Boom

party lines

Last night over dinner (leftovers from the election day feast),  I was talking about a conversation I overheard/couldn't escape while I was drinking some morning coffee at a cafe around the corner. The guy--my age, maybe plus 5 years or so--was blah-blahing at a couple of old guy regulars about how the two presidential candidates were essentially the same, that what was really needed was a true multi-party system, blah blah Nadar talking points blah. He was too loud, went on too long, was way too condescending and I considered pouring my latte on him just to get him to shut up. 

The silly thing is, low charisma aside, part of me agrees with him. Having a true multi-party system would be helpful in a few ways, and unhelpful in others, at least as far as actually getting things does in government goes. When it comes to their willingness to be overly close friends with generally damaging global business interests, I agree there's little essential difference between the D and R columns. But in terms of social issues--which I will use to encompass everything from health insurance to immigration to reproductive rights to marriage--they couldn't be more different. 

This is what we ended up talking about over dinner. The Rebuplicans are a mess; they do still control the house, but otherwise did poorly in the election. Many of their pet issues are failing. But the Republicans have been around for about 150 years, and I don't expect them to evaporate--and in that century and a half, they morphed from the party of civil rights to the party of unregulated business to the party of fundamentalist fear-mongering rascists, funded by big business. And finally, I think those funders woke up and realized that the platform they were funding, the crap that goes along with deregulation, is not very popular. Or not popular enough to win.

This leaves a couple obvious options. One, the platform starts to shift to more moderate ideas: less adamantly anti-abortion; less hateful to immigrants, the poor and gay citizens; more willing to believe that science is occasionally correct. These platform shifts seem to take a minimum of 20 years to complete, which may not be fast enough for Big Everything. An alternative is that Big Everything starts cozying up to the Dems, finding ways of de-fanging attempts at regulations, which gives the Democrats that same couple of decades before they've entirely sold their political little souls (perhaps a little less, since they're clearly pretty well sold off already). 

This morning, I saw variations of some of what I said appearing at Huffington Post and Ta-nahesi Coates, as far as the Republican party goes: it's no longer an appearance problem, it's a platform problem (I'm sure variations on the idea are everywhere, I just prefer my news sources to have a nice liberal bias). As long as women and brown folks keep voting, you can't get away with being so actively loathsome to women and brown folks. It might be that the dogs that the business interests lay down with are so insistent on remaining dogs that they really will splinter off into their own group, abandoning the GOP to become, I don't know, Poor Ignorant Whites for Ayn Rand (they were trying to be the POWER party but can't spell). Unless a zillionaire comes along to fund that--along the lines of Ross Perot--I don't see that happening in a sustainable manner, any more than I see the Green Party doing anything but making impressive speeches on occasion and reminding progressives of their better selves. 

It's weird to think I might regularly vote Republican at some point down the road, if Big Everything does start pouring its money into the Democrats, and if the GOP starts shifting its platform.  

Politics Today

1. Scott Walker wasn't recalled. Numbers I saw on Fox (the only site I could find actually reporting something as silly as actual percentages) said 53% voted to keep him; 46% voted to boot him. Seemingly everywhere, from all viewpoints, considers this a big win. Which I think is odd. Obama won with 52.8% and that certainly wasn't considered a big win, was it? I mean, it was exciting, sure--my god was it exciting--but it never felt like he swept the nation. According to this list, if you're interested, Nixon in 72 was the biggest presidential win in my lifetime. Reagan in '84 was the second biggest. Nobody really talks about Nixon getting reelected, but Reagan, at 58.77%, is sure remembered as a sweeping victory. If it turns out that Walker stayed in office with above 55%, then maybe I'll--gasp--agree with Fox that it's a big win. 

2. The stupid haters got like 230k signatures to put marriage rights on the WA ballot in the fall. It's Referendum 74. Assuming you are not a bigoted jerkface, you want to APPROVE R-74 in November. You also want to give WA United for Marriage some money to fight the bigoted jerkfaces who will be funding the reject movement. Everyone, but particularly if you live in a more conservative neighborhood or outside the Seattle city limits, you want a yard sign or 12. It's going to be tricky, I fear, to make sure that everyone knows to approve this thing. Approve = I approve full marriage rights. 

