Local Politics

Since low-rent impresario Chicken John is running for mayor of San Francisco, alongside a nudist, a professional clown, and a rather spaced-out homeless cab driver; I thought it would be good fun to attend the only mayoral debate in which the incumbent, Gavin Newsom, planned to participate. This took place last Thursday in the auditorium beneath the City's main library.

I was ten minutes late getting there. On the one hand, this didn't matter since Newsom was about ten minutes late himself, and the first half hour of the show was taken up anyway by a lecture about how San Francisco's new system of ranked-choice voting will work. --On the other hand, being late mattered a lot because the auditorium had already filled beyond standing-room capacity, and spilled into a short line outside. Guards were only letting us in when someone else left.

But I was #12 in line, and there was some movement happening; plus I had a book to read and some time to kill before I had another place to be at 8. So I waited.

I was well-buried in that book when a klieg light kicked in on me, and a thoroughly-groomed man was tipping a microphone into my face while introducing himself from CBS-5 and asking what had brought me to the debate.

Ambush!

Before anybody gets excited about the fact that I have the video clip below, be warned that (a) it's of abysmal quality - I mean, criminally bad. I VHS-taped the 11:00 news off of my little TV, tilting the rabbit ears into the best position I could (because yes, I can only watch TV with the help of rabbit ears); then transcoded it to quicktime for upload. And considering that (b) I am a catastrophic disappointment in the video (if not, indeed, a bit of a fool), I wouldn't even have gone through that trouble had it not seemed like an amusing tech experiment.

Yeah, I blew my big opportunity in front of the camera. I didn't say, "Why, I came to see Chicken John's agenda of art and affordability enunciated in the public square!" I did not say the truth, which was, "I came here to see whether a circus erupts!" Instead, I gave a numbingly dull good-citizen translation of that latter thought:

Anyway, I was finally let into the debate for its last 40 minutes or so. Some funny things were said. The cab driver, who calls himself Grasshopper, kept putting his hands into the "flying birdman" goggles position while other people were answering their questions (as per left, below). When answering questions himself, he just gurbled on in spaced-out tones about how marijuana and sex work should be legalized.


A candidate named H. Brown was giving Newsom a little hell, saying apropos of the new system of neighborhood security cameras, "If we'd had a camera in the mayor's office this past year, Newsom wouldn't even be in office today." --An evident reference to Gavin's affair with a top aide's wife, which is about the only piece of local politics I've actually heard anything about.

The nudist (who was, sadly, not nude) actually sounded level-headed enough. He just kept saying San Francisco should borrow more progressive ideas from major European cities.

Chicken John - at least while I was watching - ignored the questions he was asked about surveillance cameras and earthquake preparedness to hold forth about how the City drums out artists with its high rents, and that Muni buses should be run on coffee grounds. In his summary statement, he jabbed in the very funny line that, "San Francisco is not a city of zombies!" - funny, since there was a zombie flash mob slated to gather outside the library and attack the audience and candidates as they left.

And that's San Francisco politics for you, at least in an off-year like this one.

Before the batteries in my camera died, I was able to take one or two pictures of the zombie flash mob that were as bad as, or worse than, this one:

(If you click on it you'll at least be able to get some detail.)

Update: Jim Lamb has provided me the link to some much better documentation of the zombie attack.

citizenship test

This is a bit of fun. Ten questions from the new version of the US citizenship test.

I got nine out of ten - god knows how I was able to pull from out of the dim reaches of my recollection that there are (spoiler alert) 27 amendments to the Constitution.

But I didn't understand their interpretation of the question, "Name two rights of American citizens," and, silly as it sounds, I missed that one.

In defense of Jenna

It feels more than a little weird setting out to defend Jenna Bush. Just seeing her creeps me out a bit: she looks far too much like her father, although younger, and in drag. Quite like the weird little pop! of the senses you get when you see Lisa Marie Presley.

She's him - I mean, she's her own dad... but yet... she's her?

You know.

Plus, Jenna seems to carry the analogy with her father right into the frat house. She strikes one (okay, me) as a bratty, gum-snapping entitle-ee, chafing at the bit - now that she's earned that B.A. - to go pull down some mid-six-figures for doing little or nothing at a consulting firm; but feeling obliged first to build up some public image by helping a handful of disadvantaged third-world youths and pulling down a six-figure royalty advance for writing having a book ghost-written about it. A rather shoddily ghost-written book at that, by most accounts. But an easy read for the pre-teen set.

I know I said I've come here to defend her. Just not about any of that.

No, I want to defend Ms. Bush against this foolish notion that she's required to go fight in Iraq. And sure, there's one obvious reason she shouldn't: she'd be a target, a danger to her fellow soldiers, etc. The Prince-William thing. But I don't care about that. What I care about is the more basic implication that parents' children should be held to account for their sins. It's such a patently ridiculous idea that you can actually find it espoused in the Old Testament.

