Category Archives: Politics

A Big Day

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John Edwards has dropped out, leaving the Democratic race between Obama and Hillary.

The news from today that really shocks me, though, is that Giuliani:

  • Dropped out of the race, and
  • Endorsed McCain (!)

Giuliani scared me the most, but I think McCain is the one Republican that stands a chance of winning in 2008, which is equally as scary.

If the race had come down to Obama versus, say, Giuliani, I think it would be a landslide victory for Democrats. But if it comes down to Clinton versus McCain as early signs are showing? Clinton’s disliked enough, and McCain’s moderate enough, that he might just win it.

McCain is a rather interesting candidate. On one hand he’s taken many issues I like, such as speaking out against torture, among others. On the other hand, he’s part conservative, part lunatic…

State of the Union

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Tonight is the State of the Union address.

As an aside, if I’m ever President, I think I’m going to direct those familiar with the speech to keep mum. I know that the State of the Union isn’t exactly the place for suspense and drama, but it’s kind of upsetting, in some way, to know exactly what he’s going to say before he says it. USA Today comments that Obama and Hillary will both be present, and ads, “Those two alone will draw most of the reaction shots shown on television.” So not only do we know what will be said, but we seem to know, as fact, what the cameras will be focusing on.

I hope Congress will vehemently oppose his push for permanent codification of warrant-less wiretaps into law, and am pretty leery of him being the one behind tax cuts (they seem to be given to the wrong people), but I do support (strongly!) his plan to curb earmarks.

The frequent Reagan comparisons (on the part of USA Today) are borderline creepy, by the way.

Letters to the Editor

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In the local newspaper that mysteriously appeared on our kitchen counter, there are two letters to the editor in a row. (Actually, the second reads more like an article and has no name signed, but is under the “Letters to the Editor” section.)

The first starts off, “Granite Staters have always been among the first to stand up against discrimination of any kind, including opposing slavery, expanding women’s suffrage and supporting the Equal Rights Amendment. Adopting civil unions continues this proud tradition of standing up for what is just and fair.” It’s short, concise, and just praises voters for standing up for the rights of same-sex couples.

The next is about a Right to Life march. What an ironic pair of letters!

What I find strange is that the second letter/article never once mentions, “Killing unborn babies is wrong,” but is instead comes across as a rant on a slew of unrelated issues. One person is quoted as saying, “We’ve got to put the moral order back the way it should be… Reverse Roe v. Wade. Reverse civil unions…” He goes on to add, “There are more people coming in from Mexico and other places, and we’re killing ourselves off. That changes the voting demographic… They’ll wipe out the Constitution.” He goes on to complain about how “birth control has been proven to be extremely detrimental to those who use it… You have sex to have babies. If you don’t want  babies, don’t have sex.”

A second person mentions, “I heard on EWTN that after an abortion, females can get sick–cancer of the breast, cancer of the uterus.” The problem is that she says this right after the article includes a big paragraph about how no one has ever found a link between cancer and abortions.

Reasons to oppose abortion, then:

  • Gay marriage is immoral.
  • We need lots of babies to dilute the effects of those darned Mexicans who are coming into our country so that they can destroy our Constitution.
  • People who use birth control go on to lead miserable lives.
  • Despite a lack of any evidence claiming this, you might get cancer if you have an abortion.

Never mentioned:

  • They think abortion is killing babies and should thus be stopped.

To me, the latter argument would be a little more convincing. I really can’t understand what they were thinking with this letter. It’s also not as if I skipped over the section with the good arguments. I’ve basically given you a recap of the article, minus peoples’ personal backgrounds (neither of which involve abortion.) They just rant about irrelevant stuff, throw in a lot of incorrect statements, and even resort to some arguments dripping with racist sentiment. And yet, it’s very easy to present a strong case against abortion. They just fail–miserably–to do so.

Inexcusable

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Culled from recent news, here are some things that have occurred that I can find absolutely no excuse for having happened:

  • Hackers infiltrated computer systems, turning off power to several (foreign) cities. I guess it makes sense that the power grid would now be controlled by computers, but it’s sheer idiocy to have such a system, in any way, connected to the Internet. (And one has to suspect it was, in some manner, an inside job: I can’t imagine there’s a spiffy web GUI with a “Turn off power to Washington, DC” button, but rather some inscrutable interface.)
  • This is actually old news, but it was dug up recently: Mike Huckabee’s son was arrested for trying to bring a gun on an airplane. I’ll buy that it probably wasn’t his intention to hijack the plane, but how you “accidentally” carry a gun into an airport escapes me. Most of us are paranoid about whether our tiny bottle of shampoo is pushing the envelope and whether it’ll result in a cavity search. And yet people keep waltzing in with guns. Furthermore, anyone who doesn’t know where their guns are shouldn’t be allowed to carry them in the first place. (Despite what some have said, this doesn’t change my opinion of Huckabee himself… His statements like, “And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards…” are what influence my views of him.)
  • Another case of a laptop with private data on more than half a million people going missing.

Islam

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One thing I ran into in the Obama campaign was persistent rumors that he was a Muslim. I always thought it was pretty dumb that people were actually convinced of this, but it took me a while to realize that the real problem is what they don’t say, but surely think: they think that he’s Muslim and therefore a bad person.

I wish more people were at least marginally familiar with Islam. It’s a peaceful religion with a few fundamentalist nutjobs who interpret their scriptures in bizarre ways. Really not unlike Christianity.

There are two major sects, the Sunnis, with 85% of the Muslim population, and the Shi’a, accounting for around 15%.

