Presidential election 2016

I dunno if any of you have heard, but there is an election for president of the United States in 2016.

Does it sound weird for me, a self-professed radical leftist, to say that I think I might prefer Michael Bloomberg over Hillary Clinton? (This is assuming Bernie won't be on the ticket. Or Nader. Or Feingold.)

There is a part of me that thinks that, at least when I'm listening to Bloomberg, I generally know what the smoke he is blowing up my ass is.

And maybe I'm still burned by actively volunteering for Bill Clinton in 1992, then watching the horror show that we got for eight years of the Clinton presidency (see, e.g., DOMA, PRWORA, IIRIRA, AEDPA, Don't Ask, Don't Tell, NAFTA, maintained the so-called "War On Drugs", pioneered "extraordinary rendition", authorized logging and clearcutting of old growth forest, and on, and on.) I'm not saying Clinton wasn't an extraordinarily gifted politician: he certainly was. He was one of the foremost orators and extemporaneous speakers of the last half of the century. He was also fundamentally conservative, and his positions and policies made Reagan and Nixon look like bleeding heart red diaper babies.

/rant

I almost made the below paragraph another post, but decided to keep the theme of the presidential election all in one post. Hopefully, this might be about the last you hear from me (anytime soon) on this year's presidential election...

I continue to wonder, as some of the pundits and talking heads did in the beginning, if Trump was paid by the Democratz to run. What a gift to Hillary Clinton that jackass is. Surely Sarah Palin was paid off to endorse him: the combination of tragicomic buffoonery with those two is just impossible to imagine without some palms being greased.

In all of these things, we reap what we sow, and honestly we don't have a great history. If we elect a hateful bigoted racist xenophobic classist elitist clown like Trump, it won't be that different than electing a B- grade movie actor who played short man to a chimp.

Vote! (I did.)

As longtime readers of this blog already know, I take voting very seriously. Though it mystifies some of my lefty friends, I believe that the franchise is a critical right, and should be expressed meaningfully and thoughtfully by all those who we haven't disenfranchised fucked over.

And since I'm pretty open about it, as I did in 2010, I'm again posting photograph of both sides of my voted ballot for the Alaska 2012 general election:

Some thoughts:

voting thoughtfully is a time consuming process. It once again took me several hours of research to decide how I was going to vote.
I was surprised to find that I actually was okay with voting for the democrats in the US House, State Senate, and State House races, and didn't feel like I was just voting against the republicrats.
I particularly dig the candidate for US House, Sharon Cissna, who is aggressively anti-TSA for outstanding reasons. (And Michelle Scannell is her former chief of staff.)
As for bonds, I'm generally tax-and-spend, but unstated transportation bonds where I couldn't find any clear indication of what it would be spent on? Since it's a decent prediction that that "something" would be primarily to build and improve infrastructure for single passenger automobile transportation, I passed.
A constitutional convention? Ummm, sure? Why the heck not? (This is required by state law to be automatically included on the ballot every ten years.) Here are some thoughts on what a constitutional convention could do (though I'm not at all sure how I feel about a unicameral legislature, which the author advocates for.)
Justice Winfree I was genuinely kind of torn on, and it was a somewhat close call. (I mostly evaluate appellate judges based on their written opinions, especially their dissents, where you get to judge how they really feel about stuff.) 
Judge Bolger sucks.
The real timesuck was researching every single superior court and district court judge, using their applications to the bench, in some cases their reappointment packets, and in some cases, extraneous web searches when this didn't yield enough information.
Turns out it's actually really important to vote on judicial retention in Alaska: judges are regularly retained by as little as 55-60% of voters.

Okay: back to work for me!

Is this your bike? Or: notes on grammar, irony, and intentional misuse

Below is a recent posting from the ever-vigilant Midtown Ponce Security Alliance (MPSA), a citizen group that employs off duty Atlanta PD cops to patrol a nearby area with a significant emphasis onbusting "gangs" of trans* prostitutes, or what MPSA ally Wayne Mock of the similarly styled off duty rentacop police force Midtown Blue likes to call "tranny hookers."

Is this your bike?

May 13, 2012 · Posted in Eye on Midtown 

APD recently arrested a homeless male who is staying at the Peachtree-Pine “shelter” for stealing money out of parking lot boxes on West Peachtree Street. They are looking for the owner/victim of the bike he was riding, a baby-blue, almost brand-new Power Climber 2X suspension by Dynacraft. The subject refused to divulge where he found the bicycle. According to the police report, the “shelter” folks told police that he is new to Midtown community. If you are missing a bike please contact Investigator Cantin directly at JCantin@atlantaga.gov.

Power Climber? Dynacraft? Whoa! Sweet ride that someone is no doubt burning to get back, right? Well, in case the desperate crime victim needs their memory jogged, this might be their bike if they recently paid $88.00 for it at Wal Mart.

