twistedchick | Entries tagged with 2012

For the past several years, when we get the leaflets from the Board of Elections about primaries and elections, we've gotten three at this two-person household. The third is for this address, but has a name on it of someone I've never met, and I will certify for anyone that whoever that is has not lived in this house any time in the past 20 years.

And I keep taking it back to the Board of Elections and telling them that this is wrong, and nobody seems to listen.

Send good thoughts, please. I'm planning to do it again, tomorrow.

It bugs me that someone I have never met is using my address for voting fraud -- because it is fraud if it's a false address. And it bugs me that I do this *every year*. What do I have to do to get this sorted out?

Obama to promote job training at community colleges.

Um. This is NOT news. Community colleges have been doing job training for at least the last 35 years, to my specific knowledge, along with giving kids who can't afford an expensive four-year college the first two years of their university education for less money. When I was a reporter in southwestern New York state in the 1980s, I wrote a lot of stories about the college-industrial cooperative training going on, as well as the classes staffed by industry-based teachers to help employees become better at their jobs or advance to other positions.

For those of you outside the US, community colleges provide two years of education at a university level; they are not trade schools, high schools or anything similar. Every county in the US -- and yes, that includes cities like New York, where each borough is also a county -- has a community college, which is part of the public state college/university system (in this a college is part of a university, not something else), and every one is different. Classes are less expensive than at a university, students can save money by living at home, and a lot of older students take classes there in the evenings or ones that are scheduled around their jobs. When I worked at the auto factory, a lot of the other assembly-line employees were Italian immigrants who wanted citizenship, and they took classes at the community college so that they would have something to present at their citizenship interviews to show they had a stake in this country and that they were working to learn more.

I've heard a lot of slagging of community colleges by people who thought they were second-class, but most of those doing the slagging a) had never been involved with a community college and were displaying their ignorance, or b) would rather party than work on getting a decent grade anywhere (including the four-year colleges they flunked out of), or c) were simply not academically oriented and would have done better to learn something physical like machine tooling (which, however, requires excellent math skills for calculations.)

So Obama wanting to send money to community colleges is good and progressive and may be newsworthy but the CC-industry alliance was new 30-40 years ago, not now.

In a political sense, this is an interesting move, as it affects union and nonunion workers, educators, and working-class people with little money who are working toward an education as well as young people who can't afford a full-cost university. It's a pretty mixed group in terms of party affiliation -- I'd expect to find as many Republicans as Democrats.

Rick Perry drops out of the GOP race, endorses Gingrich.

Eastman Kodak files for bankruptcy. One of these days I'll write something about what it was like to grow up when Kodak, General Motors and Xerox were the big names in Rochester.

NYTimes: Megaupload is dead; 7 arrested. I can't help thinking this is a governmental FU for yesterday's protest. ETA: Anonymous takes down websites of the Dept. of Justice, FBI, Universal Music Group, RIAA and Motion Picture Association of America in retaliation for the Megaupload hit.

NARAL: Facts and figures in the war on women in 2011.

Should the government have the right to search your brain and seize the knowledge therein?

GQ: The hacker is watching. I'm putting masking tape over the camera on my laptop. ETA: Open this link in a new browser page or a new tab, and close it when you've read it; it has trapper code that doesn't let you leave.

Your guide to organic, biodynamic wine.

Ron Paul, who preaches austerity for taxpayers and devastation for government, flies first class and sticks taxpayers with a $52,000 bill for his travels. I find this reprehensible.

I can well remember running into my late Congressman, Barber Conable (who had been head of the House Ways and Means Committee during the Vietnam War) flying coach, the same as I was, on the regular USAir flight from DC to Rochester many times, back when my parents were alive and I went up to see them often. He always had a bulkhead seat, probably because he was well over six feet tall, but there he was, the people's representative who happened to be in charge of a great deal of the people's money, not to mention financing the war, sitting in the cheap seats with the rest of us. I did not agree with him on a lot of things, but I did appreciate his willingness to mix with the rest of us instead of being wined and dined in first class.

I think once I saw him in what used to be business class -- slightly better than coach, but not that cushy -- and it appeared that he was having a meeting with some others, so the relative quiet he'd have in that area would have made sense at the time. Business class had about the same seats as coach, but was closed to children, and generally held only guys in suits anyway.

