Mumbai (What's Up in Thailand)

A/K/A the perfect day to be home snug and working! Larder well-stocked, etc. Valiant V. out to his office despite the wind and rain.

I miss Thanksgiving, that moment of light and civilization and joy with friends, bracketed by the horrible events of Mumbai (and elsewhere, everywhere, in the world).

These grim events are so frequent we now have formulaic, ritual responses, like this one, in Friday's NY Times. Just swap out the place names for the ones in Manhattan, and you have a hundred of those very same pieces written within days of 9/11. Somehow, this sort of response seems from where I sit pathetically inadequate and irrelevant as a counter to the desire of these religious dominationists of whatever brand they wear.

This ritual response is a big reveal of the economic divide that plays such a role in the rise of these events (the chimp telling us to go shopping as our Brave Action of Sacrifice Spitting in the Face of the Enemy Who Took Out the Two Towers), that the author doesn't comprehend -- the people who make these moves of death and destruction across the global board merely inadequately hate people (like us) who make money and live very comfortable lives, without any legitimate provocation. It is onlybase envy of their betters and superiors. And, oh yes, they are cowards too, since they are willing to die themselves to make their point of view hit the world's news cycles.

Here is a piece from from Suketu Mejta, a writer out of that same class membership:

[ There isn't a place that I frequent when I go back home that hasn't been hit by the 10 attacks that began late Wednesday at India's commercial capital that targeted premier landmark establishments of the city I grew up in and the city I long to go back to. ]

However, another writer, Anant Goenka, also in journalism, but a student, demonstrates an understanding of the perpetrators' purpose for these events:

[ And as my mother calls me shaken and afraid with sights of victims, hostages and blood on the road between my home and the Oberoi and as friends and family call to share their stores; how they escaped or how they are concerned for their loved ones who haven't, a small part of me is happy that the rich are no longer isolated from the realities of India. On December 12, when I land back in Mumbai, I hope to see a change, a renewed sense involvement and empathy for the vast majority of the country that live in the fear and horror of terrorism. Not only have these attacks caught the attention of the flagbearers of the nation but they have involved and consumed them. The carelessness and disinterest with the rest of the population's concerns that often went disguised as the city's brave spirit will no longer hold. People say we will come out stronger and more resilient. This time, when I go back home, I hope we grow weaker. Because that's what it will take for the city's affluent to unite with the rest of the city. Maybe now India's millions of voiceless victims will be heard. ]

He is a student, who affluently flies home to Mumbai for 4 months out of the year:

[ Anant Goenka is a Dean's Scholar at the Annenberg School for Communications, University of Southern California pursuing a Master's degree in Print Journalism. He is an international student from Mumbai with an undergraduate degree in Business Administration and an emphasis in Brand Management from the USC Marshall School of Business.

Anant Goenka is the grandson of Ramnath Goenka, a freedom fighter and founder of The Indian Express, India's most respected national newspaper group.

Goenka has lived in Los Angeles since 2004 and spends 4 months of the year back home in Mumbai. He eagerly awaits returning to Mumbai to work in the business side of The Indian Express Group. He has interned briefly at Indian news channel NDTV 24x7, Business India Magazine and at The Indian Express newspapers in Mumbai. ]

So is it merely the youth of the writer that allows him to be resilient enough to recognize what is at least one of the primary driving forces for what creates such meticulously planned terrible events?

Writing as though one is demonstrating such great courage and resilience by going back to the way things are, as the first writer does -- safe in his Ivory Tower of the NYU Journalism dept. -- reveals nothing except the willful, blind selfishness that everything is really just what it used to be.

Nothing is as it used to be, other than the very wealthy still believe all is well enough in the world that they may continue to pillage and rampage over the rest of the world, devouring the earth, the water and the air as they please, and in personal peace. But that's the point of these acts. They are not senseless acts of violence. They are proving that not even the very wealthy and priviliged are safe or immune.

As the reports of the irreversibility of global warming within a couple of centuries become more numerous, how much longer is it going to take for us to learn these lessons? Where is our Darwinian sense that resilience means change, means we, the species, changes? Where is our species' survival instinct?

Mumbai

A lot of Indian blogs are not accessible. One of the things I've like very much about blogspot is the circle of young Indians blogging there, as well as individuals.

But here is another one, that's still up.

And this one too.

Who Celebrated the First Thanksgiving in the New World?

[ Miles Standish didn't get an invitation to these "first Thanksgivings" in 1541, 1564 and 1610. These celebrations predate the Plymouth colonists and their feast of gratitude in 1621.

