Together we can: Obama campaign makes voting a social experience

Sitting with a group of women friends last night, we talked about voting. I've already done it. I became a permanent vote-by-mail voter as soon it became legally possible because I'm always working on some campaign on Election Day. Several others had received their ballots, were working as volunteers on various facets of the Obama campaign, and intended to send them in soon. And the inevitable person said, "I know it is easier to vote by mail, but I want to go to a polling place on November 4. I want to feel like I'm doing it with everyone else."

There was a lot of agreement with that nostalgia -- and awareness that this wasn't the way the world seemed to be going. Californians all, we wondered at the fact that all elections in Oregon are by mail. But we too have long had the option of voting by mail if we choose without giving any reason at all.

The growing predominance of voting by mail scares me. It's all very well for habitual voters. But for folks who are just getting into to the process, first timers, or people who because of their race or income aren't so sure they belong in our democracy -- they get a boost from feeling Election Day as a sort of civic participation festival. I've seen this in action while canvassing low-income Latino precincts in California's Central Valley and the sometimes mean streets of impoverished Oakland. I've written about what researchers call "convenience voting" here and here.

Given these misgivings, it is exciting to see the Obama campaign creating situations that overcome the isolated individualism of the early and vote-by-mail voting experience. Obama supporters aren't expected to do their pre-Election Day voting alone. In states where there are "early voting" polling places, Obama organizers are bringing a party to the voting area. As reported by Sean at 538.com:

Obama for America [West Virginia] State Director Tom Vogel told us that during the GOTV phase, all 55 counties in the state will have early voting and weekend GOTV rallies. In Charleston on the 25th, for example, the campaign is holding a live music street fair just two blocks from an early voting location.

This week, the New York Times reported how the campaign is getting it done in Colorado. Obviously campaigns love early voting. The Colorado campaign is hoping to get 50 percent of voters "banked" before November 4. This guarantees that no late news can sway weak supporters. Further it will mean only half as many people have to be found and pushed to the polls in the last twelve hours. And voters get to avoid inconvenience and long lines. But the campaign also knows it has to give voters something back -- the feeling of collectively practicing democracy!

FORT COLLINS, Colo. -- The presidential debate had barely ended Wednesday night when Kristin Marshall had her ballot on her lap, pen in hand, ready to vote. Three friends, all supporters of Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, had their ballots, too.

"Obama's the second one down -- don’t accidentally pick the first" said Ms. Marshall, 27, a reference to the ballot placement of Senator John McCain, Mr. Obama's Republican opponent, as her living room of Obama supporters erupted in laughter.

The traditional American vote -- a solitary moment behind a black curtain in a booth, civics in secret -- was never thus. ...

In coming up with strategies to get out the mail-in vote in Colorado, both campaigns have focused on making the mail-in voters feel part of a bigger movement. The Obama campaign's debate-and-vote parties, for example, were intended to create a feel of civic participation.

Awesome organizing this -- what a campaign can do when it has 3.1 million donors and vast sums to spend on facilitating people to people contact, in addition to making its essential advertising buys. Bravo!

About those McCain robocalls

Don't worry Obama fans: buying robocalls is what you do in a campaign when you are desperate -- and it doesn't work.

McCain is doing this because he doesn't have enough money to compete as we go down to the wire. See this article in Saturday's New York Times.

Mr. Obama’s advertisements come as Republicans have begun a blitz of automated telephone calls attacking him.

Obama bet he could fund his campaign from eager, anxious citizens; he has won his bet. So when John McCain tries to relax by watching the Arizona Cardinals, he is confronted by Obama on national television. (Odd way to relax ... but who's a 49er fan to talk?)

Buying robocalls is what you do when you can't afford anything better. I had responsibility once for a campaign in which our candidate was getting swamped by money. The other guy had $4 million -- we never got to $400 thousand. End of the campaign is coming, what to do? Blow a little on robocalls. Now I did something very different with our money than McCain has: instead of throwing sleaze, I targeted the calls to the demographic that included our supporters, hoping to encourage their efforts. (Didn't help; nothing could.) But I can imagine the bad choices McCain's handlers have.

Robocalls are mostly wasted money. This is the rare election tactic that is easily subject to social science research. There are academics who set up real world tests, with treatment groups who get the worked on by various electoral tactics and control groups that don't. I've looked at their research before here and here. They conclude that voters are nearly impervious to robocalls.

Just think about your own reactions: the more of these we get, the more we hate 'em. Even if we agree with them. I can't get worried about McCain's robocalls. They are just throwing the little money they have up in the air and hoping for a miracle.

Obama supporters need to keep working to turn out our voters and don't have to worry about McCain's desperate gambit.

Will this hold true once LGBT marriage becomes a norm?

Some good articles about which U.S. demographic groups tend to have which partisan leanings came out today. There wasn't anything earth-shattering or markedly different from the new Democratic electoral coalition whose shape has been emerging for years. But this stuff always appeals to my inner geek.

I noticed a theme that gave me pause.


The Women's Voice, Women's Vote Action Fund is clearly angling for more cash to send persuasion mail to unmarried women voters. They contend that this group is uniquely likely to respond to mail persuasion. Their chart above shows how much better Obama does among unmarried women than the married.

Meanwhile, a wide-ranging examination of electoral demographics in the National Journal points out the Democratic leanings of single people in general. Single status seems to overcome other factors, like being white or less educated, that often might suggest a Republican tendency. Some instances:

Democrats have run somewhat better among single white men. Clinton, with an assist from Perot, carried them both times. Kerry's 46 percent among that group in 2004 was the highest share for Democrats over the past 20 years, and Kerry actually ran even among white, single college-educated men. ...