What was good enough for longtime Congressman Conable should be good enough for Ron Paul. Security concerns? Buy a few extra seats around him and fill them with bodyguards, as long as they don't disrupt anyone else.

How does a tree burn from the inside out?

Of interest more to local DC-area folk than others, perhaps, but still good reading is Catillation, a fairly recent food blog by a friend who is one of the people running the Olney Farmers Market. The subtitle is "when you lick your plate clean", which is the sole relationship between the title and cats (it's not about either cat food or eating cats or feline dietary requirements, so you may read without those concerns).

And, speaking of food, I have always had good luck with Auntie Arwen's Spices.

The governor of Pennsylvania could learn a lot from the commonwealth's Quaker founders and their openhandedness toward poorer people. He's planning to restrict access to the federal food stamp program.

Crazy fruit animation. Actually, it's a bit alarming.

Matters of the Silly Season:

Obama's proposed an executive order that requires federal contractors to disclose their political contributions. Seems like ethical common sense to me, goes against Citizens United, riles the Republicans -- there's no bad here.

Republicans want stronger voter ID laws "to prevent voter fraud", even though little to none has been found other than their own machinations. The NY Times considers this in voting in plain sight.

And today John Huntsman has dropped out of the race. As far as I'm concerned, he was the only sane Republican candidate; that doesn't say much for the rest of the field.

Guantanamo has been open for ten horrible years. The Center for Constitutional Rights rightly wants it closed. And a new movie, Doctors of the Dark Side (this is the trailer) documents the participation of physicians and psychologists in torturing the inhabitants of Guantanamo. But we would do well to remember that this is not the first time that the US tried to lock up prisoners for life: Native American Netroots discusses the fate of the Apache prisoners of war who were incarcerated for decades by the US government.

A press card doesn't buy you safety at Occupy sites, not when reporters are targeted for arrest.

Bill Moyers decides the rocking chair is not for him, and comes out of retirement with a new interview show, Moyers & Co.

Native American sacred places in New England.

Exit, pursued by a bear, Shakespeare said. And it was a real bear.

The Virtual Museum of Japanese Arts.

Photoshop by Adobé, the new makeup. Very silly and sarcastic -- and right on target.

There will be caucuses and/or primaries in all 50 states this year. If one of them occurs anywhere near where you are, and if there's a chance that you could get a question in edgewise, here are some thoughts on how to frame and aim that question:

1. Don't be too narrow or too wide in scope. Too narrow ("Why did you support x?") lets him snow you with a list of things he's done otherwise, or else go straight to the talking points. Too broad, while it has the attraction of establishing a pattern of action, also allows for a lot of verbal pettifoggery on the part of the candidate.

2. Choose one topic, no more than three instances when the candidate's actions resulted in something dreadful. Or up to three things he's supported on that theme, whether they got anywhere or not. This is also symbolic: in our society, we are taught to remember up to three things, not four. The fewer, the better.

3. Use the topic and instances as background for your question. Examples:

"Mr. Candidate, you have said X and Y and Z about contraceptives. Why do you want to control the sex lives of millions of women?"

"Mr. Candidate, your platform appears to be based solely on your religious beliefs, without reference to current societal norms or needs. Why do you want to impose your views on millions of people who are not members of your religion?"

4. Another approach: ask about vision. If their ideas are put into action, what do they see happening?

"Mr. Candidate, if contraception were to be outlawed as you want, what good outcome do you see resulting from this? What is the beneficial policy outcome for everyone? Can you give us an off-the-cuff cost-benefit analysis of this?"

"Mr. Candidate, if all illegal immigrants are pushed away from our borders, are you willing to go into the fields to pick vegetables and fruit? What beneficial outcome do you see? Will you sponsor workers' rights legislation to improve the living conditions of migrant workers?"

What is political is always personal for the people who are affected. Make it personal for the people who want to make the decisions.

PressThink: A viewer's guide to Iowa caucus coverage, which I'm posting today, after the caucus, because this info is good for the season and in certain ways applies to both parties. Another way of thinking of it is that it's the highly formalized rituals of the civil religion, choosing high priests.

