Office of the Independent Blogger

Glad to see the Housing and Urban Development Secretary has quit, as I hoped for here. Now I hope the President can choose a suitable replacement who will do the job with admirable skill and courage, or who will not do anything awful, at least. Is that too much to ask for? (As an aside, this headline, coupled with the last post, reminds me of a conversation I had in the summer of 2005 in the midst of an August heatwave when everything I wrote had something to do with the heat in its headline. “How long are you going to keep making these cheesy puns?”)

Bruce Reed, whose Has-Been blog is one of my favorites, writes about the Pittsburgh Pirates and their struggles as metaphor for western Pennsylvania’s. While there is plenty of hope for Pennsylvania today and going into the future, I wonder if even Barack Obama could find hope for the Pirates! (Personal note: I am going to Pittsburgh this summer for a Pirates game — I am! because it’s a great ballpark, by all accounts, and I’ve been wanting to for a long time but haven’t been able to because of familial restrictions that are fortunately no longer there. Relatedly, I’m going to LA from the 11th-13th of April for some fun with some friends, Friday and Sunday, and a Dodgers game Saturday.) And you know who else has been talking about baseball recently? George W. Bush, for several innings on ESPN’s coverage of Opening Night in Washington D.C., with its new stadium. He was booed lustily when he threw out the first pitch (I thought the crowd’s reaction was classless and disgraceful) and then he delighted at least one viewer with his commentary for ESPN. “Looks like Chipper’s got his first homerun” and the conversation he had with Joe Morgan about “the K zone” was rioutous. I’m glad Bush had the chance to get out and enjoy himself — the White House must be feeling like a prison for him, and I just finished reading about the only two Presidents who could literally feel imprisoned in the White House (Johnson and Nixon) due to the savagery of their opponents, so I have sympathy for the President, even if he has not faced the situation LBJ and Nixon did and even though he is not my favorite person in the world. Edit: after considering it just a little bit more, Bush’s reception at Nationals ballpark demonstrates the beauty of our democratic country. “Your leader is booed and hated!” Maybe (hate is a strong word) but the people are free to boo or cheer and do as they choose.

These are the sorts of people who deserve the death penalty. If there are any people who deserve it, these are them. I am still opposed to that form of “justice” on principle, but I would not shed a single tear for these monstrous little Hitlers who tortured a disabled pregnant woman to death, for weeks, and her corpse was found with thirty BB bullets and countless other inhumanities inflicted upon it. I typically avoid posting anything true-crimeish, but this is too evil to pass up without a single mention.

On a different note, the Democratic primary is nastifying with Hillary Clinton promising not to end her campaign until, at earliest, June 3rd. Clinton vowed to fight all the way to the convention if the Democratic Party does not do something about Florida and Michigan delegates. This won’t end well.

Now, to follow up on the post I made a few days ago about Zimbabwe’s election, Condi Rice has called Robert Mugabe a “disgrace” amidst mounting fears of election fraud in that country. I hope not, but it has been standard operating procedure there for a long time and there’s very little to stop that government. Not even their disgusting economic figures have stopped them before, and it is sometimes hard to believe that a government can survive such numbers as these:

INFLATION

In 1987 inflation averaged 11.9 percent. It surged to an official record of 100,586 percent in January 2008, but economic experts say the real rate is much higher.

LIFE EXPECTANCY

Average life expectancy dropped from 63 years in 1990 to 37.3 years in 2005, according to World Bank and U.N. figures.

HIV/AIDS

In 2007, Zimbabwe had an HIV prevalence of 15.6 percent among adults aged 15-49 years — the fourth-highest rate in the world. The United Nations Development Program says the epidemic causes the death of around 3,200 people per week. The population is 13 million.

I hope you aren’t faint of heart, Dear Reader, because those are disgusting, and I hope his loss of support from the public is validated and he loses every ounce of power he has.

Do it.

