Month: July 2004

Uh, I don’t have a problem with the former First Son and retired ballet dancer speaking at the DNC. But his Embryonic Stem Cell Research miracle product pitch is kind of out-of-place among the political speeches. It’s especially a let down after Barak Obama‘s inspirational I’m-gonna-be-the-first-Black-president speech.

It’s sort of shockingly manipulative of the democratic party convention to celebrate African-American sheroes like Shirley Chisholm and Fannie Lou Hamer who the party didn’t just fail to embrace at the right time, but actively worked against. Better late than never, I guess.

I just flipped on CNN (to watch my boss do her job),  and they played a video clip of Bill Clinton taking the stage at the convention last night. The voice over: “Last night Bill Clinton showed he still has it. But did he get his facts straight? And was the speech effective? More after this…”

What are the odds the Republican convention gets treated this way?  I’d have to call it zilch.  Goddamn “most trusted” bullshit…

I have been thinking a lot lately about how doomed the Democratic Party is, and how little I care about it as an institution. Even now, as they use this week’s bully pulpit to make the best pitch they can muster, they are still trying to recruit support from some phantom “middle,” and mostly giving the finger to their base. Not only is this a losing strategy, it’s one without a soul. And that’s why I think the DP is going to die, and why I kind of look forward to it’s inevitable demise.

I know this will create an unpleasant power vacuum on the left, not to mention in congress, but the fact is there are many national groups who I think see this disaster on the horizon, and they’re rising to the challenge. Or at the very least, they are gaining the loyalty of the progressive base by working to beat Bush and simultaneously building powerful grassroots political organizations.

For more about this, here’s a really great article by a “small-l libertarian Republican”about “the organizational revolution taking place among Democrat-friendly interest groups”:

The future of party politics?
…both in this electoral cycle and in their plans for creating an idea machine, these organizations aren’t talking about appealing to centrist voters — if anything, there’s a disdain for the Clintonite policies of the nineties. The goal in the short-term is to motivate those latent voters symapthetic to a liberal/progressive agenda. The goal in the long term is to generate the ideas that will pull the country in a leftward direction.

How’dya like this lazy AP reporting:

The AP headline says Clintons Vow to Make Kerry Next President, but Bill and Hillary haven’t even spoken yet! That’s some lazy shit.

I expect to spend a lot of time at ConventionBloggers.com to find out what’s really going on next week.

I also plan to spend Thursday night at Hell trying really hard to get inspired by Kerry’s big convention-finale speech. (Don’t worry, I saved a barf bag from my last flight.) Wish me luck.

In related news, I am currently reading Hillary Rodham Clinton’s biography. I can’t even really explain why I did it, but I had a chance to get it autographed by her… and it was right near my office in DC… and I just got all swept up. Have you ever heard her speak? Sometimes she actually inspires me, much to my surprise. Anyway, I’m also surprised to find I’m enjoying the book. And now I understand: I really am a political junkie. But furtunately I’m not alone.

When I went to bed at 2am Wednesday night after finally fixing a mysterious bug on OrangePolitics.org, I knew it was going to be hard to get up early Thursday for my flight to a last-minute work meeting in DC.

But instead of getting up at 6:30am, I woke up at 4:30am to the sound of my voicemail beeping. It seems that thoughtful American Airlines called to tell me they had cancelled my flight due to “weather” in DC. I checked the websites of NOAA, thWeather Channel, and the Federal Aviation Administration. They all indicated nice weather and no problems in the DC area. American is lucky that I don’t have time to follow up on this particular bullshit right now.

After about an hour, I gave up on my effort to find an alternate flight. I was either not going to have time to make an early flight, or I would get to DC so late I’d miss most of the meeting. I decided I would just have to phone it in to this meeting – literally.

But the boss had other plans. She called me @ 5:30am and said she’d find me a ticket because it was so important that I attend this meeting (she was awake because her husband was very sick). She said she’d make it work by cancelling the morning meeting. And she did. I spent 7-8 hours in transit for less than 5 hours of meeting – most of which my supervisor agreed I did not really need to attend. The woman who convened the meeting, for which people flew in from N.C. and N.Y., didn’t attend because her husband was in the hospital. Meanwhile colleagues are waiting on me, and about a dozen urgent tasks went undone. Some of which have to be done before I go to Utah for work Monday and I’m supposed to be out today…

Still, I do love my job and I’m lucky to have it. But some people sure do make it harder!

I also posted this at OrangePolitics.org.

If you don’t know me that well, you might be surprised to learn that I am one of the happiest people in town to witness the long-awaited opening of the free-standing Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History at UNC. It’s future existence was the the primary purpose of my day-to-day existence during my last two years of college. As a member of the Student Coalition for a Free-Standing Sonja Haynes Stone Black Cultural Center, I organized marches, spoke at rallies, met with administrators, slept in South Building, and wrote flyers, press releases, and site analysis reports. I dedicated myself to helping the University community understand the compelling need for this institution.

I was glad to read coverage of the upcoming festivities around the opening of the new free-standing center in last week’s Chapel Hill Herald. But I was confused by the severe contortions they went through in that editorial. Comparing the CBHC (I still think of it as the BCC) to Carolina North was strange. But citing it as an example of administrators’ long-term vision and tenacity was absurd.

The opening of the CBHC’s new building is in spite of UNC’s leadership, not because of it. Chapel Hill Herald Assisant Editor Ray Gronberg ought to know this, since he was there. I remember meeting him in the lobby of South Building when I was among about 100 students who occupied it for two weeks to protest the Chancellor’s foot dragging on the BCC. It was almost 10 years before some UNC administrators realized the center would be an asset to the campus and the state, and saw that it wasn’t going to happen without their support (ie: funding).

In the early 1990’s, it was the UNC Board of Trustees and administrative leaders (like then Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Edith Wiggins) who raised the arguments against it that the Herald cites: “One of the arguments made then against the project — that it was a frill — finds echoes today in the general criticisms of what some in this community see as UNC’s mindless expansionism.”

In fact, the institutions that now support massive campus expansion, are the same ones who stonewalled against building a black cultural center for many years. They are are ones who claimed “we don’t have the money,” “we don’t need it,” “it’s divisive.” One could raise those same objections to Carolina North, but you don’t have to when there are so many more substantive things to critique.

So it’s putting it lightly to say that I think it’s a stretch for the Herald to compare UNC’s leadership on the BCC to it’s vision on Carolina North. If they supported the idea of building Carolina North like they did the idea of building a black cultural center, you’d find administrators claiming that the current campus is really quite adequate, and these research programs aren’t really that important to the university or the state, and the best location might be in distant Chatham County, if it really must exist at all.

All the evidence used in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.

Still haven’t seen it? Better think of a good excuse to tell your grandkids that you missed the political turning point of the decade…

I’m going to edit out some letters just so I don’t get a buch of errant Googlers looking for gay p*rn or something…

She really means it. I’ve never seen anyone who enjoyes talking about, um, ‘it’ as much as Wonkette.