In May 1541, Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado and 1,500 men celebrated at the Palo Dur Canyon -- located in the modern-day Texas Panhandle -- after their expedition from Mexico City in search of gold. In 1959 the Texas Society Daughters of the American Colonists commemorated the event as the "first Thanksgiving."

Another "first Thanksgiving" occurred on June 30, 1564, when French Huguenot colonists celebrated in a settlement near Jacksonville, Florida. This "first Thanksgiving," was later commemorated at the Fort Carolina Memorial on the St. Johns River in eastern Jacksonville. ]

The Huguenots -- Vaquero's Peeps!

Obama's Choices

Democracy Now!
November 20, 2008
"Agents of Change or Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons? A Discussion aboutBarack Obama’s Advisers and Transition Team"

[ As speculations abound over who President-elect Barack Obama will name to key cabinet positions, we look at some of the central figures advising Obama, many of whom are leading candidates for posts in the nextadministration. We speak with Jeremy Scahill, author of the new piece “ThisIs Change? 20 Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons to Watch for in Obama’s WhiteHouse,” and David Corn, author of “The Agents of Change on Obama’sTransition Team.” ]

And, in The Nation

[ "Past and Future"
Comment By William Greider
November 24, 2008

A year ago, when Barack Obama said it was time to turn the page, hiscampaign declaration seemed to promise a fresh start for Washington. I, forone, failed to foresee Obama would turn the page backward. Thepresident-elect's lineup for key governing positions has opted forcontinuity, not change. Virtually all of his leading appointments arerestoring the Clinton presidency, only without Mr. Bill. In some importantways, Obama's selections seem designed to sustain the failing policies ofGeorge W. Bush. ]

The Difference Between the Obama Way & The Clinton Way

The Clintons did / do things by polls.

The Obama people do it by data mining.

That's change.gov I think.

change.gov mailings from John Podesta

I'm getting them regularly, now that they've revamped the change.gov site.

I think I got on the list because I responded at length and detail on the first version of the site on the Submit Your Ideas and Issues button from the Agenda menu. Then they took all of that away.

Now things are back, though in a different format.

Podesta sends me these things and then I go and tell them what I think, as they request.
Doubtless, this is a placebo and provides illusion of input only.

Though with all the disappointments including queeny hillary as sec of state, Obama's video speech today about his determination to implement as soon as possible a public works and infrastructure program is something I'm really in favor of.

As long as they don't muck it up as with Lyndon Johnson's public works - superhighways programs which essentially destroyed the inner cities, and entire communites as in New Orleans. That's what I told 'em. I'm sure they'll listen!

Fundamentalists

It is below freezing despite being nearly the middle of the afternoon. Ice in the streets. We finally were able to re-instate the Saturday ritual of Chinatown shopping for produce, teas, spices, condiments, meat, poultry and seafood. When we got back with about 50lbs of groceries -- carried by us -- we were cold-stunned. Woo. It's a little early in the year for this degree of cold. Usually this happens after New Year's. It may be a long winter.

Then I went off to do some early Christmas shopping alone, while Vaquero was off to interview one of the co-founders of WWOZ, who I initially met on LJ.

A young, blonde Mormon missionary stopped me on the sidewalk. He asked, "Are you familiar with this book?" -- The Book of Mormon. I said, "Oh yes." He stopped looking so depressed and was ready to talk to me about the Lord and the Church. I interrupted and said, "I know all I need to to know about The Book of Mormon."

Additionally, right now, I'm working out to audio version of The 19th Wife, which includes long extracts from a book of the same title written by Ann Eliza Young, post her divorce from Brigham Young. She wrote the book to expose the horrors of polygamy, and with hopes that this exposure would help eradicate the practice, if enough of the U.S. understood what plural marriage really is about. Though Ann Eliza Young is called the nineteenth wife, in truth Brigham Young had more like a hundred wives, or likely more than that. No one now knows. He very likely didn't himself. He started to keep the marriages secret because, well, this really was excessive. But you know women and wives. They will talk ....

One of Ann Eliza Young's convictions is that women involved in a society of plural marriage are even more determined to know everybody's business than others. For one thing, they can't help it. As in Brigham' Lion House, that housed 50 some of his wives and the many, many children, everything they said or did, was done in front of everyone else.

The missionary wanted to engage me in discussion to prove that anything I might think about the LDS is wrong. I told him my life is too short and valuable to waste arguing with him about his religion. Additionally, like so many citizens of this nation, I am feeling particularly uncharitable to the Mormons right now, because of their role in rolling out No to Proposition 8 in California. Because of this, Mormons were going to looked at with even greater dislike and suspicion here in NYC, where all of us have very good friends who happen to be gay. I believe he was genuinely shocked and surprised to hear that.