Democrats carried white single women by double-digit margins in each of the past four elections; Republicans, meanwhile, carried white married women every time. ...

Single white women without a college education lean Democratic ...

On average, Republicans have run 13 percentage points better among married independents than among single ones since 1988.

What do you want to bet that some fairly significant fraction of these "single" people are actually gay? That's been the reality of many gays for decades. For most legal purposes, that's how the world has classified me for the last 28 years I've been with my partner.

And though there are some anomalous upper class white gay men who pride themselves on the eccentricity of identifying as Republicans, overwhelmingly LGBT people lean Democratic. Dems don't usually make common cause with fundamentalists who'd like to exorcise or "cure" us. Republicans do. I suspect we are even more likely to be Democrats than to be genuinely "single" -- though I don't know where to get the data to prove that.

So -- as more and more LGBT people leave the category of the ostensibly "single" for a socially sanctioned marriage status, it will be interesting to see whether the electoral leanings of single and married people come more to depend on other variables than whether people are in a recognized couple relationship. A part of the "marriage gap" might disappear. I am certain there will be some shifting of categories.

I like the idea of gay folks emerging into the light when we choose to. No on Prop. 8 in California is working to speed this transition.

Bonus: check out Ellen Degeneres making her personal pitch for preserving her option to marry.

Toward a "Dog Food Retirement future"

So the stock market gyrated again today -- first the Dow was down about 400 points, then up a similar amount. That's an 800 point swing over a day -- certainly enough to make a good spectator sport, if only these oscillations didn’t have real life meaning. But they do.

The post-Reagan Republican "ownership society" has pretty much killed off pensions and shoved millions of us into 401-k plans that force us to play in the big casino that is Wall Street. Pretty much everyone in that arena has just taken a 30 percent hit to the "value" of whatever they were invested in. (Quotations marks there because the real value will be the price when we liquidate those holdings, not the number they happened to have in a quote today. But what if we can't wait for the value of our holdings to come back, if it ever does?) For a discussion among elders of what that means in the current market, see this post by Ronni Bennett at Time Goes By. Robert Reich, a former Secretary of Labor, lays out lucidly the particular crunch this puts "early boomers" (the 55-63 year old set) into.

But in addition to those of us in a position to worry about all this, there are also millions of people for whom such worries would be living in luxury. Jonathan Tasini at Working Life laid out some of the facts in a recent post.

• 24.5 percent of all Americans earn poverty wages ($9.60 or less);

• 10 percent of all Americans --15 million Americans -- earn $6.79 or less;

• 33.3 percent of African American workers and 39.3 of Hispanic workers earn poverty wages;

• At the recent new minimum wage of $6.55 an hour, if you worked every single day, 40 hours a week, with no vacations, no holidays, no health care and no pension, you would earn the grand sum of $13.624. The POVERTY LEVEL for a family of three is $17,600;

• 47 million Americans have no health care and tens of millions more have inadequate or costly health care that can bankrupt them;

• Since 1978, the number of defined-benefit plans -- that means, pensions that give retirees a promised monthly amount -- plummeted from 128,041 plans covering some 41 percent of private-sector workers to only 26,000 today. It’s a Dog Food Retirement future for millions of people.

Kind of puts the gyrating Dow in some perspective to think about the people who are at the true bottom of the U.S. pyramid. They pick our food, work in meat processing plants, clean hotels, build subdivisions -- and we enjoy the product of their labor. If we indeed get a Democratic administration, those of us with a little more need to keep the pressure on the new regime to make sure those with even less have a chance to work their way into the mainstream of U.S. life.

Update: I'll just add this story of the intersection of financial flimflam, economic stagnation, and the endless war which came to me this morning from Code Pink, along with an appeal to help Jocelyne Voltaire whose story it tells.

No more debates! Yeah!

Matt Yglesias explains why the debates have been a win for Obama and a disaster for McCain:

What Obama's good at doing is redirecting conversations to things people care about. He's good at conveying both with words and body language that when the subject shifts to something people don't care about, that he'd rather be addressing the things people care about. He'd rather be talking about something else, but unlike McCain he's not personally affronted that the other side criticizes him.

It's not about how he feels or what he wants but about what normal people want to hear about. By contrast, McCain's key campaign theme is that McCain is awesome and that the government should spend less money, neither of which have anything to do with real problems in real people's lives.

McCain hasn't got a message for the majority of us who aren't looking for a grandfatherly alternative to the upstart Black man. He's not speaking to us at all. And he doesn't even know it.

When I teach campaign basics, I hammer a maxim: just about the moment when you are bored to tears with repeating or arranging for repetition of your main message, the people you want to reach have finally noticed that message. Keep repeating it.

McCain never got either an attractive message or the discipline to stick to it. This observation suggests that he never had to run a truly difficult campaign before this one.
***
This video is not for the faint of heart. The whole world is watching the U.S. election. A goodly fraction of it is watching on the Al-Jazeera TV network, based in Qatar, a Gulf oil state. Their correspondent interviewed some of the poorly informed, frightened people who attended a Palin rally in Ohio and an Obama supporter who tried to influence them. No further comment from me.

California ballot: a perversion of democracy

I voted by mail yesterday. That is, I voted for Barack Obama, for Cindy Sheehan for Congress (to remind Nancy Pelosi she has constituents), for a local supervisor (I like Eric Quezada in District 9), school board members, community college board members, a judge, and a BART Board member.

