politics and mundanities

_{(Is "mundanities" a word? I don't think it is. Ah well.)}

So, summer is swiftly drawing to a close, and I find myself in the midst of various upheavals, as usual. Ah well. Here's what's going on lately, in no particular order:

-I was on TV tonight! Our Representative, Dan Burton (R-IN), held a town hall meeting about the proposed healthcare legislation, so of course I had to go and speak my piece, and on channel 15's 11:00 news, they showed me up at the microphone asking my question. It was very exciting, if I do say so myself, and I do.

-Summer jobs are winding down. I've been done with Stride Rite for a few weeks now (oh, it is nice), and tonight was my last night at Pizza Hut for the summer. I took on cleaning my mom's church again, basically for just this month until she could find somebody new, because the people she hired last year quit, and next week will be the last week for that. Yeah, I worked a lot this summer.

-My brother is officially a middle schooler now. He started 6th grade on Monday. He seems to like it so far. Mom's sending him to a little private K-12 school in Fort Wayne, and it seems like a really good place; I'm glad for him.

-My cousin has moved in with us. She's fifteen, and through a long series of events, she ended up going to the same school as Michael, and needing a place to stay, so I volunteered my room (since I'm leaving for school in less than two weeks anyway). Of course, that meant I had to clean my room (all my junk was just kind of lying in there; I've been sleeping on the couch all summer), but that's finally done, and as soon as I get all my crap packed up for school, the house will finally be more or less de-cluttered.

-Another cousin of mine is having a get-together this weekend at his lake house in Michigan. I am rather psyched. It sounds like it might be kind of cold for lake antics, but there will still be campfire doings and game playing and the like. It will be mad good times. And a canoe trip! Mustn't forget the canoe trip. :D

-And of course, most importantly, 12 days until Knox!

sideswiping arguments

I just wanna say, I'm really tired of the whole gay marriage "debate." Both sides think they're right, and they've got their arguments that they absolutely will not give up, and the stupid talking heads keep parroting the same soundbites and nobody's saying anything new.

The fundamental problem here is that the two sides aren't arguing the same points. The pro side says that not recognizing gay marriage is discriminatory because it's taking away a fundamental right by not letting gays marry, and the anti side says they're not denying anything because, definitionally speaking, a same-sex couple cannot "marry"—that is, to them, based on their own personal and/or religious beliefs, a marriage is only what happens between a man and a woman; anything else cannot be called a "marriage."

Now, break that down to its simplest version, and here's what you've got (and please note, I'm using "liberal" and "conservative" as blanket terms for the purposes of easy generalization here; I realize not all liberals and conservatives think these things):

LIBERAL: Gay people must have the same rights as straight people.
CONSERVATIVE: A same-sex partnership cannot be called a marriage, because that is not what marriage means.

Now, compare those two statements, and you may notice something significant—they have nothing to do with each other. You can't argue against a point by making a point of your own that is completely unrelated to the original point. Now, the ridiculousness of this argument is revealed when somebody tries to actually properly argue against one of these points. An example would go somthing like this:

LIBERAL: Gay people must have the same rights as straight people.
CONSERVATIVE: They do! A gay man can marry a lesbian just like any other man can marry any other woman. It's perfectly legal.

Or, conversely;

CONSERVATIVE: A same-sex partnership cannot be called a marriage, because that is not what marriage means.
LIBERAL: So call it something else?

Now, you may notice, this shit is kind of ridiculous. My own personal opinion is that the government shouldn't be in the business of "marriage" at all if it's going to cause so much fuss. Clearly, the mad right-wingers cannot understand the difference between civil marriage and religious marriage; therefore, eliminate the word "marriage" for legal and government purposes and give all couples, gay and straight, the same rights across the board, and call them "civil unions" or something of that ilk. If people demand to be "married," they can go to the church of their choice and get a religious "marriage;" meanwhile, everybody else can have a civil union, which would entail the full legal rights and status of what we now refer to as "marriage" in the legal sense, and then everybody's happy. Really, it's not that difficult.

