Beam Me Up, Obama…

I’ll be damned.  After rewriting my post on the New World Order, juxtaposing Obama’s vision of the future with Gene Roddenberry’s political theories, I find I’ve hit some kind of left-wing, Trekkie vein in the zeitgeist.

I’m not much of a Star Trek freak myself, so this is probably obvious to all but me.  Nonetheless, check out Paul Rosenberg’s Star Trek Socialism on the Open Left blog.

Geeks and lolcatz rule.

New World Order

I promise to get back to writing silly flights of fancy soon, but I’m not quite done processing my thoughts around the momentous events down south yet.  I’ve tried to do a little of both here in this re-written (11/08/08) blog post.

Barack Obama’s 1994 autobiography, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, has shot to the top of the amazon.com and other bestseller lists. However, if you want to know what Barack himself is reading, you might want to check out Fareed Zakaria’s new book: The Post-American World. Zakaria is the editor of Newsweek International, and I caught an interview with him this a.m. on Nov 6th on CBC Radio 1.

Prior to that, I had an exchange with aurora*raby on gawker about what the next step is for the U.S. (this was Nov 2, before Obama won).  The left-leaning,  educated, predominantly northeast, urban gawker audience was raging against and in some cases vehemently insulted by an article in Germany’s der Spiegel calling the U.S. “a superpower around the globe, but a Third World country at home…” and making a number of other inflammatory (albeit closer to true than false) accusations. In a moment of sanity on a thread that was degenerating in somewhat surprising ways to me given the gawker demographic, aurora*raby commented:

“we prove ourselves to be one big alcoholic family (Bush’s, no doubt) if we lash out at constructive criticism. We are very close to throwing off the yoke. Let’s start thinking about the next step.”

It prompted me to think about the next step.  Also, over the next week, about leadership, globalization and the Starship Enterprise.  To get in the proper frame of mind, I suggest you click on this youtube vid for the soundtrack to the rest of this post.

More, after the jump.

History is Made

Congratulations to the American people for electing Barack Obama the 44th President of the United States.  This landmark event is of significance to all people, all over the world who have fought and will continue to fight for justice and human rights.

Rosa sat,

so Martin could walk,

so Obama could run,

so our children could fly.

author unknown

Canadamerican Politics: Pt II (EM was here first)

Under the category Unlikeliest of Bedmates, here are people who are agreeing with Eccentric Muse (hehehe) since my post of yesterday:

David Frum, journalist, former speechwriter to George W. Bush, bordering-on-incoherent, neoconservative embarrasment-to-Canada (oh, oooops … get a filter, EM), actually provides an analysis that is pretty much spot on and a strategy that makes sense:

From The Washington Post, Oct 26:

There are many ways to lose a presidential election.  John McCain is losing in a way that threatens to take the entire Republican Party down with him. …

[Republican] resources are limited, and our message is failing. We cannot fight on all fronts. We are cannibalizing races that we must win and probably can win in order to help a national campaign that is almost certainly lost. In these final 10 days, our goal should be: senators first. A beaten party needs a base from which to recover. [boldface mine]

Then he gets really paranoid about a Democratic Senate and Congress going on to stifle dissent, muzzle the freedom of the press, and wield unchecked power to advance cronyism through the nationalization of financial institutions.

Ummmm, project much, David?

BUT:  I will give him this.  He’s right that the Republicans are eating their own innards and will have no vital organs left with which to regenerate the body politic when all is said and done.  And he’s right that a sound (the only) Republican strategy left–one that actually DOES put “country first” (you hypocritical, extremist assholes)–will be to give up the race for the Whitehouse, which at this point is virtually unwinnable (4.3% chance as of yesterday, so sayeth Nate Silver, the smartest pollster on the Web). 

The Repubs need to salvage their good, strong, capable, experienced, SANE Senators (yes, there are some)–who can provide the checks-and-balances that will be needed in a Whitehouse, Senate and Congress that is about to be overwhelmingly Democrat. From there, they can maybe, MAYBE, rein in the delusions-of-grandeur of the Palinists (and how freakin’ lovely that that rhymes, and resonates, with “Stalinists”…hmmmm??).

Extremism–on either side–is never a good thing politically or personally.  As my Grandma Flora used to say, “everything in moderation.”

