Mari Ness

All of the recent excitement over a certain major party primary race has overshadowed the real story of the 2008 campaign: Mike Gravel is still in the presidential race, this time running for the Libertarian party. And even if he should fail to win that nomination (which my practical Libertarian friends assure me is all too likely since the Libertarians apparently are going to insist on nominating an actual, you know, Libertarian, an understandable if short-sighted political approach*), we still have hope that he will continue a quirky independent run, perhaps under the newly formed Throwing Rocks party, illustrating his honest approach to government.

The endorsement below includes bikinis:



* Have you seen the Libertarians win a presidential election through this "we only nominate Libertarians" policy? I didn't think so. Time for a new approach: nominate Stephen Colbert.

Thanks to the internet, I have a lot of international friends and acquaintances who watch U.S. politics with interest and complete befuddlement. "Do you actually, um, understand your own voting process? Do any of you guys actually pay attention to your own candidates and what they're saying?" is a not infrequent observation from around the globe, and anecdotally, they seem in general to be better informed about U.S. politics than many Americans are. (Although it's entirely possible that I'm just choosing to hang out even online with people with an interest in politics.)

Here's part of the problem:



Edit: Irk. For some reason the MSNBC.com video isn't embedding properly. So, instead of the video, a link to where I found it.

Most Americans, alas, get their news from television shows just like this one.

Brought to my attention by CrooksandLiars.com.

1. Plumbing update: To my alarm, the trench outside my apartment building, is growing, and now extends into the little road that winds through my apartment complex. On the bright side, this adds to the overall trench warfare feeling around the place, and, since I can't park anywhere near the accessible entrance to my apartment, I'm walking a lot more.

2. So for once, I gained something through procrastination: a free stamp. For some insane reason, the U.S. Post Office decided to shut down the majority of its local branches on Tax Day, which sent all of us last minute folks scurrying to the one remaining post office that keeps its self service office open until 10:30 pm – creating one massive line of desperate taxpayers and not incidentally a broken self service machine. In some desperation, a very nice post office manager just started handing out free stamps.

3. Geek love at its best.

4. And manta1104 has justified her existence by introducing me to Celtic Thunder which happens to be a great group to listen to when you are irritated about plumbing. (Broadway fans might want to check out "That's a woman.")

5. Minor health update: still feeling a bit dizzy and lightheaded, which is incidentally a good excuse for not doing particularly thoughtful or meaningful blog posts. Which is also why I'll just let Jon Stewart speak for me:

If I have found one point of agreement this year among Republicans, Obama supporters, Hillary supporters, and those not so secretly hoping that the presidential inauguration will be overtaken by aliens who will not so incidentally introduce us to high speed space travel and a new way of creating fine chocolates to appear next to your hand by mental request alone, it is this:

Our current presidential party nominating system seriously, but seriously, sucks.

Criticism has included the following: it's dumb, it's unfair, caucuses disenfranchise working people and parents with very young children who can't spend significant time with their kids at caucuses (this seems like a legitimate complaint); caucuses are dumb and undemocratic; the proportioning of delegates makes absolutely no sense to anyone (hi Texas!); it goes on way way too long; when it doesn't go on too long, most people don't get to have their votes counted (insert squawks from a Republican acquaintance in Pennsylvania here who is not overly fond of McCain and feels left out); it leads to nasty interparty squabbling that helps no one; we're tired of elevating Iowa and New Hampshire to such importance; Iowa is a dumb state (apologies to any Iowans reading this); the entire Florida legislature is composed of idiots (this appears to be another universal truth); the process allows Republicans to jump over and interfere with the Democratic primaries and, at least apparently in Florida and possibly Michigan, Democrats to jump over and interfere with the Republican primaries; people are really tired of the whole thing already and it's nowhere near November; the process ends up wasting a lot of money on political ads that could be used for other purposes; and "Way too much singing."

About the only plus we could see in this year's primary system: it did manage to soundly defeat Guiliani and ensure that we would not have to endure him in the fall.

I'm not entirely sure that we should blame the primary process for the singing that has indeed infected this campaign on so many levels, but otherwise, this outcry has a point.