So...yeah. This is what happens when I go home; everybody's in bed at like, 10 PM, leaving me alone in the middle of nowhere with nothing but network TV, so I end up compulsively refreshing Facebook and watching Charlie Rose. *sigh* It's gonna be a long summer.

dog whistles

In today's news, it's still spring break for another couple of days, so I don't feel guilty about staying up all night surfing the politics blogs. I haven't done that much since I got back from Spain, and I realize now that I kind of miss it—I've been focusing far too much on school and my own life lately. I can't tell if that statement is ironic or not...

Anyway. So it's a bit old, but chalk it up to me just getting back into the swing of these things, and go read (or skim, at least) this article on Politico. Now, can I get a WTF?

Now, forgive me if I'm stating the obvious, but it seems like the author of this article may have missed a fairly crucial bit of evidence here: Barack Obama is—how shall I say this?—black. We understand this, yes?

This talk of "dog whistle politics," I really can't see how it applies here. I mean, if Mr. O were trying to keep his racial identity a secret, perhaps, but he's clearly not (or if he is, he's doing it really really wrong). Dog whistling is what happens when a politician wants to signal something to a specific group of people without the general populace knowing what's up—Bush's "phrases lifted from church hymns and the Bible" is an example of this because, generally speaking, non-Christians aren't going to catch those references. The Bible may once have been part of the popular lexicon in the US, but (and especially for my generation), this is increasingly not the case; hymns, often being specific to a few denominations, are even more obscure. Therefore, if you're not in the target audience, you probably won't catch the reference: hence, dog whistle politics.

However, the cited examples of Obama's "dog whistles"?

*“American dreams that are being deferred” - maybe it's just me, but I thought everybody read A Raisin in the Sun in high school. I mean, we read it in my (private, very whitebread) high school, in Indiana, no less. Just sayin'.

*Michelle's “South Side of Chicago" - Jim Croce was talking about this in 1973, and everybody's seen Save the Last Dance or an equivalent thereof. Next.

*"we as a people will get there" - Y'know what? I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land, and there are white people over there who know that MLK made more than one speech (*gasp*). And I bet I'm not the only one on this side who knows that either.

*Okay, the last one, I'll admit, I didn't get to Spike Lee and Malcolm X until college. But I did get there. And still, that's hardly obscure.

Again, dog whistles, to be effective, must generally be audible only to members of the target audience. I am not black, nor do I come from anything like a racially diverse background. I easily pick up on these references. Therefore, if they are dog whistles, somebody's DOING IT WRONG. More likely, however, is that the author of this article is grasping at straws to prop up an invalid and pointless argument.

A few more points with which I must take issue:

"Imagine John Kerry or Hillary Clinton saying, ‘Yes, we can!’ It would have sounded phony — only in what I call a ‘black-cent’ can it sound prophetic and arousing."

Um, no? It's a piece of rhetoric. Imagine John Kennedy saying that—could he have pulled it off? I think you'll agree he could've. The issue is not race, the issue is rhetorical prowess. I think we can all agree that John Kerry, among other things, was sorely lacking in that category.

Beyond speech, blacks have picked up certain of Obama’s mannerisms, particularly his walk, that signal authenticity. Bush had his cowboy strut, and Obama has a swagger — a rhythmic lope that says cool and confident and undeniably black. It was most noticeable on his first post-election trip to the White House, some said.

I really don't have much to say to that except, WTF? Does Obama swagger? Because I have certainly not noticed that. And even if he does, how the hell is that "undeniably black"? Besides being mindblowingly ridiculous, that strikes me as quite a racist thing to say, all told. Am I alone in this?

Notably, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele has used phrases recently like “bling bling” to describe the stimulus package and “off the hook” to describe the new RNC outreach plans, at a time when he is trying to step up the party’s appeal to African-American voters.

You'll notice Obama doesn't do that. The reason? Because he's not making very obvious attempts to play focus-group, target specific politics. Those phrases would be tacky coming from Obama, just like they're tacky coming from Michael Steele, or anybody in any sort of position with political power and authority.

