The Sh*t L*st

Ok, found my voter's guide. Just going to vote the opposite of everything recommended here.

My Bizarro-CCCA Voter's Guide:

Pres: Kerry

Senate: Boxer

HOUSE
53: Davis

STATE SENATE
Kehoe

STATE ASSEMBLY
66: Nicholson
73: Calzada
74: Underwood
75: Huemann
76: Saldana
77: Larkin
78: Davis
79: Vargas
80: Andreas

PROPS
1a: Y
59: Y
60: Y
60a:
61:
62: N
63: Y
64: N
65:
66: Y
67:
68: N
69: N
70: N
71: Y
72: Y

I find it odd that the CCCA opposes 63, since I imagine a number of their poor and unhealthy brethren would benefit by this. However, I don't find it especially surprising.

Finally got my absentee ballot in the mail yesterday -- just in time not to be able to mail it back in time.

Also got the following email:



Is that all you have to say for yourself?

On the one hand, I'm inclined to say this woman probably has the worst job in the world right now. And I should accept the fact that she was even able to hit the reply and send buttons to my email as a small victory.

On the other hand, this is why they call you a public servant. And this is the kind of thing that gives government a bad and makes a folk hero out of people like that moron Howard Jarvis.

I'm going to just mail my ballot first thing tomorrow. If the post office does it part, my ballot should get to the San Diego Registrar's office in time on Tuesday. Of course, that doesn't give me much time to actually inform myself on all the ballot propositions. I was going to use Moveon.org's CA voter's guide as my "template", but I can't find it. (Someone emailed it to me this week.) So I'll have to follow the California League of Conservation Voters. Which I just discovered doesn't cover all the ballot measures.

Democracy: what a nuisance.

every time someone reads your blog, they pay you

Interesting idea. Will it work? I kinda doubt it. I'd guess that most the accounts right now are free or promotional or something.

The popularity listings is probably the most interesting feature. But if there really is any money to be made, I suspect it will be gamed by some spam-jockey in a trailer park outside Reno, or by a teenager in Romania, before too long.

Plus, the layout isn't anything special. If you could attract some serious writers, maybe this would work. This design isn't going to do it. Right now, it just looks like a bunch of monkeys at typewriters being paid with Monopoly money.

The blogger/adwords incentive model seems much more plausible.

Two business days until the election and I still haven't received the absentee ballot that I requested (twice) from the San Diego County Registrar of Voters last week.

Looks like you screwed me again, Sally McPherson.

Voice your patriotic disgust with my unconstitutional disenfranchisement here:

rovmail@sdcounty.ca.gov

I wish someone'd rip his lungs out, Jim.

Man, this song is telling the story of my life:

Y'all don't know what it's like
Being male, middle-class and white

Except, nowadays, I'd probably count as upper middle-class.

Here's your goddamned voters' guide:

In Their Own Words

Is it me or does it sound like U2 hired that Spanish firm that uses weather-modeling algorithms to construct Euro pop hits and combined that Supremes song "You Keep Me Hanging On," "Gloria," and a garage-band "yeah, yeah, yeah" for that song in the new iPod commercial? All it needs is a fucking g.u.i. -- which I guess is where the iPod comes in.

The funny thing: I still kinda like the song.

Had some business at a church today. It was also a grade school which made my presence doubly blasphemous I suppose. The church office was labeled "church office." From the inside, it looked a lot like any other office -- which made it all the more unsettling. Cubicles, computers, beeping phones. Maybe a little less religious paraphernalia than the average American workplace.

Church people are funny. I know that sounds condescending. But I figure anyone who believes in a higher power expects a certain amount of condescension. Maybe not from me. But, hell, I'm there in a pinch.

In the church office, there was an old woman talking with two church secretaries about her dead husband in heaven. The women were sympathetic -- probably because they could see her husband in heaven more or less as she described it. On my way out, I noticed that they had been joined by a man who looked rather like the boss from "The Office." I grinned a bit demonically imagining how he'd react to this situation.

I got the pamphlet on ballot initiatives that the state sends out last week. The thing's as big as a college textbook! So how many people are actually going to study this thing? And how many are simply going to follow the favorite Christian coalition voting guide, the last commercial they saw, or what Arnold says? As a means of governance -- what a fucking joke! Any economist will tell you, you're a fool to take it seriously.

