The 44th President of the United States

Some modest suggestions

My decidedly old school recommendation wishlist for the new administration. I look forward with wonder and delight (and probable amazement) to President Obama's actual choices.

Agriculture:  Kathleen Sibelius

Attorney General: Robert Kennedy, Jr.

Commerce: Michael Bloomberg

Defense: Wesley Clark  (when he becomes eligible)

Director of National Intelligence: Jane Harman

Education: Graham Spanier

Energy: Amory Lovins

EPA: Al Gore

FEMA: Douglas Wilder

Health & Human Services: Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg

Homeland Security: Janet Napolitano

Housing & Urban Development: Ellen Sahli

Interior: Olympia Snowe

Labor: Andy Stern

National Security Advisor: Richard Clarke

Poet Laureate: Martin Espada

Special Prosecutor: Dennis Kucinich

State: Bill Richardson

Transportation: Susan Kupferman 

Treasury: Paul Krugman

UN Ambassador:  Bill Clinton

Veterans Affairs:  Max Cleland

Poem of the Day

 
Joy, Shipmate, Joy! by Walt Whitman
  

  Joy! shipmate--joy!
(Pleas'd to my Soul at death I cry;)
Our life is closed--our life begins;
The long, long anchorage we leave,
The ship is clear at last--she leaps!
She swiftly courses from the shore;
Joy! shipmate--joy! 

YES YES YES YES YES YES YES

YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES 

Voter Diary

Just back from voting.  At 11am I was number 526 to vote. In 2006, I was number 178 at 4 pm. 2004, around 425 at that same time. This is shaping up to be a VERY high turnout.

All going smoothly in my precinct except for the common error of dividing the alphabet evenly at j/k and expecting even length lines.  From the personal experience of years of convention registration work I can tell you  that American names are weighted very heavily to the first quarter of the alphabet. Dividing registration at E or even D will get you equal length lines in most groups. As a result, the a-j line had 50 people in it while I, being R surnamed, was behind 3 when I entered the building and voted quickly.

Another pleasant surprise, my county has completed the change back to paper scan ballots since last fall. No more Dieboltian vote swallowers here.

No McCain workers outside the polling place. 4 Obama workers and a lone sad looking supporter for the local Congressional candidate.

GO OBAMA!

Update: Reports on local radio say that over 1000 Penn State students were in line before polls opened at one of the downtown State College precincts. Go Lions!

Election Predictions

from my post to the Blatt on July 5th:

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Obama will win by 323 to 215 electorial votes. The Dems will hold all the states they had in 2004 and add AK CO IN IA MT NM NV OH VA and possibly NC.

In the Senate, the Dems will pick up 10 seats in AK CO ME MN MS NC NH NM OR VA, leaving themselves one vote short of being fillibuster proof.

In the House, the Dems will have a net pick-up of 18 seats. They will give the GOP a strong run for our congressional district (PA 05), but will probably lose...it will depend on turn out in State College.

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Looking back, it seems that I was too conservative on the EV count.  Obviously I am wrong about AK, but I still feel pretty confident about the rest. I'm moving NC to a win and adding MO and IN as strong possibles. Weak possibles are WV, GA, MT and ND.

O 346 to M 192  5.8% spread in popular vote

In the Senate, I am certainly wrong on ME, I stand on predicting wins in AK CO MN NC NH NM OR VA and add GA and MS as  strong possibles, meaning there is a shot at being rid of Traitor Joe.

In the House races, I now think 18 is too few, but I am not sure how many more...say a total of 32 seats picked up...

Glenn Thompson (R-unqualified idiot) will win in our local Congressional race, but Mark McCracken will do a lot better than the average someone who has spent less than $1 for every $6 of his opponent does. I say an 8% spread

All the local State House and Senate incumbents will win handily.

The water system finance bond will pass easily.

The Dems will continue to hold all the State row house offices (Auditor General, Attorney General, Treasurer, etc) 

The Pettigrew principle

From KOLCHAK:

Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency is nothing less than a history-marking event, regardless of how it turns out. For those of us who attended Catholic school in the 1960s, however, the campaign is not entirely unfamiliar.

If you were attending Catholic school at that time, you could subscribe to a comic book called Treasure Chest. As you might imagine, given the time and the audience, there were lots of “educational “and “inspirational” stories in Treasure Chest. As an adult, I would probably find these stories stupid or offensive, or both…if I remembered them. Fortunately, the stories I remember are the ones that slipped in under the radar. There was a series about kids living on a space station that I remember liking, and there was 1976: Pettigrew For President..

From what I’ve been able to put together so far, 1976: Pettigrew For President ran for 10 chapters in 1964. Treasure Chest came out every two weeks, so the story played out over roughly half a school year. The title character was Gov. Timothy Pettigrew, who was running for his party’s presidential nomination in that exotic future year of 1976. I would’ve been in fifth grade when the series ran, but my parents were already wondering how much longer would I be reading those weird funnybooks.