Jeremiah Wright is going to be the death of Barack Obama in bitterly-contested states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio. Wright has been set loose once again, this time for slurring Italians, and there’s plenty more where that came from, my common sense tells me and Slate magazine confirms. In what will be a potential knock-out blow with white voters when Republicans get a hold of it, Barack Obama seems to endorse particularly nasty bits from the first sermon of Wright’s Obama ever attended.

On Hugh Hewitt’s radio show yesterday, he played excerpts of Barack Obama reading from his autobiography, Dreams of My Father. In one, Obama remembers a sermon by Rev. Jeremiah Wright:

[T]he pastor described going to a museum and being confronted by a painting title Hope.

“The painting depicts a harpist,” Revernd Wright explained, “a woman who at first glance appears to be sitting atop a great mountaintop. Untill you take a closer look and see that the woman is bruised and bloodied, dressed in tattered rags, the harp reduced to a single frayed string. Your eye is then drawn down to the scene below, down to the valley below, where everywhere are the ravages of famine, the drumbeat of war, a world groaning under strife and deprivation.

It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, aprtheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere … That’s the world! on which hope sits.”

And so it went, a meditation on a fallen world. … [E.A.]

Sounds … controversial! Keep in mind: a) Obama isn’t disapproving of this sermon. In the book he weeps at the end of it; b) Demonstrating that at least some blaming of “white greed” for the world’s sins–which Obama now criticizes– isn’t an exceptional topic for Rev. Wright in a few wacky sermons Obama may or may not have missed. It’s at the quotidian core of the Afrocentric philosophy that Obama says drew him to the church; c) Indeed, in his big Feb. 18th race speech Obama reads the passage from his book that describes his emotional reaction to this very sermon (his “first service at Trinity”)–how it made “the story of a people” seem “black and more than black.” d) This is also the sermon that gave Obama the title of his next book, The Audacity of Hope. e) The “profound mistake” of this sermon is not that Wright “spoke as if our society was static”–Obama’s analysis on Feb. 18th. The problem is that “white folks’ greed” is not the main cause of a “world in need.”

I’m not saying voters shouldn’t cut Obama a lot of slack on Wright’s anti-white fulminations. But the Senator should have spoken up publicly against the semi-paranoid “white greed” explanation a long time ago, no? And he could show a little humility. Again, this wasn’t the occasion for him to be lecturing everyone else

I have said before that I think this election is going to ruin politics for a wide variety of young people, and I stand by that. But the truth is that Barack Obama has never been a candidate I can get behind. He is a radical masquerading as a moderate, closer to George McGovern than Hubert Humphrey, John Kennedy than Harry Truman, and I’m just not a fan. Worse, I am a Democrat who does not like to lose and is in fact tired of it. I do not see Obama as hope for America. I see him as a platitude, and besides, I don’t believe that “unity” and “coming together” is a Presidency. Believe me, I am all about coming together and making friends — ask anyone at my College, and they will tell you I am a social butterfly who does not like to make enemies because at my core I believe we can work any problems out if we sit down and decide to — but this is not a campaign, and it does not inspire me. The greatness of America isn’t in sitting down to hold hands. It’s in being free to walk off and do things your own way, and that is another reason I don’t think he will resonate. I’ve written about this all before, but now he is slowly showing himself to have weaknesses that are, perhaps, fatal.

I was fifteen years old when my first article was published by someone other than myself or one of my teachers. It was titled, “A Tyranny of Misperceptions.” I was recently asked, via email, to comment on it. Specifically, they wanted me to determine whether or not I stand by the article. The first paragraph is one I am still very verreh proud of, even if I have made a few minor changes in this re-posting:

The United States of America is ruled by a tyrannical force, and I do not mean the Republican Congress, the conservative Supreme Court, or even George W. Bush. At the end of the day, the men currently in power will be booted out of office at the voting booth, face term limits, step down and retire or simply die, as we all must. They do not hold true power in this country. There is a stronger force behind them - behind all of America - and it is the tyranny of misperceptions.

