Random Political Roundup

The New York Times has a piece today about the Republican party, and at the end, about the city of Seattle. Having grown up in the city's suburbs, and having lived atop Queen Anne Hill for a while between undergrad and grad school, I knew long ago the city's political leanings, but I agree; it would be nice to have some more conservative voices around, questioning the status quo.

Now that I live in Berkeley, I enjoy the fact that I'm not going to be getting into political arguments with my neighbors (though, I'm sure there are plenty of Nader-Gonzalez supporters around, whom I completely respect and with whom I agree with on some points). But my choices for mayor were: Tom Bates, current Berkeley mayor and Democrat and Shirley Dean, former Berkeley mayor and Democrat. Yep, it's Democrat versus Democrat. For a while, it looked like Zachary Running Wolf would run, but he wasn't on the ballot, so I have no idea what happened with that. How did I decide? Right or wrong, I chose Dean over Bates, because Bates once stole a bunch of copies of the Daily Cal (that's the university's student newspaper) because the paper endorsed Dean. As someone who once interned at the Student Press Law Center, I could not vote for someone who did that.

So one thing is for sure this year: Berkeley will have a Democratic mayor, and a mayor who has been Berkeley's mayor before.

Another thing that is for sure: little Damon Weaver will make a great newscaster someday. In fact, I think he's better now than most of the newscasters on today. And, like him or not, Biden seems to have a firm grasp on that little document called the Constitution. I've moved countless times in the last ten years, but one of the few things that's made every single move with me (except the one to Japan) has been a pocket copy of the Constitution that I received from the Girl Scouts when I was much younger than I am now. It does not say that the Vice President "can get in there with the Senate and make good policy changes."

And if anyone's curious, I voted against Proposition 8. I know a number of homosexuals, some of whom are married. I know homosexuals who have children who are far better parents than my own (heterosexual, married forever) parents were. The idea that a family is a "mother and a father and children" is ridiculous. Doesn't that exclude single parents? Plenty of kids grow up in single-family homes and turn out fine.

And the idea that gay marriage somehow "hurts" the institution of marriage is similarly ridiculous. Does your neighbor's divorce hurt your marriage? Do your neighbor's marital problems hurt your marriage? The ads I see now are all about how gay marriage will have to be taught in schools. First, why is that scary? There will undoubtedly be children who live in same-sex parent households in those classrooms, whether gay marriage is legal or not. (The homosexual parents I know are not legally married.) Second, talking about gay marriage in school does nothing to "encourage" children to be homosexual. People are who they are. Let them be. And if you're that worried about your own marriage, maybe you should stop spending all your time worrying about two gay men you'll never meet and start worrying about your own spouse and how you're treating her.

Ahh ... so much has happened, but it feels like nothing at all has

In mid-September, I took a business trip to New Jersey for a couple of days. In the airport, waiting for my flight home, as I watched Sarah Palin on the terminal TV, I mentioned to my traveling companion that despite my serious disagreements with this woman's politics, I thought she had very nice clothes. An elderly man sitting nearby heard me, pointed at the screen, and said, "that's our next president." I responded, "Let's hope not!"

Well, now we all know why her clothes were so admirable. This whole story irritates me for so many reasons. Yes, she probably needed clothes for the campaign trail. I suppose the RNC thought it was permissible for them to use their donors' money to buy such clothes. If I were a donor to the RNC, I would not agree. But, seriously, if you know you're going to have to disclose these purchases, why would you have made them with campaign money? AND, why would you have made them so conspicuous? $150,000 is a LOT of money for clothes, whether they end up going to charity or not. (I can see it now — a charity accepting a Valentino jacket that cost $2,500, and then doing what with it? If they're smart, they'll sell it on eBay, and use the proceeds to buy at least fifteen nice jackets for the people they're trying to help.)

