Archive for the 'Politics' Category

“What do we do now?”

In the famed 1972 political film, The Candidate, Robert Redford plays a naive California lawyer who, at the suggestion and advice of an election specialist, becomes the Democratic frontrunner for Senator in California. While the whole movie is very good, it all comes together at the very end, when a surprised and distraught Redford who, after winning the Senate seat, asks his campaign manager in the midst of screaming journalists, “what do we do now?” The campaign manager does not hear him, and Redford is left speechless and puzzled while heckling reporters surround him. The New York Times’s A.O. Scott has a very good comparison of this movie and modern American politics, but for me the last line sums up what everyone’s thinking — what do we do now? For each party that participated in this campaign, there is a different answer for that one, oh-so-important question:

Barack Obama: For the President-elect, these next few days and weeks will play out like a Jewish wedding: Election Day was like the actually ceremony, and Election night was the consummation. Right now is his sheva brachos, or seven blessings, the period of seven days after a wedding filled with lots of partying and more food than you can possibly imagine. But, after the sheva brachos, the not-so-glamorous parts of marriage begin to seep in. You need a better job, a better house; do you want kids, do you not want kids; does your spouse need to lose weight or do you; and, of course, there’s that issue of finding some “me” time. Similarly, Obama will need to start getting his act together after the partying is all done. He’s already started by inviting Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel (brother of superagent Ari Emanuel, the inspiration for Entourage’s Ari Gold) to be his Chief of Staff, but other issues such as picking a Cabinet still loom. Also, Obama will need to figure out how to implant a lot of the “change” policies he’s been touting for the past two years. With the Democrats possibly getting sixty Senate seats this election and at least 254 in the House, this probably won’t be a huge issue, but still one that needs addressing. And of course, the President-elect will need to tend to the two most pressing issues for the U.S. currently: the economy and Iraq. Healthcare and more general foreign policy (three cheers for America being popular in the world again!) are also highly important. But, at least for now, enjoy your parties, Barack, because these next few weeks will require your utmost focus and attention.

Congress: As I mentioned before, not only did the Dems win the presidency in a landslide, they also increased their majorities in both houses of Congress. What does this mean? Well, in addition to being able to speedily pass Obama’s proposed legislation (which ranges from taxes to Iraq to healthcare), the new Congress may be able to firmly tackle some important issues like gay marriage and economic stimulus policies. But before they get too ahead of themselves, Congress will need to remember that the last time the Democrats won Congress and the presidency, in 1992, it was promptly taken away from them in 1994, when Newt Gingrich and his “Contract with America” Republicans took control of both houses, which they held until 2006. While the factors then and now are very different, the Democratic Congress will need to remember to avoid being too partisan and hostile to the GOP, as political unity after a close election is key to preserving political stability.

The Media: “The election is over…so how the hell do we make money?” Good question. Well, for one thing, now that Obama’s President-elect, he’ll be ripe for media (and talk show) scrutiny about past voting history, policies, and his personal life (but not any of that Bill Ayers bullshit). Still, NBC can kiss goodbye their Tina Fey/Sarah Palin election viewers, which is a shame, but not an excuse for SNL to go back to sucking royally. My advice to the media: keep digging for the truth, in the election and Obama’s past, even if it no longer matters in terms of voting, because as American citizens we have the right to know the whole truth and nothing but the truth about our leaders, even if they’re great ones (just ask Bill Clinton…). Oh, and talk/comedy shows, don’t stop being funny. Please. Just because you lose Dubya and Caribou Barbey doesn’t give you an excuse to stop coming up with good material. Remember, Biden’s a friggin’ gaffe machine and Obama’s, well, got those big ears.

We, the People of the United States of America: Before I say anything, I would like to show you this xkcd comic, which sums up what I was going to say pretty well:

91107F1D-26A9-4056-8E9D-99CD5C3548EC.jpg

Yeah, basically what this (and I also) is saying is “what the hell are we going to do without a constant stream of election news?” Well, Slate has an article listing things to do online to ward off post-election boredom, which includes such classics like watching online videos and playing addicting flash games. Also, sites like HuffPo and The Daily Beast aren’t just going to shut down; they’ll still be producing lots of cool, non-election content. And hello, just because this election is over doesn’t mean that politics stops existing. There’s still important issues out there, like gay marriage and abortion rights, that need to be tackled. Plus, the economy is still in the toilet, we’re still in Iraq, and Putin will need to be watched by more than just Little Miss Sarah’s Alaskan brigade. And hey, football season is underway, and the Giants are beasting, so if you need to follow, root for, and track something relentlessly, that’s it. The point is, there’s still loads to do, even if compulsively watching FiveThirtyEight.com isn’t one of them. As a people and a nation, we’ve accomplished so much these past two years it makes no sense just to take all of that grassroots organization and throw it down the toilet.

