Will, Fully Obtuse

On the NY Times site yesterday, William Safire complained about a line in (President!) Obama's speech:

He skirted the controversy about harsh interrogations with a facile “As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals” — when there are times when that painful choice cannot be “rejected.”

Safire is missing the point entirely here. It's not that Obama was looking for a nice turn of phrase here: he was saying that the choice is always rejected. Torture is always wrong. Etc. But Safire chose to see that line through a prism that is willing to sacrifice liberty in order to gain security, and we should all remember what Ben Franklin has to say about that.

(Full disclosure: I still have a grudge against Safire from the time he partially blamed the decline of marriage on "nubile women postponing weddings to pursue careers.")

Comedy in a Post-Bush World

Just as 9/11 killed comedy, apparently so will the Obama administration. The NY Times interviewed a bunch of comedy writers on how they planned to cope with the apparent upcoming comedy drought. (Full disclosure: I would totally watch Letterman do household safety demonstrations.) I particularly liked the point made by an Onion editor:

Too many people had one Bush-is-dumb joke and thought that made them the next Mark Twain. The arrival of a president fluent in English should raise the bar.

Although, to be fair, there was an awful lot of mileage from the Bush malapropisms:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Childrens Do Learn

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

(Three more days!)

Senator Stuart Smalley!

It is with great glee that I note that Al Franken has officially won his senate race. Not only will C-SPAN2 be more entertaining, but this is the final bit of proof that we live in our own alternate universe. I think a switch got flipped back in 1998 or so, giving us, among other incongruities, Dubya instead of Jeb. (Also, in the alternate universe we elected a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama. Seriously! Look it up!)

I think I'm obsessed with alternate histories -- mostly from WWII to the present -- because I don't have a good feel for exactly how stable our society is. How could the past eight (or fifty) years been different, for better or for worse? Where is the tipping point where we slide into totalitarianism? What if 9/11 never happened? What if it was worse? What if Kerry won in 2004? What if Bush died, and Cheney had been president since 2002? I've inhaled Jo Walton's alternate histories, as well as some Philip Roth, and I cannot wait for people to start tackling Bush years.

Happy 2009 to you all. Let's make sure this alternate history doesn't get shelved under "dystopia".

Sometimes, putting family first means putting it off

This article on red state and blue state attitudes towards sex didn't really tell me anything new. But this jumped out at me:

Maybe these choices weren’t originally about values—maybe they were about maximizing education and careers—yet the result is a more stable family system. Not only do couples who marry later stay married longer; children born to older couples fare better on a variety of measures, including educational attainment, regardless of their parents’ economic circumstances.

I think the choice to wait to marry and start a family is about values. It's about valuing family so that you wait to marry the right person, not just the one you're with when you're 18. Building a family because you want to, not out of obligation, makes it stronger.

I'm pro-family, which is why I'm voting against Proposition 8. I want everyone to have the chance to put together the family they want.

Change (is) how the story ends

Right now we're all excited and hopeful that things will go well on Tuesday, and that Barack Obama will be elected president. But before we get too complacent, let's look at what we said in 2004 before the election:
Vinay (via email) said:

It's very 4:56 in the AM, I'm about to leave for my 1st of (right now) 3 shifts for election protection.

I'm wearing a medium-size shirt that's more like a small.

And to top it all off? I'm wide awake.

Have fun 'yall. :-)

In response, I said:

Woo!

I'm also about to leave for my 16-hour shift of election inspecting, and
I'm listening to R.E.M.'s "I Believe":

"and change is what I believe in ...."

A lot of that sounds awfully familiar (and not just because I was apparently four years ahead of the game). We had spent weeks obsessing over the campaign, reading about it, blogging about it, and working on it. We had one last epic day of the electoral process ahead of us, and although it wasn't a sure thing, we really thought Kerry could win it.

Let's look at how that all turned out. After the election, Eli said (all quotes again via email):

I bet Swift blows up on the launch pad just to make this one of the worst months ever.

Vinay, after reading coverage of the election:

I want to stab myself in the eye. A lot.

Oh! God! My eye hurts!

and Melinda, summing it all up for us:

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCKETY FUCK.

I know the polls look good right now, but if there's any year in which something could go completely haywire in the next five days, it's this year. Make sure you vote and get out the vote, and try not to relax -- or even take any deep breaths -- until Wednesday. I don't want to spend another election night watching it all slip away. I want happy emails in my inbox this year. I want change, dammit.