And this, from the Anchorage Daily News in their endorsement today of Barack Obama (which is delicious in and of itself, but there is more deliciousness within).  Enjoy:

Sen. McCain describes himself as a maverick, by which he seems to mean that he spent 25 years trying unsuccessfully to persuade his own party to follow his bipartisan, centrist lead. Sadly, maverick John McCain didn’t show up for the campaign. Instead we have candidate McCain, who embraces the extreme Republican orthodoxy he once resisted and cynically asks Americans to buy for another four years.

…despite [Palin's] formidable gifts, few who have worked closely with the governor would argue she is truly ready to assume command of the most important, powerful nation on earth. To step in and juggle the demands of an economic meltdown, two deadly wars and a deteriorating climate crisis would stretch the governor beyond her range. Like picking Sen. McCain for president, putting her one 72-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the free world is just too risky at this time.

If I ever read or hear that expression “a heartbeat away from the Presidency” or any variation thereof one more time I’m gonna stab whoever says it in the eye (even, yes, if it’s Anderson Cooper, my sweet). Nonetheless, they too are right. They didn’t actually come out and say that the first, most damning, most conclusive sign that McCain’s opportunism trumped his centrism was picking Palin herself, but they might as well have.

Finally, an international view (drawing heavily on Frum as a source), The London Telegraph’s headline says it all: Republican fears of historic Obama landslide unleash civil war for the future of the party.

Jim Nuzzo, a White House aide to the first President Bush … told The Sunday Telegraph: “There’s going to be a bloodbath. A lot of people are going to be excommunicated. David Brooks and David Frum and Peggy Noonan are dead people in the Republican Party. The litmus test will be: where did you stand on Palin?”

… [Nuzzo] said: “She emerges from this election as the probable frontrunner for the 2012 nomination. Her supporters vastly outnumber her critics. But it will be extremely difficult for her to win the presidency.”

On that last point, it will only be true if there are voices left on the right to challenge her ascendancy. In many circles, she is already being called “Queen Sarah”–and when evangelical zealots say that, you know they mean ‘ordained by God.’ Look at the language Nuzzo uses: this is a holy war, he says it specifically elsewhere in the article.

I’m no Christopher Hitchens, but if the thought of Queen Sarah achieving the Presidency doesn’t make you shudder, the fact that she and her supporters believe she is being led there by Divine Right surely ought to.

Listen to Hitchens on CNN last Thursday.  I was really happy to hear Hitchens come back to the issue of Palin’s scorn for research using fruitflies, which had been summarily dismissed as irrelevant and inconsequential–as “minutia,” said one (hehe)–by the two Republican pundits.  Bloody well right fruit flies are important.  Fruit flies reproduce every 24 hours. Changes in fruit fly physiology as a result of natural selection are therefore highly observable, making the study of genetics and other life sciences feasible in really important ways.  Hitchens gets the last word on the matter, which drew a direct parallel between Palin’s creationist beliefs and what would be, by logical extension, her lack of support for science/technology funding. (And he should have stopped there, but didn’t …. oh, well.) Now if only someone would tell me how to get them out of my house other than sucking them up one by one in the vacuum cleaner, I’d fund a study of that.

Canadamerican Politics: An EM Theory

Photo: Barbara Woodley

Welcome to Saturday, October 25th.  On this day in 1993, Canada held a federal election.  Just four months earlier, Kim Campbell assumed leadership of The Progressive Conservatives, the party that was in power at the time, making her the first female Prime Minister of Canada ever.  Yayyyy!! Uhhh, yayy?

While it could certainly be deemed some sort of feminist victory for a woman to have won the leadership of a federal political party, and a conservative one to boot, Ms Campbell wasn’t actually elected Prime Minister.  We don’t do things that way.  As I said, she assumed the role because her party was in power at the time.  Then, she called a federal election.  And then, just four months later on this day in 1993, the Progressive Conservatives were wiped off the face of the Canadian political map, losing 149 seats of the 151 they held.

What does this have to do with the politics of race and gender, The Garden of Eden and Kurt Vonnegut?  Find out, after the jump.

Colin Powell Endorses Obama: The Photo

This is the photo that (Ret.) General Colin Powell referred to in his endorsement of Barack Obama on today’s Meet The Press. It is more stylized than I imagined, but just as powerful. The entire photo essay from The New Yorker is very moving. See it here.

Elsheba Khan at the grave of her son, Specialist Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan. Photo: Platon, The New Yorker, Sept 29/08.

