Category: politics

hey obama, get control of your message

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

way too many people are going off the reservation in the obama campaign.

we’ve had the guy talking to the canadians about nafta. hillary, of course, did the same thing, but that’s not my concern here.

then this samantha power person called hillary a monster and had to resign.

now we find out that she told the bbc that obama might waffle on the troop withdrawals:

He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. Senator…. You can’t make a commitment in March 2008 about what circumstances will be like in January of 2009…

good lord.

say what you want about hillary (and most of what i say is bad), but at least she and all of her people are rigidly disciplined, on message, and on the same page. even if what they have to say is odious, at least it is coordinated.

obama himself may have pretty good message discipline, but his people are all over the map.

his campaign is starting to look like amateur hour, coinciding with the first real pressure he’s faced as a candidate.

they need to get professional, and fast.

update: mark halperin at time magazine addresses this very subject.

Barack Hussein Obama…and other Semitically Named American Heroes

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

a wonderful article investigates, with elegance, erudition, and wit, the origins of barack hussein obama’s name.

from the article:

Now let us take the name “Hussein.” It is from the Semitic word, hasan, meaning “good” or “handsome.” Husayn is the diminutive, affectionate form.

Barack Obama’s middle name is in honor of his grandfather, Hussein, a secular resident of Nairobi. Americans may think of Saddam Hussein when they hear the name, but that is like thinking of Stalin when you hear the name Joseph. There have been lots of Husseins in history, from the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, a hero who touched the historian Gibbon, to King Hussein of Jordan, one of America’s most steadfast allies in the 20th century. The author of the beloved American novel, The Kite Runner, is Khaled Hosseini.

But in Obama’s case, it is just a reference to his grandfather.

this article is a must, must, must read.

msnbc.com completely bites; obama shines anyway

~ jamie ~ 2 Comments

watched the second half of the final debate last night.

didn’t watch the first half, except in stutters, with constant “buffering…please wait” messages flashing across my screen. it’s not my internet access — cnn streamed their two debates to me without a hitch. and when i finally abandoned all hope and went to wonkette.com to read a liveblog of the debate, i found that everyone else in the comment strings was having the same problem.

and the commenters recommended cleveland.com as an alternative, which worked perfectly, and i watched the second half with no hiccups whatsoever.

and as a capper, each time i reloaded msnbc.com’s feed, the prestitial commercial streamed perfectly and then the live coverage didn’t work.

good job there, people. if you are going to heavily promote accessibility to your debates, then make sure you have the bandwidth to do the job. failing that, at least make sure that the audio streams continuously, even if the video drops frames. last night’s feed just froze constantly. it’s always encouraging when the national network is outplanned by the local affiliate. but thanks for all of the commercials. i’ll run out and buy some preparation h, or whatever.

not that the msnbc debate was well-planned anyway. brian williams, and especially tim russert, asked inane and poorly formed questions, and repeatedly got in the way of the candidates and made the event about themselves, and not about the candidates and the issues. here’s how to run a debate: ask a well-thought out question, and shut up while people answer it. at some points, i thought the debate was between tim russert and hillary clinton, or tim russert and barack obama.

and, can we cue up the right video, please? jeebus. that was so unfair to hillary clinton, but both candidates handled it gracefully.

in general, i found clinton to be grating and overly aggressive to no apparent positive point. perhaps her (to me) off-key performance was prompted by the out-of-bounds questioning, but barack seemed to handle the same aggressive questioning with aplomb. that tells me whose cool demeanor i want sitting across the negotiating table from tinpot nutbag dictators.

i keep asking myself if i am watching these debates with a view askew, slanted toward the candidate i am supporting. but every time i approach her with an open mind, clinton just disappoints.

obama is just a cool customer. to me his vision and demeanor trumps purported “experience”.

last night’s debate

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

watched the debate last night, the same way we did last time, since we have no cable tv.

