Decks.

The market is shifting from Reverse into Drive, CEOs are being laid off by the Federal government, and capital is creeping out of the Sealy’s and Serta’s, and all Mr. Krugman can come up with is another deckchairs metaphor?

“It’s a plan to rearrange the deck chairs and hope that that keeps us from hitting the iceberg.”

I jest, and I think Krugman understands the capital markets better than anyone, but critique is always cheaper than praxis. Krugman was not appointed by the Nobel committee to be the world’s economist, though he seems to be knighted as such by the major media.

Stewart on CNBC.

If you want a good laugh-cry, check out The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on March 4, 2009. He skewers, in one fell swoop, Wall Street, Rick Santelli, and the horrible pundits on CNBC. UPDATE: Will Bunch, at The Huffington Post, provides great commentary on Stewart’s research-based reporting.

For those not in Canada, the video should appear here:

Peaked.

After watching Obama on Tuesday night, I’m looking for answers as to who has their finger on how the global economic crisis will get resolved. A friend of mine, who works in politics in Washington, says that he thinks no one really knows what to do and that this crisis might be beyond our control, at least for now.

A list of recent articles and ideas around the poverty of our current response to the economic crisis, as follows:

Is philosophy a luxury good? at the Economist.

Oil’s not well in Canada by Frances Russell.

Asia Braces for Spike in Suicides Due to Economic Woes by Ling Woo Liu.

Feelings of despair by Paul Krugman.

Crisis of Credit by Jonathan Jarvis.

The Hope.

Having just watched the majority of Obama’s speech tonight, I recognize that his appeal to patriotism is as unique as his approach to the financial crisis. Throughout, Obama praised military service, community service, American automakers, the GI bill, and the halls of the Congress itself. He now wears the American flag on his lapel and his quick push into the Republican section of the Congress, following his speech, was a conscious attempt to appeal to those who would so easily dismiss his “Muslim” or “foreign” roots.

This is a real example of Obama’s genius. He is able to transcend the real differences between groups and ask a kind of “forgiveness” for his liberal indiscretions among his conservative colleagues - without at all admitted guilt or insecurity about his worldview. With great care, places himself in the center of the conflict in a highly personalized way that embodies the dialectic he represents. As a constitutional scholar, I’m sure that Obama was introduced to the idea that, by collapsing the old order onto the new, he can transform the material world and our relationship to history.

In fact, I think a argument could be made that Obama is in many ways a student of dialectical materialism, a fundamental component of historical Marxism, which states, in part, that everything is transmuted by our work and our relationship to nature - and that history reflects the massive transmutation of that relationship.

It is an eternal cycle in which matter moves, a cycle that certainly only completes its orbit in periods of time for which our terrestrial year is no adequate measure, a cycle in which the time of highest development, the time of organic life and still more that of the life of being conscious of nature and of themselves, is just as narrowly restricted as the space in which life and self-consciousness come into operation. A cycle in which every finite mode of existence of matter, whether it be sun or nebular vapour, single animal or genus of animals, chemical combination or dissociation, is equally transient, and wherein nothing is eternal but eternally changing, eternally moving matter and the laws according to which it moves and changes. Fredrick Engels Dialectics of Nature

And even better:

It shows that history does not end by being resolved into “self-consciousness as spirit of the spirit”, but that in it at each stage there is found a material result: a sum of productive forces, an historically created relation of individuals to nature and to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its predecessor; a mass of productive forces, capital funds and conditions, which, on the one hand, is indeed modified by the new generation, but also on the other prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a definite development, a special character. It shows that circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances. [italics mine] Karl Marx The German Ideology

O2.

On the day of the inauguration, my dad noted on the phone to me that he thought that January 20, 2009, was a more important day in the history of the United States than the election of John F. Kennedy. For some reason, I was taken aback by this thought; afterall, Kennedy was a massively exciting figure during a complicated, transitional time in American political economy and culture.

But, in looking back a few days, I can see why my father says this and the photos he pointed me to on the Big Picture site confirm it. Because the world has become smaller (or flatter, or warmer, or more wired), the impact of Obama’s ascendency is simply felt more widely. Obama represents a fundamental shift in the way we perceive others in the world, peering at us as we peer at them.

O.

What an incredible inauguration. Obama is fearless. He spoke truth to power while former President Bush sat next to him. He asked all Americans to help him solve the massive problems faced worldwide. He’s now walking down the street in the freezing D.C. cold as throngs of fans yell out to him. And, interesting to me, he launched a brand new White House website today, which is a thing of grace. Not least, he sent a crack team of his staff to get to work as soon as he was sworn in. What more can we ask of the man? Within 4 hours of his Presidency, he’s changed the country, forever.

P.S. The thing that brought me and many others to tears today were the words written by poet Elizabeth Alexander. Here’s her poem, called Praise Song for the Day:

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each other’s eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere, with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum, with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus. A farmer considers the changing sky. A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed, words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of some one and then others, who said I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road. We need to find a place where we are safe. We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign, the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself, others by first do no harm or take no more than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national, love that casts a widening pool of light, love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, any thing can be made, any sentence begun. On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

Massivity.

Years ago, in college, we talked about the theory of totality. At the time, in the late 1980s, the word “totality” referred to the full-on construction of reality that is mediated by corporations in conjunction with governments. The kern of the idea, based in left social theory, is that we are fully embraced by the entirety of corporate-created desire: every thought, feeling, deliberation, policy, and production (whether aesthetic or concrete) was fueled by the rationalization of generating profits, stabilizing dissent, and rooting out radicalism of any kind.

Obviously, the theory of totality is itself a kind of totality. Nothing can escape the reality of totality theory; we are all subjects to its work — and resistance, while not futile, is complicated and highly uncertain. The ideas behind totality and its many spinoffs are like those of many I know who believe that the systems in place currently are built to ensure continuity — and that there are even meta-systems of thought and governance that determine the progress of that continuity. These meta-systems appear, for all intents and purposes, to the outside world as conspiracy or on the order of conspiracy. To those who have knowledge of these meta-systems, they are more like proven theorems that have not yet been accepted.

I find it all very fascinating. With the coming economic recession/depression, people are talking about many of these meta-systems en masse and whether one or the other will either save us or destroy us. Massive spending. Massive taxes. Massive infrastructure. Massive muscle. There’s more than a bit of apocalyptic derring-do in all of the pundits arguing for massive activity to get us out of a massively complex set of problems: most recently, it’s been John Judis and Jonathan Cohn at The New Republic, and Paul Krugman, of course.

Massivity has become a new way to handle the crisis and I hope the economists and pundits are right. But I worry, deep down, that their ability to apprehend the entirety (but not the totality) of global finance and its complexity is not unlike that of people who think have a worldview based on some brand of totality). In other words, I’m wondering if the economists, who are paid to understand financial history and to get us out of the coming mess, are not fundamentally different from those who look at global systems and see conspiracy hiding in the darkness.

By no means am I associating Mr. Krugman with Sasquatch watchers. But, as much as I believe Krugman knows what he’s talking about, I worry that he’ll inevitably miss the mark as much as anyone who thinks they can see through an opaque reality. Massivity, to me, is a new way of explaining how to solve a global crisis based on the proposition of normative economic knowledge.

Recessionary Inequity.

I just saw a headline in the New York Times online, reading Obama Warns of Prospect for Trillion-Dollar Deficits. It’s brought home to me what I’ve been thinking for some time. That the US Federal Government is now going to be forced into helping out major corporations because the government itself has been so eviscerated during the eight years of Bush rule. Had the government been running health care, building roads and bridges, and not fighting massive foreign wars, a deficit of a trillion dollars would not be either overwhelming or unrealistic. Instead, it would be considered a true investment in the future of the country and its young inhabitants.

But with so much having been given away to the banks, the insurance firms, and, soon, the car companies, the U.S. Government is essentially asking these market-based structures to do their work for them - keep people employed, ensure fiscal continuity, and set the agenda for the next dozen or so years of financial life. I’m not at all suggesting that, had the States been a socialist democracy, a massive deficit would be easier; however, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the lack of responsibility on the part of the country has resulted in even more massive future-based spending.

A diet of gluttony, under Mr. Bush et. al. (including Democrats in Congress), has taken its revenge on the body.

New Truth.

On this, the first day of 2009, I had the opportunity to watch An Inconvenient Truth paired with an episode of David Suzuki’s The Nature of Things. Both were shown on different CBC channels, in a possible attempt to swaddle the Canadian public in environmental awareness all at once, one one evening, at the beautiful start of the year. It was like a Polar Bear swim, an event that also happens today in colder climes, for the televisual brain. Going back and forth between the two channels, I watched as Mr. Gore analyzed the policies and illogic of 30 years of denial while espousing the hope of change articulated by Mr. Suzuki as he toured Europe’s windmill farms, bicycle paths, and solar-powered boats. The two shows, bookended by alternating commercials, mashed together like a song of hope for the year, and years, ahead.

Full disclosure: Mr. Gore is a client of mine.

Obama Bubble.

I can’t read or tolerate reading anything negative about President-Elect Obama. It’s not because I’m thin-skinned; rather, the man hasn’t stepped foot into the White House yet and already the media are holding him up to FDR-like standards.

But I do agree with many pundits that the first 100 days are going to be critical for his administration, not only to boost sagging economic morale but to keep American jobs on the table that will have been lost between now and mid-January. But I think folks need to be careful not to fall into a still-working campaign of fear and cynicism driven by the last election; afterall, questions are still being raised around Obama’s citizenship.

Steve Clemons, of The Washington Note, makes the case that expectations around Obama’s capacity are far too large and I believe he’s right. It’s driving both unrealistic expectations and setting him up for a fall based on the ineptitude of the current administration:

Clemons: I think that we’ve replaced the housing bubble in the United States with an Obama bubble. There are so many hopes not just in the United States but around the world that he’s going to produce in just sort of stunning ways on all kinds of policy challenges that are out there. As he begins to define and scope what his real priorities are and are going to be, and as he brings in his team, I think that that bubble is going to deflate. Bubbles, in the economic sense, can be very, very good. They can lay a lot of railroad tracks, they can create a lot of cheap I.T. infrastructure. Lots of folks will end up losing, but what’s going to be very important when Obama runs to the end of his honeymoon is whether he has created enough strategic shifts for the United States so that we can get back in the global game, and that there’s some resurgence of hope for the American and global economies. And right now, I’m a real pessimist. The challenges he has are Herculean. I think when he comes into office, he has enormous support and he has got a kind of Reagan-like mandate in the sense that when Reagan came in after the Iran hostage crisis, high oil prices, high inflation and low morale in the country, Reagan had the ability to cite the crisis we were in as a way to break the bank on all the money he spent on defense. And Obama’s going to have that same ability to spend on infrastructure, keep the middle class working, but also to do other big shifts. I don’t know how long that is going to last, but he’s got to front-load it. If he goes cautious leading into it, I think the half-life of Obama’s strength and the bubble that he has are going to deteriorate very rapidly.

There’s no reason, politically or ideologically, for Obama to “go cautious.” He’ll be spending big and he has the political capital to do so. The question is where does he get the real capital to spend?

Obama in town.

Obama, in all of his grace, did one thing very, very well: he personalized the campaign for millions of people. Whether by going to people’s hometown, shaking hands with the elderly, having icons for every ethnicity and state, or modifying his oratorial style to fit his venue, he figured out a way to be many (but not all) things to many (but not all) people. It’s impressive - an almost Zelig-like approach to ensuring continuity in the American experience of his candidacy.

For me, there were two more piquant moments of the campaign that touched me personally: On the right side of my brain, is his appearance at my hometown in Pennsylvania, captured by this highly emotional photo (at The Big Picture blog, the best photojournalism blog around). On the left side of my brain, it was his his ability to maintain total brand consistency throughout, whether on his website, his signage, his t-shirts, or his dress. No organization that I know of has pulled off this type of messaging as well as his design team has, and, as a practitioner, it’s superbly impressive.

Grateful.

