Linguist/translator. Work: AI / machine learning for Google in L.A. Life: baseball, poetry, politics. Go Angels.
Politics: Spinozan, left-libertarian. Kossack since summer '02. Registered independent. Wanted Feingold. YES on Iraq? Can't vote for you.
It's easy to get wrapped up in the small stuff. Primary season is heated, and we're all entranced to some degree by polls, the horse race, the snubs and the flubs. Trivia and the politics of perception. I'm there too.
But when it comes to finally choosing among the alternatives, we need to think of something greater than the shadowboxing and the spin room. We need to think of the others who lack the fortune of our leisure.
When I vote, I think about the great tragedies and misfortunes of the past two decades...our generational moments where millions of lives hung in the balance, and were lost to criminal neglect and the failure of political will to rescue them. To save their lives, and thus testify to our character.
I think of Iraq. I think of Rwanda. I think of Sudan. I think of lost opportunities in Cuba. And I think of Kenya...and what may or may not become the next great horror there.
And when I think of political will and personal judgment...and who among our presidential aspirants has the greater supply to address or avert the greatest tragedies of our era, the choice couldn't be clearer.
LAS VEGAS -- Barack Obama has warned about the dangers of gambling -- that it carries a "moral and social cost" that could "devastate" poor communities. As a state senator in Illinois, he at times opposed plans to expand gambling, worrying that it could be especially harmful to low-income people.
Today, those views are posing a problem for Obama in the gambling mecca of Nevada, which holds its presidential nominating caucuses Saturday. While his top rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, also talks often about aiding low-income Americans, she has embraced the gambling industry and its executives, and her campaign has used Obama's past statements in an effort to turn casino workers and other Nevada voters against him.
Since the sort of journalism that focuses on our candidates' legislative accomplishments are few and far between, I want to draw attention to this excellent, concise Washington Post piece from former state legislator and editor of the Washington Monthly, Charles Peters.
Focusing on legislative accomplishment is something we should do with all of candidates, though we often tend to get caught up in questions of process, style and personality. It's what I tried to focus on when I wrote my first pro-Obama diary after months of winnowing my choices: is there a convincing back-story to these claims of Obama's that he is capable of working across the aisle to promote and pass progressive legislation?
I think there is. And this short Charles Peters piece is part of that back-story.
Congratulations to the Obama campaign for their surprisingly decisive victory in the Iowa caucuses tonight.
Given the unprecedented turnout, and the mobilization of the youth vote and independents for the Democratic side, this is a great victory for progressives and Democrats across the board, and something to hearten us all in the race to November!
But I'm a sucker for details. Details tell the story. So here's a list of ten remarkable details of tonight's Democratic contest after the break.
There's a remarkable schizophrenia at work in the Daily Kos community. It's not uncommon in progressive circles, and it's been historically responsible for the destruction of progressive coalitions repeatedly in the past.
Of late, in this community, it's taken this form:
(1) a fetish for extreme partisan polarization that tends to a Maoist enforcement of language protocols
vs
(2) a 50-state strategy that tolerates language flexibility, self-criticism, and coalition building.
It's very difficult to reconcile those two impulses, but one is clearly more valuable than the other. It's as simple as the difference between "GATEKEEPING" and "GATE-CRASHING".
One would have thought we had learned the lesson by now.
Some kids carry the US Constitution in their pocket. Helluvan idea!
In this primary season, if you have two pockets, here's another small copy of a document that you would do well to carry as a sidecar.
It's a small graphic the New York Times put together last summer highlighting some of the more than 800 bills Barack Obama sponsored while in the Illinois Senate.
***
On a day when the Clinton campaign went deeply negative and launched two attack websites, coordinated with a Times article, based on 3% of 4000 votes Obama cast in the Illinois state legislature, I thought it would be useful to take a look at some of the very progressive things he not only voted for during the same tenure, but a few of the 823 bills he sponsored and fought for over those eight years.
The top recommended diary at the moment is a very optimistic and positive take on a single candidate's performance in today's Democratic debate. I applaud it's optimism. I do not however applaud its use of selective editing to come to rather unlikely conclusions.
Avoiding any spin for one candidate or another, I just want to present the evidence and let this community make come to its own conclusions.
Here is the full, unexpurgated video of the Luntz focus group segment of 29 undecided Iowans featured on Fox News:
Perhaps this snapshot diary may be somewhat redundant with all of the campaign diaries trying to spin a slight advantage for one of the three frontrunners, but this is a historic moment, and I want to record for posterity the unusual situation we have in this dynamic race:
Beginning one week ago, essentially every poll released since December 3 shows both Senators Clinton and Obama statistically tied in all three states.
We'll all want to tout ground games, trends, micro-politics, fleeting news events, endorsements and outliers, but the data is pretty clear:
In the ecumenical spirit, I'll assume Sunday is a day for secularists and pulpit-punchers, non-believers and believers, to come together in shared memorial of our common past. Earlier this week, a tidy bit of stagecraft occurred that raised even the brows of some Trinity College religion students, wherein the Republican presidential aspirant whom Christoper Hitchens' has called "the well-heeled son of a gold-plated church" managed to demonstrate himself ignorant not only of the Enlightenment legacy and secular thrust of our nation's founding, but also the self-evident advice that one should avoid the tautological in favor of the remedy of simpler truths that don't confuse our values.
