<$BlogRSDURL$>

Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

For Sale Cheap: One Meaningless Oregon Presidential Primary 

...the manner in which Americans select the people who will end up living in the White House suffers from two major problems - ok, aside from electioneering monkey-wrenching like "cleaning up the voter rolls" and ownership of leading voting machine companies by major-league riwht wing movers/shakers. Never mind all that; those are simply elements of crookedness that could be cleaned with a bit of hard time. The two major institutional prolbems with picking our next president are the Electoral College and the presidential primaries...

The problem with the Electoral College became fairly self-explanatory in 2000, when we managed to wind up with a president who didn't actually receive the most votes on a national level. More to the point, the manner in which the Electoral College selects the president serves to buttress the whole idea of red and blue states; all those silly national maps from 2004 and 2006 that painted counties red and blue ignore the simple twin facts that people vote for Democrats in those deep red counties, too, and that (when one looks and some of the vast expanses on the map) acres don't vote (so the fact that some southern Rocky Mountain state is all red is easily offset by the fact that all the residents of a couple of those states combined is less than the population of - say - Seattle)...

The problem with the presidential primary process is more immediate, and far more personal for politically active residents of Oregon. The primary process has been so front-loaded with early primaries over the last few cycles that what we Beaver Staters may think about the subject has been reduced to being not much more than some sort of meager footnote. Next year, however, the Oregon primary will be reduced to an absolute and meaningless afterthought. With the primary date selection battlelines finally drawn with New Hampshire's announcement of it's primary date, lots of pieces start flinging themselves at the puzzle and - by the time those of us out west here in Oregon slice open our vote-by-mail ballots - over twenty states will have cast their primary votes and the fat will be fully introduced to the fire...

That's not to say that Oregon political leaders didn't consider getting in on the effort to try to Be Somebody like Michigan, Florida, and a few others. It didn't matter enough here, though, and the punch line to this sad little joke is that Michigan, Florida, and some others may have ended up either diluting or negating whatever influence they sought to gain owing to the loss of some or all of their delegates at the national conventions. Won't matter to us, though. We in Oregon will be sitting around our kitchen tables looking at all the other issues on the mail-in ballots and pretty much ignoring the presidential nominees - or even casting contrarian ballots for whoever in our respective parties represents the best vote that sticks it to Teh Man - because it just doesn't matter again...

There was a time - in my early adulthood, no less - when the distribution of presidential primaries was such that a June California primary offered moments of high political drama. The recent thrash of efforts to be the firstest and bestest have drowned that weakling impulse in the bathtub and has created a circumstance where the two thirds of the states that offer a presidential selection process after early February can expect to see little more than candidates' first cousins and a host of second-tier famous people stumbling around in the dark mid-spring mud season offering half-hearted exhortations to participate in a done deal. It's probably not an accident that alternative proposals for primary schedules such as the Fair Vote America Plan have started to gain some attention. The 'horse race' media coverage and Big Campaign Money have taken the right to chose presidential candidates out of the hands of a great many of the people; states have responded accordingly in order to make themselves feel like they still matter at the front end of this process and some are now threatened with the punishment of being rendered irrelevant for their efforts...

It's obviously time to rethink the whole notion of how presidential nominees are selected. Oregon and a whole host of other states that are currently meaningless in the presidental nominee contest aren't necessarily mirrors of the demographics of the nation, but they are arguably at least as diverse - if not more so - than Iowa or New Hampshire or Nevada. At the end of a very long day, every state - and everybody - matters...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:29 PM 0 comments

Monday, November 19, 2007

Ur Kalifornya Fire Officials Iz Lurnin 

...yesterday, weather predictions suggested there would be a return of the high-speed, low-humidity Santa Ana winds in central and southern California of the sort that created the multiple and massive fires last month. California fire officials at the local, state, and federal level decided that it might not be a bad idea to be just a shade more proactive than they were accused of being last time, even though the threat seems to be abating...

Early this afternoon, Pacific Standard Time, I heard the raspy rattly sound of multiple large radial aircraft engines moving from north to south over my place here in south-central Oregon. An adult lifetime in my particular career field made me think almost without reflection "retardant plane", mostly because there is no more distinctive aircraft sound than that of a mid-twentyth-century multi-engine prop-drive airliner that has been converted to retardant delivery service. It's a sound that's not uncommon around Rancho Jack K. during the summer, given that a long-time supplier of large retardant aircraft is based about 60 miles north of here, but not one that I would normally expect to hear during a mid-November snow storm. Didn't see it, but I didn't need to; that was the sound of mobilization...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:48 PM 0 comments

Moral Clarity The Huckabee Way 

...not often that you see a real live Republican national office candidate come right out and recite chapter and verse of the fundamentalist Right's goals with regard to a woman's choice to have some control over her body. Most nibble around the edges and fudge the bottom line and twist the party platform into odd shapes to just make it seem as though they are True Believers of the premise that Roe v. Wade is really the problem; it's all part of the "local control" argument, don't you know, and nobody is really talking about making the termination of a pregnancy under any and all circumstances a felony...