Michael Moore loves this line of attack. I always thought it was one of the dumbest bits of Fahrenheit 9-11, him running around Washgington, DC asking Congresspeople if they'd send their children to hunt down those Mesopotamian WMDs. To me that's a softball; you answer, "I am terrifically proud of my wonderful son [daughter] and would support wholly his [her] decision to wear the uniform of his [her] country if he [she] so chose. But his [her] life is his [her] own, and I respect his [her] decision."

Oddly, none of the Congresspeople did that. They just got nervous and squirmed away. The line worked so well for Moore that he took it to the 2004 RNC and pounded Bill O'Reilly with it (~ minute 6:00). "Would you sacrifice your child to eliminate a brutal dictator?" "Er - I'd send myself, but I'm not talking about any children here!"

Anyway. The poor girl (Jenna) doesn't know about this whole complicated thing (Iraq) one way or another. She no doubt believes in the war because to do otherwise would be the beginning of the admission that her father is a moron of world-historical proportions. Further than that, I do not believe she's much thought about the matter. You know - just like 90% of the American public didn't much think about it in the buildup to this Vast Miscarriage in the first place.

("Vast Miscarriage": I like that. I think I'll actually start using it to refer to the Iraq war all the time.)

But none of that's particularly Jenna's fault, and it's not logical to somehow punish George by attempting to send his daughter into the conflagration he's uncorked. Even rhetorically.

As for George himself? He should be turned out for lifetime infantry duty on January 21, 2009. We can give him the rank of Sergeant so that Cheney can serve as Private right beneath him.

No Gore '08

Well, I wish he'd run, since I think everything he's come out supporting in the past six years has been borne out to be stone-cold right: and I'm leery in the extreme about ending up with another round of Clintonian triangulation, which is what we'll get if the presidential race proceeds as it has. Not to mention that Gore '08 would be an elegant piece of poetic justice.

But I think he won't run, and the reason, indirectly enough, is that the Republican candidates suck.

All of them, fearsomely. Which is a crying shame.

See, Democrats are very comfortable right now. They feel like they're going to take the White House next year in a walk; and, to be fair, they will. But what this disastrously results in is a total lack of dissatisfaction with the current crop of Dem candidates. "Hillary? Sounds fine by me, but if there's a problem down the road we've got Barack to fall back on. If he doesn't work out, well hell, Edwards will do in a pinch."

And thus Gore lacks the sort of opening through which one might most energetically catapult. So he will likely have to content himself with a cozy little life of racking up Academy Awards, cash, and - from the sound of it - a Nobel Peace Prize in the morning.

Although I agree with Hitchens about the loss of cachet he will suffer for not running (at least for me personally).

Interrogation Techniques

Not a Christian Nation

This clears it up as nicely as you could ask anybody to.

PS. No posts from me for a spell, I realize. Will compensate for that shortly.

Timid majority

Two very decent, important pieces of legislation were shot down in the Senate this week by a Republican threat of filibuster. They were (a) the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act, and (b) Jim Webb's (D-VA) defense-spending amendment mandating that our troops get equal time stateside for every 15-month Iraq/Afghanistan deployment.

Forgive me if I'm getting overly basic here, but the filibuster is a senatorial technique to prevent legislation from coming to a vote (you can't use it in the House of Representatives, because only in the Senate are legislators given unlimited floor time during debate). For any legislation, it takes a 60-Senator "cloture" vote to force debate to an end and actually move to the vote-vote. This gives us the result that if a minority of 40 Senators is gung-ho enough about torpedoing a given measure, it's gone.

But consider: when Strom Thurmond wanted to block the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the fool actually had to stand on the floor of the Senate and speechify away for 24 hours and 18 minutes (with, it is perhaps apocryphally said, an external catheter hidden in his pants). You didn't have to talk about the legislation at hand during a filibuster: you could read out the telephone book or recite baseball statistics if you liked, but you did have to stand there in the pit and keep talking. As we all saw dramatized in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Since then, however, it's become standard operating procedure that filibusters need only be threatened. It's one of those comity things. You say you'd block the vote we want to bring if we brought it? Okay, you win, we won't bring it.

Now, Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, could make would-be filibusterers actually filibuster if he wants; but he hasn't been doing that. The question is, of course, why not? The Republicans have embarked on a strategy of obstructionism, and are getting the two-for-one deal of both keeping the Democrats from getting what they want, and also making them look incompetent in the process. Not, it should be said, without reason.

Among the legislation that has succumbed to natural and pseudo-filibustering are amendments to advance stem cell research, a bill that would have reduced the cost of attending college, multiple pieces of legislation designed to facilitate a drawdown of troops from Iraq, and a provision that would have allowed the Department of Health and Human Services to negotiate drug prices with drug companies. (Huffington Post)

And next up, Bush is asking for more Iraq money within a month or so. Here's what should finally happen: the Democrats tie the money to specific withdrawal benchmarks - how many troops out, and what dates they're to be out by. Then make the Republicans come in with their cots and catheters and their day-long speeches to make their case to the country as to what "success" means in Iraq, how we can still expect to achieve it after the past 4.5 years of unmitigated catastrophe, and what benefit this nation ever did or still could stand to gain.

Here's what will happen: the Dems will give Bush whatever he wants, while making various noises about how he needs "a new strategy in Iraq."