Power and Politics - I am Not the Yellow Peril

Changes

2011-04-26T01:17:00.001-07:00

It's been so long since I wrote here that it took me some time to remember my password. It gave me the opportunity to go back and look at previous posts and I think the writing holds up pretty well. If anything, I'm a worse writer now that I'm not blogging regularly.

My sense of narrative is failing, to say nothing of poetic turns of phrase. I don't write poetry anymore. If that's not a sad and short statement of where my life is, I don't know what is.

It's not that I'm unhappy, quite. You could say that I'm comfortable, except that I'm still searching for who I am. So I hope to blog here more often, to sort through what's happening in my life and to have a record of how my life is progressing.

Reading earlier posts, they're so raw that it still hits me. Naive, angry, hurt, cynical but not jaded. Part of me wishes that I never hit the jaded wall, that I always remain just on this side of hope. I'm older and hopefully wiser. Or at least people look up to me for advice. I feel like an old timer these days, less bitter and more contemplative. Happier to spend a day cooking and eating with friends, and less inclined to try to overturn the scales of justice.

It's what I've always wanted. So why can't I sleep at night?

Aging with and without grace

2010-09-19T00:22:00.001-07:00

I just re-read some of my old posts. God, I used to be a much better writer. I guess you could say I usually write better out of a place of angst, and these days, I don't know if it's angst or inertia or malaise.

When I was younger, I burned hotter, with the fiery zeal of an evangelical. These days, I think I see more grey in everything. In my hair, in the cracks between the sidewalks, in between the fissures of my heart. Forgive me, but I have lost the martyr's passion and gained the bittersweet wisdom of age. The wisdom that says, "Yes, volunteering to be cannon fodder is sexy, but so is staying in bed and sleeping for once." The same jaded voice that says, "Innocence once gone, never regained."

I can't look at what is so cynically, and yet calculatingly called "the professional left" without throwing up a little. Because that label is at once searingly true and blindingly false. There are enough people jostling around who are paid organizers who should have hung up their shoes a long time ago cos they checked out and they;re never going to come back in from the cold.

There are also all these people who I don't understand. The hacks who make and break campaigns. The ones who eat the cash they're paid without caring much for the issues. The "do as you're told" ones. I don't understand how they think. I've never taken a job where someone told me how to think and actually parroted those phrases back. I've also been questioning, even in my faith. I've been privileged to be a believer, and damned to be a believer, and well, I guess there remains a deep reservoir of idealism in this old, greying mare.

It makes me angry when people who should be better are not. It makes me angry when my friends sell out their beliefs, even if those don't dovetail with mine. Jesus Christ, all that I want is for the people I love to live brilliantly. And yet everyday I see more friends just making the motions. With the exception of one friend who gave up on it all and took a hermit's life, I just don't know. We're aging, the lines growing deeper. The lives growing greyer?

On lack of sleep

2010-09-19T00:04:00.000-07:00

I don't know what I'm doing these days. The days go by in a blur and the nights similarly whiz past. And I can only think about one thing and one thing only. I'd say that I'm consumed with this but it's not quite accurate.

I do things that are nonsensical, I give away things that I can't get back. Sometimes I worry about why my head is so deep in fog but I can't seem to pull myself out of it regardless. Maybe for days or hours here or there but then I get plunged back in.

It's like drowning, over and over again. Tonight I'll go to sleep. Tomorrow, I'll drown again.

Remission

2010-08-31T21:36:00.000-07:00

I've been remiss in updating this blog. Family concerns have been kinda stressful, and personal matters have been pressing.

I've had some highlights and lowlights of my career over the past year and a half and I have yet to sort through all of this.

I'm not sure what to do with the blog since I update so rarely now.

Balance

2010-05-29T10:04:00.000-07:00

I am in submission again. I have resubmitted to crazy hours and too much needless stress. I had a life all stable, and then I turned it topsy-turvy.

This time, the challenge is balance. I have been here before, I have walked these tangled lines, I have run past the bramble thickets. The choices are different, the choices are the same. The outcomes are both larger and more insignificant.

My god I miss the campaign life. I miss the highs, the lows, the close friendships and the vitality. The rush of the vote count. I miss the one on ones, the victorious feeling of converting a maybe into a key ally. I want to leave no stone unturned.

This time, I am made of stronger material. I am in better shape, mentally and physically. I read people like scantron.

It helps.

On Coakley

2010-01-19T16:47:00.001-08:00

I'm stil following politics, just slightly less religiously than in the past - so for example I am watching Massachusetts and massively pissed at how Coakley ran her race. You can blame the party for lack of support all that you want but the truth is that voters like to see their candidate out for more than 10 minutes at a time, and they like to see a candidate who doesn't disdain facing the voters.

Coakley may well be a good Senator but just because you think you can rest easy especially in a "change" election, well, there's no voter that likes being taken for granted. You still gotta work like you want it. And she didn't seem like she wanted it. She sniffed at the idea of "standing outside Fenway Park [map], in the cold, shaking hands.” She then said that gladhanding basically wasn't worth her time when she had the support of a small town mayor. Take that plus her dissing Curt Schilling as a Yankees fan. YEah, she dissed the star pitcher who led the Red Sox to an 04 victory against the Yankees. Doesn't play well deep in Red Sox country. Plus her staffer's gaffe in wiping out a conservative columnist in the final days of the campaign. All bad. Bloomberg looks better for having endorsed Alan Karzei, founder of CityYear. Sam Yoon looks better for having endorsed Congressman Mike Capuano.

She's not the most progressive of the primary candidates, and indeed I have a friend who worked in her office who never wanted to work in the AG's office again. But she would have been good on a lot of issues, and she would have been a good Democratic vote in the Senate. But being privileged and being distant doesn't win you votes. Yes, this is Massachusetts, which has had Senator John F. Kerry, who was pilloried for being a windsurfing snob, in office for 20-odd years and Senator Ted Kennedy (may he rest in peace) for more than half his life. But I've seen both work a room and a convention hall, and they can both turn on the charm whether it's a donor, a voter, or an average citizen. And they do it because it's part of their jobs to respond to the public. Coakley lost because she ran as much from the crowds as she did the . You can't only like the idea of being a Senator, you gotta work for it.

Dan Drezner, a professor at Tufts writes, "I don't want to live in a swing state ever again" after being barraged by calls from surrogates and the campaigns, and likely some 527s and PACs urging him to vote for or against a candidate. All I can say is, I've been on the ground in swing states in presidential elections, and that ain't the half of it. Real swing state residents have people knocking on their doors repeatedly at all hours, their mailbox and doorstep gets cluttered with campaign lit, they get leafletted at the grocery store, at school, and at church. Not to mention the state fair and wherever you go to try to escape this stuff. Your tv is full of commercials about the candidates - cable or mainstream channels. You turn on the car radio and it's blanketed with ads.

Anyway, there's not a lot to be hopeful about in this special election.

Obama v Bush as Star Trek v Star Wars

2009-06-14T21:07:00.000-07:00

Pretty funny and accurate, from Newsweek.

Judy Chu wins primary

2009-05-21T02:07:00.000-07:00

Very exciting - Judy Chu wins the Democratic primary and advances to the runoff election, where she'll face off against an opponent with a familiar name, Betty Chu. (Betty is apparently a distant cousin.) It'll be an interesting matchup since it'll feature two Asian American women, but Judy should be a lock to win the heavily Democratic district.

Jeff Sharlett: Texas hell house and the eros of evangelicism

2009-04-06T19:28:00.000-07:00

Whoa, Jeff Sharlett does it again. He wrote a masterpiece of an article on a particular brand of self-denial as religious fervor and ecstasy. Read Naked and Guilty for a view on what one type of evangelical Christianity preaches on recovering one's self, one's soul by denying sex and being reborn.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

2009-03-30T18:08:00.000-07:00

Writes movingly, heart-achingly about delayed rage and not being able to process the death of a loved one because of a lack of a spiritual lens that would help to make sense of things, as an athiest.

I'm with you man, I'm with you.

As a fellow atheist (or agnostic) it's hard to know what to do with a senseless death and how to make meaning of it. First I think we must have proper grieving. We rebuild by carrying the principles that our late friend or loved one operated on in our hearts. Try to behave more like they would have and honor them in that fashion. Then comes the reconstruction.

What I am afraid of is that because I am agnostic, that my processing takes longer and has less meaning than others. And rationally, I know this is not true. But in my low days I worry that my lack of communication with God or the gods prevents all my beloved ones who have passed from having the peace that they desire. (Jeez, you know it's bad when ghosts don't even have to guilt you and you do it all to yourself.)

What I have been missing in the blogosphere is Steve Gilliard's angry and moral (because true) voice. I think Nehisi-Coates has that same kinda fire, the same black nerdboy tendencies as Gilliard, not unlike what Junot Diaz wrote in Oscar Wao. It's the kind of voice that I, as an angry Asian American nerd, have been missing in the "mainstream" blogosphere.

So I'm adding him to my blogroll.

Weirdos want to kill AG Cuomo

2009-03-09T22:09:00.000-07:00

This is really weird and crazy: NAMBLA (aka the pedophiles) put a hit out on NY Attorney General Cuomo.

Lost funnies, tv musings

2009-02-18T17:26:00.000-08:00

On tonight's episode of Lost: Jin comes back, is found by Sawyer. Jin is devastated when his wife Sun is not there and he's shouting in Korean. Sawyer gestures to Miles Strom, played by Ken Leung, to "translate!"

Miles: "Translate what? He's Korean. I'm from Encino!"

On another note, has anyone else given up on Grey's Anatomy? I never thought it would happen to me, since I do love Christina Yang, but is it any wonder that Katherine Heigl and J. R. Knight actively want off a sinking ship? I mean the economy is bad enough that it could be hard to find a new gig, and yet they can't get away fast enough.

Last, I LOVED the 30 Rock Valentine's Day episode - it was spot on! Not the best 30 Rock ep ever, but really great. I can't decide if the best 30 Rock ever is Jack imitating Tracy's parents or if it's Jack as El Generalissimo.

Dead of winter

2009-02-15T17:56:00.000-08:00

Recently I have been feeling the need for nature, for verdant life and the tranquility of trees. I miss the leave-dappled sunlight falling on me as I take a leisurely hike in the mountains.

I don't know if it's my work, my personal life, or the failing health of those around me, but I felt a very desperate need to escape to the countryside that has yet to be fulfilled.

In lieu, I bought some green beans from the market and boiled them, without even stripping away the stems. I have been biting into their green juices and feeling the sweet crunch of life.

It is a pale substitute for time spent connecting with the earth, but it will have to suffice for now. My heart has been heavy, my thoughts weary and belabored for a while. I need some form of release, a weekend by the water or the foothills.

In this dead of winter, I am trying to taste the vitality that the earth provides and sing an ode to friends here and gone. Instead I bury myself in sleep.

Goal

2009-02-11T03:01:00.000-08:00

Become more organized. Else, mishaps follow.

Friday Night Lights, part 2

2009-02-10T20:05:00.000-08:00

I read the wiki entry on the show, and it's pretty funny because I am far from a white male who gives a shit about football, but I do love the authenticity of the show:

This early strategy caused several marketing problems for the long term the most notable of which is the lack of women viewers. The early marketing campaign created an audience of almost exclusively young men and all but repelled women with its football heavy slant. This in turn deprived the show of a large audience who would enjoy the more character-driven soap elements.

. . .The show’s producers decided at the outset to allow their performers leeway in what they say and do on the show. Though scripted like any hour-long television drama performers are given great leeway in the delivery of their lines and the blocking of each scene. If actors feel that something is not true to their character or that a mode of delivery doesn’t work they are free to change it provided they still hit the vital plot points.^[19]
The freedom that producers have extended to the performers is complemented by the fact that the show is taped without rehearsal and without extensive blocking. Camera operators on the show are trained to follow the actors rather than actors standing in one place and having cameras fixed around them. This allows performers to not only feel free to make changes but to feel safe in making those changes because the infrastructure will work around them. Executive producer Jeffrey Reiner described this method as “no rehearsal, no blocking, just three cameras and we shoot.”^[20]

I love this show because it is so real and the emotions and relationships feel real and the writing is excellent. Watch it!

Flipping stereotypes

2009-02-02T00:14:00.000-08:00

The Onions flips the stereotypical Asian fetish so that a Japanese teenaged girl has the hots for sweaty bald overweight white men.

"I can't explain it," said Nakajima, dressed in a pleated miniskirt and pure white knee socks. "There's just something about American men who are at least twice my age and nearly three times my body weight that totally drives me wild."

Added Nakajima, "They're so hot."

Though she finds all pasty, middle-aged men intoxicating, Nakajima said balding Midwesterners who carry most of their weight in their stomach particularly turn her on. According to the sexually inquisitive teen, she often daydreams about sleeping with a 43-year-old divorcé with poor hygiene habits.

While not full on brilliant, it is pretty good.

Her Morning elegance by Oren Lavie

2009-01-31T23:27:00.000-08:00

Such a beautiful video, and a good song. Now back to work.

Procrastination

2009-01-31T23:17:00.001-08:00

Just how bad of a procrastinator am I? Bad enough that I took a 20 minute test to measure it.

:(

Try it yourself.

I am 100 out of 100. This is pretty depressing.

Your score is 100 out of a possible 100

Usually a Procrastinator

You rank in the top 10% in terms of procrastination. That is, when it comes to putting things off, you often do so even though you know you shouldn’t. Likely, you are much more free-spirited, adventurous, and spontaneous than most. Probably, your work doesn’t engage you as much as you would like or perhaps you are surrounded by many easily available and much more pleasant temptations. These temptations may initially seem rewarding, but in the longer-term, you see many of them as time-wasters. Though you are likely incredibly productive just before a deadline, you might not get all your work done and there is a lot of unwanted stress. You may want to reduce what procrastination you do commit. If so, here are three tips that have been shown to work:

Goal Setting

This is one of the most established ways of moving forward on your plans. Take any project you are presently procrastinating and break it down into individual steps. Each of these steps should have the following three aspects. First, they should be somewhat challenging though achievable for you. It is more satisfying to accomplish a challenge. Second, they should be proximal, that is you can achieve them fairly soon, preferable today or over the next few days. Third, they should be specific, that is you know exactly when you have accomplished them. If you can visualize in your mind what you should do, even better.

Stimulus Control

This method has also been well tested and is very successful. What you need is a single place that you do your work and nothing else. Essentially, you need an office, though many students have a favorite desk at a library. For stimulus control to work best, the office or desk should be free of any signs of temptation or easily available distractions that might pull you away (e.g., no games, no chit-chat, no web-surfing). If you need a break, that is fine, but make sure you have it someplace at least a few minutes distant, preferably outside of the building itself. If you are unwilling to take the time to get there, acknowledge that you likely don’t need the break.

Routines

Routines are difficult to get into but in the end, this is often our aim. Things are much easier to do when we get into a habit of them, whether it is work, exercise, or errands. If you schedule some of those tasks you are presently procrastinating upon so that they occur on a regular schedule, they become easier. Start your routine slowly, something to which you can easily commit. Eventually, like brushing your teeth, it will likely become something you just do, not taking much effort at all. At this point, you might add to your routine, again always keeping your overall level of effort at a moderate to low level. Importantly, when you fall off your routine, inevitable with sickness or the unexpected, get back on it as soon as possible. Your routine gets stronger every time your follow it. It also gets weaker every time you don’t.

Farewell Howard

2009-01-30T18:18:00.000-08:00

Thank you for the 50 state strategy. Thank you for being real, an antidote to Terry MacAuliffe's terrible leeching of the states. You will be missed, teal sweatshirt and all.

James Risen gets his due

2009-01-30T18:14:00.000-08:00

Who is this James Risen guy? He's the NYT reporter who played a big role in crucifying Wen Ho Lee in the press before there was any solid information. So do I think it's more than slightly poetic that he was the target of NSA/FBI wiretaps?

Yes. Though overall, it's a scary thing when your nation is listening in on journalist's phone calls.

The reason he was targeted by the Bushies is because Risen broke the story about the whole illegal wiretapping in the first place.

If this were a movie, it would have lots of symmetry.

Something stinks in Obamaland

2009-01-21T13:23:00.000-08:00

The crushing of the 50 state strategy as designed and delivered by Howard Dean is here. The 200 state organizers who were assigned to state parties have been fired, and they probably won't be coming back.

Instead, Obama will centralize operations and while the 2009-2012 operations will be broader than the 13-17 states that were focused on for 2004, they won't be all 50. It will keep the traditional hot battlegrounds of Ohio, Florida, Missouri, and second tier purple states like Nevada and Colorado that joined the blue column this year will get their places cemented on that list. I would also bet that it will be around 20 states including nontraditional places like North Carolina and Indiana which also swung blue this year. I would hope that Georgia makes the cut - it's truly impressive that Obama came within 5 points of John McCain here, and the close Senate outcome (not during the special election) suggests that had Obama kept his team here, we would have a Senator Jim Martin to bring us to 59.

Something stinks in Obamaland, and I smell Rahm's stench all over it. Well, him and the other Clintonites who have grabbed positions of power.

Funniest comment about Rahm

2009-01-10T18:35:00.000-08:00

On a gawker post about how Rahm knifed Howard Dean by 1) not giving him the Secretary of the HHS post and 2) having D.ean dispatched to American Samoa when Obama introduced the new DNC Chair, VA Gov. Tim Kaine.

Some people are saying that Rahmbo turns them on, and in steps the quitest, funniest comment I've ever seen:

"Hold me closer, tiny dancer."

A perfect quip.

Worst 500 passwords - is yours one?

2009-01-10T16:22:00.000-08:00

Check this list of the 500 worst passwords of all time - ie, the ones that hackers find to be most common and try first. See if yours is on there, and try not to grimace at how many iterations of sexual organs are on there.

Also notable are how poor some of the passwords are:

password
666666
7777777
qwerty

If yours falls on this list, make sure to check yourself, protect yourself and change it to something harder!

Economy sucks, let's play a game!

2009-01-10T16:19:00.001-08:00

A neato piece of advertising for the firm that designed it, so due props to Blue Earth.

Play the Bailout Game in which you can dial Alan Greenspan in his multiple guru forms and hand out up to $1000000000 to bail out banks. But watch out for the recession (burning pitchforks and all behind you!)

Notable player names: Adam Smith, socialist, Donald Trump.

Nifty java game

2008-12-25T21:33:00.000-08:00

Very innovative and all about perception:

Coign of Vantage.

It's about rotating 3D pixels until they match an image - much different than a typical spot the difference or any other game. And a good way to while away the winter hours!

The atheist's prayer

2008-12-23T20:47:00.001-08:00

This is beautiful:

An Atheist’s Thoughts At Christmas

by elfrijole

Tue Dec 23, 2008 at 09:02:28 AM PST

Christmas, to me, is still a time of joy, comfort, renewal, and forgiveness. I think of the people who are important to me in my life, I think of the less fortunate, and I think of how I might have been a better person in the last year, and what changes I can make in the new year. I hope that I will actually get off my ass and do something meaningful to make this world a better place in the coming year, instead of just forgetting about that warm Christmas feeling after the holiday has passed.

elfrijole's diary :: ::

As your atheist husband/son/friend/uncle (etc...), I promise to help you when you need help, love you when you need love, challenge you when you need to be challenged, forgive you when you ask for it, ask for forgiveness when I need to, and be there for you in any other way I possibly can.

I won’t worry about saving your soul, but will challenge you to be a better person here on earth, as I hope you will do for me. I will ask that you not wait for an after life to celebrate the life you have, but live your life to it’s fullest measure now. I will not assume that if I wrong you, we can meet in heaven and work things out; I will try and work things out now.

I will not mock or devalue your faith, whether I disagree with it or not, but if you subvert your faith because you are in my presence, then I will question how firmly you hold your faith.

I will be offended if you trust me so little that you think I wouldn’t respect your wishes to pray over supper, wear a cross around your neck, go to church or tattoo a picture of Jesus on your back if that’s what you want to do. It is your faith, not mine.

I will ask that you understand that I didn’t come to my belief that there is no god because of some whim. I will hope that you understand that it is my sincerely held belief that I see no good evidence of a benevolent, omnipotent, and all knowing god. Also, I don’t see any evidence of ghosts, angels, spirits or other super natural beings that either support or battle an almighty god or interfere in our lives. If you and I are having issues, it is because of you and I, no one else.

I will hope you understand that the phrase "I don’t believe in god" is different than "I don’t believe there is a god," which is a subtle, but important difference. The second statement is the one I prescribe to.

