Tag: 2008 election

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.

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.