The Shining Rays

I don't want to jinx anything (too late!) but the Rays prevailing over the Red Sox has given me hope about Obama's prospects...

Let me explain.

For tracking the polls, the best place by far is fivethirtyeight.com, which uses some hardcore statistics to combine polling and demographic data to forecast the election results. The guy who runs the site, Nate Silver, has a day job doing hardcore statistics for Baseball Prospectus. Way back in February, Nate forecast that the Rays would be the most improved team this year. And he was right!

In the ALCS (Nate was not so bold as to predict the Rays would make the post-season, let alone the World Series) the Rays were up 3 games to 1 against the Red Sox. Building a 7-0 lead in the 7th inning, the Rays were roughly where Obama is right now. But it ain't over til it's over. And the Red Sox came back and won the game. And won comfortably in Game 6. It looked like an epic collapse was at hand...but in the end, the Rays prevailed!

Similar to the calculation of safe lead in college basketball, an extremely unlikely series of events has to occur for McCain to prevail now. And the Rays/Sox showed us how unlikely that is.

(Of course, I probably jinxed everything now. But if Nate was right about the Rays...)

The Climate of Fake America

Until last December, I had lived my entire life in the Upper Midwest (Michigan and Ohio) and the mid-Atlantic (Pennsylvania). When I was getting ready to move to California, lots of people -- friends, family, and strangers alike -- made all sorts of denigrating comments about California and Californians. I was warned against becoming a crazy driver, becoming a hippie, dying in an earthquake, turning into a self-absorbed asshole in general, you name it.

But once I got here, I saw that Californians couldn't be lovelier. When I say I grew up in a small town in Ohio, they don't say, "Oh god, how did you ever survive?" They say, "Hey, I was in Cleveland recently, and had a good time." When I say that I come from a religious family, and grew up going to church weekly, they don't say, "Ew! How oppressive!"; they talk about their own religious experiences (or lack thereof).

All this "real America" rhetoric from Republicans has rankled me. Growing up, my family was one of the few liberal families in a conservative town, and those "real Americans" would say awful things about us. We ate dinner together every single night, but apparently lacked "family values" because we were Democrats. Now I live in what is unequivocally not real America, and all the fake Americans I know have much more goodwill towards the rest of the country -- not just the parts that look and think like they do.

The culture wars have become one-sided, which bizarrely gives me hope. The McCain campaign has been using them as a last-chance tactic, and it doesn't appear to be working. If Obama wins, they might actually be over.

Ohio will always haunt me

Right now, I am so mortified to be from a small town in Northeast Ohio. Strongsville is a mere 12 miles up the road from where I grew up, and I haven't watched the video, because I'm afraid I'll recognize someone.

This is no exaggeration -- I am not surprised at all by what people in the crowd were saying.

I am really curious as to how Medina County will vote in this election. Summit and Cuyahoga* Counties will definitely go for Obama. Wayne and Ashland Counties will definitely go for McCain. But Medina County is on that border, and is growing more and more due to sprawl from Cleveland and Akron. For a while I thought that was enough to tip it to Obama, but now, with that video, and the conversations that my mother tries to avoid yet overhears, it seems that I'd forgotten a lot about my hometown in the past 11 years.

*Okay, Strongsville is actually in Cuyahoga county -- along the southwest edge of the county, and at the edge of the Cleveland suburbs. In general, the suburbs to the south and west of Cleveland are more conservative than the suburbs to the east, which is probably correlated with how white the south/west suburbs are. Anyway, if you take Strongsville, and make it more rural and more conservative, you get Medina County. Whee. (And thus ends this edition of At This Point You Should Just Be Glad Becky Hasn't Started on About School Funding in Ohio.)

The Game Would Just Be Redundant

Like many people, I've been gleefully looking forward to the VP debate. I was going to make a drinking game of it, but realized it was nigh-on impossible for two reasons:

1. If you drink every time Sarah Palin says something incoherent, or every time Joe Biden is historically inaccurate, you'll be hammered in fifteen minutes.
   
   
2. You're already going to want to drink every time Sarah Palin says something incoherent, or every time Joe Biden is historically inaccurate.
   

So raise your glass of Yuengling if Scranton gets a shout-out, but other than that, you have no choice but to make some popcorn and brace yourselves for a bumpy ride.