Yes, yes, yes, I am aware that the contemporary LDS does not condone or practice plural marriage, yet their fundamentalists do -- though mostly it looks more like a cult-scam for a limited number of men to wallow in p*ssy and grab milliions of tax money in welfare checks for all these unmarried mothers, since by our nation's laws you can only be married to one person at a time.

Another reason I loathe fundamentalists of every kind, for it seems every kind of religious fundamentalism is determined to establish the ideal life of a significant number of men, which is to have all their lives an endless supply of fresh young p*ssy, have women do all the work, fight each other for the 'husband's' attention, while all these husbands do is fornicate, drink and drug -- and every word they utter is law, without recourse or argument. It really is turning women into things, objects, one thing only, and that's their genitals. Literally keeping them ignorant and pregnant and isolated from everything except yourself. What pathetic pos men like that are. Blech. Thank goodness not all men are like this, or we'd still be living in caves. OTOH, a lot of fundamentalists dream of us all living in caves and shooting each other for cans of food. Double blech.

These are thoughts that swam around my freeze-dried brain while in the state of shopping. When I shop it's as though I go into a trance. Or at least some other zone. On the top is the focus of what I'm looking for. Underneath all kinds of other things have my attention.

Obama Criticized By the Black Left

Black Agenda Report: The Journal of African American Political Thought and Action

"Barack Obama: The Empire’s New Clothes" by Paul Street.

Here.

The Book Is Finished. I Went Shopping. We Watched a Movie.

The film Blaze is based (loosely? I've not read it) on Blaze Starr's memoir, My Life As Told By Huey Perry.

Paul Newman plays the role of Louisiana governor Earl Long (1895 - 1960). Newman was brilliant in the role. He so changed his voice and appearance you very seldom 'see' Newman at all, unlike any other role of his that I recall.

The role of Blaze Starr is played by the very lovely Lolita Davidovich. This was the summit of her film career. She continued acting, but not that much, and in nothing that so spotlighted her in terms of screen time or publicity and pr.

The film follows Earl during the last months of his life, in which he has a 'relationship' with exotic dancer, Blaze Starr. Additonally, according to this film, Earl was pushing for the passage of the Voting Rights Bill (1959) for Louisiana's population of people of color. The film includes Earl's people interning him in a mental institution to keep him away from the state capitol while the voting goes on. With Blaze's assistance / encouragement Earl escapes and charges into the legislative chambers. Newman proceeds to eat all the scenery in sight as he does, to my great delight at least, throughout the entire film.

Governor Earl Long's older brother was the Kingfish, Governor Huey Long (1893 - 1935), who was shot. In 1946 Robert Penn Warren published All The King's Men. In his novel the figure around whom revolve all of the characters is named Willie Stark, who stands in for Governor Huey Long. The b&w film version (1949) starred Broderick Crawford as Willie Stark. In 2001 the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry (what about the novel?).

All the King's Men was re-made by Sean Penn, who started filming the year that the levees failed. Penn produced, directed and played Willie Stark. It was released in 2006, and fared not well at the box office. This despite the authentically heroic rescue work that Penn performed during the worst era of the catastrophe, and all the aid and assistance he's provided since for the victims of the disaster.

Nor did Blaze do well with critics or viewers. It was 1989. The film's dialog made very liberal use of the n word, which may have been part of it. Embarrassing for everyone in the theater. The actress playing Starr was very pleasant to look at and adequate in her part, but the critics found her performance less than stellar and inadequately compelling. Evidently neither critic nor audience wanted to be reminded of the harsh realities of that time, 1959, when Kennedy was running for POTUS, and, as Governor Long yelled at the state's legislators, "We got to get over this fuckin' em at night and kickin' em in the day."

If only for views of a lost and very compelling Deep South landscapes and buildings, Blaze is much worth seeing. Newman's accomplished performance is even more worth watching. And who, I ask, could object to seeing such a lovely woman strutting upon a strip club stage runway, and asking the assistance of besotted males in the removal of her gartered silk stocking?

How Rightwing Talk Show Hosts Work

From the Milwaukee Magazine, Nov. 13, 2008, in "Secrets of Talk Radio", by the former news director of WTMJ, who reveals how talk show hosts ... work to get us angry.

[ To succeed, a talk show host must perpetuate the notion that his or her listeners are victims, and the host is the vehicle by which they can become empowered. The host frames virtually every issue in us-versus-them terms. There has to be a bad guy against whom the host will emphatically defend those loyal listeners.