I hope that you can see one day that I do have faith, but that it is faith in you. You have been there for me; you’ve helped me when I needed a hand; nursed me when I was sick, listened when I needed an ear to bend, comforted me when I was sad or grieving, and celebrated with me when the opportunity presented itself.

I hope that instead of praying for me, that you will call me, come see me, email me, text me, or write me. To me, all those things are better than a prayer I will never hear.

All in all, what I value in you is your humanity. I see no need to prescribe your kindness, loyalty, and strength to a heavenly father, maybe just your earthly mother and father, brothers and sisters, and other friends and family who helped make you the imperfect, but lovable person you (and I) are.

In the end, I hope for you all the all the things I hoped for you when I was a Christian; Joy, health, longevity and most of all, love.

Merry Christmas

Senator Kennedy, not so fast

2008-12-17T19:50:00.000-08:00

Caroline Kennedy, that is. I am sure if she became Senator she would be fine and that one day she might even become the well respected Senate lion that her uncle Teddy is. But really, I think that one of the things that Barack Obama's election has shown is the uselessness of political dynasties. (Although the Salazars and Udalls got their own thing goin' in the West.)

Obama made it because of his hard work and intelligence. And he broke through the Chicago machine to do so. I am sure that there are plenty of people in NYC who would be just as, if not more qualified to be Senator from New York, especially during a financial crisis when we need someone who has lots of experience legislating, who would have a much harder time getting A1 ink. It's nothing personal, just that she would probably have a bunch of staff running the show for the most part.

On another note, Blagojevich?!? Can the media get over Obama's ties or lack thereof to one of the stupidest governors in Illinois' history? The guy is from a state with a political machine second to none (maybe New York's) and what do you expect? Someone I was talking to said, "Shyeeet. This sorta stuff goes on all the time, but did he have to be so friggin' idiotic about it?!?"

And that's the weekly rap.

Obama picks an Asian American for DoE

2008-12-11T17:40:00.000-08:00

Word is Obama is picking Nobel Laureate Dr. Steven Chu who runs the Lawrence Livermore labs at UC-Berkeley for Secretary of Energy. This is a huge cabinet level pick and actually fits in really well with Obama's ability to position and frame narratives - first Japanese American general to run the VA (Eric Shinseki) announced on the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Also Shinseki had been a critic of the Iraq War strategy and yet stayed mum after the fact.

Now he names Dr. Chu to run Energy. Lest anyone forget, it was the DoE who persecuted Taiwanese American physicist Dr. Wen Ho Lee who used to work at Los Alamos. It was this racist scapegoating that led many Asian American scientists to leave or turn down jobs at national labs, and it was New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson who was heavily suspected of being the

Family roles affect work behavior

2008-12-03T23:47:00.000-08:00

Interesting article on how family role and statuses may play a role in workplace relationships. In a bit of Adlerian psychology, they analyze how if you re the first born, it carries over in work behavior as being disinclined to like authority figures; if the middle child you wind up playing the mediator or diplomat role.

“I sometimes have to tell myself, she is not your mother, she’s your partner,” said Amy Frankel, 53, the chief strategy officer, referring to her two co-owners.
Both Ms. Frankel and her partner Terry Rieser, 58, the chief operating officer, are eldest children, and for them, an important motive in starting the company in 2001 was to be their own bosses. Like many other firstborns, they said, they are dominant personalities and have trouble with authority.
The third partner, Gina Delio, 52, the chief creative officer, is the second of five children. Her two partners describe her as the peacemaker of the group, true to middle-child form.
Ms. Rieser, whom her partners described as the most direct of the three, is often asked to handle difficult conversations with clients or employees.

Interesting because I can see behavior like that at my current and previous workplaces. It makes perfect sense that the behavior we exhibited when we were kids and that we grew up acting out would continue over, as natural and as instinctive (though actually learned and taught) as any survival training. Especially in periods of stress, we revert back to our practiced behavior that we displayed as children -- I'd hazard that most workplaces are stress incarnate.

Sunny punk rock: the Happy Hollows

2008-12-02T23:26:00.000-08:00

I've been rocking out to the sounds of the Happy Hollows recently. They have a free/pay what you want new EP, The Imaginary, and it's like Sonic Youth meets quirk rock. (Yeah I made that one up.) The trippy, hoppy, sunny, happy beats belie lyrics about things like Vietnam. But most importantly they just like to have fun - and on My Wet Tongue, the lead singer sounds like she is a panting meowing kitten cooing and purring her life away.

The band is fronted by an energetic woman who I swear sounds just like Kim Deal growling on this track, plus they have a drummer who looks to be pinoy!

Here's a good review of their newest album, and they have been getting some really great press including Wired and major rags like the Los Angeles Times.

Pimp it, it's good.

Chinese Andy Rooney

2008-12-01T23:37:00.000-08:00

Pretty well thought out imitation of Andy Rooney. The curmudgeonliness translatse well.

Chinaâ��s Andy Rooney Has Some Funny Opinions About How Great The Chinese Government Is

Thanksgiving

2008-12-01T02:22:00.001-08:00

I am thankful for my health. A short but simple tribute, because I have been in much worse shape. Just look back to where I was when I started, and well, now I am mostly holding up decently, if you don't count the gaffer tape.

I'm alive and happy, and that's what matters.

Oh, I am also eternally grateful for Stephen Colbert.

Make happy happy dancing!

The best revenge is looking good

2008-11-24T17:59:00.000-08:00

Silda Wall Spitzer comes out swinging in a hot red dress and looking amazingly refreshed for someone who is 50 years old. She took a new position as a marketing director for a Manhattan hedge fund and made her first most public debut since her husband's publicly aired dirty laundry of sleeping with a prostitute. Ashley Dupre's been in the press a lot recently, so Silda probably thought the best revenge is looking good.

Apparently marketing execs and directors of hedge funds are hired for their looks. Now I don't know what peels or injections they've given her but she looks friggin smoking!

Also I'm not sure that the below description fits my friends who do PR for hedge funds - they are perfectly intelligent women of their own right.

“You meet these bimbos and they say, ‘Oh, I work at a hedge fund,’ and you think, What?!?” says one head of an investment bank who pals around with high net worth investors. “And then you realize, Oh, this is, like, the PR girl. And it’s a wildly successful strategy. The influential rich people who put money into these things like to be titillated by pretty girls.”

This reminds me of the pharm reps that get hired from college cheerleading associations to be bait for doctors, who tend to be mostly male. These (mostly women) use charm and other devices like freebies or chum branded with the prescription drugs' names to entice doctors to write more prescriptions for their Rx of choice.

But let's get back to the main point - damn, revenge never looked so H-O-T!

White Liberal Guilt Overflows

2008-11-15T15:04:00.000-08:00

Now that all the historic hope and change is incoming, I think it's okay to start making fun of it a bit - or at least the famous white liberals' responses to our mixed race President.

New York Mag, a magazine for younger white liberals, has a run down of things middle-aged white people at upper class white liberal periodicals did.

Then Leon Wieseltier revealed in the New Republic that the day after the election, he threw over his usual ponderous, academic, white-people hobbies in favor of doing spirited black-people things:
I woke up the next morning still under the spell of solidarity and love. I decided to make the spell last. I gave away my tickets to a performance of some late Shostakovich quartets, because for once I was not interested in the despair. Instead I spent the day listening to the Ebonys and the Chi-Lites and the Isley Brothers. For lunch I went to Georgia Brown's for fried green tomatoes.

I'm sure that you don't know anyone who tried to be black the night of or the day after all in the name of love and solidarity. Besides, as Maureen Dowd's mailman could tell you, "He's not yours. He's ours!"

Maureen Dowd was so excited when she observed blacks and whites "intermingling" in Washington, D.C., in the wake of the election that she decided to try it, too:
I heard my cute black mailman talking in an excited voice outside my house Friday, so I decided I should go ask him how he was feeling about everything, the absolute amazement of the first black president.

“Are you talking about the election?” I said brightly. “How do you feel?”
He shot me a look of bemused disdain as he walked away. I suddenly realized, with embarrassment, that he was on his Bluetooth, deep in a personal conversation that had nothing to do with Barack Obama.

Yup, the first Asian American Tiger Woods POTUS.

Rahm Emmanuel is hot?!?

2008-11-12T20:36:00.001-08:00

I have a friend who thinks Rahm Emmanuel is hot.

Yeah, this man. I don't quite get her train of thought -- I understand thinking that intellect and power is hot, but I asked her to distinguish quite clearly between the two. And she still thinks he's physically hot.

So there you have it -- the hotness of the incoming White House Chief of Staff, as confirmed by 1 random woman in DC (ok, 2 - I have another friend who thinks this and points out his ballerina trained physique. I'm just ashamed to admit that I know 2 people who think this.)

What's it with Asian women and Rahmbo?

Hardcore Pikachu

2008-11-12T20:24:00.001-08:00

Too friggin cute! And with that, I'm back!

Sorry for the delay in posting. Life's been busy and whatnot.
*Little violin plays*

Like you care, right? Now back to the regular programming, a steady diet of Colbert, cuteness, and commentary.

PS: Oh and you might be interested in the return of Mark Foley: "

And while he concedes his behavior was "extraordinarily stupid," he remains somewhat unwilling to accept full public scorn.

These were 17-year-olds, just months from being men, he insists."

Ick and yuck.

Palin flow chart

2008-10-03T19:52:00.000-07:00

Whoever designed this was really spot-on, in a depressing way.

2012: Huckabee's at the head of the class

2008-10-02T21:28:00.000-07:00

Marc Ambinder has some good points on why Huckabee looks like the clear leader in the GOP race for 2012:

-least ties to the Republican establishment which has been weighing people down like an Albatross
-socially liberal (seeming) and very tv-friendly: "Huckabee seems most like the friendly, forward-looking face of conservatism"

"Now -- Huckabee's biggest challenge comes not from Gov. Romney at the outset. His populist economic policies will be challenged by the Pence/Shadegg axis of the party, although I wouldn't be surprised if the two reconcile, and Huckabee moves to the center-right on government"

Other challenges include fundraising (which can be overcome) and Newt Gingrinch sniffing the air.

Biden. Ugh.

2008-08-23T07:00:00.001-07:00

Well, AT least Biden is more socially liberal than Chet Edwards. And I always knew he was going to have to pick a senior statesman - either one with executive or foreign policy experience.

I would have preferred Tim Kaine or Mark Warner. But I was impressed with Biden's humility in the Iowa NPR debates. And it is patently obvious that Obama tapped Biden not for his electoral advantage of 3 electoral college votes. And he comes with many advantages, not the least of which is his ability to fundraise from credit card companies (ba da dum.) In all seriousness, Biden has some real advantages apart from his years as a senator - his Catholic roots, and his hard working ethos as a senator. While he might be from a working class family, I'm just not sure that Biden is going to be for working class families.

It's funny because just last night I said well, Obama did vote for the bankruptcy bill. So he's matched with Biden there.

The other thing I have to consider is Biden's relationship with the APA community. What is it? Most people I know are worried because it's been nil.

In a lot of ways, I think that Obama picking Biden is also emblematic of a campaign and candidate that seeks to be post-racial. To overcome the insult of being called "so fresh so clean" to pick a guy who says that "all Indians work at Dunkin Donuts." He will provide a good foil for Obama though, and a good way of painting the campaign as one that seeks to build bridges.

But Biden!!!! The guy can't stay on message. How is he going to operate in a campaign that has been pretty tightly on message?!?! Tim Kaine shot himself in the foot because either he or his people couldn't help but tease the press with their vetting, literally the equivalent of a high school girl going "tee hee, you want me, you really want me!" Which the Obama staff and campaign don't like since they value loyalty and secrecy. Contrast this with Kathleen Sebelius' radio silence on the matter.

Argh, why is it that Biden can't keep his mouth shut at certain times but then when he's being vetted he managed to do a lockdown. Argh.

Thoughts on Edwards

2008-08-10T01:58:00.001-07:00

I had a sinking feeeling when I first heard about the National Enquirer story, and then reading Edwards' responses I felt like he was guilty of having an affair. This is when no one from the MSM was writing about this out of deference for Elizabeth (who must be really steamed.)

I kept hoping however that my instincts were wrong. Ah well, you know how that turned out. Now my gut tells me that the baby is his. Why else would she refuse to demand a paternity test even though Edwards has offered?

Ergh, pretty depressing stuff. My best thoughts to Elizabeth and his family at this time. I just wish politicians were able to control themselves.

Beijing opening ceremonies

2008-08-09T05:18:00.001-07:00

It was hard not to think of military precision when watching the Beinjing Olympics opening ceremonies. The majestic choreography was awesome, wondrous, and not a little intimidating. At over $300 million, it was the greatest live action movie ever made, and it took no less than Zhang Yimou, the director of such epic dramas as Hero, to direct the whole thing.

My gods, the scale and intensity, the use of light as a paintbrush, the glory of China's 5000 years represented through pageantry, song, and dance. It was really breahtaking, and I think that opening ceremony is not likely to be topped for years. It even had tolerable Beijing opera singing.

I had the oportunity to watch the whole thing on HDTV and watching the 2008 taichi performers, I had to understand the militaristic thrill, the sheer shiver of fear that occured watching such synchronized and determined youths. A friend asked why they didn't use elderly taichi masters, and I said, "They couldn't - they had to present China's flowering youth and might."

Not to mention that whomever planned this was a true marketing master - the closing of the opening featured Yao Ming, the gentle giant, and a 9 year old survivor of the Szechuan earthquakes who managed to free himself, and then went back to save 2 classmates. A truly adorable kid, with just a shock of hair missing to represent his trauma. But otherwise lively and the camera loved him. No better way to represent the innocence and liveliness of China. Man, the conductor of this orchestra understood at once how to still a deep sense of respect, intimidation, and wonder at China's finesse. And I wondered if the government had told the director to do this or if he had intuitively understood all that the ceremonies had to convey, and my friend thought he had. REally masterful propaganda. Also, what's with calling Taiwan "Chinese Taipei"?!?!?

But the beautiful symbolism and imagery is just beyond compare. Money was clearly no object in putting this spectacular spectacular together.

Below, one of the most wondrous parts of the ceremonies. They have super amazing clothes with electrical light up circuitry! I could just watch this part over and over again. We all agreed that this was the only opening ceremonies we ever wanted to own on dvd.

Is Obama the first Asian American president?

2008-08-04T04:33:00.000-07:00

At a recent fundraiser in DC, Obama joked about being the first Asian American president. Jeff Yang follows up in the SF Gate. I'll detail a few pros and cons and then get to the meat of the matter:

YES:
-Fulfills every Asian mother's fantasy - Ivy League undergrad, Harvard Law graduate
-Grew up in Hawaii, the only state with an APIA majority
-Schooled in Indonesia as a child
-felt like an outsider
-son of an immigrant

NO:
-single mother
-grew up in Kansas
-runs away from Muslims

To be truthful, I believe that Obama is neither the first "post-racial" president nor the first "Asian American" president but really just the first mixed heritage president. And it is this aspect that many APAs, especially the hapas, can identify with.

Calling Obama the first Asian American president doesn't obscure or invalidate his other identities - black, white, multiracial, transnational, pancultural; if anything, it simply highlights the fact that his diverse heritage uniquely invites those around him to project on him a full spectrum of hopes and dreams.

"He's basically a human Rorschach test," says Lu. "African Americans think, and rightfully so, that this is a guy who understands their experience. But it's similar if you talk to Latinos and Asian Americans, or to our 22-year-old field organizers. People see in him the qualities they want to see."

This might be true but I really know of very few Asian Americans who grew up in single parent families. (One of the few byproducts of our cultural shame game is that divorce rates remain comparatively low but rising in as generations adapt to American mores.)

Obama is a blank slate. He is and he isn't Tiger Woods, the everyman millionaire golfer phenom. Rather Obama is a mirror, a reflection of disparate parts of our nation, a product of globalization. We too are products of globalization, caught in the fray and the struggle of finding our identity. We have also been accused of being other. But here is the crucial difference -- our assertions of Americanness will always be questioned. Not just our aptitude to be president, but our very Americanness. They have tried this "is he sufficiently patriotic" routine with Obama and the flag pin. Some percentage of Americans still think he is Muslim, (and consequently not American enough.) But the way he sometimes runs from it (Michigan rally photo staging and D-Punjabi press release), you would think that he was ashamed of Muslim associations. And I'm sorry but I want our first Asian American candidate to be someone who is proud of various parts of the community.

His half sister is Maya Soetoro Ng, who is married to a Chinese Canadian. You might ask me, well, isn't that enough, and how much closer do you have to get? My answer is that we have to let Obama be who he is, and understand that he is going to distance himself from us in certain ways.

The first APA President, when and if we get one, I bet will also be a Harvard or Yale alum who comes from a suburban background and whose parents are doctors or lawyers. True model minority material.

Also, I'm going to have to ding Obama on not having enough high level APIAs on his campaign. I've said it before and hopefully I won't have to say it again, but it strikes me as a bit odd that while Pete Rouse (his chief of staff, and a hapa) and his Legislative Director Chris Lu are both very close to the Senator, they are on the policy side. NOT the campaign side.

This should be good once Obama becomes president in that we'll have super qualified APIAs on the inside making policy decisions but in the course of a campaign, the lack of high level APIAs (the APIA team just having been hired a month ago) means that battleground state strategy and early buy in have virtually closed out APAs from major political decisions. But it has deprived APAs of a critical chance to determine strategy.

I give Obama's team credit for hiring some of the top APA political talent for the APIA team and for funding it earlier than Kerry-Edwards in 2004.

Terror politics and Batman

2008-07-21T00:01:00.000-07:00

Oh, those parents complaining that the new Batman is too creepy and disturbing for their kids to watch? They're so right.

This isn't about censorship, this is about how wigged out I am right now!!!! Yeah, I'm one of the lucky few who got to watch Batman on opening weekend. Of course I could only get a nighttime showing. I was all ready to hit the hay after the show but the movie has just left me shuddering and crying for mommy.

Heath Ledger does a bone-chilling job as the Joker, and the movie is really uncomfortable. Not just the violence, just the unrelenting darkness of it - the lack of hope. Damn, they have to put warnings on these things - "Do not watch in the middle of a recession."

I'm sure Christopher Nolan, the director, meant it as a parable of our times - a mirror of society. When I saw Aaron Eckhart as Two-Face (excellent excellent casting in this movie by the way - Michael Caine as Alfred, Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox, Maggie Gyllenhaal as the female lead) I thought of Eliot Spitzer. I'm sure I'm not the only one. And no, it's not analogous - murder and prostitution. But I thought of how high the angels climb and fall and how all politicians are the same.

It was uncomfortable because it left us with no hope, no happy Hollywood ending. Everything was trashed and burned. The one or two bright lights at the end were minor in comparison to all the willful mayhem that had occurred. But strangely, if ever a movie were to serve as cautionary tale of where our country could go, damn this is one for our age.

This movie is all about terror and terrorism, and how far powerful figures go to construct an illusion of good versus evil. How far can one man or many be pushed to save themselves and their loved ones? The movie even addresses that the Joker is playing, toying with our fears and that we cannot give into a terrorist's demands. Without giving anything away, suffice it to say that the Joker effectively preys on fears by creating rampant instability and discusses how plans legalize and legitimize deaths. You could swap out the word plans here for laws. It can also be considered an investigation of natural law and justice versus civil law and vigilantism. Batman is a hero but also a villain, a complex Hell's Angel who is content with sullying his reputation to protect the city.

This movie is so dense, there's so much to unpack and the only way to do that is by rewatching except that my brain and guts are still in hiding. Compare this to the other movie I saw this weekend, Hellboy II, which was utter crap and so surface that I nearly walked out of the theatre. Except that I'm a cheap bastard. With wanton destruction that doesn't have meaning and no character development. What ever doubts I have about Zack Snyder, I'm glad Guillermo del Toro isn't doing the Watchmen movie after seeing this junkpile. Unlike Ironman, which struck a great balance between being over the top and smart alecky with some political notes thrown in, Hellboy was empty calories.

So Christopher Nolan, I salute you. You took the ugly and made it not glamorous but somehow more real, infusing it into our ids and unconscious corners of our brains. You left several men puddles of whimpering fear and you managed to question whether might makes right, the age old quest since the days of Arthur. You did it with pretty good cinematography and using the lie of makeup and the art of shadow, you've revealed the truth. Our nation's underside is base and depraved and if we don't watch it we're going like Nero.