There's a million dollars and ten thousand people out there to wipe out every informed vote.

Two decisions I have made -- both are fairly knee-jerk:

Prop 63 : Yes (I just want to drive all the millionaires out of San Diego -- ha!)

Prop 71 : Yes

Some help : Legislative Analyst's Office

Somewhere I work with just sent me this email, then handed me a copy of a flyer with the same info:

For anyone interested. I think every one should at least check it out.

Here is a link to a website with a (NON- Partisan) voters guide.

www.ccca.org

or for a more direct link to it?

http://65.108.245.174/2004general/countymapENG2004GE.htm

It shows ?who stands where? on MANY of the issues we face today, as opposed to one or two issues.

I believe these guides can help us all to vote in a more informed way.

He kept repeating that it was non-partisan.

What a waste of time. Life is a fucking waste of time.

Blowhard right-wing uncle forwarded me this junior college professor's reflections on the upcoming election. Whole morning shot picking apart the logic in this passive-aggressive neocon twaddle.

My response:

"The election of John Kerry will serve notice to every terrorist in every cave that the soft underbelly of American power is the timidity of American voters."

Bullshit. That someone would cast their vote on this single issue shows how far chickenhawk fears and Fox News ideology have infiltrated our electorate.

Manweller ignores this remark by Kerry in the last debate:

"The president and his experts have told America that it's not a question of if; it's a question of when. And I accept what the president has said. These terrorists are serious, they're deadly, and they know nothing except trying to kill.

"I understand that. That's why I will never stop at anything to hunt down and kill the terrorists." (Debate transcript)

What part of "hunt down and kill the terrorists" didn't you understand? Drop the Reaganesque platitudes and back your shit up.

A better framework for anticipating the impact of this election on this country, the world, and history than the stereotype of the terrorist in the cave might be the Arab kid in the madrass. Tom Friedman points to some sobering facts in his column last week:

"The Arab region has had the highest rate of population growth in the world in the last half century. It has among the highest unemployment rates in the world today. And one-third of the Arab population is under the age of 15 and will soon be entering both a barren job market and its child-bearing years. There are eight Saudis under age 15 for every one between ages 45 and 60." (New York Times, 17 Oct)

These guys aren't in caves -- not yet. One of the goals of our foreign policy should be keeping them out of the caves, not giving them reasons to find glory in the empty promises of zealots and pointless suicide missions. Bogusly justified, ill-planned military invasions are not a very bright way to do that.

There are other more relevant reasons to vote for Kerry. This is simply a reason not to vote for Bush.

Still contemplating sending this. Maybe after I tone it down a little. But then again, what's the point? These flag-thumping morons aren't capable of changing their minds. And anyone capable of changing their minds as a result of this wouldn't be capable of changing their minds as a result of this.

Is this the offhand remark that costs Kerry the election and leads to the end of the world?

With the military records to prove it.

Somebody here's listening to Rush Limbaugh. He sounds panicked. He'd better be careful, or he's going to end up back on the painkillers.

Polls Put Bush on Edge (Los Angeles Times)

He belongs over it.

As far as sacks of crap go, this guy just gets ranker and ranker. Sure he served as a swift boat commander in the Vietnam War. But he was Nixon's bitch after it. And if he had things his way, we'd probably still be fighting that war. Or, scarier still, we might have we won it. (See Pyrrhic victory.)

His Swift Boat group's attacks on Kerry's awards have been exposed as bullshit (see factcheck.org). And when confronted with evidence countering his position, as on Nightline last week, the pathology of his denial comes out.

Not really. It'll be fun watching this sack of crap spin for his life.

Fucking idiots!!! I was trying to exchange a faulty monitor for a client -- 58 minutes on the phone, transferred to 8 different people (6 Indians, 2 Americans). The last 4 (previous to the final one) each claimed that the next person I spoke to would be the last person I needed to speak to. The last guy told me that I had to have the part in front of me so they could try to troubleshoot it over the phone. (Our tech had already troubleshot it -- it is defective.) Thanks, asshole. Now why couldn't someone have told me that 58 minutes ago?