That wasn't so bad. I also voted on 12 statewide propositions. No on Prop. 8! That's the one that would eliminate same-sex marriage. Also no more locking black and brown people away because they scare us, so no on 6 and 9. And no chipping away at reproductive rights, so no on 4. And no on the redistricting one -- nothing that comes from Arnold Schwarzenegger is likely to be a good thing. Come to think of it, I don't think I voted for any of them. Maybe the one about the size of animal cages...

And then there were the 22 city propositions: charter fixes, bond measures (yes on B for affordable housing), efforts to rein in PG&E (yes on H; that's a no brainer once you've been buried in "No" ads) and naming the sewage treatment plan after our departing 43rd President.

This sort of ballot is flat out insane. This isn't democracy; it's rule by fundraising and 30 second spots inflicted on the electorate.

Initiative politics reduces the incentives for legislators to work at long term planning and difficult policy making. Some person or group withenough money can trump their efforts by bringing their own policy preferences to the ballot. Legislators throw up their hands and seek funding for their next election contest.

And yet, historically anyway, we the people love the initiative process. A survey done in 2000 [pdf] found:

Seven in 10 residents think it is a good thing that a majority of voters can make laws and change public policies by passing initiatives, while less than one in four see it as a bad thing. Most Californians (56 percent) also think it is a good thing that a majority of voters can permanently change the state constitution by passing initiatives, while one in three believe this is a bad thing. A majority of Republicans and Democrats have positive impressions of the citizen initiative process, while voters outside of the major parties hold the most favorable views. There are no differences across regions, and both Latinos and non-Hispanic whites hold the initiative process in high regard.

The study did find some unease, but nothing approaching the massive distress with the process that would be required to change our electoral customs.

Of the various proposals I've seen for initiative reform, one I like a good deal would limit Constitutional amendment propositions to November election in years when federal candidates would be on the ballot. That is, we'd only get Constitutional amendments every two years, in elections that draw a fairly high turnout. It seems reasonable that a high fraction of the electorate should vote on changes to the state constitution.

A reform proposal I like even better is simply to put a limit of six on the number of propositions that voters could be confronted with from each jurisdiction on any ballot. That way I'd probably see six from the state and six from the city. People (most people) who live in a county jurisdiction that is separate from a city would see an additional six measures. That's still 18 of these things to try to understand, but it would be more manageable than the current menu of incomprehensible choices! Which ones would get on the ballot? Put them on in the order they qualify -- but make qualification expire after three years so an infinite number of prospective initiatives can't clog up the queue. Pretty rapidly we'd only get initiatives that had proponents who could wait a year or two to get to the ballot -- not a bad hurdle to add to the process.

It's not going to happen of course. California voters and its campaign industry is hooked on the initiative. Maybe the coming recession will lead to some cutbacks, but I doubt it. Initiatives remain a growth sector.

Lest we forget: "the real situation in Iraq"

Laith writes about getting to and from work in Baghdad -- running a gauntlet of checkpoints and dodging military convoys, U.S. and Iraqi, full of trigger happy men with too much fear and too many weapons.

The way those people who have guns behave makes me like many Iraqi civilians feel that Iraq became a wild jungle where survival is only for the strongest. This kind of feeling kills the soul of patriotism in the hearts of people.

I never thought that freedom means mess and I never thought that liberators care only about themselves. It's too hard to believe that but this is the real situation of Iraq.

Iraq Today

Cutting through the bull

I didn't know you were allowed to say anything this sensible on TV. But Campbell Brown, who looks just like the sort of professionally attractive straight woman I have a bias against, nails some of the racism in our attitudes toward Senator Obama and the wide world of the Others we involuntarily live among. It's only 2:25 and well worth watching

If you couldn't make yourself view the YouTube, here's part of the transcript:

So what if Obama was Arab or Muslim? So what if John McCain was Arab or Muslim? Would it matter? When did that become a disqualifier for higher office in our country? When did Arab and Muslim being dirty words, the equivalent of dishonorable or radical?

Whenever this gets raised, the implication is that there's something wrong with being an Arab-American or a Muslim. And the media is complicit here, too. We have been all way too quick to accept the idea that calling someone Muslim is a slur.

I feel like I'm stating the obvious here, but, apparently, it needs to be said. There is a difference between radical Muslims who support jihad against America and Muslims who want to practice their religion freely and have normal lives, like everybody else.

There are more than 1.2 million Arab-Americans and about 7 million Muslim Americans, former Cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, successful business people, normal, average Americans from all walks of life. These are the people that are being maligned here every time this happens. And we can only imagine how this conversation plays out in the Muslim world.

We can't tolerate this ignorance, not in the media, not on the campaign trail. Of course he's not an Arab. Of course he's not a Muslim, but, honestly, it shouldn't matter.

Tough stuff. We still have to redeem the label "radical" because we do need some going-to-the-root radicalism of imagination if we're to enhance democracy and keep the planet from frying. But Campbell Brown is doing good work here.

Yes, we span!

United States citizens overseas are sick of being embarrassed by a President. See a lot of them in this video. [5:57]

A little sweet, a little long, but heartening.

Via Thought for Food.

This is sick

From Equal Justice USA:

The Supreme Court has denied the appeal of Troy Davis, clearing the way for a new execution date to be set.

The Supreme Court announced today that they will not hear Troy Davis' case to determine whether it is constitutional to execute someone with a strong claim of innocence. The Supreme Court has essentially said that innocence doesn't matter - Troy Davis can be executed despite the fact that case against him consisted entirely of inconsistent eyewitness testimony and that seven witnesses have recanted their testimony.

If this is all the protection we can expect against executing the innocent, we must stop executions now.

