This article originally appeared in the Washington Post, but I’m linking to it there and at a mirror in case the post requires a login or puts up some other hassle to viewing. It pretty much exactly mirrors my opinions of the Republican Party. My belief that their current leadership is radical, corrupt, and not really all that conservative is not just partisan B.S. You could have a principled conservative party that I would still strongly disagree with, but at least respect. Even within a radical and corrupt party (at the national and most state levels), the Bush white house may just be the worst of the bunch.

Today is the last day for public comment for new voting guideliness to be sent to the Election Assistance Commission. You can send a letter to them via a form at:

http://www.demaction.org/dia/organizations/vevo/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=1301

You can just send their form letter, you can edit it to include local information, or you can write you own letter and enter it in the space provided.

I can hardly even believe this. We all know they believe this shit, but it’s rare to catch them saying it.

Maybe I wasn’t wrong after all. I should learn not to doubt me.

Here’s a thought for you. Houston alone has picked up more than 150,000 refugees from Katrina. I’ve seen estimates up to a quarter million for Texas. Assume for a moment that half of them never have the means to go back to New Orleans or a place to go back to. Texas could gerrymander 100,000 primarily poor, black refugees into one or two existing minority congressional districts. The extra population, however, might be enough to tip them over the point at which they’d pick up yet another congressional seat in 2010, a seat they’d be sure to gerrymander so as to be an easy pickup for a white, conservative, Republican.

Growing up in Tallahassee with a father who was an AFL-CIO lobbyist and election organizer, I sort of absorbed Florida politics by osmosis. Tallahassee is a company town and the company is government. In the 90s and up through the 2000 election, I had a damn near perfect record in picking primary winners and general election winners. My powers peaked in 2000. I was telling anyone who would listen that Florida was not “leaning Bush” as most prognosticators had it. It was a toss up and, I felt, trending toward Gore. I made some desperate and, at times, mean-spirited attempts to sway friends and associates from voting for Nader.

I moved away from Tallahassee in the fall of 2000. I spent just under a year in Boston, came back to Tallahassee for a bit less than a year, then moved to the Orlando area. It’s much harder to stay up on politics here. We don’t have an all day news & talk NPR station. Our local network affiliates just give highlight coverage to state politics until you’re within a few weeks of an election. I need to get back in the habit of reading papers from around the state.

In 2002, the Democrats really screwed up the governor’s race. I still don’t believe there’s a chance in hell that Janet Reno would have beat JEB! had she been the nominee. Bill McBride turned out to be a terrible candidate. Among friendly audiences, he seemed sharp, well versed, and able to put a good “broad appeal”* spin on some very progressive ideas. At the debates, he looked like some dumb good ol’ boy who who had less grasp of the details than our president. I cringed all the way through it.

I utterly failed to give enough political weight to the surprisingly effective relief efforts after Florida’s fall 2004 hurricanes. I was kind of blindsided by how solidly Bush tied the state up.** I am not going to let that happen again. Over the next year, I’m going to get my finger back on the pulse of politics in this state. Expect to see a fair amount of entries on that topic.

* I don’t think McBride put a “centrist” spin on things, though that is probably how most pundits would characterize it. In opinion polls, progressive ideas generally poll well with the american public on specific, individual issues. I believe that they can be well communicated and appeal to the majority of the population without being diluted into centrism.

**I firmly believe that there was widespread voting fraud in areas where electronic voting was used without creating a paper trail. I think that’s true outside of Florida. I’ve read enough credible, not conspiracy theory, stuff to be convinced. I think Bush probably won Florida without the fraud this time, though.

In a follow-up to my post from a couple of weeks ago, I found this article online a little bit ago. This reads more like some cyberpunk dystopian fantasy than anything I ever should be seeing on the ground in my own lifetime. This, by the way, is exactly the kind of thing that feeds into my notion that (sometimes unwittingly) the Libertarian party and its adherents are truly fascists. In the fantasy world that many of them conjure up, these heavily armed corporate thugs would be a common sight, enforcing private property rights in a more efficient and cost-effective way than public police ever could.