Compaq, you're on the Shit List -- as soon as I have time to add you.

In The New York Times today, William Safire parrots the new Fox News rationale for going to war in Iraq after the Duelfer Report: European oil companies were trying to make money in Saddam's Iraq.

As the hares zoom by, Paul Volcker, the U.N. investigative tortoise, tells his people to forget the French and Russians and to concentrate on Kofi Annan's right-hand man, Benon Sevan, and Kofi Annan's son's relationship with Cotecna, the U.N.'s see-no-evil "monitor," The White House is wringing its hands because it needs the U.N.'s blessing on the Iraqi election, and John Kerry must be praying not to be asked about this in tonight's debate.

What are they going to ask Kerry? "William Safire writes in today's New York Times, The former French ambassador to the U.N., Jean-Bernard M�rim�e, is listed as receiving vouchers for 11 million barrels of oil from Saddam, the proceeds from which would beat a diplomat's pay. Doesn't this fact change everything and make it the right war, right place, right time?"

So French energy companies are as unscrupulous as American ones. I suppose the argument is: if only the French didn't have these economic interests in Saddam's Iraq, they would have ceded the crystalline logic of the Bush administration's rationale for war. To an angry, disaffected Iraqi or Middle Eastern Arab, I imagine this argument suggests that we had to depose Saddam so that American companies could profit from Iraq instead of French ones. The question for Safire is: so how exactly does this justify the invasion of Iraq? More to the point, how does it justify Bush's justifications of the war?

Put that question to Bush then count how long it takes him after his eyes roll back in his head to pull one of his bullshit "you gotta understand, Saddam was a brutal dictator" or "we're spreading freedom and democracy" platitudes out of his ass.

Is this satirical? Was he being sarcastic? The libel laws in the UK are notoriously rigid which would suggest -- without further confirmation -- that it is true. But then how could this go unremarked by the American media? This is a bombshell. I mean, everyone knows that orgies relieve social tension. It's just no one expected Justice Scalia to go public with the news.

He is the conservative bastion of the US supreme court, a favourite of President Bush, and a hunting partner of the vice-president. He has argued vociferously against abortion rights, and in favour of anti-sodomy laws.

But it turns out that there is another side to Justice Antonin Scalia: he thinks Americans ought to be having more orgies.

Challenged about his views on sexual morality, Justice Scalia surprised his audience at Harvard University, telling them: "I even take the position that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged."

Full Text

Everyone else is probably over it by now. But if I had an iPod, I'd erase everything else on it. Even now.

Deconstructing Derrida

In our self-righteous indignation, he will always live:

Jonathan Kandell's vitriolic and disparaging obituary of
Jacques Derrida takes the occasion of this accomplished
philosopher's death to re-wage a culture war that has surely passed
its time. Why would the New York Times assign the obituary to
someone whose polemics are so unrestrained and intellectual
limitations so obvious? There are reasonable disagreements to have
with Derrida's work, but there were none to be found in Kandell's
obituary. If Derrida's contributions to philosophy, literary
criticism, the theory of painting, communications, ethics, and
politics made him into the most internationally renown European
intellectual during these times, it is because of the precision of
his thought, the way his thinking always took a brilliant and
unanticipated turn, and because of the constant effort to reflect
on moral and political responsibility. Kandell reports that Derrida
disparaged the classics and jettisoned notions of truth, but
Derrida made his name through reading Plato and Rousseau, among
others, and anyone who has read his work in the last years know
that questions of truth, of meaning, of life and death - the
perennial questions of philosophy - are the ones that claimed him
most. This most outrageous obituary fails to demean Derrida only
because his work will continue to be read unabated, but it does
cast a shadow on those who wrote and published it. Why would the
NY Times want to join ranks with American reactionary
anti-intellectualism precisely at a time when critical thinking is
most urgently required?

Judith Butler
Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature
University of California at Berkeley

Yeah, maybe professors of Comparative Literature need to start their own cable channel where they can give us fair and accurate, no-spin news on the death of major European intellectual figures.

From some FEMA-queen in Florida:

"I have a plan!"