I went on to make two broad points: the press fails the American public due to its need for sponsorship and advertisement, and the Central Intelligence Agency is not responsible for the “intelligence failures” of the Iraq War. I stand by my defense of the CIA, without equivocation, but I do back-pedal from the stronger criticisms of the media I made. Not entirely, however. It is still true that the media focuses on petty points of contention quite frequently, as the recent pomp and circumstance over Bosnia and “tax forms” shows, and they put the spotlight on celebrity escapades as frequently as ever, but listening to journalists speak and writing for a newspaper, myself, I have come to appreciate the press more than before.

I firmly believe that the media exposes much of what there is to expose, and that if there is a “there” there in terms of a scandal, a crime or an act of corruption in public affairs, it will be exposed. I think that newspapers, in particular, continue to be fine sources of information and I do not believe that the Bush Administration has been given a free pass from anyone but Fox News. That isn’t to say that I am uncritical of our press: the emphasis is still there on absurd and unnecessary issues, and there is something deeply unsettling about corporate moneyhounds owning networks and newspapers, but I will not impugn the integrity of the vast majority of newspaper men and women, nor can I blame problems with the press on modernity or claim them as a unique and exclusive phenomenom of our times. The press is not fully “independent” as it should be because it is still reliant upon big moneymen and the whims of advertisers, but I feel that these are problems more akin to scratches than flesh-eating bacterial infection.

If I were revising my article today, I’d probably change the wording and sentence structure more than anything else, but I’d also focus more on what, exactly, the “tyranny of misperceptions” is, beyond press coverage as I was making a societal point. The “tyranny of misperceptions” is when people believe Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 (as mentioned in the original piece), when people believe Hillary Clinton killed Vince Foster, when someone misinterprets a poem about doves to be about skin-care products — the tyranny of misperceptions comes when people belittle Richard Nixon as “Watergate,” lunatics write about the Harry Potter books as Satanist propaganda, a politician is not allowed to change his mind lest the public consider him/her a “Waffler.” This tyranny exists every day, and always will — people will perceive things as they will, and little will change them, causing people to be pigeon-holed and ideas to be marginalized by “first impressions” and the power of perceptions. I try to fight first impressions, and my perception of the world and its inhabitants is constantly evolving. I hope the same is true for you, my Dear Reader, so that I may have company in revolution against this tyranny, because there is nothing more frustrating than ignorance of the important issues of the day or misunderstandings — I hate like hell to be misunderstood, and I hate like hell to misunderstand.

Data that bolsters my assessment of the 2008 campaign, with its emphasis on John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, is available today, and I will bold the parts that I believe are most important to understand when predicting the race without bias.

New polls show many Democratic voters could swing their support to Sen. John McCain in the general election if their candidate isn’t nominated. […] The poll suggests if Obama wins, a majority of Clinton supporters — 51 percent — would be dissatisfied or upset. The number was 35 percent in January. The poll had a sampling error of plus or minus 7.5 percentage points. […] According to a Gallup Poll taken March 7-22, about one in five Obama supporters — or 19 percent — said they will vote for McCain if Clinton is the Democratic nominee. If Obama’s the nominee, more than one in four Clinton supporters — or 28 percent — said they’d vote for McCain.

The last time many Democrats were willing to vote for a Republican was during the Reagan years: 26 percent in 1980, and 25 percent in 1984.

The bitterness of the Democratic division is not the only reason so many Democrats are considering voting for McCain. A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. Poll taken February 1-3 suggests many Democrats like McCain. The poll showed Democrats were split over McCain: 44 percent said they like him, 42 percent disliked him.

Not good, my friends, especially not when he is giving sensible, moderate speeches against unilateralism and in favor of the World while Democrats bicker over whose Pastor is the prettiest and whose victories are more legitimate.