It probably took me a couple of chapters before I realized that there was something strange about “Pettigrew.” We would never see the governor’s face. We would hear his voice as part of a telephone conversation, but, if he was in the room, his head would always be blocked by something, or someone. I knew that the strip’s creators were building up to something, but I don’t think I had any theories about what it was. So I was definitely surprised when, on the last page of the story, as he accepts his party’s nomination, Tim Pettigrew is revealed to be African-American.

I know: to an adult, this all sounds heavy-handed, at best. To a fifth-grader, though, it was anything but, even though we never find out if the governor was elected president.
For what it’s worth, there’s a similar reveal in “Judgment Day,” a story that appeared in one of the classic EC science fiction comics. In this story, a man from Earth comes to Cybrinia, a planet where humans had deposited a colony of super-intelligent robots sometime in the distant past. The visitor was to evaluate the culture the robots had developed, to see if Cybrinia was worthy for inclusion in the Galactic Republic.

While many aspects of the cybernetic culture are positive, the Earthman quickly discovers that the robots with orange skins are discriminating against the robots with blue skins. This disqualifies the Cybrinians for membership in the Republic. Throughout the story, the human visitor wears a spacesuit that obscures his face. In the last panel, though, he takes his helmet off and “the instrument lights made the beads of perspiration on his dark skin twinkle like distant stars.”

“Judgment Day” first appeared in 1953, but I first read it in Tales Of the Incredible, a paperback reprint which came out in 1965 (and is sitting beside my computer right now).

Someone named Bob Wundrock—another survivor of the Catholic School system, I’m guessing—has posted some pages from 1976: Pettigrew For President on YouTube. They confirm another memory I had of the series—Pettigrew actually looks a bit like Obama—and they provide some plot points that I’d forgotten.

Pettigrew’s major opponent for the nomination is the ominously-named Senator Oilengass. The governor picks Oilengass to as his vice president , but a typo adds some unintentional humor to the invitation. The word balloon reads: “Senator, will you run as vice-president with me? I’d be proud to have you?”

Go ahead, look at it again. I’ll wait.

Even in fifth grade, I was far enough into comics that I was looking at credit boxes and noticing artists’ signatures. So it registered on me at the time that 1976: Pettigrew For President was drawn by Joe Sinnott. Sinnott is probably best known as Jack Kirby’s inker on the Fantastic Four comic, but he was providing both pencils and inks here.

As for the writer, I still don’t know much about him. He appears to be someone named Barry Reese, but that’s all I’ve been able to find out. For the record, “Judgment Day” was drawn by Joe Orlando. I haven’t been able to find a writing credit for this story either, but stories in the classic EC comics are usually credited to Al Feldstein.

1776:Pettigrew For President may have been an indicator of the liberal trends in the Catholic Church at the time. Or it may have just slipped in under the radar. In either case, the so-called real world is finally catching up to it.

Barack O'Bama

 Obama is as white as he is black.

And he is neither as well.

This song hits exactly the right tone about something that has always baffled me about the subject of race in America. Oh I understand the "reasoning" about a "drop" of the fatal blood and all that. But if being white is so superior you'd think that well, the "good" would overcome the "bad'. Seems to me.

Of  course that doesn't stop someone who has a cousin who dated a woman who once kissed an Irishman from claiming that that makes him Irish as well.

Oh and by the way, you fucking racist asshats coming out to Gov. Palin's rallies..

KISS MY MIXED RACE BEHIND!

This is scary friends

And all McPalin can talk about is Bill Ayers, a former radical activist who is now a Distiguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois in Chicago. A man who has worked closely with that known bunch of radicals The Annenburg Education Foundation (snark). A man who was named "Chicago Citizen of the Year" in 1997.

The economic world is crashing down around us largely because of the policies championed by McCain and his chief economic wiz, Phil Gramm.

And all they can talk about is this meaningless gossip. 

It is to weep.

Debate scoring

60/40 Obama

Bad news for McSame who needed a clear win in the debate that was about his supposed strong suit, foreign policy.

Obama responded with quiet strength when attacked. McSame looked like a chipmunk on meth at some points and as if he was falling asleep at others. He never looked at Obama, averting his gaze in a most curious manner. Obama always turned toward him and looked at him when answering him.

Obama scored his biggest points during  the Iraq section, telling McSame that "he was wrong" to take his eye of the ball in Afghanistan, wrong about the WMDs, wrong about  our troops being greeted as liberators and wrong about there being no great enmity between the Sunnis and the Shites.

McSame made some strong points during the section on Russia but  once again spewed forth the lie that the Russians started the Georgia crisis.

All in all, a credible performance by Obama who clearly looked "presidential', whatever that means.

He scored well with Independents and Democrats. MsSame scored well with the ill-informed and the brain dead.

Now on to Sarah "I can see Russia from my porch" Palin.

How an adult speaks of politics