Who said that? Wait! Who says that every time you hear him speak?

That's right folks! KERRY!!!

In the two presidential debates I hear Kerry persistently say, "I have a plan!" but I have not heard him tell me what that plan is. "I have a plan for this. I have a plan for that." What is that plan? I have heard that phrase so much that I feel that I am being hypnotized by some repetative Gregorian chant!

I don't think he knows what that plan is because he has no backbone to decisively make or carry it out. Tonight, during the debate, Kerry announced that he is a Catholic. With this playing card, he hinted that he has a pro-life belief but if he becomes president he won't let that interfere with allowing others to have abortions. I don't get it.

If you believe abortion is murder, then you can't compromise that core principle. How can you negotiate murder? If Kerry is able to allow what he supposedly thinks is the blatant killing of human life, than does he really believe it is murder or is he just trying to appease both sides and retain the Catholic vote?

Bush has guts! He has principles he believes without compromise. I like that. I want a president who can lead not concede to every whim so that he can remain popular. Kerry would be a neutered president, Bush is a leader with balls.

My comment :

I think he asked you to look it up. You can find it here:

Plan for America

The debate format obviously doesn't lend itself to detailed exposulations of policy.

And if slackjawed fundamentalists didn't demonize family-planning and birth control and handjobs (I was going to say blowjobs, but handjobs are good enough -- especially self-administered ones), we could eliminate many more abortions of convenience. You have to waste the superfluous life force somewhere.

Obviously Kerry doesn't believe abortion is murder -- especially in real cases of heartbreaking trade-offs as opposed to abstract cases used for the purpose of knee-jerk moralizing.

As for the balls and guts, useful in running swift boat missions in the Mekong Delta perhaps. The health care crisis and deficit require something a little more cerebral.

Why do I even bother? I'm too delicate for democracy.

From The Scientist:

Ups and downs for Nobel Bourse

A virtual stock market for trading on Nobel Prize candidates missed medicine winners altogether.

Sorry, James Surowiecki. Maybe it'll get the Economics winner right, but the site seems to be out at the moment.

Tonight's the big night. Someone's chance to cash in and take the bounty.

Heard this on NPR the morning. Pretty... what? Shocking? Chilling?

No wonder Bush is so out of touch.

Cheney's intentions seem a bit baffling here. I figured the site was some RNC front. But then I guess the details don't really matter in any event. To cite a website address was enough to convince some people in the audience that Cheney hasn't favored Halliburton while in office.

Cheney Blunder Lauded Anti-Bush Web Site

By Joanne Kenen

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Vice President Dick Cheney probably did not intend to direct millions of television viewers to a Web site calling for President Bush's defeat but that's what a slip of the domain achieved.

Anyone who heeded Cheney's advice and clicked on "factcheck.com" on Wednesday morning was redirected to the site of anti-Bush billionaire investor George Soros that had a banner message saying "Why we must not reelect President Bush."

The GeorgeSoros.com site later put up a notice saying that it does not own factcheck.com and was not responsible for directing readers from that site to the Soros message. "We are as surprised as anyone by this turn of events," it said.

A lawyer for the factcheck.com site was not available for comment.

Defending his record as Halliburton's chief executive, Cheney said in the Tuesday night debate that Democratic vice-presidential challenger John Edwards was trying to use Halliburton as a smokescreen. Any voter who wanted the facts, Cheney said, should check out factcheck.com -- which led to the Soros site.

The Web site Cheney had in mind, factcheck.org, was not amused when the vice president proved that he was not master of the factcheckers' domain.

Factcheck.org, run by the Annenberg Center of the University of Pennsylvania, said on its site on Wednesday that Cheney not only got the domain name confused, he had mischaracterized its fact-finding.

"Cheney ... wrongly implied that we had rebutted allegations Edwards was making about what Cheney had done as chief executive officer of Halliburton," the site said on Wednesday.

"In fact we did post an article pointing out that Cheney hasn't profited personally while in office from Halliburton's Iraq contracts, as falsely implied by a Kerry TV ad. But Edwards was talking about Cheney's responsibility for earlier Halliburton troubles. And in fact, Edwards was mostly right."