NATO is not messing around with violent protests in Serbia.

NATO peacekeepers in Kosovo will respond with “all appropriate means” when faced with deadly weapons in Serb protests, a spokesman for the KFOR peacekeeping force said on Wednesday. “We are not a police force. We don’t have the same rules. Don’t expect KFOR to send flowers when we are being shot at,” KFOR spokesman Col. Jean-Luc Cotard told a news conference in Pristina, capital of newly independent Kosovo.

The NATO-led peacekeeping force of 16,000 bristled at Serb allegations of “brutality” during riots on March 17 in the flashpoint town of Mitrovica, a Serb stronghold and now a bastion against Albanian-dominated independent Kosovo. Serbia’s nationalist Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica accused the allied force of turning “snipers and banned weapons” on Serb protesters as they battled over a United Nations court building the Serbs had occupied.

NATO said Serbs hardliners fired automatic weapons and threw grenades and Molotov cocktails during the clash. A 25-year-old Ukrainian U.N. policeman was killed by a grenade and a Serb protester was shot in the head and gravely wounded. “I make a strict distinction between citizens and murderers,” Cotard said. KFOR, in such circumstances, was entitled “to use all appropriate means”, he said.

At the least, this shows that there are still military forces in the world who understand that military force is not supposed to be soft and gentle. A violent action often deserves a violent response, and so it is with brutal attempts to stifle a democracy. And that isn’t all the encouragement freedom and progress have to claim today: Iraq’s government is fighting the militias, and their Prime Minister personally led the Iraqi force against them, warning them to stop fighting because it’s time to stabilize.

I know, “encouragement freedom and progress have to claim…” sounds propagandistic, perhaps, or violent, but please do not take it so. What I mean is that there is a school of thought that calls for violence not to be confronted because violence is violence and so retaliation is wrong. I do not think that right, especially not in Serbia, and I am simply encouraged by the sight of an Iraqi-run military operation.

Some people need to get over themselves and all their perceived slights against them:

When the owners of Quickie Burger and Dogs chose their logo, they thought it would make patrons crave an order of chili cheese fries. But the logo, a busty woman in a tight shirt straddling a hamburger, has drawn criticism from campus groups. The newest addition to the South State Street landscape has caused a stir on campus with its brightly colored logo, which some believe is offensive. The restaurant, which opened two weeks ago, sits south of campus at the intersection of State and Hill streets. Adorning the blue awning above the restaurant next to its name is an image of a cowgirl riding a hamburger.

The Stonewall Democrats, a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender caucus of the University’s College Democrats chapter, has taken offense with the restaurant’s logo and recently began circulating a petition to sway the owners to change the logo. LSA senior Kolby Roberts, a member of the Stonewall Democrats who has led the effort, said he finds the logo’s message inappropriate and offensive. “I have a problem that you take a women riding a hamburger and you put it next to the word ‘quickie,’ ” he said. “It just seems like it’s not putting a good message out there for the objectification of women.”

Maria Arman, whose family owns the restaurant, said the logo was meant to invoke a cowboy theme. “We were thinking beef, rodeo, so instead of putting a cowboy, we just picked a cowgirl,” she said. “It’s a rodeo-style cowgirl riding a bull, but instead, it’s a burger. It was put together to be funny and different. No offense was meant to anyone.” Before selecting a logo for the restaurant, which features a maize and blue color scheme with televisions tuned to ESPN on the interior, the owners showed the logo to more than 100 people and none of them objected, Arman said.

“The people who we talked to told us, ‘It’s a college town and the kids will think its funny,’” she said.

Instead of worrying about whether or not a cheesy-but-amusing hamburger stand is offensive to women everywhere, people should focus on events with real-world repercussions to women everywhere. Like this testament to the lengths the world still has to go to be liberal.

A teenage girl and two young men in Iran have been sentenced to lashes for having sex.

