We make it much too difficult to vote in this country. I won't be in the New York area this election day, and it's taken me several days of false starts and research to figure out how to vote in-person absentee. I took a chance this morning and trekked down to the Brooklyn Board of Elections first thing. Once there, I had a bit of trouble understanding the logic of how the paper ballot was laid out. I finally voted, hallelujah. But let's make election day a national holiday so at least people aren't struggling to cast their ballot while at the same time worrying about getting back to work.
Today marked one first and one near-first experience for me. First the near-first. Since I've been a legal resident of Washington DC beginning in college and until last November, it's been about a decade since I've had the opportunity to vote for a United States Senator. To be honest, I'm not even sure if I ever have voted for one. It felt gooood to fill in the bubble for Senator Clinton. (About a half million Americans living in the nation's capitol aren't represented by a Senator or a voting Congressman. Learn more about DC voting rights.) And for the first -- I voted for a Republican. Though if you follow New York politics, you probably know which one and why.
Reason's blog Hit & Run has cracked the mystery of what Jim Cavezial is mumbling in Aramaic at the beginning of the Michael J. Fox response ad:
"You betray me with a kiss." So now we have actors responding to actors with biblical references that are both vaguely threatening and completely irrelevant, spoken in an obsure Middle Eastern language that a maximum of three people in all of Missouri understand. This is an election cycle like no other.
More seriously though, what the heck were they thinking? I'm guessing that we're dealing with some sort of code-talking here, but directed to whom? Unsettling.
Even if you're a New Yorker settled on casting a ballot for Spitzer or Clinton come Tuesday, you still have a choice to make -- whether you're gonna vote for them as Democrats. As the result of an interesting quirk of Empire State politics known as "fusion voting," candidates can appear on the ballot as a candidate from more than one party. Spitzer and Clinton are also running on the Working Families Party line.
Votes for them as candidates of either party count towards their final tallies, so there's no danger that of squandering your vote. In fact, since both Spitzer and Clinton are coasting towards victory, mindfully choosing which through which to vote for them is one meaningful voting-booth chance that progressives have to voice an opinion this election.
[M]arriage is a religious institution in which government has no business, except for the enforcement of the contract inherent in that sacred institution. I say, civil unions for everybody -- straights, gays, transgendered, omnisexuals, whomever -- and let the religious institutions determine on which couples they will confer the blessing of marriage.
If we can quickly get to the point where Americans embrace the simple fact that their religious home -- Catholic, Muslim, whatever -- will never have to sanctify man-man/woman-woman unions if they don't want to, we'd be a lot closer to solving the same-sex marriage quandary once and for all.
Though I know we can never be together, I have a deep and abiding love for Rep. Frank. My latest favorite Frankism, on gay Republicans: "The right to privacy should not be a right to hypocrisy."
Hey -- vote Democrat, and that guy could be our next House Financial Services chairman. (via Andrew Sullivan)
We need to have a little
perspective, folks. This smells like a victory, and
from my layman's perspective, probably a sound way to go about
getting to full equality. Marriage is both a legal and cultural construct.
The court said
yesterday that the state has no business telling any adult couple
in
New Jersey that they could not have the full and complete slate of
rights
and responsibilities given
to what has for a
very
long time been marriage. Read Adam
Bonin for the details on what was gained.
That's huge to me. That's huge for me.
They also said that the cultural side of the question -- whether to
call such
unions "marriage" -- is properly decided by the legislature in Trenton.
Maybe it's because I have a reverence for legislature, dunno, but the
people's
representatives
do have their place in making these decisions at the pace right for
the state. We want a lasting, enduring standing on marriage equality,
so
that we're not still arguing it 50 and 100 years from now.
I
remember the dark old
days
where
just support for equal rights for
committed
adult
couples made a Democratic presidential candidate a raving leftist.
That was way back in 2003. Today we've got civil unions in Vermont,
marriage in Massachusetts, now this in New Jersey, so on and so forth.