Obama’s win last night is a win for many, many people: the disenfranchised, the displaced, and the voiceless. His message of possibility is confirmed by his very electability and the willingness of Americans to believe in the very best of themselves and their country. I believe our children are the beneficiaries of the result of this election: today, they can look into our eyes and know that anything is possible - a poor, fatherless, minority kid can become President. It’s what we were all taught in grade school and that we are witnessing now. I hope the knives are sheathed long enough to recognize the power of this moment, the magnitude of our endeavors, and the resilience and strength of democracy and its American implementation. Finally, I’m thinking of all of the incredible, thankless work tackled by nameless millions who got out the vote against all odds and asked Americans to ignore the fear and the dirty tricks and elect with their future in mind. I’m incredibly grateful and utterly, utterly thankful for all those who moved history this past year.

Obama Rules.

Congratulations. I’m shaking and thrilled for my beautiful country.

16 Years.

While The New York Times came out endorsing Mr. Obama today, meaning not very much to a lot of people, unfortunately, SNL issued its own kind of endorsement that is both hilarious and scathing.

“The next 16 years!”

Postscript: Somehow the show has been able to make Palin’s husband look like an effeminate woos with his sled clothes in lieu of Marc Jacobs.

Main & Wall.

Someone from the Obama camp should be posting this chart on the homepage of the McCain website. Forget about domestic policy, war, or education (the focus of the final debates tonight); if you want general economic prosperity, the numbers indicate that everyone should vote Democrat.

Democrats Abroad.

All politics, all the time here at Deckchairs Headquarters.

After getting voter registration help from Democrats Abroad, the overseas branch of the Democratic Party, I felt compelled to send the Democrats some money. I hadn’t done it before, out of sheer laziness or sheepishness, but I’m convinced that now is the time. Democrats everywhere (and democrats everywhere) need to ensure that the world is guided by intelligent, educated, and caring individuals in the White House. As the New Yorker made it abundantly clear this week, this election will probably do more to decide the future of world affairs than any other election in my lifetime. If it goes one way, there is a chance that global warming, economic friction, and systemic issues will be addressed. If it goes another way, there is an even better chance that more conflict, more indiscretion, and more global anxiety will result.

I encourage all fair Democrats abroad to donate; it’s the least we can do, having grown up in the United States of America, under the aegis of relative peace and prosperity, despite the country’s many faults. Many of us said that 2004 could not happen again. It can again, but it mustn’t.

Nobel Krugman.

I’ve been reading Paul Krugman’s New York Times’ pieces for years. Many of my earlier thoughts on the residential real estate bubble (way back in 2004) were informed by him. In fact, he’s become my favorite columnist these past few years, and I always look for a chance to procrastinate by reading him. No other columnist offers the decisive, clear-headed, and honest writing that he does. Further, no other economist, in my mind, has more publicly called attention to the lacunae in American economic policy.

Today, he wins the Nobel. Or, more accurately, he received the The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2008, not for his columns but for his contributions to understanding economic models and market behavior. Congratulations, Mr. Krugman. It is supremely deserved.

Welt vote.

Interesting.

Right now, it’s 87% Obama, 13% McCain. Not a good number for the latter.

And Macedonia digs McCain.

Harper Bush.

A few years ago, I wrote about the utter ridiculousness of Canadians electing to office the conservative Conservatives. A nation with a real health care system, a strong social and educational policy, and a relatively benign approach to international politics does not need southerners (e.g. Rove et. al.) telling it how to run a country based on relatively liberal values and cultural aspirations. Despite my very strident protestations, Conservative Stephen Harper was elected Prime Minister. He is now running again for office. The entire election here in Canada has been subsumed beneath the longevity and inanity of the American election but, nonetheless, it’s still a critical juncture for Canadians.

The Canadian election is on Tuesday, October 14, 2008, and it appears that the Conservatives have taken it on the head, slightly, because of people’s anxiety about the economy. However, there are finally attempts this time around to equate the conservatives there with the Conservatives here.

Interestingly, the mini-site that the liberal Liberals put together to make the connection between Harper and Bush looks a lot like the ones the Obama campaign has designed: the use of lots of lovely gradients, the color blue and the font called Gotham. Nice work liberals. Nice work Liberals!

Postscript:

It's fun!

This whole market economy crashing thing is really neat. Here’s why:

1. There are all these cool graphs with different colors showing up on the news. They go down now but they used to go up.
2. On the radio, at the top of the hour, I’m learning new words like “battered” and “tumult.”
3. There’s lots of really big numbers being used that we never got to really hear before: numbers like “850 billion” and “3 trillion” and stuff like that.
4. There’s all this cool stuff happening in other countries, too, like Japan.

Forget the debate.

The entire debate made it clear that Obama is an entirely better candidate for the highest office in the land and that McCain, despite his age and passion for his work, is basically able. But, for that murky middle of voters who can’t seem to decide, all they should do is watch this:

Doesn't have to be.

President Bill Clinton spoke to David Letterman tonight. With regard to the market collapsing, he said “there’s plenty of blame to go around.” He further elaborated that, if you multiply all of the houses that may go into foreclosure in the near future, you have a situation unlike any other. When Dave said, “It sounds pretty scary,” Mr. Clinton, in the most relaxed, gentle, and persuasive voice, said, “It doesn’t have to be. We can solve it. It doesn’t have to be.” And he smiled, calmly.

At that moment in time, I fully believed Clinton, despite everything. He was a full light in a dark room of lies and speculation and back-room, shady handshakes.

Clinton: “It’s a mistake to bet against America. We can turn this around.”

P.S. Chris Rock, on ten minutes later, jokes “Did he do everything he could not to mention Barack Obama?” And it’s true - a few mentions of “Hillary” and an almost weak-sounding endorsement of McCain and no mention of Bill’s younger and better successor, Mr. Obama.

Fey Palin.

This was just so dead-on, culturally astute, and well-acted that I plan on watching it again. And then cry.

Save As.

Today, my daughter came home today, explaining that she learned how to “Save As” at school on the computer there. Besides for the fact that kids are learning to make a duplicate of a file on a word processor, I thought it would be great to use “Save As” in our political predicament.

De-spite all of the gloomy stories, Gail Collins’s good piece and David Broder’s (weaker) piece today read Save As.

It was a pleasure to read that Obama, and the United States of America, has a chance.

McCain's Voice Mail to Palin Leaked to Press. (Not Really.) (I Think.)

Every day is a new post about politics in ‘Merica, as I say the word. Today’s is McCain talking.

Listen and weep and then laugh.

Back.

Okay, I couldn’t stay away any longer.

I realize I only have about 3 readers left. I’m embarrassed by my incredible absence these past few months. Forgive me.

But I’m called to write because the election in the United States is becoming a fatter and wider preposterity than even I could have imagined. Let me try to sum up the facts for my 3 readers:

John McCain, a man of incredible integrity and pride and love for his country, decides to allow his journeymen consultants to persuade him to accept, as his Vice President, a person with as much political experience as your average county clerk. He knows he’s old and jokes about it often but, with his focus on national security, he has no problem with putting the nuclear arsenal and the power and privilege of serving in the hands of a political neophyte, currently under an ethics investigation for firing Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan.

Then, it turns out that the selected VP candidate’s daughter (bless her soul), is preggers at the ripe age of 17. It’s fine. Her daughter should not be part of the equation, because our values say that children offer us the world and life is not to be taken for granted. Except that if Obama had a 17-year old daughter with a baby, she’d be accused of irresponsibility, miscegenation, and being sexually deviant.

On top of this, we learn that the Republicans want to take off their elephant hats and put on their stars-and-stripes ones because people in levee-land are in trouble. But the display is entirely a FEMA show, put on by the Bush administration.

Worse still is that the media is just eating it up. They love a good story! And there’s nothing quite like seeing compassionate Conservatives helping out their fellows by not going to their national convention. The benevolence! The generosity! See!

I’m done. Except this: I typically don’t watch NBC or CBS U.S. national news. But when I tuned in this morning, my jaw dropped as the latter’s Bob Schieffer, a man who I had thought had some journalistic integrity, repeated to the television anchor the lie that Obama has as much political experience as Palin. There I said her name.

Bush Not Golfing.

President Bush really is the Chance Gardiner of the 21st century. He spoke recently to Mike Allen, a writer for Politico, and, incredibly, it seems that the President has made golf a primary personal sacrifice during his war in Iraq.

For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families. “I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,â€� he said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.â€� Bush said he made that decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. official in Iraq and the organization’s high commissioner for human rights. “I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man’s life,â€� he said. “I was playing golf — I think I was in central Texas — and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, ‘It’s just not worth it anymore to do.’”

It occurred to me the other day that, with the war in Iraq now six years old, it’s lasted almost longer than the Second World War, during which over 70 million people were killed between 1939 and 1945. President Bush can kindly argue that at least that many people didn’t die on his watch because of this war.

Die Off.

Oil reached an all-time high today, at $122 per barrel, which is twice what it was one year ago.

A friend of mine introduced me to the unhappy world of Peak Oil and the suppositions that, soon, without oil, civilization will falter and fail. It’s a very unpretty picture that folks are painting but it’s not without its supporters (in government primarily) and those who believe it but can’t speak its name.

Anyway, if you’re at all curious, the one site that’s super gloomy but powerful is DieOff. I’m going to tread slowly on this territory but it’s interesting, to me, in particular because the signs of the related Olduvai theory are apparent. The bubble of reality that we all live in seems never so thin.

Postcript: I’m particularly curious about White’s Law, which Wikipedia argues:

For White “the primary function of cultureâ€� and the one that determines its level of advancement is its ability to “harness and control energy.â€� White’s law states that the measure by which to judge the relative degree of evolvedness of culture was the amount of energy it could capture (energy consumption). White differentiates between five stages of human development. In the first, people use energy of their own muscles. In the second, they use energy of domesticated animals. In the third, they use the energy of plants (so White refers to agricultural revolution here). In the fourth, they learn to use the energy of natural resources: coal, oil, gas. In the fifth, they harness the nuclear energy.

3 AM Girl.

The Clinton campaign apparently used stock video footage for her scary “3:00-am-who-do-you-want-answering-the-scary-phone” ad. Well, Hillary not only got called on the use of the stock footage (which is no crime) but it was done so by the child actor who was the actress in the footage eight years ago. And that child actor is a big Obama supporter. Doh. I imagine that there are a few creative directors in the Clinton ad campaign headquarters that are wishing they had hired a “real” actor to do the dirty work. Oy vey.

P.S. I use stock for my clients. Everyone does. There’s nothing wrong with it, inherently.

Dep.

Since the massive interest rate cuts by the Fed a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking that the economy is far shakier than we are being led to believe. It wasn’t from the numbers (which I can’t say I understand) nor from some ideological belief about market economies (which I generally like). Rather, my worries about what the Fed knows and can’t tell us stems from the fact that the Fed can’t seem to stem the tide. The Fed cannot continue to bail out companies like Bear Sterns constantly, every week or every few days. If lending is shut down entirely, we will enter a massively scary economic crisis that could make 1929 look like fun. It’s truly scary. The Fed’s lack of transparency here or willingness to provide true oversight of these massively over-leveraged companies, combined with Mr. Bush’s blind confidence in their capacity, makes for lots of worries. No Fed leader wants to say the word “recession” let alone “depression” but those two words came out today for the first time (to my ears) from a number of pundits on NPR.

P.S. This piece from my pal, V.S., via Jon Stewart: “If you want to do the Jedi mind trick, you have to be a Jedi.”

Spitzer.

I’ve always had a lot of respect for Elliot Spitzer. You might as well take look at his current Governor of New York page, because it won’t be there for long, as his statement today is listed on the website as “Recent Events.”

I’ve been listening to the shock and awe of Spitzer’s announcement that he had a “private” mishap being involved with some kind of prostitution ring and/or being a john. But while the pundits are focusing on his poor family and wife, they seem to have forgotten that Hillary must be pissed off. As the Senator from New York and a Democrat closely aligned with the good works for the Spitzer administration and fund-raising machine, she must be livid. Additionally, the pundits I’ve heard are ignoring the possibility that he was targeted for this transgression by either the Feds or some kind of Republican apparatus, whether New York State-based or otherwise. Spitzer was dangerous to the Republicans and now, I think, he’s a danger to the Democrats.