Aside from the RNC's stupidity, there were so many other ways to have solved Ms. Palin's "problem". First, even if we assume the Palins couldn't afford the $150K, I am fairly certain they could have afforded something say, one-tenth the cost. This amount would have had them nicely outfitted from stores like Nordstrom or Ann Taylor, where you can buy very nice silk and wool suits for women for about $300 - $500 each. Second, if the campaign cared so much about designer labels, couldn't the McCains have paid for this stuff? According to one estimate, Cindy McCain's outfit for the night John McCain gave his acceptance speech was worth approximately $300,000 ($280,000 of that was for her diamond earrings). Oh, wait, maybe someone suggested the idea of paying for the clothes to the McCains, but the McCains decided it was socialism.

Two things that cannot get donated to charity are the services of Ms. Palin's makeup artist and Ms. Palin's hairstylist, which cost about $30,000 for the first two weeks of October alone. How the HELL do a makeup artist and hair stylist cost that much? Ms. Palin looks naturally attractive enough to me to not need much makeup in the first place. Uggghh, this part really really irritates me because I see absolutely zero justification for it. And again, using campaign money for it?

No matter what people make of this clothing/hair/makeup mess, I wonder seriously what is going on within the Republican party. Some people see Palin as a future "star" of the party, but so many conservative columnists/pundits/whatever have come out against her. David Brooks called her a "fatal cancer". Prominent Republicans are bailing on the McCain campaign, in large part because of the choice of Palin.

The only way this election doesn't leave the Republican party in shambles is if McCain somehow wins. If he can win despite all the ridiculousness of this campaign, and despite the ridiculousness of his VP choice, it will be either the strangest mandate for an ideology I've ever seen, or the saddest comment on the state of the American people's ability to think critically about important issues I've ever seen.

The thing that really gets me, though, is that the Republican Convention railed against the "angry left", but which of the two tickets comes off as angry when you watch? If you watch Obama rallies, he discourages even booing of McCain. ("We don't need that," he says. "What we need to do is vote.") It took the press to remind McCain/Palin that they were tacitly approving of hate speech by not saying anything to the people who yelled out "kill him" when they brought up Obama.

This was the same convention that spent its time insulting "community organizers". Yeah, people who try to improve their communities, they deserve to be despised. Keeping kids off drugs should be left to the markets!

Alas, though, we still have a little more than a week to go. Who knows what might happen before the fourth of November. I've already voted, so I am more than ready for this to be over with. It'll be nice to take a deep breath again.

In other, completely unrelated news, my paper shredder tipped over last Sunday night and landed on the top of my left foot. Arrgghh, it hurt, but the doctor doesn't think it's broken. He gave me a cane, which I have learned is absolutely no fun to try and use. It was my first-ever trip to an ER, and despite the fact that the one I went to was clean and modern and the people were all very nice, I hope I don't have to go back anytime soon.

Fox News: The world isn't fair, and we are becoming mentally imbalanced.

This video is hilarious.

I know it's a little grainy, but look out for three things: the guy in the back whose wife (presumably) forces his raised hand down, the one hand that goes up for McCain turns out to be the REPORTER, and the fact that the diners laugh at said reporter for saying the room is "split".

Seriously, it needs to RAIN!!!

It hasn't rained but once, and only for a couple of hours, since February. So I suppose the fact that flames are now engulfing Angel Island and that it took ten minutes for the fire to go from two acres to fifteen acres were inevitable. I can see the island burning from my windows and my balcony. There is a tremendous amount of smoke.

This isn't what I learned about in high school civics class ...

I vote absentee because it's convenient, and so that I'm not surprised by ballot measures when I show up on election day.

I received my ballot this week, and here's a puzzler: Measure LL for the City of Berkeley: "Shall Ordinance No. 6,958-N.S., Repealing and Reenacting Berkeley Municipal Code (BMC) Chapter 3.24 (Landmarks Preservation), passed by City Council, granting the Landmarks Preservation Commission new authority to prohibit, instead of suspend, demolition of historic resources; eliminating property owners' approval in establishing historic districts; and substantially revising procedures for designating historic resources (including limiting reconsideration of properties not designated) and regulating alteration or demolition of historic resources, subject to appeal to the Council, be adopted?"

