bruorton | Entries tagged with politics

In the news, the wars rage on.

The terrible and the duped

strive tirelessly to make the world

worse. The world, tired herself,

seems to be complying. But while

the stakes do seem to go nowhere

but up, history would suggest we
have always lived under this pall.

Meanwhile, our attention snags

like a bare foot on every jagged nail

of aggravation. This morning the coffee

spilled. The cat made a mess as you

rushed to get out the door. You hit

every stop light. One of those awful

starts that inevitably heralds, perhaps

manifests, an awful day to come.

It's a survival instinct, I suppose,

to focus on the worst things. But

what is survival, these days? Last

weekend I somehow forgot until

evening the medication I must take

every morning to stop my body

from destroying itself. Behold, a

tiny miracle: I am still here. This

morning I didn't notice until after

rinsing my contacts under the faucet

that I hadn't closed the sink drain

first. A terrible start to the day

that never manifested. And now,

walking across the yard, a raven

is making a hilarious ratcheting

noise with its throat, like those

wooden toys designed to simulate

a croaking toad. Juvenile robins,

summer's first brood to the pair

nesting in the old wreath on the

garage, are flitting about to test

their wings. After two solid weeks

of rain, the sun is only partially

obscured by clouds.

For months -- about 8 months out of the past year -- I canvassed for Warren in NH. I'd never done that before, not for any Presidential candidate: knocking on the doors of strangers, trying to figure out how to assess in about 2 seconds what sort of approach might keep them from shutting the door on me, could just maybe interest them in opening up and considering what I had to say.

Most of the time, the doors stayed closed. No one was home, or at least not answering. (This is what writers call "a metaphor.") And every time that was the case -- every single time, I am not kidding -- this introvert who felt deeply uncomfortable about doing this at all, would feel a little rush of relief, followed by a surge of guilt at my own relief.

( Read more... )

Do you remember the the other night

walking home in the dark

because we'd thought the moon would be up

so we didn't bring a flashlight

the squnch squnch of fresh snow under our boots

but still warmed by the glow of neighbors
chatting around the table of wine and munchies
discussing the weather, kids, housing travails,

and despite the inevitable dark turn to politics
the lyrics still in our ears

If there's hope in this house I'm gonna find it

If there's hope in this house get me rope

I'm gonna ride it

while in the clear night the train is sounding

all the way down the valley from the next town over.

In the moonless black you say Taurus looks more like a fox

and I point out Castor and Pollux, the twins over Orion,

and our path home is apparently due north

because there is Polaris, beckoning us on.

1.
I pause to take up the chickens' feed
and dump their water as we are heading out
to the election night party.

It is a momentous night, and we are full
of a year's worth of waiting. Near the coop door

two currently molting hens, lacking nearly
half their feathers, have roosted close together.
For them this night is simply
a blessedly mild one,
after the recent cold snap.

We return home

in shock.

Whatever we expected

it wasn't this.

Thank God our state rep,

who strapped on a dust mask

to help clean out constituents'

flooded trailers after the hurricane

managed to win re-election

by 3 votes.

We can't begin to grasp the future
we are careening into

or even comprehend how

it happened.

Our kitten hears us enter,
after midnight, and sends up

a piteous mewing from his crate.

He comes out purring, tiny wedge tail up,

so grateful to be back with

the people he loves.

3.

Two days later my elderly cat wants

to take a longer walk than usual,

and though the dusk is deepening
fast this time of year

I indulge her. I've already put

the winter siding on the coop,

and put away my tools.

So we stroll together down a wooded bank,
then up the darkened lane beneath

dimly looming trees.

Somewhere, Hispanic children are being

taunted by their classmates. Someone

is scrawling "TRUMP" across a college's
Islamic prayer room door. A black woman

is told she will be raped and sent back

to Africa. Someone signing to a deaf

friend on FaceTime is told they are

retarded, not wanted in this country

anymore.

The leaves rustle and crunch under

my sneakers, her pads. We stop

for a moment at the intersection,
just listening to the darkness.
Then we double back up the

driveway, heading for
the distant lights of home.

So I was reading this concise and educational article on Juneteenth today, a day that celebrates the final emancipation of the last US slaves -- exactly 150 years ago today, as it happens. But of course this anniversary, a momentous one in any event, is weighed down by an act of racist terrorism committed on its eve, and committed in a church that is a landmark in the struggle for racial equality in our country. And towards the end of the article, I was caught off-guard by the mention thrown in of the attacker's "alleged interest in starting another civil war." But I shouldn't have been; I really shouldn't.

Because it is clear that in so many ways, the war has never ended.