This enemy can be a politician – either a Democratic officeholder or, in rare cases where no Democrat is convenient to blame, it can be a “RINO” (a “Republican In Name Only,” who is deemed not conservative enough). It can be the cold, cruel government bureaucracy. More often than not, however, the enemy is the “mainstream media” – local or national, print or broadcast. ]

And:

[ In the talk radio business, this concept, which must be mastered to be successful, is called “differentiating” yourself from the rest of the media. It is a brilliant marketing tactic that has also helped Fox News Channel thrive. “We report, you decide” and “Fair and Balanced” are more than just savvy slogans. They are code words signaling that only Fox will report the news in a way conservatives see as objective and truthful.

Forget any notion, however, that radio talk shows are supposed to be fair, evenhanded discussions featuring a diversity of opinions. The Fairness Doctrine, which required this, was repealed 20 years ago. So talk shows can be, and are, all about the host’s opinions, analyses and general worldview. Programmers learned long ago that benign conversations led by hosts who present all sides of an issue don’t attract large audiences. That’s why Kathleen Dunn was forced out at WTMJ in the early ’90s and why Jim and Andee were replaced in the mid-’90s by Dr. Laura. Pointed and provocative are what win. ]

As well as more, much more. This has been going on since the 70's. So we do not need to ask why those kids on Staten Island went looking for an African American person to beat and kill on election night to show how they felt about the results. Of course they found an African, not an African American. But he had an African name, so there ya go. Proves their point. Hopefully their victim won't die after all, but they will spend a long time in prison. White guys in a black prison population. Not good. Won't teach them a damned thing.

[ . . . . I had seen and helped foster the transformation of AM radio and the rise of conservative hosts. They have a power that is unlikely to decline.

Their rise was also helped by liberals whose ideology, after all, emphasizes tolerance. Their friendly toleration of talk radio merely gave the hosts more credibility. Yet an attitude of intolerance was probably worse: It made the liberals look hypocritical, giving ammunition to talk show hosts who used it with great skill. ]

Tell me again that the Fairness Doctrine shouldn't be re-instated.

Google Earth Has Added Ancient Rome

From BBC News / Technology:

[ Google has added a new twist to its popular 3D map tool, Google Earth, offering millions of users the chance to visit a virtual ancient Rome.

Google has reconstructed the sprawling city - inhabited by more than one million people as long ago as AD320.

Users can zoom around the map to visit the Forum of Julius Caesar, stand in the centre of the Colosseum or swoop over the Basilica.

Researchers behind the project say it adds to five centuries of knowledge. ]

Here's the Google Earth / Rome e-ddress.

This is very cool.

Today

It would be lovely if there was peace everywhere today.

I've been listening to women giving their accounts of what it was, has been like, and probably will be again (fully a third of those who have served, have served more than once) serving in Iraq.

Women are not receiving broad honor and recognition for their service. The public, PR faces of the troops remains overwhelming that of men's faces. Women are in combat but their courage, their stresses, their presence are all dismissed, considered not to be putting out the same level of courage, stress and risk, by their own fellow troops because they are classified by the Pentagon asx combat support, not combat troops.

Several of them stated there wasn't a day when she was in Iraq that she wasn't in combat. The women agreed that when they were serving in Baghdad there was no difference between combat support and being in combat.

A medic testified that not a single day went by without being sexually harrassed. She was also assaulted. While she was working to save lives of troops and Iraqis.

All of them agreed that these were the conditions, and they'd had to accept them or not survive. They received none of the same support and respect and recognition as the men when they returned. This lack of respect started with those very same men with whom they served.

Then all these old guys in the audience had to put in their opinions. Smugly they proclaimed there is no place for women in war. They hadn't heard a goddamned thing any one of the women had described. What these smug old white guys were saying is that everything that has happened to you is your own goddamned fault and you asked for it when you went to war. They never heard the women's descriptions of all the women and children who didn't choose to go to war and were killed, maimed, injured, raped, orphaned, widowed, etc. anyway.

Why is there no place for women in war other than as victims? Yet Our Sacred Troops are victimizing their sister troops.

Ayup. that's the only place for women in war. Victims. Victims. Victims. Despite how often they prove otherwise.

Our Sacred Troops haven't done their own damned job to counter this, you know. They have been the bottom of the problem. They have chosen not to be the solution.

Well, that's how this woman cannot help but see things as all her life she seen the stories of what American troops actually do and how they behave have been shuffled from public view, starting with the rape rampages they went on in the South Pacific back in WWII. Vietnam was even worse. Funny that. How unjust wars make troop behavior even more out of control, isn't it. And then there is the personal family experience that I won't go into here, on this day, when we honor the troops again, and peace -- well, not so much.