Takeaway lesson: Obama's NOT TRYING TO ACT BLACK. He IS black. There's a very important distinction there. He connects with young, intelligent, informed constituents, because he is young, intelligent, and informed. Not because he has a "black-cent" or because he "swaggers" or because he talks about "bling bling" (I'm fairly sure he does none of these things). Now, can we please get back to matters of policy and substance? (I know, it's a lot to ask from the politics blogs. But hey, a girl can hope.)

Yay Obama! Yay Indiana!(?)

So, first off, YAY OBAMA! I'm way happy, in case you've never heard of me and couldn't guess. I didn't sleep Tuesday night, because being in Spain, they didn't call it until about 5:30 AM local time, and I just couldn't go to bed before that, and then I had to watch the acceptance speech (definitely teared up a bit there), and then I decided to stay up and finish an essay instead of try and sleep the final two hours I had left, so Wednesday I drank four coffees and was a zombie most of the day. Then I slept fourteen hours last night and now I'm good.

But I'm also confused. See, when I finally turned off the computer Wednesday morning, Indiana was still too close to call. That being my home state, I was thrilled (never in my lifetime has there been a question of which way Indiana would go—it has been a "red state" since before the term existed—so a tie like that is amazing), and once Obama had it in the bag, I figured it wasn't a big deal, I could find out later which way Indiana ended up going. So this morning, I do a Google search for "Indiana election results" and the first thing to come up is the Indiana Secretary of State's page, which said (and currently says) McCain got more votes. Sadface. But a bit more searching tells me that all the networks finally called Indiana for Obama.

So who's right? The numbers of votes on the MSNBC page are bigger, which would make it seem like their info is more complete, but they (and the other networks) all say "99% of precincts reporting," so did they call it and then stop updating without complete info or something? And the Indiana Secretary of State's page says it was last updated Wednesday at 11:09 AM, and they ought to have the official information, no? I mean, it's the freaking government page. But then again, besides being a raging neocon, Todd Rokita (our sec. of state) is also a blithering idiot. And while I know it's not him personally updating the website, it is his office, so...who knows. I know it doesn't make any difference now, and just to have been that close is historic enough for me, but I'd really like to know who actually ended up getting Indiana's eleven electoral votes.

Either way, yay Obama! It's been a really good couple of days.

*UPDATE* (11/6/08)
So they've updated the Indiana Secretary of State's webpage (it's now says "Last updated November 6, 2008 (11:28 AM)"), but it's still got McCain having more votes. In fact, it doesn't even look like the numbers have changed significantly (I can't be sure on this, because I didn't write them down earlier, but they look quite similar, and still far smaller than the numbers on MSNBC, which have not changed). But every source I can find has Indiana as having definitely gone for Obama, which makes me think there must be something wrong, or at least something I'm missing, on the Secretary of State's website. Todd Rokita = failplz.

But then again, we knew that already.

*UPDATE NUMBER 2* (still 11/6/08)
I've fired off an email to dear old Todd('s office). It reads as follows:

Your "Election Results" page for the just-past presidential election seems to be showing incomplete and/or misleading information. It currently shows McCain/Palin as having gotten 922513 votes and Obama/Biden as having gotten 839625 votes.

This information appears to be either a)incomplete, or b)not the information I'm looking for (a tally of how many actual votes in total each candidate received, and hence, who won the state).

In case of a), being two days out from the election now, it seems ludicrous that the complete information would not be available here, especially when the major commercial networks all seem to have it (e.g. MSNBC).

In case of b), it needs to be much more clear as to what information I'm looking at, because what it *appears* to be is what I said before, a tally of how many actual votes in total each candidate received. If this is not the case, that needs to be clearly stated, because that is seriously misleading.

I'm really disappointed that I haven't been able to find the information I needed here. I would expect a government website to be a reliable source of info, and I hope the situation will be rectified immediately.

I wonder if anything will happen.

