Politics

Morford on peaceful revolution via raising the price of gas

stuart updegrave — Wed, 10 May 2006 11:46:00 GMT

I love reading Mark Morford -- he's got bits of Molly Ivins and Hunter S. Thompson and a sense of palpable wonder/excitement/outrage depending on the subject at hand. I'd forgotten about him for a while, until Julie was laughing over his column one day. There and then, I added his rss feed to my reader.

His latest column is, to me, a great read:

Bring On The $6 Gallon Of Gas
It would revolutionize America. It would make us all better humans. But could you handle it?

No wait, not six. To hell with that. Make it 10. Ten bucks a gallon, no matter what the going rate for a barrel of light sweet crude. That would so completely, violently, brilliantly do it. Revolutionize the country. Firebomb our pungent stasis. Change everything. Don't you agree?

Here's what we could do: Give gas discounts to cab drivers (at least initially) and metro transit systems and low-income folks, those who have to drive their busted-up '78 Honda Civics to their jobs scrubbing restaurant toilets and flipping burgers and vacuuming the residual cocaine from the seat cushions of numb SUV owners. Everyone else, 10 bucks a gallon, across the board. Eleven for premium. [...]

What, too far fetched? Too implausible? Not at all. Sure, 10 bucks a gallon would be extremely painful for a while. Citizens would wail. Commuters would scream and stomp and die. But then we would do what we always do. We would evolve. Adapt. Systems would quickly transform, habits would instantly shift. It would be easier to implement than the goddamn mess that is Medicare reform, far easier than Lots of Children Left Behind, more viable and livable than the toxic existence of Homeland Security and the disgusting Patriot Act.

Go, read it. Be entertained. Think about reading him regularly, for brilliant beautiful hyperbolic rants on the crazy state of our country.

Dear President Bush,

stuart updegrave — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 16:10:00 GMT

Perhaps you should consider restraining your desire to impress the public with your vast vocabulary, if you can't manage to actually get the words right.

I was embarrassed both for you and for this country when I saw you on TV yesterday uttering the following while discussing the recent Amnesty International report condemning US treatment of Guantanamo Bay detainees:

“It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of -- and the allegations -- by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble -- that means not tell the truth.”

Last I checked, 'disassemble' means to take apart or dismantle.'Dissemble' is probably what you intended -- and that still doesn't exactly mean “not tell the truth.“

Tom DeLay and ignorance of the law

stuart updegrave — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 14:14:00 GMT

On Congressman Tom DeLay (R-Tx) and his impending legal / ethical woes due to several lobbyist-paid trips, from MSNBC today: (link)

Bobby R. Burchfield, an attorney for DeLay, said that none of these incidents presents serious jeopardy for his client. The primary reason, he said, is that DeLay believed that the trips were arranged and paid for by bona fide organizations unconnected to lobbyists or lobbying groups, and that DeLay had no reason to think otherwise. [...]

"Congressman DeLay cannot be held accountable for things that he did not know about," Burchfield said.

Last time I checked, ignorance of the law was no excuse for us regular folk. Further, the mere fact that someone tells you what you're doing is OK doesn't necessarily make it true. I'm puzzled as to why it should be any different for Rep. DeLay, as Mr. Burchfield seems to assert.

excuse me, could you clean up my mess?

stuart updegrave — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 13:34:00 GMT

On the question “Are we winning the war in Iraq?“:

"Winning or losing is not the issue for 'we,' in my view, in the traditional conventional context of using the word winning and losing and of war," [Donald] Rumsfeld said Tuesday at a news conference. "The people that are going to defeat that insurgency are going to be the Iraqis." (link)

Uh, hey, Rummy. Didn't we create that insurgency for them? How cool is it for us to go into Iraq in the name of freedom and democracy, cause tons of resentment (which fuels the insurgents), and attempt to wash our hands of the cleanup now that there has been an election?

Oh and too bad about that election, huh, that three months later they're still wrangling over makeup of hte new government, only in order to do it all over again this winter.

verifiable voting

stuart updegrave — Thu, 25 Nov 2004 18:54:00 GMT

in my post-election post 'Crisis / Response', i mentioned that i've been thinking about what i can do over the next four years 'to help ensure a better turnout next time'. a lot of that thought so far has been about the problems (more uncovered all the time) with the 'black box' voting systems used in the last few elections. www.blackboxvoting.org has lots of information on this for those who want to find more.

the other day, i saw an interesting link: www.votehere.com. they're a bellevue company working on voter-verifiable, auditable voting mechanisms. according to the information i've seen, VoteHere focuses on verification as opposed to securing the systems. systems are inherently crackable; the Black Box Voting folks have shown the ease with which Diebold's systems can be broken.

one of the VoteHere system outputs is an election transcript that can be audited by anyone that's interested. second, a receipt that the user can use to verify that their votes were recorded as cast.

and, they've published their source code.

here is a very high-level overview of how VoteHere's technology works (note, PDF link):

http://www.votehere.com/vhti/documentation/how_VHTI_works.pdf

and FAQ (also PDF):

http://www.votehere.com/vhti/documentation/VH_VHTi_FAQ.pdf

there are a lot more documents at that level of the site. as time allows, i'm going to try to dig through them more.