The White House Web site annotated the debate transcript, parenthetically noting that Cheney meant factcheck.org, not factcheck.com. It linked the transcript to factcheck.org.

Of course, of all the issues debated and conflicting claims made last night, this is the one that everyone ends up focusing on. Still, shows you what kind of guy Cheney is. And the kind of people he's trying to impress.

It seemed to me, too, that he went out of his way not to thank Edwards in his final remarks as Edwards had thanked him. Man, that guy is an asshole. A real sack of crap.

By the way, I never got around to formally observing here what a fucking idiot that Democrat from Texas is who thought it would help Kerry to try to pass off these documents as legitimate. Just let the issue simmer. Now everyone is sick of it and those cocksuckers on Fox get to strut around acting like Bush's whole dereliction of duty was a forgery -- that he really was protecting the women and children from the Viet-Cong back here in the States.

I suppose Burkett's heart was in the right place. But think it through, man. If he hadn't of released the documents, Karl Rove probably would have himself. To the same effect.

Ok, we've all heard how bloggers broke the story on the forge Bush national guard memos, while missing the important point (the content of the documents was true.) Anyway, this is even BIGGER!

Since posting my DSL rant last week, I have:

1. Received two phone calls from a technician in India
2. Received an email from a Tier Technical Support rep with a repliable email address and a phone number at which to contact her.

And then, the coup de grace:

The techs in India determine the problem is in our phone lines and today, out of nowhere, SBC sends out to our house a tech who spends three hours checking and repairing our lines. The DSL service already seemed to be working a bit better. Now we're even getting better phone reception! I feel like a chubby teenager on Extreme Makeover.

I'd like to think that this would have happened even if I hadn't posted my rant. But, at the very least, it seems to have accelerated the process.

It is that paradox of the open market. Complain, grip, act like a jerk, file frivolous lawsuits and, in the long run everyone is better off for it. Grin and bear it (like the English) and you end up with higher prices and lousy service (like the English.) Still, you should try to be as civil as possible while still getting the service to which you are morally entitled.

So though it's not really the purpose of this blog to make nice and recognize a job well done, honor demands some acknowledgement of the quality of the service I have received. SBC support wins my praise, keeps my business, AND COMES OFF THE LIST. (I don't know if it's ever happened before.)

Thanks Keamoe, the service guy who came to our house today whoever you were (I was at work), third shift at the call center halfway around the world, and Blogger for the soapbox to sound off from.

Tomorrow, back on topic: why democracy burns my crack.

Curiously, since whining about my DSL service, it's gotten much better -- despite no direct communication with tech support and no reconfigurations of software or hardware!

In justice, an Indian tech left a couple messages for me. (Apparently, they looked at the blog link I sent them.)

So, Quick & Reilly quickly returns to the No. 1 spot. And SBC Yahoo! drops out of the Top 10.

Still, not happy with the run-around and still haven't gotten an answer to my question. I'll have to look into satellite internet service.

David Brooks today in the New York Times:

In weak moments, I think the best ticket for this country would be Bush-Kerry. The two men balance each other out so well.

Kerry can't make a decision; Bush makes them too quickly. Kerry changes his mind by the month; Bush almost never changes his mind. Kerry thinks obsessively about process questions, but can't seem to come up with a core conviction; Bush is great at coming up with clear goals, but is not so great about coming up with the process to get there.

That was the striking thing about the debate on Thursday night. It wasn't so much a clash of ideologies, or a clash of cultures. It was a clash of two different sorts of minds.

You could say it was a hedgehog (Bush) debating a fox (Kerry), if you want to use that tired but handy formulation.

No, we much prefer your tired bullshit formulation: the decisive commander-in-chief vs. the waffling flip-flopper.

There were two minds on display Thursday night: an knowledgeable, well-trained one. And one that cycles repeatedly through a playlist of about 8 sound bites.

It was good to see the Kerry team learned its lesson from Gore's debates in 2000 (though in retrospect, it's obvious we all should have been sighing in exasperation as we listened to Bush's bullshit that night.) Bush is going to have to try to cram a few more platitudes into that underpowered mind before the next debate. Can't wait to see the results. I'm already cringing.