The arc of history is bending
toward justice, and quickly.
Outside.in is (1) the first clever use of a TLD that I've ever liked and (2) author Steven Berlin Johnson's latest project. It's a geo-located news aggregator, blog, and coffee shop rolled into one. Type in your zip code or neighborhood name and it constructs an online world of the things going on in your immediate space. One thing I particularly like is that, unlike with many social tools, content here isn't treated like it has an expiration date. For example, there may well be a great restaurant or music venue that stays great from one year to the next. You'll find that here. Sprinkled in there are still of course the timely bits -- gossip, police reports, event notices.
But the neatest part is a Google map application that allow you to pull back and back and back from your neighborhood to the larger environs. That's particulary useful in a place like New York City, where there's a lot of relevent information in my neighborhood but a whole lot more just outside of it.
It's Johnson's "long zoom" at work. If you haven't read his recent New York Times article, Johnson thinks that the long zoom is the defining way our era sees life. The idea is this. Renaissance art had a way of looking at things from a fixed perspective. The 80's is defined by the MTV quick-cut style. What makes us unique is that nowadays we "mov(e) conceptually from the scale of DNA to the scale of personality all the way up to social movements and politics --- and back again."
Now that the gainful employment is not so much what you would call full-time -- if you're unfamiliar, there was this southern Governor who we thought might run for president but we was wrong -- I've been focusing some on my side project, Darfur Watch. Dafur Watch has evolved from a media monitoring and aggregation project that I started after the Abuja peace agreement in May into just a regular old blog focused on the situation in Western Sudan. What I'm trying to do there is the sort of thick-description, holistic writing that I aim to do more broadly soon -- though this effort is hampered a bit by the fact that I haven't been to Darfur and don't see myself getting a chance to go anytime soon. Still, hope you'll check it out.
I was reading the decision (that's a pdf) in Doe vs. Oberweis Dairy the other day in an effort to bone up on the legal precedent around the sexual harrasment of minors. When I was done, I remarked to Jane how every time you find yourself reading a well-written, humane, and ground-breaking judicial opinion on the more pressing issues of our day, it always seems to have come from the pen of Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals' Judge Richard Posner. See for yourself. Former Posner clerk Tim Wu and a web developer named Stuart Sierra have pulled together Project Posner, where the Judge's finely-crafted opinions are sortable by year and searchable by topic. (Didja know that, over the years, Posner has cited Hamlet 13 times and Franz Kafka 7? You do now.)
An amazing short movie from Dove shows how a frankly ordinary looking woman becomes billboard-beautiful through the magic of makeup, hair product, and Photoshop. There's no there there -- this gorgeous woman is entirely a creation, a product of editing and embellishment. Watch it and send it to the young girls, young boys, young women, and young men that you know. (via Ezra Klein)
Though not so much on the blog, in person I tend to regularly bag on the goings-on on Capitol Hill. It's the lack of care that goes into the legislative process, the willful and rewarded ignorance of some members of Congress, the "expertists" who get ever bigger jobs by repeating the same tripe never validated by facts, or reality, or the outside world. While I'm actively trying to rid myself of that sort of cynicism, this sort of thing simply does not help. The national security editor of Congressional Quarterly regularly ends interviews by asking the subject -- legislator, national security-type, what have you -- if they can explain in broad strokes the difference between Shiite and Sunni. Here is a typical response:
Representative Jo Ann Davis, a Virginia Republican who heads a House intelligence subcommittee charged with overseeing the C.I.A.'s performance in recruiting Islamic spies and analyzing information, was...dumbfounded when I asked her if she knew the difference between Sunnis and Shiites.
"Do I?" she asked me. A look of concentration came over her face. "You know, I should." She took a stab at it: "It's a difference in their fundamental religious beliefs. The Sunni are more radical than the Shia. Or vice versa. But I think it's the Sunnis who're more radical than the Shia."