Crisis / Response

stuart updegrave — Sat, 06 Nov 2004 11:20:00 GMT

Wednesday morning's news was so disappointing -- seeing that our country had elected George Bush to a second term made me have what many religious people might consider a crisis of faith. I'm trying to get past this, and am beginning to think I'm doing a decent job.

A few ways that this manifests:

Reflecting that now, at least Kerry and the Dems won't get tarnished for failing to clean up all of Bush's messes
Keeping away from anger and bitterness. I see many of my friends seething with a righteous indignation right now. This strikes me as incredibly unproductive; instead we need to be focusing on: What went wrong? and How do we avoid this the next time around?
Thinking about my 'What Next?' items -- what can I personally get involved in over the next four years to help ensure a better turnout next time? I’ve got a few ideas already, and will address them (and others that come up) in future posts.

Perhaps it's incredibly wishful thinking on my part, but I have found some slight consolation in the early analysis that 2nd-term Bush is likely to be less partisan. Well, that and the difficulty he's going to have carrying out some of the more egregious parts of his agenda.

Fareed Zakaria (one of my favorite political writers) speaks to the likelihood of a more centrist second term in an article from the Nov 15 2004 issue of Newsweek:

The question for many is, how different will this Bush term be from his first? My own sense is that it will be different, but not for the right reasons. The second term of the Bush administration will be less aggressive, less unilateral, less militant and less arrogant in its foreign policy. However, this will not be due to a change of heart, but because the administration will be hemmed in. America is now constrained by the world, a situation largely created by George Bush's policies. Unilateralism, military force and arrogance simply won't work.

If you want to see what Bush 2 would look like, look around—it's already happening. On North Korea, Iran and many other issues, the Bush administration is working with allies, using international institutions, preferring diplomacy to force and being patient. Sometimes too patient. The irony and tragedy of Bush's second term might well be that even if force or the threat of force were necessary—to deal with North Korea and Iran, for instance—George Bush would be a paper tiger. He would not be able to garner the minimal support or legitimacy to make good on his threats. Any attempt at another major military strike, and the United States would truly have to go it alone—perhaps without the backing even of Britain.

Source:

Zakaria: Writing Prose for a New Term

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6399907/site/newsweek/

More soon.

cheers,

~stuart

William Gibson blogging again

stuart updegrave — Wed, 27 Oct 2004 21:48:00 GMT

in case any of you three readers out there aren't yet aware, William Gibson (one of my favorite authors) is blogging again. this, after a hiatus of slightly longer than a year.

so far, the vast majority of it is very politically charged -- a bit of comment from him, along with quotes from various news sources. his initial post upon returning explains well why he's back:

Why?

Because the United States currently has, as Jack Womack so succintly puts it, a president who makes Richard Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln.

And because, as the Spanish philospher Unamuno said, "At times, to be silent is to lie."

one interesting non-political tidbit: “Pattern Recognition“ is optioned for a film from Warner Bros, with Peter Weir directing. yay!

Blog site: http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/archive.asp

RSS: http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blogger_rss.xml

What happens after Arafat?

stuart updegrave — Wed, 27 Oct 2004 13:44:00 GMT

I suspect that Ariel Sharon is excited about the possibility of the looming death of his long-time adversary, Yasser Arafat (as reported all over the place).

MSNBC has the following to say, in an article from 27-Oct:

The Arabic-language Al-Jazeera news channel and The Associated Press, quoting officials in Arafat’s office, reported Thursday morning that the three senior officials — Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia; his predecessor, Mahmoud Abbas; and Salim Zaanoun, head of the 512-member Palestinian parliament — would run the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization under a decree Arafat issued sometime before he became gravely ill, al-Jazeera reported.

I have to wonder what is in store for the Palestinian people -- and Israel -- after Arafat dies. He has held such a grip on Palestinian political life for so long, for good or bad, that the possibilities after his passing seem vast. Will the vacuum created cause internal struggle? Will it provide an opportunity for Qureia to lead with a true mandate? Might Hamas ascend in the turmoil? Perhaps it will provide an opportunity for a stable democracy to flourish.

I wish I knew the answers to these issues. I'm sure I'm not the only one.