3. We have a candidate for Governor who's been supporting marriage rights since before we were sure we'd have to vote on them. That candidate is Jay Inslee. The other guy is a Republican weasel and we do not want him in office. Mr. Inslee is in many ways a typical Dem: pro-environment, pro health care that is both affordable and non-politicized, pro-civil rights, slightly protectionist when it comes to trade. NORML, the NAACP and unions like him a lot; the NRA and the Chrisitan Coalition don't like him at all. There are more ratings here. 
True story: this is the first time in my life I will  be voting for a white guy for governor. Also true: Non-Seattlites in particular need yard signs. How does one get a yard sign? Well, Inslee's website is pretty sucky and only lists a single PO box which is useless. His volunteers are nice. I've asked for a list of his field offices, and as soon as I have it, I'll go back and add it in. I've given him $$ and was sent an email about getting a yard sign, but apparently I deleted that. 

the king

While I have mixed feelings about nonviolence as a movement, it's been a solid part of every successful modern revolution (and a few pre-modern ones, which I will ignore today). Dr. King had teachers, and a long list of men and women who fought (Or, more accurately, sat. And marched. Not fought. Stupid nonviolence.) alongside him. I'm mostly linking to Wikipedia below; it's as good a place as any to go read snips of these heroic lives.

A few of my personal favorites:
-Ida B. Wells, who sued (and won, which was overturned) a railroad for making her give up her seat some 70 years before Rosa Parks refused to move on the bus. She went on to publish and agitate on the topic of lynching, and successfully encouraged black folk to leave the southern apartheid states. She tore it up with more than a few women in the temperance movement over white feminists refusal to deal head on with racial issues.

-A. Phillp  Randolph, an atheist socialist who unionized the Pullman car workers and agitated to end military segregation. I don't think you can understand American civil rights history without understanding the Pullman car workers.

-Bayard Rustin, a openly gay black Quaker (born just up the road from my hometown!) who coaxed and counseled the then-armed Dr. King to the message of nonviolent resistance and started the Freedom Rides. Please note that homosexuality was illegal in most of his lifetime, yet he was uncloseted. A hero in every way.

-Fanny Lou Hamer, a righteously loud Christian organizer who was certain she had god on her side. When we sing We Shall Overcome, we do her honor. Of course, Billy Graham was equally sure that god was on his side, but whatever. Fanny Lou's personal history and charisma, along with her belief that civil rights needed to be a multiracial movement, makes me love her.

-Shirley Chisolm, who survived three assassination attempts when she ran for president in 1972. She's as much as a feminist hero as a civil rights hero, which earns her at least triple importance. She worked hard for kids, women and the urban poor...and Nixon, of course, vetoed her most important bill.

-Melvin Tolson, a poet and professor who's probably best known for his work with the Wiley Forensic Society (subject of The Great Debaters movie with Whitaker and Washington and produced by Oprah). I think it's more interesting that he was the poet laureate of Liberia and wrote a book-length epic poem called Libretto for the Republic of Liberia. (I hoped to link to the text online, for those of you interested in reading a book-length poem in your few minutes of blog perusal time, but couldn't find it. But it's available for purchase here and there, if you are so inclined.)

-This last one is more an exercise in frustation for me. A few months back, I stumbled across an interesting fellow; a white guy (Jewish? Quaker? I don't recall.) who's been teaching nonviolent resistance in this country for decades. He was, at least as of about eight months ago, still alive, and a professor emeritus somewhere. In case it's not obvious already, I didn't write his name down, or at least write it down in a place I can now find. The school he's affiliated with isn't a coastal state, but that just means "somewhere in the Louisiana Purchase" which is more unhelpful vagueness. I found him interesting because I'd never heard of him before, and he's about a zillion years old and still active, and it struck me that he's pretty damn important in any civil rights narrative and dammit, we should all know who he is. I am both annoyed and ashamed that Mr. Who The Hell Knows will continue to live in relative oblivion, thanks to my lazy/disorganized discovery.

i just gotta say

Currently, a kid and a judge are dead, and other folks are full of bullet holes and in the hospital. And it sucks.

And yes, Palin and Beck and the other Tea Party crazies are evil, and foolish, in equal parts. And the fear and hate they help shill for is dispicable.

But it was just as dispicable yesterday as it is today.And as I see more and more writers I admire--Klein, Krugman, a long list of others--all in one way or another blaming Palin, Beck et al, I would like to remind everyone that correlation and causation are two different things.