Which is precisely why this plan from the Republicans is so dumb. (More here) Basically, said plan keeps Iowa and New Hampshire, then spends a month allowing small states to vote, and allows big states to jump in only in March, effectively disenfranchising California, Florida, New York, Texas, Ohio and Illinois all over again. (Despite this year's looooooooonnnnnnnng Democratic party process, most of the time, as McCain has demonstrated, things are wrapped up well before most states get a chance to vote. This has been the chief squawk in previous years.) Also, it uses the phrase "rotating pod" which even by presidential election standards is pretty dumb.

Perhaps most annoying is the statement by Republican idiot number one that "nobody wants a national primary." Correction: I can't speak for everyone, because I'm certain that everyone doesn't want a national primary. But I know several Americans in both parties and several states that very much want a national primary, pointing out, with some justice, that we have a national election that works relatively well most of time (if we kick Florida out of the country, which as a Florida resident I must admit has a bit of justification to it) and doesn't seem to disenfranchise anyone (except some Florida residents, again). The person in question notes that a national primary would eliminate "the ability of candidates to come into someone's living room and talk to them."

No offense, but although I understand that McCain cooks a mean barbeque, I'm really not excited about the idea of presidential candidates in my living room. (Well. Maybe Gravel. The two of us could sing.) More to the point, under the current system, presidential candidates don't end up in the living rooms of most American citizens. Instead, they spend a long and irritating two years swamping the states of Iowa and New Hampshire, sometimes going into living rooms, which is the exact point that those of us in the other 48 states object to, since it makes the rest of us less important. Also, Iowa and New Hampshire, offense intended, have historically been terrible at picking candidates. Just dreadful.

Admittedly, a national primary this year would probably have selected Hillary Clinton straight off as the Democratic nominee which I wouldn't have been thrilled with, based on her name recognition alone. It also might have given Guiliani more of a chance, gulp. But this isn't about picking candidates that make me happy (which both major parties have consistently failed to do under the current system anyway); it's about remembering that we supposedly live in a democracy, and it would be nice for our two major parties to remember that.

As many of you know, I gained an odd fascination with the decidedly, um, odd campaign of Mike Gravel back when he started to throw random rocks at people and to set things on fire, since if I can admire any quality in a presidential candidate, it's open honesty about his or her ability and willingness to damage us all, hopefully with live weapons.

Now, having unexpectedly decided to leave the Democratic Party for the Libertarian Party while endorsing a Green Party candidate,* Gravel has, to his credit, refused to abandon his technique of campaigning with almost completely inexplicable videos, choosing to combat Barack Obama's musical triumphs, with, um, well, I think it's meant to be rap music, because it sure as hell isn't the Beatles or U2:

[Warning: contains some potentially disturbing violent imagery]



I can see I'll be counting the Gravel votes in the November election!

Thanks to wyldemusick for the link.

* For international readers, the Green Party and the Libertarian Party are pretty much polar opposites.

Look, let's get one factoid out of the way: during primary seasons, I become a political junkie. I love this kinda thing, even if I rationally firmly believe that the process is entirely mucked up and what we really need is a nice national primary. But I can't help following the horserace and getting excited about it. Really. And, like everyone, I'm impatient to hear the results.

But as long time readers know, I have one major peeve about this, aimed at the media:

CAN YOU PLEASE, PLEASE STOP POSTING AND ANNOUNCING RESULTS WHILE PEOPLE ARE STILL VOTING?

Specifically, I'm speaking tonight of results from Ohio and Vermont. As other people besides me noted, results from Vermont were announced at 7 pm, before a single vote was actually counted.. That was bad enough.

But then we get to Ohio.

At 7:30 pm, the networks and the Associated Press announced that McCain had won Ohio and that the Democratic race was too close to call. The reason the race was too close to call?

Because of weather problems, voting in some Ohio counties was extended until 9 pm..

Get this?

The networks called the election for McCain and announced a close vote between Clinton and Obama before the election ended.

For crying out loud.

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In related news, anaisis, from Texas, is on the phone astounded at the turnout for the "precinct convention," -- the post primary thingy that Texas is running that absolutely no one, including me, understands. Nonetheless, failure to understand something is not about to stop Texans, who are happily showing up, children in tow, and squawking about the lack of parking.

Have I mentioned that this primary system is really dumb?

From, of course, The New York Times: Ohmigod, he was born near the Panama Canal! (The headline actually makes you anticipate something a hell of a lot raunchier, until you realize that The New York Times was just talking about Panama.)