like last time, i liked hillary. she’s intelligent, measured, informed, and projects enthusiasm, power, and competence.

problem for her is, so does obama. two great candidates. and what i’m reminded of is the cycle i went through after the last debate — she impressed me then as well.

and then her campaign kicked in, with all her (to plagiarize a phrase) silly politics. obama plagiarized his speeches, and his wife michelle doesn’t love america, and we’re going to steal his pledged delegates, and what not.

silly.

i liked her a lot after the last debate, and then she (or more accurately, her minions) completely turned me off. if she can’t control her message and campaign in a disciplined and effective manner, why should i believe that her governance will be any better?

ready on day one, indeed. she’s not even ready now to run an organized campaign, after two years of running for this office.

it’s too bad that the discourse of her campaign doesn’t match the level of her personal discourse.

quick question

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

if the republicans have any real nasty, smoking gun-type dirt on barack obama, why would they save it for a general election? why wouldn’t they get it out there now in hopes of knocking out obama in favor of hillary?

hillary, about whom they have warehouses of dirt to unload. and you know they’d rather run mccain against hillary, who they can (and would) beat, rather than run mccain against obama.

i don’t think there’s a lot of real dirt out there to be had. i think that obama smartly has gotten out ahead of any real nasty revelations. the drugs, the rezko thing, and all.

at least i hope so.

obama: looking back, looking forward

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

from kos, a great snapshot of where obama stands, how he got there, where the race is probably going, and why we should take a deep breath and appreciate the race lasting a bit longer.

from the article:

Now I know people will be calling for her to quit the race, but I hope she rides it out through Ohio and Texas. I think Ohio needs a good dose of infrastructure building, and this primary will help make that happen. Same with Texas, where a solid ground operation can pave the way for some serious people-powered action in the Senate race with our man Rick Noriega.

It would be great if this thing went to Pennsylvania for the same reason, but I doubt it’ll get that far. I’ll call it right now — baring a major gaffe or disaster, Obama will win both Texas and Ohio and that will be that.

from his lips to god’s ears.

please…make…her…stop

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

is this hillary’s attempt at mobilizing young voters via viral video?

if so, it’s hard to imagine a more tone-deaf attempt.

if not, the campaign should have had the foresight to not let a camera anywhere near this spectacle. or, indeed, not produce the spectacle in the first place.

i can live with that

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

so mitt romney is out, which means that john mccain is the republican nominee.

I’ll probably still vote for whoever the democratic nominee is, although if hillary is the nominee i will give mccain a good hard look. if obama is the nominee then there’s no question — he’s my man.

(and to all that vice-presidential talk floated by the clintons to lessen obama’s perceived stature: don’t do it. i don’t want him tainted by them in any way, and anyway, he’d be #3 behind bill)

as someone said to me last night, it’s nice to know all your choices are decent candidates and you are choosing the best from among them, when usually you are holding your nose and picking the best of a bad lot.

there are few issues with which i am in complete agreement with john mccain, but most are moderate enough that i would not drive off a cliff if he were elected. we need a different direction in this country, and he would be different enough for me. he’s certainly a different republican than most we’ve been seeing, and his fical conservatism is right up my alley. god knows that just the fact that he drives right-wingers crazy is enough for me.

for me to actively vote for him, hillary would have to be the nominee, and i’d have to consider whether that fiscal conservatism was enough of a mitigating factor to outweigh his negatives. versus whether hillary’s positives on the issues are enough of a mitigating factor to outweigh what would be four/eight more years of slash-and-burn politics.

still, today, with these particular three little indians remaining standing, i’m pretty optimistic about the future of my country. each of the three has at least something i can like.

not bad after the last eight years of nonsense, i’d say.

mike gravel, i hardly knew ye

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

voted for barack obama this morning, as i thought i would.

but then, of course, with perfect timing, i later ran across this jezebel.com interview with mike gravel.