I have almost no idea what that means, but the idea of "eliminating property owners' approval in establishing historic districts" seems a bit dangerous to me.

However, I am grateful to live in a state where things like Proposition 2: Standards for Confining Farm Animals are on the ballot. It requires that "certain farm animals be allowed, for the majority of every day, to fully extend their limbs or wings, lie down, stand up and turn around." Hmmm, before we kill you for our dinner, we'll let you run free. That, after all, is the humane thing to do.

Even better is local measure JJ: "Shall the City's ordinances be amended to require the City to issue a permit to medical marijuana dispensaries as a matter of right and without a public hearing, eliminate limits on the amounts of medical marijuana possessed by patients or caregivers; and establish a peer review group for medical marijuana collectives?" You had me until this "require" bit, this "without a public hearing" bit, this "eliminate limits on the amounts of marijuana possessed" bit and the "peer review group" bit. Yes, let's make the entire city one gigantic medical marijuana dispensary, with no limits on the amount dispensed, and the only oversight will be all the other people who are stoned out of their minds... Super.

You're just like me, an alcoholic who has to drive his children to various after-school activities.

Since I'm in the middle of suffering from what my health insurance company calls "major depression with suicide risk", and the economy appears to be headed for a major depression with implosion risk, I have decided to do the only sane thing left: avoid the news. Well, that's not exactly right. I have decided to switch from getting my news from the News Hour and the Nightly Business Report and The New York Times to getting my news from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. This is somewhat complicated by the fact that I don't have cable, so I watch the shows the next day online.

So, not only is the news I'm getting mostly satire, it's also a day old. Besides, I figure if anything really important happens, John McCain will suspend his campaign until the problem is ... oh, wait. Maybe this isn't such a good plan after all. But, at least it's distracting, and educational. My favorite was when Dennis Kucinich showed Stephen Colbert the contents of his pockets, which included a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution.

"Did you shrink this down yourself?" Colbert said.

"No," Kucinich responded. "George Bush already did that." And everyone in the crowd cheered like I'd never heard them cheer.

Hmmm, I'd rather use my new-fangled criteria, thank you very much you liberal-media-elite-snob-reporter.

Thank you, Sarah Palin, for yet again reminding me that we need "strict oversight" (by way of deregulation?), we need to get rid of the "greed and corruption on Wall Street", that you and John McCain are "mavericks", that tax cuts magically create jobs, and that Ronald Reagan was also a Republican.

After listening to ninety minutes of that mixed with substantial answers from Joe Biden, I was hard-pressed to determine who might have won. I needed some assistance, so I decided to listen to the commentary on PBS, and this is what I heard: "If you use the traditional criteria to determine the winner, like who gave more substantial answers, who actually answered the questions, then Biden won this debate." What other criteria would you want to use in a case like this, I wonder?

But what I really wonder is exactly how long the Republicans can play the Reagan card. Yes, he was extremely popular, and the last two Republican administrations have been marginally bad and disastrous, respectively. However, Reagan was president from January of 1981 to January of 1989. I was nine and a half when he left office. Eighteen and nineteen year olds, who will be voting this year for the first time, were not even born when he left office. I'm nearly thirty and I remember very little of his presidency except for him calling to bring down the Berlin Wall.

So let's say you need to be at least 35 to have substantial memories of his presidency, because that would make you about 16 in 1989. He would have been president from the time you were eight to the time you were 16. That means that, to some degree, the Republicans have "lost" nearly 20 years worth of young voters simply by virtue of the fact that we haven't had a decent Republican president in that long.

No wonder young people overwhelmingly vote for Democrats. They can't even remember a time when the Republicans were respectable. And here they keep blaming it on the liberal academic elite. How about doing a competent job for once? People might start respecting you again.

But then again, that's only if you want to use the traditional criteria for determining how good a president was.