I'm sure that we can all think of lots of good reasons for McCain not to be president, but this isn't it, and indeed, it makes me itch again for a nice solid Constitutional Amendment allowing any U.S. citizen to run for president regardless of where said citizen was born. Admittedly, this does mean that Teh Terminator might become president, but it would also mean avoiding idiotic arguments like this one.

International Herald Tribune reports that Obama has won the Democrats Abroad primary. The interesting part of the article is buried way, way down:

The party will send 14 pledged delegates to the convention, each with a half vote. The primary was used to determine nine people, or the equivalent of 4.5 delegates. Obama won 2.5 and Clinton won two, according to Schon Marques.

So, what happens with a half a delegate? Does this unfortunate person need to arrive half dressed? Allowed to listen to only half the speeches? Get to eat half a pizza? Miss (fortunately) half the media coverage?

Seriously, um....what?

So as you might have heard (right here on this blog, actually) Florida had a small little primary yesterday. But again, none of you want to know about that. What you want to know is what happened to our man Mike Gravel. After all, the strangeness that is Florida would seem to be a natural fit for the strangeness that is the rock-throwing Mike Gravel. Has he been able to follow his growing popularity, his surge of momentum, the love he generates through throwing rocks?

I am pleased to say a definite yes to this. As of 7:32 pm, the Florida Department of Elections, admittedly not one of the most reliable entities on the planet, reports that based on 99% of precincts reporting in, Mike Gravel has won a grand total of 5,236 votes, or .3% of the vote. The momentum is there, people, it's there. But in reading over the media coverage, I was shocked, shocked, to find that CNN and MSNBC, to name but two organizations, were maliciously and deliberately leaving this completely out of their coverage. This is CNN. Note that they continue to list Kucinich, who a) has dropped out of the race and b) actually got fewer votes than either Joe Biden or Bill Richardson, who also jumped out of the race. But do they mention Mike Gravel, who is still actively campaigning? No.

To somewhat balance this out, CNN also ignored the candidacy/votes for Alan Keyes, who, I was shocked to see, was actually listed on the Florida Republican ballot, despite being -- how do we put this -- certifiably nuts. (He received 3,980 votes, only beating out Tom Tancredo, who has also left the race.)

Oh media. We have given up on any hope for accuracy from you or any hope that any of you may learn math (Quote from last night: "John McCain won a sizeable majority...." Numbers from the Florida Department of Elections: 36%, a strong plurality and a definite win, but not a majority, sizeable or not.) But can we hold out any hope that your coverage will at least be complete?

On a related note, I am extremely displeased to note that, once again, the media started reporting Florida votes while people were still voting.. Florida stretches into two time zones, so the Panhandle continues to vote an hour after the rest of the state, and state law says that voters in line at 7 pm have the right to vote, which left some people in Broward and Miami-Dade (it's always Broward and Miami-Dade) voting right up until 8:25 pm, even after the media were reporting the numbers, and even after this sort of idiocy helped cause the confusion of the 2000 election. Media. I'm ok with waiting until everybody has voted before I find the results. That's kinda the point.

So as some of you might be aware, Florida is having a little primary tomorrow, a primary upon which, we are assured, the fate of the nation -- nay, the world! nay, the universe! nay, Rudy Guiliani's heart condition! -- may depend. Thanks to my iPod, I almost never listen to South Florida radio these days anymore, and thanks to the writer's strike and the utter inanity of local television news, I don't watch much broadcast TV these days either, which means that I've thankfully avoided most of the effects of this. Most, not all: my library, which has nice disabled accessibility, has been completely devoured by Early Voting Mania (and for those about to chime in against early and absentee voting before election day, supposedly robbing voters of their opportunities to hear everything about the candidates, you have not experienced the hell that is attempting to vote in Florida on the actual election day) complete with annoyed cops, annoying political signs, and no parking. I am so looking forward to Wednesday when I get to enjoy my library again. But other than my library problems I've mostly dodged the insanity of the Florida political process, until today, when I was merrily driving along Atlantic Boulevard and caught a glimpse of a person enthusiastically waving a large Rudy Guiliani sign. Rather too enthusiastically: he lost hold of the sign and it went bump, bump, bump out into horrendously busy Atlantic Boulevard causing several people to brake and hit their horns rather uselessly since the sign crashed into someone else's window anyway.

"How metaphorical," I thought.

After this, I popped on I-95 and headed north, only to see another Rudy Guiliani person waving a sign on one of the overpasses -- and as I watched, the wind blew and the Guiliani sign hit his poor supporter on the head.