i vaguely remember a few digg stories about how well gravel did in early debates. and, like some of the story’s commenters, i once did an online candidate chooser, and his name came up on top along with dennis kucinich. and, much like them, i paid attention to kucinich, ignored gravel, and figured out how closely i agreed with the candidates i was leaning towards. name recognition value, and all.

but damn, is it a shame. gravel makes a lot of sense.

from the article:

What I want us to do is to take our place as an equal in the world and commit to the United Nations and work for world governance and world peace. We now have globalization of the economy; of science; of the ability to destroy the planet; and of the environment. You can’t just turn back time. [Ron Paul is] steeped in that redneck philosophy that we can’t give up sovereignty. I’m suggesting that we move some of that sovereignty away from the nation-state structure and into a world governance structure. We will never have peace on earth until we have global governance. The United Nations is a good charter but it’s not functioning on its charter, it’s become paralyzed and non-functional as states seek to use it to protect sovereignty at all costs. That’s not how to get to world peace.

now how many candidates are calling for world government?

or this:

If you vote for power over substance, then you won’t ever get either. You’ve got to vote for substance regardless of who you think will win, because you’ll see that substance will win out in the end.

damn right, and the reason i voted for rev. al in the last presidential primary.

so, why didn’t i vote for mike gravel? damn good question. as it turns out, he wasn’t on the ballot in new york. too expensive and complicated, i suppose. and even if he was on the ballot, i’m not sure i would have voted for him. his main issue is to start having ballot initiatives on the federal level, and my initial reaction to that, without researching, is disaster. i lived in florida for too long, where every goofball organization that wants to ban gay marriage or whatever can just bypass the legislature.

i’m glad i voted for obama, especially since it’s so close with hillary. i’d say that i voted for a viable candidate (obama) rather than potentially voting for a non-viable candidate (gravel, for instance), but that’s a dangerous path.

i don’t regret my vote.

much.

listening to hillary

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

kirk and i don’t have cable tv, and our tv doesn’t have a tuner, so no television for us. but we have wanted to see one of the debates, so we tuned in to last night’s debate between hillary clinton and barack obama. tuned in via cnn.com, which provides a live feed.

a very tiny live feed, in a window that can’t be made full screen on the computer. a computer which is maybe 10 feet away from the couch. so, rather than crowding around the computer to watch micro-hillary and mini-obama, we just turned up the sound and listened.

and, i have to admit, hillary didn’t bug me as much when i wasn’t looking at her. kirk said the same thing. i’m sure it’s my prejudgment of her that i need to get past. but she sounded strong, effective, wise, informed, and remarkably relaxed. and she had the best line of the night:

“It did take a Clinton to clean after the first Bush and I think it might take another one to clean up after the second Bush.”

a bit too pat and rehearsed and poll-tested, but still, there’s a point there.

i’m still supporting obama. hillary still exhausts me. and, i never thought i’d say this, but after bill clinton’s recent antics i’d prefer to keep him away from the oval office in any capacity.

but.

i think i could live with her being president.

i think i could live with john mccain as well, though that bears further investigation.

obama would be a dream.

morning in america, indeed.

update: on the other hand, ann coulter said yesterday that if mccain is nominated, she will actively support hillary. maybe i need to rethink all this.

confirmed: i’m supporting barack obama

~ jamie ~ 2 Comments

i’ve been thinking about supporting obama. i liked his book, and following his campaign i’ve liked what i’ve seen.

two things have pushed me over the edge toward full-fledged support.

the first was caroline kennedy’s endorsement yesterday.

I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.

she doesn’t mince words. it doesn’t get much more direct, or moving, than that.

the second thing was in today’s paper, a story on gay democrats and the primaries:

In an address last week honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at a black church in Atlanta, Senator Obama made waves by lecturing the audience about homophobia. “We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them,” he said during the speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. King served as co-pastor with his father.

