50 State Strategy

I want to give a shout out to Howard Dean for making the decision four years ago to spend money and time in all fifty states. The winner of this election is the President of the nation and all of its people. Getting 50% +1 is not enough. It is not a mandate. It is a cheap way to get a win. Getting the message out to all 50 states, rather than just the states already leaning your way, allows the whole nation to get behind you. It is an upward spiral. There are liberals everywhere. If you can reach out and speak to them, you can build the energy necessary to gain a few votes and build a movement. Writing off a whole state from the beginning hurts, because as I’ve seen tonight even the reddest states have hundreds of thousands of people voting for the democrat. If you don’t give the population the opportunity to hear something different directed at them, you give those red state democrats less hope and fewer liberal friends.

Career Politicians

With the constitution created by business people, teachers, blacksmiths and other lay people, not career politicians, I like the idea of term limits. And besides, no politician who took more than 14 years to rise to the office has been elected President or Vice-President since Teddy Roosevelt. This tells me that the general public agrees without necessarily realizing it. I don’t mind a candidate not having decades of national and international political experience.

This is almost a defense of Palin, but not really. If you don’t know, you don’t know. Sadly you will get skewered for saying that to Katie Couric; the modern media will not accept that answer. But Palin’s display of hubris and bravado in the place of knowledge and experience excited her base and annoyed everyone else.

Obama’s ascension to the highest office in the land was fast. His years as a community organizer encompass the best of what we should want from our politicians. Talking, organizing, listening, solving and working.

Urban Archipelagism

I love cities. After the 2004 election, I became an Urban Archipelagist. I was deflated, wondering how it was that so much of my country disagreed with me; wondering whether I was wrong; or wondering what it was that I had missed. But then I read the Urban Archipelago article from the Stranger. Bush had won office by getting people to vote for him regardless of the fact that his policies would not be helpful to them; in fact, that his policies proved harmful to their livelihood. They had a guy who condescended to them so much that he pretended he wasn’t Ivy League educated, treated us all like children and would enact policy on the basis that he and his cronies knew best.

I’ve heard enough about small towns. Small towns are fine. But they are not better than big cities. The issue is the size of the community. Smaller communities might breed good people, due to close support, but the size of a community has nothing to do with the size of its town or city. As John Stewart said to Peggy Noonan, New York City is nothing but a bunch of small towns in one building. Cities breed tolerance, understanding and concern, as you are surrounded by people less like you.

The Moment I keep Coming Back To

The speech that makes me tingle was given at the Democratic Convention in 2004 by our new President-elect.

It is that fundamental belief — I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper — that makes this country work.  It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family: “E pluribus unum,” out of many, one.

This is how the American society should work. We are a better nation when our weakest people are able to start caring about more than the basic necessities of life. When they can move up the ladder of Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs. When our population is able to worry about more than their next meal, medication or bed, they can focus on solutions, businesses, ideas and innovations. We increase our base of knowledge and opportunity.

Switching Roles

Back in the day (1996), it used to be said that in American politics there is a Mother Party and a Father party and the Republicans are your Daddy. In other words, Democrats want to take care of everybody and discipline with a reasoned care. And with a down home twang, Republicans take the We-Know-Best mentality to Politics. The Newt standard and the Contract with America club did an incredible job of making any aggressive Democrat look like a blathering, angry, bleeding-heart democrat. That era is over. Obama brought the right amount of aggressiveness and confidence to successfully make the point that liberal politics is good for America.

As Andrew Sullivan said: Obama has the ability to grin like Reagan and brawl like Nixon. The man is just cool.

A Few Problems With Our New Guy

While it takes money to run a 50 state campaign, I was disappointed when Obama passed on public financing in order to raise $500 million from his huge support base. I said it before, and I really think this lead to more credit card debt. Second, I was upset about Obama’s Telecom Immunity vote. “Given the choice between voting for an improved yet imperfect bill, and losing important surveillance tools, I’ve chosen to support the current compromise.” Paraphrasing, I’ll fix it if/when I’m elected. But what if he didn’t win. You can’t take that vote back. You can’t speak as effectively for change when you were on board with the status quo. Well, I guess you have your chance.

So…

Please, Mr. President (chills). You got my vote. You got some of my money. You got some of my time. I ask you sir, please: make me proud.

1000 miles since April 2007. A thousand miles running on trails, sidewalks and roads in Bellingham, Orlando, Las Vegas, Seattle and more, baby.