*UPDATE NUMBER 3* (11/13/08)
So, I never heard anything back from dear old Todd, but I happened to think of it and went on over to check out Indiana's election results page again, and look! Information that appears to be accurate! And a big red headline that says "Note: These results are NOT yet official. A number of counties have yet to provide their data to the state." Could we actually be seeing honesty and competency from our Secretary of State's office?

Well, I don't know that I'd go that far. Not having the "official" results, two weeks after the election, seems like an awfully big stretch on the "competency" factor. I'm sure they know the "official" results; they're just too damn lazy to update the webpage. But their totals are at least larger than MSNBC's now, so I'm done messing with it. They can leave that "unofficial" notice up until 2012 for all I care (and I have no doubt they will).

But it's a step in the right direction anyway.

RIP

Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH) passed away yesterday after a brain hemorrhage. While I first found out who she was during her stint as a somewhat dubious celebrity on the Knox campus, she really was a credit to the House, and it's a shame she had to go so soon.

politics

In short, I'm sick of 'em. But not so much that I'll swear off them completely—that would just be madness. You know me.

Anyway, if you follow the news at all, you've probably heard about Obama's support of the FISA bill. Highly disappointing. And really, it's not like they have to vote on these things—McCain didn't. When senators are running presidential campaigns, they miss votes all the time. So that means Obama made a special effort to show up that day to vote that way on that bill. The wrong way, might I add.

So I sent a letter. I know, I know, it's not really a whole lot, but I don't often send letters to elected officials (and he is one, don't forget, he's still an Illinois senator, and as a student at a college in Illinois, I am a constituent), so it's something, anyway. I have copied the letter here, because this is my blog and I can. And if you happen to feel the same way I do, you should write him too!* (Or even if you feel differently. Everybody should be involved. Our government, after all, is supposed to be participatory.)

Mr. Obama,

As a registered voter and contributor to your presidential campaign, I was sadly disappointed by your support of the FISA bill. On your campaign website, it says, "It's time to put an end to the say-anything-to-win politics of the past," and yet, that seems to be exactly the kind of politics you are playing here. You tell voters (of the more liberal variety) that you won't stand for the abuses of power committed by the current administration, but your support of this bill says the exact opposite; this is either an attempt to draw in more hawkish voters in hopes that the rest of us won't notice (or won't care), or it is a revelation that perhaps you're not so different from the current president after all.

Either way, as I'm sure you know, this bill gives retroactive immunity to the companies that enabled the current administration to ILLEGALLY SPY ON AMERICANS, and supporting it is the same thing as saying, "Yep, that's okay by me." As a person who fully supports the Constitution and the rule of law, this does not sit well with me at all. I want a president who will protect the rights and freedoms of the American people, not the bloated, shady government organizations (DHS) and the anything-for-another-dollar corporations.

I hope that in the future, you will think more carefully about the effects your decisions will have, instead of trying to pander to the more conservative voters—you don't balance a tipped see-saw by standing in the middle, and the time for trying to please people on both extremes has long since passed.

Sincerely,

Andrea Johnston

_{*That's the link for his Senate website; if you don't live in Illinois—or go to school there, as I do—you'll have to find your own means of contact, sorry. I'm too lazy to do it for you. Though I'm sure it's not hard.}

omg hicks!

Srsly kids, is there any reason to maintain hope for humanity?



On a slightly brighter note, at least John McCain apparently has realized that global warming is bad and has a plan for fighting it, albeit a decidedly stupid one.

More on John Ashcroft

We're in the national news again!

As I mentioned before, John Ashcroft came and spoke at my school Tuesday night. (For the coverage in the school newspaper, click here—and check out the videos!) As might be expected with such a controversial conservative figure at a decidedly liberal institution, not everyone was happy about that, and there were a number of protests. In the Discourse section of today's issue of TKS, there were a number of responses to the protests, and while some were positive, others were decidedly less so, including one column entitled, "You embarrass me and yourself." Some of my fellow students have been called "rude," "immature," "disgraceful," and even "despicable," and I must say, I really don't think that's correct, necessary, or helpful. Now, I don't know that I have my thoughts very well organized at this point, but I'd like to put them out there, so I hope you'll bear with me.

