Author: Ruby Sinreich

How many Bush administration officials does it take to change a light bulb?

When you think about this, it’s amazing that things aren’t much worse:

From Electoral Vote Predictor citing MTSU Statewide Poll.

Here are the comments I made to the Chapel Hill Town Council tonight about the OI-4 zone:

I believe that UNC is a major part of what makes our town great. And it goes without saying that Chapel Hill is a major asset to UNC. Since we are inseparable, UNC and the community share a common destiny and common needs. That is, what is good for one is good for the other.

I also believe that one of the things that has made Chapel Hill so prosperous and good for UNC is our excellent quality of life. While some deride us for it, the highly deliberative nature of our local government has been crucial to ensuring that the community grows in a thoughtful and well-planned way.

While I regret the occasional expense of our development review process on moderate-income homeowners, I think we call all see the fruits of good planning in our highly functioning transportation system and civic areas. I’m glad we take the time to review and improve projects before we approve them. In fact, I think we usually take more than 6 months to review a typical Special Use Permit application.

Six months (or sometime up to a year!) for the staff to analyze the proposal, to get input from advisory boards and town residents, to negotiate improvements, and finally for the Council to deliberate and ultimately approve a development. While I understand this can sometimes be expensive, I think most of us agree that it’s worth it.

How then can we justify spending so much less than 6 months on much larger proposals? Most of these Development Applications that we have seen and expect to see in the future, will have a much bigger impact on our town than 10 typical SUPs put together. If you rezone the Horace Williams to OI-4, you will be expected to review the biggest development in town’s history in 90 days or less. Is that really a good idea? Is 120 days significantly better? I don’t think so.

Now that we have some experience with applications in OI-4, I think it’s clear that it doesn’t work well for either the University or the town. Now we are beginning to see the difficulty in even determining what constitutes a complete application that starts the clock ticking. These Development Applications (and their “modifications”) have typically been over 300 pages. I don’t think a single one has come to us where the planning staff didn’t need more information to evaluate it, or when there wasn’t information in the proposal that had to be later corrected by the University. Should this be going on while the sands flow through the hourglass in an insanely short review period? That is not deliberative. That is not good for us. Or for UNC.

And here are the notes I made on OrangePolitics.org while I was waiting to make these comments.

Here’s the view from atop the ferris wheel at the N.C. State Fair.

As we walked in to the fair (from the awful, disorganized parking, I don’t even want to start on that huge rant) I
was a little disturbed to see family after family wearing “Bush/Cheney”
stickers and even carrying B/C yard signs. Slowly a few “Kerry/Edwards”
stickers and signs appeared in the stream of fairgoers. Finally we reached some equilibruim at about 65% B/C and 35% K/E – this is out of the 10% of people at the fair who were wearing their votes on their sleeves.

Eventually we found the tables that were the source of
the propaganda. They were on opposite sides of the huge agricultural
display hall. Near the Democratic Party table there was a steady stream of people picking up materials. I slapped on a K/E sticker next to my “Stand up for Choice” stickers. There was even a state supreme court judge there who personally asked us for our votes. I will definitely vote for her if I can remember her name… In contrast, there was a serious throng over at the Republican Party table. Fortunately, none of them seemed to be at all interested in the Right to Life table across the isle.

So after ogling some of the biggest vegetables I have ever seen (including a 700-pound pumpkin) we left the ag hall and I reviewed the many reasons not to feel bad about this disparity in activity at the party tables. NC is expected to vote Republican, so of course you’d see more of that… the state fair is hardly a representative sample of voters… etc. But the real saving grace came to us in the “Village of Yesteryear,” where artisans wear faux colonial garb and display their mad skillz on the lathe (or their weapon of choice).

As I was perusing some jewelery, I thought the craftsman was joking when he asked “so do you know who you’re voting for this year or hevn’t you decided yet?” My clever, sarcastic response was lost on him as he was actually talking to the lady running the booth next to him. She was noncomittal, so he continued: “I voted for Bush last time, I never vote for Democrats, but I just can’t support him this year. Kerry’s very liberal, I wish they had picked someone less liberal.” I almost interrupted him at this point. I’m glad I didn’t. He went on: “Bush is arrogrant, and he’s being advised by arrogant people.” And then he said something about how the President in stubbornly going in the wrong direction, I can’t remember exactly.

Although I was certainly disappointed in the gentleman’s poor customer service skills, I was actually quite glad to be ignored by him and to listen to this very honest statement from a genuine conservative voter. Let’s hope more Republicans come to their senses and rediscover their consciences like he did.

Just in case you’re thinking about hitting the fair, I can tell you that even though the company running it is new this year (an interesting story in it’s own right), nothing there appears to have changed in the past 20 years. Except there are a few more vegetarian options, and fried Twinkies. (I had one. Disgusting and delicious!)

The DRM interviewed me for his show called “3 URLs” on AudioActivism.org. I talked about three different sites that use social software to allow for self-organized/network-centric advocacy: flickr.com, bloglines.com, and of course OrangePolitics.org.

AudioActivism.org is getting involved with the emerging podcasting movement. I don’t love the name, as it’s not very descriptive. It’s really just audio blogging. Podcasters record their thoughts (and sometimes music) and post them in a consistent format on their websites. There are some different software and things you can get that will automatically grab the audio file and put it on your iPod (or whatever) – but really there’s nothing stopping you from just listening at your computer. I see podcasting as a cross between a blog and a radio show.

Some people think podcasting is the wave of the future. But until audio files can be searched and index like text can, I’ll be sticking with my text blog.

OK, now I’m blogging this.

This map of the 2000 election results shows every county in the country shaded by how it voted in the last presidential election. Red for republicans, blue for democrats, green for independents. Interesting to note how much of the country is purple, but also that there are very distinct red and blue trends (in the obvious places). I think the midwest looks more violet than I would have expected. I’m also happily surprisd that I don’t live in the only bright blue part of N.C.. Not surprisingly, the very poor, mostly black northeastern part of the state is as blue as Orange and Durham counties.

Check out the pictures at FreewayBlogger.com.

Bonus link for my family members:
Bubbie kicks Bush’s ass.

I’m off to DC again, where I will have to play the debate drinking game all by myself tomorrow night. ;} Actually, given how ill I have been since Sunday, I will probably give it a pass. I need the sleep, plus my delicate stomach might not be able to handle the bullshit.

On your TO DO list this week: contact local sponsors and tell them to Boycott Sinclair Broadcast Group. These are the same jerks who wouldn’t air the Nightline program reading the names of Americans killed in combat in Iraq. Now Sinclair wants its stations to pre-empt their own programming and show an anti-Kerry hatchet peice called “Stolen Honor.” It’s no wonder they’re being called the next Fox.

UPDATE: Jay Rosen’s PressThink has a characteristically long and thoughtful piece about the impact of this new movement in media: “A lot depends on how we define Sinclair Broadcasting: as a media company with a political agenda, or a political actor that’s gotten hold of a media company and is re-shaping it for bigger battles ahead.”