Farc.

So, “Raul Reyes, a FARC leader, was killed in Saturday’s raid into Ecuadoran territory, which sparked the rising border tensions” among Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela. The latter is now accused of providing $300 million dollars to FARC, which has for a long, long time, sought to overthrow the Colombia government in favor of a socialist-type government.

In lefty news, like Democracy Now, Farc is treated something like Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen organization. But it’s not. Farc is a malevolent organization, bent on kidnapping, hurting, and killing people in the name of their aspirations. The murder of Raúl Reyes, imho, should be applauded. While he was on the “diplomatic front” of Farc and not so much a military leader, he was also the public face to a very malignant organization that plants land mines, sells and profits on massive drug trafficking, recruits kids for killing, and punishes its own with more violence.

I don’t doubt that the U.S. and other countries were involved in the murder of Reyes and that Farc is only part of a reaction to U.S.-supported death-squads.

But Farc and its leaders deserve to be decimated. They killed my friend, Ingrid Washinawatok, who was in Venezuela on a peace mission exactly nine years ago in 1999, after kidnapping her along with two of her colleagues.

Hillary's SNL.

Hillary doesn’t have much of a chance this week but I give her credit for her SNL appearance last night.

You can tell, when asked about how her campaign is going, that she’s less than confident in her response. Maybe her campaign should have made a better video for her than this one, which looks like it was directed by a 14 year old who studied video production in Romania in 1992. It’s called “Hillary4U&Me.”

Zeitgeist.

I just watched the freely downloadable film Zeitgeist on my little laptop. It’s a very powerful, if deeply flawed film, that tries to tie together the ritualistic domination of religion, government, and corporations into one fell message: That the future will be theirs if we, as North Americans, don’t wake up. I won’t give away the semi-science fiction ending of the two-hour long semi-documentary. But I will say that the film makes a good case study for us to look at the hard reality of the world and not the one filtered for us by television, the media, the workplace, major corporations, tax and national regimes.

The film, with its retailored conspiracy theories and rehashing of religious history, doesn’t break a lot of new ground, but it does make me ask the bigger question of why we are in the state in which we are.

The film is immensely watchable and it make me really wonder if I should shut off my television for my family for one week or maybe two, look around, and read and love more deeply than ever before. It actively calls for a profound awakening among all of us to look at the world through the lenses of love and natural being rather than war and fear. As banal as that sounds, it reminds me of many of the messages of the early English Romantic poet, William Blake, who I studied and wrote about in college.

Here is just a sampling of quotes from the great Blake:

“The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.”

“To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour.”

“I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s. I will not Reason & Compare; my business is to Create.”

And the most powerful of them all:

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

If you want to see the movie the Googlopology, it starts here. More info about the movie and its critics can also be found, though, surprisingly, these seem few and far between.

Barack's Timeline.

The New York Times has crafted a smartly detailed timeline of Barack Obama’s political and non-political life. The thing is very well thought out, rich in different kinds of media (from photos to video), and shows what Flash can do in the right designer’s hands. Hey, check out Obama in Central Park in 1981!

Mount Airy.

I know that this is Super Duper Tuesday. Or Super Special Tuesday. Or Stuesday, or whatever. I’m very excited to see how the day turns out and I’m not making any bets.

But I do think that, as much as this race has been unusual, compelling, and complex -what with a racial minority, a woman, a Vietnam vet, a Mormon, and a pastor all competing for the highest office of the American land - this campaign has been very vacuous. What are the true policy initiatives of each of the candidates? Where do they really stand on Iraq, abortion, poverty, and race? Where is there a website that clearly delineates these aspiring pols’ differences, their similarities, their accomplishments on the behalf of those who they represent?

More specifically, I wonder how well did Hillary Clinton do for upstate New York? How did Illinois fare under Obama’s senatorship? Are U.S. soldiers, sailors, and marines better off with McCain’s support of the war and the surge? Are Iraqis better off? How exactly is Romney’s business experience relevant to running a country? Where does Huckabee stand on issues of church and state?

Granted, the debates have been good and illuminate strategy, personality, persuasion, rhetoric, aspirations, ideas, and grace under pressure. They demonstrate that the American media is fully capable of posing good questions about a campaign’s given momentum and turn-out. But where are the issues? Am I wrong to think that this race is more high school than executive office?

Postscript: Obama’s site just gets more and more beautiful everyday. It’s a keeper, done by a real group of professional designers that actually care about their customers and Obama’s audience. If Obama hires designers the way he hires Vice Presidents and cabinet members, the U.S. will be in pretty good shape.

President.

I just watched, out of the corner of my eye, the President of the United States, give an address to Congress. Supposedly, it was a “State of the Union” but I didn’t hear any statesmanship. Instead, the President made references to his accomplishments; it was a sordid attempt to ensure his historical place, despite everything. Here are some questions:

1. Why is Mr. Bush signing autographs to members of Congress on his way out the door? Can’t Congresspeople get signatures from the President pretty much any day of the week? Is his signature worth much on eBay these days?

2. Why do Republicans like Mitt Romney need to praise the current President? Has he really done anything for them in terms of assisting their political strategy, helping their candidacy, or lending legitimacy to the party?

3. Is the economy really okay? It’s so hard to tell who is telling the truth, who is speaking lies, who knows nothing but looks knowledgeable, and who knows lots but needs votes.

Bushed again.

With George Bush’s constantly self-proclaimed presidency (e.g. “I’m the President,” “I”m the Decider,” “The Commander-in-Chief must…”) comes an ironic one as well. A new movie is coming out about the guy and, now, the famous painting in Bush’s office gets an airing in a recent issue of Harper’s. It turns out that the rider, who has a striking resemblance to Mr. Bush, is not a heroic figure charging up Lordly Mountain but a lowly thief, “fleeing his captors.”

Mountaintop.

It’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in the US and I had the honor of listening to his entire I’ve Been to the Mountaintop speech, delivered one day before he was murdered in 1968. King was prescient in almost every way: around race, democracy, American political structures and imperialism, global Marxism, gender, religion in the US, and, not least, his own death. His brilliance and challenge to all of us shines powerfully, 40 years late and later.

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

Voting.

What with my last post and all, I thought it would behoove me to actually register to vote. Sure, I’ve voted in almost every U.S. presidential election since I was 18. But, when I left New York City in 2005, I also relinquished my ability to easily vote. And, unless I become a citizen of Canada, I can’t vote here.

After a bit of research, I found a great site, called Democrats Abroad (and there’s a “sister” site called Republicans Abroad as well). The site has a very nice, intuitive Web-based wizard that collects your information and spits out a well-formed PDF that is then ready to send to the Federal Voting Assistance Program, an agency dedicated to helping those overseas (including those in the U.S. military) to vote. It’s all rather cool, except that, before finding the Democrats Abroad site, the information on the Web and the FVAP site was confusing to the point of being obscure. It wasn’t clear, to me, what information on the form I needed to complete and where to send the form. For instance, did I really need to provide my full Social Security number or not? (For New York State, it turns out the answer is “not.”)

After printing the completed PDF, I faxed the pre-built cover page and associated application to the 703 number provided. I then mailed the cover page and application to an address in Kings County (Brooklyn) that was also provided. (This part was never truly clarified for me but, essentially, you register to vote with the county in the state where you last resided, regardless of your current state residency status. In other words, though I’m no longer a resident of New York State, I sent my application to Kings County in New York State, which, apparently, has been given the responsibility of caring for me in my voting old age.)

Long story short, if you’re overseas and you’re an American citizen and you want to vote (and you should), use the Web wizard found on Democrats Abroad, regardless of your political affiliation.

Dirty Hands.

While Americans are out shopping intensely for their loved ones, I’ve become very saddened that so little news appears about Iraq, from what I can tell. Only a few commentators nationally are saying anything of substance about the waste of lives and treasure there; on in particular is the inimitable Bob Herbert, who writes today a piece called Now and Forever. The expenditure of funds for the misguided war continues and, according to Herbert, might go to $3.5 trillion.

Do people know how much money that is and what that same amount of money could afford them? Free health care forever, stable bridges and infrastructure, energy independence, massive educational investments, even free child care! All of that would be possible if, somehow, Americans would stand on their feet and come to terms with the squandor of their own money and the jeopardization of their children’s futures.

I ask in seriousness and seriousness of purpose: Is there mass hypnosis going on in the States?

Disaster Capitalism.

I listened with lots of quietly anxious attention to author Naomi Klein today on Democracy Now. She is a powerful speaker and I’m looking forward to reading her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism .

This is from today’s interview with Amy Goodman (and you can listen to the full interview at the first link above):

And we talk about torture so often in this country as being just about getting information. Torture is a tool of state terror. That is what torture is, and that is why it’s prohibited. It is about instilling — it’s a method of instilling terror in an individual, and it’s also a method of spreading terror throughout a whole society, saying we are willing to use these techniques; if you cross us, you will be subject to these techniques. So it is the science of terror. It is literally terrorism. You know, if you have somebody in your control, and your goal is to convince them that they are going to die, and as they gasp for breath their lungs are filled with water, what are you, if not a terrorist?

Easy War.

I finished watching the one-hour-and-ten-minute Sean Penn-narrated documentary War Made Easy. It hasn’t happened recently, but by the 57th minute, I found myself shaking in anger and anxiety, filled with a rage about the war that has been costly and useless. The film ingeniously makes use of now-historical footage from Vietnam and Iraq in which administrations and the media co-actively constructed the cause, needs, continuity, and deceipt of war.

The documentary ends with parts of Martin Luther King’s powerful 1967 speech Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence. Here are just some of the words he spoke, back then, over 40 years ago, just long enough for us to have forgotten:

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

And this:

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Oil.

Jim Holt, a newish writer I believe, wrote a very compelling piece eight days ago for the London Review of Books about the real logic behind the war in Iraq. I had to read it twice (nay, three times) because what he articulates is what every citizen of the world kind of already knows and what Alan Greenspan already spilled: “In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success.”

Random Rots.

From my perch up in The North, the United States has been undergoing a tremendous upheaval politically, full of high crimes, misdemeanors, symptomatic illegalities, and impoverished will. But it’s been accompanied by, to my eyes, an American public that is more docile than I’ve ever witnessed. I’ve been in email conversations with some friends in the States about this and we’re trying to figure it out.

But I thought I’d make a list of some of the more, crazy, heinous or venal activities of the past year or so just so I’d have a record of it.

Here:

• Darfur, despite the word “genocide” being uttered by some in the Bush administration, continues to be a word that describes “genocide.”
• Democrats were elected to office recently in a fantastic “sweep” and it appears that the Congressional janitorial staff have done more in their offices than elected officials have.
• Polls indicate that both Americans and Iraqis (by a large majority) want the U.S. to calmly and intelligently leave Iraq; despite this, there is neither calm nor intelligence in Iraq.
• In nearby Iran, thumbing one’s dirty nose at the U.S. has become a national pasttime of the picking variety.
• Taking responsibility global warming have become industrial design terms for large corporations, indicating that the message to them is loud and clear and that they’ll shout back in quiet advertising.
• Michael Moore released a movie called “Sicko” a while ago. That was so cool that he made a movie again.

Hillary Dining.

It's not yet embeddable (the campaign needs some Web smarts still) but I actually enjoyed watching this video of Hillary and Bill parody the Sopranos ending. All new.

Michael Moore on Government.

I guess this is politics week here at Deckchairs.

I can't say enough good things about Michael Moore's recorded speech to the California Nurses Association on Tuesday about the realities of health care in the United States. It's completely on and is a must-listen (or -read) for anyone confused about why contemporary health care in America is provided inequitably. He's so completely coherent, funny, and smart that I think the guy should be considered for a Nobel. Who else is willing to say publicly that American government can be reconstructed to provide real health care for all Americans, regardless of income level?

One beautiful quote: "Ask your grandparents if that Social Security check comes every month. It not only comes every month, my Dad said, it comes on the same day. Through the government-sponsored US mail. And remarkably it is the same amount every month! They actually get the check right. How do they do that? Tens of millions of seniors every month get a social security check on time for the exact amount!"