So, to answer Senator McKay’s question, there is a lot to do now, whether you’re President Obama or, yes, Joe the Plumber. So, instead of standing there with a confused look in your face, get out there and do something for this big, crazy world we live in!

Some blog updates:

Yeah, it’s been a while since I posted (thank you Austen for reminding me!). But I do have an excuse: homework! Haha, can’t argue with that one. I know I did say that I would try to post more frequently, so here’s a little wrap-up of what’s new in my life an online that’s worth noting:

  • Saw David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow with Jeremy Piven (the force behind Entourage’s larger-than-life Ari Gold), Raul Esparza (from the TV show Pushing Daisies and the recent revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company), and Elisabeth Moss (who phenomenally plays Mad Men’s ambitious secretary, Peggy Olson). Moss was very good considering her co-stars are more experienced stage performers than her, and this show should really help her career. Piven was, as expected, very good, but was actually outshined by Esparza, whose better skills in conveying emotion and passion on the stage was able to outdue even the wild craziness that is Ari Gold. Overall, a must see.
  • I’m still loving my new MacBook Pro, even though the glossy screen can be really annoying at times.
  • Sarah Palin gets pranked called! Yep, that’s right, a French comedic duo, The Masked Avengers, from Montreal radio station CKOI, called Palin, pretending to be French president Nicolas Sarkozy. The audio’s right here (courtesy of The Huffington Post), and a transcript of the call is on Daily Kos.
  • Catching up on Life on Mars, which is actually a really good show. Harvey Keitel, Michael Imperioli (a.k.a. Christopher from The Sopranos), and Jason O’Mara are all great. Just a few more episodes and I’ll be ready to watch it live.
  • Just two more days until Election Day!

Well, that’s about all that’s important in my life for now. And keep reading the blog, as I will try and post more frequently. Stay tuned for a possible (read: possible) Election Night post!

When the Right is too Right for the Right…Did That Make Sense?

It’s amazing how coming of age in this political climate can change you. As someone whose earliest political memories are Monica Lewinsky and Florida 2000, it can be amazing for me to see that the way politics works now, with the inctedible polarity of the Democrat and Republican parties, was not always the case. In 1936, F.D.R. won the electoral college, 523-8. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won every single state except Minnesota. These two men could not be more different, whether it be in demeanors, personal history, or politics, yet they both won in landslide elections, capturing many of the same voting demographics (want to learn more about thee FDR-Regan phenomenon? Buy my dad’s book, The Inheritance: How Three Families and the American Political Majority Moved from Left to Right, now available from Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com). But somewhere, somehow, something changed. Instead of trying to research and explain it myself, I’ll let New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks do the talking:

But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.

Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

Basically, what Mr. Brooks just said is that the Democrats gained a strong base of Ivy League, coastal types, prompting the Republicans to do the opposite and distance themselves for the coastal intellectuals by becoming the party of the midwest and deep south (though the latter may have more to do more with LBJ). So, what was the result of this political evolution of the GOP? Brooks, again:

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.

And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.

The signs of this radicalization of the Republican party have never shown more clearly than in this election. Recently, two moderate Republicans of very different positions announced their support for Senator Barack Obama: Christopher Buckley and Colin Powell. Buckley, the son of conservative author and pundit William F. Buckley and Washington satire author of Thank You For Smoking, announced his support for Obama, which subsequently resulted in him resigning for his father’s magazine, the National Review, on Tina Brown’s The Daily Beast, saying:

John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

When Powell announced his support for Obama on Meet the Press yesterday (video link here), he similarly remarked that, “As gifted as [John McCain] is, he is essentially going to execute the Republican agenda, the orthodoxy of the Republican agenda, with a new face and a maverick approach to it, and he’d be quite good at it. But I think we need a generational change.”

Buckley, and more importantly Powell, moving their support over to Obama is the climax of an American political paradigm shift that has been in the works since Reagan. The truth is, intellectual, moderate Republicans, once a staple of the party, have been increasingly sensing that they are living in an environment hostile to their beliefs, and need to jump ship before they are forced out by their former colleagues. It’s no coincidence that both Buckley and Powell described Obama as being new and different from other Democrats — he is also part of the paradigm shift of how the sacrifice of the South made by the Democratic Party in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 will finally be returned to them in the form of a new leader, one who will break through the tight grip of the Republicans and reclaim voters who never should have left the Democrats in the first place. Yes, I know this sounds little messiah-esque, but the point still stands that Obama will be the man who brings together the left and right, north and south, Joe Sixpack and coastal conehead. So what can the Republicans do about this? Well, it’s too late. What started with Reagan will soon end with Obama, and it’ll take another thirty years for the Republicans to ever get their intellectual, moderate base back and become popular again.

