Category: Current Affairs

Wow! I’ve been gone a little while and I missed writing here a bunch. Here’s what I’ve been up to.

*BookTour.com, the company I co-founded earlier this summer, was featured in a NY Times story this past Sunday. Huge for us and a personal milestone for me.

*I published this essay about Bill Graham, the legendary rock promoter in connection with the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love.

*I celebrated a late birthday with 25 of my closest friends.

*I’m a Berkeley Rep. Theatre subscriber for this season, thanks to a birthday surprise from my parents.

Regarding this blog, I’m gonna spend some time evaluating what needs to go on this blog and what doesn’t. In the recent past, the intimidation of feeling like I had to post x much, y often has kept me from posting at all. I don’t want that to happen again. But I also need to be clear on what this space is for. I used to write all the time here because I wasn’t making my living it at. Now that I am, I can’t justify writing essay-length pieces here I could be writing for publication. Or perhaps I can, to push an idea out of the nest and see if it can fly.

Increasingly, I view my blog as a map of my mind, a snapshot of where I’m at on a given day and an outlet for expression to small to ignore but too big to devote worktime too. Right now, that makes the most sense to me.

So I’ll be messing with a bunch of different kinds of postings. If you keep reading, I promise to keep it worth reading.

I never thought it would happen but after reading this article, I actually feel a little sorry for George Bush. It took 7 years but here we are.

No modern president has experienced such a sustained rejection by the American public. Bush’s approval rating slipped below 50 percent in Washington Post-ABC News polls in January 2005 and has not topped that level in the 30 months since. The last president mired under 50 percent so long was Harry S. Truman. Even Richard M. Nixon did not fall below 50 percent until April 1973, 16 months before he resigned.

The polls reflect the events of Bush’s second term, an unyielding sequence of bad news. Social Security. Hurricane Katrina. Harriet E. Miers. Dubai Ports World. Vice President Cheney’s hunting accident. Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay and Mark Foley. The midterm elections. I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Alberto R. Gonzales and Paul D. Wolfowitz. Immigration. And overshadowing it all, the Iraq war, now longer than the U.S. fight in World War II.

Seems as a result the president doesn’t socialize much any more, has been abandoned by many of his once close friends and and is taking the counsel of many a learned man to discern his place in history. He gets how much the voters disapprove of his performance but remains convinced of his own righteous.

For the first time in 7 years, Bush seems to me like a man trapped by his own fatal character defects instead of a dangerous fool.

According to a CNN Poll, support for the Iraq war is at an all-time low at %30. On the other side, 63% of Americans are ready to bring the troops home with %38 of Republicans opposing the war altogether.

This sound like an abject failure to me. Are we ready to pull the plug?

I will send you all scooters, or wings, or those tubes that the Jetsons rode around in. Something, because, lord, I’m so so sorry.

This from the New York Times…

With his 20-minute announcement, Mr. Romney took the latest step in his transformation from a Republican who managed to get himself elected governor of Massachusetts, one of the more Democratic states in the nation, to a someone trying to capture the Republican presidential nomination in a process dominated by social conservatives.

Man, this is going to be an interesting election year. Or year and a half.

Update: Guiliani says he’s in too.

Salon reports that he’s running in his home state of Minnesota. What an election year 2008 is going to be.

I have a weekness for the old-fashioned pomp and circumstance of government so I loved reading this article about the first convening of of the 110th Congress, headed by Speaker-Elect Nancy Pelosi.

Some of the rituals I didn’t know about:

1. The Speaker of the House election is the only time the Speaker addresses Congress from the dais. All other times, the Speaker is on the House floor like everyone else.

2. It’s also the only time votes are announced out loud. Otherwise they are tabulated electronically.

3. Tradition dicates the Speaker is nominated by the head of the majority parties caucus, in this case Rahm Emanuel of Illinois.

4. Swearing in of the new speaker is done by the most senior member of the house, in this case John Dingell of Michigan who has served continuously since 1955.

Is there a definitive list of who the new congressional majority/minority leaders/whips are? I can’t seem to find one anywhere.

Wise man Jeff Chang had this on what made the difference this election cycle…

You want to know how it happened? Just check the League of Young Voters site. In Ohio, they knocked on 50,000 doors. In Pennsylvania, they ran a massive registration and GOTV and election protection campaign, and backed up those efforts on the ground in Maryland, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Florida, Maine, Missouri, Connecticut, and California. Not a few of those states turned on very thin margins–all made by young voters.

I have to admit it’s wonderful to see all the old pundits and their brainwashed young followers (beginning with NPR and extending all the way to the alt-weeklies) who have been bemoaning the waste of “apathetic youth” eating a large serving of crow along with Rumsfeld and Bush.

Here here to that…

An update on Virginia. Thanks to the sharp eyes of my friend Kevin Lawver, CNN is reporting that the Associated Press is calling the race for the Democrat Jim Webb which would give them a 51-49 majority in the Senate.

That may be the best news I’ve heard all year.