The court dismissed the girl’s claim that she was raped. It said she had sex of her own free will, the official Iran Daily newspaper reported. The girl was sentenced to 100 lashes because her accusations of rape and kidnap could have landed her partners a death penalty, the Tehran judge said. Sex outside marriage is illegal in Iran and capital punishment can be imposed. The young men in the case were sentenced to 30 and 40 lashes each.

The Iran paper quotes the girl, who has not been named, as confessing: “I trusted one of these young men, whom I got to know by phone, and went to his place. “But because he betrayed me, I filed the case against him and his friend out of revenge.”

In December the UN General Assembly voted to censure Iran for human rights violations, including discrimination against women and girls. Tehran rejected the criticism as propaganda. Under Iranian law, girls over the age of nine and boys over 16 face the death penalty for crimes such as rape and murder, while capital punishment can be imposed in certain cases of illegal sexual relationships.

What can I say to that, exactly? It’s absolutely shameful and horrifying to decent people everywhere, right? And as if this were not a great study in contrasts between what people worry about and what they, perhaps, should worry about, then this tells us that nothing is ever clear-cut and no one can be pigeon-holed without you sacrificing insight to the world and those who live in it. George W. Bush has been rebuked by the Supreme Court for asking a lower court not to execute people because their rights were violated. Digest that one for awhile.

The Obama campaign released its tax forms from the 2000s today, excluding their 2007 returns, and they’ve “challenged” Hillary Clinton to do the same because they believe it makes her look bad not to and they know that her husband’s forms will be an embarrassment if she decides to. No matter what she does she is in a bind, and this is a true Catch 22: keep them private, as she has every right, and she’s hiding something; release them, and you know why she was hiding something! I only wish that we didn’t focus on what I surmise are ultimately shallow questions, although I suppose there’s something to be said (and Republicans said it through the 90s, and Obama seems to be implying it now) that the Clintons can’t be trusted not to pimp the White House out to campaign donors. And of course, we have to have the argument over whether or not Hillary Clinton ever came under sniper fire in Bosnia. All the while, Americans are facing significant economic trials and the War in Iraq is disappearing from the media, for better and for worse. I for one am thrilled the media and the candidates are allowed to have their pomp and circumstance while Americans are struggling with their bread and butter.

At this moment I am surrounded by incense, guitar riffs and good (rowdy) people. This alone does not prevent me from making a substantive filing here at the Office. I am incapable of that because of the worst Internet connection known to man, and so I shall return tomorrow.

Two US Senators are calling for the ouster of the Federal Housing Chief. I believe it is with good reason, and I would note that it is government positions like those at FEMA, HUD, etc. etc. that often have the most direct effects on the regular people the government is supposed to serve, and it always disappoints me when hacks hold positions of power in critical institutions that lead to crisis later. Bill Clinton, in My Life, writes about FEMA and says that he had made a priority of appointing a competent director because in the event of a disaster, he’s the most important man in the world to the people affected. Not only has the Bush Administration mishandled Housing and Urban Development, they’ve disgraced the environment and the goals of conservation here and into the future, with new evidence coming to the forefront about our shameful inaction in protecting endangered species of plants and animals.

One day, I’d like to do an empirical study of autocratic nations which have a significant democratic movement rise, become crushed by the government, and see how often that movement grows over time to overthrow its dictatorship. There’s a belief in some political circles that once freedom and liberalization are “on the march,” as George W. Bush famously puts it, it can not be stopped, only contained and only for the short-term. With that in mind, I believe that this is beautiful.

Zimbabwe’s opposition is trying to thwart plans by the regime of President Robert Mugabe to rig Saturday’s elections by offering cash rewards to anyone who comes forward with evidence. A website and postal address have been set up in the Hague promising $5,000 (£2,500) for the first 40 whistleblowers, a fortune in a country where inflation of 150,000% has reduced average salaries to the equivalent of £3 a month. Posters will go up this week advertising the rewards from an organisation called Zimbabwe Democracy Now. They warn: “It is illegal in Zimbabwe and anywhere else in the world for anyone to destroy, tamper with or try to hide election results.”