Did she know which branch Al Qaeda's leaders follow?
"Al Qaeda is the one that's most radical, so I think they're Sunni,” she replied. "I may be wrong, but I think that's right."
This isn't a Jo Ann Davis problem, she is one of many, many, many. It's a Washington problem to its core. Elect the curious! Demand that they hire, appoint, promote the same.
I've returned to the East Coast from taking the Governor out to San Francisco to meet with about a dozen people working in what can broadly be called "emerging tech." It was two hours of what I thought was a challenging and engaging discussion, centered around why and how to get technology-minded folks involved in the political process. Jon Lebkowsky has pictures, and I have two myself.
Our first morning in the Bay Area, the cover of the Chroniclefeatured Reuters' decision to open up a bureau in Second Life, with a nice mention of the Governor's efforts there. Oh, what could have been. Okay, done with the moaning. The virtual reporter Adam Reuters has already broken such stories as the Joint Economic Committee's rumblings on how taxation might work in virtual worlds. Both stories -- and especially the congressional interest -- were yet two more reminders that Second Life really has taken some small hold in the public consciousness since the Gov's appearance back in August. If you're interested in making your way in that virtual world space, Wired this month has a nice guide to getting around. In other SL news, this month's Washingtonian (offline) has story on Second Life that calls me "a slim sexy brunette." Okay, so they're talking bout my avatar, but I'll take it. (UPDATE: Pablo, a.k.a. "a series of tubes," has a picture.)
Latest in the series of "why'd he do it?" is Ryan Lizza's New Republic piece. I'm going to ruin the ending for you:
Every governor or senator thinks about running for president. Most do so because they are ambitious and see the presidency as the next rung on America's political ladder. The big question they often ask is strategic. How can I make it through the process and get elected? In the end, that's not the question Warner asked. His advisers swear that the nuances of the primaries and the details of how to topple Hillary Clinton never came up in his final deliberations. Warner asked not whether he could be president, but whether he should be president. The irony of Warner's answer is that the kind of person who dwells on that question is the kind of person you want to be president.
It's hard sometimes for me to think that we're not in big trouble in this country, exactly because I can't solve the Lizza dilemma -- just what sort of person would subject themselves to this process in this day and age who would also be the sort of person we'd want to lead us? Read Lizza's description of the pre-campaign thus far and answer me that.
Like this Time piece on the Governor's decision to opt out of the big race. UPDATE: Nice photo series from the Washington Post, but jeez, it's not like the guy died.
Don't look to me to say much right now about Governor Warner's announcement today of his decision not run for the presidency in 2008, but I will say this -- from my perspective and in my experience, he handled this whole process and his final decision with dignity and a great deal of respect for those around him. So, god bless him.
This series by New York Times' Diana Henriques on the legal exemptions given to religious groups -- from everything from zoning laws to day care regulations to property taxes -- is remarkably good. What I like best about the series is that Henriques and her editors don't resort to "false balance." That's the approach to journalism where you say "they say this, but then again they say this, let's call 'em both right." Take this passage from today's piece on the so-called parsonage exemption, the income-tax pass pastors get on housing expenses:
Pastor [Rick "A Purpose Driven Life"] Warren argued that the tax break is essential to poorly paid clergy members who serve society.
The tax break is not available to the staff at secular nonprofit organizations whose scale and charitable aims compare to those of religious ministries like Pastor Warren's church, or to poorly paid inner-city teachers and day care workers who also serve their communities.
That's a good reporter thinking, right there on the page.
We make it much too difficult to vote in this country. I won't be in the New York area this election day, and it's taken me several days of false starts and research to figure out how to vote in-person absentee. I took a chance this morning and trekked down to the Brooklyn Board of Elections first thing. Once there, I had a bit of trouble understanding the logic of how the paper ballot was laid out. I finally voted, hallelujah. But let's make election day a national holiday so at least people aren't struggling to cast their ballot while at the same time worrying about getting back to work.