We have severe problems in our military and this latest cooing and dewy-eyed "We support Our Troops No Matter What" isn't helping. The military cannot continue without the women who have been part of it for so long. It's about farkin' time the powers that be do something to reflect that, and start kicking serious butt when women are not respected and treated as they have earned to be treated and deserve to be treated.

But by doing that the Pentagon and the world would have to give up the most dearly held enticement that keeps young serving in the wars made by the old -- women and uncontrolled violance against them, their supreme reward for allowing themselves to be in a position where their nutz might be blown or cut off.

The Argument Against Reinstating the Fairness Doctrine

I'm linking here to the article on the Mother Jones website, but this is how I've heard the argument against taking up the Fairness Doctrine stated by other 'liberals' too, including Ron Kuby.

Obama has also said that he was not interested in starting this big fight.

This kind of explains what it is Obama does want to do, which seems somewhat heartening, as he seems to realize that some kind of reform in communications must be taken up among all the other problems and issues and disasters.

[ "This summer his campaign issued an unequivocal statement on the subject: "Sen. Obama does not support reimposing the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters. He considers this debate to be a distraction from the conversation we should be having about opening up the airwaves and modern communications to as many diverse viewpoints as possible. That is why Sen. Obama supports media-ownership caps, network neutrality, public broadcasting, as well as increasing minority ownership of broadcasting and print outlets." ]

Terrorizing Dissent

Terrorizing Dissent - The Election Cut

[ Glass Bead Collective, Twin Cities Indymedia, and other independent media activists have released a new film, 'Terrorizing Dissent', an exposé of events at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Featuring first-person accounts and footage from more than forty cameras on the streets, 'Terrorizing Dissent' focuses on the story of dissent suppressed. People charged with "conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism" speak out against the government's campaign to manipulate media coverage and label civil disobedience and community organizing as terrorism. ]

New Orleans First Second Line Post the Election

This afternoon, thanks to our friend, Chris Dunn, who was there with his mighty camera.

Go here to see and hear.

Plus more!

Delusional Dreams

Can anyone explain why the studio powers came up with the most stupid title ever for a Bond flick? Really. What idea can you get from Quantum of Solace? The Brits aren't liking the movie either very much. A Bond seeking 'closure' evidently is a departure far too far from the Bond that all know and love. He doesn't even bonk anybody, it is said.

Now in the endless state of being sick we've progressed to endless coughing, so sleep is a few minutes at a time. In one of those dozing hiatuses from coughing I dreamed that McCain was running with Cheney as his running mate and they were an out gay couple, running on a GLTGBI platform. It beat the nightmares in which bush&co were raping me or bombing me, I guess.

My nightmares weigh nothing in balance of the nightmares for so many that began so long ago thanks to the vicious bush&co -- 20,000 muslims just disappeared around the world. Their families have no idea where they are, or what happened to them. How is Obama going to take this on, Robert Fisk asks, in the Independent. Will he? Is there will to deal with this?

http://www.change.gov

The following e-mail went out to the list this morning, our response to www.change.gov. :

[ A project of the Obama/Biden transition team, Change Dot Gov lays out policies and claims to want your input:

>Tell us your story and the issues that matter most to you. Share with us your concerns and hopes. – the policies you want to see carried out in the next four years.>

There's an "agenda" tab that has a "foreign policy" sub-tab. under this tab, there's a lot about Iran. and Georgia. But "Latin America and the Caribbean" was, as of last night (11/6), a dead link. How appropriate to its place in the chain of priorities, always. However, as of this morning "Latin America and the Caribbean" was MIA. Evidently it has been decided already that the only foreign policy concerns are: Iraq-Iran (Afghanistan?); Israel-Palestine; Russia and nuclear weapons. This is a deeply negative indication about the direction this administration is choosing.

Is anyone really going to pay attention to this? I'm cynical, but hey, if Barack Obama asks your opinion it's your responsibility to give it to him,no? This is an open challenge. Tell the Obama-Biden transition team what you want to see happen with Cuba. Everyone in the United States with an opinion on this topic, this is the time to say it.Take a little time to write it. Let them hear that a sane Cuba policy matters to Americans.

There is some confusion about President-elect Obama's policy on Cuba. Some people seem to believe he has indicated he will end the embargo. He has not, to my knowledge. So far, in concrete terms re the embargo, he has only indicated that he is in favor of removing travel and remittance restrictions for Cuban Americans to visit families. That doesn't even put us back to where we were during the first years of the George W. Bush administration, before harsh new guidelines were implemented at the end of 2003.Here are some of my points. Feel free to compose your own:

(1) As the Cuban Revolution looks out across the Gulf toward the eleventh US president it has known, the United States embargo of Cuba is the poster child for failed policy.