Joe the Plumber ain’t no plumber!

Really, Joe, really..if that’s even you’re real name. Actually, it isn’t. Turns out Joe “The Plumber” Wurzelbacher is actually Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, and he’s not even a licensed plumber! The Times has more details, plus a video (which I’ve also attached below). As it turns out, Joe the Plumber actually sounds kind of like an asshole.

Thoughts on Last Night’s Debate

Well, as you politically aware readers know, last night was the last debate of the 2008 Presidential campaign, between John “Maverick/Oldie/Satan” McCain and Barack “Terrorist/Hussein/Savior” Obama. Now, the day after, the question to be asked is, who won? Let’s see what the Interwebs had to say:

The Huffington Post

John McCain didn’t just fail to get the game-changer he needed — he was trounced in this third and final debate, if the instant post-debate polling provides any indication.

The New York Times

Senator John McCain used the final debate of the presidential election on Wednesday night to raise persistent and pointed questions about Senator Barack Obama’s character, judgment and policy prescriptions in a session that was by far the most spirited and combative of their encounters this fall.

CNN

John McCain came out of the gate strong, but Barack Obama gained strength as the night progressed Wednesday in the final presidential debate where each candidate tried to convince voters that he is better equipped to steer the nation through these troubled times.

From this little metablogging sampler of post-debate analysis, it seems that a) McCain’s glove pulling made the debate more interesting, and b) Obama still schooled his old man ass. In my personal opinion (based on the first hour I watched for before heading off to bed), McCain definitely gave his best performance yet, with zinger lines like “Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago.” Still, Obama was cool and collected, if a little dry, considering that he has significant leads in the swing-state polls. There was also another interesting aspect of last night’s debate: Joe the Plumber. Who is Joe the Plumber? Well, he’s a combination of two things: a Joe Six-pack-like metaphor for the Everyman (and the hockey mom’s working-class spouse), and he’s also an Ohio plumber named Joe Wurzelbacher (seen with Senator Obama at right). Mr. Wurzelbacher’s now famed epithet was mentioned over two dozen times last night, mainly in reference to the differences between the two candidates’ tax policies, prompting some lively Internet discussion.

But the question still remains — did this debate help determine who the next President will be? Maybe not, but I’m sure that it helped the business of one Ohio plumber.

Palestinian-Israeli-American peace talks redux

As many of you already know, today was the Middle East Peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland, hosted by President Bush. While many other Middle Eastern dignitaries showed up, the main attractions were Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who were there to, at least in theory, try to discuss peace between their waring peoples. If anything, the greatest accomplishment for Bush from the event was the following photograph (which is most graciously stolen from The New York Times).
27Prexy2-600
Nice, isn’t it? But doesn’t it remind you of another, similar photograph from, say, 1993?
Rabin, Clinton, Arafat
Yeah, that picture depicts then-Isralei Prime minister Yitzchak Rabin, PLO leader Yassir Arafat, and President Clinton at the signing of the Oslo Accords. Now, let’s see what they’re up to now:
Rabin, Clinton, Arafat-1
Yeah, not so good. And as for the Oslo Accords, they kind of, well, failed. The Israeli and Palestinian death toll from suicide bombings and attacks over the past fourteen years should tell you that. But that was then, what about now? Here’s how our current peace-makers are doing in the polls:
27Prexy2-600-1
OK fine, “Hamas wants to kill me” isn’t a percentage, but I couldn’t find any Abbas poll statistics in a quick Google search. And as for Olmert’s numbers, they’re the same as the margin of error, or lower! Theoretically, less than zero people in Israel support Olmert! That’s not even possible!!! But the point is that all of these guys need something good on their record if they want to go down in history as anything better than “total screw-up.”

Sure, maybe I’m taking a cynical view on the conference, which I am. But truthfully, Israel-Palestine talks haven’t worked well in the past. Rabin was assasinated for even participating in them! But I still believe that peace is possible, just not in Annapolis with a President who needs something to distract the public from Iraq. But on the plus side, Abbas and Olmert have both vowed to come up with a peace treaty by the end of the year. For their sake, and ours too, hopefully they will.