The Times, They Are A-Changin’

Friends have asked me why I have been so interested in this year’s U.S. election. This is why:

Washington, DC
August 28, 1963

Dr. Martin Luther King was introduced as “the moral leader of our nation” to a crowd of 250,000 civil rights workers on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

I Have A Dream

St. Louis, Missouri
October 18, 2008 (45 years later)

Barack Obama speaks to a crowd of 100,000 by the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, as the first black Presidential candidate, and very likely the first black President of the United States.

History is being made.  It’s rare that you can watch an event unfold and feel the full weight of its future importance as it is occurring.  Perhaps the moon landing was another time.  I remember gathering with my mom, dad and brother around the black & white TV up in Capreol, Ontario, bunny ears on top and nickel-belt rock under it (for better reception, doncha’ know!), to watch the U.S. put three men on the moon.  And now, 40 years later, I’m hopeful that I’m about to see them put a black man in the White House.

This is one of those times that you can watch and see the events of a generation leading a nation to the cusp of achieving an objective that millions of people fought and died for.  Watching MLK here and thinking about the civil rights movement of the 60s, even at the same time as I watch racist hatred still being spewed during this campaign in 2008, makes me realize that this is one of the hardest-won battles in the history of the U.S., and it has still not been won even if Obama is elected.  Thus, though I do not pray to a God, I pray that in one respect, history is not about to be repeated.

Violent Hatred Is The Last Refuge of the Desperate (Pt I)

In an attempt not to promulgate the level of violence, ignorance and hatred currently spewing from the mouths of Republican rally attendees, I simply offer this:

Canadians for Obama

A recent BBC World poll of 22,500 people in 22 countries showed 49% preferred Obama compared to 12% in favour of McCain. Read more here at The World Wants Obama Coalition blog.  Canada was the fifth strongest supporter, at 66% in favour of Obama (14% McCain; rest undecided), topped only by Italy, France, Australia, Kenya and Nigeria.

The astonishing majority supporting Obama outside of the U.S. is in stark contrast to how close the race is within the U.S.

Here is a link to the current polling results which shows Repubs leading Dems by 208 to 202 among states where a preference can be determined statistically (with 128 seats in play).  There are currently 12 swing states where it is too close to call:

Montana, Nevada, Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, New Hampshire

In 2008, after eight years of Bush and close to 50 years of civil rights activism; after Martin Luther King and JFK; after rioting and Viet Nam and Watergate and women’s rights and gay rights and Roe v. Wade; after war upon war upon war fought for oil and corporate greed; after Three Mile Island and the Exxon Valdez; after Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove; after the desecration of the tropical rain forests and the hole in the ozone and the melting of the ice caps; after AIDS and Afghanistan; after the flooding of Katrina and the meltdown of Wall Street–this Presidential race should NOT be this close. And the reason that it is points to a deep-seated, inherently narrow worldview that is nurtured and sustained by what any rational thinking person believes must be, can only be, a minority segment of U.S. population.

But, it is not a minority.  It appears to be a majority:  those who shout from a pulpit, point to a Bible and maintain a hold over the hearts and minds of Americans who are too afraid and too uneducated to be able to slash their way through the hypocrisy and deception perpetrated upon them by the very people who claim to be Christians but act without compassion, without mercy, and without any level of responsible, critical thought.  And another percentage who may not be in a church–maybe they are on a street corner or in a bar, or at the Nascar races or working in a hardware store or in an insurance office–but they believe, still, remarkably and almost impossibly, that not all people are created equal.  That a black man–because of his skin and only because of his skin–cannot be President.

Check this out from Associated Press today:  Racial Views Steer Some White Dems Away From Obama.  Of note:  “The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 — about two and one-half percentage points.”  Another pundit I read elsewhere cites “the Bradley effect”:  the requirement of a 7-point margin of error for a black candidate to assure victory.  In other words,  Obama needs to be at least seven points ahead in the polls to be sure of a win in any state.  While the Bradley effect is said to have softened since 1984, when it was first identified, the poll shown above is hardly stable, even where Dems look to be ahead among decided voters.

I despair.

Argggh … Politics!!

It’s been so long since my last post.  I’ve been avidly following the U.S. election.  It seems so much more important than our own here in Canada.

The Republicans and especially McCain and Sarah Barracuda frighten the living daylights out of me.  That a party can be so disingenuously in the pockets of lobbyists and evangelical Christians and STILL be seen by 50% of the electorate as a viable choice to form a government is nothing short of evidence of mass psychosis.