And in that light, the analogy of Juneteenth as a version of Independence Day struck me further -- because it means celebrating a victory both achieved, and still aspired to. It reminds me of the way Jesus spoke about the Kingdom of God, actually: that it had arrived, and that it was still coming. Meaning it was something we could understand, hope for, celebrate, and above all -- spend our lives trying to make a reality in the midst of a broken and bleeding world.

So it seems to me that Juneteenth should be a holiday we all observe, with an attitude of joy, reverence, anger, and stubborn hope that is probably impossible for us to associate with the 4th of July -- because this is a victory not yet won. Even if we personally are not on the front lines, we observe it in a war zone, fought in the land of the free.

"We are all created equal" are still fighting words.

We may fall, but we will rise.

Hopeful Juneteenth, everyone.

Science:

Working to save the Ozark hellbender, one of the world's largest salamander species.
Newly discovered hydrothermal vents near Antarctica reveal more alien worlds, where Volcanoctopi prey on yeti crabs. Video of the site, taken by a robotic submersible, is pretty sweet.
"Orca poop is a treasure trove of information." So who better to assist researchers than Tucker, a "ball-obsessed" black Lab?
2011 was a good year for lemmings ("furry sausages with legs") which meant a great year for snowy owls in Canada -- leading to an unusual irruption this winter down into the US. Maybe one will come our way... (There are some great pics on flickr.)

And such:

Keith Little, one of the last Navajo Code Talkers of WWII has passed away. Punished by his school teachers for speaking his native tongue, he dedicated his life after the war to encouraging young Navajos to embrace their culture.
Contemplating the deathbed works of famous composers.
How have I never heard of the game of Nomic? And what is a "logical hand grenade"?
So, the hapless Republican field is still conspiring to nominate the guy that none of them want. Whatever. But they can still entertain us -- I bet you'll never guess what Ron Paul's theme music was at his NH party last night!

I've been periodically gathering the interesting-er stuff that's recently gotten my attention for a little while now, and I thought -- what the heck? Why not post it somewhere? I don't post much anywhere these days, and this is one window into what's on my mind, anyway. And maybe, if I get back in the habit, I'll think of posting more personal stuff, which I think is the more valuable in any case.

As a warning, these will tend toward the political, but there's always some variety. Ignore or comment at will.

President Obama finally took a confrontational stance to obstructionist Republicans -- and appointed Richard Cordray head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (Cordray is a former OH attorney general). As a recess appt, it only last through this year, but Republicans had pledged not to confirm anyone to this position until the Bureau was gutted of authority and independence (prompting Elizabeth Warren, who created the CFPB, to run for Senate).
Obama's also made a few other much-needed recess appointments (there are dozens of vacancies, from the EPA to judicial seats, which really pisses Sen. Leahy off). Maybe it's just because it's an election year, or maybe the President's finally learning there is no "bipartisan" to be had with these cretins. Either way, it gives me hope he'll follow through in blocking Keystone XL... there are more than enough warnings to nix it, esp. now that Congress has jettisoned a full environmental review.
The Roman Catholic church reaffirms its status as a regressive haven. I wonder, though, if the existence of married priests could have unintended effects?
NPR's blog notes the passing of an Olympic fencer and Hollywood choreographer (from Princess Bride to Lord of the Rings), who also -- at the age of 60 -- played Darth Vader in a number of classic combats (such as the duel w/ Luke in the carbon freezing chamber).
An intriguing National Geographic article taking in its scope twins, genetics, and autism. Also, naturally, some cool photo portraits.
In case you managed to miss it (in which case, congratulations!) -- the main story out of the Iowa caucus was that Santorum (the latest in a long string of Not-Romneys) tied Romney, with only 8 votes separating them. (Closer than Bush-Gore! And so much less meaningful.) Bachmann, coming in dead last, has dropped out; Gingrich (4th place, behind Ron Paul!) basically promised a scorched earth campaign against Romney from here on. With that pseudo-event out of the way, the craziness is now headed this way....

Rant of the Day: Mitch McConnell is such a putz. After the spending bill was pulled from the floor, he said he couldn't believe Democrats tried to push through a bill so bloated with earmarks -- never mind that he was himself responsible for $85 million worth of them in the bill. (And never mind that earmarks don't cause any more money to be spent, they just direct money already budgeted.)

Reason for Hope: On Ashura, many devout Shi'ite men publicly whip and cut themselves to remember the martyrdom of Hussein ibn Ali (Muhammad's grandson). Part of his tragic story is that he died because there were none to help him, so leading Afghan clerics are calling on Afghans to donate blood instead -- pivoting the holy day's commemoration from one of grief over the past to help for those in need today. (It's also a practice that women can directly take part in.) This actually seems to have been spreading across the Muslim world for a while, taking down a myth that giving blood was against Islam as it went.