Among the offences listed are stuffing ballot boxes, voting in more than one station, bribing people with food, voting under orders from a superior and registering “ghost” or dead voters. “We will see who is rigging the vote this time,” the posters declare. “We will not let our dreams be stolen.” Travelling across Zimbabwe from the townships of Bulawayo to rural areas in Mugabe’s home province of Mashonaland West and businessmen’s haunts in Harare, I found that every person I spoke to was demanding change. Not one wanted the 84-year-old Mugabe to stay on after 27 years in power.

“Look at what has become of us,” said Promise, one of a huddle of four scrawny men selling firewood along the highway from Chegutu to Harare.

I dearly wish that the opposition can defeat Robert Mugabe and bring change to a part of the world in desperate need of it.

Bill Richardson crawled out of the woods today to throw his support and supporters, all five of them, to Barack Obama. Of far greater interest to me are the latest comments by the former President, Bill Clinton. What he said was quite bizarre but, I think, prophetic: “I think it would be a great thing if we had an election between two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interests of the country and people could actually ask themselves who is right on the issues, instead of all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics.”

He was talking about his wife and John McCain; he was, it is widely believed, implying that Barack Obama’s patriotism would be a major general election issue. This is, undoubtedly, true, and one of the more foolhardy harms Barack Obama is exposing himself to. He won’t wear an American flag-pin because he does not want to display “false patriotism.” I certainly understand and agree with his position but this, coupled with his wife’s infamous “This is the first time I’ve ever been proud of my country!” comment, will be a potent punch against an Obama candidacy that will be coupled with charges of Islamic treachery, anti-Christianity and radicalism. Obama is right that flag-pins are false patriotic images; he is naive (Yahtzee!) to continue this tradition in a campaign for the Presidency.

There are countless attacks candidates will face without walking into landmines unnecessarily. Clinton recognizes this, and the criticism stands true. I’ve been predicting that an Obama candidacy would ruin politics for an entire young generation due to the nastiness the Republicans would destroy him with, and Clinton is hinting at that. I’ve also long said that nothing is ever certain in politics, so we’ll have to wait and see, but I think the former President’s warning is true enough. (His wife is weak, too, but on different levels than Obama.)

Spent the morning working on a variety of things — a collection of poetry I’ve been writing for awhile, baseball season previews for BaseballEvolution.com, reading from a few books on metaphysical Russian literature, and looking at George W. Bush’s September 12th, 2002 speech to the United Nations. I gave it another look because Christopher Hitchens refers to it as the most misunderstood speech of the Bush Presidency and I must say, I come away from it even more convinced that the War in Iraq was and is just. I recommend it to you, Dear Reader, if only because I’m sure you haven’t looked at it in a long time (if ever) and would benefit from doing so on an intellectual, historical and political level.

Two interesting polls are out today: Clinton is leading Obama significantly, and McCain has a lead over Obama and Clinton now, according to Gallup. I’ve always preached that polls are often insignificant at this time of year but in this case, not so much; obviously, it has real-world ramnifications for the Democratic primary campaign but what is quite interesting, to me, is that McCain would be over anyone at this time. He has not truly had the time to start to do the things I expect him to do to the Democrats to win the Presidency: he has yet to campaign hard, define his opponents or make in-roads all over the country, yet he has already taken a lead by some polling data. This campaign is not a Democratic lock (as I have previously argued that McCain will win the Presidency) and I am starting to think that Barack Obama has peaked with his speech, which history will record as a masterpiece of sorts but it seems to have furthered a slip in the candidate’s standing now, today. I’m not sad to see it, as I don’t believe him to be a strong candidate for the Democrats or a good potential President, but I am a little surprised that he’d start to lose to Clinton this late in the game. He should have locked it up by now.