Where Obama and his people are spinning and positioning but generally taking the high road, McCain and his people are outright lying.  In particular, McCain’s statement that Obama’s plan for health care reform puts a government bureaucrat in the way of the “average American” and adequate care would be laughable, if it wasn’t so blindingly, simplistically WRONG.  The strategy here is to deceive a huge swath of the U.S. electorate who have been conditioned to fear “socialist” policies:  tricking them into believing that health care reform will cost them more money and mean worse care.

As it is now, huge insurance companies, for-profit organizations, stand between the average American and adequate care.  And these days, that means a great number of the formerly middle middle-class, not to mention those who don’t have health insurance at all because they have lost their jobs and therefore their coverage.  That is, what, better?!?!

The Canadian health care system has flaws, for sure.  But we don’t regularly have people being denied care or going bankrupt because they can’t afford private insurance premiums. People bleeding to death after being shuttled from one emergency department to another because their credit cards were maxed out or the hospital they stumbled into had already served their quota of uninsured.  Or people simply dying because they couldn’t get the proper treatment as it wasn’t on their HMO’s approved list.

“Big government”, “socialized medicine” and the potential of higher taxes are like waving a red flag in front of a bull for so many Americans.  Brains turn off, and fears take over any kind of logical or critical thinking.  Combine that with raising the spectre of unpreparedness or weakness in terms of facing down the “terrorists,” and it’s a lie that quickly turns lethal.  Lethal for Americans who are living in poverty.  Lethal for those who are fighting a misguided and illegal war.   Lethal for those who can’t afford a college education to dig them out of the cycle of poverty that inevitably leads to lowered life expectancy through violence, poorer health and death in war in disproportionate numbers.

And McCain and Guiliani and Palin had the utter balls and contempt to scoff at Obama’s experience as a community organizer.  Someone who has actually got his hands dirty trying to help the very people that eight years of Bush ineptness have driven deeper into poverty and despair.

McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin, the far-right wing, anti-abortion, NRA-supporting, environment-destroying and woefully inexperienced Creationist Governor from Alaska, betrays his dangerous recklessness and opportunistic pandering to his party’s base at the cost of his own principles.  Until this pick revealed him for what he was, McCain was actually appearing to be a tolerable Republican.  I wouldn’t have voted for him, even if I could, but I wouldn’t have felt so heart-achingly, mind-numbingly frightened of the potential third term of Republicanism in the U.S. had he selected, say, Lieberman as his running mate.

Maybe he has done us a favour by showing his cards so clearly.  Within the first few days of her nomination, I had hope that it would be seen for what it was:  a shameless ploy to curry the favour of undecided independents, and one that showed utter contempt for voters with even a few remaining braincells.  But alas, his ploy seems to have worked to mobilize the Republican base.  I can only hope it mobilized the Democrat base, as well.

Unfortunately, the Democrats–the thinking person’s party–appear to be making their typical campaign errors of talking over the heads of people and shooting themselves in the foot by navel-gazing and psychoanalyzing, instead of going on the offensive with clear, compelling arguments to counter Republican fear-mongering.

Maybe Palin will sewer him yet.  Or better yet, McCain will sewer himself.  The debates will tell a tale, I believe.  I don’t know if I have the intestinal fortitude to watch them.

As it stands, watching the two conventions and the campaigns unfold, I am on the edge of my seat with my heart in my throat and my stomach in knots.  I think there is a very real possibility that the Republicans could win this election.  What that says about the malaise, fear, and complete lack of common-sense and rational thought of a population of 300 million people just south of me makes me shake my head in wonder.  And worse, what it means for the future of the planet makes me want to vomit.

Sigh.

This, along with Jon Stewart and Spamalot (which I saw here in Toronto recently) are the only things that’ve made me laugh in the last two weeks.  Enjoy:

Let The Games Begin!

I don’t know what I love most about this … Hillary whacking Bill with a frying pan; Obama riding a pretty pink unicorn in a demented Disney-scape; war hero/monger McCain; or the fact it uses Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’.

VERY nice political satire–even-handed in its mockery. Let the games begin ….

Pssstt … there’s a new Mensa brainteaser up here.  I’m off to watch the big night of the Dems’ convention.

I heart Anderson Cooper.  Too bad he plays for the wrong team.  And I don’t mean the Repubs.