I hope Palin feels remorse about her "crosshairs" and "in our sites" and "target" tag lines and that she behaves differently going forward. But Loughner is responsible. He's the one who showed up at a grocery store today and shot until he ran out of ammo. And it doesn't matter what websites he liked, what books he read (actually, he and share a few favorite books, according to his MySpace page), what music he listened to, what video games he played, what hobbies he had, or, fundamentally, who he might have voted for in November, if he did indeed vote.

What matters is that he directly caused physical harm. People do this sometimes. It's sad and wrong. We wish other people wouldn't cause harm, whether it's to a person's livelihood or family or ecosystem or pet or property or self. Sometimes a kook with a gun causes harm, sometimes a nation launches a 'war on drugs' and causes harm, sometimes a guy goes crazy in a cabin in the woods and sends packages that cause harm, sometimes an actor thinks he's taking a stand and kills a president, causing harm to one individual directly but indirectly to generations who live under the resulting American Apartheid, sometimes a nation gets tired of starving, elects a nutter supported by cowardly or equally crazed beaurocrats, and an entire continent loses its mind, killing millions of individual civilians who belong to a suddenly unacceptable religion, race or sexual identity. The motive never actually matters. The action or actions matter tremendously, both immediately and for a long time to come.

I have had multiple conversations with [redacted] about unpleasant scenarios involving [redacted persons] and other [redacted persons]. I had years of dreams where I caused physical harm to a certain former official; they were highly troubling but also, I must say, mildly satisfying. While having some of those conversations and those dreams, I read a lot of inflammatory political websites, along with a tall stack of books involving politic theories and revolutions through history. My stairway contains my Hall of Revolutionary Heroes and for the most part they don't tend towards nonviolent types. And yet, I'm not going to go shoot Rep. Reichert--my nearest Republican--even if someone I admire publishes an ignorant, foolish tag line that suggests I should. 

 

2006 / 2010

The last midterm elections were profoundly different for me than the one that happened this week. First: I was back in a lovely city with no oxygen (Quito, something like 9k feet in altitude) having just wrapped up the event that lives on as "my vacation story trumps your vacation story." I spent some probably irrelevent time explaining to citizens of the empire what was meant by 'midterm elections' and obsessing from afar about how things might turn out. Election night found me in my oxygen-free hotel room, glued to CNN and leaking tears of delight at the idea that perhaps my home turf was not as full of violent sociopaths as I had assumed.

This midterm series finds me in my cozy home, playing a lot of Fable 3, working a lot (with pleasing results), mucking about in the kitchen and garden, and drinking hot buttered rum. Except I'm back to feeling like my turf is just as violent and sociopathic as previous years.

Now, I am not a fan of the two-party system. On those online tests that tell you how you feel about the world, even Ghandi was more of a warmongering tyrant in his political beliefs than I am (this is a paraphrase of whatever test it was, but Ghandi was the guy I was to the left of in the little grid). In 2004, tests suggesting ways of finding out who I agreed with most for a potential president, I was closest to Mike Gravel who is a total crackpot. Kucinich wasn't progressive enough for me.

I expect that most policies I support (legal, regulated and taxed drugs of all kinds, strict limitations on corporate citizenship, capital punishment for large-scale environmental and worker safety crimes, total reform of all policy related to natural resources, equal pay for equal work, full citizenship rights for all citizens and full amnesty for all illegal residents, abolition of NAFTA, immediate energy policy reform, new programs to restore felon rights, unfettered legal access to abortion...and let's make unicorns the national symbol, while I'm at it...) won't be approved by voters, but seriously: what sort of crazy upsidedown world do we live in when 'tax the rich to fund kids' education' gets rejected?

There aren't enough people in this state who make more than 200k in a year to have voted it down by their selfish selves. So, there are many folks with more typical middle class incomes who are
A) idiots
B) sociopaths
C) completely convinced that if their boss has to pay a fairer share of her income in tax she will firm the voter, thus meaning that the voter's kids will be homeless while having a slightly less-crappy education.
D) all of the above

There's also the one about taxing soda and candy. Went down in flames. It was also for education. I was promoting it at work, with the idea of "let my Take 5 habit support your kid's education." In this case, people were claiming it was punitive on the poor. My point is that it was punitive for people who buy candy and soda. Which are luxury items. We tax the hell out of booze and cigarettes (and I wish we would with weed): but somehow candy counts as food.