Joe Solmonese, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay lobbying group, said he thought Mr. Obama’s speech was the first time a presidential candidate had brought up gay issues in front of a nongay audience without being prompted to do so. “This is dramatically refreshing,” he said. “It’s a great day when we can look at a field of candidates and determine that we are comfortable with all of them on gay rights and move on to other issues.”

i’m not a single issue voter. but gay issues are important to me, and obama’s choice of raising of this issue in this arena shows real leadership. it shows he puts his truth ahead of his politics. it’s a telling anecdote, and that’s enough for me.

stimulate this, congress

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

i like getting money as much as the next guy.

and a $600 check will certainly be welcome, and if/when i get my stimulus check from congress, i will put it toward a credit card balance.

but the idea that we have to send everyone checks to stimulate the economy is nonsense. you’d think it was an election year, the way that congress is nakedly pandering to the electorate.

perhaps stimulus is needed, although i maintain foresight and planning would have been better. but given this bunch of fools, that’s too much to ask. it was apparent to anyone with half a brain that the real estate runup was a bubble that would burst, just like the internet bubble and, indeed, tulip mania before it. wiser people than me could have figured out how to avoid all this, although i’m sure that most of the people who saw it coming were busy figuring ways to profit from the downturn.

i’m no financial genius, but even i knew better than to get one of these foolish interest-only balloon-payment mortgages. we got a thirty-year fixed mortgage for an apartment we could comfortably afford on just one of our salaries, in case anything drastic ever happened. and now i’m expected to smile while my tax dollars bail out idiots whose greed led them to buy more house than they could possibly afford, signing mortgages they now claim not to have understood. know what? you signed it. your decision. your fault. you pay the consequences, not me.

but i know that we live in a financially interconnected world, and if everything goes to hell i will be affected, and we’re all in this together, and what not. it’s offensive to me that our prosperity, and our financial rescue, will come at the hands of countries like china, who finances our debt while millions of their own people live in abject poverty. every time i buy something frivolous i don’t need, it comes directly from the blood of some poverty-stricken third-world person.

but, i’m comfortable, and it’s easy to ignore that, so i do, along with everyone else. when will the ultimate reckoning come? someday. i hope not in my lifetime. at some point, though, this country’s prosperity will come to a sudden, screeching halt, and it won’t be pretty.

in the meantime, we will stimulate the economy with $600 checks, plus $300 extra per child for the breeders. and now the retirees are complaining that they will be left out, so i’m sure someone will see to them as well.

michael kinsley and joe klein touch on this in their columns in time magazine this week. i especially like kinsley’s take, comparing the situation to a drunk’s bender:

I think we should sober up first. Plenty of people are still partying as if it were 2006. Right-wing radio talk shows are still dominated by ads for second mortgages. Every day’s mail still brings fat envelopes from companies begging to issue you a credit card. Every TV commercial that isn’t about some prescription drug for a disease you never heard of (but may well have, now that they mention it) seems to be for payday loans. Always borrow responsibly, they say. A little late for that.

Here’s a thought. Suppose we don’t go further into debt in the name of fiscal stimulus. Suppose we stop selling ourselves piece by piece to foreigners (and suppose we stop blaming the foreigners for problems of our own making). Suppose we use taxing and spending to show the world that we can behave responsibly, see how the world responds to that, and let the Federal Reserve Board supply the stimulus with lower interest rates. If we must have a fiscal stimulus, let’s make sure it’s not too enjoyable. Build some rapid transit; don’t give away any tax breaks.

joe klein comes to much the same conclusion. build some infrastucture. use the money to insulate buildings, make things more energy efficient, build mass transit. give us some energy independence, so we can perhaps avoid some of the troubles that got us where we are now. that’s too much vision to ask from our oilman president, of course, but we can dream.

in the meantime, i guess i’ll wait for my payola to arrive.

my florida friends and relatives: don’t vote for giuliani

~ jamie ~ 2 Comments

it doesn’t look like he will win, and it looks like losing may knock him out of the race for president.

but, my fellow floridians, take it from a former floridian who lived in new york under giuliani for a time: you don’t want this guy as your president.

the new york times summed it up this morning:

The real Mr. Giuliani, whom many New Yorkers came to know and mistrust, is a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man who saw no need to limit police power. Racial polarization was as much a legacy of his tenure as the rebirth of Times Square.