Now if only I could sleep without fear!!!!

Yellow Sticky Notes

2008-07-18T09:09:00.000-07:00

Spotlight on Jeff Chiba Stearns' animated short "Yellow Sticky Notes" which I just saw on youtube. It's a simple yet refined personal history told through to do lists and art but it blends in 9/11 and the subsequent wars as well as some political commentary on global warming and hurricanes/ tsunamis. Short, eloquent and sweet, it was a joy to watch. Thanks for adding a bright note to my day, youtube and Jeff!

PS: Jeff happens to a hapa and mixed race advocate of Japanese Canadian descent.

Surprise

2008-07-16T04:33:00.001-07:00

I am surprised that anyone is reading my blog nowadays but the fact remains. For awhile, I was really addicted to the high of seeing the readership spikes, and it was going up at an alarming level. But now I am back to writing for myself, plain and simple.

Return to the simple. This is what I need. A reduction, not unlike in cooking, of all my wasted time and thoughts and energies.

some perspective

2008-07-16T00:46:00.000-07:00

On the New Yorker cover, which I do think is stupid and in terrible taste. Ambinder (who I read precisely because he both is part of the media decision-making circle and yet has some perspective for a DC insider) says:

Fake Crisis v. Real Crisis

14 Jul 2008 03:11 pm

So the New Yorker is headquartered in Conde Nast's Times Square palace. A few blocks away are the sturdy skycrapers housing Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. And other banks that are going bust.

The financial system continues to unravel, rapidly for itself but slowly for our news cycle, which I guess confuses everybody.

And we're in a tizzy over a magazine cover?

I think this is spot on analysis. As usual. I guess I read Ambinder because for a political journalist, he seems more willing than most to draw aside the curtains and to talk about how the sausage of media-constructed stories are made:

Outrage is often phony; major campaigns contrive their outrage precisely for effect. (When I ask about these contrivances, I am told that they are "part of the game.") But outrage is often phony even if it seems real. Phony outrage is outrage for the sake of feeling outraged; it's a comfortable outrage, an outrage that serves to reinforce feelings of solidarity and get rid of feelings of dissonance. Outrage is a covering emotion, like its close cousin, self-righteousness. We love to be offended. We love to feel affronted.

Everyone is so outraged, outraged, outraged all the time that we're defining outrage down. If our outrage meter hits 10 at every conceivable sleight or remark, then when something really outrageous happens -- something truly morally despicable or cowardly takes place -- we're numb. Outrage moves votes and changes opinion. But if everything's outrageous, then nothing is.
And that's outrageous.

Astute and apt.

Rebuilding; or Sink/Swim

2008-07-14T23:40:00.001-07:00

Our country desperately needs to go through a time of healing and rebuilding. The Bush presidency has left some very deep wounds which would take time or a magician to heal.

And Barack Obama is no magician. He even tells us this with his flaws and foibles. He is, after all, only human, as I must remind my eager and naive friends. He is not only human, he is a politician, and he has to win. As any good community organizer knows, you must always hold the elected officials accountable - even when they are your friends, even when they come out of community organizing.

I also want to say something about my own rebuilding process. I have not been blogging recently because I have been trying to process things in the personal arena:

How do you know when you have it all?
How do you know to be happy with what you have?
How do you maintain and grow?

Losing friends is always hard - it feels like a breakup of some sort. Good friends understand that you need time and distance to heal as well. I went through a do I call? When do I call? Does making the first move mean that I am at fault?

And what I am slowly coming to realize is that yes, I am more at fault and I need to take responsibility for that. Perhaps it was never a tenable situation because even when we were younger I never felt like we were equals. But we were. It has to do with how people perceive us - the light and the dark. The tall and the short. The loud and the reflective.

I had to grow, and so did she. Part of why it's hard is because I don't even know if she ever felt like it was unequal. (No, that's not fair.) I know she has learned from me and I from her, and that part of my lack of confidence in myself and my words actually dates back to 3 years ago when I lost respect for myself. I could cry and say that I am damaged goods because of that, irreparable. I could feign courage (and that would be a start because I am in a very defensive position and have been retreating) but I think I owe myself the honesty of saying I don't know. To somewhere somewhere where it won't hurt a loved one.

I don't know if I have the strength to change. To keep on fighting. And this is not even about -- rather, is not just about expectations. My expectations for myself, other people's expectations that I be the passionate leader and trail blazer.

It is about acknowledging that yes, things have happened in that past. Childhood memories and patterns are imprinted upon us like whisper weave gauze, filming how we see the world. Underneath, we are totally visible to the world, lace brides of extinction.

And yet the dreamy blur that we see through, always coated, always there. I have been taught since childhood to maintain face. To follow instruction.

Then I untethered myself to chart a new course. I subverted the model and walked my own path, a rarer path than most. Do I say this with some small amount of rebel's pride? Yes, because I have walked it and made it work for me. It's like putting on some spike-heeled shoes and finding out midway through that they are actually the most comfortable pair of Docs. That contrarian's knowledge was my battleship plating on some if not most days.

But now I find myself unmoored.

At all previous points, I have found safe harbors in unknown waters. Full of drive and curiosity, I have created safe havens, lit by the fire of escaping someone else's preconceived or pre-defined destinies. Now I feel as though my engine's sputtered. And I know I am merely drifting.

It is too easy to dissemble and pretend that I haven't lost my moorings. That everything is okay. I do, and I can, passably. But I am not a good enough actor and so sometimes I am too brutally honest. People prefer the solace of little white lies.

I've become adrift precisely because I can. Because I have that privilege. It's weird and disturbing and I don't want to think about what that means. I've grown up fighting for people without much and now I can simply coast. And my tremendous guilt is what's allowing me to run along on the back of the wind. But winds change, and I don't wanna be stuck in the middle of the ocean, miles from nowhere and short on supplies.

I need to go back to being resourceful.

To take this empty space and to figure out how to reinvent myself. To focus if nothing else on what I like, what I excel at, and where the twain meet. To figure out who I am and why I have come this far. I cannot be a good person, friend, activist, lover without doing some of this hard work. No one else is going to do it for me. The self-induced emotional flagellation has to stop. The growing has to start.

And I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I am afraid to rebuild. My battleship's a shambles and taking on water. My immigrant parents would be ashamed that I can't fucking decide if I want to sink or swim.

Typical - I am half-heartedly dog paddling.

McCain's appeal to Latinos

2008-07-11T11:30:00.000-07:00

Senator McCain put out a new video today highlighting the accomplishments and patriotism and faith (damn, how's that for a grand slam?) of Latino immigrants.

Curiously, toward the end, it cuts away to a shot of Tom Tancredo. Marc Ambinder thinks that this is an example of dog whistle politics signaling to Latino voters that he is willing to challenge his party's orthodoxy and extreme bigotry. I'd agree.

It's a pretty effective ad that ties together Vietnam vets with Iraq and Afghanistan vets who are not even green card holders. The final quote:

"So let's, from time to time, remember that these are God's children. They must come into our country legally but they have enriched our culture and our nation as every generation of immigrants before them."

Quite artfully said and an appeal to Christian values as well as the politics of the Church. With more and more churches now joining the sanctuary movement, and with bishops playing key roles in the immigrant rights movement, a clever way to appeal to two constituencies. The words and imagery stir even this cold jaded heart. Is this a sign that with Steve Schmidt ascendant that the McCain ship is somewhat righting itself, or just that Ken Mehlman's brand of outreach to traditional Democratic bases (Mehlman was notable for apologizing in 2005 to the NAACP convention for use of racial politics) is on the upswing. I would give more credence to the latter, and this thought also lends additional weight to Ambinder's hypothesis that it's Melhman's proteges, not Rove's who are now controlling the McCain campaign.

Rove was not known for the "you attract more flies with honey than vinegar" approach - if anything he delighted, as Mark Penn still does, in dissecting and chopping off pieces and fingers and toes of the American people - segmenting into infinity. An ad like this that deliberately calls out to the Latino community is something that Mehlman would have done, if nothing else to minimize the percentage of Latinos who vote Democratic.

And it's a smart move - it's too late to go after African American voters but not too late to wedge Latinos, although that window of opportunity is fast closing as immigrant communities come to find out more about Obama and welcome him increasingly.

Pump and dump: CocoRosie and Tha Pumpsta

2008-07-10T10:54:00.001-07:00

Full disclosure: I was going to start out writing a post about CocoRosie given their slobbering review in the NYT Mag. I was all set to hate it, and I wound up liking it especially songs like "By Your Side" that reminded me of a mix of Bjork, Ani DiFranco and Cocteau Twins. Then I listened to "Jesus Loves Me" featuring the lines:

Jesus loves me
But not my wife
Not my nigger friends
Or their nigger lives
But jesus loves me
That's for sure

Do I get the irony in that? Yes. Do I get the Christian imagery in said irony? Yes, but I can't really get behind it. Nigerian Boy says it better about a different song of theirs, "Armageddon":

I get irony, I get reverse psychology, I even get shock for shock sake, but I don't get this; and what sucks is I enjoy them otherwise, and now I can't listen, I just can't. I'm not even trying to be poetic with this entry, I tried trust me to understand this song, but it always hit me the wrong way, as a person of color it's pretty hard to find any value in those lyrics, it leaves me cold and lost and alone, particularly because of the song's musical setting.

And now that I have all that off my chest, I finally figured out who Bianca Casady sounds like - it had been bugging me for a while. Yes, it might be shocking to folks that Bianca Casady's voice might grate. But, SHE SOUNDS LIKE ADAM SANDLER!!!!!

- - - - - - - -

I just had a collective brain shudder reading about and subsequently listening to the so-called music of "Tha Pumpsta", a 25 year old kid originally from Atlanta who now runs dances in Williamsburg (where else?) Brooklyn marketed under the name "Kill Whitie!"

It's all in the name of ironic hipster fun, though you hear? And even though the parties are promoted on flyers featured headless big-bootied black women, saying things like "free admission to anyone with a bucket of chicken," well, I had to go check out this guy's music and website. And it is all terribly bad.

Really bad music - just noise signaling nothing. If you don't believe me, check out the video on his site. It features him grinding an African American woman and closes with him gnawing and gobbling fried chicken in a very disturbing gut-churning fashion that matches the lyrics. And yes, I went to his myspace page. I listened to 3 songs, which was as much as I could bear. I listened to Sallie Mae out of interest, thinking that it might at least be an ironic yuppie take on foreclosures but "Sallie Mae, I don't wanna play . . . . You can't play you can't play you can't play, you can't walk away" is technically accurate and yet a third grader's understanding.

Basically, his schtick reminds me of these guys who started up a "humor magazine" that later crashed and burned because they tried to write satirical pieces about race. These were white boys who were mega wealthy and rather poor writers. As with everything, it's in the execution. If they had been really great writers, they might have gotten less flak.

(If you're waiting for the connection here between CocoRosie and Kill Whitie, Bianca enjoys going to Kill Whitie parties and was interviewed by the Washington Post:

Bianca Casady, a multiply-pierced woman with a scalp divided between long dark hair and a buzz cut, grabs her female friend by the hips and shakes her like a blender. She steps outside, catches some fresh air and talks about the party.
"It's about being nasty, people come to grind on each other," said Casady, 23. "It's like friends being sexual with each other."
Casady was raised in Santa Barbara, Calif., but quickly notes her worldliness by listing the cities where she has lived along the trail to Brooklyn. A regular Kill Whitie partygoer, she tried the conventional (that is, non-hipster) hip-hop clubs but found the men "really hard-core." In this vastly whiter scene, Casady said that "it's a safe environment to be freaky."

Brainwashed has the takedown at CocoRacist, You're so Worldly, How's Mom's Audi?)

Love wins the day

2008-06-18T10:05:00.000-07:00

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Helen Zia, one of my Asian American activist icons, was legally wedded to Lia Shigemura, her longtime partner, in the state of California.

Additionally, George Takei ("sulu" of Star Trek) was in line for an application for marriage in Los Angeles.

Thank god people can finally legally have the same rights as everybody else in one more state in the nation. Now for the 48 other states . . .

(Yes, I know NY Gov. David Patterson has approved allowing same sex married couples who move to NY State be recognized - this is just the first step, not the same thing as equality. But a great first step it is!)

For now, love wins the day.

Post partisanship and the apocalypse?

2008-06-12T13:29:00.000-07:00

The National Review's blog the Campaign Spot gets a shout out from dailykos on debunking the vicious and false smear that Michelle Obama's on videotape calling people "whitey" and then asks for help in debunking more rumors about Obama by getting a copy of his birth certificate.

A sign of the apocalypse or of the post partisan politics of the Obama campaign?

Some conservatives like Bruce Bartlett, former Reagan advisor, think that Obama will do more to push certain conservative ideals like school vouchers than any conservative could actually achieve. And of course true conservatives are pissed like hell about the war spending and Dubya's crazy out of control deficit creation.

Here's a snippet from his very interesting and thought-provoking piece in the New Republic:

Milton and Rose Friedman's son, David, is signed up with the cause on the grounds that he sees Obama as the better vessel for his father's cause. Friedman is convinced of Obama's sympathy for school vouchers--a tendency that the Democratic primaries temporarily suppressed. Scott Flanders, the CEO of Freedom Communications--the company that owns The Orange County Register--told a company meeting that he believes Obama will accomplish the paramount libertarian goals of withdrawing from Iraq and scaling back the Patriot Act.

Libertarians (and other varieties of Obamacons, for that matter) frequently find themselves attracted to Obama on stylistic grounds. That is, they believe that he has surrounded himself with pragmatists, some of whom (significantly) come from the University of Chicago. As the blogger Megan McArdle has written, "His goal is not more government so that we can all be caught up in some giant, expressive exercise of collectively enforcing our collective will on all the other people standing around us in the collective; his goal is improving transparency and minimizing government intrusion while rectifying specific outcomes."

In nearly every quarter of the movement, you can find conservatives irate over the Iraq war--a war they believe transgresses core principles. And it's this frustration with the war--and McCain's pronouncements about victory at any cost--that has led many conservatives into Obama's arms. Francis Fukuyama, the neoconservative theorist, recently told an Australian journalist that he would reluctantly vote for Obama to hold the Republican Party accountable "for a big policy failure" in Iraq. And he seems to view Obama as the best means for preserving American power, since Obama "symbolizes the ability of the United States to renew itself in a very unexpected way."

So between this lovefest and the wildfires in California and the floods in the Midwest, is the apocalypse really coming? Cos if someone knows, I'd appreciate a heads up. Bucket list and all, y'knows?

Veepstakes shootout

2008-06-12T04:18:00.000-07:00

Ugh, this whole debacle over Jim Johnson being forced to resign as head of Obama's veep search committee is really obnoxious. Just because he was involved with Countrywide.

[Pause. Take a breather.]

I do not love what greedy individuals involved with the mortgage meltdown and now credit crisis have done to this country. How many people have lost their homes and their jobs. But there is a difference between someone representing military juntas and someone doing deals around mortgages.

Now, the question of whether it was smart for the Obama campaign to pick someone who is very DC insider to head up the search committee is a whole different question given his emblematic "DC outsider" brand. But I understand wanting to have someone with a lot of experience at this thing, because it is arguably one of the most important decisions that you make in a presidential campaign.

Cos god willing you win the thing and then they are your partner and deputy in trying to push back all the years of manure that Bush II loaded on this nation.

But here's the other thing: Johnson is not staff. He is a volunteer - ultimately a very high level volunteer, but a volunteer none the less. And one of the crazy things about this campaign is just high high profile it is and high thoroughly people involved with it are scoured compared to the McCain campaign, compared to previous campaigns.

Marc Ambinder, who I deeply respect (and thanks for bringing back comments!) sounds sad that this is a war of attrition. I agree, a lot of it doesn't make sense, but the media are complicit in being the bloodhounds, as are we all. By asking for and demanding transparency in this internet age, there is so much information available about anyone online.

So we become mini oppo researchers sitting at home and we feed the beast. We all want increased transparency, but when does it stop? For those of us involved in campaigns, even as low level volunteers, would we want that harsh a light shined on our activities? Or would we also want some level of privacy?

Consider S. R. Siddarth, a former college student who helped bring down a sitting US Senator. I don't think he thought he would be at the center of a press frenzy, and over being insulted. And gods, he was only a college student! Imagine if you were him and didn't want all the press attention afterwards?

Uncomfortable, no?

At the end of the day, I think we should focus our energies on candidates, and to some degree staff. Unless candidates consort with killers or pedophiles or things of that nature.

My only remaining question is why did the campaign give over Johnson that quickly? The RNC should know that it's not an equivalent scalp, and now they are just thirsting for more blood. Sharks sense blood and weakness and attack. Man or woman up folks, this ain't over yet.

Dean to stay at head of DNC

2008-06-05T10:04:00.000-07:00

Obama is keeping Dean as Chair of the DNC, which is a smart move and a way not to ruffle additional feathers at this time. Sure, Dean isn't well-beloved by the Clintonistas or Rahm Emmanuel, but he has the loyalty of state party chairs and activists who finally for once got some staff on hand.

This arrangement works because Obama is really all about a 30+ state strategy or a strategy where you fight for most of the states and you campaign hard in untraditional areas, and Dean was all about going onto Wisconsin and YEARRRRGH!

I love Dean and Obama together - a priceless combination.

I'm pretty sure Paul Tewes will take over once Obama is elected though.

Process and retreat

2008-05-30T01:02:00.000-07:00

I originally started this blog as a way of processing what was happening to me in a previous (it feels like many moons ago) job. Since then, I've managed to forgive most of the people there, and really, it's not like they did me any huge wrongs. The organization was poorly run - so poorly run that after I left, it was discovered that 1 person had been stealing.

There are lots of things going on in my life now, and I need to keep blogging if only so that I have a place to sort these things out - if not on paper, then in bytes.

Writing has always always helped me to process change. This is no different than any of those times. The beauty and the joy of living is embedded in these moments of reflection. Of genuflection.

My life has been the tiniest bit in turmoil recently, and this is a change year in many ways, not just the election.

What I want now is a good solid ship to sail on.

Addendum: I got sucked into the whole tracking of my stats and it was exhilarating to watch it spike and climb exponentially. I started blogging just for the ego-feeding of it and felt a demand and need to publish and produce not unlike the unholy horror of academia. Now I think I am simply back to writing for the hell of it, for the need of it. Be forewarned, this is going to involve a fair bit of personal analysis of . . . well, me. Politics may come second for a little bit. But as they say, the personal is political.

Where I'm going and where I'm at

2008-05-22T22:45:00.000-07:00

I have been neglecting the blog for a bit lately. Things have been sorta rough, and I am trying to sort things out. As if you could handle life items the way you handle clothing that you take out of the dryer.

I started the blog when I was in confusion and disarray. It seemed to help me sort and process. So maybe it's back to blog therapy - who knows?

All I know is I have loads of angst to burn, and that leaves not much time in which to write, sort, or live.

In my previous years I have always retreated into my personal writing space as a way of coping and of making sense of the world. Perhaps its time to hit the political pause button and just wind up personal for a bit. I'm not even sure how many of these rants and processes are going to be made public but I need a separate space, a separate self to rant. And then I can come back later and pick through the pieces and put together the puzzle, just as I did with my "stop breathing" posts.

Sorry for those readers who are interested in my political analysis. I'll still throw in the odd tidbit here and there, but in the middle of a country that's falling apart, so am I.

(Yeah, I did just write something that narcissistic.)

Can't you tell that's why I desperately need to blog it?

Happy readings,
power & politics

The Edwardses' differing preferences

2008-05-06T12:17:00.001-07:00

It seems that Elizabeth likes Hillary's health care plan and that she would be the first female POTUS while John likes that Obama brings change, according to a People magazine interview.

But he cited two things he likes about the charismatic young senator from Illinois: "One is, I think he really does want to bring about serious change and a different way of doing things. And secondly, I think it's a great symbolic thing to have an African-American who could be president."

Differing Opinions?

At that, Mrs. Edwards rolled her eyes and, gripping the arms of her kitchen chair with some exaggeration, seemed about to lunge from her seat. "What about the great symbolic thing about a woman ..."

"It's important. It's important," her husband said. "I know it."

More importantly, they have decided to stay out of the primaries to focus on pursuing issues dear to them - health care and poverty.

I still respect John Edwards as a candidate, and think that he still can run in 2012. Meanwhile, Hillary is done in the party. This is no longer her party, nor Bill's party. They need to stop thinking that they are the reigning king and queen of the ball, because it now belongs to the people. If they saw Dean as a threat (and they still do, because he is the titular head of the party), Obama's their worst fear - someone who actually wants to include and respect all comers, without regard as to their length of duration in the party or their previous affiliation.