Some people are upset because, they say, most of the Knox attendees had their minds made up about Ashcroft beforehand and went in closed-minded, with the intent only to ignore and mock him. To the second part of this, I can say that the people I went with, at least, had no such intentions; sure, we all went in not liking him, and came out not liking him, but we only wanted to see what he was going to say. And we got to do that. The protestors didn't stop that from happening. He wasn't there to change anyone's mind, and if you think otherwise, you really are deluding yourself.

Furthermore, I want to point out that if Knox had its mind made up about Ashcroft beforehand, he almost certainly had his mind made up about us. That "skepticism vs. cynicism" comment was certainly not off the cuff. Besides that, he knew the atmosphere of the campus coming in, and he was in full deflect mode; he didn't give a single straight answer during the entire Q&A, even to questions that weren't directly confrontational.

And speaking of questions, if you want to accuse students of not being prepared to listen, you must also realize that Ashcroft was not prepared to answer. He has proven himself many times over, in the media and elsewhere, to be completely unwilling to answer questions about the issues raised by the protestors and questioners. The point of these questions is not to get an actual answer, because we all know that won't happen. The point is to underscore the fact that there are differing opinions and to start a conversation about them, not in the context of the speaker—as I have said, that is not a practicable venue for such discussion—but later on, discussing things with friends in smaller groups afterward. Unless I read it wrong, this was, in fact, the goal in bringing Ashcroft to campus.

It has been pointed out that Ashcroft himself was not entirely blameless, as he ignored questions, turned them around, and even attacked some of the questioners; it has also been noted that his responses only became hostile because the questioning had grown hostile. I'd like to back it up a step further and point out that the questioning did not start out that way; it became hostile because Ashcroft was very blatantly not answering the questions posed. As I've said, this is to be expected from political speakers; however, his twisting of words, nitpicking at irrelevant details, and especially the wilful misunderstanding of questions seemed to me to be particularly blatant, even for a politician. I would expect an educated man addressing a college audience to have some modicum of respect for our intelligence; I didn't even ask a question, and I still felt insulted.

I'm not saying absolutely everything was perfect, or even acceptable—the gentleman who demanded to know how Ashcroft sleeps at night and whether or not he has a soul was out of line. I think we can all agree on that. But questions of that nature were not the majority. No other questioner made blatant personal insults as a part of a question; in fact, aside from a few poorly organized ramblers, I found the level of the questions to be quite acceptable, and often insightful and to-the-point.

In his piece, For Shame, TKS's perennial conservative columnist Chris Berger wrote, "I know students who want to transfer because of [the protests], and one professor contemplating not teaching next year if apologies are not issued." To people holding this opinion, I can only say, please go. People have the right to express their opinions; Mr. Ashcroft completed his speech without a substantial breakdown of order, people got to hear what he had to say, and hey, nobody got "tased." With the possible exception of Alex Enyart (the "do-you-have-a-soul" guy), no one but no one needs to apologize for stating their opinions. If this kind of dissent is enough to sour your opinion of the entire school, you're not the kind of people I think of when I think of Knox.

I highly encourage everyone to at least glance over all the articles in the Discourse section linked above, particularly the Thoughts from the Embers and Graham's column, "Regarding Politeness" (Graham was the student whose question about LGBT rights was quite blatantly dismissed).

And to Devin Day, Chris Berger, Melinda Jones, Lauren Peretz, and anyone else who's feeling embarrassed over this, you have every right to feel that way if you want to. But please speak for yourselves—I am most certainly not ashamed of my peers, and if you are, then I have to wonder, for whom?

I have seen the face of evil...

...and it is a wrinkly politician.

Y'know, I probably wouldn't have said it aloud like the guy did in the Q & A, but I do legitimately wonder how John Ashcroft sleeps at night.