Sometimes, the metaphor just writes itself, doesn't it?

On a related note, not that this means much, but most of the little lawn signs I've seen down here are for either Mitt "I've never had an opinion I couldn't change the next day" Rommey or Ron Paul, with a few scattered signs here and there for Huckabee and one sad and forlorn sign for Fred Thompson, which, like Thompson, seemed remarkably uninterested in running for election. But, on the bright side, we can have all of our Law and Order reruns back!

From tonight's CNN Democratic debate, which dzuummod started me watching about midway through:

Question about race from moderators. All three candidates announce, clearly, that they are not interested in going down the racial road. Again.

And what does the media do?

Ask Barack Obama, and I quote, if he thinks that Bill Clinton was "really the first black American president."

:: head on desk ::

Edit: Things got even worse, if you can believe it, with the last question of the evening: "Why would Dr. Martin Luther King endorse you if he were alive today?"

:: double head thunk on desk ::

My take, having now watched some clips from the first, livelier half of the debate: Candidates, 1, Media 0. Geesh.

So box_in_the_box directed me to this fascinating piece showing the changing radicalism/conservativism politics of Doctor Who over time.

The way current politics and beliefs and arguments become framed in fiction and art constantly fascinates me, whether in the obvious, overt way (24, The West Wing, the current incarnation of Battlestar Galatica) or the subtle (Dead Like Me, Rome, and, to an extent, Farscape. ) And I'm particularly fascinated by these reflections in what I'll term "unreal worlds" – that is, films/fictions/art deliberately set outside the reality of now: historical epics, science fiction and fantasy. We often assume that by their very unrealism these films must be detached from today's reality and politics, but any piece of art, no matter how fantastic or mundane, is rooted in and reflects its time.

Not many know this, but in a previous incarnation I studied the portrayal of the medieval in film, fascinated by the political messages of these films. The perhaps classic example is Errol Flynn's The Adventures of Robin Hood, produced just before the U.S. entered World War II. Its producers (Warner Brothers) and Jewish director did not dare make an outright jingoistic, pro-war, anti-Nazi film, so instead, they transformed the Robin Hood story into an indirect, yet powerful, anti-Nazi movie and call to arms. Note how Robin Hood's fight is couched in racial terms of "Saxons" and "Normans" – a distinction present in some, but hardly all, of previous Robin Hoods, and how all of Prince John's men are going after peasants that were chosen for explicitly "Jewish" features, and routing the "Saxons" with Nazi-like methods, and the film's cry for standing against racial injustice and tyranny. (For real fun, compare the film to the highly racist Gone With The Wind, also starring Olivia DeHavilland, which uses colors and images to make an even stronger case that the U.S. should stay out of World War II.) Sometime, when you're watching a medieval epic or fantasy movie made in the U.S., note the almost universal message that aristocracy by nature is inevitably corrupt and corrupting. (In Braveheart, this is taken to the point where the aristocrats are literally physically dying from disfiguring, destructive diseases as they continue to cling to power.)

I don't know that the creators of Doctor Who actually had any overt political thoughts in mind, but this chart is absolutely fascinating nonetheless, and I think I'll be giving some of those old Doctor Who shows another look.

So a little primary election, part of the U.S. presidential process, was held yesterday in New Hampshire and it appears that the media think that various people have won.

But you don't want to know about that. What you want to know is, how did our man Mike Gravel, the utter underdog of the Democratic race, fare? As many of you know, Gravel did not do at all well in Iowa. Indeed, the Iowa Democrats went so far as to snub him entirely and give him a grand total of 0 votes.

I am pleased to say, however, that the good people of New Hampshire, more discerning than their Iowa counterparts, did come out in droves (small droves) for Mike Gravel, giving him a total of 397 votes (ok, very very small droves), according to NBC this morning after 96% of precincts had reported in. (This is not quite the same as 96% of votes counted.) Who knows? The remaining 4% might push him over the edge to 400 votes!

I spent the evening updating two friends about Mike Gravel's not overly meteoric rise to this astounding total (when I started watching he was at about 17 votes, so, yes, progress was made.) When he reached 342 votes, I messaged them both in excitement. One responded promptly with, " *gasps and staggers back, clutching her heart.*" As I was typing in a sarcastic response to that, the second wrote, " I'm having palpitations. Although that could be my coffee." Sometimes I'm not sure that my friends always take me seriously.

