Is there something wrong with Bill Clinton?

Eileen spotted something disturbing on the Daily Show the other night. Bill Clinton was the guest. Take a look at this clip at about 3 minutes in. Watch Bill's right thumb. His thumb starts to tremble and continues trembling even as he lays his hand in his lap. He spots the tremor and quickly hides his hand.

What the heck is that all about? Anybody know anything about Parkinson's Disease?

Taking it too seriously

Last week, I did something I never thought I was capable of: I told a colleague to "Eff off!" because he was spouting some Republican gibberish about Barack Obama. I've know this guy for 11 years and I've put up with his irrationality and illogical politics with good humor, just as he has put up with mine. I've gotten steamed at him from time to time (most of the time actually) and I've had to get up and walk out of the room on occasion. But last week I'd finally, really had enough. I sent out an email to my office telling people that they can't discuss politics with me because this election is deeply personal and the standard disinformation and sarcastic slanders that are a part of any watercooler conversation about politics are so painful to me that I've got to insulate myself from them to keep my sanity.

I hear anecdotes from friends about similar blow-ups in their respective offices. I wonder how common a phenomenon it is for folks to get exceptionally riled up this election cycle?

Don't worry about awards

People have been complaining on some of the blogs I visit about how their favorite show didn't win any Emmys.

One guy was really upset that The Wire (which I've never seen) didn't win something. "It's sort of proof if you needed any that the Emmys are not something that should be taken seriously."

Well, I think most folks knew that the Emmys were, and always have been, something not worth taking seriously. But that's not because The Wire didn't win. It's because awards shouldn't be taken seriously. John Adams winning best miniseries doesn't legiitmize the Emmys just because it happened to be the best miniseries.

I first learned that awards were a fraud when I was 14 and Star Wars lost to Annie Hall for Best Picture. I knew the fix was in and that the Academy were all a bunch of phonies.

However, I find awards and prizes are useful for hinting at a group of products that might be worth experiencing. When I don't know what the cool kids are listening to, I check out the Mercury Prize, or the NME Awards and listen to all of 'em. Some of the bands are actually pretty good. The same with the Pulitzers and the Bookers and the Whitbreads and so on. They help me filter for the "best" stuff to read.

When you're young, you either want the things you like to be liked only by you, or you want them to be liked by everybody. Personally, I always wanted to have a monopoly on the poets, and musicians, and films, and oblique little journals I enjoyed because I didn't want anyone else to be smart or sophisticated enough to "get" them like I did; it made me feel smarter. But it's been a long time since I felt that little frisson of pleasure from discovering some tattered reprint of an obscure French proto-Imagist poet in the back stacks at Powell's Books and, really, I don't miss it.

72 & Sunny

Eileen linked to one of the more brilliant ads we've ever seen. It was part of the XBOX360 rollout campaign from an ad agency called 72 & Sunny. They also are the brains behind another one of the best commercials I've ever seen. You don't have to be a soccer fan to appreciate the genius of this ad, but it helps. Head on over to 72 & Sunny if you've got a few minutes and check out the rest of the XBOX and Nike Euro campaign ads.

Finally

Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. To live in such times...what a blessing.

James Howard Kunstler

My friends, who humor me more than I deserve, have listened to me invoke the name of James Howard Kunstler for years. He is the Ron Paul of Peak Oil obsessives. While I'm not a PO crackpot, it's clear to me that there is plenty of reason to be wary of what an oil deprived world may bring. There's no disputing that there is a limited volume of easily accessible petroleum in the world, which combined with an insatiable appetite for the stuff, will lead to convulsive social and political upheaval throughout the industrialized world if we don't manage to ween ourselves off it. Unfortunately, Kunstler makes a convincing case for why that will not be easy, and why we'll have to transform in very fundamental ways who we are as a society and what we should desire as individuals. His op-ed in the Washington Post makes for a good introduction to what his argument is.

"The elephant’s in the room, but nobody will say it."