Signs of the times

The Obama campaign is all but ignoring lawn signs in some battleground states -- so they can focus on silly things like voter registration -- and it's starting to backfire in Virginia. From my anecdotal survey of two voters, it's also starting to piss off Ohio supporters, too.

I think the campaign is underestimating how emotionally attached people are to signs, especially in swing states or conservative areas. It's not just about declaring your support: it's about saying "Fuck you"* to your neighbors, because you're freaking tired of hearing the 19 percent-ers impugn your patriotism.

* I am not implying that my mother would actually say "Fuck you" to anyone.

Polling the family

Talking to my parents about the election is always interesting -- Eli and I are in California, surrounded by Obama supporters, so we are perhaps overly optimistic about the election. Meanwhile, my parents are in Ohio, surrounded by conservatives, and, well:

Down here, Friday afternoon is when you wash the sheets. Saturday is when you hang them out. Sunday is when you wear them.

(Quote from a supposed Obama supporter. BUT STILL. I can see why my parents are so fed up and pessimistic.)

Waiting (for 11/4/08) is the hardest part

Yesterday morning, we saw Joe Biden in Canton, which was entertaining (despite starting 1 1/2 hours late). There were two opening speakers: Governor Ted Strickland, which was a pleasant surprise, and then . . . John Boccieri. Who? Well, he's running for Congress in a district where the 30-year incumbent Republican is retiring, and he has a pretty good chance of winning.

Plus, he released this awesome video some time ago:

I wish I could vote for him!

I don't understand 25% of the country! But not the 25% you might think

I don't particularly care or worry about the 20-25% of the population who still approves of Bush. They're lost causes.

What does concern me, if you believe the polls, is the 25%-ish of the population who disapproves of Bush but is planning on voting for McCain. I am baffled by them! When has there been any indication that McCain will change the direction that this country is going in? Not in 2006, when he voted for the Military Commissions Act, which lets the president authorize pretty much everything. Not in 2007, when he voted for Bush policies 95% of the time. Not in 2008, when he explicitly voted against a ban on waterboarding.

He even hired Bush's speechwriter from 2000 (start at about 4:50):


(In a related note, Jason Jones has been growing on me!)

Arugula for all!

While the Obama campaign has had lots of fun mocking McCain for not knowing how many houses he had, the McCain campaign came back with . . . an arugula reference. Because a year ago, Obama had the nerve to mention the price of arugula.

I find it unbelievably frustrating that worrying about the price of vegetables makes one elitist. I don't know why someone would take pride in not being able to spell it. It's healthy! It's tasty! And it is a goddamn crime in this country that organic arugula is $4 for 5 ounces (or $7/lb for non-organic), while mac and cheese is $1.58 a box. Vegetables should not be luxuries, and I wish someone would actually say that for once.

Punk'd!

Yeah, we got punked.

But Biden has had two of the funniest lines of the campaign, so this should be fun. With

Your kitchen table is like mine, you sit there at night after you put the kids to bed and you talk about what you need. That's not a worry John McCain has to worry about. He'll have to figure out which of the seven kitchen tables to sit at.

and

Rudy Giuliani. There's only three things he mentions in a sentence -- a noun, a verb, and 9/11.

I can't wait for the VP debates!

Those are some elitist bootstraps, I guess

Plenty of bloggers and journalists, not to mention McCain himself, have called Obama "elitist" at various points throughout the campaign.

I would just like to point out that in politics right now, the two greatest examples of living the American Dream -- of starting from nothing and working hard from there -- are Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. I don't know why a grandmother in Hawaii makes Obama an elitist, while two houses on Coronado Island doesn't make McCain and elitist, but whatever. And do not even get me started on arugula. There will be a whole 'nother post coming about why caring about the price of arugula makes you explicitly not an elitist.

Running to the center is not leadership

Gail Collins is correct when she notes

You liked Barack because you thought he could get us past the old brain-dead politics, right?

But those of us disappointed about the FISA vote aren't disappointed because we don't understand what a compromise is. I'm disappointed because Obama wasn't only talking about bipartisanship and building a consensus -- he was talking about reducing the influence of big business in politics. He has a strong history of supporting civil liberties. I had hoped that an Obama administration would be less corrupt and bloated than the current executive branch; now, I'm not so sure.