Jihad itself is an interesting term. Thought to refer to “holy war,” it’s actually an ambiguous term referring to anything from holy war to a “struggle to improve one’s self and/or society” (per Wikipedia). And even when it does refer to holy war, there are lots of restrictions: it’s not supposed to include non-combatants, for example.

I don’t know half as much as I’d like to about Islam, giving its increasing importance in the world. But I do wish that more people would at least stop labeling all Muslims as terrorists.

Retail Politics

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One of the things that rocks about New Hampshire is the so-called “retail politics,” where politicians have to get out and work to convince us that we should vote for them. Running TV ads and blowing Iowa and New Hampshire off doesn’t work, as Giuliani proved.

Last weekend, we went to a house party in Merrimack (hosted by a fellow ham, actually), where a few dozen people came to hear Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick speak about Obama. If you look at the US as a whole, this is a terrible proposition: the governor of Massachusetts takes an hour out of his day (well, probably more like three, if you account of travel time and all) to talk to thirty or so people? And yet this is what it takes.

Governor Patrick, by the way, is an awesome guy. He came around and talked to each person in the room. I told him I was going to school in Massachusetts, and he thanked my mom for “loaning” him to them. He seemed to genuinely care.

title=”Governor Patrick in NH by n1zyy, on Flickr”>Governor Patrick in NH

He has this incredible way of, when talking to you, making it seem like you’re the only person in the room. Here’s the governor of Massachusetts, coming up to someone’s house in New Hampshire, and talking to my mom and I as if he’s an old friend.

He spent a good deal of time just mingling, before he finally addressed us as a crowd and talked about Obama. He kept that brief, and then asked us a lot of questions. At one point, he was talking, and happened to say something along the lines of, “And I’ll tell you why I–” right as the home phone rang. Being the awesome person he is, he added, “And I’ll tell whoever’s calling,” and then picked up their phone.

title=”Answering the Phone by n1zyy, on Flickr”>Answering the Phone

“Hello, this is Governor Patrick.” I don’t really know what the person on the other end said, but I can only imagine they were somewhat confused. “We’ve got quite an enthusiastic crowd here for Obama,” he said, before asking the caller if they supported Obama. “No? Well then I’m afraid whoever you’re calling for isn’t home,” he joked before handing the phone over to the home’s residents.

Whoa’8

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One thing that I find oddly fun is thinking about possible Pres-VP combinations.

Some that come to mind are obvious: Clinton-Edwards, Obama-Edwards… Each has its own nuances that are neat to explore. But there’s another reason I think it’s interesting. In the business world, if you have a fragmented market–many sellers in a market all competing–it makes sense to try to merge some of the small guys to become a powerhouse. (Obviously, you can take this too far and become an anti-competitive monopoly.) Where this tactic is especially important is when the markets are bad. (We’ve discussed at length whether Ford and GM should merge.)

I think the Democratic race is fragmented. (Republicans, too, but in a different way right now.) We have three candidates all attracting substantial support. I have to wonder what would happen if, say, Obama somehow convinced, say, Edwards to be his running mate. Would they form a powerhouse?

There are a lot of combinations that are laughably improbable. I don’t think we’ll ever see {Clinton, Obama}-{Romney, Giuliani}. They’re at opposite ends of the spectrum, and I think {Clinton, Obama} fans would be turned off that they’d picked {Romney, Giuliani} as a running mate, and vice versa. But I do like the idea of bipartisan couplings. I also don’t think that an Obama-Clinton (or Clinton-Obama) ticket is likely. They’ve spent so much time at each others’ throats that I can’t see it working.

But here are two that I find, to quote Kucinich, viable:

Obama-Richardson: They complement each other well, and, in my opinion, are both awesome candidates. Richardson is far behind in the polls, and thus doesn’t really stand a chance of getting the nomination; I’m far from the first to talk about him being in it for VP. Obama has Senate experience; Richardson has gubernatorial experience. Obama doesn’t have much foreign policy experience; Richardson has heaps of it. Obama brings an exciting, fresh perspective; Richardson brings decades of solid experience. (I’m not implying that Obama has no experience, nor that Richardson is ‘stale’–neither is true.) And neither of them are white, which is neat in a way.

Obama-Huckabee: Hear me out! Of the Republicans, I think Huckabee is my favorite. I certainly don’t agree with every position of his, but there are two things I really like about him. One is that he’s a good, honest guy. I think anything he does will be because he thinks it’s truly the right thing to do, not because it’ll make him rich. I think Obama-Huckabee would be the “cleanest” Administration in history. (Not in borderline-racist “clean and articulate” terms, but in “actually fighting for the American people and not doing anything crooked” terms.) And the second thing is that I love the way he views his faith–a call for him to do good on Earth. A religious, conservative Republican against the death penalty and in favor of helping the poor? Wow-a-wee-wow! There are some big differences between them, and I don’t know how reconcilable they are. But there comes a third benefit, too: done right, I think a bipartisan running ‘couple’ attracts the most votes. A Republican who would never go for Obama-Clinton might be convinced to vote for Obama-Huckabee. Not to mention centrist independents.

Right Down through the Wire

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It’s time! I’m going to go grab some lunch, but then I’m going out to cast my vote, run a couple errands, and then spend the rest of the day on Get Out The Vote activities. When the polls close at 8, I’ll breath a sigh of relief that I can sit down, but I think my nerves will be shot, too, as I go somewhere with my fellow supporters to watch the results come in.

New Hampshire residents, don’t forget to vote!