Not Mike Huckabee, though. Although he strongly supports the idea that all Americans should be allowed to legally pack heat in order to carry out extra-judicial death sentences against any meth-head who wants to lift your wallet in some ham-handed mugging, the idea that a woman should be forced by the full power and authority of the Federal Government to bear a child - not just an unwanted child, mind you, but a child conceived against her will - is a strict issue of morality.
Q: South Dakota had some proposed legislation to outlaw all abortion except saving the life of a mother, no exceptions for rape or incest. You said you'd sign that. Why?
A: I always am going to err on the side of life. I believe life is precious. It's because of my view that God is the creator and instigator of life.
Source: Meet the Press: Meet the Candidates 2008 series Jan 28, 2007

Huckabee's views on the employment of handgun conceal/carry laws to reduce crime are predicated more on the idea that bad guys will be more careful if you waste a few now and again rather than any sort of common American understanding of law and order. He is representing a more Old Testament Levitical view of societal justice modified to modern times to account for the difficulty of rounding up enough upright Godly citizens with a sufficient amount of large rocks to exact the sort of immediate justice called for in that first covanent. The clearly understandable problem with this as it regards both non-capital offenses verses persons and property and the issue of a woman's right to control her own body is that the United States - for all the chitter about God that might be found in the Declaration of Independence - is a nation founded on secular principles found in the Constitution of the United States...

The differing views of Christian sects that may have dominated the demographics of the country at the time of the Constitutional Congress have been - if anything - trumped by both the geographic and demographic expansion of the country over the last two hundred and thirty years. Because of that expansion, there has been a parallel expansion in the need to understand the necessary difference between one man's or one group's view of morality and what actually constitutes "The Rule Of Law" necessary to maintain good social order. The United States stands as an icon of 'majority rule' representative democracy insofar as that dominance doesn't harm the minority at some sort of bone-deep personal level (OK, so forget this last little decade-long foray into "Daddy's Home" Republican dominance; focus on the Bill of Rights and other Amendments to the Constitution). Inconsistencies of policy and law do incredible violence to that understanding of the core of this nation, and Mike Huckabee - if some of the state-level polling in Iowa and some other early caucus/primary states is to be trusted - stands as a spear-carrier for a powerful and seductive example of the most out-front and profoundly inconsistent "Christian" fundamentalist idea that some sort of specific set of rigid viewpoints that aren't even necessarily held by large number of Christians should be the law of the land...

Mike Huckabee doesn't see a moral conflict between gunning down some punk looking to grab a few bucks and the need to criminalize the termination of a date-rape pregnancy. He apparently has a moral clarity superior to others of us who have spent most of our half century on this earth going to church and studying our Bibles and trying to draw understanding from our belief in God. It would seem that the New Testaments that the Gideons distributed back in the day in Arkansas were different from that kids like me were given out here in the wild, wooly, immoral Pacific Northwest, given the differences between Mike's and my view of moral clarity and how that translates to public policy. It's pretty obvious, however, that the civics textbooks in our classrooms were entirely different...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:22 PM 0 comments

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou Working 

...never hurts to keep in touch with family. Celebrate their highs, mourn with them over their lows, maybe even keep track of the fact that they are directly involved with a company that your federal office is supposed to be investigating. Howard Krongard may not have done as good a job about all that as he should have and, given his role as the Inspector General of the State Department, it may be just as embarrassing that his brother Alvin says he told Howard about his role with Blackwater as it was that he originally denied that Alvin had any involvement in the first place...

It should probably come as no surprise that Howard really would rather not have all that embarrassment compounded by having to sit in the same House committee room with his brother rehashing his confusion over his brother's doings. Given the fact that he is already dealing with accusations that he monkey-wrenched inquiries into possible irregularities in Iraq, including some directed at that security firm that he said he was sure his brother didn't work for. It would be a moment of personal shame to have to admit that maybe a fella didn't do as good a job of checking in with blood relatives as maybe he should have. Having said brother sitting right there saying "Yes I did, too, tell you about this gig, bro" can only sharpen the sting...

And then, of course, there's that whole 'purjury' thing to worry about...
Posted by: Jack K. / 5:31 PM 0 comments

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?