Several months ago, I made a post elsewhere wherein I was absolutely wrong about something. My prediction was that the U.S. economy couldn’t handle prolonged oil prices at $50 or more per barrel. I did not believe that a nation full of financed SUVs, commuting through sprawling suburbs could handle gas in the $2.50 to $3.00 per gallon range for very long. Optional Spending would stop. The only thing that might prevent serious inflation for the cost of all the goods we ship by truck would be the fact that slowed spending would force retailers not to raise prices lest they lose even more sales. All of this slowdown in spending and reduced margins would lead to layoffs. Rinse. Repeat. And you’ve got another recession.

So far, it appears as if I’ve been dead wrong on that one. We are seeing some inflation. We are seeing a bit of a slowdown in the economy, but we seem to have a lot more ability to absorb the increase in the price of oil than I had thought. This may still change when winter rolls around in the Snow Belt and people see a possible doubling in their usual heating bills on top of the increased commuting cost.

One thing that I predicted in this scenario has come true. Prolonged expensive oil would restart production in areas where the high cost of extracting oil meant that it wasn’t profitable when it was only selling for $30 per barrel or less. I read an article in the Christian Science monitor this morning that, I think, puts the lie to one of the current myths of the mainstream left. It is widely believed that the decline of oil availability is going to force green and sustainable energy into the forefront of our economy. I’ve never believed that we’re anywhere near as close to the end of oil as the fashionable punditry would have us believe. We’ve seen “deadlines” where oil production couldn’t keep up with consumption come and go many times over the last 30 years. The predictions have always been wrong, largely because new technology finds a way to find oil that was hidden or tap oil that we couldn’t get our hands on previously. I think we’ve got at least a couple more decades of that process on tap before we run out. But even if you accept the premise that we’re about to run out of oil, the economics (and to a very real extent the ideology) of the oil business isn’t going to lead us into biodiesel and hydrogen cars. I think the Monitor article makes a pretty compelling case for the notion that we’ll just see other fossil fuels converted into synthetic liquid fuel to fuel our cars, home heating, etc. These fuels easily become profitable when oil is selling above $40 per gallon. At best, in the short term (like the next decade or two) some of these green technologies will make us more fuel efficient. We may get to where we’re getting 60+ MPG, but we’ll still be burning up lots of that light, sweet crude. We may see another 25 years of rising domestic demand.

I wish I could post just about everything he said during the show, but the following is a nice representation:

Second, what I want to say is this: I think Jim is a good is doing a good job of demonstrating and this show is. the difference between left and right of center. It originated in the French parliament. The people left of center were liberals; the people right of center were conservatives. Broadly speaking. And generally speaking, people on the left of center on the right of center, I’m
sorry the conservatives, the right of center are interested in property values, property, property rights. The rights and the rights of property.

And generally speaking again it’s all generalized the left-of-center people are more concerned with humans and human beings and human concerns; to the care of humans, not the care and worry about property rights. That’s generally been true. And Bush is pushing this country farther down the hill, faster than anyone has before. [applause]

–George Carlin on RealTime with Bill Maher 9/16

I know what the next book I’m going to buy is. Catherine Crier’s Contempt:How the Right is Wronging American Justice takes a lawyer’s gift for creating clear, logical arguments and applies that to shredding the common assertions of the right wing regarding the judiciary and the intent of the founders. I’m really surprised to see this particular book coming from her. She’s someone that I’ve always thought of us being somewhat conservative. I found out during an interview with her this morning that, as a Texas Republican, she was the youngest person ever elected to a judgeship.

I’ve long argued that it’s a huge mistake for the left to cede the ground of original intent to the right. You damn near never hear liberals citing Jefferson et al to back up their theories of constitutional law in the media or other public venues. And while she’s not a liberal, she is definitely making the argument for the secular intent of our founders and the secular system they established. I’m looking forward to reading it.