George Packer has another article in The New Yorker that identifies some big problems Barack Obama has in Appalachia, especially Kentucky and West Virginia. It makes for sobering reading. Here's a paragraph that jumped out at me:

John Preston, who is the county’s circuit-court judge and also its amateur historian, Harvard-educated, with a flag pin on his lapel, said, “Obama is considered an élitist.” He added, “There’s a racial component, obviously, to it. Thousands of people won’t publicly say it, but they won’t vote for a black man—on both sides, Democrat and Republican. It won’t show up in the polls, because they won’t admit it. The elephant’s in the room, but nobody will say it. Sad to say it, but it’s true.” Later, I spoke with half a dozen men eating lunch at the Pigeon Roost Dairy Bar outside town, and none of them had any trouble saying it. They announced their refusal to vote for a black man, without hesitation or apology. “He’s a Muslim, isn’t he?” an aging mine electrician asked. “I won’t vote for a colored man. He’ll put too many coloreds in jobs. Colored are O.K.—they’ve done well, good for them, look where they came from. But radical coloreds, no—like that Farrakhan, or that senator from New York, Rangel. There’d be riots in the streets, like the sixties.” No speech, on race or élitism or anything else, would move them. Here was one part of the white working class—maybe not representative, but at least significant—and in an Obama-McCain race they would never be the swing vote. It is a brutal fact, and Obama probably shouldn’t even mention it.

If Packer knows this, the brain trust of the Obama campaign knows it, too, and, even worse, the Clinton campaign knows it and uses that to their advantage. Is it any wonder that the Obama campaign wasted little time in a place like Kentucky?

What is it about Kentucky and West Virginia?

This post from Obsidian Wings raises some good points about the primary results from Kentucky last night.

The most salient graphs are:

"One thing to keep in mind is that many of Kentucky’s “Democrats” are Republicans for all practical purposes. Interestingly, registered Democrats still far outnumber Republicans 57%-36% (that's as of 2006, though Republicans are gaining). But despite the party registration totals, Bush won the state handily 60%-40%."

and

"Ideologically, many of these people are simply Republicans — but they still got to vote today. Sure, they sometimes vote for a Democrat on the state or local level (just like Massachusetts elects Republican governors). But they consider themselves conservative — and no Democratic candidate who could win the median Democratic voter nationally would be acceptable."

You'll find demographic and cultural, social parallels in West Virginia. Kentucky and West Virginia are what you get when you blend Southern states without any meaningful ethnic diversity with endemic poverty and ignorance.

This video raises some interesting questions about the motives of some voters in West Virginia.

George Packer's "Interesting Times" contribution to The New Yorker in April raises similar issues about Kentucky.

Finally, here's an overview of Obama's "Appalachian Problem".

Exit polling in Kentucky indicates that "race" was a factor among 20% of Kentucky Democratic primary voters. The number was 25% for Dem primary voters in West Virginia.

There is much to loathe about Hillary Clinton's efforts to overturn the will of the majority of Democrats who have voted in these primary races. However, the tacit racism of arguing that there's no way poor, white Americans would lower themselves to vote for a black man for president is the most repulsive ploy yet attempted. It may well prove that Barack Obama can't be elected president because he's black, but for Clinton to argue that she's more electable 'cause she's white is not an argument a Democrat should make...ever. Hell, it's not an argument any American should make...ever.

Here's something else, courtesy of Andrew Sullivan.

How awesome is this?

Here's a link to Andrew Sullivan's "Email of the Day". Big, big doin's in California today. Their Supreme Court recognized what the Legislature already knew: Gay people fall in love, too. I read that one in ten Americans live in California. When are the other nine gonna get the same rights as folks in Cali and Massachussetts?

Mildred Loving has passed on

Mildred Loving, of Loving v. Virginia fame, has died. There's nothing I can say about this remarkable woman and her husband that she didn't say better herself last year on the 40th anniversary of their landmark case. You can read a PDF of her statement at Freedom to Marry.

Pennsylvania Primary

I'm afraid that there are few ways that Clinton can win the nomination without destroying the Party or sabotaging Democrats' chances in November. If she had Lee Atwater on the payroll I'm not sure she could've run a nastier campaign. There's a possibility that this is a reason why her 20 point lead in Pennsylvania dissolved to less than 10, and why people keep giving him money and she's broke.

Clinton certainly has a right to campaign as long as she wants, that's her right. But she doesn't have a right to think she's gonna turn this thing around. That's just crazy.

Travis County Democratic Convention

Today was our county convention and I was most proud and honored to be an Obama delegate. Here's a run down of how it all went.