For more on this Georgia case, see Amnesty International. Davis was convicted of killing a police officer at a Burger King based entirely on witness testimonies. There was no physical evidence and no weapon found. All but two of the non-police witnesses have recanted or changed their "recollections" since the trial.

But Davis is up against two big problems:

One of the two witnesses who has not recanted his testimony is Sylvester "Red" Coles -- the principle alternative suspect, according to the defense, against whom there is new evidence implicating him as the gunman. Nine individuals have signed affidavits implicating Sylvester Coles.

Now there's a guy with an incentive to stick to his story.

Davis' other problem is that, in the interest of "steamlining" court proceedings, the "justice" system limits appeals. The Supreme Court isn't saying they think Davis was rightly convicted; they are saying they won't look into the issue in the interests of a smoothly operating system.

Yeah, right -- a smoothly operating conveyor belt to execution for unlucky, poor, black folks...***You can send a letter to the Georgia parole board here.

Why vote?

Here's a letter from a college student, a fellow taking one of those not very cool or practical humanities majors, who has been thinking hard about why voting matters. We can all listen up [my emphasis added]:

I've heard people say they don't plan on voting, which surprises me because of the naivete and lack of responsibility this shows. Yeah, the system sucks. We all know it. But the notion that you can change this system by being hip and anti-establishment and refusing to vote is a terrible argument with no legs to stand on. I see this as being complicit [in] the system.

First of all, this isn't just about the Presidency. There are other things to vote on, and sometimes we forget this. Proposition 8 has been going different ways in different polls. If you care that a proposition backed largely by out-of-state interests could pass to keep certain people getting married in California, then go vote.

You don't have to vote for the presidency. And if you aren't sure, fine, don't make a choice. It is perfectly valid to not make a line on that question at all. In fact, if you showed up and turned in a blank vote, it would be better than not voting at all.

So vote on those things you are educated about, and don't think you have to just choose randomly or not vote because you don't know all the issues.

And by the powers of greyskull, vote even if you don't want to choose between McCain and Obama. Though I have no idea why you wouldn't have a choice.

This is California, go ahead and vote for a third party presidential candidate. You won't be spoiling the electoral votes for Obama.

But, if you vote in Ohio or other battleground state, please do not vote for a third party. There is a responsible way to work within the flawed system to minimize harm. I don't think that is a hard concept to understand, since it's how American life is on a large scale.

And the whole "my vote doesn't matter" idea is just... arrrgghhh that's stupid. That's like saying "it doesn't matter that all the products I buy are made in sweatshops, because even if I didn't, they still would be." It's too convenient to forget that groups are made up of individuals. If everyone who said their vote didn't count voted, they would count! Just like if everyone stopped buying unfairly produced products, the market would change.

...Go vote, instead of standing by while a disproportionate number of elderly conservative white people decide who I can marry...

As a wise politico wrote today, with three weeks to go, " ... winning teams don't relax when they are up 10 points with halfway to go in the fourth quarter. Instead, the goal should be to run up the score."

What's wrong with this picture?

For those who don't live in the Bay, read up on Angel Island here. For more on fire in California, see this. For more on the collapse of the great casino of the '00s, try any mainstream publication.

Happy Monday.

Europe votes

Awhile back I wrote several posts on how the rest of the world sees the U.S. election. These rather trivial comments continually get hits through Google. The rest of the world is stuck watching us and, mostly, holding its breath in the hope that the dangerous, wealthy adolescent in North America might at last get a semi-adult government.

So today the Nobel Prize Committee found a way to vote: it threw the economics prize to Paul Krugman. What better way to say -- stop giving us ignorant cowboy presidents! And put a grown up in charge of this crisis of financial gambling gone wild into which you've led the world!

I'm not equipped to evaluate Krugman's economic prowess, but he has been one of the few reliable voices of sanity in the New York Times during the past dreadful decade.

Columbus Day: the conquest

Detail from a mural by Diego Rivera in the Palacio Nacional, Mexico City.

Europeans brought mayhem, slavery, an obsession with gold -- and a religion that seemed to bless it all from the perspective of the "discovered." The muralist made art from the story.

Dropped into Blizzcon

Photo from MaryDang.

I have spent the weekend in Anaheim, California, scoping out the Convention Center for work I'll be doing next summer.

Our site visit put us right in the middle of BlizzCon, the monster World of Warcraft show and convention where enthusiastic gamers congregate. From what I saw, this is a happy, imaginative culture of devoted role-players and slayers of fantasy monsters.

So, being the politico I am, I had to ask myself, do these people vote? Do they interact with the civic culture outside the game universe? I know I don't know.

Thanks to Google, I found what may provide some of the answer. The Pew Research Center released a report last month entitled Teens, Video Games and Civics. FWIW, convening WOW players don't seem to be teens, but maybe the act of going to a convention makes an economic skew toward an older age group. And WOW is not a video game; it is a MMORPG-- massively multi-player online role-playing game. But Pew may provide some pointers to answers to my questions. They surveyed teens, but I would not be surprised if their findings applied to some extent to the older age groups, especially perhaps to folks who might convene together at Blizzcon.

Among teens who play games with others in the room:

• 65 percent go online to get information about politics, compared to 60 percent of those who do not.

• 64 percent have raised money for charity, compared to 55 percent of those who do not.

• 26 percent have tried to persuade others how to vote in an election, compared to 19 percent of those who do not.

• Teens who take part in social interaction related to the game, such as commenting on websites or contributing to discussion boards, are more engaged civically and politically.

• Among teens who write or contribute to these game-related websites: 18 percent have protested in the last 12 months, compared to 8 percent of those who play games but do not contribute to online gaming communities.