(2) The embargo of Cuba is implicitly also an embargo of Havana's historic great trading partner, New Orleans. If Cuba were able to buy products from the United States, much of the shipping traffic would necessarily flow through New Orleans, as it did during the 190 years there was trading between the two cities before the imposition of the embargo by President Kennedy in 1962. Let's help get New Orleans back on its feet by ending the embargo of Cuba.

(3) The embargo of Cuba isolates the United States in the world community, as we are the only country that maintains it. We join Lula of Brazil, and 17 successive years of near-unanimous UN resolutions (this year's vote was 185-3), in calling on Obama to end the embargo. (Of course, thanks to Helms-Burton, which President Clinton signed into law, it takes congressional action to do that, but there's a lot the president can do, both in terms of administrative action and a call for legislation.)

(4) End the embargo unilaterally, as Jimmy Carter suggested. Don't demand concessions first. Just do it. No preconditions. Short-circuit the stalemate. Let the United States, which imposed the embargo, take the first step. Then let's talk.

(5) While we're working on ending the embargo, end the travel ban, period. This can be done without congressional action.

(6) While we're working on ending the embargo, remove the restrictions on credits and other Bush-era bureaucratic obstacles that keep American farmers from selling their products to Cuba as presently allowed by U.S. law. This would also have beneficial humanitarian consequences. Cuba is has repeatedly asked to be able to purchase American farm products at marketvalue.

(7) Stop relying on the advice of so-called Cuba experts who have never been to Cuba. We need a new generation of Cuba specialists in all disciplines of the arts and humanities. Open and facilitate academic and artistic exchange immediately, so as to cultivate better mutual understanding and information flow, beginning now.

(8) Let music help the process along. At present, no musician living in Cuba and planning to return home has been allowed by the United States government to come in and perform since 2003. Beginning immediately, greenlight visas for Cuban performers.

(9) Introducing sanity into our relationship with Cuba would be the cornerstone of a reasoned, constructive Latin American policy. The converse is true: without removing the embargo, our relationship with the rest of Latin America will continue to be strained and distorted by it.

(10) We urge President Obama to follow through on his debate pledge to talk directly with high-level leaders in Cuba without preconditions. That would be a truly historic breakthrough in relations.

(11) We voted for change. Let's change the United States embargo of Cuba. ]

Before Midnight

He conceded.

Cell phone, land line, even text messages, plus e-mail of ecstatic messages from our AfAm friends.

So, OK, why did it take this dayemed long!

Why can't I be partying with our friends, dancing? Coz I'm so dayemed sick. WHY?

I have not forgotten he's a corporatisto, but he's also a good guy.

That's the advantage of being so young and so new -- he hasn't sold his soul yet.

He's got lots of time.

In the meantime -- Hooray!

Election Day 2008

Updated

I’ve been so sick that at all the many plans I had for this happy election day have evaporated.

My across-the-hall neighbor was waiting when our polling place opened at 6 AM and it took her an hour and a half. But I did vote, post the before-work crowd, before the lunch time surge. I'd have to have been dead not to have voted in this election. It took about a half hour.

Our polling place is at a vocational high school that is all African American and Hispanic African students, teachers and administration. Usually on election days we white and Asian folks, who are the vastly predominate population in this part of our city, don’t even register on their awareness. Today though, very sharply dressed young male students were seated on the steps of one of the school’s doors that opens to the sidewalk that feeds the voters to the polling area. Very softly one asked, “Obama?” We smiled and thumbs-upped. Huge grins spread across their faces and they high-fived, along with “AhIIIte!”

Our precinct was organized and things moved quickly. However the district had put some other precincts into our place, and those lines didn't move so quickly, and some of them were very long. One of the machines malfunctioned. The usual.

The feeling among everyone -- the poll workers, the students, the voters, was so pleasant. People smiling at each other. Many had brought their small children. The new, youngest voters often came in groups of friends. People were patient, but more than this, they all seemed to be enjoying themselves. This part of the city it's fairly safe to believe that most of us are solidly blue, so it's been a long time since we've had anything to be happy about politically, and since 9/11 -- and we are part of the voting area that are just outside of Ground Zero, and we were deeply affected by that, progressively more so. We protested the invasion of Iraq from the gitgo.

Our part of the city is one of the places to which freedmen and women flowed during and post the Civil War, to work in the textile factories and sweat shops that were here. We’re also only blocks east of the old wharfs (which were very busy in those days), and the warehouses serviced by the railroads. Many New York state's people of color had already been working over there. The oldest continuing operating business/building in the city is there, now called the Ear Inn, but was the James Brown House, that serviced the black labor force employed on the docks and the railroads, and provided rooms too. The building we live in was thrown up originally to provide housing for this influx up from the South. All this felt very close to us today.

