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Challenged Ballots: You Be the Judge!

You've been dying to be an election judge ever since Florida 2000.

Now you can be!

Minnesota Public Radio has examples of challenged ballots from the recount of the U.S. Senate election between Al Franken (D) and Norm Coleman (R).

You get to play judge and say how you would rule in each case. See how your choices compare with the decisions of others!

Sigh . . .

I used to party, chase girls, and rock and roll. Now, this is how I get my fun.

h/t Political Wire.

Change We Can Believe In #27

Obama gives the word and Joe Lieberman gets to keep his chairmanship of Homeland Security.

Obama wants Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State.

Obama wants Larry Summers, Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary, to be his Treasury Secretary.

Obama wants Eric Holder, Bill Clinton's Deputy Attorney General, to be his Attorney General.

Obama hires about 40 other former Clinton staffers to be in his administration.

Obama meets with John McCain, reportedly offering him Secretary of Defense.

Wait, no, George W. Bush's Secretary of Defense is going to be Obama's Secretary of Defense.

Next up, Obama asks George W. to stay on as Secretary of Education. Karl Rove will run Health, Education and Welfare.

The United States will be one big happy family.

So, get used to it.

Or else.

America's First Black President

Barack Obama's election victory on November 4, 2008 was cool and all, but he's actually not the first black President of the United States. Here's the original:



The Prez, Lester Young, discusses his economic platform in "Pennies from Heaven," from a September 1950 Jazz at the Philharmonic film session.

He's joined by his cabinet:

Hank Jones - piano
Ray Brown - bass
Buddy Rich - drums
Bill Harris - trombone

Then, the "First Lady of Song," Ella Fitzgerald scats with the group on "Blues for Greasy," along with Harry "Sweets" Edison on trumpet and Flip Phillips on tenor sax.

The film was directed by Gjon Mili, who also did the greatest jazz film of all time, Jammin' the Blues (1944).

Lester will always be my favorite president.

Barack Obama and Bi-Racial Politics

The November 17 issue of the New Yorker has several good articles on Obama and the 2008 Presidential Election. You can read most of them online. Here's the Table of Contents.

I particularly recommend David Grann's "The Fall: John McCain’s choices" and Ryan Lizza's "Battle Plans: How Obama won."

Best of all, however, is a long article by the Editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, entitled, "The Joshua Generation: Race and the campaign of Barack Obama."

Much has been made of Obama being African-American, but we sometimes forget that his life experience has been that of a person with a white mother and a black father. Obama himself spends most of his first book, Dreams from My Father, talking about this fact and how he struggled in his attempts to navigate the contours and difficulties of being bi-racial. Perhaps coming from a bi-racial family myself, and hearing stories from my father and aunt, I was particularly struck by this aspect of Obama's book.

Remnick covers a lot of ground in his article, but his look at Obama's bi-racial background and how it's played out in his career and in the 2008 election was, for me, the most interesting part.

The historian David Levering Lewis, who has written biographies of King and Du Bois, told me that after reading Obama’s books he had the sense of a young man almost alone in the world, trying to find a place. “The orphanage of his life compels him to scope out possibilities and escape hatches,” he said. “This very smart mother was somewhat absent, and certainly the father was, and the grandfather marched with Patton, but he was not a rock. Obama is in the world almost solo and he learns to negotiate.”

- - - -

As [Harvard professor Randall] Kennedy followed Obama’s career, he was struck by the uniqueness of his background and how it may have affected both his temperament and his public appeal. “He’s operating outside the precincts of black America,” Kennedy said. “He is growing up in Hawaii, for God’s sake. And then, when he comes to the mainland and tries to find his way, he has to work at it. He does have to go find it. He is not socialized like other people. I can’t help thinking that he might have thought it a burden at the time, but maybe some of the things he missed out on were a benefit to miss out on. For one thing, he didn’t absorb the learned responses, the learned mantras and slogans, the learned resentments of that time that one got in college.”

- - - -

“I don’t think Barack’s candidacy was like any other candidacy,” Axelrod said. “He was the first African-American to come along as a legitimate contender whose candidacy was viewed in the broadest terms.” In his Senate race, Obama had campaigned hard and successfully in southern-Illinois towns nearer to Little Rock than to Chicago, and in white areas of northwest Chicago where Harold Washington had been booed in 1983, when he first ran for mayor. “Barack would come back from these white towns and say, ‘They’re just like my grandparents from Kansas,’ ” Axelrod said. “That’s one of his gifts: there is no room he walks into where he doesn’t feel comfortable and make the people feel that way. It’s both his personality and his background—one contributes to the other. There’s no doubt that being biracial contributes to a sense that he doesn’t compartmentalize people by race or ethnicity or background.”

Even black leaders who were initially wary of him came to recognize his advantages. “His background helped,” Al Sharpton said. “He had a primary understanding of peoples that we may not have had. He could meet with me and then with a representative from Kansas and understand the nuances as well as the content of both conversations.”