Fascinating stuff. Apparently, social interaction of any sort increases civic participation measurably. It's worth all this canvassing and talking to each that we politicos do.

Further, if game players become protesters at high rates there is some kind of alienation being expressed. Hard to know what kind -- most of us are alienated in one way or another. But apparently gamers are, relatively, inclined to act on their alienation.

Friday cat blogging Frisker is ready to endorse

She considered John McCain but doesn't trust anyone who has seven houses. Can such a person be trusted to make proper arrangements to feed the cat? She doubts it.

Barack Obama does not apparently live with a feline -- and he has children. She does not trust children. But on balance, he seems a more responsible person, perhaps more able to learn that a country is only as successful as its care of cats.

Friday pick me ups

I'm on the road and too busy to blog, but here's some interesting ads to ponder.

Here's a Democratic candidate whose message is worthy of a day when the Dow dropped another nearly 700 points. [:30]

Jim Slattery isn't going to win in Kansas. They don't elect Democrats there, anymore than we elect Republicans in San Francisco. But he's saying things that need to be said. Catch that Wall Street banker.

Here's another, even better: [:30]


H/t Cogitamus.

An ad you should see... and won't if ABC has its way

I watch football on TV. I watched the Olympics. In fact I watch very little on the tube except sports.

But I've seen hours of oil company ads touting their supposed clean energy research, their ever-so-responsible social policies. Being who I am, I don't much believe them, but there is no escaping them.

So I'm downright pissed off to learn that ABC refused to air the Alliance for Climate Protection's Repower America ad about how oil and coal companies have blocked the country's switch to truly clean energy. Here's the ad.



You can help get this run on national TV -- it is only fair. Tell ABC to reconsider their decision and air the Repower America ad.

McCain: depths of dishonor

Tim Dickinson at Rolling Stone has dug through the nooks and crannies of John McCain's biography and drawn a frightening profile of a spoiled brat who never grew up, but pursues boundless ambitions with a child's selfishness and disregard for inconvenient people and realities.

The whole article is worth reading -- but since this blog has been following the development of the U.S. torture regime, I want to pass on what Dickerson writes on that topic.

Then there's torture -- the issue most related to McCain's own experience as a POW. In 2005, in a highly public fight, McCain battled the president to stop the torture of enemy combatants, winning a victory to require military personnel to abide by the Army Field Manual when interrogating prisoners. But barely a year later, as he prepared to launch his presidential campaign, McCain cut a deal with the White House that allows the Bush administration to imprison detainees indefinitely and to flout the Geneva Conventions' prohibitions against torture.

What his former allies in the anti-torture fight found most troubling was that McCain would not admit to his betrayal. Shortly after cutting the deal, McCain spoke to a group of retired military brass who had been working to ban torture. According to [Colonel Lawrence] Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former deputy, McCain feigned outrage at Bush and Cheney, as though he too had had the rug pulled out from under him. "We all knew the opposite was the truth," recalls Wilkerson. "That's when I began to lose a little bit of my respect for the man and his bona fides as a straight shooter."

John McCain, famous P.O.W. and torture victim, enabled torture for his personal political profit.

An anniversary: remember Afghanistan?

Opium poppies flourish near Bamiyan, Afghanistan. Peace doesn't do so well. (Omar Sayami photo)

Seven years ago, the United States launched its attack on Afghanistan in response to the attacks of 9/11. The United States is still at war in Afghanistan, though often it is not very clear who the troops are fighting.

Michael T. McPhearson is Executive Director of Veterans For Peace and Co-Chair of United For Peace and Justice. He was a field artillery officer in the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division during Desert Shield/Desert Storm, also known as Gulf War I. Today he shared his thoughts on the Afghan war. (That's the war Senator Obama wants to expand.)

I was in New York City on September 11, 2001. I was horrified, angered and confused by the brutality and audacity of the attack. I knew there would be a military response. So I knelt and prayed that our nation's reaction would be thoughtful and provide leadership to the world through what promised to be the beginning of a dark time. ...

The hope was eclipsed. My government chose to use war as the primary policy direction. As I said, I expected military action. However, to what end? The current policy appears to be, engage the enemy until there is no longer opposition, or in a word “war.” War is not a sufficient policy to address the causes of the attack and will not bring peace. It will only bring more war. There is not a government to defeat or leader to topple. The faces of the opposition change and remain nameless with occasional exceptions like bin Laden. But without a doubt, even if bin Laden were captured today the occupiers and resisters would continue to fight.

Caught in the crossfire of U.S. waging war against a near endless supply of nameless and faceless opponents are civilians who wish to live their lives without fear. Civilians who if choosing between living in fear of U.S. air strikes and home invasions which to them seem to have no rhyme or reason, or in fear of the medieval thinking and actions of the Taliban, will pick the fear with a face they recognize and actions they can anticipate.

Meanwhile, the U.K.'s senior general in Afghanistan says that Western forces can't win against the Afghan insurgency.

An absolute military victory in Afghanistan is impossible, Brig.-Gen. Mark Carleton-Smith told England's Sunday Times newspaper.

What foreign forces must now come to grips with, he said, is reducing the level of insurgency so that it can be managed by Afghan forces and no longer poses a major threat. ...

As such, striking a deal with the Taliban could be considered as a strategic option, Carleton-Smith said. It is an idea that has been repeatedly — and recently — advanced by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

CBCNews,
October 4, 2008

The Canadians are naturally interested; they've lost a lot of soldiers over there. So has the United States -- more than in Iraq in recent months.

What was this war about anyway?

Once again, I cannot recommend strongly enough Ahmed Rashid's Descent into Chaos for a overview of the region and its wars.