Whoa... interesting. Long story short: Jim Swilley, leader (bishop?) of a megachurch in Atlanta, GA, came out as gay to his congregation after encouragement from his ex-wife, children, and a sense of conviction from hearing homophobic reactions to the recent gay teen suicides. (NPR story here, incl. extended interview and full video of his church address in which he told his story.)

It's a startling step closer to the day when a rejection of homophobia is no longer a conservative or liberal issue, in the church or in society. There is so much that distinguishes this from other high-profile outings (like Ted Haggard), most importantly that Swilley isn't just trying to get out in front of some scandal. In fact, it bears none of the usual sense of hypocrisy: he doesn't treat it as a sin from which he must repent, and he says that he's never made derogatory or homophobic remarks. He just wants to be honest about who he is.

There's lots of good stuff in the interview; for instance, Swilley seems willing to consider marrying a gay couple, and rejects the "marriage only for procreation" argument by saying "I marry folks on their 2nd or 3rd marriage who aren't going to have kids... and am I supposed to do fertility tests on all the couples I marry?" I'm not clear exactly what your title as bishop means, but -- right on, Bishop Jim!

It was also fascinating to hear him seemingly working through the issues anew even as he's talking to the interviewer, as if he's still just realizing the new vistas that have opened to him for thinking about civil rights, marriage equality, and so on. For me, his most touching comment was: "Saying all these things out loud is just so new for me..."

Actually, just an excerpt of a speech Robert Kennedy gave at the University of Kansas on March 18, 1968. It is a rare and elegant sort of truth-telling that remains stunningly true many decades later:

"Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.

"It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

"Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

"And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."

I had an instructive day earlier this week, on the focus of media narratives.

Apparently in the last week or so, the narrative had developed that the President was not showing enough anger about the Gulf oil spill disaster. Driving in to work, I heard on the morning news that a recent interviewer (Matt Lauer from NBC) had actually told the President:

"This is not the time to meet with experts and advisers. This is a time to spend more time in the Gulf and -- I never thought I'd say this to a president -- but kick some butt."

I'm fascinated that interviewers don't ask questions anymore, they tell their subjects how they should be doing their jobs. But that aside, the President -- conscious, I suppose, of this narrative against him, and aware that strong sentiment trumps shrewd thought in American politics -- responded with this:

"I don't sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar. We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick."

First off, kudos for his nice effort there to try to play the demanded "angry" role while still conveying a logical point. But what's interesting to me about the discussion surrounding this exchange is not so much just that we are being told to focus on the President's emotive abilities rather than on the actual corruption and incompetence of the industries and those tasked with regulating them. I mean, we've learned to take that for granted in our modern punditocracy.

No, what fascinated me was that by my drive home that afternoon, the narrative had moved on apace. The discussion by this point was now: had the president been too vulgar? Was this demeaning to the office?

Aha! I was wondering what I should be distracted by next.

With all the pundity sorts chattering about yesterday's elections (NJ and VA governor, and the wacko special for Congress in upstate NY) this morning, I can't help wanting to give my take on it, because oddly I haven't heard anyone else say this: the most important message is not for Obama -- it's for Republicans.

I know, everyone whose job is to fill their time slot with chatter wants it to be a referendum on Obama. And yes, he made an effort to help out in NJ -- less so in VA, where the Democrat (Deeds) didn't want his help in the summer when the shine was coming off, then really really did want his help once Deeds started to flail. And yesirree, Republicans won both races. As the party out of the White House typically has done in these states; Dems won them while Bush was around, and so on going back at least to Reagan.

National trends aside, from what I saw of the Dems in these races they were poor campaigners (esp. Deeds). That shouldn't negate, however, the fact that the Republicans won big in VA in all sorts of races besides the top one, and that they won the top job in a blue state like NJ even though the opposition to the weak incumbent was slightly fragmented.

Why? Well, elections express the choice not of everyone, but of everyone who shows up. And it's pretty clear that Democratic enthusiasm, and therefore turnout, was way down. Voters under 30 were a powerful Democratic force last year, for instance, but this year went from around 20% of the voters to 10% or less. If there's a message for Democrats to consider for next year, it's that truism that they've got to deliver on what their voters were hoping for last year. If not, they stand lose that big chunk of "swing voters" from their base who can swing between caring enough to vote, and not caring enough.

But the message I mentioned for Republicans? It's the choice in front of them. In NY-23, a third-party right-winger got the celebrity treatment (read: Sarah Palin et al) and funding (read: $1 million from the Club for Growth) and managed to use it to clobber a socially liberal Republican (of the sort that used to be common in the Northeast) into actually dropping out of the race even though she had the "official" party backing. As a consequence, a Democrat managed to win a Congressional district that Republicans have held continuously since the 19th century.