This last weekend I hit that pretty cool milestone. Using my Nike+ system with my Nano, I have kept pretty meticulous track of my mileage. I was about the 8,614th 1000-miler on nikeplus.com.

But this coming weekend, daylight savings is going into effect, and just like last year, it is about time I scale back my mileage. I need to heal a couple of muscles and get a couple of massages.

It’s good timing, because I have a pretty busy month ahead of me: Michigan and Orlando, Thanksgiving and a bunch of happenings at work.

Masunaga Optical Manufacturing, based in Fukui, usually makes 12,000 MP-704 glasses in a year and a half. Thanks to Palin, it has already received 9,000 global orders, mostly from the U.S., in the last 10 days, says Masunaga store chief Akira Nagayama. - AP

What? She couldn’t find some American glasses that she liked?

Let me set this up, if you’re not paying attention. McCain announced today that he is suspending his campaign to head back to Washington to help negotiate a deal in the Wall Street crash. He urges Obama to follow and to agree to postpone Friday’s debate. As a result, Obama faces the problem of going to Washington and looking like he is following McCain’s lead, or not going and looking like he is putting politics above country.

Which did he choose? Well, he’s not going, but he has set up a smack down of his own.  It’s not about politics. It’s about talking to the people. Now is the time.

“With respect to the debates, it’s my belief that this is exactly the time when the American people need to hear from the person who, in approximately 40 days, will be responsible for dealing with this mess. And I think that it is going to be part of the president’s job to deal with more than one thing at once,” Obama said. A hint of a smile crossed his face after he delivered that line. He then added, “I think there’s no reason why we can’t be constructive in helping to solve this problem and also tell the American people what we believe and where we stand … So in my mind, actually, it’s more important than ever that we present ourselves to the American people and try to describe where we want to take the country and where we want to take the economy.” - Senator Obama

And to make it worse, Senator Reid does not want them. Why should McCain and Obama now head back to Washington to look like we’re huddling around the President that helped get us in this mess. Keep your distance. Weigh in from the road. Huddling around the president does not make you look presidential.

Now is the time for Obama and McCain to speak directly to the largest possible audience about what they want to do and how they are going to do it. If they want to change anything, change the focus of Friday’s debate from Foreign Policy to the economy.

Maybe McCain should suspend his campaign for another reason. Neither he nor Palin are ready to answer any questions.

1. OMG, are we still talking about this.
2. Palin’s the lipstick.
3. McCain’s the pig.

Whether Obama meant this or not, I understand why no one in the McCain camp wants to clarify what they think he really meant. Palin as the lipstick on McCain the pig is a much more biting, accurate, effective and funny analogy. Thinking and saying Obama meant to insult Palin makes no sense, but there is little sense at this point of a presidential campaign.

• Those were some wacky images on the enormous screen. From a not-so-random school in California, iStockphotos of people and windswept prairies, the pictures didn’t seem to match the speech in any way. They were just big and weird. Plus, I had a feeling there were some subliminal words or messages hidden in there.
• During the I-feel-your-pain section, McCain mentioned people he’d met on the trail, along with their State of residence, to share their sad stories (lost their house, bad health). This was weird, because at the mention of each state, that state’s Republican Delegation would start cheering. So it worked like this: “Bob and Sue Smith from Pennsylvania lost their house.” Followed by the hooting and woo-hooing by the drunk Pennsylvanians. Umm… timing… which leads me to the next point…
• Bad, bad timing. I am certain the most common phrase on the teleprompter was “Wait for Applause”. Not that applause was warranted. Only that when you stop talking, back up and smile creepily, people don’t know what else to do. They applaud.
• That creepy, creepy smile. Aghh.

McCain is now running the same basic campaign as Dole. The “It’s my turn” campaign. Only this one includes a woman VP candidate, instead of Jack Kemp. He’s done his duty after being racked over the coals eight years ago. His party owes him. It’s his turn. But he’s just so creepy!

From BoingBoing:

The Daily Show has a segment with video clips of Dick Morris, Karl Rove, Bill O’Reilly, and others complaining about the media’s unfair treatment of Sarah Palin, along with earlier video clips of these folks dishing out the same garbage about other women, including Hillary Clinton.

So, I’m in a political bizarro world.