Hillary is acting as the Nader in this race, and she is ruining it for everyone, from talking and acting Rovian to taking away the best line that Democrats have against John McCain (100 years in Iraq) by stating that she thinks it's okay to stay 50 years.

Not okay, Hillary, not okay.

Burning down the house, blow-torch style

2008-04-30T10:18:00.001-07:00

I haven't posted in awhile - work and personal and a confluence of things have been getting to me. But I will continue posting on things that outrage me, like the fact that a Democratic 527 (with Hillary affiliations) is making confusing phone calls to African American voters in North Carolina. They were charged with doing the same thing in Virginia.

Women's Voices, Women Vote is a DC based group that aims to boost voting amongst unmarried female voters. This is a fantastic cause, and one that I wholeheartedly support. However, the question is, what then are they doing using an African American man's voice to make robocalls to African Americans in North Carolina.

Dailykos is on top of it.

Women's Voices Executive Director Joe Goode worked for Bill Clinton's election campaign in 1992 as a pollster; the group's website says he was intimately involved in "development and implementation of all polling and focus groups done for the presidential primary and general election campaigns" for Clinton.

I am so angry that I want to cry and tear my hair out. Why would you deliberately do something that would damage our chances in the general election?!?!

If Hillary thinks that even if she survives the primary, that she can win without African American voters, then she is wrong. Because it's not only African American voters who are pissed about this behavior. Only someone like Hillary can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory - the economy is for shit, gas is hitting $4/barrel, and reports say it may go as high as $6/barrel in the summer.

The politics of destruction have gone too far. I am a staunch Democrat, but that is because Democratic platform currently includes equal opportunity and fairness. I will still vote for Hillary if she is the nominee, but it is only because McCain is a far worse choice. If anything, I believe that Hillary will drive a lot of people back out of the party and to independent or third party groups. Currently her influence on the race and Democratic registration and enrollment is about 50 worse than Nader. And super delegates should be aware of this - if she is willing to not just ignore, but actively disenfranchise African American voters, she will be willing to knock down and run over any one of you to gain power.

I have been moderate about Hillary. Now I am done with her. After this election, I am sure that her advisors will remain in the party. That the Clinton money will still stay in the party. But she is not my candidate of choice or happenstance. And if there is a primary challenger in her upcoming Senate race, I will find a way to support him or her.

These are new low tactics, and they are beyond the pale. There's a reason why her trustworthy polling is in the 30s when Obama and McCain are in the 60s, and she's definitely damaging his ratings. It's over. Pull out. Drop out. Obama's won.

When even Rahm Emmanuel is saying that the way the loser loses decides how we win in November, then you know you're toast. Emmanuel is as big a Clintonista as there is, and the only reason he has remained neutral publicly is because while he may have supported Clinton and run his political operations, he is a Congressman in Chicago (where the Daley machine is strong) and his home state senators are the dream team duo of Dick Durbin and Obama.

Ugh. Good riddance.

GOP candidate speaks at Hitler bday party

2008-04-30T07:41:00.000-07:00

The photo is priceless.

Not sure why this asshat Republican congressional candidate thinks that this is good for his candidacy or career, but it sure is one way to get some notoriety.

From the Times Northwest of Indiana:

Tony Zirkle, who is seeking the Republican nomination in Indiana's 2nd District, stood in front of a painting of Hitler, next to people wearing swastika armbands and with a swastika flag in the background for the speech to the American National Socialist Workers Party in Chicago on Sunday.

"I'll speak before any group that invites me," Zirkle said Monday. "I've spoken on an African-American radio station in Atlanta."

Sure, because that's FAIR AND BALANCED, right?

Even his local GOP county chair is distancing himself:

Porter County Republican chairman Chuck Williams on Tuesday denounced Zirkle's appearance at the gathering.

"He certainly doesn't hold the view of the of the Republican Party," Williams said. "I don't know why you would stand up in front of a picture of Adolf Hitler when millions of Americans fought against that kind of oppression."

Zirkle compared his speech to other politicians appearing at Bob Jones University.

Ugh, talk about foot in mouth syndrome! What's hilarious is that he's compared Bob Jones University to a Nazi gathering. Everytime McCain appears at Bob Jones university, Democrats should repeat that comparison.

The event was not the first time Zirkle has raised controversy on race issues. In March, Zirkle raised the idea of segregating races in separate states. Zirkle said Tuesday he's not advocating segregation, but said desegregation has been a failure.

Zirkle received 30 percent of the vote in the 2006 primary, losing to incumbent Chris Chocola, who was defeated in the general election. Zirkle said Tuesday that winning the election is not his primary goal.

I can't believe this guy got a third of the primary vote, but apparently that's Indiana for ya, and Obama is trying to win the state in the Democratic primary and the general election. That's the backdrop. I just can't believe that someone would go and speak to the modern day Nazis. But I suppose it is better that the do it in public than privately hold meetings and pass legislation that would harm communities of color. Death by a thousand cuts and all.

Trent Lott took flak for what he said at Strom Thurmond's birthday party: "When Strom Thurmond ran for president [of the dixiecrat party], we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years, either."

Thurmond had run on a segregationist agenda, and Lott had voted against things like the Voting Rights Act, the continuation of the Civil Rights Act, and against making Martin Luther King's birthday a holiday.

We don't need more politicians like Lott, and I'm glad he left the Senate. I wish more elected officials and candidates would make their opinions known sooner so that they never make it into office or get kicked out, if they hold similarly offensive views.

Mark Penn gets canned

2008-04-06T23:46:00.001-07:00

First by his client, the government of Columbia (not the District of Columbia), in its effort to push a free trade deal with the US.

Then he gets moved around like just another chess piece by the Clinton campaign. No, he didn't fully get canned - he's continuing to do polling for the campaign. But he will no longer be the chief adviser and campaign strategist that he loves being called.

I mean, the Latina running the campaign got fully dismissed, but the white dude gets to keep getting paid?!?!

Not sure how this is fair, but I am sure that this is what happens when you try to play both sides of an issue and you forget your ethical duty to not be Jack Ambramoff-like. No taking money from the tribes and the casinos and the taxpayers.

I'm glad Change to Win came forward to put additional pressure on the Clinton campaign.

Also, I'm sure that there are a lot of Hillary campaign staff who are exceedingly happy today, not to mention a number of top tier strategists who are quite gleeful. But it is a problem when the focus is on the adviser and not on the candidate. Additionally when people within the staff seem to hate their campaign strategist more than they do either their Democratic contender candidate or even the GOP nominee. It's a weird weird world and Penn seems to inspire that level of dislike. Hey, look at me, I'm blogging about him getting bumped down a few notches and I don't even know the guy!

The general consensus is that this was bound to happen.

That Mark Penn would one day step aside from the Clinton campaign has been, as they say in sociology, overdetermined for a while. He had few allies inside the campaign, he was subject to withering criticism in the press, and he simply refused to give up his outside work, some of which conflicted with Sen. Clinton's policy positions.
After Thursday's disclosure in the Wall Street Journal that Penn had met with the Columbian government about its trade agreement, Clinton's aides were put in the position of not being able to come up with a defense for Penn; he had done the indefensible. For Clinton, who has tolerated Penn's public errors in judgment because she believed in his strategy, it was the last straw.

"The senator and president were very angry about the meeting. Mark knew that he had made a very big mistake and decided to step aside," a senior campaign official said tonight.

Penn will continue to serve as the campaign's chief pollster. But it unlikely he will serve the campaign in any public capacity, such as participating on press conference calls or appearing as a television surrogate. (Marc Ambinder)

Well, I gotta say that this move should have happened a HELL of a lot sooner. as a matter of fact, it doesn't really give the Clinton camp much credibility if this is how they would run their presidency. Penn has clearly been rather incompetent and out of touch with what voters want to hear for a while.

Plus he's really smarmy and he's a TERRIBLE spokesman. He looks like the quintessential DC fat cat and any average viewer could tell you that. Paul Begala remains my favorite Hillary surrogate because he's unassuming and unpretentious.

Oh, let me also point out that I thoroughly wish that no self-respecting presidential or other campaign ever hire Mark Penn's services. Besides, check out his losing streak, according to DHinMI of dailykos!

Why the Clinton campaign would even keep him around is baffling; he has always sucked. It's hard to find information about his past clients via Google searches, but he's on a tremendous losing streak, one that's rumored to be at least 13 straight. I haven't been able to find anything he's won since Bill Clinton's 1996 reelection (in which Clinton didn't top 50%). He polled for Al Checchi when Checchi lost the three-way CA gubernatorial primary to Jane Harman and eventual winner Gray Davis in 1998. He got fired from the Gore campaign in 1999. In 2002 his clients included Dem gubernatorial primary losers Jim Blanchard in Michigan and Andrew Cuomo in New York, and his candidate Jeanne Shaheen lost the 2002 NH Senate race (she's got a different pollster this time around). In 2004 he polled for Joementum's presidential run and Peter Deutch's losing FL Senate primary against Betty Castor. In 2006 he even polled for asshole Silvio Berlusconi, who in addition to being a far-right scumbag—did I mention he's a far-right scumbag?—was the sitting prime minister of Italy, and owned most of the Italian media! (Check out this great "historical reenactment" of a Penn memo to Berlusconi.

Please let Penn go the way of James Carville.... or Dick Morris. No Democrats should hire him.

The Hillary brand has been damaged through a combination of Bill's eruptions, desperate name-calling, erosion of her standing as first lady, poor financial management, craptastic map strategy (who thought it was a good idea to skip the caucuses and to say that the vast majority of the states don't count!?!? . . . Oh wait. . . Penn was saying that Richardson is insignificant as of a few weeks ago.) they totally eroded her status as First Lady and reinforced all the things that people were prone to dislike about her - her kneecapping, the honesty issue, the sense of entitlement, the willingness to use any means to win, the Tracy Flick in her, the hardball chick, the Wonder woman/ iron will of her, and even things that should be admired.

At the end of the day, a lot of the things that people hate about Hillary are aspects of her strength and of her personality. And I still believe that there is much to admire about her. But jesus christ, the way she gets (or doesn't get) stuff done. Her demeanor is lacking. Her campaign staff are packing.

General election - it's time to get cracking.

(Yeah, I don't know why I broke out with the bad rhymes. Call it primary inertia and going stir crazy in the glass house we've built. It's this mind-numbing pain and dumbing frustration.)

American Apparel's Next Top Model

2008-04-05T12:30:00.000-07:00

Wow. I watched this thing more than halfway through and didn't know that it was a farce. Yeah, I am kinda clueless in that I don't know exactly what Tyra Banks looks like.

Forgive me, I was distracted by Dov Charney's craziness.

for those of you who don't know American Apparel as something other than super soft cotton T's made by US based employees and striptease ads with hipster model employees, you should also know that Dov Charney is currently facing several sexual harassment lawsuits.

Do I also own a few American Apparel items? Yes, and they are really soft. Anyway, this spoof was so zany that I really believed it.

The End of the White Man?

2008-04-01T04:33:00.000-07:00

This bumbling, ridiculous New York Times op-ed made little sense. It's all about a white man looking at himself in a narcissistic fashion, at his world, and then back at his own belly button. It's about his pissing fears that it's the end of the era of the white man, just because America is currently going through an economic downturn that most people feel like is a recession, and because China and India are growing and hold the teeming masses.

The whole op-ed meanders on like it's very own third paragraph:

"The jumble makes no sense. It just goes on, like the mindless clacking of an ice-dispenser."

Of course, this would be cute and not merely trite if well, "the white man" was the only person who lives in America. Oh, I'm sorry, he addresses that: "It’s the end of the era of the white man; and, before it even began in earnest, of the white woman, too."

Gee golly whiskers, it's nice that white women had a brief moment in the sun, but now I guess they are going to be taken over by Asian women. Who will probably either just bow and scrape demurely, or deceitfully ravish and plunge their jeweled hairpin into your back, depending on whether they are playing the role of geisha or dragon lady in the theatre of the Western mind today. (See, I can match Cohen overused Asian stereotype for stereotype, and all wrapped in a pretty bow too.)

And what of Europe, where the Euro and pound are faring quite well against the dollar? What about Canada, that great white expanse to our north where their loonie holding its own against our Illuminati eye dollar bill?

This kind of solipsistic tripe angers me, because caught in between the flowery words and extended metaphors that claw their way to nowhere is the very real and unimaginative spectre of the yellow peril. It's the same thing that happens everytime that the US economy is down - we find someone to blame, someone to point fingers at. Someone to scapegoat for our current situation. We point at someone else who seems to be doing better or unreasonably well, maybe by magical powers of persuasion, maybe even effortlessly as if the whole race were somehow magically smarter and more gifted.

He even interviews a mysterious, "effortless" "Oriental".

I went to see Frederick Ma, Hong Kong’s secretary for commerce. He’s suave in that effortless Hong Kong way, the shrewdness wrapped in a soothing patter of bonhomie. How is it that this is the only place on earth where people think of what you want before you’ve thought of it yourself?
. . .
“I am very worried about the U.S. economy right now,” he said. “When I was visiting last November, I asked a banker friend what’s going on, and she told me that a Wall Street problem was soon going to be a Main Street problem.”

Wow! A Magical mystical mandarin who knows what you are thinking before you do! It almost sounds like a butler or a servant! Wait, since Hong Kong is a whole city and province, it's legions of servants! And does he also have an expressionless face like a mask, hiding his deep and darkest desires to betray you?!? Whose dagger-like shrewdness is all wrapped up in a silk blanket of "bonhomie." Perhaps he's a Manchurian candidate!

(And yes, he's concerned about our economy - we're the world's leading superpower. I'm concerned about our economy, and so is everyone else in America! not to mention other countries who will see their economies go down because of globalization. It seems the only people who haven't seemed to recognize that the economy sucks is President Bush's administration!)

Really? Effortless? I mean that's not similar at all to the model minority stereotype is it? Because all Asians are good at math and science, it must come effortlessly to us, right? Like it's hardwired into our genes?!?

Because it's effortless until it's not.

Come to Asia and fear drains away. It’s replaced by confidence and a burning desire to succeed. Asian business leaders are rock stars. The culture of education and achievement is fierce. China is bent on beating the U.S.A.

No doubt this is because of the effortless Asians. Oh wait, somehow you can't reconcile effortless with "burning desire to succeed or the culture of education and achievement" So now we have the really hardworking stereotype of the model minority at play here - the Asians who are determined to overcome. Maybe the culture of education and achievement just somehow rubs off on Asians like a good luck genie (to use another tired Orientalist image.)

What you feel in Asia, said Claude Smadja, a prominent global strategist, is “a burst of energy, of new dreams, and the end of the era of Western domination and the white man.”

(This man who is quoted is on the board of IIT. Which is really a prominent university in . . . their imagination.)

Yes, please cast Asia in the role of paper tiger. Because really, all of Asia is doing so well. Last I checked a major source of the Philippines' revenue was remittances (money sent home by immigrants abroad.) That's how robust their economy is - they export their best people, and then their entire economic system slows when remittances drop. But of course China, which is holding the Olympics, is representative of all of Asia, which actually contains more than 60 countries.

(Yeah, some of these are not typically considered "Asian" countries but they are all georgaphically in Asia the continent. And the point stands - the diversity of Asia is far greater than China. Or China + India. It'd be like saying Latin America is Brazil.)

So here we have a reporter who conflates the white man with America, and China with all of Asia. And he is the former foreign affairs editor for the New York Times and an NYT columnist!

And when fear of the enigmatic Asian doesn't work, club them over the head with how many of these effortlessly hard-working Asians there might be.

Asian statistics can be numbing. With one third of humanity, the numbers get big. There are now 450 million cell phones in China.

Damn, maybe that one third of humanity will figure out how to turn on their cell phones and use them all at the same time, thus sending a powerful wave of electromagnetism surging across the globe and somehow revitalizing the Asian economy while electrocuting all the white men at the same time. Or, they could just simultaneously just chuck them all at the white men, thus bruising their heads.

I just think that really, the NYT should be more responsible and screen better for higher quality reporting and opinion. He's like a male version of Maureen Dowd. He's a ditz. OR at least he writes like one, and NYT readers deserve better. If this is the perspective on global affairs that the NYT can afford to hire to educate their readers on our world, then well, maybe it's better not to put it out there. No wonder Americans are so little informed about other nations if our perspective on them is via these kinds of biased perceptions. And shoe shines.

Update: today he has a similarly nuanced article on whether shoe shine countries or non-shoe shine countries are better. I am not sure how or why the paper of record prints such dribble. What happened to standards and sophistication versus subpar stupidity?

NY Gov. Hillary Clinton: Say it ain't so

2008-03-31T21:17:00.000-07:00

Oh god, please say it ain't so, I don't wanna know. . .

Jonathan Alter of Newsweek is talking about "giving" Hillary Clinton the NY State governorship as a consolation prize for not winning the presidential nomination.

This is ridiculous. First of all, just because Paterson is currently having problems does not mean that he will have to resign, and second, the reason why I don't want Clinton as my president (apart from issues of judgement) is that she feels entitled to it. It's as though her parents didn't get the big huge stuffed panda and now she just has to settle for the still large but just slightly smaller one.

Get over it.

Maybe this prospect would have seemed more appealing if she hadn't totally botched her campaign and if she hadn't started down the nuclear path. But more importantly, you don't just get handed a governorship. You should have to work for it. The way she worked for her first Senate campaign, and the way that she worked to represent the people of New York.

I don't have a problem with her having higher ambitions - if politicians didn't, they probably would never get anything done. But she consistently just uses and loses people, cities, states. Look at how certain states (Iowa and oh, about 20 states) were important and then not so much. Look at how Bill Richardson was important, and now not so much.

I mean, c'mon. When's the last time the people of New York had a competent governor for a long period of time? Mario Cuomo? Oy.

Starts and stops

2008-03-31T10:45:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to highlight two of my fellow APIAblog network bloggers. H Super Political started a whole new blog to document all the ways in which John McCain is not our friend, in case you thought he was a cuddly teddy bear.

And Reappropriate is taking some time off to focus on work and to take a breather from negativity. I guess I am blessed or cursed with only a few comments on my blog, so I don't get the chance to hear back from my readers but I guess I also am shielded from the occasional pettiness that blog back and forths can take.

Blogging is a long path full of many start and stops. It's a marathon, and many blogs go dark after 2-3 years for a host of reasons. I can still remember some of my favorite blogs that have gone by the wayside - Steve Gilliard is tops. It gets to be kind of draining sometimes - a burden rather than a release. Sometimes I have also stopped production of posts because of work or illness or whatever. I guess the thing I would say is to remember that the person you are talking to on the blank white screen is human, and not some robotic monkey who doesn't feel the flames.

But then again, asking for civility on the internet is like asking the LOLcats to learn how to spell. and I do hope that Jenn feels refreshed after her blog vacation.

Lou Dobbs goes off on cotton (picking) politicians?

2008-03-31T09:05:00.000-07:00

This is a fine way to criticize others' dialogues on race - Lou Dobbs gets into his rant and barely prevents himself from saying the full thing:

"not a single one of these cotton p-- erhm, these . . . just ridiculous politicians should be the moderator on the issue of race. We have to have a far better discussion than that."

Cotton picking?!?!?

REALLY?!?!

Wow, where is the media outrage over this one? That's such a racist thing to say - to say that black politicians are slaves.

Hillary's hardball tactics backfire

2008-03-26T18:46:00.000-07:00

As I predicted in previous posts, Hillary and her campaign's shenanigans and hardball tactics are turning off supporters and undecided superdelegates.

The Clinton campaign has been actively wooing these delegates, believing a plurality represents the strongest, and increasingly the only, way for her to win the nomination. But one undeclared delegate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the recent tactics are turning her and other superdelegates off.

"I don't think anybody's saying 'step aside,' but 'stop with the garbage' is what people want to say," the delegate said. "Just chill a little bit."

As activists committed to the party, they said, they have been impressed by Obama's ability to bring new Democrats into the fold, and they worry that Clinton is threatening that.

"We like the fact that there is a candidate that has won so many states overwhelmingly," the delegate said. "We're feeling her advisors are leading her in a path that diminishes her as well as him."