Our local, the corner French bistro, is owned by an immigrant Egyptian Copt family. The oldest brother hugged me in front of his place. He voted before coming in from New Jersey. "I get off at 5 today. I'm going home. I'm turning the television. I am having a big bottle of scotch sitting next to me, and I am having a party."

Another Update

Massive lines in so many places here, and this is a solidly blue region. If you wanted to skip this election because of illness or other hardship, you wouldn't be betraying the Cause. However, it seems this election is also about the massive repudiation of the American people of the last 8 years and those who are responsible for them. We all want to contribute to that repudiation, and in the company of our fellow human beings. So we are voting, no matter what.

I'm a lot happier about this country than I've been in many years. Also, this time around, if it doesn't turn out the way I want, I cannot blame the candidate or the party. We have a magnificent candidate and he did everything right. Just witnessing someone on Our Side (however you fall on the center - left spectrum, he does fall on our side) doing everything right, particularly when They have been so successful at doing everything wrong on purpose as their goal and objective, is a comfort.

Sweet Potato Pie

The New York Review of Books.

[ Everything else they would never see. It existed only for the several thousand cheering people in Vernon Park on that bright morning in Germantown. They would never see, for instance, Obama's riff on sweet potato pie. It came as he told a story about his campaigning "the other day in a little town in Ohio, with the governor there," about how he and the governor suddenly felt hungry and "decided we'd stop right there and get some pie." Now here began a little gem of a story, which had at its center the diner employees who wanted to take a picture with Obama, not least because, as they told him, their boss was a die-hard Republican and "they wanted to tweak him a little with that picture." All this was heading toward a carefully choreographed finale, where the owner appeared personally with the pie for candidate and governor and Obama looked at the pie and looked at the pie-carrying die-hard Republican owner and "then I said to him"—perfectly elongated pause—"How's business?"

This brought on great gales of laughter from the crowd. For the joke turned on a point already precisely made: How can even the most die-hard of die-hard Republicans, if he is thinking of his self-interest, how can he vote Republican this year? "If you beat your head against the wall," Obama demanded of that faraway Republican with his pie, to a blizzard of "oh yeahs!" and "you got that right!" from the crowd, "and it hurts and hurts, how can you keep doing it?" But it was those two words, "How's business?"—that casual greeting thrown at the Republican diner owner that showed that there simply could be no other choice this year—that showed the case proved, wrapped up, unassailable.

And yet what struck me in this little model of political art was a tiny riff the candidate effortlessly worked into it from his banter with the crowd. When Obama launched into his story with "Because I love pie," a woman out in that sea of cheering, laughing people shouted back, " I'll make you pie, baby!" and to the general hooting laughter the candidate returned, "Oh yeah, you gonna make me pie?" Then, after a beat, amid even more raucous laughter, and several other female voices shouting out invitations, "You gonna make me sweet potato pie? " More shouts and laughter. " All you gonna make me pie?"

"Well you know I love sweet potato pie. And I think what we're going to have to do here"—and the laughter and the shouting rose and as it did his voice rose above it—"what we're going to have to do here is have a sweet potato pie contest.... That's right. And in this contest, I'm gonna be the judge." The laughter rose and you could hear not only the women but the deep laughter of the men taking delight in the double entendre that was not only about the women and their laughing, teasing offers and about their pie that that lanky confident smiling young man knew how to eat and enjoy and judge, but even more now, amazingly, as people came one by one to recognize, about something else. To those people gathered in Vernon Park that bright sun-drenched morning, it was an even more titillating and more pleasurable double entendre, for it was most clearly about something they'd never had but hoped and dreamed of having and now had begun to believe they were within the shortest of short distances of finally tasting. "Because you all know," their candidate told them, "that I know sweet potato pie." ]

I heard that *&^% Arnold, "the Austrian One," standing next to McCain, going on about Obama's skinny little legs and how he needed to get some muscle on him like a real man, and how his ideas needed some muscle like real ideas.

Well who is short and stumpy and you know jealous as heck about Obama's height? And who moves like a dancer, or ... a basketball player? And um, who really isn't a U.S. citizen and thus cannot ever be POTUS? They are so transparent.

"Hiding in Plain Sight"

Published November 2008, OffBeat Louisiana Music & Culture Magazine, Volume 21, No. 11. "Hiding in Plain Sight", Vaquero's tribute to Earl Palmer.

In the meantime I have developed what Vaquero's got and it is some really vicious germ. No sleep at all last night.