Yet more moderate Republicans won -- narrowly in bluish NJ, and decisively in purplish VA -- by playing down their socially conservative views and focusing on nuts and bolts sorts of practical issues. You'd think a party looking for the way to win back some real power in next year's mid-terms would seize on this sort of moderation and focus on getting something done as the key, rather than catering to the uncompromisingly far right party-purity faction.

But honestly, alas, I wouldn't count on it.

I can hardly believe it. Governor John Baldacci, of Maine, just signed the second legislative establishment of marriage equality. It seems likely that there will be some sort of challenge at the ballot box, but we'll just have to see.

In the meantime--what's going on, New Hampshire? After all, your legislature passed out a bill over a week ago now... Gov. Lynch, I'm looking at you.

I'm not a huge fan of the Silver Bullet Theory of crisis solution -- for example, that a single technology will save us from global warming. There are too many structural things that need to be changed for us to actually live within our means, habitat-wise; I also think that much of our structure itself needs to become decentralized, with everyone depending more on the food, energy, and community in the places they live.

That said, as far as large-scale power generation goes, concentrated solar power is the only thing I'd feel particularly inclined to support. I only happen to mention this because over lunch today I read an article describing the history and theory of CSP which included the amusing revelation that "Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks contain many designs for solar concentrators, including some for industrial purposes, because he worried about the destruction of the earth's vast forests in humanity's search for fuel." Gotta love that guy. 550 years old, and he still knows how to keep with the times.

That article, on the other hand, is a bit out of date. It was a link in an article today about the challenges to actually building these plants, one of which appears to be either Sen. Dianne Feinstein, or conservationists' concerns about building power plants in the fragile desert ecosystem... depending on how you look at it. Anyway, I really only bring this up to suggest (if reading about climate change issues appeals to you) to check out this blog in general. Joe Romm is one of those people who likes silver bullets, and wants to find ways for us to keep living more or less the way we do now, but nonetheless knows what's going on in the world of climate science, politics, and economics.

He's also the one who came up with my favorite line so far on the whole thing (I'm paraphrasing): "We're all Bernie Madoffs... we have constructed the grandest of Ponzi schemes, whereby current generations have figured out how to live off the wealth of future generations."

Now that's what I call staying on the rhetorical cutting edge.

I'm not very focused on politics these days, but this headline cracked me up. Courtesy of Chris Bowers: "Legalizing Marijuana More Popular Than Republicans."

We live in an odd world. A couple years ago, that would have sounded to me like a parallel universe.

It is my understanding that Chief Justice John Roberts is a strict constructionist, believing that every word in our Constitution was fully intended just so, and is therefore unalterable.

So -- whether he was nervous, or just in a hurry -- it's at least ironic that he screwed up the oath of office when he administered it to Obama yesterday.

(Just for the record, the oath is not what makes it official. According to Amendment XX, Article 1, Obama became President at noon, five minutes before the oath was given.)

Ich bin ein Vermonter Update: Obama has taken the oath a second time, "out of an abundance of caution." Curiously, he will be only the third President to be sworn in twice, and the other two -- Chester Arthur and Calvin Coolidge -- were both Vermonters.

Coincidence? I think not.

They call the end of an election that for a reason, I guess.

First off, Jesus' General has documented some of the people McCain is proud to have at his rallies. (He also directs us to the alarming expose, Jesus Christ: Wrong for America.)

Sure, you say, it's not news that the racists probably migrated into the McCain camp early. But then the New Yorker reports people using the "n-word to declare their support for Obama" and a Republican led focus group finds people who think he used to be a terrorist but hey, if he'll do something about health care... and I really don't know what to think any more. I think the word "demographics" might not mean what we think it does. This phenomenon was also documented in this week's K Chronicles (since this post wouldn't be complete without at least one cartoon).

I'm not going to get into the whole "Joe the Plumber" fiasco, though the last debate devolving into both candidates trying to talk to a theoretical person of dubious existence (something like 2 dozen references to him between them) is sort of the epitome of the term silly season. But with at least one campaign trying to go in all directions at once, it looks like we can expect plenty more of this kind of absurdity in the last week and a half.

I'll close with this, for you gamers out there: the campaign as a campaign. Lots of throw-away references for the serious nerds in there. (And if you're a nerd but not a gamer, maybe you'd like to consider what you would do with $3 trillion instead of have a war.)

Enjoy!

(PS -- I'd give every American household a herd of 125 Angora goats!)