Though ours is not the age of simple truths, but rather of the sort of wicked bumper-sticker-ready theo-con koans that only a political adman could flim-flam. And we got it good:
Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.
This morning, Clinton's internet director Peter Daou did a quick driveby to post a couple polls intended to contradict the recent wave of polling showing Clinton tied or falling to second place in Iowa polls. Daou pointedly didn't comment on when the polls were taken or their methodology.
Turns out both polls were sampled beginning the first week of November, conducted through mid-November, and finished well before the recent wave of polls showing a surge by Edwards and Obama. In the case of the Iowa State poll, the sample ended in mid-November.
Picking up where Markos left off, the New York Times caucus blog gives air to CNN's overt pro-Clinton bias in its post-debate spin room, where Anderson Cooper joins a former Clinton advisor (Gergen), a current Clinton advisor (Carville), and a former Republican Congressman (Watts) to give 'objective' assessments of how the debate went down. As Media Matters corrects CNN's (and its mindshare mama Fox News') wild pre-fab spin on the debate, diary after diary from Clinton campaign plants embrace the corporate media's manufactured frame.
It's enough to make one nostalgic for "Mission Accomplished!"
First, let me recommend folks to a blogger that isn't mentioned here as liberally as he should be:
Scott Horton and his blog No Comment provides one of the most consistently excellent forums for critical thinking through international law, the war on terror, and Near East and Central Asian issues.
Horton has an entry today that is well-worth readers' time. "A Change in the Offing in Iraq?" itemizes some recent revelations from Bush Administration insiders that have the "Decider" appearing a little, well, indecisive in his surge slippers.
And, lo and behold, many of the critical reasons for this slouch toward the dreaded realpolitik are (ahem) really political in nature. (Maybe our post-historic Howdy Doody is a "man of the times" after all.)
George Lakoff is our friend. Don't think of an elephant.
I shall not mention the elephant. An elephant cannot speak, and has trouble trying. Who do you know that cannot speak well? Who has troubles articulating policy and flubs his words at the most inopportune moments? Who gets us all into trouble by trampling over his intended jokes and anecdotes?
Oh...okay. That elephant in the room? It's George W Bush. And George W Bush wants to spend this last week before the midterms reminding us of what's happened since 2004. Particularly in Iraq.
Last night I went and viewed Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" on its opening night in Santa Monica. While it struck me as slightly less powerful that the slide show itself (which I managed to see some months ago at the company where I work, where Gore is an advisor)...the science was less detailed, the photo evidence too quickly passed through...it still struck me as a very important, and impactful, political document.
This morning I found a quite well-written review of it that I'd like to share. It reminded me of two rather inconvenient facts occluded by the documentary itself:
Looks like Bloomberg is being encouraged to run as either an independent or Democrat. This could really shake things up, creating a scenario not unlike 1992 when William J Clinton surprised everyone and took the presidency.
Likely 'Pubs: McCain, Allen
Likely Dems: Clinton, Warner
Likely spoiler: Bloomberg
It may just be Kevin Sheekey's misguided hopes, but I for one hope this comes to fruition. It'd greatly improve our chances of getting a social liberal into office.
The Census Bureau has just issued its latest, and it's an atrocity. Behold the Bush economy, where the poor indeed get poorer, and grow their ranks by the day.
WASHINGTON, Aug. 30 - Even as the economy grew, incomes stagnated last year and the poverty rate rose, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday. It was the first time on record that household incomes failed to increase for five straight years...
The census's annual report card on the nation's economic well-being showed that a four-year-old expansion had still not done much to benefit many households. Median pretax income, $44,389, was at its lowest point since 1997, after inflation.
But that doesn't deter Magoo Machiavellis from spinning the business cycle and hoping against all hope:
A lone House Democrat has broken ranks and said what most Democrats concede is true, but do not want to say for fear of compromising the political 'unified resistance' strategy.
Rep. Robert Wexler of Florida says it's time to raise the cap on Social Security contributions:
In an interview, Wexler said he was acting out of duty to his Florida district, which he said includes the second-highest number of seniors of any House district. It includes parts of Palm Beach and Broward counties.
"My allegiance to seniors is greater than my allegiance to the Democratic leadership," he said.
"The president has challenged Democrats to come up with plans of their own for dealing with Social Security's solvency," Wexler said. "I think it's time we met that challenge without cutting benefits or raising the retirement age."
MOSCOW - (KRT) - As authorities struggled to restore calm in eastern Uzbekistan on Saturday after a bloody uprising a day earlier, President Islam Karimov defended the decision by his troops to quell the violence by firing into a large crowd, killing up to 300 people by some estimates.
The uprising's toll became grimly clear at dawn Saturday, as soldiers were seen by witnesses pulling up four trucks and a bus to load the bodies of men, women and children shot to death by Uzbek troops in the eastern city of Andijan.
Saidjahon Zainabitdinov, an Andijan human-rights activist who watched soldiers, estimated that at least 300 bodies were loaded on the trucks and the bus. Another human-rights activist, Lutfulo Shamsutdinov, told The Associated Press that he counted 200 bodies being loaded.