What really rubs raw about this article is not their lack of understanding that they really mean "dual suspension" rather than "2X suspension", but rather their bizarre and inappropriate use of scare quotes (a.k.a. air quotes) around "shelter." No matter one's position on the Peachtree and Pine shelter run by the Metro Atlanta Taskforce for the Homeless, it's most definitely a shelter. Check out this article and the reader comments to get a small flavor of the debate over this shelter. If you click through on that article, try to ignore the blatantly unobjective [micro] journalism in a series described thusly: "Welcome to another edition of "Visions for Vacancies," where we visit a local vacant commercial building and ask you what you'd like to see go in that space.…"

Confidential to Midtown Patch: the Peachtree and Pine shelter isn't vacant, and the parking lot across the street from it isn't part of the shelter, and those who hang out in the parking lot (which really isn't as terrifying as they make it sound: I ride by it semi-regularly) explicitly aren't allowed to access the shelter's services.

Confidential to MPSA: the word shelter isn't ironic. Perhaps you were going for a "writer's concise (but possibly misleading) paraphrasing, characterization, or intentional misrepresentation of statements, concepts, or terms used by a third party."

For the grammar nerds out there, if wikipedia isn't a sufficiently reliable source, see also the MLA Style Manual (3rd. Ed., 2008) at section 3.48(a), or The Chicago Manual of Style (15th Ed., 2003) at section 7.58. I assume the CMS 16th Edition (2010) section is numbered similarly, but I don't have it to check. Anyone out there in internetlandia have the 16th edition and want to post a comment confirming or denying this?

Earthquakes, militarism, and memory

The earthquake in Haiti is more tragedy for an already tragic country, and international aid (with and without automatic weapons at the ready) is beginning to pour in. Estimates of deaths are anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000+. While the outpouring of aid and support is clearly a good thing, I have to wonder how quickly Americans will forget about this, the way we forget about most disasters outside our borders.

Quick: what the last natural disaster that caused over 50,000 deaths? If you guessed the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in China, you'd probably be right. 69,197 are confirmed dead, and more than 18,000 remain missing.

But did you remember the 2005 2005 Kashmir earthquake that caused an estimated 79,000 deaths, and left more than 3 million people homeless?

I really don't mean to minimize the deaths and suffering in Haiti. Though if I were Haitian, I'd be a little concerned about the relief personnel from the United States being so heavily military, including the 82nd Airborne, a Marine expeditionary force, and the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson. Let's not forget that the US occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, or that this isn't the first time in recent memory that the 82nd Airborne has been knocking on Haiti's door, or even the first time this decade US Marines have dropped by.

Rather, the point which I'm making (probably somewhat poorly) is how quick we are to forget mass deaths when they are outside of our borders. We certainly haven't forgotten Hurricane Katrina, where 1,836 died and 700+ remain missing; we haven't forgotten September 11, where 2,992 died. Again, not to diminish the suffering in those events, but consider the relative scale.

It's a little like the American public getting all freaked out about 3 deaths from E. coli tainted spinach, or West Nile Virus (for which annual US deaths peaked at 284 in 2002, and were 28 last year), while somehow forgetting that somewhere around 5,700 people die every day of HIV/AIDS (who happen to be largely located in sub-Saharan Africa.) Or that around 2,400 people die every day from malaria (who happen to be largely located in sub-Saharan Africa.)

How long will it take before we forget Haiti again?

And aren't there better ways of assisting countries in need than combat troops?

JFK

JFK: mediocre president, horrible airport.

JFK presidency: we canonize and lionize any president who is assassinated, and even those who just die. (Newsflash: all humans die. Being a dead president, or a dead pop singer, or any other flavor of public figure, doesn't make your death more tragic. There are, of course, degrees of difference. Johnny Cash and Kurt Vonnegut dying is considerably more of a loss than Michael Jackson.) Anyway, he was a philanderer who led the world to the brink of nuclear destruction and escalated the conflict in Vietnam.

His little brother dying a couple months ago was another excellent example of being way, way too star-obsessed with public figures. Yes, Ted Kennedy was a reasonably respectable senator. he did some good things. He also collaborated on No Child Left Behind, supported the invasion of Afghanistan, and generally compromised with the right wing any time it seemed politically expedient. Funny that in all the news coverage on Ted Kennedy's death, I literally heard the dreaded word "Chappaquiddick" mentioned once; I heard "Mary Jo Kopechne" zero. Those of you who know me, or at least know my politics from this blog, know that this is no right wing talk radio sort of rant. I just want us to stop this bizarre hero worship of deeply flawed people simply because they've died. I'm very proud to have gone to a college where, when they made the mistake of lowering the flag to half-mast when Nixon died, it was burned within hours.

On to the airport: my flight was first on time, then early, then delayed for mechanical for one hour, then delayed for 2.25 hours, and now one hour delayed. I'm going to check now.

The balm: one of the bartenders in the Delta Sky Club mixes a screamer of a mojito: mostly rum, with a splash of mojito mix and just a kiss of soda water. Yum.