And really can you blame them? Between crazy jabbering about "converting" (read: stealing) pledged delegates and mentally incompetent jawboning about Richardson as Judas (expect to see some Latino leaders walk away soon - first the firing of Patti Solis Doyle and now the description of the nation's highest ranking Democratic Latino as "Judas", well this is kinda starting to show a trend where Hillary is just using them as tokens and discarding them just as quickly.)

Plus Clintonites recognize that Pelosi ain't so happy with Hillary and now are trying to force her back into a corner. Read their letter to her here including this thinly veiled threat from some of the Democratic Party's major fundraisers: "We appreciate your activities in support of the Democratic Party and your leadership role in the Party and hope you will be responsive to some of your major enthusiastic supporters."

It's hard not to read this as a threat to withhold funds from the DCCC. And it's true that these people are no joke - Maureen White was the former finance Chair of the DNC, Steve Rattner was behind the Atlantic Yards project in New York, Susie Thompkins Buell founded Espirit, and Haim Saban created the Power Rangers franchise. These people give massive amounts of money to the party, but it doesn't mean that their voices should count for more than the millions of voters.

This is probably the stupidest thing they could have done, and will just result in her unleashing her deputies to a greater degree. In case they forgot, Pelosi is the speaker of the House, the titular leader of 233 of the superdelegates, and many have not publicly sided, belonging to the 400-odd group of undecided delegates (the super-undecideds?) Also, Pelosi is no stranger to hardball politics, but unlike Hillary she is able to pull people back into her corner. (Witness her election as Speaker when several Dem congresscritters voted present rather than voting for her as Speaker. She has done an excellent job of maintaining party unity for the most part, and has gained the respect of those previous holdouts.)

Pelosi knows how to count and whip votes like nobody's business, and I want to point to Dan Lipinski, who reps the most conservative district in Illinois that's held by a (nominal) Democrat. Today he endorsed Obama, leaving Rahm Emanuel the lone undecided in the Illinois Democratic delegation.

Basically, having run a number of campaigns, Clinton is desperate because she's running a sinking ship. By the time you have to arm wrestle your supporters, you've already lost. And the crazy, desperate, haphazard flailing and failing actions you take are ones that unnerve even your supporters. You lose perspective and try to be too ham-handed, and it's not good for anyone, least of all your campaign. If you had a campaign that was doing well, you would be attracting superdels and volunteers and donations like flies to honey. Kinda like what Obama's campaign is doing.

Instead, your pressuring of Dean, Pelosi, and other national leaders has given you a black eye and brought it to the point where Harry Reid, whose son ran your successful Nevada operations, is saying that this will be over soon.

It's not too late to leave with grace and dignity. After all, when Kerry starting making noise about running for president again, he got some serious primary challenges floated. Don't think the same won't happen to you.

UPDATE: correction - posters are correct, these are two different people. Bruce Ratner is the Atlantic Yards developer and Steven Rattner is the American venture capitalist. I apologize for not double checking and researching. Thanks to readers for catching this.

Hillary: the Tonya Harding option

2008-03-26T08:25:00.000-07:00

Well, I barely resisted the urge to call her that in my Sunday post, but a DNC official has gone public (in that anonymous DC fashion), calling Hillary out.

Jake Tapper of ABC has the scoop:

What will she have to do to Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, in order to eke out her improbable victory?

She will have to "break his back," the official said. She will have to destroy Obama, make Obama completely unacceptable.

"Her securing the nomination is certainly possible - but it will require exercising the 'Tonya Harding option.'" the official said. "Is that really what we Democrats want?"

The Tonya Harding Option -- the first time I've heard it put that way.

It implies that Clinton is so set on ensuring that Obama doesn't get the nomination, not only is she willing to take extra-ruthless steps, but in the end neither she nor Obama win the gold.

(In this metaphor, presumably, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., would be Oksana Baiul. Does that make former President Bill Clinton Jeff Gillooly?)

Here's what I said:

"If this is an example of how she is running her campaign (and it is), I don't see why more superdelegates aren't running in the opposite direction. This is a prime example of why Democratic activists are afraid of endorsing because they are incredibly sore losers who will try to handicap your knees."

Why did I not want to fully call it that, and instead just alluded to it? Because I do think that it is slightly sexist. It plays into people's perceptions that Hillary is a fighter, albeit a dirty fighter who is willing to do anything to win, who is a rough and tumble gal. I think that Hillary's hardball antics are increasingly turning off a number of high profile Dems, Richardson and Reid among them. It's the Judas-calling kinda stuff that reminds people that she has high disapproval ratings amongst parts of the Dems and the GOP, and the independents.

This meme is so powerful that it will be the one to end her presidential campaign, and it may factor into a netroots/progressive Senate challenge in about 4 years. It's catching fire and soon youtube will be flooded with videos comparing the two. Only, this time it's not going to be a challenger like Jonathan Tasini, it will be someone who is better funded, and who is going to do a much better job of drawing votes from various disenfranchised communities. If you think that the media is just eager to cover this angle, you forget how much the media despises Hillary (despite her well-trained press team.)

And Hillary won't have the backing of the Governor's machine this time around because he's busy enough trying to save his own political hide. Sure, she might have his verbal backing but when the knives come out, he won't be in her corner.

She has poisoned her own well, and she's going to have to drink from it sooner or later.

Clinton: The Audacity of hopelessness

2008-03-25T07:48:00.000-07:00

Ouch. Well, one could have expected it to be coming from one corner or another. This time from conservative-ish New York Times commentator David Brooks who estimates that Hillary's chances of winning have dropped to 5%.

For the sake of that 5 percent, this will be the sourest spring. About a fifth of Clinton and Obama supporters now say they wouldn’t vote for the other candidate in the general election. Meanwhile, on the other side, voters get an unobstructed view of the Republican nominee. John McCain’s approval ratings have soared 11 points. He is now viewed positively by 67 percent of Americans. A month ago, McCain was losing to Obama among independents by double digits in a general election matchup. Now McCain has a lead among this group.
For three more months, Clinton is likely to hurt Obama even more against McCain, without hurting him against herself. And all this is happening so she can preserve that 5 percent chance.
When you step back and think about it, she is amazing. She possesses the audacity of hopelessness.

Our party is being torn apart, rendered asunder form within. Someone asked me last night if a long primary wasn't good for the Democrats, and I said "Yes, up to a point is drags out and brings to light things. But it's gone beyond the pale. Calling someone a Judas?!? Saying that the Republican candidate would be better as president than your fellow Democrat?!?"

In other news, I think the wall against Clinton is rising as more party leaders cement their opposition to Clinton's strategy of "well, if I can't have it, I'll break it." Harry Reid, who is as much of a fixer as anyone in DC, who knows how to play the game, hints at a deal in progress.

From the review-Journal:

Asked about it last week, Reid said he remains convinced the nominee will be decided well before the August national convention. He wore a serene and mysterious smile.

But Reid isn't one for lengthy explanations. The conversation went like this:

Question: Do you still think the Democratic race can be resolved before the convention?
Reid: Easy.

Q: How is that?

Reid: It will be done.

Q: It just will?

Reid: Yep.

Q: Magically?

Reid: No, it will be done. I had a conversation with Governor Dean (Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean) today. Things are being done.

That's all the Nevada Democrat would say about it.

So it also looks like he thinks that Michigan and Florida delegates will be able to be seated but not get to vote. I am not sure that this is any better of a solution than not letting them come, since it is eerily reminiscent of 2/5th of a vote (and I'm one of the main people who thinks that they broke the rules, the Clinton camp broke the rules and they can't keep changing the rules.)

But more importantly, it sounds like Clinton's rampage is coming to an end.

And thank god, because some of her lead advisors like James Carville are unapologetically craaaaaaazy, that's for sure. He refuses to resign or in any way apologize for calling Richardson a Judas: "I was quoted accurately and in context, and I was glad to give the quote and I was glad I gave it. I'm not apologizing, I'm not resigning, I'm not doing anything."

Clintonite calls Bill Richardson "Judas"

2008-03-23T19:04:00.000-07:00

WOW! Just when you thought the kitchen couldn't get any hotter, Ragin' Cajun James Carville throws some tabasco sauce in the mix, calling Bill Richardson a Judas (!!!) for endorsing Obama over Hills:

"An act of betrayal," said James Carville, an adviser to Mrs. Clinton and a friend of Mr. Clinton.

"Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic," Mr. Carville said, referring to Holy Week.

Damn, talk about over the top. I mean, obviously the Clintons are pissed that Richardson didn't go with La Famiglia, but this is WAY over the line. And I am saying this as someone who doesn't love Richardson (mostly because of how he threw Wen Ho Lee under the bus as Sec. of Energy.)

I mean, the whole Mark Penn saying that Richardson was significant before he was insignificant is par for the course. But Judas?!? Does that mean they think Hillary is Jesus?!?!?

Not okay. They just insulted the top ranking Latino in the US, is she trying to kill her base?!? I mean she has a large part of the Latino vote, is she really trying to throw them over?

If this is an example of how she is running her campaign (and it is), I don't see why more superdelegates aren't running in the opposite direction. This is a prime example of why Democratic activists are afraid of endorsing because they are incredibly sore losers who will try to handicap your knees.

This is just beyond the pale, and incredibly bad taste. This is why people hate the Clintons. Carville needs to be fired for this.

Tidbits for Easter: Pelosi and Peeps!

2008-03-23T18:59:00.000-07:00

Very cute and fun - the Washington Post had a Peep diorama contest, and some of the entries are adorable. Maybe next year I'll enter!

Pelosi claims to be neutral, no one believes her.

Clinton can't beat the media or the facts - this race is oh-vah!

Plus Democratic activists want this whole thing to be over.

Civil war at Fox News over race, hell froze over

2008-03-21T10:36:00.000-07:00

Wonkette has the goods on civil war at Fox News over different interpretations of Obama's comments on his grandmother being a "typical white person" on a Philly sports show, and his speech in general.

Chris Wallace of FOX is defending Obama on his own show, and a Fox in the Morning anchor storms out over boneheaded arguments from his co-anchors.

I mean, what has the world come to when people try to have a normal and reasonable discussion about RACE on Fox?!? A debate that isn't just "pander and inflame"? I know we talk about the GOP driving a wedge, but I think it's possible that Obama is weding the traditionally Republican base. And this, my friends, this is amazing. Remember what I said about Obama taking progressive stances and making them so resaonable that most people could agree?

Well, it's happening to even conservatives. I have NEVER seen a Democrat able to wedge the GOP like he does, only the opposite (i.e., Reagan.)

Obama is the exceedingly rare politician who can do this, who can make people hope again, who can get things that never get talked about like race, back on the table. Our country is having an entire discourse on race and it's done much more for our nation's discourse than Bill Clinton's roundtable. Because EVERYBODY's talking about race around the watercooler and the dinner table. I am in awe of his political skills.

And this is totally separate from his ability as a politician. Because Obama didn't shy away from talking about the issue, he elevates our political discourse. When Romney talked about religion, the average person didn't care. Because he didn't really make us question our assumptions and re-examine our values. This speech - we are all reconsidering our impulses.

And if Obama can do that on race, he can do that on other issues, like immigration. Like war. By gods, can you imagine what this country would have been like if we fully weighed the implications of going to war with Iraq? If newcasters actually debated the merits and consequences?!?!?!? Instead of just being scribes, paid to write and read whatever the administration put out (to paraphrase the immortal Colbert.)

To be fair, not everyone who works for Fox is crazy conservative. I've known a few people who were producers and anchors, and they were normal, even *gasp* Democrats. Granted, these were people of color who said that working at Fox is a crazyhouse, and that they had to leave for their own sanity.

To be more in depth, I did my research, and Chris Wallace is a registered Democrat in D.C., which he says is because there is really only one party in DC and in order to have a voice on local elections, you have to be able to vote in the primary. Fair enough.

Richardson for Obama (now plus video)

2008-03-21T09:40:00.001-07:00

I just want to state how shocking this endorsement is, given where all the chips were stacked at the beginning of this marathon round of poker (i.e, in Clinton's corner.)

VIDEO of richardson endorsement

As of Richardson refusing to endorse after Feb 5th, this is much less shocking, but still amazing given that Richardson had been seen by many as campaigning to be Hillary's veep. You can see it in the debates, and in his comments and his steady defense of her when she's down in the debates (witness the exchange after her major stumble on drivers licenses in October).

For instance, in this last debate, after repeated attacks on Hillary’s honesty, Richardson used the precious few seconds he had on one of the few questions he was asked to defend her against accusations that she was in the pocket of special interests:”You know what I’m hearing here? I’m hearing this holier than thou attitude towards Senator Clinton that - it’s bothering me because it’s pretty close to personal attacks that we don’t need. Do we trust her? Do we - did she take money from special interests?” (Blogger News)

Even as late as December 2007, he and her are flirting with the thought:

After first comparing himself to former Arkansas governor and former president Bill Clinton saying they were both CEOs and have both balanced budgets, Richardson asked Clinton, "Don't you think that governors make good presidents?"

Richardson may not have anticipated the response she gave after the laughter and applause subsided.

"Well, Bill," Clinton said, "I think they also make good vice presidents."

But he's been moving at a snail's pace toward endorsing Obama. Slowly but steadily, his public comments have indicated that he prefers Obama's character. On March 3, he defended Obama's judgment against Hillary's "red phone" ad:

He was outspoken in his criticism of Clinton's new "ringing phone" ad, which suggests that Obama is not ready to become commander in chief.
"I happen to disagree with that ad that says that Senator Obama is not ready," he said. "He is ready. He has great judgment, an internationalist background."

And if this bolded bit from 10 days ago (emphasis mine, quote courtesy Los Angeles Times) doesn't indicate how he feels about being told that he "owes" Bill for being appointed as UN Ambassador and as Sec of Energy, well, nothing else does:

Richardson, as New Mexico governor, is a Democratic Party superdelegate, and he demurred on the question. But his answer still served as tea leaves to be read. "I'm truly conflicted," Richardson said. "I'm torn. I see ... a lot of loyalty I owe President Clinton. He made me U.N. ambassador. He made me secretary of Energy. He's treated me extremely well. But you know what? I paid him back. Because I served well." Richardson described Hillary Clinton as "enormously capable ... but I did run against her."

Then he focused on Barack Obama, someone he said "I don't know as well. But I think there's ...

something that is very special about this guy, that is good." Richardson related an anecdote from one of the debates: He fielded a question and then, as the next point went to another candidate, leaned toward Obama next to him on the stage and whispered, "'Boy some of these debates really boring, aren't they?' Or something like that. And he said, 'Oh god, yeah, you're right.' "

As the two were whispering, a question suddenly veered back to Richardson -- who hadn't been paying attention. "I looked at Obama and he says [whispering] 'Katrina. Katrina.' And I go back and say, 'Well, my three-point plan on Katrina is ...' Obama could have thrown me under the bus. But he didn't. So I said, 'Thanks, Obama,' and he said, 'Just listen next time.'"

Earlier I wrote that Bill Clinton apparently tried to play hardball with Richardson.

Some are folks who owe the Clintons a favor but still feel betrayed or taken for granted. Could that be why Bill Richardson, a former U.N. secretary and energy secretary in the Clinton administration, refused to endorse her even after an angry call from the former president? "What," Bill Clinton reportedly asked Richardson, "isn't two Cabinet posts enough?"

Apparently heavy-handed tactics were enough to turn him off. That's right, cos no one likes being forced to be the token water boy.

I think it's good for Richardson to have endorsed Obama, I just think it would have been better for Obama had he done it sooner, like in time for Texas. (Yes I know Obama won the delegate count but he lost the popular vote.) Also, I am impressed that he was able to buck the Clinton machine. There is a tremendous amount of pressure there, and be assured that they will find some way to get back at him.

In the general election, it will help. And for now, Richardson is one of the big name players who have been sitting on the sidelines. So this will encourage other supers to get a move on. I mean, this is really something - for someone who was supposedly auditioning for her VP to go an back Obama. Whew!

UPDATE: Apparently Richardson is saying he's endorsing Obama specifically because of his Philly speech on race. Nice validation. Man, Obama having a spine shows other Democrats what it means. I'll take that ANY day over Clinton's waffling sort of leadership.

UPDATE 2: Posted video at top, and here's a notable Richardson statement: "It is time, however, for Democrats to stop fighting amongst ourselves and to prepare for the tough fight we will face against John McCain in the Fall."

Clinton's perceived honesty gap and some basic questions

2008-03-20T13:53:00.000-07:00

A new Gallup poll has it in pretty stark numbers: a majority of Americans don't consider Hillary to be honest.

Obama and McCain's numbers are within the margin of error, so they are essentially tied with 2:1 ratios of voters trusting them to be honest.

It's something that I've flagged as a problem of hers before, and the results don't surprise me, because those numbers include both Democrats and Republicans. Hell, the thing I hear the most from people who don't like Hillary when I ask "why?" is "I don't trust her."

Now, this trust issue spans a lot - it spans that they don't trust her to tell the truth, but it includes not trusting her to fully defend progressive values, not trusting her to lead our country in the right direction. Some of this is mistrust on how she's seemingly willing to tear down the party to prevent someone, anyone else from winning the presidency (on the Democratic side.) Some people don't trust her because she used to be a College Republican and they think she continues to use Republican tactics. But I also hear it from apolitical people and swing voters, as well as Republicans. I hear it from Asian Americans, Latinos, whites, and African Americans. I hear it from all ages.

I'd say this is her major hurdle to overcome. The general populace is inclined to believe that she has the experience. They just don't believe that she won't use that experience to either stab us in the back or to fail to stand up for the little guy or girl.

One of the only positive side effects of the rev. Wright thing is that it has helped to wash away the Muslim smear. Instead there's a black nationalist smear. But Obama took a risk and was open and honest about how he personally connects to the issue. And I think that people appreciate that kind of courage and convictions.

It would have been easy for him to throw Rev. Wright under the bus, to completely disown him. But Obama didn't - he said, this man has raised me and brought me into the church. That shows loyalty, a kind of loyalty that the Clinton's haven't shown to their supporters, for the most part. During the Clinton-Gore campaign of 96, the APIA community got shafted and scapegoated for participating in our democracy. Staffers were afraid for their jobs, leaders felt silenced and our community - which was very much still emerging at the time, just on the cusps of starting some foundational new organizations - well, we just shut up. (There's a lot of reasons for this, including lack of infrastructure and even less power then. Check previous posts.)

I keep referencing this because if they would distance themselves from us over some bad checks, what do you think they would do if it comes to a harder issue of deeper importance, like immigration and keeping families together? I don't mean on an individual case by case basis but rather if the GOP wants to use us as the economic grinding-stone of white working class anger? Listen to Obama's speech for a good perspective on both sides.

It's already happening to some degree, and I've seen this movie before. It doesn't end pretty. In 1996, hate crimes increased 17 percent. In the 80s, there was the beating of Vincent Chin and movies like Rising Sun. There's legislation out there that would more clearly define and punish those who perpetuate hate crimes, and we can't seem to get it passed.

Hillary has proven that she fumbles hot potatoes like the drivers licenses issue, that she finds these issues radioactive. But the question is: when will she take a stand? My fear is that despite everything that there is to admire about her (and there is a significant amount), she either won't stand up for our community on the most important issues and really put her weight to bear on preventing bad legislation or passing good bills. Or that she'll fumble because she lacks the coalition building ability like with HillaryCare.

Obama puts himself in everybody's shoes, and as painful as that thought is to some reflexive progressives, I think it makes for a better argument for our case at the end of the day. It helps you spot the objections that other parties have and to address them. Too frequently, we are blind and deaf to the base concerns of Americans, and that's why we are unable to seal the deal.

Obama listens, and that informs his speeches. He makes his position and our position the majority one in simple and plain terms that make it easy for people to understand why he supports his positions.

One could argue that he puts himself in everybody's shoes because he has to walk in a lot of paths, but the who and why is not as important as the how. Because the how is what allows you to walk further down that path and to cross the bridge.

Biggest post ever, thanks to the Big Lead

2008-03-20T07:39:00.000-07:00

Wow, I'm really honored for the link. So far the single posting that I have ever written which just got me mad hits today was on DMX not knowing who Barack Obama is, and it's a link from the guys over at The Big Lead. Which is a sports site. I must admit that my knowledge of sports is scant compared to my knowledge of politics, so this is an honor.

While I am mostly a political-personal blog. This has engendered even more hits in just the past hour than when Craig Newmark linked me after appearing on the Colbert Report. It is good to see politics and the interwebs bringing the jocks and nerds together. It's kinda like a high school reunion, only with less drinking and awkwardness. *Cheers*

LOL Peep Show

2008-03-19T13:40:00.000-07:00

Maybe I am wrong but I would have thought a "Peep show" would have the marshmellow chick peeps on stage. Anyway, this wraps up the past week and a half of Spitzer-Paterson sex stories. I go to LOLcat to escape the depressing news only to see it reflected. Bummer.

