Why I Am A Democrat

On jury duty in Los Angeles

I'm sitting in a jury assembly room in downtown Los Angeles. It could be a jury assembly room in any city in this country, except for the American Cinematographer magazine sitting on the magazine rack.

I love being here. I love doing my civic duty (geeky, I know). But even more than that, I love the chance to be in a room with a random cross-section of the Los Angeles population. When I lived in San Francisco, I usually got around town on public transportation. Being on the bus can be a great equalizer in a city. But until the Red Line opened, I hadn't been on Los Angeles public transportation since 1983.

(In case you didn't know, everyone drives everywhere in Los Angeles.)

I used to think that one of the main reasons Angelenos don't have a public life is that they don't ride the buses.

Riding the bus leads to being around The Other, which leads to taking away fear of The Other, which leads to wanting to be around The Other. Ipso facto!

More recently, I've become convinced that our lack of public life is more a function of the transient nature of the population here; apparently, the longer you live somewhere the more likely you are to get to know your neighbors. Whodaguessed?

But blaming it all on not taking the bus has a certain populist romance for me, so what the hell: everyone in Los Angeles should be required to take the bus somewhere at least once a month.

Catholic stuff.

A lot of people (bloggers!) are talking about how Bush is trying to get the Pope to help radicalize the US Catholic clergy, hoping that such a thing would marginalize Kerry.

Strangely enough, none of the items I've read mentions the Latino vote, which is certainly overwhelmingly Catholic, and which is also swinging Kerry's way.

Getting Kerry excommunicated is, as they say, a "free gift" or an "added bonus." I think the point here is that enlisting Catholic help shows that the B***ies don't believe they can get the Latino vote using carrots.

Hell, even the second generation Cubans are against him.

On why two computer monitors just aren't enough

Two web pages, Outlook, sticky notes, 2 IMs, a download going on in the background, and desktop icons.

I need three computer monitors. Things are getting lost. Efficiency is dropping. And now I need to launch Word!

Ch-ch-ch-changing.

Yeah, I've done the "oh I'm so angry with the B*** Administration" thing since I started this blog.

And I am.

But now I just kind of feel sorry for it, like I felt sorry for the child murderer at the end of "M."

Some of it will be over soon, I believe.

Other stuff will linger. The important stuff will only get resolved over the next four years: are we still a republic? Do we get some of our freedoms back? Do we figure out that our democracy is stronger than nihilism, or do we NOT figure it out, only to figure out eventually that it isn't?

I'll probably weigh in on things I think would help us maintain our society, but that won't be the focus of this blog anymore. There are too many voices now. I'm too polite to "pile on." (!)

And anyway, people (especially bloggers) need to start thinking about the things that need to be done going forward. Having Kerry in the White House doesn't mean we're home free.

So I'm going to post what I think, sometimes, and what I'm feeling, sometimes, and I'll probably write more about my life, or make shit up, or whatever. In any case, we'll see where it all goes.

In Praise of iTunes

So I work here, in this little office, in a facility where people are in, and are out, and other people are in. Some -- the ones who make eye contact in the hallways, say hello, try to strike up a conversation or at least converse back when I do -- are nice. Some -- the ones who walk down the hallway, eyes down -- aren't.

In this building there are probably 50 shifting people. And out of these, every day there are four or five who have iTunes loaded onto their computers. These computers sit on a common network. The network allows everyone who has iTunes set to share see the music of everyone else who has iTunes set to share.

This is so incredibly cool. I don't know these people. It's possible that the people who share their music are the people who walk down the halls with their heads down (after all, some of their music SUCKS). But knowing that I can listen to other people's music, that they WANT me to listen to it, and that they can listen to mine...without knowing me...and yet getting to know me...this rocks hard. Right now, one person is listening to my music. My name is on my office door. I hope the person makes an introduction.

Google Bombing!

I'm just cutting and pasting here, but it should work for the purposes Drum intends:

Currently the google results for the Democratic National Convention brings up a fake republican site pretending to be the official convention site at the top of the results. In effect, an actual, practical, use of the googlebomb to screw with your political opponents (so a tip of the hat to the wingnuts who pulled this off).
This post is merely an effort to get the real Democratic National Convention site back up to the top of the search rankings. I encourage other bloggers to join in this counter googlebomb. Unlike "flip flopper" and the other fun googlebombs, this one actually matters.

I wish I had said that.

