3 June 08
Being a Political Junkie is Over till Tomorrow...
We don’t write much about politics on Feathers of Hope.
But tonight, I have Hope, and the November election’s looking pretty good.
Hillary Clinton fought hard, harder than I’d ever have expected. I wish she had done so more fairly, without inciting her supporters to racist vitriol. The constant pleasant/vicious flip-flopping became really predictable after a while and I’m glad it’s over.
Because it really is over, and now we can look forward to the task ahead, which is getting rid of these scoundrels who throw lives into the hopper on a whim and who scoff at the Constitution. Can we?
Yes we can.
31 May 08
Batting Average With Delegates In Play
Over this primary season a blogger going by the name of Poblano has been producing some remarkably accurate predictions of the election results based on some sophisticated demographic modelling.
Today Poblano outed himself. It turns out his name is Nate Silver, and he is a whiz baseball statistical analyst by profession. He is a managing partner of the publication Baseball Prospectus, and developed the PECOTA system for projecting players’ future performance based on historical pattern. As a data geek I am delighted to see such overlap between baseball and political analytics.
Closer to home the UC Davis Aggie baseball just won its first NCAA Division I playoff game! They beat Stanford 4-2 on a complete game pitching performance by Eddie Gamboa. A few years back the UC Davis students voted to move the athletic program to the highest NCAA division. The 2007-2008 academic year has been the first year since the move that the UCD sports teams have been eligible for the playoffs, and the baseball team has done very well for itself this year.
22 May 08
Board Elections
Tonight was the last meeting of the Yolo Audubon Society for this school year, and we all got drafted onto the YAS board for another year. The YAS board elections are hardly competitive; rather, the task is to hunt far and wide to find somebody who wants to be hospitality chair.
This is quite unlike the elections for the Davis Food Coop board. The annual election is underway, the ballots are to be submitted in a week, and we don’t have a clue who to vote for. The annual member meeting was this evening, but we had the YAS meeting to go to, so we missed that opportunity to learn about the candidates. Heated letters about the candidates have been appearing about the candidates in the local paper for several weeks now. Nine candidates are up for four slots. We only really like one of the candidates, and are not sure how to fill out the ballot.
11 May 08
Our Lord Vetinari
Apologies to those who are not fans of Terry Pratchett, but I think axmxz is on to something when he suggests that there is more similarity between Barack Obama and the gently Machiavellian ruler of the city-state of Ankh-Morpork than one would suppose at the outset.
19 March 08
Speech For The Ages
Barack Obama gave an amazing speech today on race and politics. Don’t just read the commentaries on it — it’s well worth the time to watch or listen to the video of the speech, or at least read the complete text of it, all of which can be found here.
11 February 08
Maine Caucuses II
Well, my mother braved a blizzard and waited in line for three hours to try and vote yesterday. She had two women with her, fellow alumnae from Mount Holyoke, who were in their upper 80s.
The line went out for 1/5 mile. It was so slow, and so overwhelming, they ran out of registration forms, had to send someone to City Hall to copy more.
In the end they left before they got a chance to vote. But she’s never seen anything like it and wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
In my sister’s town of Norway it was also a mob scene, where the officials gave up and just asked people to raise their hands for Clinton or Obama. (More hands up for Obama.)
On another, sadder, note, I just learned from a friend of the death of Sheldon Brown, founder of Harris Cyclery in Newton, Massachusetts, and known affectionately in the cycling world as “Uncle Sheldon.” Tailwinds, Uncle Sheldon…
7 February 08
Maine Caucuses
My mother moved to Maine recently and left the straightforwardness of California ballot elections for an arcane primary caucus system.
She’s registered “Decline to State” or whatever the designation is in Maine because she doesn’t want to be harassed by canvassers (in my experience this makes you more, not less, likely to be harassed, but that’s what she wanted to do). It turns out she’s able to change this designation on Sunday at the caucus and then go and stand on whichever side of the room she feels corresponds with her candidate. (This whole system of standing here or there feels medieval to me.)
Bucking the predictions of the New York Times and other worthy sources, her candidate and mine appear to be the same (I’m over the magical 44 that designates women-for-Hillary). She’s planning on voting for Obama. A lot can change between now and Sunday, of course. But still: I consider this a great transformation. (She campaigned for Eisenhower in ’52, came from a solid Republican family, one that valued fiscal responsibility and, well, responsibility period. I’m just glad my grandmother never lived to see the likes of W.)
This is by far the most interesting election I’ve lived through since I moved to the US in 1988…
1 February 08
Focus the Campus
Despite the US Federal Government’s incredible lack of initiative on the topic, there is a great deal of activity taking place here to confront global warming. In California the legislative mandate for this is coming from AB 32, a bill passed in 2006 which requires California to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020, and to 80% of that by 2050. It seems the lead in this country on this issue will have to come from the bottom up.
Yesterday there was a nationwide teach-in on global warming called Focus the Nation. This was perhaps the largest teach-in ever in this country, with over 1750 institutions participating. The University of California took the event quite seriously, and our Davis campus had many events going on.
I didn’t go to any of the panel sessions that ran all day in the student Rec Center, but went to the Ideas Fair and the World of Ideas Café in Freeborn Hall nearby my office. The Ideas Fair which I went to over lunch was populated by lots of groups, everyone from the Community Alliance with Family Farmers to the campus Transportation and Parking Services department. My favorite booth was the one setup by Campus Utilities that invited you to do a blind taste test comparing UC Davis tap water, UC Davis filtered water, City of Davis tap water, and Arrowhead bottled water, the point being that bottled water isn’t necessarily better tasting than tap water.
The World of Ideas Café ran at the end of the day. 17 teams each with a different theme presented their ideas for dealing with greenhouse gases and increasing energy efficiency, and we got to wander around and talk to team members and then vote on what were our favorite ideas. I liked the ideas on achieving efficiency through eco-friendly urban design and transportation systems.
26 January 08
The Latest Poll Figures
Numenius reads me the latest poll figures. I think he’s joking. He isn’t.
12 January 08
From the Back of the Yards
Answer: Saul Alinsky.
Question: What mid-century radical activist and community organizer deeply affected the early political education of both Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton?
This is a story I just learned a couple days ago, though it has been chronicled in various places, for instance this report on “All Things Considered” last May.
A year after Barack Obama finished college at Columbia, he took a job as a community organizer in Chicago, and thereby fell in with with several old-time Chicago activists who taught Obama the ways and tactics of community organizing. These old-timers had in turn been mentored by Saul Alinsky, who had started off his career as an organizer in the Back of the Yards district in Chicago in the 1930s.
Obama has never left his identity as a community organizer behind. After his U.S. Senate win his wife Michelle said “Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He’s a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change.” To which he later responded “I take that observation as a compliment.”
The interesting twist is that a decade-and-a-half earlier, Hillary Rodham studied and came to know Alinsky. Rodham started off at Wellesley College as a Goldwater Republican, and ended up a supporter of the anti-war Democrat Eugene McCarthy. When she was scouting around for a senior thesis topic, her professor suggested Alinsky, whom she had met earlier on a youth church outing to inner-city Chicago. Her senior thesis was titled “ ‘There Is Only the Fight…’: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.”
Rodham was quite taken by Alinsky himself, calling him “a man of exceptional charm”, but in the end felt that Alinsky-style actions were too small-scale to lead to widespread change, and instead believed one could effectively change the system from inside. After graduation she had the options of going to India on a Fulbright, entering law school at Harvard or Yale, or taking a job offered to her by Alinsky at his new training institute. She chose law school.