Maybe this LOLcat is better.

Obama's speech and affirmative action

2008-03-19T12:17:00.000-07:00

He talks about race, class, and religion, all in a very nuanced fashion. He feels the pain of both white working class voters and African Americans. And it should be noted that Obama is the only person who consistently addresses all Americans including African Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans and American Indians, if only to say that there is no separate and distinct each of these, but that we are all part of America.

He talks about the power of hope, and the GOP ability to divide and conquer, our inability to see the corporation who left us and our families stranded as the problem versus the black family down the street, or to stop hating the white family who didn't perpetuate the "sins of slavery."

In all so many words, he basically talks of the Other and being the Other, but rejecting that label and declaring himself an American. As deeply part of the American fabric and story and dream. It's the kind of discussion that we would have in college after reading too many ethnic studies textbooks, only deeply personalized.

He draws on the ideals upon which our nation was founded, "we the people", "a more perfect Union", and blends it with a very 2008 understanding of how we relate to each other. I'll admit to crying while watch this speech, because it's unlike anything I've heard a politician say to a national audience in well, forever.

And if this speech doesn't cement him as being the more real and honest candidate, the candidate who you want to be, who you want leading this country, and making decisions, then I don't know who you would want. After these long years of Bush and his inability to speak or pronounce words, much less write a speech like this, well, I for one and looking forward to an Obama presidency.

One of the things that strikes me about Ferraro's comments that Obama wouldn't be here if he was a white man, implying that he is our presidential affirmative action candidate, well all I can say is - Obama vastly outguns, out-classes, and out-smarts everyone. He's a better candidate than Clinton, he's run a smarter campaign, and he's brought hope to a nation that needs it. Bringing it back to something I've opined on before (higher education) I will say however, that George W. Bush is the ultimate legacy. He's the ultimate frat boy who got into Harvard and Yale, who fucked around and acted the clown, drinking and doing god knows what drugs. He was given companies to run (which he ran into the ground), and then he was handed the presidency and stewardship of this country, which he has treated like his own personal piggybank. And now we lie here, broken into pieces, with the coins dribbling out, being ransacked by Bush's friends, not unlike some episode of Lil Bush (which is getting better and better.)

So is Obama the affirmative action candidate? I wouldn't bet your sweet life on it. There are so few politicians of any race or gender in this country who have his ability to orate and to move crowds. Unlike Bush, he worked hard and got into Harvard Law and became a community organizer. Instead of running companies, he built community strength.

In thinking about what DMX said in his interview, that basically, the nation is only giving a black guy the chance to run the country now that it's all fucked up, well I don't necessarily think he's wrong. Republicans have said as much - that the next 4 years are going to be a hellride, so why settle for McCain?

I think the country is sick of what a legacy president has done to us, and we are desperate for change. In the background is the economic insecurity, the shadows of a war that Bush started but doesn't plan to finish, the increasing sense that our nation is adrift and that clouds are looming ahead. It is in this context that Americans are willing to give the new guy a chance, like the fourth quarter of a basketball game where the home team is struggling and the starting roster is busted, played out and lackluster, unable to get the ball down the court. The forward has fouled out. The coach makes the decision to turn things over to the rookie b-baller, who has the chops to turn things around. That man is Barack Obama.

What Dean fought for

2008-03-18T18:57:00.000-07:00

I know Howard Dean has been under attack in some quarters of the left, mostly by Hillary supporters as of late. But I was watching this video of what it was like being in the room when he gave his now infamous Iowa speech and "scream" and the dkos poster is correct - the media frame and filter always colors how they present the news and consequently, what ordinary Americans see and believe.

So yes, I believe that the media's portrayal of Wright is just snippets and not necessarily representative of everything Obama's preacher said or did. But going back to Howard Dean, who came across so angry.

Now, the average public may not understand the technical difference between a vocal mic and a room mic. And so they may not understand how manipulated the infamous "Dean Scream" really was. But I can assure you with 100% certainty that the people at CNN, NBC, and Fox knew exactly what they were doing.

And they know exactly what they are trying to do to Barack Obama.

Whether it's to drag this race out for increased advertising revenue (political campaigns are big bucks) or to eliminate a threat, this spectacle is nothing less than the media manufacturing "controversy" to manipulate American democracy.

Everything that Howard Dean said is right - we want to take back America for the normal people. We want and need to run a 50 state strategy so that our message is carried in all corners by everyday Democrats. So that all Americans see that Democrats care about them - about Democrats in big and small states, in states that have traditionally been ignored, and in states that have traditionally acted as ATMs.

It has been said before, but it bears saying again - Howard Dean was right about most everything - his opposition to the Iraq War, his desire to move Southern voters beyond god, guns, and gays, his drive to talk to voters in all 50 states. And as DNC Chair he is implementing these things, but he's not on the Sunday talk shows like Terry McAuliffe used to do, because his audience isn't the politicos who are up watching Sunday talk shows. Indeed, he knows the media isn't his friend.

Witness the incredible turnaround from when they were raising him up as an insurgent, and then the quick Icarus flameout when they roasted him on a spit, turning his words over and over in the eyes and ears of the American people via their cruel instrument of tv.

Instead he has organizers on the ground in 50 states, paid staff that have rejuvenated the party in states like Idaho and Montana, as well as South Carolina. Obama has taken Dean's strategy and expanded upon it, with just results. But Obama know he has to be just as wary of the fickle media, because they can make or break you.

He gave a good speech, one that resonated with people across the country. He gave a speech where he reminded us of the best that this nation has to offer, and he did it all by himself, writing and crafting it by himself.

I think part of it is that the media is just friggin glad to have a president who can think and talk for themselves, but this doesn't mean that they don't want to roast Obama so that the race drags on, whether for ratings or otherwise.

DMX doesn't know who this Barack Obama is

2008-03-18T14:59:00.000-07:00

Pretty funny interview. In a time when everyone is glued to CNN, the home of politics, and previously totally unpolitical people are gorging on politico, DMX doesn't know who Barack Obama is. He's flummoxed that someone would name their son Barack.

From XXLmag:

Are you following the presidential race?
Not at all.

You’re not? You know there’s a Black guy running, Barack Obama and then there’s Hillary Clinton.
His name is Barack?!

Barack Obama, yeah.
Barack?!

Barack.
What the fuck is a Barack?! Barack Obama. Where he from, Africa?

Yeah, his dad is from Kenya.
Barack Obama?

Yeah.
What the fuck?! That ain’t no fuckin’ name, yo. That ain’t that nigga’s name. You can’t be serious. Barack Obama. Get the fuck outta here.

You’re telling me you haven’t heard about him before.
I ain’t really paying much attention.

I mean, it’s pretty big if a Black…
Wow, Barack! The nigga’s name is Barack. Barack? Nigga named Barack Obama. What the fuck, man?! Is he serious? That ain’t his fuckin’ name. Ima tell this nigga when I see him, “Stop that bullshit. Stop that bullshit” [laughs] “That ain’t your fuckin’ name.” Your momma ain’t name you no damn Barack.

Well, to be fair, he can't vote because he's a felon, so he hasn't been following it at all, but he has a pretty pessimistic view on what a president really is able to do.

Also, Ben Smith thinks Obama's speech is Walt Whitman-esque.

More on Paterson's affairs

2008-03-18T14:05:00.000-07:00

Apparently Paterson also had dalliances with some state employees, including a woman who worked for Gov. Spitzer, who the new Gov. Paterson has also "inherited" (in his terms.) Why can't politicians keep it in their pants?!?!

In the earlier news conference, Mr. Paterson said he was speaking out because he did not want the state to become embroiled in another sordid distraction.
“I wanted to come forward because I didn’t want it hanging over my head,” Mr. Paterson said. “I didn’t want to be compromised, perhaps, by innuendo or some sort of message that you better not do something or we’re going to out you about the infidelity in your marriage.”
Mr. Paterson flatly denied that he had ever used any campaign money in connection with the affairs. “I would never use campaign funds for that purpose,” he said.
Mr. Paterson did most of the talking during the news conference. But twice Mrs. Paterson spoke in a hushed, soft voice. “There’s no marriage that’s perfect,” she said at one point.

But as I said yesterday, I think it's smart of him to get all this stuff out now in the interest of transparency, rather than wait for the GOP to pounce on it later.

I'm not someone who demands marital fidelity of elected officials, although it would be nice. Mostly I think this is stuff that is very personal and only when it impinges on how the govern or on policies, then that is when I care.

The weird thing is, in Spitzer's case, it's not as though he made anti-sex trafficking laws easier on the johns, he made them harder. As if perhaps to punish himself or because he didn't think he would get caught.

That's why Republican controversies like David Vitter and Larry Craig caught fire so quickly - because they both did things that opposed family values. And because Larry Craig had voted against many many gay rights bills. (And why haven't those two stepped down already?!? Vitter even has the nerve to claim that his case is totally different from that of Spitzer's even though Vitter went to a prostitute to indulge his diaper fetish. Totally distasteful.)

I don't expect personal concerns not to be reflected in politics - after all, people run for office because there are certain things they want to change, certain ideas and issues that are most important to them. But when I say that I hope bedroom trysts don't impact politicians' choices, I mean it in the sense that I'd hope that they don't decide to benefit that person's family or business in some way. That the individual hopefully doesn't persuade them to take a position counter to the interests of their constituents.

In light of the fact that politicians seem to be incapable of keeping it in their pants, I'd say that that's the minimum standard. Although of course, I have high standards for politicians whom I personally believe in. Because at the end of the day, they are human just like us. People don't magically attain a halo when they get elected, although some behave as though they do. They do however have the spotlight of public inquiry on them, and should try to behave as though they have halos.

A GOP "Macaca" Runs in Virginia

2008-03-17T20:29:00.000-07:00

Amit Singh is an Indian American running for Democratic incumbent Jim Moran's seat in the 8th District. The twist is not that he's an Indian American running in Virginia, home of the real Americans, to paraphrase former Senator George Allen. The twist is that he's a running as a Republican, but he doesn't identify himself as such on the website.

An Arlington small-businessman, Amit Singh is committed to protecting his nation and serving the people of the 8th District.

Like many of you, he is unhappy with the direction that the politicians have been taking us. Our freedoms, our rights, and our civil liberties are being eroded through compromises allowing the Real ID and the government taking power from the people. Our economy is sinking, the debt keeps growing, and the politicians keep spending our children’s future on pork barrel projects for their friends.

Which is probably smart for the Democratic leaning Northern Virginia district that he's running in. As Sepia Mutiny points out, he should know that real Americans, real GOPers know that you don't call those other brown people "undocumented workers" but rather "illegal aliens" or whatever Lou Dobbs is saying these days.

Moran has been controversial because of some of his anti-Israel stances and comments, but I still think that Amit has an uphill battle. Not a bad looking guy though. Plus he seems to be a libertarian, small government Repub, so theoretically better than your run of the mill GOPer. But I'm not endorsing and I doubt he'll win the primary anyway. But maybe he should consider seeking George Allen's nod.

New Gov. Paterson admits to extramarital affair

2008-03-17T20:13:00.001-07:00

Well, that was fast.

Just days following Spitzer's admission of "wrongdoing" his replacement (who was only sworn in today) admits, in a joint interview with his wife, to BOTH OF THEM HAVING AFFAIRS.

Damn.

NY Daily News has the scoop:

In a stunning revelation, both Paterson, 53, and his wife, Michelle, 46, acknowledged in a joint interview they each had intimate relationships with others during a rocky period in their marriage several years ago.

In the course of several interviews in the past few days, Paterson said he maintained a relationship for two or three years with "a woman other than my wife," beginning in 1999.

As part of that relationship, Paterson said, he and the other woman sometimes stayed at an upper West Side hotel — the Days Inn at Broadway and W. 94th St.

Dude, is New York going to run through a string of electeds until they come to someone who is clean? I mean, not just in terms of marital fidelity but also ethics? Cos obvs Senate Majority Leader (by a thread) Joe Bruno ain't so hot on the ethical count. I guess NYers will just work their way down to the janitor who cleans up all their messes in the Capitol.

Also, this is just kinda gross:

Asked if he had stayed with anyone else since 2001 at the same West Side hotel, Paterson said, "From time to time I used to take Michelle to that hotel."

. . . He and his wife went to the West Side Days Inn when they were trying to rekindle the romance in their marriage, he said.
They did so after a marriage counselor he used recommended they introduce "new and exciting things" into their relationship, Paterson said, and so they could be alone and away from their children.

"It's convenient since it's only four subway stops from my Harlem office," Paterson said.

Nasty - I would not want to be their kid. I really don't need to know where my parents are trysting. And I don't think I would want the rest of NYC knowing that either. Why did they decide to come out about it? Because they wanted to preempt the leaking of it by reporters or political aides.

Well, I doubt that the NYS Republicans will be calling for his head immediately because that would just be a cold war with everybody outing everybody's bid-nasty. And I'm sure they've got very deep closets stacked high with bony bodies. It's actually smart of him to get it out in the news today because everyone's just excited to move beyond the Spitzer mess and get a new Gov. Plus other things have been dominating the press, like the meltdown of the markets and the buying of Bear Sterns. Cos well, sex is entertaining and everything but there's real things going on like job and home losses.

Props to Juan Gonzalez on the scoop.

Pelosi pushes for Obama and the future of the Democratic Party

2008-03-16T19:29:00.000-07:00

As I've noted throughout, Speaker of the House Pelosi (god I love that phrase) has been pushing for Obama in every so slight and subtle ways, including with her lieutenants Jan Schakowsky and George Miller endorsing him. More recently, she said that a Clinton Obama ticket was never going to happen because of the things that had been said, which supports his position that he would not be her veep (and can we talk about how ridiculous it is for the Number 2 to be offering the front runner a veep position?!?!)

Now, Pelosi comes out even more, and supports his stance on delegates. She is perhaps the single most important player in the Democratic party, as someone who has the support of the liberals and who understands how the game is played. Keep in mind that when she supported Mike Honda in a tight race for the DNC Vice Chair position, he got there.

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says it would be damaging to the Democratic party for its leaders to buck the will of national convention delegates picked in primaries and caucuses, a declaration that gives a boost to Sen. Barack Obama.
"If the votes of the superdelegates overturn what's happened in the elections, it would be harmful to the Democratic party," Pelosi said in an interview taped Friday for broadcast Sunday on ABC's "This Week."
. . .
Pelosi's comments could influence other House Democrats who are neutral in the presidential race and will attend the convention as superdelegates.
In her interview, Pelosi also said that even if one candidate winds up with a larger share of the popular vote than the delegate leader, the candidate who has more delegates should prevail.
"It's a delegate race," she said. "The way the system works is that the delegates choose the nominee."

She understands what is at risk - a divided party is not going to be good for downticket races or for the future of the Democratic party. Indeed. what is ironic is that Hillary shares the same sector of voters that McCain does, at least in age. She has all the older voters, and something I am hearing more and more frequently now from the 30 and under cohort is that they will not vote for Hillary if she is the general nominee. This is from people who are NOT Naderites.

REPEAT: These are not Naderites. Naderites are the lunatic fringe. These are normal people in big cities and suburbs, some married with kids, of all races.

They are not the fringe of the party, but rather party activists and loyalists. And even people who have been less politically involved and engaged up until now. Who are now reading politico.com obsessively and whose watching of CNN is starting to rival mine (!!!) Many of these people are not political junkies and have never been. But they are deeply passionate about Obama and his message of change, and this is the future of the Democratic party.

Some of these people are the independents (a slice of the electorate that has been steadily growing) who want to come to the Democratic fold.

I am shocked and pleased at how informed people in the US and internationally are about our election. At the general enthusiasm and excitement. I wish it would stay this way but I'm increasingly concerned that some people will be turned off of politics for good if the current level of debate goes on like this and Clinton wins. I am going to support her and work for her regardless if she is our nominee, but I'm alarmed at WHO is saying that they won't. More than the party activists, I'm alarmed at the "normals" (if you will) who are making these declarations.

I hear that the campaigns are going to play cleaner for a bit, and I hope they stay there. Because all of this dirt and outrage is going to be played back by the RNC and McCain's campaign in the general election. And Pelosi is right - there's no way that if Obama wins he puts Hillary on the ticket just so the RNC can run ads with her saying that John McCain would be a better president.

That is beyond the pale. And if she was smart, she would stop trying to burn our house down. This level of naked ambition isn't going to do her well if she is trying to position for 2016, because all these millennials and the 30 and unders who are disgusted with her tactics are going to remember and never let her get a chance again. But maybe that's what's driving her fierce urgency this time around. The Democratic Party is changing, more rapidly than people could expect.

It's a good and healthy thing for us to be evolving. Good lord, it's been so long! But Clinton donors are trying to put the squeeze on Howard Dean as DNC chair because they are afraid of the evolution of the Democratic party, and afraid of losing their stranglehold over the power.

Pushing to seat the Florida delegates, at least one top Clinton fund-raiser, Paul Cejas, a Miami businessman who has given the Democratic National Committee $63,500 since 2003, has demanded Democratic officials return his 2007 contribution of $28,500, which they have agreed to do.

“If you’re not going to count my vote, I’m not going to give you my money,” said Mr. Cejas, who was the United States ambassador to Belgium from 1998 to 2001.

Christopher Korge, a Florida real estate developer who is another top fund-raiser for Mrs. Clinton, held an event last year in his home that brought in about $140,000 for the national party, which was set aside in a special account for the general election battle in Florida. But he told committee officials this week that if Florida’s delegate conundrum was not settled satisfactorily he would be asking for the money back.

“If we do not resolve this issue,” Mr. Korge said, “I think it’s safe to say there will be a request for a return of $140,000.”

Nice.

NY Gov. Spitzer linked to prostitution ring, apologizes

2008-03-10T12:29:00.000-07:00

I am really blown away by this news. Spitzer made a name for himself as Mr. Clean, and he campaigned on a reform mandate - he cleaned up Wall Street, and organized crime. He even prosecuted prostitution rings as an Attorney General and passed an anti-sex trafficking law as Governor. He was a populist and an overachiever.

I am just shocked and well, I don't know. I thought that he was really one of the good guys. I guess it just goes to show that the higher you climb, the harder you fall. Ben Smith reports Spitzer has no allies left, having been a hard-hitting prosecutor of Wall Street, and with terrible relationships with his state legislative leaders.

His wife is standing by his side, and she looks gaunt and absolutely devastated. Silda Wall is a beautiful woman, and she does not normally look like this. Spitzer's married with 3 kids, and I just can't believe that someone this smart would be so dumb or unethical. The NYT story has the details and apparently one of his aides was crying while waiting for him to take the stage.

Spitzer didn't take any questions and didn't say he would resign, but I don't know that he can stay in there.

"I acted in a way that violated in my obligation to my family...I apologize first and most importantly to my family, and to the public, I promise better."
"I am disappointed and failed to live up to the standard I expected my expect I must dedicated some time to regain the trust of my family. I will report back."

Ben Smith is a must read today, and he has a look at the prospective successor, Lt. Gov. Patterson. Apparently if Spitzer resigns, and Patterson accepts, he would be the state's first black governor, and the first blind governor. If Patterson refuses, the state's governorship would go to NYS Senate leader Joe Bruno, Spitzer's arch-nemesis.

Wow. Just wow. It's kinda like if you found out that Eliot Ness was using prostitutes.

Here's the NYT with some details:

The man described as Client 9 in court papers arranged to meet with a prostitute who was part of the ring, Emperors Club VIP, on the night of Feb. 13. Mr. Spitzer traveled to Washington that evening, according to a person told of his travel arrangements.
The affidavit says that Client 9 met with the woman in hotel room 871 but does not identify the hotel. Mr. Spitzer stayed at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington on Feb. 13, according to a source who was told of his travel arrangements. Room 871 at the Mayflower Hotel that evening was registered under the another name.
Federal prosecutors rarely charge clients in prostitution cases, which are generally seen as state crimes. But the Mann Act, passed by Congress in 1910 to address prostitution, human trafficking and what was viewed at the time as immorality in general, makes it a crime to transport someone between states for the purpose of prostitution. The four defendants charged in the case unsealed last week were all charged with that crime, along with several others.

Here's some from the conservative Daily Sun.

Politico has links to the court affadavit.