"We're like contestants on Wheel of Fortune with a long phrase spelled out in front of us with maybe one or two letters missing. We know what the letters spell. It's obvious. We just don't have the heart to say it out loud."

The New York Times Gets the Memo.

So now they're also reporting what the Wall Street Journal said yesterday:

A team of administration lawyers concluded in a March 2003 legal memorandum that President Bush was not bound by either an international treaty prohibiting torture or by a federal antitorture law because he had the authority as commander in chief to approve any technique needed to protect the nation's security.

The memo, prepared for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, also said that any executive branch officials, including those in the military, could be immune from domestic and international prohibitions against torture for a variety of reasons.

One reason, the lawyers said, would be if military personnel believed that they were acting on orders from superiors "except where the conduct goes so far as to be patently unlawful."

So, here's the deal.

We are at the edge of losing our Republic. I'm not hopeful that we'll hang on.

"Jim, please ask Bill to pass the income exclusion benefits."

"Why don't you ask him yourself??! He's sitting right next to you!"

Yep, things in the Republican-controlled House are peachy if, by peachy, you mean infantile.

The relationship between two House committee chairmen has become so strained that they have stopped talking to each other and rely on an intermediary to negotiate over corporate tax-reform legislation.

Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) and Small Business Committee Chairman Don Manzullo (R-Ill.) communicate through Rep. Jim McCrery (R-La.), a senior member on the Ways and Means Committee, to convey their positions and learn about each other’s views on a set of tax breaks for American corporations that have been ruled illegal by the World Trade Organization.

Back to the Present

It's good to know some news is still getting through the Reagan white noise. Unfortunately, this is the news:

The working-group report elaborated the Bush administration's view that the president has virtually unlimited power to wage war as he sees fit, and neither Congress, the courts nor international law can interfere. It concluded that neither the president nor anyone following his instructions was bound by the federal Torture Statute, which makes it a crime for Americans working for the government overseas to commit or attempt torture, defined as any act intended to "inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering." Punishment is up to 20 years imprisonment, or a death sentence or life imprisonment if the victim dies.

"In order to respect the president's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign ... (the prohibition against torture) must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his commander-in chief authority," the report asserted. (The parenthetical comment is in the original document.) The Justice Department "concluded that it could not bring a criminal prosecution against a defendant who had acted pursuant to an exercise of the president's constitutional power," the report said. Citing confidential Justice Department opinions drafted after Sept. 11, 2001, the report advised that the executive branch of the government had "sweeping" powers to act as it sees fit because "national security decisions require the unity in purpose and energy in action that characterize the presidency rather than Congress."

Fucking war criminals.

Reagan

Everyone is commenting, so I'll be brief.

When I heard Reagan was shot, I cheered. I remember being in high school and hearing and looking at my friends and cheering.

Yeah, it was wrong morally. I should never have cheered. Granted.

But when I look at how the cancerous group of people who surrounded Reagan have subverted our country's democracy during the current presidency, I can't help but wonder what would have happened if Reagan had died during the attack, and Bush 41 had started his presidency eight years early.

Basically, while my head says this, my heart says this.

NBA Finals

Has there ever been a worse opening theme for a sporting event?

Pumping Fists

This article made me pump my fists in the air and mouth the words, "YOU'RE GOING DOWN, FUCKER."

President Bush has consulted an outside lawyer in case he needs to retain him in the grand jury investigation of who leaked the name of a covert CIA operative last year, the White House said Wednesday.

Smarter than I

From today's billmon.org:

In his brilliant analysis of financial bubbles, Manias, Panics and Crashes, the economist Charles Kindleberger talked about a common tendency for desperate speculators to latch on to some shred of hope in the last stages of a market collapse - usually by convincing themselves a potential action or a pending event will salvage the situation.

During the 1929 stock market crash, for example, rumors that the Rockefellers and the Morgans were going to step in and rescue the market ("organized buying support" was the magic phrase) were enough to trigger a brief rally following Black Thursday. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear such support was entirely mythical, leading to Black Monday - up until 1987, the worst day in stock market history.

Well, it appears to me the June 30 transition in Bahgdad has emerged as the equivalent of "organized buying support" for our Gambler in Chief and his band of suckers. They've pinned an enormous amount of faith on the idea that the new interim "government" will be seen by the Iraqi people as something other than what it is: a slightly repackaged collection of the same exile politicians we've been coaxing or bullying into doing our bidding for the past year.

(sigh)