Our precinct, #240, representing a lovely part of Northwest Austin, earned 22 delegates to take to the county convention (14 Obama delegates and 8 Clinton). As it turned out, only 10 Obamaniacs and 6 Clintonistas made it to the festivities.

It was held at the Travis County Expo Center which is tailor-made for rodeos but was a distastrous location for an event whose very nature requires different lines for lots of different people. The line of cars to get in to the grounds was a couple of miles long. There was no organized assistance from the Party officials once people showed up and there were thousands upon thousands of paticipants.

The delegate sign in was scheduled to close at 10:00 this morning, but it was clear that the powers that be were completely unprepared for the number of participants in the Democratic caucuses earlier this month, and thus for the number of delegates that would attend the convention, so the sign in continued 'til about 12:30.

By random chance, I ended up pulling in the parking space next to our precinct secretary, so we made the long hike to the arena together and got in the hundreds-deep line for credentialing. After about 20 minutes, Pete realized we were in the wrong line. He discovered that the line we needed to be in had about 20 people in it, so once we found out where we needed to be, we got credentials in just a few minutes. Pete went in to look for the couple of people who signed in ahead of us and I went out to patrol the lines to look for our missing Obama folks. I found four of them and got them out of the 500 deep alternate delegate sign-in line and got them to our short one. It was a great relief to get them through; they would've been out there for hours. While I was trolling the lines, a woman heard me calling out "Precinct 240! Precinct 240!" She was a Clinton delegate and timidly said "I'm in 241." So I told her that she was in the alternate delegate sign-in line and that she would be stuck out there for hours, but I would take her to the right line. A woman next to her told her "It's a trick...He's an Obama supporter, he's trying to get you in the wrong line so you can't cast your ballot for state delegate." The first woman looked me up and down and turned her back on me. True story...oh, well.

Once everyone in our group was accounted for, we headed in to the arena to find our seats. The Clinton delegates from our precinct were already in their seats so we sorta grouped ourselves just adjacent to them. In the meantime, while folks struggled to get through the credentialling process outside, we were treated in the arena to a whole range of speakers. The first to take the stage was actor Sean Astin, a Clinton supporter, who made an impassioned plea that we all rally around the presidential candidate regardless of who that happens to be. He was going to hit 4 county conventions around the state to pump folks up. It was really cool to see Samwise Gamgee up close.

Before the speakers really got going, the arena recognized our fallen service memebers with a moment of silence. It is a truly amazing thing to be surrounded by 10,000 people and not hearing a sound. My fellow precint delegate Jack pointed out quite rightly that there are few things as powerful as silence. I'm a real sucker for things like this so I got all choked up. Next, we did the Pledge of Allegience and sang the National Anthem. By the time that was done I was a blubbery mess.

Congressman Lloyd Doggett was next speaker, followed by District 14 State Senator Kirk Watson, who gives a great speech. We also got to hear from Mark Strama and Eliot Naishtat and Valinda Bolton and Congressional candidate Larry Joe Doherty, who wasn't my choice but he gives a fiery speech. Mixed in were some other speakers that I missed 'cause I was gabbing with my fellow delegates.

Finally, about 12:45, we got the go ahead to conduct our precinct caucus to elect our one delegate to the state convention. Our Democratic precinct chairwoman was the Obama candidate. The Clinton folks nominated one of their own as well. The way it works is that everyone votes by show of hands. The candidate getting the most votes is the delegate to the state convention. The second place candidate is the alternate. So naturally the Obama candidate is the primary delegate, the Clinton delegate is the alternate. Once that task is done, everybody except the delegate-elect and the precinct secretary get to leave. We were apparently the first precinct to finish their caucus 'cause we were the only folks making our way to our cars at 1:15 when we finished up.

So much for nailing down that coffin lid

The last week or so it's become painfully evident that my enthusiasm for my candidate, and my distrust of his opponent, has clouded my judgement about how things would turn out in the March 4th primaries. Actually, more correctly, my hopes compelled me to believe the predictions of "experts" whose enthusiasm probably led them to believe the predictions of other "experts" to the point that we all end up conflating our desires with what would actually happen, despite what the reality on the ground may describe.

Texas Caucuses

Here's a great article in the Washington Post on the caucus system in Texas. The gist of it is that, for some reason, the Clinton campaign just found out about how we run primary elections down here. Here's the punchline:

"Several top Clinton strategists and fundraisers became alarmed after learning of the state's unusual provisions during a closed-door strategy meeting this month, according to one person who attended."