I am not a happy person.

Listening to the Locals: North Dakota

Adam Blomeke, a blogger at the site, North Decoder, writes about Our State's political state on Daily Kos today.

Read it here.

He says, "It's exciting for North Dakota to finally be a player in the electoral college." Though I haven't lived in ND since leaving it at age 18, I feel the same way.

Ed Schultz and his liberal radio show (he bills it as "Where America Comes to Talk"), which he started on a Fargo radio station, has had a lot to do with this, it may well be. In other words, Air America has had an effect, despite its very low numbers, i.e. funding and access -- and even though it's gotten too limousine liberal for me, owned by the big real estate Greene family here in NYC now. It didn't start that way. It's shifted way right, er, centerist, since they took it over. It's all about Ariana Huffington, Robert J. Kennedy, Jr., Mark Greene and other wealthy Dem elite celebrities.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that the rank-and-file Air America crew has worked tirelessly and enthusiastically since its inception during the darkest days of the regime that seemed to be permenently installed as the single oligarchical ruling class, as the neoCONs blithely, publicly, declared was the Goal.

Starting with the splendid, highly educated, highly articulate Laura Flanders, who travels constantly around the nation, connecting activist communities to each other from Utah to Louisiana (and which it seems to me Ed Schultz has imitated with his "Town Halls", though he charges admission to them, like everything else in his heavily merchandized bully pulpit). She gave us hope. She showed us we were not as alone, as solitary, as isolated as we felt. And if we would get off our duffs, and connect again with our communities, we can make a difference.

It seems to me, since Air America gave Schultz its prime slot, the noon to 3 gig, is that he's far better than Tom Hartman, who had the slot prior to Ed (Al Franken had it first). Hartman started as a CON, before seeing the light, and it shows. He wastes far too airtime by giving it away for days at a time going to cover rightwing gatherings and letting them talk. The right wing owns the primary media; they don't need the air time -- and besides they loathe the Fairness Doctrine and got it repealed, allowing Limbaugh to thunder hate speech for decades now to all of the U.S.A that isn't pockets with more choice in radio listening like NYC.

Schultz, also, when times get really rough, as they did immediately post the mcpln bounce and coo, never loses faith. He keeps people going. And again, for anyone living where you have no choice in radio other than limbaugh and religous armageddon broadcast, Schultz and everything on Air America is a tonic beyond price. Even in NYC, with the largest public radio broadcasting station in the country, having an alternative to the corporate blandness and determination not to offend their big corporate sponsors and doners -- who are, well, corporations and definitely not leftist, much less Democrat -- Big Eddie and Air America can be a great antidote.

When they brought in Rachel Maddow, I quit listening to "All Things Considered." The bland lies ATC propagates, their slants of unexamined assumption and statement as facts things that are not, have just become too slimey to swallow without either gagging or yelling, and I don't want to expend energy doing either.

I just wish Ron Kuby were more of something or other, or less. I'm not sure. When I heard him the other day blithering on with a neoCON attorney about why the whole idea of a Fairness Doctrine in broadcasting in this day and age was risible, I had to restrain myself from going to the show's blog and writing a whole chronology of what has happened to the news media since the corporate media moguls got the Fairness Doctrine repealed. The consequences? Iraq, for one. The theft of one, if not two, national elections.

A proof? Today in the NY Times there's a story about the nervous nelly Dems who won't allow themselves to believe that perhaps the Dem candidate will become POTUS, despite the many favorable signs. The article blithely mentions in passing the reasons Dems are such nervous nellies this year, "one if not two elections stolen." This is the first time the NY Times has ever acknowledged that the 2000 election WAS stolen. If it wasn't for the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine they might have had to admit much, much ealier, because the news journalism on the old school public broadcasting networks would have said so, the alternate weekly papers (which no longer exist other than to provide adverstising to local communities for escort services, etc.) would have beat the drums about it, and so on and so forth. So this is why despite how obviously intelligent Kuby is, he puts forth way too often some really ignorant ideas. He spent far too much time as the only nonwhackorightwingnut with Curtis Sliwa. He still hasn't purged himself of all he's unconsciously absorbed from that long-time, lucrative gig. Time for him to get over it.

Air America also receives the accolade of providing the first Female, Lesbian, Leftist, Rhodes Scholar and Ph.D. in Political Science, political pundit, Rachel Maddow to the wider world of prime time television political punditry.

Laura Flanders and Rachel Maddow. That's pretty darned good. But the Greenes have determined Laura not rich / successful / celebrity enough to have a show on here, in NYC, the Air America flagship station. That is bad. Very, very bad. And stupid too.