The difference between this and the Larry Craig scandal? No one expected this - it wasn't whispered about, and this mistake, of all things, is one of the worst things he could have done. Because he has run as a strict moral crusader and advocate, he is probably done for. All his legislative success or anything else will be done.

Whew. I think I am just recovering from the shock.

McCain blows up at NYT reporter

2008-03-07T11:55:00.000-08:00

THe funniest part of all of this is that it's at Elizabeth Bumiller, who is generally not considered to be the one asking the hard questions or even the followup questions. She's a GOP scribe and lapdog if you ever saw one.

I bet that this is probably the last time she even bothers asking a question apart from, "May I have some fries with that?"

I mean, cos it's soooooo terrible for the man who was previously "enchanting" you on his ranch and feeding you BBQ to now be getting angry at you like your grandpapa. McCain's temper and ferocity is legendary - he's said "fuck you" to many GOP senators, and had to apologize many times over. Is this the man you want with his finger on the red button!?!?

now documented here, here and here.

The following is an ABC News transcript of the conversation:

New York Times correspondent Elisabeth Bumiller: Senator can I ask you about Senator Kerry. I just went back and looked at our story, the Times story, and you told Sheryl Stolberg that you had never had a conversation with Kerry about being, about Vice President –

John McCain: Everybody knows that I had a private conversation. Everybody knows that. That I had a conversation. There’s no living American in Washington -

EB: Okay.

McCain: - that knows that, there’s no one.

EB: Okay

McCain: And you know it too. You know it. You know it. So I don’t even know why you ask.

EB: Well I ask because I just read –-

McCain: You do know it. You do know it.

EB: Because I just read in the Times in May of ’04 you said.

McCain: I don’t know what you may have read or heard of, I don’t know the circumstances. Maybe in May of 04 I hadn’t had the conversation --

EB: But do you recall the conversation?

McCain: I don’t know, but it’s well known that I had the conversation. It is absolutely well known by everyone. So do you have a question on another issue?

EB: Well can I ask you when the conversation was?

McCain: No. Nope, because the issue is closed as far as I’m concerned. Everybody knows it. Everybody knows it in America.

EB: Can you describe the conversation?

McCain: Pardon me.

EB: Can you describe the conversation?

McCain: No, of course not. I don’t describe private conversations.

EB: Okay. Can I ask you –

McCain: Why should I? Then there’s no such thing as a private conversation. Is there (inaudible) if you have a private conversation with someone, and then they come and tell you. I don’t know that that’s a private conversation. I think that’s a public conversation.

EB. Okay. Can I ask you about your (pause) Why you’re so angry?

McCain: Pardon me?

EB: Nevermind, nevermind.

McCain: I mean it’s well known. Everybody knows. It’s been well chronicled a thousand times. John Kerry asked if I would consider being his running mate.

EB: Right.

McCain: And I said categorically no, under no circumstances. That’s all very well known.

EB: Okay, let me ask you… (moves on to another question.)

UPDATE: Hmm, here's some video footage, he doesn't look as angry as thought. however, it does seem as those he snaps at her. Supposedly McCain has been taking anger management classes . . . perhaps it's helping a little. I still wouldn't want him near the red button. Or the red phone.

Housekeeping - updated blogroll

2008-03-07T09:29:00.001-08:00

I have been reading and linking to an awful lot of Marc Ambinder, so I replaced Wonkette with his blog. Plus he links to angry asian man, a rarity for mainstream political bloggers. Mainstream political bloggers tend to be focused on . . . well, anything but APA culture and politics.

I'm increasingly liking Ambinder not just for his willingness to call it what it is (see previous post on "white guilt") but also his insights. Including his post on the Yeldarb effect (the opposite of the Bradley effect.) He's literary and well, his style suits The Atlantic's. Smart, incisive and sociological commentary.

I had to replace wonkette because it's watered down. It's not as sharp or funny or breaking. queen wonkette has a mainstream media stage now (and I might add ana marie cox's tumblr.) They lack a female voice, which really is just too DC now that I think about it. Maybe I'm growing out of that kind of humor, or they're just doing it less well or both. But I find myself less drawn there than ever before. I'd say I read more jezebel at this point, and I get my political news and analysis from much more sophisticated sources.

Also added Stuff White People Like to the blogroll. We'll see if it stays up more than a few months, but it's been spot on and had me chuckling. And really, in my line of work, I need more chuckles.

Should Clinton be Obama's veep?

2008-03-07T06:42:00.000-08:00

Is the question that a lot of national pundits and some grassroots activists are asking. Is even the case that Governor Ed Rendell is pushing.

They argue that the Democratic base is so divided that we need these two on a ticket to bring the fold back together. That Hillary can retain and bring the female vote.

My gut response is no, no, no. NO. NO. NO!

Although my friends argue in discussion that Clinton's media discipline and DC insiders' knowledge are useful in the White House and in moving policy, my reasoning is that Clinton would hamper Obama from making real and meaningful change. That her veep advisors would overwhelm and hamstring and doublecross his WH staff on the Hill and around every bend if there was an issue that they disagreed on.

That whatever initiatives these are would go down like Hillarycare. In flames, and over disagreements about how we get there.

And this doesn't result from a dislike of Hillary. I find that they agree on many issues, but I am sure that Obama's ways of getting there would be vastly different than Clinton's, and I don't want a change president hampered by the exact opposite.

Not to mention that I really don't think we can win with Clinton on the ticket. Not a national general election. This is apart from the GOP base hating her fanatically. Either Obama or Clinton, if they became the nominee, would need someone to balance out the ticket - someone either with tremendous amounts of military, executive, or economic experience. Ideally all three, but 2 out of three ain't bad.

Here's what voters care about this election: Iraq and the economy. Increasingly, the economy is a major concern, and I'm sure that voters in Ohio care more about that than other issues.

If an Obama candidate brings someone to the table with lots of military experience like Jim Webb, then we can at least draw neutral with McCain on the military experience issue. If we can neutralize him on that we go after him on his total lack of understanding around the economy and his lack of judgement on Iraq and "bomb bomb bomb Iran."

Democrats are already more trusted on economic issues, so I think Obama needs to go more populist and talk more about the economy, but to also really figure out how to connect with lower income voters. Part of that means going to Appalachia.

If Obama brought someone with both economic sense and executive experience, like Mike Bloomberg, then he would still need to hammer on the military stuff some. Don't get me wrong - I don't think Webb is the most progressive guy, and he hasn't been great on immigration. But I think he can also talk to Appalachians and lower income voters and he relieves people's mind son the security question.

The last time that we pushed our national front runner to adopt a veep because they were next in the popular vote, we got Kerry Edwards. Kerry and Edwards didn't necessarily get along, it was more of a shotgun wedding. And no wonders that it didn't last. The GOP kept taking things that Kerry had said about Edwards or vice versa in the primaries and using them against us. In order to create change you have to have people who welcome it. The spectre of Mark Penn in the White House is not something I want.

I also don't trust her to cut and run on crucial issues. To use Penn to read the public's opinion on a given week and to decide based upon numbers what is good and right. Hillary has MAJOR trust and credibility issues. It is the biggest complaint that I hear from people who are apolitical, from people who are conservative, and who are liberal. We don't trust her to do the right thing, and I cannot have someone that high up in the Executive Branch like that. People trust McCain's judgement - under pressure he stayed under torture rather than use his connections. That is huge and it is vastly different than George Dubya. There's as contrast that McCain can draw, right there.

We want someone who is going to fight for the everyday people, and Hillary is not that person. Barack Obama has community organizing experience, but Hillary went corporate. She was on the WalMart board. Her adviser Mark Penn has done lots of work for WalMart.

Hillary has run a BAD campaign, whether it was led by Mark Penn or whomever. At the end of the day, she has to take responsibility for that and for overseeing and hiring the wrong people. I don't want that kind of decision making in our White House when we have just suffered under a terrible president.

And I'm going to put this out there, for what it's worth. Someone asked me if we shouldn't just put Hillary on the ticket just to prevent her from bringing the whole house down. Just because she's on the ticket doesn't mean she can't subvert it from the inside. If not during the campaign, then over a 4 year term. Her machine is known for being ruthless in getting what they want. And she wants to be top dog.

Previous wallflower states now treated like the prom queen

2008-03-07T06:20:00.000-08:00

Well, all these states who are used to their votes not mattering now might get to decide who our nominee is. Pennsylvania for one has had Chelsea Clinton in the past few days and a massive influx of resources and staff.

Will Bunch of Attytood thinks that it's not PA Gov. Rendell who's the ace in the hole for Hillary, but rather Philly mayor Nutter, since his prominent support of Hillary assures white voters that they aren't being racist by voting against a black man.

A blogger finds that Obama has a hard time in Appalachia. This has big portents for Pennsylvania and explains a good deal about the Ohio turnout.

Puerto Rico is changing up its June 7th caucus to a June 1st primary (in a move that can only benefit Hillary.) Don't forget that one of the largest concentration of Puerto Ricans is in New York State, and that also Hillary has been doing better in primaries than in caucuses, where her field staff don't get how to organize (and admittedly the seniors have a hard time getting to, so there is an age discrepancy.)

Michigan will revote, Florida (in the form of Democratic senator Bill Nelson) is trying to shake down Howard Dean's DNC for money for a recount. I heard the Michigan definitely will revote line a few weeks back from an on the ground source. I'm glad that Michigan will revote - I'm all for people voting and being able to vote. But Florida - this is really ridiculous by the way - if the state hadn't decided to flaunt the rules to begin with and try to draw more national attention and prominence to their state and increase the value of their votes, then they shouldn't have changed their primary date. Now, they get the prominence that they want if they decide to schedule revotes in June, and they're trying to bribe/extort money for that revote from an entity that is supposed to be neutral?

If Dean gave Michigan and Florida the money, it would encourage other states in 4 years to also flaunt the rules and then whine and cry and extort more money to hold revotes. Moreover, holding a revote and paying for one would be seen as being partial to Hillary since it 1) encourages rule-breaking and 2) Michigan and Florida both went for Hillary already. That's not the role of the DNC. If Florida finally decides they want a revote, they have to figure out how to pay for it.

Lastly, on the press and bias, I wanted to point some attention to Marc Ambinder's excellent analysis. He brings up white guilt (I can't believe no other reporters have the guts to use this term.)

Then there is white guilt, magnified by the progressive political impulse found within the professional set's cultural liberalism. We are transfixed by race, obsessed with it, we whites are obsessed with expiating the collective sins of our country, and that works to Obama's advantage. I think we feel we are done with gender (we aren't, but we feel as if we are) and so we don't meditate on those questions as much.

Whether or not you agree that the press has been treating Obama kinder, or whether you believe that the press leans left, you need to read this. I don't know that it's just white guilt because there is also a class guilt that comes from being the white collar tastemakers/spinmakers and being the Fourth Estate. That comes from some of the top reporters and editors having been Ivy League educated. That comes from reporters generally being educated, and therefore falling into the Obama demographic camp is they tend to be Democratic.

Reasons why Hillary will stick it out until April

2008-03-04T05:01:00.000-08:00

From Mark Halperin:

1. She thinks she would be a better president than Obama.

2. She thinks she would be a stronger candidate against McCain than Obama.

3. She feels an obligation to her supporters to keep fighting.

4. She thinks she can win Pennsylvania.

5. She thinks she is finally gaining traction on the “national security experience” argument.

6. She thinks the one-on-one debate has only just begun, along with the heightened scrutiny of Obama.

7. She is finally raising enough money to fight the fight with paid TV ads.

8. She knows the Rezko trial is getting started.

9. She knows Obama is still well short of winning a majority of the delegates.

10. Clintons don’t quit–and she really, really, really wants to win.

Not saying that this is what I want or necessarily think will happen, just that an awful lot of people seem to be writing her out of the picture before she's formally exited, stage right. Never forget that she has the capability to bring the house down with her by going nuclear, and that the Clintons are sadly, very sore losers. The main reason so many of the superdelegates have yet to commit is not that they dislike Obama, but rather that they fear the wrath of the Clinton machine.

Also, reasons why Mark Penn needs to own his failure, courtesy of Marc Ambinder. Along with this stinging volley, which I consider quote of the week:

First, giving a quote like this to a reporter while your candidate remains viable is like the NTSB issuing a report on an airplane before it's crashed.

Hmong American soldiers

2008-03-02T05:47:00.000-08:00

Hmong Today has a good article on the Hmong Americans who are serving in Iraq and their link to the Hmong soldiers that fought on behalf of the US during the CIA's "secret war."

I thought that this was a very moving article and describes the legacy and history of the elders being passed onto a new generation.

History was in the making both as Americans and Hmong. The young troops added to the legacy of Hmong on the battlefields, brave younger soldiers who put their lives on the line to fight for freedom. "Your sons and daughters, new to America, put on their uniforms and served us again," commended U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum. When McCollum requested the honored troops as well as veterans to rise from their seats, one glance around the room proved that at that moment, a link in history was being created between the elders who could recount the Secret War via memory and their children who came years later but were being honored that day.

In the past, the Hmong served the U.S. as allies, this time, they served as citizens who honored their country. "To you men and women, I am awestruck. We are so fortunate for you. We are fortunate for your parents that they came to this country. We are one as Americans," acknowledged former Gov. Al Quie who expressed his appreciation for the Hmong, both as service personnel and community members.

"People who have suffered bring something that people who haven’t don’t know," Quie continued. "You cherish freedom and human rights, because of what you experience, not what you read. That’s what you’re bringing to us, a wonderful, wonderful strength of character…. Tell those stories to your children, but tell it to us too because we can learn from it too."

Indeed the troops who were honored Sunday brought back to the states experiences that could open the doors to greater understanding and advancement. Not only did they voluntarily put their lives on the line to protect, they took on toil and hardship to return home, and guide. And yet many of these humble service personnel repeat to others what was said to State Sen. Mee Moua. The microphone in her hand, Moua tilted her head and glanced over at the 25+ troops seated to her left, "I know that you didn’t do it to be a hero," she explained and paused as the thoughts of unknown danger and sacrifice passed through the minds of audience members, "Many of you said ‘I’m doing this ma’am, because it is my job.’"

One Hmong-American soldier has died in Iraq, Qixing Lee. He lost his life in battle last year.

APAs for equal marriage

2008-03-02T05:18:00.001-08:00

This is pretty cool - a whole slew of APA groups (over 60) have filed an amicus brief so that everyone can have the freedom to marry. (Story found at the Bay Reporter.)

In recognition of Freedom to Marry Week, Marriage Equality USA (MEUSA) is featuring the Asian Pacific Americans' amicus brief filed by several Asian American Bar Associations throughout California and over 60 Asian Pacific American civil rights organizations; including the Japanese American Citizens League, National Korean American Service and Education Consortium, and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

. . . The brief begins by saying, "As Asian Pacific American organizations, Amici are familiar with the history of discrimination, especially California's history of exclusionary efforts targeted at Asian immigrants which made it difficult to marry, establish families, have children, build communities and integrate into the larger American society. We see important parallels between the contemporary exclusion of lesbians and gay men from marriage in California."

One of the main plaintants, Stuart Gaffney, actually is the product of an interracial marriage which wasn't recognized in states like Missouri, since laws related to the Chinese Exclusion Acts had yet to be banned there.

"At the core, this discrimination was motivated by stereotypes about each group and the putative threat each group posed to whites in California. For example, some argued that American institutions and culture would be overwhelmed by the habits of people thought to be sexually promiscuous, perverse, lascivious and immoral. These stereotypes led to the enactment of laws that not only impeded full integration into society, but promoted segregated communities and institutions." – APA amicus brief

When the parents of Stuart Gaffney, a marriage plaintiff and Marriage Equality USA Asian Pacific Islander (API) Outreach Director, met at the University of California at Berkeley and married in 1952, (just five years after the California Supreme Court had struck down California's own anti-miscegenation law) their marriage was still not valid in many states.

In fact, when they moved to Missouri and started looking for a home, they learned that their marriage was null and void under Missouri law. One generation later, Gaffney and his partner of more than 20 years, John Lewis, are challenging the current exclusionary law prohibiting them from marrying.

"We have shared our family's story to raise awareness of our state's history of exclusion and to encourage our society to continue to challenge unjust laws and embrace the American tradition of fairness and equality for all," said Gaffney.

"The exclusion of gay couples from marriage pushes them outside of the common framework and vocabulary of family and civic life; it forces them to be outsiders." – APA amicus brief

I'm proud of our community for supporting and coming to the forefront on this issue.

Open letter to Asian American journalists

2008-03-02T04:25:00.000-08:00

Dear Asian American journalist,

I am glad you succeeded in your dream of being an Asian American journalist. I understand you work long hours, with few resources, and frequently work under very short deadlines.

That said, you are in the business of writing or producing or editing or researching the "truth." Whatever you put out get believed by thousands (or millions, depending on your media market) of people. It gets quoted and recited as the gospel - "Did you hear what they said on Channel 11 about those alligators breaking out of their cages?"

Whether or not it's true, whether or not it's a story, whether or not you or your writers have done all the research, people still believe it. I don't know why, but media still shapes our views. Perhaps because you get access to politicians and decision-makers and business people who we've only ever seen on the front pages of your magazine.

Take, for example, this recent Austin News 8 story on how Asian Americans are the swing vote. Thank you for finally saying that we are the swing vote. It is so much better than when an Asian American AP reporter writes that the "Asian Population Lacks Political Clout" and it gets published everywhere and internationally. And, yes, this was in 2004.

I'm not going to get into all the stats he quoted that drove me crazy, when he could have looked at the numbers in a different way, but he chose to report on us as having the least political agency possible.

So back to the Austin tv story, which is reported on by Heidi Zhou. Although the premise of th story is positive, she doesn't interview any of the Asian American elected officials in Texas (Jennifer Kim is a city councilwoman in Austin) or even the local heads of the OCA, JACL, or other Asian American institutions. She doesn't interview anyone from the college, where I'm sure you could find some ardent pro-Hillary or Barack supporters who are APIA. She doesn't interview someone from suburbia who speaks proper English. No, instead she, like other reporters, interviews someone whose English is less than perfect:

If members of that community vote the same way they did on Super Tuesday when they voted 3-1 for Clinton, Obama could be in trouble.

"I think he probably needs more experience. Because from here jump to here, that needs a lot of work," Chialing, an Austin area resident said.

This doesn't mean that I disavow that Asian American immigrants who speak less than perfect English are not representative of our community. It does mean that I believe that APIA reporters can also do their bit to make sure that the few times that someone who looks like us appears on TV, that we don't reaffirm stereotypes about ourBlogger: Power and Politics - I am Not the Yellow Peril - Create Post community being unable to speak English.

Contrast that with this recent Los Angeles Times story on Vietnamese American voters moving left - well researched and written by an Asian American reporter (perhaps the LA Times is trying to make up for their hatchet job on Clinton and Chinese American donors in New York.)

The widening political bandwidth is a sign of change in the Vietnamese American community, where the agenda -- once sharply and nearly exclusively focused on foreign affairs -- now includes domestic issues such as poverty, healthcare and Social Security.

"For so long, there has been a one-party monopoly in the Vietnamese community," said Kim Oanh Nguyen-Lam, who became the first Vietnamese Democrat elected in Orange County in 2004 as a Garden Grove school board member. "We Democrats are coming out of the shadow."

Long Dinh Dang, 67, is an example of the shift. Dang became a Republican after he immigrated to Orange County in 1994 and was worried that Democrats had become too cozy with the Communist regime when former President Bill Clinton lifted the trade embargo with Vietnam.

But now, a man who twice voted for President Bush says he has had a change of heart. He switched to the Democratic ticket last month to vote in the presidential primary. More than communism, he worries about the slumping economy, Medicare and the Iraq war.

"Democrat, Republican, it doesn't matter," he said. Particularly in local elections, "I judge candidates more on their ability to be closely connected with our Vietnamese community," he said.

Granted, a newspaper article is much longer and in depth than a tv piece, but doesn't that just make the one person you interview that much more important, and the single representative? I mean, why not go interview someone in the suburbs as well?

I'm not asking for journalism advocacy, just for all sides and perspectives to be represented.

Sincerely,

Power and Politics

P.S. On a side note, here's a Los Angeles Times opinion on Fred Armisten playing Obama. The author has a different stance than I do and thinks he played a believable Obama. He also ties in the Miss Saigon yellowface controversy. Although I don't agree with his conclusion, I do appreciate that he researched and has included the yellowface travesty as a comparison point.