Hamas Rules.

So 1.5 million Gazans now have the lovingly hooded Hamas government to thank for taking over their schools, infrastructure, and nationhood. A fiasco.

Let's see who might be to blame here. I'll write a list:

1. The United States (for saying little and doing nothing)
2. Gazans (for voting Hamas in)
3. Fatah (for idling)
4. Israel (for denying)
5. The United Nations (for handsitting)
6. Saudi Arabia (for funding)
7. Syria (for financing)
8. Iran (for supplying)
9. Egypt (for organizing)
10. Jordan (for ignoring)
11. Russia (for laughing)
12. Lebanon
13. Kuwait
14. Bahrain
15. Yemen (these four, for fomenting and abetting)

Andrew Card Carded.

Speechless:

The Vice President in a Goddamn David Lynch Dream Sequence.

Much thanks, yet again, to V.S. via Wonkette: This is one beautiful long shot.

House of Cards.

Libby is going to jail. Bush is sending more troops to Iraq. Cheney may resign in the coming days. Military hospitals, the Katrina clean-up and Middle East affairs are being run poorly. The house of cards built by the Bush family and their supporters in 2000 and 2004 is starting to crumble under the weight of its own ineptitude and hubris. Even more importantly, it's falling because the administration has, since January 2002, demonstrated a careless disregard for the people it governs. History will likely be more ruthless to this administration than any other; as many have noted, even Nixon's reign will look okay, in retrospect. As my own dad would say, "It couldn't have happened to nicer people."

Thomas Friedman has a thoughtful, if reductive, piece in today's Times. It's called Don't Ask, Don't Know, Don't Help, but the last part of the headline should be "Don't Care." This is the best three paragraphs in the column:

From the start, the Bush team has tried to keep the Iraq war “off the books� both financially and emotionally. As Larry Diamond of Stanford’s Hoover Institution said to me: “America is not at war. The U.S. Army is at war.� The rest of us are just watching, or just ignoring, while the whole fight is carried on by 150,000 soldiers and their families.

In an interview last Jan. 16, Jim Lehrer asked President Bush why, if the war on terrorism was so overwhelmingly important, he had never asked more Americans “to sacrifice something.� Mr. Bush gave the most unbelievable answer: “Well, you know, I think a lot of people are in this fight. I mean, they sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible images of violence on TV every night.�

Sacrifice peace of mind watching TV? What kind of crazy thing is that to say?

Rudy Runs.

My former landlord in Brooklyn wrote a very large and very scathing book about Rudy Giulani, former Mayor of New York City. My landlord met Rudy many, many times and simply referred to him as "Rudy." I was always afraid our house would be firebombed. But I won't get into it because the Onion basically summarized the story of Rudy this week. Here's an excerpt:

Giuliani To Run For President Of 9/11

NEW YORK—At a well-attended rally in front of his new Ground Zero headquarters Monday, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani officially announced his plan to run for president of 9/11.

"My fellow citizens of 9/11, today I will make you a promise," said Giuliani during his 18-minute announcement speech in front of a charred and torn American flag. "As president of 9/11, I will usher in a bold new 9/11 for all."

If elected, Giuliani would inherit the duties of current 9/11 President George W. Bush, including making grim facial expressions, seeing the world's conflicts in terms of good and evil, and carrying a bullhorn at all state functions.

"Let us all remember how we felt on that day, with the world watching our every move, waiting on our every word," said Giuliani, flanked by several firefighters, ex-New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, and Judith Nathan, his third wife. "With a campaign built on traditional 9/11 values, and with the help of every citizen who believes in the 9/11 dream, I want to make 9/11 great again."

Andrew Hawk.

I can hardly believe I'm writing this but here I am writing to, essentially, support the call for more troops being sent to Iraq. After four years of destroying the country's political and social economy, President Bush has determined that he has one last chance to do right by Iraq and its people. I, and all Americans, should hold Bush responsible for ruining the country by, at the very least, not following the advice of critical generals and State Department advisors at the very start and, before that, aiming to invade a tortured nation for no reason except some kind of misbegoten, frat-party imperial exceptionalism.

Having said that, in my opinion, Bush has no choice but to throw more troops at the problem. Pulling soliders and materials out of Iraq precipitously could exacerbate a civil war that could lead to a region-wide conflict, one that could at some point, turn into full-out nuclear war. The military and logistical support already exists in the region to supply this last-ditch endeavor with possibility. The last thing the world needs is a conflict among Israel, Iran, Syria, Egypt and Saudia Arabia over the resources and security of the Iraqi nation-state.

There are a lot of "ifs" in this equation that Bush has made: If 20,000 troops is enough to pacify and quiet Baghdad and other critical areas of the country; if the baby Iraqi government can get its act together to agree upon shared sovereignty; if already exhausted American troops aren't too cynical to keep fighting; if the Bush administration can work diplomatically to get countries like Iran and Syria to be part of some solution; if the most angry elements of Iraq aren't further inflamed by the American presence; if the President tells the Iraqis that the US will not have a permanent presence in their country; if the new "surge" can happen over a period of two months and security becomes more real over a period of six months, if Americans and their newly elected Democratic representatives can stomach more violence; if a sustainable plan for economic development can be stabilized in the country, then, maybe, there's a chance that Iraq will not fall apart. There must be a timetable, however, and this table should be provided in weeks, not months.

I recognize the inherent naivitie in all of this. But it's based on the knowledge that the United States too often abandons the messes it clearly makes. I sincerely wish the newly appointed troops luck and the administration something else.

Canada Elections Act.

As my newly adopted country readies itself, possibly, for another election for the office of Prime Minister, the Government has put out an ad campaign in local newspapers explaining that contributions to political parties is now extremely limited. I don't claim to know all of the ins and outs of the new regulations, but the Elections Canada section essentially explains the following information (quite incredible to a tired political water from the States) that was highlighted in today's Winnipeg Free Press ad:

There are limits to what you can give. As of January 1, 2007, only individuals can make federal political donations.

• As a Canadian citizen or permanent resident of Canada, you can give up to $1,100 in total per year to each registered party.
• In addition, you can give up to $1,000 in total per year to the registered associations, nomination contestants and candidates of each registered party.
• You can give up to $1,100 in total to the contestants in each registered party leadership contest.
• You can also give up to $1,000 per election to each independent candidate.
• You can no longer make a cash donatino of more than $20.
• Corporations, trade unions, associations and groups can no longer make political contributions.

Can I take up a few more lines to repeat that last item?

• Corporations, trade unions, associations and groups can no longer make political contributions.

In the States, this bullet point would cause bloodsheed, a constitutional crisis, and perhaps a shutdown of Government. I'm a bit incredulous that this law, as far reaching as it is, has received so little notice either here or in the U.S. Election reform, long promised but never delivered in the U.S., has taken place in Canada. Amazing.

Borat's Politics Are Mine Now.

The funniest thing I've seen in months.

A New American Order

It's hard to believe, but after all these years in the desert, the Democrats took it (almost all, waiting for Virginia) back today. I'm amazed and excited for the country. It's obvious and corny but nonetheless true: American democracy is a privileged and imperfect system but it astoundingly tends to work. The country's health, measured by yesterday's election, is stronger not because of who got elected but because they were elected and because change is considered a good thing in America.

I think the Democrats should gloat, grin, shake their fists, stick out their tongues, moon the pundits, and sing heroic "We Are the Champion"-type songs. It's deserved and Howard Dean should get loads of credit. A Muslim was elected, a black candidate was elected in the South, a woman may soon be House Speaker. These things are not trivial. A shout should be shouted.

But then I hope that the Democrats roll up their newly pressed sleeves and get to work. A lot of the world is poor, malnourished and living in fear and there's not a lot of time to lose.

The Last Drop Drips.

I have to hand it to the editors and publisher (Conde Nast) of the New Yorker. While print journalism is increasingly going "walled garden," allowing only paid subscribers to access their content, the New Yorker continues to publish its often superb pieces online. I'm a long-time New Yorker subscriber, even here in Winnipeg, and though it's expensive ($90 per year!), it would take a lot for me to give it up.

In last week's issue, Michael Specter wrote a frightening article called "The Last Drop: Confronting the possibility of a global catastrophe." It's worth in its entirety and reviewing it in detail will not do it justice. But, essentially, Specter makes a provocative yet realistic assessment of the world's coming shortage of water. We're in trouble. Here are just a few quotes from the first half of the piece:

There is no standard for how much water a person needs each day, but experts usually put the minimum at fifty litres. The government of India promises (but rarely provides) forty. Most people drink two or three litres—less than it takes to flush a toilet. The rest is typically used for cooking, bathing, and sanitation. Americans consume between four hundred and six hundred litres of water each day, more than any other people on earth. Most Europeans use less than half that.

China has less water than Canada and forty times as many people. With wells draining aquifers far faster than they can be replenished by rain, the water table beneath Beijing has fallen nearly two hundred feet in the past twenty years.

If a large bucket were to represent all the seawater on the planet, and a coffee cup the amount of freshwater frozen in glaciers, only a teaspoon would remain for us to drink.

As people migrate to cities, they invariably start to eat more meat, adding to the pressure on water resources. The amount of water required to feed cattle and to process beef is enormous: it takes a thousand tons of water to grow a ton of grain and fifteen thousand to grow a ton of cow. Thirteen hundred gallons of water go into the production of a single hamburger; a steak requires double that amount.

Folly.

Rarely do I post anything on politics and international misbehavior, which is always rampant, and therefore, hard for me to dissect. The recent Israeli entree into Lebanon again is grotesque. The hundreds of people who are dying there are dying in vain. Israel will not solve the persistence of its Arab neighbors' hatred through bombing.

Then there's the but(t). Israel is, was, and always has been stuck in an international milieu in which very wealthy Arab countries support tyrannical governments that prevent cultural, social and political developments from developing internally. People who live in Israel's neighbor countries, including Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Syria and further places like Iraq and Iran and Qatar and UAE live at the whims of their rulers. Israel, because of its birth amidst the destruction of European Jewry, is held to a Western standard that these other countries are not. And so, again and again, Israel is condemned, scorned, hated and villified because it needs to defend itself. The country, which is the size of the state of Delaware, is held together by raw history, American support, and sheer luck, not necessarily in that order. And the country does horrible things, no question, like every country has ever done. But, as Rex Murphy points out in his editorial in yesterday's Globe and Mail, no other country is required to live among neighbors who constantly threaten to run it into the sea.

Would Pakistan, constantly threatened by Indian military prowess, allow India to lob missiles over its border and not take any action? Would Pakistan allow a militarized Hindu terrorist organization to sit on its border and not demand that India reign in the "revolutionaries"? Would Pakistan sit down and talk with Hindu revolutionaries if they refused to even acknowledge its very existence? Doubtful.

The point is that it's all too human to criticize Israel for being a proxy, a stepchild of the United States, a progressive democracy amidst totalitarian Islamic states, or a Jewish religio-state. (No other country in the region has 20% of its population not belonging to the country's dominant religion, by the way.) Israel and its actions are constantly headlined in every newspaper in every country not because its actions are that disproportionate or overwhelming or even interesting. Israel is simply held to a hypocritically higher standard of justice so that anti-Semtism can be psychologically, liminally or politically legitimated. In this way, countries can vilify Jews generally, condemn them to non-state status, relegate them to another historical dustbin, or otherwise hope for their demise. It's a 5000 year old and excitingly baneful aspiration of world culture that drives the (admittedly sad headlines): Delete the Jews and the world will suffer less.

Rex Murphy says it better in his "A doctrine of cruelty and folly":

Proportionality, as the word is currently understood, appears to me, anyway, to be a kind of code. The state of Israel is allowed now and then to respond to those who are unlawfully attacking it or abducting its soldiers, but it must on no account do so in a manner that might actually end the attacks and permanently stop the abductions. It must fight terrorists according to rules that do not, by definition, apply to terrorists.