So I'm alas quite aware that my entries have been a little thin of actual content lately, when they've been there at all. I'd like to tell you that this is because I'm caught up in an evil government conspiracy to hid the truth from you that the Wii is, indeed, a sophisticated methodology of brain control, oh, and that aliens, as it turns out, refuse to come out in public because, let's face it, they look like circus clowns, and no amount of makeup can disguise that terrorizing effect.

It's not that I don't have things to write about -- I do, with half planned and completely unfinished entries about movies, Tin Man, getting rid of all but one of my bras, some new teas at Teavana, an annoyed response to Mitt Romney's religion speech of yesterday which declared, among other things, that agnostics like myself are not Americans, and that we need to bring religion back into the public sphere, ignoring the very visible presence of large churches, synagogues, mosques and Christmas lights and menorahs all over the place at the moment; the U.S. may be many things, but hostile to religion, no. Hostile to agnostics, apparently. (Hmm. Apparently my rant was already written in my mind.) And so on. But it's more that I just haven't found myself writing about any of these, for whatever reason.

I suspect things will change after December 17, when I'll have full access to Livejournal at work and can return to my old habits of blogging as a thought comes to me. In the meantime, I can give you more Muppets:

I hesitated about passing this little gem on, which has been popping up in numerous political blogs as of late, but I just couldn't resist the Chuck Norris bit:



And yes, yes, eventually I will be back to posting non-Youtube.com entries. I promise.

Al Gore and United Nations panel share Nobel Peace Prize.

In seemingly unrelated news, five people died from a car bomb in Baghdad and an even more horrifying case where a bomb was planted among toys, and the Pakistani army reports 200 militants were killed in three recent days of fighting on the Afghanistan border.

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I forgot to note it here, but if you haven't heard, Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature, which surprised me only because I thought she had already won it back in the early 90s.

This is interesting.

I've always been a fan of abolishing the Electoral College, not just because I'm sick of getting saturated with presidential ads insulting my intelligence every. freaking. presidential. election but primarily because it leads to voter apathy. Which, mind you, may not always be a bad thing: my cynical side reminds me that far too many idiots and ignorant people vote in every election, and I frequently wish that voters would be forced to pass some sort of general knowledge test before being allowed to vote, impractical and problematic though that would be. (As a historical note, such tests were previously used specifically to keep black people from voting.)

But the general ignorance of the American electorate is one issue: voter turnout is a second and equally serious one. I can't help but think that more Americans might bother to vote, or learn something, if they felt their votes really mattered, and with the Electoral College, frankly, in most states their votes don't. And therefore, in many cases, people don't bother to vote.

For example, in the infamous 2000 election, which was predicted to be close, only 30 to 33% of the Texas electorate bothered to vote, since they knew their state's electoral votes were heading to Bush anyway, so why bother when they could be getting a lovely drink at Starbucks instead of standing in line? The following day we were told that Al Gore had won the popular vote. Quite true. But what if we had been electing the president via popular vote? Would more pro-Bush Texans have come out to vote? Quite possibly. Would they have been countered by more pro-Gore Californians and New Yorkers? Again, quite possibly. We don't know.

But alas, I fear this is all just speculation on my part: abolishing the Electoral College means amending the Constitution, and if the 2000 election didn't convince us of that need, I'm not sure that anything will.

Something you really have to see for yourself.. (Mostly worksafe unless you work at a particularly prudish location.)

(And yes, yes. I know about the music. Give it a moment. Really. Trust me.)

Disclaimer: The above link should not be taken as any endorsement by this blog for the Ron Paul campaign, and is presented purely for the purposes of keeping my politically minded readers informed, and was most certainly not listed here in any attempt to appeal to prurient readers, or to suggest that this blog endorses political campaigns of this nature. Public service. Really. Just a public service.


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But I have to admit that, bodices aside, the very existence of an ad like this intrigues me for multiple reasons. Not that using sex to sell politics (or haunt an opponent) is a particularly new thing, and certainly eager volunteers have created political advertisements at their own expense well before this -- from quick signs to fairly sophisticated television ads. But the internet has enhanced the ability of amateurs to create and disseminate ads of this nature. I can't predict the effect, but I can say that something like this is considerably more memorable than most of the utterly idiotic ads that we will get bombed with next year over our television screens -- hastening, I think, the move of political discussion away from television and onto the computer, with all of the resulting implications.