McCain's latest race card

The Republican line of yesterday seems to be have been that Senator Obama "hangs around with terrorists." That piece of nonsense is for surrogates and the pathetic Palin to mouth. From the candidate himself, the line was slightly more subtle.

McCain, under the guise of asking legit questions about Obama's record, slips in charged language designed to paint him as a scary unknown. "He's not exactly an open book." "There's always a back-story." "Who is the real Barack Obama?"

Oddly, when McCain delivered that last line there was a visceral roar from the crowd of McCain supporters, as if this attack -- there's an alien in our midst! -- has been the one they'd been waiting for.

I think we have a case here of trying to lead low-information voters from their slightly confused and curious response to the novel Democratic candidate right on over to their distrust of a foreign-sounding, perhaps alien, indubitably BLACK, candidate.

From my experience canvassing for Obama ten days ago, this may work with some. The feeling among those few voters who were still just tuning in was that Obama is too unknown. Those who said this weren't necessarily expressing racism -- they really just didn't know what to make a candidate who wasn't an old white guy who'd been in the news for years. Maybe some of that was a cover for racism, but some was just astonishment at novelty.

I imagine the McCain sleaze attacks go over quite well in focus groups with this dwindling group. He is supplying an ugly content to an unformed feeling.

On the other hand, there are not nearly so many undecided potential voters as there were ten days ago, so there are less for McCain to influence.

Onward to the next debate...

The financial meltdown comes home

She may get some respect, but she is not likely to get a raise. Members of the USF faculty union held an informational picket recently.

Folks know their 401k plans are getting hammered as they watch the stock market tumble, but it is a little hard to envision what the "credit crunch" the media are yammering about might mean. The President of the University of San Francisco, a small Jesuit college, tried to explain it in a letter to his community today [emphasis is mine]:

This communication will come as no surprise! I write to you about the University's response to the widening economic crisis.

Vice President Charlie Cross wrote to you last week regarding the University's cash flow needs and our careful monitoring of that situation, including students' ability to pay their bills. This later consideration is critical, given that 95% of our operating budget comes from tuition, fees and room and board and that economic instability makes it increasingly difficult for families to afford college. Mr. Cross also pointed out the negative impact of the stock market decline on the University's relatively modest endowment [approximately $200 million before market]. ... we cannot completely insulate ourselves from the market's downward spiral.

Like virtually every household in the nation, the University suffers the effects of rising prices, tightening credit and wildly fluctuating variable-rate debt. There is an emerging consensus that we are at the beginning of a long story and must plan carefully for turns and twists in the plot as we work our way through an increasingly challenging situation. We must engage in the same belt-tightening that families are doing all across the country... The University will develop a graduated set of action steps that prepare it to respond to escalating financial challenges of increasing severity. While we remain hopeful about the future, we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of not preparing for the negative effects of a prolonged economic downturn.

Stephen A. Privett, S.J.
President

I'm not going to pretend I know what action steps they are imagining that will make up for a significant decline in student tuition payments as colleges loans dry up and families loose their savings when their investments plummet. I suspect the good President doesn't have much idea either.

That's the bind we're all in. We don't know and can't imagine what might protect us in a financial meltdown, either individually or collectively.

It would be nice if we had confidence that we have a government working for our interests. But we don't. We've had nearly 30 years of government pretending it worked for our interests by either ignoring the needs of most people or giving super-assistance to rich people. Can we claw our way to envisioning a democratic (small "d") government that weighs the needs of the people, and a frying globe, as of more importance than the needs of the lucky few?

Radio ad for bluegrass fans

Music for a Monday morning. I'm busy today...

Africom launched

Via Crossed Crocodiles.

Most countries exist more happily when they are not on the U.S. political radar screen. Unfortunately, as the New York Times reports today, the African continent is looming more important to Washington policy makers. And this week, it got its very own Africa Command, cutely called Africom for short.

In the newspaper of record, it emerges that this is part of the worldwide militarization of U.S. relations as the empire struggles to preserve a threatened monopoly on shock and awe. When the Pentagon is around, all other agencies of the U.S. government become obviously dispensable bit players.

Refugees International released statistics showing that the percentage of development assistance controlled by the Defense Department had grown to nearly 22 percent from 3.5 percent over the past 10 years, while the percentage controlled by the Agency for International Development dropped to 40 percent from 65 percent.

For another look at the U.S. in Africa, check out Crossed Crocodiles, a site that has been trying to expose the implications of Africom for awhile. Here's the CC take:

The Africa Command is a creation of the Bush Cheney American corporate predator state. It was conceived by people who were focused on Africa’s oil, other natural resources, and on opposing China. These are the same Bush Cheney cronies that have done the most to convert American democracy into a corporate predator state, and destroy American democracy in the process. ...

Although there is a lot of talk from AFRICOM about partnerships, there has been little real consultation with Africans. ...

Funny thing, the prescription of both the author of Crossed Crocodiles and the Africans he quotes is exactly what many of us in the States want:

What is needed is energy, focus, and money to strengthen civilian democratic political, economic, and social institutions, so that democracy, participation of all the people, can grow and flourish.

Democracy remains a potent idea.

Blindness, not insightful

As far back as I can remember, my grandfather was legally blind. With his glasses, I think he could perceive shapes when he held things next to his nose. But he didn't live in the world of the sighted. Every day he got up, bathed, dressed himself, tied his tie -- and retreated to the woodworking shop he'd set up in the attic which was the focus of his life in retirement. If I was very quiet, stayed in a corner, and promised not to move anything, I'd be allowed to watch him use a bandsaw, a drill press, and a table saw, as well as hand tools. He made kitchen utensils, furniture, and best of all, jigsaw puzzles for me. His being blind meant he had to move carefully and deliberately with dangerous tools, but it certainly didn't stop him.