She’s a woman who will attract the disappointed Hillary supporters who were solely concerned with electing a woman. But she’s a far right-wing woman with radically different positions on social and economic issues. Die hard Hillary supporters are disappointed, not ideologically blinded.

She’s a Washington Outsider who will backup McCain’s maverick status. Right. But she’s such a maverick, she is potentially down with the Alaskan secessionist movement crowd (one could say she is married to it).

She’s young and… ready? She’s young with less experience than Obama, who has been criticized for being too inexperienced for the job. A person in the Vice-president slot should be as prepared to take office as the Presidential slot. If McCain believes Obama is too inexperienced, I find it hard to believe he truly believes Palin’s experience has prepared her for office. To me, it looks like McCain has selected an Obama of his own: a young whipersnapper to energize the young people.

And the thing that’s brought me to total realization of my deportation to bizarro world is the Bristol story. The baby’s daddy has now been flown to Minnesota convention with photo ops and a potential stage presentation?!? I understand empathy for the situation of an underage, unwed pregnancy, and kudos for having and keeping the baby. But are we really going to celebrate this?

My mom was 18 when she had my brother and 22 for me. I know it was hard and she had to sacrifice a ton for us. I’m 36 and I’m still not sure I’d be able to handle the things she shielded us from.

Recognizing the situation and the reality is one thing, but we don’t need to be desensitized to it any more than Juno has already done. The grandchild of the Alaskan governor and potential Vice-President of the United States is guaranteed to have everything it could need. This is not necessarily the case for most every other baby in a similar situation. And if the argument is “no one can get a 17-year-old girl to listen.” I guess that might be true, no one except that is for celebrities. Which is exactly what we just made of Bristol and the baby’s daddy.

The best I can do to rationalize the choice is it was a gamble. That McCain sees his chances as slim and he needed to do something to shake it up and hope for a lucky bounce. If this is so, at some point he’ll need to realize he’s going down a bad, bad road. Will he be too stubborn to change direction?

Morality, spirituality, the meaning of life — science doesn’t handle those issues well at all. But that’s cool. We have art and religion for that stuff. Science also assumes predictable cause and effect in a world that’s a chaotic, bubbling stew of randomness. But that’s OK, too. Our approximations are usually good enough. No, the real reason science sucks is that it makes us look bad. It makes us bit players in the Big Story of the universe, and it exposes some key limitations of the human brain.

Look at it this way: Before science, we humans had dominion over Earth, the center of the universe. Now we’re just a bunch of hairless apes on a wet rock orbiting a minor star in a marginal galaxy.

Even worse, those same cortexes that invented science can’t really embrace it. Science describes the world with numbers (ratio of circumference to diameter: pi) and abstractions (particles! waves! particles!). But our intractable brains evolved on a diet of campfire tales. Fantastical explanations (angry gods hurling lightning bolts) and rare events with dramatic outcomes (saber-toothed tiger attacks) make more of an impact on us than statistical norms. Evolution gave us brains that crave certainty, with irrational fears of crashing in an airplane and a built-in weakness for just-so stories about intelligent design. Meanwhile, the true wonders revealed by the scientific method — species that change into new species over time, continents that float around the planet, a quantum-mechanical world where nothing is for sure — are worse than counterintuitive. To a depressingly large number of us, they’re downright threatening.

In other words, thanks to evolution, half of all Americans don’t believe in evolution. That’s the universe for you: impersonal, uncaring, and ironic.

Humbling. Nice.

It was the first time I’d done a sprint triathlon and I wasn’t as prepared as I should have been. I might have been a little cocky having done Alcatraz in June, because I didn’t really go for a bike ride OR a swim until two weeks before this race. But I thought: This is a sprint. 800-meter swim, 15-mile bike ride and a 5K run. Taking such a long break from cycling and swimming would mean I was just well rested…

Not so much. I did the swim in 20 minutes. That’s pretty slow. I went without the wet suit for this event, well, because the water was so warm and my transition to the bike would be less cumbersome. I killed it cycling 15 miles in 46 minutes. I felt very strong on the bike. But then I was beat coming off the bike. The juice just wasn’t there. I ran nine-minute miles for the 5K. That’s at least a minute off my race pace. End time: 1:36:39.9

The event was a fundraiser for the Lake Samish fire department, and extremely well organized, especially since this was the first year for the event. I’m glad we have good local events in which to participate. Hopefully we’ll have two or three more next year!