Now, it's entirely possible this sentence doesn't actually capture the real attitude of the Clintonistas in their top-secret strategy sessions, but if it does and these folks are just learning about the "convoluted delegate rules" it speaks volumes about the competence of her whole operation.

Once again, this demonstrates how judgement trumps experience every time.

(I found this story alluded to on several different sites (Sullivan, Burnt Orange Report, etc.))

Nail? Meet Coffin.

The Service Employees International Union, the fastest growing labor union in the country, endorsed Barack Obama this afternoon. I can't help but believe this is a devastating and unexpected body blow to the Clinton campaign. I also find it difficult to imagine that this doesn't bode ill for Clinton in terms of a potential endorsement from Edwards. I wonder if the SEIU might not have consulted with Edwards before making their decision.

Update: I missed this, but the United Food and Commercial Workers Union endorsed Obama yesterday. Between the two unions, that's a membership of 3.2 million workers. The UFCW has 69,000 members in Ohio and 26,000 in Texas. I have no idea how union endorsements actually affect membership voting patterns, but I'll bet it sure doesn't hurt.

How they do it

As if there weren't enough analyses of how the Obama campaign has managed to succeed against two political powerhouses in Edwards and Clinton, the NY Times has a great article about just that.

I've been remiss

There's been a ton of fascinating stuff about the Democratic Primary that is now hopelessly out of date. Here, however, are a few links to what I think are some interesting developments.

The scorched earth policy that the Clinton campaign appears to be prepared to wage may be short-circuited by the party elders. The NY Times has a story on a Democratic icon having second thoughts about his commitment to Clinton.

Now, I have no more insight into this matter than anyone else, but John Lewis' change of heart seems to me to be as significant a development as anything we've seen in the primary season so far. There is obviously a fight being waged for votes and delegates out in the open, but there is also a quieter but just as vigorous fight being waged behind the scenes for the super delegates that may tell the tale of this contest.

Also, Clinton is running ads in Wisconsin challenging Obama to additional debates. Here's the ad in question.

It seemed to me that the only reason Clinton would want to get back on stage with Obama was to keep him from engaging with voters, which is something she absolutely must prevent to have any chance of slowing his locomotive-like momentum. Here is Obama's reply to her ad. (Courtesy of Sullivan).

It's pretty clear that the Obama campaign is on to her and their response is so perfectly nuanced as to expose the Clinton jibe for the craven and desperate attack that it most surely is.

Here's an editorial from a website that I frequent. I learned a couple of things I didn't know.

It looks to be an interesting week or so; I'll try to do better at documenting the attrocities.

Fareed Zakaria on Hillary Clinton

Zakaria's column in Newsweek articulates better than I can what it is about HRC that rubs me the wrong way. If there weren't somebody like Obama to stand as a counterpoint to Clinton's focus group driven politicking, I'd be more enthusiastic about her, if only because she wasn't McCain or Romney. As it is, Obama's one-two combo of transparent generosity of spirit and cautious political pragmatism is in such stark contrast to Clinton's cynical maneuvering (reneging on seating the Michigan and Florida delegates, for instance) that if I have to pull the lever for her, it won't be with much enthusiasm

J. G. Ballard

At the end of every email I send through gmail is a quote from J. G. Ballard. It reads: "I've always suspected that the Soviet Union was the last of the old style authoritarian tyrannies. The totalitarian systems of the future will be obsequious and subservient, plying us with drinks and soft slippers like a hostess on an airliner, adjusting our TV screen for us so that we won't ask exactly where the plane is going, or even whether there is a pilot on board."

A Google search of Ballard quotes turns up a catalog of tasty selections. I encourage you to see for yourself. I also encourage you to find his novels and short stories and read them; he's a fascinating guy.

Here's an essay by Dan Lockton, of Architectures of Control , published on the enlessly edifying Ballardian site.

Howdy!

My friend Hope started a great blog back in the day called Appalachia Alumni Association. That went the way of most blogs...life gets busy and blogs take a back seat to family and friends and work. Hope, gratefully, has started a new blog and I've decided to start one, too. I expect it will consist of little more than links to things I find interesting or 'cool', but it may acquire more content if I can work up the motivation and enthusiasm. Regardless, I hope you find something interesting to link to from here.