To accept this understanding of proportionality is to accept that Israel is in a perpetual war of attrition, that it is always obliged to contain what force it has so that it is always balanced, even to ideal equivalence, with the force enjoyed by the rogues and terrorists who attack it.

I cannot think of any other state in the world that is asked and, by the truly high-minded, expected to live in a perpetual dynamic of attack and response -- with the initiative always understood to be with its enemies.

Such is proportionality. It is a doctrine of cruelty and folly, but, more significant, it is a doctrine designed for the only state in the world that has to seriously worry about the fact of its own existence.

Lately, it has more reason to do so than has ever been the norm for that battered country. One of the other ruder messages coming out of this current crisis is the number of voices starting to remind us that maybe Israel was a mistake to begin with. In Western opinion, this thought is but a whisper, but how common a whisper it is becoming.

Matthew Parris of The Times, no less, gave the thought its most weary expression: "My opinion -- held not passionately but with little personal doubt -- is that there is no point in arguing about whether the state of Israel should have been established where and when it was because it has become a fact. To try to remove it now would be at least as great an injustice as the one originally done to the Palestinians."

What an interesting thought: Clear away the clutter and the ennui and what it says is that Israel was a mistake, both where and when, and if it weren't so much trouble, maybe we could fix it.

Well, there are others on this globe who don't mind the trouble involved in fixing it, among them Hezbollah, al-Qaeda (which has jumped onside with Hezbollah) and the Iranian President, who speaks with such fervour of wiping Israel off the map. The latter is building a nuclear arsenal, and is likely not as dispassionate as the weary Mr. Parris.

That kind of whisper is the tuning of an orchestra we do not want to hear. Nor do we wish to view, even in our dreams, the horrid proportionality its strains would most likely evoke.

This is not to excuse Israel's folly. It is to say that Israel cannot sit around hoping that other countries will play nice someday. Unfortunately for the world, Jews have had no historical experience of this.

Stormy Weather.

I've been idly sitting by my computer reading the political headlines, and ooooh, it's going to be a messy week, and not for the weak. There's nothing scary or particularly new in any of this; it all could have been easily predicted (and was) by my more conspiratorial friends. What is a bit frightening is that Mr. Bush and team, like cornered wolves, may try to do something truly nutty—declare war, declare martial law, resign, or worse.

IMF acts to avoid markets meltdown

CIA leak probe looks at Cheney writings

Karl Rove Indicted on Charges of Perjury, Lying to Investigators

NSA Whistleblower To Expose More Unlawful Activity: People Are Going To Be Shocked

Granted, the parallels are extreme: The Bartlet Administration Comes to a Close.

Postscript: I was wrong, completely wrong.

Colbert's Cojones.

Last night Stephen Colbert had the gall, cojones, and vision to joke at the President Bush's expense. For me, it was incredibly uncomfortable watching the video of Colbert, line by line, taking the presidency down a few notches - almost six feet under.

Oh, and I couldn't help but appreciate his line: "This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring If anything, they are re-arranging the Deckchairs on the Hindenberg."

The Retaliation.

It goes without say (in the mainstream media) but Israel's retaliation for today's suicide bombing and the subsequent political support by the reigning Ph.D.s in Hamas is going to be immense. It's a truly bloody perfect storm coming in the next few days or week: A new and untested Israeli government and prime minister, a vocal and posturing (and elected) Hamas leadership, a taunting (but inept) Iranian government, a soon renewed (but inept) White House administration, and the decision on the part of multiple (inept) Arab governments to fund the Hamas government will, assuredly and sadly, lead to major bloodshed. I cringe.

The Street.

The Muslim world has gone nuts over the past few days because of a pretty ugly series of cartoons. I don't blame them for being pissed. Jews get pretty angry when Saudia Arabian and Lebanese and Syrian papers, for instance, publish heinous editorial cartoons of Jewish leaders looking like Nazis. This happens pretty much every day in strictly Muslim countries.

But more shocking than Muslims burning down the Dutch embassy in Beirut is that the liberal media (who I read with pleasure) has said absolutely nothing of meaning about this. Is their Street closed? Nothing of import and no headlines in Salon, Slate, The Nation, etc. Take a look a look. It's not unlike a few months ago when France and other parts of Europe were burning (or at least vehicles there were). Are they afraid of their offices being torched? Do they, like the US Government, not have enough "translators" to follow the story? Perhaps they don't have an opinion about thousands of people burning buildings, cars, and effigies?

Canadian Conservatives.

Disclaimer: I know nothing about Canadian politics.

There's a very strange thing going on in Canada right now with the election only a week or so to go.

I don't get it. The Canadian press and all polls show the Conservative party winning this next election and the new Canadian Prime Minister will be Stephen Harper. Why? It's time for a change. It's total bullshit, at least to me. The Liberals, which are essentially the Democratic party of the States, have had 12 years of good economics, sound fiscal policy, strong deliberation and stands against U.S. foreign policy, same-sex marriage legalization, general overall political and national unity, and healthy immigration. There's this scandal, concretized by the Gomery Report, that Canadians seem very upset about wherein money changed hands wrongly in Quebec and there was definitely some mismanagement of taxpayer money.

But now even the left-leaning newspapers like The Globe and Mail have issued new editorials stating that Canadians should kick the Liberal bums out of office because, well, there is a need for somethin' new.

It doesn't add up. From my experience in the States, conservatives and conservative parties have done a phenomenal job of convincing mass numbers of people that they have a better way of getting things done by killing government programs and then telling them, when government doesn't work well, that government doesn't work. It's brilliant, no doubt. It has an elegant internal logic in terms of public appeal that kept George Bush in the White House a few months ago. And now the Conservatives in Canada, which seem to essentially a "lite" version of Republicans, are making the case that they have "new ideas" such as tax cuts, Kyoto-defiance, healthcare privitization and space militarization that might actually be neat if they could be implemented. Canadian polls show that they don't like the current Prime Minister, Paul Martin, because he doesn't seem to connect with their concerns and he had a chance to do something great and they haven't seen it, yet.

There's absolutely no assurance that a Conservative government in Canada can do anything except make the nation a U.S. backwater which rationalizes its best policy, intellectual, and national assets away. Conservatives are billed as change agents while the Liberals are viewed as old, sitting ducks. I feel sorry for Mr. Martin, who honestly seems committed to pushing forward a European/American-style approach to good government.

Finally, I can't help but think, as a new American immigrant in Canada, that the Conseravtive party must be getting lots of very nice financial and strategic help from their buddies in the States, who, in turn, are looking to make life easier for themselves with a conservative northern neighbor. I have little doubt that Karl Rove and other friends of the right are rubbing their sweaty palms together, awaiting the kingship of Conservatives in Canada who can begin to dismantle the nation's "welfare" statehood.

The Cynic

I hate being cynical. It's a total waste of time. Except when it's fun to be realistic and cynicism is the only out. In the name of realism and in the hope of connecting some lost dots, I've attempted to create a list item rondo that will explain the viscious circle of contemporary cynicism:

1. Life is too short for anyone to be truly kind.
2. Individuals have no ability to self-police.
3. Businesses are, as the tax laws state, fundamentally individuals.
4. Government has a reason to be self-organized for itself.
5. Communities organize around delusionally common attributes.
6. Organizations act on their own behalf.
7. Financial institutions act as a lever to consolidate wealth.
8. Travel is inherently colonialist and escapist.
9. Building is destructive.
10. Staying in place is anarchic.
11. Life is too short for anyone to be truly kind.

NK

My daughter is collecting her pennies and nickles and dimes to give to the poor here in Winnipeg. It's through a program called Pennnies from Heaven. She gets a penny or two for things she does around the house and then has collected them in a small container. We'll be putting the coins in a collection jar at school on Friday.

I just finished watching Seoul Train, the independent documentary about the many hundreds of North Koreans who escape their poverty and plight by fleeing to China every month. The hateful Chinese refuse to honor these families as refugees or give them asylum and return them to the North Korean government. The Koreans then imprison, torture, and kill these people. Despite China's paper commitment to the UNHCR, it refuses North Koreans admittance. It was an incredibly moving portrait of a few families who braved everything they had (which was only their lives) to have freedom. Real freedom. Not the kind that is spouted about by politicians or academics. The freedom that these North Koreans are seeking is of the most primal sort: the capacity to live. That's all they want and the film makes very clear that there are 20 million people in the country who do not have just that.

Here in Canada, the Conservatives (capitalized because it is a party not an ideal) are wanting to cut down the national tax from 7% to 5% over the next few years. The adline goes "Stand Up for Canada."

I got a call from the financial arm of the automotive company from whom we purchased our car a few years ago. The message left said "Mr. Boardman, please call us as soon as possible about an ... important financial matter." With much anxiety (and under the assumption that I somehow owed them thousands of dollars), I called the number left and the company representative told me they need my address to mail me a check for $29.37.

One of the cats has been throwing up. It appears to be happening every other day.

I've lost touch with a lot of friends and colleagues in New York.

Need a cookie.

Falling Governments

As you probably already saw, the Canadian government yesterday actually fell.

And I can't help but think that this seems to be such a useful tool that could be exported to America. If publicly elected officials doesn't have "confidence" in one's government officials, the superstructure is simply disbanded and the rest of the organizational institution continues to run smoothly - its social, security, defense, communication, leadership and cultural programs work fine without a Parliamentary structure in tact. In fact, there's something very self-sacrificing about the no-confidence vote held in Ottawa, Canada's capital; Ministers of Parliament not only actively disband the government's policy producing body but they also send themselves home to be re-elected by the populace.

Fascinating. In part, it's because of its apocalyptic nature to me. In the States, if the Government fell, funding would stop immediately, the overall leadership structure would collapse, state governments would have to take over and there would be lawlessness and localized military and militia control. (Elected officials in the U.S. are, by default and now more than ever, intimately entwined with everything the nation does or can do; the gap between elected officials and bureaucrats in the Government has been closing. We saw a glimpse of this back in the mid-1990s when budgets wouldn't get passed and the country was essentially held hostage by new Republican legislators. Gee, remember that?

As one friend noted, it's odd that the Parliamentary system appears so much more advanced than the American system. I remember learning over and over in Junior High and HIgh School that the federal system we had in the U.S. was an advancement over that of our British ancestors - that our system of checks and balances among the Executive, Judicial, and Legislataive branches would keep any one set of people from gaining too much power or privilege.

As anyone can tell from recent polls on the Presidency, a clear majority of Americans now think that the current Executive branch has too much concentrated power which has, in turn, lead to major mistakes, lies and criminal acts. The closest we got in recent memory to "felling" the U.S. Government was when Mr. Clinton was impeached. And I guess that this is the closest we'll ever get.

Rats.

I'm sitting here writing while watching the Wall Street Journal Editorial Report on Prairie Public Television. Paul Gigot and three similarly aged white men have now articulated, a few times, that it could have been a lot worse for the White House today because Mr. Rove was not indicated (though Mr. Libby was).

"On the other big story of the week, the news was not good, but not disastrous. Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald decided not to seek an indictment of the President's top aide, Karl Rove, in connection with the leak of a CIA officer's identity. True, an indictment did come down against Vice-President Cheney's aide, Scooter Libby. But that was not the political blow an indictment of Rove would have been." "I'm guessing that Rove is in the clear." "It could have been a lot worse for President Bush." "This is not, what it comes down to it, an accusation of a major cover-up." "There are obvious weaknesses in the White House operation, and I think they need to be addressed."

These men, to a one, look like a league of rats on a ship that sprung a leak at sea that is without life buoys and without a connection to a media which smells blood and wants some meat.

Synagogue Sin

The occupation of Gaza (and the vast majority of the West Bank) was a torrid piece of Israeli and Jewish history. It was not helpful to anyone, least of all the Palestinians, and it placed tremendous strain on Israel and the United States to maintain some semblance of political optimism about the future of the Palestinian nation. It essentially helped to bankrupt those living in the Palestinian territories while providing unnecessary fuel for extremists (Muslim, Jewish, and Christian) to aid the murder of innocents. Superbly wealthy countries like Saudi Arabia (friends of Americans like Mr. Bush) used the poverty of the Palestinians as a whip against the West and will continue to do so. Meanwhile, Palestinians themselves remained uncritical of their own leaders and allowed their schools to become recruitment zones for killers and hate mongers.