For those who haven't been inundated by news bulletins from yesterday, it's neck-and-neck Romney/Santorum (eight vote difference among 100,000 voters? I'm not even doing the stats on that), followed by Paul, Gingrich, Perry and Bachmann. Gingrich and Perry have made noises about sending their support to Santorum, Perry is going back to Texas to "think about his campaign" (translation: he's attempting to recoup support he's already blown), and Gingrich is grumpy. I am a bit curious as to whether Ron Paul ditching his homophobic pastor brought him any support. And, by the way, Massachusetts conservatives would tell you to be wary of Romney, who has a record of big talk and small results. Both Paul and Santorum are factchecked here on their disinclination to tell the truth. Ron Paul has an unorthodox campaign plan.

Something to remember about the other side of the aisle: it can be just as bugfuck crazy. And it's depending on your memory being faulty. Think about how long it took to get Obama to ditch DADT, and how he kept saying it had to come from within the military, instead of acting like a commander-in-chief and giving an order, the way Harry Truman did integration. The other thing Obama's going to give himself credit for is ending the war -- but it's not over, we're not really out of Iraq, there are thousand of Americans still there. The National Guard may be home, but they aren't the only ones who were there to start with. Remember the Blackwater mercenaries who were killed? Their brethren are still on the ground.

Bradley Manning, whose treatment by Obama and the military is surely intended to dissuade any other whistleblowers, is being charged with aiding terrorists, which may be considered a form of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, aka treason, which carries the death penalty. Constitutional lawyers, feel free to weigh in on this. From the article: ( details )

And in other First Amendment matters, Tarek Mehanna of Sudbury, Massachusetts, an American citizen, has been convicted of conspiracy to provide material support to al-Qaida because he watched online videos from Islamic fundamentalist sources and translated them for his friends.

The implications are profound and simple.

“They both came out the same week, but they are part of a pattern of putting to one side the fundamental freedoms we’ve taken for granted. We’re into a whole new legal terrain,” said Nancy Murray of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. ”As the Senate gutted the Bill of Rights, just as it gutted the right to due process and the right to trial by jury, the whole notion of presumption of innocence goes out the window. And the scary thing is that it could be applied to all U.S. citizens.”

( more details )

Where did all that military equipment for the police come from -- you know, the stuff that's being used to brutalize Occupy protesters? From your federal income tax dollars.

Ta-Nehisi Coates considers Ron Paul the Louis Farrakhan of our time, preaching bigotry and hate. If you don't know who Louis Farrakhan was, and if you do, read this.

How much of what you eat is wild food? Do you know what you're missing? Have you ever picked wild strawberries, or greens, or tasted the difference between feral crabapples and tame overdomesticated Red Delicious?

Resolved for 2012, for every day, as much as possible:

more fun, joy, peace, love; fewer 'shoulds', especially those 'you should...' ones.

And a poem, with an explanation.

The last time I visited Pendle Hill (whose website seems to have borked with the new year, and needs attention) the Meeting Room in the Barn had a wonderful 30-foot watercolor painting, which accompanied this poem, and should be evoked by it (because I am not going to put the painting online without the artist/poet's permission.) I have both on a set of postcards from Pendle Hill; contact their bookstore for more info (when their site is fixed...) This was the first time in the history of Pendle Hill (back to the 1920s) that any artwork was shown in the Meeting Room; it was not a hindrance to prayer, reflection or thought, but a starting place to go deeper.

Everything Is Indeed Reaching Out To Everything Else

An arc of arms are reaching out from distant
Suns whose gestures stir the life of seeds.
To be here, now, requires our hearts to listen,
Watch, and know that Light fulfills our needs.

When gripped by stagnant vines of fear, relief
Springs from the pulsing centers of our chests.
False boundaries dissolve in prayer; peace weaves
The seeming chaos into something blessed.

Stay rooted. Stand witness. Be upholding.
Guidance from great Mother Oak whose limbs will
Move ours to join in sacred dance, singing
Aloud that work is love made visible.

Roused by poetic muse of rainbow voice,
What stirs us also presses us against
The tide of thick embranglement of choice
In which our spirits rise and fall, unfenced.

One truth: that drawn by gravity and awe,
The world is in relationship with all.

-- Zan Lombardo