Mr. Giuliani’s arrogance and bad judgment are breathtaking. When he claims fiscal prudence, we remember how he ran through surpluses without a thought to the inevitable downturn and bequeathed huge deficits to his successor. He fired Police Commissioner William Bratton, the architect of the drop in crime, because he couldn’t share the limelight. He later gave the job to Bernard Kerik, who has now been indicted on fraud and corruption charges.

The Rudolph Giuliani of 2008 first shamelessly turned the horror of 9/11 into a lucrative business, with a secret client list, then exploited his city’s and the country’s nightmare to promote his presidential campaign.

if you are voting in the republican primary, and you want someone who will best defend this country from its enemies — pick anyone but this guy, who is in bed with many of our enemies for personal profit.

anyone.

please.

this-and-that

~ jamie ~ 3 Comments

» today is anniversary #8 with kirk. you can read all about it. love ya baby.

» next tuesday is the stevenote at macworld, which means lots of new apple stuff to potentially spend money on. in case you just stumbled here, i’m a big apple fan. what could get me to blow the dust off of my wallet? perhaps an updated 3g iphone — kirk could get the new one and i’d take his old one. perhaps something more useful than apple tv to hook up to the hdtv, since we don’t have cable tv. maybe it’s the whatever-they’ve-come-up-with-that-noone-has-thought-of. maybe the wallet stays intact.

» i’m starting to get more political again — i find myself going to more and more political news sites and blogs. i get geared up every election cycle, and this one promises to be no different. i’m sure to bore you with my mumblings and rantings, but i gotta be me. still liking that obama guy. but i may change my mind. maybe i’ll even vote republican this year. it could happen. you never know.

» via kottke, a great article by kevin smith about his new movie, “zach and miri make a porno”. anything by kevin smith is a must-see for me (chasing amy is on my top-ten favorite films of all time), but with a title like that i can hardly wait.

» have a great weekend! i mean it. no excuses.

hillary exhausts me

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

so against all odds, she won in new hampshire. by, shocking to me but also instructive, winning the blue-collar vote.

i still like obama, and frankly i like having hillary as my senator but i’m not sure about her as president. i really think we need a less partisan breath of fresh air. after 20 years of bush-clinton-bush, another clinton strikes me as a bit too dynastic. and i think hillary would be divisive, and stir up too much of the left-right-red state-blue state conflict. we’d spend four or eight more years with too much carping and not enough unity. and we’d all have to hear about vince foster again, and all that clinton baggage crap.

that said, i’d rather have hillary than any of the republicans. but that’s a real hobson’s choice.

my next task is this, though — all her blue-collar support intrigues me. i need to look deeper.

still liking that obama guy

~ jamie ~ 2 Comments

i haven’t weighed in on this as yet, but i’ve been keeping my eye on obama. i’m on his mailing list. liked his last book. and with his victory last night in the iowa caucuses, things are looking good for him.

from the article:

Mr. Obama’s victory in this overwhelmingly white state was a powerful answer to the question of whether America was prepared to vote for a black person for president. What was remarkable was the extent to which race was not a factor in this contest. Surveys of voters entering the caucuses also indicated that he had won the support of many independents, a development that his aides used to rebut suggestions from rivals that he could not win a general election. In addition, voters clearly rejected the argument that Mr. Obama does not have sufficient experience to take over the White House, a central point pressed by Mrs. Clinton.

that addresses two of my biggest concerns. i want a winner, and i want a leader. perhaps obama is both.

i’ll vote my conscience in the primaries…i always do. but it would be nice to see a democrat back in the white house.

keeping my eye on you, obama.