Last week I realized that I wouldn't exactly be able let my ACLU membership lapse after an Obama victory. And even though the Democratic party is slowly limping to the left, it's going to be a long, slow battle. I'm hoping someone has their eye on Dianne Feinstein's Senate seat for 2010, because I swear I am ready to starting working on that one now.

Now batting for Pedro Borbon...Manny Mota! (mota! mota!)

I'll admit it, I've been spending way too much time paying attention to the crazy political goings-on this season. Even after the endless Bataan Death March Obama-Clinton showdown, I've continued to pay attention. But the relentless echo-chamber, especially on the right, but also on the left, is completely out of control, and blogs have made it worse. As has been pointed out many times, it really doesn't matter what anybody actually says. From Al Gore "inventing the internet" to Wesley Clark "insulting McCain's service" to Hillary Clinton "advocating the assassination of Obama", it doesn't matter that none of these things actually happened. But all of these events can at least be directly attributable to deliberate misquotations, distortions, and spin.

But two recent spin-ups have occurred that were not even based on a mis-quotation, but appeared spontaneously from the vacuum. On one side was Obama's "complete reversal" on Iraq, and on the other was the "terrorist fist-jab" (which does have the advantage of adding a new entertaining term to the lexicon.)

First, Obama on Iraq. Suddenly the blogosphere was abuzz with right-wing claims of Obama reversing completely on Iraq, and saying we'll be there forever, a-la McCain, etc. So this claim of reversing course on Iraq? It comes from sources like this. Which has great statements like:

In Baghdad, Mr. Obama will get a chance to meet with Ambassador Crocker, who is leading negotiations with the Iraqi government on the presence of American troops. Mr. Crocker will likely tell the senator that our position is not to keep bases permanently but to lease them for 10 years from the Iraqi government, whose lawmakers, he'll report, privately hope the bases will be used as barracks for our GIs.

So this is all based on what will happen? Are you serious? But all it takes is one blog to say something, and then you have a reference for whatever you might want to say. And it echoes back and forth and you don't even need to distort an existing quotation!

Second, and much less serious, is the "terrorist fist jab". Where did this (admittedly great) phrase first come from? I first heard about it from Andrew Sullivan, who linked to this posting at Slate which claimed that Cal Thomas at Human Events called the Barack-Michelle pound "a Hezbollah style fist-jabbing." A subsequent edit at Slate admitted that Cal Thomas had not made that accusation, but it was instead one of the commenters...but which one? As best I can tell, the only comments on Cal Thomas's post referring to a "Hezbollah style fist-jabbing" were left-wingers responding to the ludicrous accusation. Somebody, somewhere, accused Cal Thomas of a ridiculous statement...commenters responded without actually RTFA...and everything started cross-posting and a meme was born.

But it was (of course) Fox News who brought it to the air and cemented "terrorist fist jab" in our language. Thank you, E. D. Hill.

But that just raises more rumors!

While I'm glad that the Obama campaign is ready to combat the crazy rumors about Obama and his family, I'm disappointed that the campaign was pressured into releasing Obama's birth certificate. (Not that anything will ever be enough for some people.) And no matter how much people insist that they just want to know if his given name was "Barack" or "Barry", or if his middle name was originally "Muhammad", I don't think that the mildest of those rumors would be flying around if his name was John* Smith.

Either the commenters haven't realized that Barack Hussein Obama is just as likely to be a natural-born U.S. citizen as John Smith, or they're aware of it and very, very bitter. Sorry, but the guy butchering names at Ellis Island retired in the last century.

What could people possibly ask for next? I'm afraid to ask, as it's only June, and the crazy xenophobes have plenty of time to write breathless emails about Obama being Muslim/Kenyan/racist/OMGBLACKWITHFUNNYNAME!

* I realize that there have also been some quibbles about McCain's eligibility for President, as he was born on a military base in Panama. But the Senate voted to declare him a natural-born citizen, and no one is disputing his birth name or his place of birth.

That was MY template!

So I was distressed today to see a blog posting on the McCain campaign PowerPoint on a "Path to Victory" (warning: NSFW). Apart from the ridiculous strategizing going on at the McCain camp (I'm not too worried after seeing their plan) I was surprised that the McCain people don't actually use PowerPoint...they use Keynote!

And not only that, they use the same template that I do!

I guess I need to find a new template.