I saw a fascinating BBC documentary the other day that showed how, previous to 1935 or so, Arabs in the region were very tolerant of Jewish settlers and Christian tourists. During the rise of the Nazis in Europe, very strong ties were developed among them and powerful Arabs in the region and the rise of tyrants throughout the area can be directly tied to European fascism, anti-semitism, and state control. These Arab countries used the Nazis and then the Soviets to maintain power over their subjects and ensure that oil was critical to the success of the West.

What is atrocious and generally unspoken is that the synagogues left in Gaza were burned down by the Palestianians for no reason other than spite. It's understandable that their hatred has become fierce. But in Israel and other Western nations, the burning of a place of a worship is crime of massive proportions. It's not acceptable to burn (even abondoned) sites of devotion. Israel protects all houses of worship.

When I visited Poland ten years ago, those synagogues that remained after World War II were rarely used by Jews there; they couldn't be because there are only a few thousands Jews in Poland out of a population of 40 million. (The Jewish population, pre-war, was about 25% of the total.) But the Poles (almost never) burned the buildings down and instead used them most recently as churches, libraries, gymnasiums or banks.

Old New Orleans

Here in the mittle of Canada, things look very odd way South. I've seen and read the news to the point of almost nausea about N.O. and it continues to be the saddest story of the year, in part because it could have been prevented, in part. But here are a few weird news-worthy tidbits I've seen and read, none of which are confirmable, and all of which add up to a stranger story. Radio silence from the official U.S. Government caters to these oddities:

• There are between 5,000 and 10,000 dead in N.O.
• Cuba is publicly offering 1,500 doctors to be immediately sent to the region
• Despite Bush's grin when he said "Send Cash" a few days ago, that's actually what non-profits and others need
• Texas has put a limit on either 250,000, or 350,000, or more, "refugees" from coming to Texas
• Residents now homeless are not only "refugees," but they are "victims," "civilians," and "Mississippians"
• Other states like Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Indiana and West Virginia are taking smaller numbers of residents into their statewide arms but the secret among U.S. state governors is essentially, "We don't want them."
• AIGA, an advocacy organization for designers, posted this on their site Hurricane Katrina has brought unexpected devastation to the design community in the Gulf Coast region. This is bizarre.
• Some say that the entire city will need to be leveled.

If it's true that the first casualty of war is truth, it's also true today that the first casualty of disaster is truth.

Londontown

I wish sincere condolensces and solidarity to everyone directly and indirectly affected by the blasts in London today. While it's easy to say that it was "inevitable" as so many bloggers are saying, it remains an outrage that cowards feel it's their duty to kill in the name of any higher cause. These were very cowardly acts and there's no real justice that can be had out of this.

Fortified Base

Let's face it: The new Freedom Tower, designed by a series of mishaps, committees, politicans, and egoist architects is a superbad idea. Today, The New York Times today shows some examples under the banner headline Redesign Puts Freedom Tower on a Fortified Base. The base itself looks shimmery and light but the reality of it is that it's made to withstand heavy duty terrorist activities.

It's not necessary to make the case this is a collosal waste of money. There are still no takers for office space in this tower and I can't think of one person who lives in New York who would eagerly go to work every day in this Freedom Tower. It's too big a target, too rarified a structure and too high in the sky for any sane person's self-interests.

The best critique I've read of the plans for the area is by Ron Rosenbaum in his piece called Ground Zero Hype: Is Giant Skyscraper A Freedom Folly? in the Observer.

I do understand the general desire of polticians and heros to "buck" the terrorists and stand up to their depravity by building something bigger and better than the Twin Towers. I also understand the interests of a few to make a clear pronunciation that the Freedom Tower is a sign of our willingness to transcend, to embrace "life," and to construct anew. But what better way of signalling this is there than to use the entire area as a public arena - a museum, a park, a memorial, a preserve, a place of rest and repose and a symbol of our belief in living?

Big Health Businesses

Totally could be wrong on this one, but I have a small prediction to make, partly in light of the last post on Deckchairs a few days ago:

"In the next year or three, big business will begin to petition the administration for long-range and transformative heathcare changes that will not be called National Health Care but will feel like it when they're provided to citizens."

Here's the logic: Companies can no longer afford to provide good health care for their employees. It will soon be nearly impossible for even companies like GM to continue lining the pockets of the insurance industry. They recognize that all other countries to the North and South and to the East and West provide healthcare and that they can no longer compete by providing what is essentially two salaries to every American employee. They will argue for a nationalized plan that will ration health care (and probably pretty poor care at that) to the working and middle class and will allow them to cut down dramatically on their insurance premiums.

I'm assuming that there will be an industrial consortium or PAC that will get this done and that the name of the plan will be something Orwellian like "Health for America" or "Heart America."

I'm also assuming that the average worker will be paying for part of the plan through increased taxes.

I'm also assuming that the new plan will offer less overall insurance to Americans but it will guarantee that employed (not self-employed, those on Medicare or Medicaid, illegals, or generally just plain poor) citizens will have a modicum of healthcare during their lifetimes. I also imagine that the plan would go along with a national ID system to make sure that citizens are in the "system" and are not abusing it; this national ID system (used in many other countries as well) with be a persuasive component of the new laws.

The funds will probably have to come out of additional tax revenue from businesses, but the lionshare of the burden will be on smaller companies because they will be perceived as getting the biggest "break."

All of the very smart, able, and excellent activist health and labor organizations like Working Today will need to quickly provide education to the media about these initiatives and weigh out the public versus private benefits. Big business, in hand with the Administration seeking to make a dent in its domestic policies before 2008, will be depicted as the saviors of the American economy and the American workingman.

The Bubble Bubble (or Double Bubble Trouble)

I'm not trying to be cute (well, that might be hard at this point) but the number of stories in The New York Times about housing, market, economic, and other types of bubbles is starting to reach grand or grandiose proportions. I've long thought that residential housing was a big ol' bubble just waiting to burst and still think it is in most of the metropolitan areas of the country but it does seem that the hype of bubble myth-making will have its own bubble.

Here are just a few pieces in The Times lately. Each on is more persuasive than the other. Our new deficits, now owned and managed by the Chinese, coupled with massively over-financed housing, tied with over-leveraged families with credit debt and no savings, wrapped around an economy based on a war-time footing rather than an investment-side caravan, strapped together with shaky free-trade markets and a speculative oil and gas system does indeed seem like disaster waiting to happen. The house of cards has to fall at some point.

But I also wonder out loud whether the bubbles that all these journalists are prognosticating are actually missing a larger piece of the puzzle that we're not thinking about. I don't know what that puzzle piece is - perhaps it's AIDS or avian flu or terror or just some new technology - but my guess is that something else will make the cards fall and not the house itself. In other words, it will take some outside force to push the the thing over; cards themselves have no desire to change their position in the fine hierarchy of various advantageous positions.

The bubble stories are coming fast and furious but they, too, probably represent a bubble that can't see the next prick on the horizon.

The Power of Nightmares

My friend V.S. sent to me a few months ago the bone-chilling BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares. This link will take you to a small version and a BitTorrent file of the documentary, which is in three parts.

I've only seen two so far, but the documentary brilliantly makes the case that the neo-cons and the sleazy men of Al Qaeda formed out of the political liberation and economic reconditioning of the 1950s in the U.S. Two male intellectuals, Sayyed Qutb and Leo Strauss, end up changing the face of the planet because of their overwhelming desire to form minds out of ideas and provide fantastic logic to their populations.

See it. While it's conspiratorial edge is sharp, it will help explain the illegitimacy of Clinton's supposed downfall, the rise of anti-Soviet policy which was based on America's own propaganda, the political use of terrorism to control minds and hearts, and the odd juxtaposition of Jewish intellectuals sucked into the desires of evangelical Christians.

Big BTW: What ever happened to the terrorism alerts that Homeland Security used to issue regularly in 2004, before the election? Did we all forget? Did the media forget to remind us that there have been (I believe) no new alerts since November 2?

West Winging

Last night I tuned into The West Wing, a fictional tele-communication that, for the past few (Republican) years, shows what it might be like if a smart, hard-nosed Democrat ran the Oval Office and the Oval Nation. It's a pretty enjoyable show and it has its flaws but overall, it's a wonderful fantasy.

Others have written about The West Wing, but I keep thinking that the Hollywood television industry has been out to lunch since 2000. In the show last night, which was the season finale, it depicted the inimitable Jimmy Smits (as Matthew Santos) announcing his candidacy and winning the Democratic nomination. I was excited to watch him pronounce, at the convention, his allegiance to democracy with a small "d," to Democrats with a large "D," and to veracity, leadership, and popular honor. It was a slightly impressive little speech he gave, better than any Kerry had given in retrospect, perhaps, and it made me want to vote.

The U.S. one day will look to a candidate like Santos, but it's a long ways away right now. Santos is too good-hearted, too clean, too minority, too composed, too smart, too strong, and too good-looking for 2005 or 2006. He is the other-Bush, the one who probably should be in office and who would be in office of Hollywood writers had their say.

For me, the questions mount: Is this just wishful thinking on the part of Hollywood? Is this entertainment a fantasy based on our collective real desires? Is The West Wing literally out on a wing or does it reflect a secondary reality that liberals inhabit on their better days? Will there one day be a minority candidate? Most importantly, when does the new season begin?

The Individual

For the life of me, I can't figure out why our great and powerful Government has lately turned to the insane, inane and profane for its legislative activities. Today, a Sunday, the Senate passed legislation that will keep a poor, completely damaged woman on life support. This is what Republicans mean by pro-life? A few days earlier, our vaunted Government found it very important to bring some of baseball's most celebrated athletes to a select House committee to learn about steroid use among this self-selected group of wealthy individuals. And a few days before that the President decided to slap a bunch of multi-lateralists in the face with his selection of Paul Wolfowitz for leader of the World Bank and John Bolton to "help" the United Nations.

It's as if our Government has decided to redefine the words "millions" and "billions" as being applicable to money and not to populations.

Owner Ship

I was listening to the radio today and there was a news segment on a Michigan insurance company that is testing workers for smoking. If they are found to be positive as smokers, they would be asked to leave the company. Four employees left, all presumably committed smokers.

On the segment, a question arose about the First Amendment. Granted speech and smoking are not the same; however, the assumption is that legal behaviors are legal in the workplace. We're taught in school and on television and in the movies that you have a right to say and do whatever you want so long as it doesn't harm others in the process. Of course, there are many shades of gray around the First Amendment and these shades of gray dutifully employ many lawyers and nonprofits. One shade of gray, of course, is whether overweight people, those who skydive, and motorcylists should also be held up to rigorous employment standards.

But what isn't so gray is that employers don't have to give a damn about your freedoms. One of the commentators on the radio show said explicitly, and I quote, "You have no right to freedom of speech where your employer is concerned. The First Amendment only concerns your rights that apply to the Government." I did not know this. The commentator mentioned that last year, a woman in Alabama was fired for driving to work with a Kerry-Edwards bumper sticker.

I feel dumb, confused and bamboozled by my own ignorance. I'm less "mad" at the Government than at the educational system that tells us our freedoms are sacrosanct. Where did the educational system go wrong in telling us that we had the freedom to speak our minds? How did employers become immune to First Amendment law? Where does the "ownership society" take us if it is our employers that own us?

Public Notices

Here are a few random things I've noticed while riding the subway almost all morning, going to and fro from client to client and back again:

• There seems to be an increase in the number of designers relying upon outlined fonts to make their words display better. Perhaps the most seen and diagnosed version is used in the new and now old The Life Aquatic.
• I don't remember a State of the Union address that has received as much attention as the one tonight to be given by our President George W. Bush. This must due, in part, to the immense following Mr. Bush has from both the right and the left. It goes unreported but there will be probably just as many red state beer-drinkers tonight watching Mr. Bush as there will be wine-swilling blue staters. I hand it to the President for giving the people what they want -- even the 49% percent who didn't want him.
• For a number of reasons, I've had to deal with some state and city government bureaucracies lately and to a tee, all of the people I've been in touch with (either on the phone or in person) have been pretty nice, straightforward and easy to deal with. As much as we all bash our government custodians of civil society, I've been impressed with the efficiency and carefulness of their work.
• There was a small news item in today's newspaper about the largest Canadian t-shirt maker, Gildan Activewear, Inc. shutting down their plants in Canada and will move some of its operations to the United States. This may be one of the first examples of offshoring Canadian work to lower paid Americans.