How News Corp. will save the newspaper industry by taking its soul

ff_142_murdoch1_f.jpgThe year is 2015. Every day, millions of Americans wake up, get dressed, and go to work. Each day they also carry in hand a newspaper, whether from a subscription or a newsstand. The paper is digital, with automatic, real-time updates from the Internet, complete with streaming text, video, and images. The newspapers experience newfound prosperity that hasn’t existed since the 1940s. Advertisers and readers flock to them, paying for subscriptions and reading in print and online, in perfect harmony. But the newspapers also are no longer what they were like even just ten years ago. Everything that’s published goes through careful screening. All articles considered to be too far left of the industry’s conservative agenda are edited or all together cut. While not always very obvious, everything in the paper is at least subtly leaning towards the political right. The newspaper content has been reduced to that of tabloid quality, with mostly celebrity gossip and very little actual news. While there are no official ties, the government and the newspapers have an agreement — keep information filtered, and everyone’s happy. Well, everyone except the rebels…

This future isn’t fiction. It’s not some 3rd-rate sci-fi novel. It could be real. Well, maybe not exactly. Sure, I may have went a little too far with the whole totalitarian-government-media-ties thing — and the rebels — but, the idea of a conservative-leaning, no-longer-totally-free press may not be too far off. Why? Well because today, News Corp. offered to buy Dow Jones. Why is this such bad news? Well, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., the same people who gave the world the journalistic gems of Fox News and The New York Post (which, back in the day, used the be an excellent paper), has now placed a bid to buy a company that provides the newspaper that just about every single businessman (and woman) in the world, and more, reads. Fortunately, the Bancroft family, which owns more than half of Dow Jones, rejected the deal. But this scary prospect could eventually become reality. News Corp. had attempted to buy Dow Jones before, and after failing again, they may turn onto other targets. Who’s to stop them from buying The Chicago Sun-Times, The Washington Post, or even (God forbid) The New York Times? One would expect the newspaper companies, but the scariest thing is, they may not.

You see, the newspaper industry is not doing very well right now. It’s losing a lot of market share to blogs, podcasts, and the Web in general (and of course, the even more ever-present TV doesn’t help either). With the ability to get free news online, even from the newspapers’ own sites, why would you pay for a subscription, which not only helps keep the newspaper alive, but also attracts the vital revenue source of advertisers? That’s the problem that newspapers today are facing. Most of the major papers like the Times still haven’t yet figured out to solve this major issue, and while The Wall Street Journal gets by by making nothing free online (because it can be deducted from most businessman’s taxes, and possibly even offered for free by the business itself), the industry itself is really falling behind. But, there is one company that knows how to save the newspaper industry. Unfortunately, this one company is News Corp.

The thing is, News Corp. really knows how to handle itself in a wired world. It already owns the social center of the Web, MySpace, and has assets in just about every form of free expression, including books, newspapers, magazines, TV, and movies. With the potential to bring together old and new media into profitable harmony (for more on Murdoch, News Corp., and the web, see this Wired article), News Corp. could control the entire media landscape itself, if the newspapers let it. And why wouldn’t they? News Corp. offers the industry exactly what it wants — money, popularity, and regained dominance. Of course, News Corp. would do to the entire newspaper industry what it did to The Times of London, The News York Post, and countless others — turn it into a platform for Murdoch’s (and, as it’s assumed, his successor’s) conservative political ideas and resorting the journalistic quality to that of the cheapest tabloids.

So, in the end, what it comes down to is whether the major newspapers will sell their soul to Murdoch and News Corp. for money and power. But for now, Dow Jones turned down the offer and Murdoch still has only one U.S. paper. Still, be wary of what News Corp.’s next move may be, which could be sooner than you think.

Boris Yeltsin dies

24yelstin-190-2.jpgThe New York Times:

Boris N. Yeltsin, the burly provincial politician who became a Soviet-era reformer and later a towering figure of his time as the first freely elected leader of Russia, presiding over the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the demise of the Communist Party, died yesterday in Moscow. He was 76.

Yes, Boris Yeltsin, Gorbachev’s successor is now dead. So, what’s the big deal? Well, like Gorbachev, Yeltsin was an economic reformer. Of course, he was also a drunk and chaotic leader. Still, he was better than the current Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who’s reversing all of the economic and political progress that Gorbachev and Yeltsin made. By recreating the fear of the Cold War-era Soviet Union and causing the entire country to rely on petroleum for money, Putin’s slowly been bringing Russia back to its dark ages. The death of Yeltsin, who tried to do everything that Putin didn’t do, is a symbol of this tragedy.

Hilary’s in

The New York Times:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton jumped into the 2008 presidential race yesterday, immediately squaring off against Senator Barack Obama and the rest of the Democratic field in what is effectively the party’s first primary, the competition for campaign donations.

Go Hilary!

Israel nuking Iranian nuke facilities…yikes

The Sunday Times:


ISRAEL has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons.
Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear “bunker-busters”, according to several Israeli military sources.


Yikes. Well, I guess it’s better than Iran having the bomb.

[via digg]

UPDATE: Never mind…