, who didn't want Bush to replace him, waited to die until Bush was approching the nadir of his political capital, which was kind of him.

larsitron: Right. I think people in Congress are waking up to the fact that they've got no coat tails the next time 'round.

italisizy: I hope so. But Senate races are the only ones that really matter at this point. With 94% or whatever of incumbents winning back their seats in the House, it will be 3 or 4 cycles before we're even competitive in there again.
italisizy: And with only a third of the Senate up, and, as I recall hearing, more Democrats up than Republicans in the Senate, we're facing an uphill batter. Also, we're up against history, as the president's party tends to pick up seats in midterms.
italisizy: I just pooped on my own parade.

larsitron: Yeah, except in '94.

italisizy: But that was with a relatively popular president. With the President screwing up, it gives the Republicans something to run against on their right, making them look more moderate.
italisizy: This pushes the perception of them toward the middle as they distance themselves from him.
italisizy: And I just kept pooping.

McCain told the Star that, like Bush, he believes "all points of view" should be available to students studying the origins of mankind.

 

The theory of intelligent design says life is too complex to have developed through evolution, and that a higher power must have had a hand in guiding it.

John McCain supports teaching of ID in schools along with "all other points of view." Great. This is where you and I part ways, John McCain. Matt tells me you're beloved because you're percieved to vote your conscience, not party affiliation. Fine, however, you still vote conservative, which I was fine with 'cause, you know, you did it from your heart.

Until you started backing this president, who we could tell, every time you went on TV, you just despised as a president (and probably respected as a man, to be fair). Maybe you don't like that he's a liar or exaggerator or the flippant and fraudulant way he sent our troops into harm's way or the contempt he has for "science" and "facts."

But your support of ID means one of two things, John McCain, that either you have the same-or-similar disdain for 'science' and 'facts' as this president--in which case you lose me, even if it is your 'conscience'--or you stopped voting your conscience and started voting with the polling data. And that I can't abide either. So that's it, John McCain, this is where you and I part ways.