PBS Buster

Interesting. Two days ago I posted a comment noting that I was surprised that the U.S. Government has not been policing the Public Broadcasting Service and Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I knew it was only a matter of time.

Today, the Education Secretary has criticized a kids show for depicting lesbians. The show, which I've seen many times, is called "Postcards from Buster" and it features the wiley Arthur character Buster filming people, including religious Jews and country farmers, and their lifestyles, habits, and families. Apparently, PBS has already pulled the plug on the show's episode but a station in Boston will air it. Pathetic.

Europhilia

I'm here listening to the United States Senate lob nice, gentle questions to Condeleeza Rice, the person who could not anticipate any terrorist acts against the country despite her access to every bit of intelligence the country held. It's amazing to me that Rice is treated so kindly and thoughtfully and that the Democratic Senators perceive themselves as having so little "political capital."

What's the point? The point is that today, while these hearings are going on, Airbus has released the massive and immensely fascinating Airbus A380 family of planes. A collaboration among almost every major European country, the new airplane is supremely fuel efficient, can carry 555 passengers, and will be available for service in 2006. The airplane has two decks and (in typical European fashion) three classes. The development and production of this airplane is an indication of Europe's new economic, technological, and monetary strength and stands in sharp contrast to the more-of-the-same coming out of our Washington, D.C.

Interestingly, one of the U.S. Senators today mentioned a new book by a journalist named T. R. Reid called The United States Of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy. I finished this book yesterday and it's an absolutey must read for anyone concerned about the future of these United States.

Reid, a Washington Post writer, has written a book that demonstrates how Europe has quietly constructed a powerful new United States that is quickly becoming more economically instrumental in the world while maintaining its high quality of living and social security. The twenty-five nations that banded together to form the European Union have spent their entire "political capital" to ensure that their collective nationality can not only become an effective economic force but maintain its high standards for health, human rights, and transportation. Reid is careful to point out that the extraordinary amount of money used to support the European welfare state comes in part from the subsidies of the U.S. over the past 50 years in the form of military and other assistance. But Reid's overall point is that the new U.S.E. has created a political, cultural, and social powerhouse despite its darkly divided historical record -- and it's done so with very little recognition on the part of most Americans of prominence.

The Other Tsunami

The past few weeks have demonstrated an incredible outpouring of support to those victims of the Tsunami disaster. The results are impressive:

• 3 of 10 Americans have dug into their pockets to help.
• Blogs are everywhere on the subject, most of them focused on relief and personal experiences and all of them asking for money.
• Corporate behemoths donated $125 million in cash and in-kind help.
• The U.S. government itself has pledged $350 million to help.
• The U.N. has stated that over $2 billion in country aid has been promised.

Now is not the time to stop giving where it's needed. But I believe it's also the time to ask the hard questions as to why this disaster has trumped all disasters. In particular, it's distressing that an entire continent far closer to Europe and the U.S. and wealthy Arab countries is being decimated by AIDS and virtually nothing is being done nor said. Here's a list of stats about AIDS in Africa, lifted off of CNN.com:

• 5.4 million new AIDS infections in 1999, 4 million of them in Africa.
• 2.8 million dead of AIDS in 1999, 85 percent of them in Africa.
• 13.2 million children orphaned by AIDS, 12.1 million of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
• Reduced life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa from 59 years to 45 between 2005 and 2010, and in Zimbabwe from 61 to 33.
• More than 500,000 babies infected in 1999 by their mothers -- most of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
• The U.S. Census Bureau projects that AIDS deaths and the loss of future population from the deaths of women of child-bearing age means that by 2010, sub-Saharan Africa will have 71 million fewer people than it would otherwise.

According to the BBC, AIDS kills 6,000 people each day in Africa. The sheer racism of this cash infusion to Asia is grotesque and needs to be called for what it is. This is not in any way to denigrate the true suffering of those families massacred by the hands of the tsunami. Nor is it in any way to knock the massive donations pushed from West to East. But it seems to me that it's time that international organizations begin using their newfound spotlight to show donors -- individual, corporate, and national -- the more massive, more ongoing, and more outrageous disaster occurring on the African continent.

Son of the Year

Somehow or another, the grade-C student, war dodger, and all-around good-ol-boy became TIME Person of the Year 2004.

It's not astonishing. What is fascinating is that Time, in its infinite (pun not intended) wisdom, decided that George W. Bush was a historical marker of some sort -- that he represents an American achievement on some order and therefore even greater recognition. Mr. Bush won a narrow majority, has "the lowest December [approval] rating for a re-elected President in Gallup's history," and has already gone back on his recent acceptance pledge to be a re-uniter.

The real question is who should have been picked. According to the posts on Metafilter, every U.S. President in office (except or Mr. Ford) has been covered since 1932. If not the President, who? Certainly, the Democrats fell flat on a race that was theirs to lose, religious figures are divisive, the array of media anchors are publicly seen as failures, business leaders have not led, the military is failing to win publicly accepted wars, and local governments receive no national attention. Internationally, the Europeans and the U.N. have not stood up to genocide while the Russians have failed themselves. In Asia, China has grown but the cost is unknown.

Who?

The Shock and Awe of It All

This will be the last political post for perhaps some time as I seek to re-transition myself and the blog to other, more pressing matters like design, the use of the color brown, the latest Palm handheld, and the dearth of good museums today.

Actually, I don't mean to jest. Politics, for almost everyone I know, has taken center stage in their lives and the way they live, act, work, eat, and, probably, sleep. Some state it outright while others suffer quietly and with the conviction that others are enduring similar angst and dolor.

I think what I find most disquieting (pun intended) right now is the presence of tremendous -- but unexpected -- sadness among many I know and others I don't. It's as if no one expected Mr. Bush to win the election -- or if he did, that his winning would be less triumphant somehow. This inexplicable (to me) feeling of collective sorrow is not like anything else I can remember during my lifetime.

I certainly don't mean to act like some sensor of the collective masses -- though I aspire to be a kind of psychic sponge that assesses the mood ring color of the totality of the populace. And, if anything, I'm projecting my something onto others' nothing. Yet, I can't help but think that the sorrow I'm seeing (on magazines, in friends, at gatherings) is the sense that an era has ended -- an era of New Deal sentiment and policy that helped drive such sentiment into our communal core. It's not about liberals or progressive or democrats or independents; it's about gentleness, thoughtfulness, and justice and the expectation that those values were in the hearts and minds of other U.S. citizens.

It turns out that those expectations are dashed and our senses about the future of hope -- are dashed.

A Blue State

First, thanks to M.B, for the title of this post.

It's not without some incredible feelings of awe that the Democrats lost the election in large part because of people who believe that their particular kind of morality is key to the future of the country. The recent post by Victor (see end of posting) is important because it outlines what liberals and social democrats generally have been accused of for ages: government is built to help people make decisions about their utterly complex lives. In the case of this election, it seems that a slim majority of voters would like the government to be involved in a different set of relationships: not social welfare, poverty, old age, health and wellbeing, or education but rather marriage, sexuality, and science.

I want to change the corner slightly and point out some very interesting data points that have been published by the New York Times a few days ago. They speak to the reality of a very confused electorate, an empassioned and bitter set of folks that seem to think government is somehow both the problem and the solution, and a population filled with minorities that are not getting, somehow, represented in government. Here:

• 54% of voters over 60 (24% of total voters) voted for Bush
• 58% of white voters (77% of total voters) voted for Bush
• 88% of black voters (11% of total voters) voted for Kerry
• 74% of Jewish voters (3% of total voters) voted for Kerry
• 22% of voters felt that moral values were the issues that "mattered most" to them - these were the folks that won Mr. Bush II the election as 80% of them voted for him

P.S. The actual article (up for a few more days) is here but the superbly well-designed chart is hosted here.

Ununited States

Yesterday was so powerful, pulling a lever for a politician who could save us from ourselves and from the possibility of an overtly powerful chain of events and companies from controlling our destinies in a semi-authoritarian sense of statehood. But today these Ununited States are divided and Rove and friends would like nothing more than for 49% of the country to fall upon itself in disgust and accusations and recriminations. My only hope is that the Spring of 2005 will bring about a more full acknowledgement of the utter failure of Bush policies and, like Nixons' second term, Bush's will garner an internal reaction unlike any other seen this side of the Atlantic. G-d Bless America.

Dow Kerry

I'm no Dow Jones industrialist but you can't beat the historical record. CNN reports today that a study predicts Kerry will win based on the Dow's October record.

The first paragraph of hte story reads: According to a recent study by the Hirsch Organization, publishers of the Stock Trader's Almanac, if the Dow loses more than 0.5 percent of its value in the month of October before Election Day, then an incumbent president is going to lose his job. The Dow fell 0.52 percent in October. This predictor has been true every election since 1904.

Vote tomorrow!

The Art of Winning

Although I've been relatively pessimistic about the current election and under the assumption that Mr. Bush will win by a narrow margin, I now have a hunch that Kerry and the Democratic National Committee knows more about this than anyone will let on: they will win.

It's not based on facts, reporting, or punditry, but my hunch that Kerry will win this election is based upon the verbal mudslinging, the tone of each candidate, and the language behind some of their past week's stumping. Bush is beginning to look weary, and his words about Kerry seem old, tired, and are symptomatic of fearfulness because they engender fear itself. Kerry, on the other hand, looks increasingly resolved, resolute, defiant, and alert.

What's behind this? My suspicion is that the Democrats actually know that they are ahead by a few percentage points that is not reflected in polls; these points come from the typically disenfranchised voters, the mobile phone set, and the recently registered and angry. And I suspect, as well, that the Republicans right now realize they're about to lose and are pulling out the punches like never before.

Neither party can actually talk about this publicly for fear of alienating voters and reducing turnout in a seriously close election. But I'll bet both parties know which way the wind is shifting.

I could be wrong. I hope I'm not.

Operation Bubbe

A newish (pun intended) organization called Operation Bubbe is attempting to bring folks from other parts of the country to Florida to help Jewish retirees get to the polls on November 2. (The overarching theme of course is that voters in Florida hold the key to our collective political future. Other organizations, like MoveOnPAC, have similarly good plans.)

O.B. asked me to design a little t-shirt ensignia for them. I'm planning on buying a few of these.

Conspiracy

I'm no conspiracist but I do indulge occasionally in reading highly educated pundits make sense of the world through suspcious facts that come together nicely.

I thought I'd take a stab at it myself, since it's the kind of scary fun that we all love during this Halloween and Election Season and the fact is -- with the current administration, anything truly is possible. Note these are only fictional hyper-thoughts about the short-term future of the world and are not gleaned from science, pseudo-science, news headlines or overly caffeinated beverages. Here goes:

• If Kerry is elected, the administration will allow a nuclear device or series of very large, indefinable explosions to go off in a small city in the United States. This will cause the Government to suspend the transfer of power and martial law will go into effect. Bush will stay in office for a long period of time while the country decides what to do.
• If Bush is elected, the Government will find that Iran has built up to ten nuclear warheads, all of which could be readied against Western allies. With a large number of troops already in and around Iraq, a memo will be publicly leaked that calls for plans to invade Iran in early 2005. A draft will soon become necessary and Congress will authorize it. Bush, though he stated there will be no draft, will have his politically dry hands tied and young men and women will be called upon to fight in the hundreds of thousands in the Middle East.
• After Bush is elected, the stock market will take a precipitous fall in February, sending the economy into a deep recession. The twin causes are the European, Asian, and Saudi pull-out of investments in the United States and the decline in profits being taken by American companies who no longer sense their privilege in world markets. It will make the crash of 2000 look like a cough. The new Bush administration will need to lay out a massive plan for saving the U.S. which will include reforming four-year presidential limits, collapsing domestic and foreign intelligence agencies, and expanding Federal work programs while deporting illegal foreigners to save American jobs.
• If Kerry is elected, a huge cyber-attack will be set off in early 2005, propagated by Texan Republicans through back-channel Russian computer systems. The attack, which could be either a trojan horse, virus, or something entirely new, would cripple U.S. government and business connections, supply chains, and communications and send the economy into a spiral. The Internet could no longer at all be relied upon, emails would be confiscated by the government, and online privacy will no longer be a right. Telephony and information technology generally will become artifacts of the past and the U.S.P.S. will need to govern (paper) communications. After four disastrous economic years, in 2008 Arnold Schwarzenegger will be elected to the highest office to tame the electronic wolves.