It's an excellent article - give it a read.

Monday Morning Madness

Will someone explain this to me?

Bond Becomes a Leftist

Juan Cole doesn't normally do movie reviews, but he has an interesting analysis of the new James Bond film in "A Quantum of Anti-Imperialism."

Some excerpts:

The reviews of director Mark Forster's "Quantum of Solace" have complained about the film's hectic pace (reminiscent of Doug Liman's and Paul Greengrass's Bourne thrillers), about the humorlessness of Daniel Craig's Bond, and even about the squalid surroundings, so unlike Monaco and Prague, in which the film is set (with many scenes in Haiti and Bolivia). They have missed the most remarkable departure of all. Forster presents us with a new phenomenon in the James Bond films, a Bond at odds with the United States, who risks his career to save Evo Morales's leftist regime in Bolivia from being overthrown by a General Medrano, who is helped by the CIA and a private mercenary organization called Quantum.

. . . .

The present film takes, to say the least, a different view of popular movements of the left. [Evo] Morales is not mentioned in the film, but his movement was in the headlines while "Casino Royale" was being shot, as he challenged the old "white" elite and was denounced by the US ambassador as an "Andean Bin Laden" and his peasant followers (many of them of largely native stock) as "Taliban." Morales's nationalization of Bolivia's petroleum and natural gas and his redistribution of wealth from the wealthy elite to villagers were among the policies drawing the ire of George W. Bush and his cronies.

If Morales is not mentioned, Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti is. The villain, Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric) remarks that while Aristide was president 2001-2004, he raised the minimum wage from 25 cents an hour to a dollar an hour. It was, he said, little enough, but caused the corporations that benefited from cheap Haitian labor to mobilize to have Aristide removed. (Aristide himself maintained that US and Canadian intelligence connived with officers at the coup against him and kidnapped him, taking him to southern Africa.) The Left analysis of American imperialism in the Western hemisphere is put in the mouth, not of a worker or ideologue, but rather of the collaborator in capitalist exploitation of America's poor neighbors. Aristide's story is a clear parallelism for the fate the CIA and Quantum are depicted as plotting for Morales.

Note that director Mark Forster's father was from conservative Bavaria, and that the family was forced to relocate to Davos in Switzerland because they were targeted by the radical Baader-Meinhoff gang after the father became wealthy on selling his pharmaceutical company. Forster's previous film, "The Kite-Runner," sympathized with the Afghans oppressed by the Soviet invasion and even shows one character refusing to be treated by a Russian-American physician. That is, Forster is no glib Third-Worldist. He and his screenwriters are simply performing the work of the intellectual, interrogating the way the wealthy and powerful in the Bush era casually overthrew (or tried to overthrow) foreign governments in the global south to get at the resources they coveted.

. . . .

Craig's Bond is an intimation of the sort of Britain that could have been, if Tony Blair had stood up to Bush and refused to be dragged into an illegal war of choice, and into other actions and policies that profoundly contradicted the principles on which the Labour Party had been founded (and you could imagine Craig's Bond voting for Old Labour, while Flemings's was obviously a Tory). In a way, this Bond stands in for Clare Short, who resigned as a cabinet minister from Blair's government in 2003 over the illegitimacy of the Iraq War.

It is a sad state of affairs that Bush's America now appears in a Bond film in rather the same light as Brezhnev's Soviet Union used to. One can only hope that President Barack Obama can adopt the sort of policies that can get Bond back on our side.

Hey, if A.O. Scott (New York Times) panned the film, it must have something going for it.

There Sat Down, Once, a Thing on Henry's Heart

Strolling these days through The Dream Songs by John Berryman. Here he is in Dublin, 1967, reciting Dream Song 29.

Only the Irish-American poet, Liam Moore, who used to performed several Dream Songs amidst a Velvet-Undergroundesque swirl of feedback, comes close to Berryman reading the original.



Dream Song 29
by John Berryman

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry's ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

Change We Can Believe In

New York Jets 34 - New England Patriots 31.

The Jets go up to Foxboro, Mass, and defeat the AFC Champion Patriots on their own home turf, in a dramatic overtime game, for sole possession of first-place in the AFC East. A very rare and gutsy win for the Jets in an important game.

Why we love Washington. (In 39 seconds.)

Is There an Echo in Here?

The New Yorker: George Packer has a new article entitled "The New Liberalism," comparing Barack Obama and F.D.R.

Packer was one of the centrist liberal cheerleaders for the invasion of Iraq.

He's a graduate of Yale (1982).



Time: Peter Beinart has a new article entitled "The New Liberal Order," comparing Barack Obama and F.D.R.

Beinart was one of the centrist liberal cheerleaders for the invasion of Iraq.

He's a graduate of Yale (1993).



Are these guys sleeping together or something?

Evidently under a portrait of FDR.