So when my partner came home from a movie multiplex reporting that supporters of the National Federation of the Blind had been flyering in protest of a new film called Blindness, I was interested. Apparently the movie's plot is pretty simple: a mysterious disease starts making people blind. Locked away together in quarantine, the newly blind are unable to dress themselves, and are reduced to defecating on themselves. They then replicate the story of violent social disintegration in the novel Lord of the Flies, finally discover they can emerge from their prison, and mysteriously recover their sight without explanation. Pretty thin stuff -- and a load of defamatory drivel that reinforces fears and misconceptions about blindness that make real blind people's lives more difficult.

From NFB's flyer:

• Blind people are responsible; a sense of responsibility is not in any way related to visual acuity.

• Blind people can care for themselves both physically and emotionally.

• Blind people are conscious of the importance of hygiene and personal appearance; they do not live in filth and squalor.

• Blind people can successfully travel; they are not generally disoriented or wandering without direction.

• Blind people are unique individuals; they are not without identity.

• Blind people are active in society, not isolated from others and the world.

• Blind people can perceive their surroundings and exercise judgment.

• Blind people are as dignified and conscientious as their sighted peers.

Thanks for saying it, NFB. Thanks for my grandfather!

S.L.I.M.E. revisited

Just as guest poster Rebecca said back on September 20: the "bailout" is the "the Successful Looting and Investment Manager Employment Act -- S.L.I.M.E."

Now that it has been signed into law, Bloomberg reports:

Oct. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is hiring as many as 10 asset-management firms to join the lawyers and bankers he is recruiting to jumpstart the government's new $700 billion bank-rescue program.

Full employment for financial managers ahead...

American Fascists

In his expose of authoritarian dominionists who have hijacked parts of U.S. Christianity, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America,Chris Hedges challenges complacent mainstream religious organizations:

As long as scripture, blessed and accepted by the church, teaches that at the end of time there will be a Day of Wrath and Christians will control the shattered remnants of a world cleansed through violence and war, as long as it teaches that all nonbelievers will be tormented, destroyed and banished to hell, it will be hard to thwart the message of radical apocalyptic preachers or assuage the fears of the Islamic world that Christians are calling for its annihilation. Those who embrace this dark conclusion to life can find it endorsed in scripture, whether it is tucked into the back pew rack of a liberal Unitarian Church in Boston or a megachurch in Florida. The mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches, declining in numbers and influence, cannot hope to combat the hysteria and excitement roused by these prophets of doom until they repudiate the apocalyptic writings in scripture.

The book covers ground well-worked in recent decades by Sara Diamond, Chip Berlet, and Political Research Associates.

Hedges brings a special anguish to his portrayal of these charlatans who are out to replace our lumbering, fractious democracy with their simple-minded violent theocracy. He acquired his tolerant, humane values from a very different kind of Christianity. Later he earned a Masters from Harvard Divinity School, and saw entirely too much real violence as a war correspondent for fifteen years. The last experience led to his other major book, War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.

Hedges cares about meaning -- and the religious right, appropriately, scares him. He raises the alarm emphatically:

I do not believe that America will inevitably become a fascist state or that the Christian Right is the Nazi party. But I do believe that the Christian Right is a sworn and potent enemy of the open society. Its ideology bears within it the seeds of a religious fascism. In the event of a crisis, in the event of another catastrophic terrorist attack, an economic meltdown or huge environmental disaster, the movement stands poised to ruthlessly reshape America in ways that have not been seen since the nation’s founding. All Americans, not only those of faith, must learn to speak about this movement with a new vocabulary, to give up passivity and to defend tolerance. The attacks by this movement on the rights and beliefs of Muslims, Jews, immigrants, gays, lesbians, women, scholars scientists, those they dismiss as "nominal Christians" and those they brand with the curse of "secular humanist" is an attack on all of us, on our values, our religious freedoms and our democracy. Tolerance is a virtue, but tolerance coupled with passivity is a vice.

This book is very much worth a read.
***I've been reading Chris Hedges' book about our Christian fascists concurrently with trying to fathom whether John McCain has really put a dominionist on the ticket with him. Because these people don't advertise their true ends, it is not easy to draw definitive conclusions. But it certainly isn't hard to arrive at a sense that Sarah Palin, at the least, comes from a milieu where the wackier beliefs of the radical religious right are part of conventional mental furniture.

• She gives creationism the time of day and seems to think believing in God precludes accepting the truth of evolution.

• She tried to exclude a gay positive book from a local library.

• The particular Assemblies of God congregation she is connected to has some seriously rightwing connections.

• There's all too much evidence that she doesn't understand or accept the science describing climate change. From the VP debate:

  I'm not one to attribute every man -- activity of man to the changes in the climate. There is something to be said also for man's activities, but also for the cyclical temperature changes on our planet. But there are real changes going on in our climate. And I don't want to argue about the causes. What I want to argue about is, how are we going to get there to positively affect the impacts?

  In the midst of that word salad, there's plenty of room for a fundamental denial of the science. I can't help suspecting her of being far more comfortable of attributing it all to a personal First Cause, rather than delving into causes that might, as Joe Biden responded, point to a solution.

• Most tellingly of all, John McCain may not have vetted Palin much when he was looking desperately for a VP who would satisfy the Christian right segment of the Republican party. But the luminaries of the dominionist establishment sure think she is just great. I can only assume they know a good deal she isn't telling us, in addition to appreciating her stance in favor of forcing women to carry all pregnancies through to births.