Two soundbites: McCain and Hillary staff

2008-03-02T03:51:00.000-08:00

At this juncture in the race, I wanted to alert you to two soundbites. One is this video of John McCain calling himself a "proud conservative liberal Republican" and the editor has helpfully mashed in some pictures of weed and colorful 60s tie die waviness. Marc Ambinder helpfully confirms that he did indeed say this.

The other is rather more serious - it's John Dickerson from Slate on a call with Clinton advisors asking when in her career, has she ever been tested by a foreign crisis?

The long silence is deafening, and the sophomoric attempts to make shit up afterwards don't help.

"What foreign policy moment would you point to in Hillary's career where she's been tested by crisis?" he said.

Silence on the call. You could've knit a sweater in the time it took the usually verbose team of Mark Penn, Howard Wolfson and Lee Feinstein, Clinton's national security director, to find a cogent answer. And what they came up with was weak -- that she's been endorsed by many high ranking members of the uniformed military.

Go to Hotline blog, which has the audio.

Reblog: Housing Crash theme song

2008-02-29T11:44:00.001-08:00

I was going through my comments because I got a nice comment from the Communications Director of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus (headed by my periennial fave Rep. Mike Honda) and I also saw Malcolm's site.

He has a good nomination for the theme song for our current housing crash under the none-too illustrious Dubya. It's Billy Bragg's "the World Turned Upside Down" although I have to dig through my Steve Earle and see if I can't find a gem there to compete.

New will.i.am Obama video

2008-02-29T11:16:00.001-08:00

Hmm, if I wasn't super in love with the first one, well, this one I am definitely not sold on.

It seems overly much hype and almost zero substance, like one of those sugary cereals that supposedly has some fiber in there somewhere, smothered under all the bright flourescent coloring, funny marshmellow shapes and gobs of icing.

I mean, I rewatched the yes we can video and got some hope out of it. This . . . this is just weak.

Also, I have no clue who most of the "celebrities" in the video are and Jessica Alba is the only person to make any real statement about WHY we should elect Obama. And, yes, hell just developed a few icicles as I wrote that last sentence.

The day that Jessica Alba is the smartest person in the room (in a video room) is well, unbelievable up until now. And the chanting of O- ba- ma O-ba-ma does not help with the people who think Obama supporters are cultists.

hollywood and the creatives are capable of promoting great beauty and art, and provoking us to think hard. To touch our heartstrings. The last video maybe had some of that. But this ain't it. "yes we can" is more like "where is the love" and this is kinda like "My Humps" in terms of substance, only less flashy and entertaining.

Actually, between this and the Jin video, I prefer the Jin video, because the vapid in this video is less endearing than the everyday families and people in the Jin video. Basically, this video reaffirms bad Hollywood stereotypes.

I have to say that if I was not an Obama supporter, this video would weird me out a lot more than it already does. Which is to say, this one is anti-effective. Good thing it's not being put out by the campaign.

So far, here is who I recognize.

Ryan Phillipe
Macy Gray
Jessica Alba
will.i.am
the other guy from Black Eyed Peas who isn't Apl.de.ap or Fergie
George Lopez
John Leguiziamo
some white guy who looks like Justin Timberlake/ Matt Damon
Daniel from Ugly Betty, but super scruffy (ick, get rid of it!)

Here's the spirited dailykos debate about it. I'm glad we can talk about things other than waterboarding once in a while. Otherwise I would be more bummed out than normal.

Right now, I'm with laughingman:

Ugh. I thought it was awful (8+ / 0-)

Will.i.am needs to make one with regular people. Who cares what Macy Gray and the cast of Friday Night Lights thinks?

Oh, I just realized that was the geek football player from Friday Night Lights, Landry. (which, if anyone at NBC is reading this, you would be stupid NOT to keep the show on the air. That show has more heart and soul than 200 other shows.) I never thought I would say this about a football show.

Constantly Lost

2008-02-29T07:09:00.000-08:00

Well, I have to give it to J J Abrams. I used to be a huge Alias fantatic, and then then show went downhill when he had other tv shows, unable to juggle managing so many plus What About Brian?

So I didn't watch Lost for the longest time. But the writers strike and what not, and well, "The Constant" is one of the best episodes I've seen in half a year or more. Possibly this entire year.

It's a love story folks, and it nearly had me tearing up. It's better than the last episode of season 3.

So far this season, I would say that J J is constantly finding his niche.

Maybe he just needs an enddate in sight to wrap up his storylines. I'm impressed because he's also working on the new Star Trek, which I hear with have George Takei (original Sulu) in it. Exciting!

(Yes, I watched the finale of Alias. No I didn't think it was a fitting end.)

Throw Mark Penn under the bus

2008-02-29T02:16:00.001-08:00

I wrote earlier about how outraged some Latinos in leadership positions were that Patti Solis Doyle, the former campaign manager for the Clinton campaign, had been thrown under the bus for mismanagement of the campaign, but that someone like Mark Penn, who has been called the "architect" of the campaign, has come without repercussion.

That, my friends, is all changing.

“Mark Penn has run this campaign,” said Ickes in a brief phone interview this morning. “Besides Hillary Clinton, he is the single most responsible person for this campaign.

Why now? Because the campaign is still flailing, and they still need a scrapegoat. And the criticism is well deserved and coming from all corners. (By the way, Mike Henry, former deputy campaign manager was right - Hillary should have skipped Iowa. She should have either fully invested early on, instead of hiring 100 field organizers back in Oct-Nov, or she should have largely stayed out. Instead, the campaign invested in things like snow shovels with Clinton's campaign logo for Caucus Day, when it DIDN'T SNOW.)

And also, Mark Penn is no friend of the working class, and unions hate him. Some very politically savvy unions came out for Obama, because Mark Penn's firm has serviced clients like Walmart. And when you go to Ohio and the unions are decimated, it's not bad to heap the blame on a DC fatcat like Mark Penn who is getting paid 2 million in a month when there are mom and pop small businesses filing in small claims court over unpaid bills.

Here once again, on egoism:

When asked about the assertion by one senior Clinton official the campaign was effectively run by committee, diluting Penn’s authority, Ickes was incredulous.

“I don’t know what campaign you’re talking about,” said Ickes. “I have been at meetings where he introduces himself as the campaign’s chief strategist. I’ve heard him call himself that many times, say, ‘I am the chief strategist.’”

Asked if Penn preferred the title of chief strategist to pollster, Ickes said, “Prefer it? He insists on it!”

Being thrown under the bus isn't so pretty. I suspect that Mark Penn will not have much political work outside of New York after this campaign.

Additionally, I want to say that Paul Begala is one of the best Clinton spokespeople and that he needs to be on tv more (as if all the CNN face time weren't enough) - he's affable, believable, and sells the message well. He does this thing where he gets you to buy into what he's saying by seemingly conceding your point but using it as a launching pad for his argument.

Words matter . . . fonts matter?

2008-02-28T00:32:00.000-08:00

Newsweek has an interview with a graphic designer who has very high praise for the Obama campaign's typeset, aka font. And their consistency of branding, which is very high quality control.

How else is Obama's design different than what has come before--or what rival campaigns are doing?
He's the first candidate, actually, who's had a coherent, top-to-bottom, 360-degree system at work. Whereas, I think it's more more common for politicians to have a bumper-sticker symbol that they just stick on everything and hope that that will carry the day.

The thing that sort of flabbergasts me as a professional graphic designer is that, somewhere along the way, they decided that all their graphics would basically be done in the same typeface, which is this typeface called Gotham. [See "Change We Can Believe In" sign, above] If you look at one of his rallies, every single non-handmade sign is in that font. Every single one of them. And they're all perfectly spaced and perfectly arranged. Trust me. I've done graphics for events --and I know what it takes to have rally after rally without someone saying, "Oh, we ran out of signs, let's do a batch in Arial." It just doesn't seem to happen. There's an absolute level of control that I have trouble achieving with my corporate clients.

Then if you go to the Web site, it's all reflected there too--all the same elements showing up in this clean, smooth, elegant way. It all ties together really, really beautifully as a system.

Is Obama's stuff on the level with the best commercial brand design?
I think it's just as good or better. I have sophisticated clients who pay me and other people well to try to keep them on the straight and narrow, and they have trouble getting everything set in the same typeface. And he seems to be able to do it in Cleveland and Cincinnati and Houston and San Antonio. Every time you look, all those signs are perfect. Graphic designers like me don't understand how it's happening. It's unprecedented and inconceivable to us. The people in the know are flabbergasted.
. . . .

Right. It's sort of hard to imagine in a voter in Cleveland (or a Newsweek political blogger from New York, for that matter) interacting with Obama's design on that level. How does it affect those of us who aren't graphic designers?
Well, I'm teaching this class at the Yale School of Management, and we were just talking about brand management and politics--exactly this thing before we got on the phone. And one of the things that came up in the conversation is, if you think about it, the challenge for someone named Barack Hussein Obama is that he's such an unprecedented figure in American politics--so much so that everything he's trying to do is, in a way, trying to make him look smoother and more normal. Someone said, "Well, why shouldn't he have revolutionary looking graphics--graphics that make him look like grassroots, like an outsider? Things drawn by hand, things that look forceful and avant-garde." But I think he's using design in a way to make him look as normal, as comfortable, as inevitable as a brand can look in American life. Those are really deliberate, interesting choices. Whether or not a sans serif font like Gotham looks more "American" than a Swiss font like Helvetica, that's in our imaginations to a certain degree. I think it's much more incontrovertible that he's actually using the seamlessness of this branding to convey a candidacy that's not a dangerous, revolutionary, risk-everything proposition--but as something that is well-managed and has everything under control.

And here's a video about Gotham, the font that his campaign uses from the blog of the filmmakers of the Helvetica documentary. A font we can believe in.

fun fun fun.

Also, Everybody Loves Obama? Even the white supremicists?!? (David Duke quotes in link, be warned.)

Words matter, names matter

2008-02-28T00:06:00.000-08:00

Words matter - look at why will.i.am, a master wordsmith in his own right, decided to make the whole Obama video. He says that Obama's New Hampshire speech cinched it for him, that before that he was "torn."

and then there was New Hampshire

it was that speech...
like many great speeches...
that one moved me...
because words and ideas are powerful...

It made me think...
and realize that today we have "very few" leaders...
maybe none...

Republicans are well aware that words matter - they've had Frank Luntz, master messenger, on their side for a long time, making phrases that that short but memorable - tax relief, death tax instead of "reducing taxes" or "estate tax." They coined the term "compassionate conservative" to give us a president who was neither.

Words reverberate and they sit inside of us, touching us with meanings and feelings. All words hit different nerves that recall memories, thoughts, gut instinctual responses. If I say "home" it resounds differently for you than it does me, but for the vast majority of people, it brings up pleasant memories. If I say "security" at a time of war, it plays on fears for your home and family.

This is all covered by George Lakoff, progressive linguist.

So why do the Republicans and their echo machine of rightwing talk radio continue to insist on using Obama's middle name of Hussein? Because they want to hit Americans on fear, fears associated with what is really a very common middle name. They want to paint Obama as being anti-Semitic and un-American. When in reality, Obama is the melting pot. He represents America better than any other candidate - all of America.

In the Bible, when God grants Adam the ability to name objects, animals and other items in the Garden of Eden, that is when they first come to life. Words are meaning, words breathe life.

So I really admire Juan Cole's take down of radio host Mike Cunningham and of the Tennessee GOP with his thoroughly researched and cited post on the many many Semitically-named American heroes (hat tip as usual to prolific blogger Ben Smith, my first read every day.)

You should really read the whole thing but here's a teaser from Informed Comment:

I want to say something about Barack Hussein Obama's name. It is a name to be proud of. It is an American name. It is a blessed name. It is a heroic name, as heroic and American in its own way as the name of General Omar Nelson Bradley or the name of Benjamin Franklin. And denigrating that name is a form of racial and religious bigotry of the most vile and debased sort. It is a prejudice against names deriving from Semitic languages!

. . . Barack and Hussein are Semitic words. Americans have been named with Semitic names since the founding of the Republic. Fourteen of our 43 presidents have had Semitic names (see below). And, American English contains many Arabic-derived words that we use every day and without which we would be much impoverished. America is a world civilization with a world heritage, something Cunninghamism will never understand.

Barack is a Semitic word meaning "to bless" as a verb or "blessing" as a noun. In its Hebrew form, barak, it is found all through the Bible. It first occurs in Genesis 1:22: "And God blessed (ḇāreḵə ) them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth."

Here is a list of how many times barak appears in each book of the Bible.

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.

Juan Cole also notes that John Mccain's adopted daughter, Bridget, is from Bangladesh, and that it's entirely possible that she also has relatives named with some variation of Hussein. He makes the good point that because the Bush campaign race-baited him with having a black daughter in 2000 in South Carolina, that it's understandable that McCain wouldn't abet this behavior, but wonders how far he will go.

Also, is there a particular reason why Bridget doesn't get included in official campaign mailings featuring the family? Or do they relate to her like George P Bush, whom Barbara has referred to as "the brown one?" Lastly, in an ABC interview, Cindy McCain says that her daughter feels hurt that the President of the United States doesn't like her because she's black.

The McCains adopted Bridget from Bangladesh in 1991, but opponents — the senator believes the Bush campaign, but it has denied it — used push-polling to make voters believe that he had fathered a black child out of wedlock.
Bridget, who is now 15, found out about the incident only a year ago when she Googled herself. Mrs. McCain McCain said Bridget was confused and hurt by the discovery.
"[She] was hurt by the fact that she thinks people don't like her because she's black," she said. "She asked me why the president of the United States doesn't like her and I said honey that's not what happened, you know this was about people that were mean spirited and wrong, they did wrong things you know, it's hard, it's been hard I'll say."

But she's really brown, and Asian American. Poor girl.

Talking about anger and hope

2008-02-27T22:18:00.000-08:00

My last post was on whether we've just been too angry for too long that it's caused us to turn on ourselves.

Please don't take it as a sign that I mean that we should give up the struggle, but rather that we have to change the discourse so that progressive values are no longer the extreme or maligned, no longer left in a corner as "other." One of the things that Obama does an extraordinary job of is sidelining the GOP haters as extremists and building a popular consensus that progressive values are middle of the road values - family values if you will. He is an incredibly skilled communicator, and Republicans are already calling him our "Reagan" - someone with the innate ability to connect with and to draw voters from the opposite side of the aisle.

We need to include all Americans under the auspices of hope, because at the end of the day, the girl growing up in rural Alabama who is not receiving a quality public education is being denied equality the same way that a boy growing up in Harlem is.

Anyway, here are two songs that I treasure deeply that represent both anger and hope, and how we need both.

I've blogged the Dixie chicks' "Not ready to make nice" before, but I really think that this is a masterful video that powerfully demonstrates the black and white feelings that we have, the pent up anger and frustration that so many progressives have had these 8 years - "shut up and sing or your life will be over?!?!" We're not okay with being told that we are on the fringes that our opinions don't matter because it's not okay. So I and many others ask, "Where is the love?"

We wonder where the love is, and we want people to join together, to reach out to their neighbors, to build something new, something special. But in order to get people to hear us, even people who agree with us, we can't always shout through a bullhorn. We have to inspire them, move them, give them a reason to believe. Give them a solution that can work. Give them the tools to build their new dream home, to fix the schools, to learn the skills needed to find a new job. Sometimes we just have to speak or sing softly, croon our vision.

Bright Eyes - First day of my life

You thought I was going to post the Yes We Can video, didn't you?

Oh, okay, here you go.

*Thanks, youtube, for helping me express what sometimes cannot simply be written.

Clinton's APA staff won't back down

2008-02-26T22:18:00.000-08:00

Most people read the Clinton staff letter by over 500 staffers pledging that they were in it to win it as a sign that the Clinton campaign wasn't going to back down.

Me, I scanned it for Asian American names. Keep in mind that this isn't even all her campaign staff - it's those who are the most dedicated and most loyal. By this list, it's not hard to see how Clinton has the most APA staff.

Additionally, it's notable for who is NOT on the list, namely Policy Director Neera Tandeen (who is a fixture in hillaryland), top APA hand Irene Bueno and APA spokesman Jin Chon.

Huma Abedin - Hillary's legendary traveling chief of staff
Nahiyan Ahmad - former healthcare consultant turned phone bank manager
Swathi Bojedla - senate staff assistant
Catharine Chen - former field staff and surrogate scheduler
Dennis Cheng - prev mentioned; NY State Finance Director
Cynthia Cho - former reporter turned Clinton staffer
Lenore Cho - former reporter turned Clinton staffer
Lillian Choi - NY attorney
Anne Gavaghan - Senate legislative aide
Diane Hamwi - California fundraiser
Melissa Ho - Senate side staff, Agricultural policy
Rafi Jafri - Chicago fundraiser
Ioanna Kefala - CT staff
Yekyu Kim - Senate side staffer, Deputy Director of Constituent Affairs
Roger Lau - Massachusetts director
Hyun J. Lee
Johna Ohtagaki
Amee Patel
Shraddha Patel Tewary
Tara Rangarajan
Victoria Ruan - former reporter turned regional field director in Nevada
Rishi Sahgal - LA attorney
Elisa Shyu
Uday Sreekanth

Angry is the new black/ Hope is here

2008-02-26T05:14:00.000-08:00

I want to thank dailykoser superskepticalman for posting a diary on his anger, and how he has allowed it to divide himself from his fellow Democrat, his fellow men and women.

Not only was I trollish, I've been trollish here lately. I'm sorry for that; at no time did I have to be. I don't want to do anything to turn new voters (or experienced voters) off the Democratic Party because of my primary season partisanship. One of me can't do much damage; many thousands more like me could: it would be shame to turn 2008 from 1932 into 1928. Sen. Obama would be the best candidate out there in the fall if he got the nomination. Sen. Clinton would be the best candidate in the fall if she got the nomination. John Edwards, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinich, and Mike Gravel (who did I leave out?) would each be the best candidate in the fall if any one of them got the nomination.
What happened was that I decided that I had to be as angry at fellow Democrats as I might be at the GOP because of my choice in Democratic candidates. That was just a stupid decision by me, and I'm sorry for being that stupid. I'd be grateful if you all will accept my apology for that.

The passion here for Democratic candidates has been more encouraging than anything I've seen for a long time. The passion of Obama supporters has been duplicated in Clinton supporters (and, while he was in it, Edwards supporters - of which I was one) and in the supporters for many House and Senate candidates. Success by our nominee in the fall will give backbone to our new and veteran Democratic senators and congressmen and women. It will give resolve to state Democratic parties, legislatures, and governors. It will go far to put the GOP on the kind of "manic defensive" that has been long overdue in the face of the Republican noise machine.

Dear Superskepticalman,

Thank you for posting this diary and having the courage to do so.

I think we have all been so angry for so long that we have forgotten how to hope, how to dream. I know that it has been true for me. We have then turned that anger on each other, and on ourselves. Who amongst us has not felt the tight knot in our stomachs every time we hear or see Bush speak, miscommunicating his latest failure of a policy that is too conveniently named in double-speak?

The GOP has gotten all of us - dailykosers, Democrats, Americans, so used to being in our own angry insular bubbles that it is so easy to lose track of the bigger picture.

That we're going to get a Democrat in office and that we'll have a chance to turn our lives, our country, and the world around. We have been failing the world as a leader, and we have the chance to change things. To move forward past these 8 years of misery, pain, deprivation, sorrow (oh look, there's my angry coming out again. . .)

But back to the brighter side of things. The GOP depends on us to stay angry and stay divided. And some anger is not a bad thing, it's a good fuel for when you get tired. But we were all so angry at Bush in 04, and it didn't get Kerry elected. At the end of the day anger must be tempered and guided by the shining light of hope. The civil rights movement was a success because of the burning hot passion of Malcolm X and because of the dreams that Martin Luther King Jr gave us. Because people felt so angry for so long, but also because they sensed an opportunity to change the status quo - they felt hopeful that one day their children would know a better world.

America is a beautiful country because we have been blessed to pass on to every succeeding generation a hope for a better world, even in the face of stark obstacles and worldwide chaos.

If I were a Republican strategist, I would be quaking in my Cole Haan penny loafers right now because there's millions of people who are devoted to working for change, fueled by the possibilities of a better tomorrow. There are millions of us, and we are powered by hope. No longer isolated in our cocoons, too distracted by our anger and too burnt out to do anything, too incapacitated by our mounting, seeming inability to change anything, we are uniting. Working alongside each other. Building dialogues. Building bridges to tomorrow.