Noise

Walking my daughter to school every day takes about one half an hour up and back. During that time, I get to listen to the screeching of car brakes, the rumble of the subway underground, the scraping of truck tires along the road, and the pounding of fearful hearts at rush hour. I'm privy to listening to the roar and rumble of the commuting crowd, the sneak previews of music coming through someone's iPod, and the generous "sharing" of typically crap music coming out of massive bass speakers lodged in tiny Honda Civics.

Then I'll hear, above the din, my daughter say something like this: "Dad, do you sil exot stracked streekly cranst?" And then I'll ask her to repeat it and then repeat it again until I'm two inches away and I'll get it and answer her.

Mayor Bloomberg has recently made noise pollution an important facet of his means of cleaning up New York City, and I'm all for it. The car alarms, however, are barely the problem. It's the shiftless sounds pouring off the street, off the buildings, and into people's ears that is deafening.

I think about what it would be like to not hear anything and whether the perennial noise in my ears would be stoned by the silence.

Is Bush Wired (for Speech)?

My buddy, V., sent me this weblog cum report called Is Bush Wired?. At first it looked like utter nonsense but, if you visit this site, take a good look at the photographs -- be sure to scroll down.

Granted, it could be doctored but it seems plausible that the President was repeating back words that had been spoken to him through a (ostensibly encrypted) wire. Of course, the logic of his poor performance last Thursday may be that the repeater was somehow turned off and he was left without a feed. I don't know. But if this turns out to be a real lead, it could upset the election.

Funny W.

I don't by any means desire to turn this weblog into an all-politics-all-the-time affair. However, it seems only fair that if the RNC is attacking the credibility of Mr. Kerry, with Mr. Kerry refusing to fight back, sites like onegoodmove.org are doing their small share with funny movies (broadband connection desirable):

1. Bush On Tribal Sovereignty
2. Daily Show "advanced copy" RNC ad
3. Bush on Gynecology
4. Michael Moore on the RNC Convention (I saw this one on TV and it further solidified Mr. Moore's humble hilarity in my small mind)

PA, OH, and FL

I'm from Pennsylvania. I was born in Philadelphia and I have a heartfelt attachment to the state.

But I learned today that the Very Big Three for Mr. Kerry an Mr. Bush are the states Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida. These are the states "up for grabs," the states that don't know what they want, the states that somehow can't distinguish between a mandate for larger wars and economic uncertainty and a call for change in the way the rich seem to get richer.

What is the problem with these states? Is their ambivalence a sign of insecurity? Does these states' political ambiguity signify a population of stupidity or perhaps noble defiance of preditability? Do these states represent the best or the worst of America and its supposed United States? And, finally, will the upcoming massive visits by both candidates to Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida really matter when the rest of the states will be ignored for the next eight weeks?

Citizens

I'm sorry to continue to focus on politics this week, but what else is there, really, right now?

I have some mutual funds at Citizens Funds and today received their Annual Report for 2004. Typically, these reports are fluffy nonsense about the power of investments over time, calls to "heed the course," and half-apologies for funds performing poorly or not well enough.

This report is different and I'd like to quote President Sophia Collier's "Letter from the President" in part:

Dear Shareholders,

It is time for persons of good will to rise up in a collective act of self-help and demand change in policies that are clearly not working...

Wengineering

I've noticed a few good pieces of agitprop in the past few days. The best of the lot so far are:

• More Trees. Less Bush.
• The Labor Union. The people who brought you the weekend.
• Lick Bush.

And the best of them all (mine): W

Landing in NYC

The Republicans are coming and, while I'm not as hateful as many of my fellow New Yorkers may be, I'm thrilled that Wayne Barrett took the opportunity to write the Village Voice cover story called The 10 Ways Bush Screwed New York. I see Wayne regularly and I can't wait to congratulate him on this piece.

In fact, I've been waiting for a piece like this for a long time; why it's so difficult for other New York-based media magazines and newspapers to rush to the defense of New York City, which gets pennies to other states' dollars in spending after it went through a massive attack and an ugly financial implosion -- it's truly beyond me.

Briefly, here are Mr. Barrett's Top Ten:

1. Osama is at large thanks to the war in Iraq.
2. The 9-11 investigation was shamefully resisted by President Bush for no good reason.
3. The Bush team, armed with the knowledge that something was coming down the pike, did nothing to even try to prevent 9/11.
4. The Bush Deficit, now at $500 billion, will have to hurt domestic programs in NYC.
5. Bush has been cheap when it comes to going the extra mile for New York's struggling economy
6. NY is ranked "35th in anti-terrorism per capital funding and 50th in bioterrorism." Egh.
7. Ground Zero workers (and maybe all of us in Brooklyn under the WTC plume in September 2001) probably inhaled too much crap, but the EPA is partisan and disassembling.
8. Government educational funding cuts have hit NYC super-hard.
9. Bush is proposing to cut $107 million for the city's housing vouchers - a first!
10. Bush, alienating his allies overseas and international treaties generally, has made NYC far and away less safe.
Posted by Andrew at 8:51 PM

When it is Scary

Yesterday's and today's New York Times had some of the scariest pages within that I've seen in a long, long time. It wasn't articles about nuclear terrorism, or lies and deceptions, or financial crisis, or massive hurricanes, or global warming, or the failure of increasingly popular charter schools, all of which appeared.

Today, two pieces appeared next to each other on the Op-Ed pages: Paul Krugman's Saving the Vote, which states that, because of electronic voting, the Florida election results in 2004 could call into question the entire election again, and an editorial titled Interrogating the Protesters, which points out the FBI's interviewing of potential protesters as if they were terrorists.

You just have to read these two pieces and combine this with Bob Herbert's piece about Florida state police officers currently visiting elderly black voters -- and not to bring them meals on wheels. Politically left or right, one gets an icy, cold feeling about the future of American democracy. These need to be read.

Sudan Suddenly

Last night I watched with tremendous sadness the rerun of this week's Now with Bill Moyers, which focused, in the latter half of the segment, on the genocide currently being perpetrated in western Sudan. The story had previously caught the corner of my eye over the past few months.

The powerful interview with Julie Flint (link above takes you there) detailed how the Darfur region of Sudan (a country about the size of Texas) has been entirely depopulated, razed, destroyed, denuded and made "uninhabitable." The government of Sudan in coalition with local militas have systematically murdered and turned over whole Muslim villages to ensure that that part of the country can no longer rise again.

According to the interview with Ms. Flint, the Sudanese did not just uproot villages -- they carefully tore out whole fields, destroyed any water and food supplies and raped women daily.

I ask myself what happened when we, after Rwanda, said (more or less) Never Again; when the UN said it will be ever more vigilent against mass murder; when the world took Bosnia at its word and brought soldiers like Wesley Clark into the maelstrom; when 320,000 dead innocents (at the minimum) would constitute the State Department's edict of "genocide" and not some mealy-mouthed "internal strife" or somesuch; when ethnic cleansing is staged without benefit of cameras and microphones.

Regan

You know there's some kind of love interest between the national media and the state when the following things happen:

• A search on Yahoo! on the word "Regan" shows up every possible website associated with former President Ronald Reagan. (Google does not do this.)
• Every major news agency and website lists the memorialization of Reagan at the top of its stories for a week. Not Iraq, not democracy, not elections, not terrorism even.
• California, seeking to replicate the 1980s, elected a popular actor to its highest office.

By the way, you can send a condolence note to the Reagan family through the auspices of the Reagan Library.

Poland in Europe

I read with great curiosity Richard Bernstein's article in today's New York Times, called "The New Europe: Poland Is Worried That Border Controls Create a New Divide". Now that Poland will soon be on the good (read: Catholic, capitalist, and calm) side of the European border, the Western Europeans have armed the country to deal with the potential flood of immigrants.

I lived in Poland for a year, and back then (1995), I was fortunate to meet up with the very few minorities living in the country: a few Polish Jews, a few Africans, and a few Koreans. I remember that the official non-Catholic population was about 2%, which included Roma and immigrants from outside of Europa. It was a new time of ethnic anxiety, as described by those I met, and I can see that those worries will continue to be stoked by both Western Europeans and the new security apparatus that is Poland.

Moreover, I can't get over the incredible irony of Poland, sandwiched between traditionally bellicose Germany and Russia, now the border guard for the wealthy to the West. Called the new "Iron Curtain," the article above mentions "exacerbating tensions around who is on the inside and who is left out of the new Europe."

The Inadequacy of Diversity

I appreciated an article in yesterday's New York Times Magazine by Walter Benn Michaels, called Diversity's False Solace. Mr. Michaels (perhaps a little too gleefully albeit boldly) points out the hypocrisy of U.S. universities that show how diverse their student populations are. Mr. Michaels' point is that their marketing is authentic but that it masks the fundamental class differences in America and American education today. Yes, he says, the racial and ethnic demographics are identified but where's the beef if everyone attending a university is rich?

I found this to be mostly true at Brown, where I went to undergrad, and at most schools like it. I'm a fan of affirmative action; however, I do wonder what will happen to this country as it slides down a superbly polarized slope where the rich eat the poor for lunch. Who really speaks to and about class these days? There are already two very structured class tiers around health insurance, home ownership, car insurance, daycare, and political representation. Once higher education, jobs, and access to clean water are divided up, it will get really scary.

Here's an excerpt from the last paragraph of the article:

This, if you're on the right, is the gratifying thing about campus radicalism. When student and faculty activists struggle for cultural diversity, they are in large part battling over what skin color the rich kids should have. Diversity, like gout, is a rich people's problem. And it is also a rich people's solution. For as long as we're committed to thinking of difference as something that should be respected, we don't have to worry about it as something that should be eliminated. As long as we think that our best universities are fair if they are appropriately diverse, we don't have to worry that most people can't go to them, while others get to do so because they've had the good luck to be born into relatively wealthy families. In other words, as long as the left continues to worry about diversity, the right won't have to worry about inequality.

Nadir

I'm all for competition. I'm all for a little fun. I'm all for working hard to get a message across. But the news that Nader is now going to run for President is disturbing, grotesque even. I can only wonder if Karl Rove walked over to Mr. Nader's place, got on his hands and knees, and begged him to please, please help Bush take the Presidency just one more time.

Health

A well-written article in today's New York Times detailed the growing probability of health insurance will become a luxury. I've known about the statistic for some time: 15.2% of the US does not have health care, 32% are Hispanic, most are 18 to 34 years of age, and they span the geographical spectrum. Now it appears that span is hitting the socio-economic spectrum, excluding the very wealthy, but perhaps not even.

The health of the United States and the health of its people should be equivalent, no? I only wonder where is the tipping point of this outrage: what will push the balance over, to begin re-regulation or re-distributive health services? Would Malcolm Gladwell say 30.4%?

Young Democrats

I remember that, in college, the Young Republicans was a real force to be reckoned with. They were well-heeled, well-connected, and well, looked nicer than the rest of us. It's interesting that Danny Goldberg, who I haven't seen in the news in a while, has a good piece called Left Out in this month's Utne. The Dems blame the kids because people always blame the kids and it's an easy way out to register disrespect for the unregistered and youthful. I'm curious to see how Dean will really rally the young and wry -- anyway, the most confusing thing to me right now, politically, is tomorrow's proposition allowing nonpartisan elections. There should be three levers for this one.