Is this how baseball fans felt with the mess of steroid scandals? I love the sport that is politics, but I feel nothing but loathing for 65% of participants.

eep

I stop paying attention for a few weeks, and what do I discover? The GOP has a 67% chance of winning the house. This needs to not happen. You know that. I still remember being in Ecuador during the 06 midterms, and alternating tears and hollering while watching the returns on CNN when the Democrats took back the house and senate from Team Crazy Pants. I know it feels like Obama & crew hasn't gotten enough done quickly enough, but imagine his first two years in office if the house had a GOP majority. No health care. Likely no economic stimulus. Very probably, we'd have two much less reassuring supreme court judges. Not even a nod in the direction of ending DODT. 

If nothing else, we have to end these ruinous richie-rich tax breaks that Bush gave that small population.

I just went and threw money at the good guys. You should, too, right now. The GOP has only gotten crazier in the last two years.

making it make sense

I'm confused why WA's AG is signing on to fight the health insurance bill. Since I am a nerd, I like a little context with my facts, so I give you:

stuff that happened with the passing of the Social Security Act. Not only will you find three full-length legal opinions from 1937 at that link, you'll also find a "brief historical essay" that is only brief in comparison to full-length legal opinions.

The 10th amendment, which provides the grounds for the seemingly crackpot AGs to be filing the lawsuits. Just for reference, I'm sure you all know all of them by heart. As it always does with our constitutional arguments, it comes back to Hamilton. It's interesting--and not that unusual--that GOP like to play kissy face with Hamilton's theories except when, you know, they don't. Then, as we are currently witnessing, they wig out and break up with Hamilton over facebook. That's the interesting thing about the implied powers doctrine: it can be as flexible as you need it to be. It may or may not be useful to consider that the doctrine was authored by a guy considered by many of the government founders to be too elitist. Defining government powers as relating to the general good of the populace seems great on the surface. It's the questions about who's doing the defining, and figuring out what might reasonably fall under the category that makes it complicated. It'd be great if  we could safely say "if we elect them, we can trust them to act in our best interests." But. You know. Bush. For starters. (I mean, let's not forget Andrew Johnson. Or the other crackpot Andrew. Ask the Cherokee about crackpot Andrew and the "general good.")

And then, a brief, much less nerdy, thing from NPR about who doesn't have to buy health insurance, and how you get out of it. (A pretty dinky annual fine.)

si se puede, GOP culo.

Don't forget to say thanks to the Democrats for getting this monster passed.

A funny little piece of that bill is noted here. I didn't realize student loans were related to health insurance. 

And the Irish Times claims that immigration reform is up next. Typically, I would assume that any bills would be the same sort of complex nuttiness of the health insurance deal, but I'm not sure if the corporate funding and priorities really compare.

fool me once

Visiting the WA secretary of state voting results page last night and again this afternoon caused me to have idiocy-induced heart attacks. Both times, the problem is me thinking about Ref 71, and intending to check the page that Ref 71 results are posted on, and forgetting about Tim "Can't Make Me Go Away" Eyman's latest stupid initiative, and then freaking out with shades-of-2004 dismay at the numbers.

Then I remember 'oh yeah, I can't make Eyman go away' and scroll down, and recover. 

(And PS) Dear Tacoma and Assorted Other Little Towns of Methlehem aka Pierce County: Cascadia and the Salish Sea would prefer it if you moved to Maine or Orange County or Utah, or Spokane for that matter, with the other jerks.

(And PPS) My Mayor McActivist continues to hold his lead. Even before they count the 203 votes his volunteers collected and drove to the airport before midnight last night. I think Slog's interview with him this afternoon is remarkable.

I Love Ed

Seriously, Ed. You inspire. The main reason I want Referendum 71 to pass is because it's right, and once every few years I think it's nice to see society as not generally horrible.

The secondary reason I want Referendum 71 to pass is so Ed Murray can pat himself on the back and go off to the other Washington and kick some righteous gay butt on the federal level.

I hope he didn't throw up.

This time a year ago, I was ripping on Cindy McCain's ugly-butt gold suit with Teen Vampire Hunter Tessa T. We were mean. I had been quietly drinking Democrat blue cocktails earlier in the evening, but was so stressed/keyed up they barely registered. Then: astonishment, relief, and much laughter and surprised blinking. 

Shortly afterward that, she tried to convince her dad she should celebrate Obama's election by getting a day off school. Back in my day, missy, Reagan made sure we all went to class, except when we were busy saying no to drugs out in the parking lot.