Hedges' American Fascists, a volume that had been sitting for months in my "to be read" pile, seems timely indeed.

Oh that's what he meant...

Joe Biden, while effectively crushing the tiresome Ms. Palin last night, had one really odd moment that left me jaw dropped. He seemed to be saying the United States had driven Hizbollah out of Lebanon. How the hell would that happen? Hizbollah is a group of Lebanese.

Time's Joe Klein explains:

Joe Biden, by contrast, demonstrated a real knowledge of the issues in question. He made several verbal fumbles -- it was Syria, not Hizballah, that left Lebanon...

Oh, that's what he meant. I couldn't call that demonstrating real knowledge. In general, most of the world does better when our politicians think about their countries less.

Veep debate: Governor Non-Sequitur spews

When I do trainings for people who are going to have to deal with the media, I have learned from the Center for Third World Organizing to have people practice using a rather amusing exercise: whatever an interviewer asks them, their job is to explain the fact that "my dog has three legs." It's fun -- and it is remarkable how proficient very ordinary people can become at this exercise with a few hours training.

Somebody seems to have tried something similar with Governor Palin -- they gave her talking points on about fifteen issues and instructed her to get them in. She's a quick study. She's getting most of them in, regardless of what Gwen Ifill or Joe Biden happen to be talking about.

What I've learned from watching this: it's harder for an uninformed person to learn to parrot fifteen talking points than to advocate for just one.

Debate anxiety -- VP edition

If you are like me, you are worried about the Biden-Palin set-to Thursday night. Things have seemed to be going almost too well for the Obama campaign recently. Pollsters say, if the election were held today, Obama would win, very big.

But now we have to get through the Biden-Palin debate. And though the Alaska governor probably has been dragging down that sinking ship, the McCain Squirrelly Express, with her inarticulate responses to Katie Couric's interview questions, she has also provided the only life raft Republicans have found in this season.

Moreover, people who have debated her say she is good in a debate format. Here's how Alaska Republican Andrew Halcro experienced going up against Palin in gubernatorial debates:

During the campaign, Palin's knowledge on public policy issues never matured -- because it didn't have to. Her ability to fill the debate halls with her presence and her gift of the glittering generality made it possible for her to rely on populism instead of policy.

We're in a decidedly populist mood these days, confronted with the prospect of funneling billions of dollars to bankers and financiers who we believe already ripped us off. Collectively, we may give Sarah Palin some benefit of the doubt -- though both parties have allowed themselves to be trapped into supporting the unpopular bailout.

Palin will probably "exceed expectations" because expectations could hardly be lower. Pundits may conclude she "won" the debate.

But none of that matters. Here's why:

• the enormous audience this event will draw is primarily a form of voyeurism. Palin is more theater than a serious contender. The very lack of seriousness McCain demonstrated by selecting her has been undermining his credentials.

• Obama "won" last week's presidential debate in the way that mattered most: he came across as a plausible President. Since we've never had a black man with an African name in the job, that's a huge hurdle. But polling and punditry agree that he cleared it. McCain either did nothing for himself or perhaps demonstrated a churlish side. But in essence, Obama won.

• Debates mostly speak to the undecided. Even more than before last week's Obama-McCain debate, most of us now know who we are going to vote for. Barring an absurdly poor performance, those of us who have decided will almost always feel our candidate won. Meanwhile, the persuadable undecided have dwindled to something like 5 percent of potential voters. There just are not very many viewers there for Palin to win over -- probably less in total than Obama's current 5 percent margin in the polls.

• Besides, vice-presidential debates don't swing elections. Pollster Charles Franklin was asked bluntly in an online chat today:

  Marion, Ind.: Is there any history of the vice presidential debates moving the polls?
  Charles Franklin: No. Though post-debate polls have sometimes found clear winners and losers in the VP debates, there isn't much evidence that the national polls at least move much.

So, though it is hard, we need to relax and enjoy the show. Go on over to Jane R.'s place and tell her what you'll be drinking.

Google speaks: "No on Prop. 8"

The official statement:

... Because our company has a great diversity of people and opinions -- Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, all religions and no religion, straight and gay -- we do not generally take a position on issues outside of our field, especially not social issues. So when Proposition 8 appeared on the California ballot, it was an unlikely question for Google to take an official company position on.

... it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 -- we should not eliminate anyone's fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love.

Sergey Brin, Co-founder & President, Technology

Well I'm glad the search engine company I use every day got that right.

The Prop. 8 argument is between a fraction of the public who think they need to impose their moral postures on society in order to protect themselves from personal and social impurity -- and another (hopefully larger) fraction that thinks legalizing same-sex marriage is a matter of elementary fairness, of civil equality.

That Google and other monster corporations might place themselves on the side of civil rights is not surprising. Large, impersonal corporate entities thrive in defined legal environments in which prejudices and passions are constrained by law, though they are not always so good on equity for the low end of their workforces.

In general, they have supported affirmative action policies that create anxiety of about possible unfair outcomes in white populations. The upside of having clear rules that promote inclusion outweighs the downside of the anxieties of some (mostly) white men.

Many of the big guys, including banks, clothing maker Levi Strauss, and the power company, PG&E, have long been supportive of normalizing the legal status of gay people. For them, it's simply good business. And having a reputation for tolerance probably offers a competitive advantage in recruiting a young, creative workforce.

The culture of people who support something like Prop. 8 barely intersects with that of the No folks. I'll be writing more about this in a few days, but if you want a look at what moves the folks who feel threatened by same-sex marriage, try Chris Hedges' American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. The link is to a Google book, by the way. It's everywhere, that Google.