There hasn't been nearly as much coverage in the US media as there should be, but what's probably one of the most significant world events is the election in Ukraine, which appears to have been stolen from the opposition candidate.
Some interesting English language blogs covering the opposition perspective are Le Sabot Post-Moderne, Orange Ukraine, and Tulip Girl.
I haven't looked into it enough to know if it's the case, but it appears that there are a lot of similarities between this election and the Yugoslav election of 2000, where Milosevic tried to steal the election, and which ended in a bloodless revolution bringing the opposition leader to power. Here's hoping that the situation in Ukraine will end as peacefully, hopefully without having to resort to revolution for true democracy to come to the Ukraine.
I haven't blogged much recently, but I'm still around. Haven't had much motivation, because this is the time of year that working retail gets insane (and puts lots of money in my pocket, whoo hoo), and since I tend to work evenings, by the time I get home I don't feel like doing much of anything other than sitting on the couch disengaging my brain by staring mindlessly at the TV. Plus, my older brother is home for a couple of months after having been gone for the past two years doing linguistic research in India, he gets a midterm two month vacation before heading back for another two year stint at which point he should have finished surveying the people group that he's focusing on.
Saw some good movies in the past few weeks. If you have a chance, I'd highly recommend catching Diarios de Motocicleta, aka Motorcycle Diaries, about Che Guevara's road trip through South America with his friend while he was in medical school. That was an important period in influencing his becoming a revolutionary, and the movie tells the story in an interesting way. It manages to avoid becoming a Marxist propaganda piece, which is good, because propaganda tends to get in the way of telling a story. Another movie that's worth seeing, if you can (which might be hard because it's currently showing in only 4 theaters in the US) is Primer which is an interesting take on the time travel subgenre of sci-fi. It's really confusing, and it probably needs to be seen more than once, but it's one of the few movies that have an internally consistent portrayal of time travel (part of the reason it's confusing, because of the recursive nature of time travel as portrayed in the film), and it's also one of the few movies I've seen that have people who you can actually believe might be engineers of some sort. Primer was made by some software engineer guy with a mathematics degree who got bored with his engineering job and decided he wanted to make a movie, so consequently, it's not exactly a traditional film. It did win the Grand Jury prize at Sundance, for what that's worth.
...is that the show that ABC was trying to promote, Desperate Housewives, is seriously lame. I watched one episode to see what everybody was talking about, and what I saw was a show that was aspiring to be a lot of things and not quite succeeding at any. The show is going for a Sex in the City set in middle class suburbia thing, but it doesn't work. It's also clearly trying to mimic the feel of Arrested Development, but misses the point that Arrested Development is a witty satire, while Desperate Housewives is neither particularly witty or a satire (if it was a satire, it might be watchable). The viewer isn't really supposed to be identifying with the self absorbed characters on Arrested Development, but it seems that (in keeping with the Sex in the City in suburbia theme) there is actually a subset of people who are expected to have a "Oh, that so totally is my life!" response to Desperate Housewives.
As for the piece in question, I think it's pretty hypocritical that everybody is getting all worked up over what was shown and how it was inappropriate for children while at the same time not giving a flip that the Eagles Cheerleaders and gratuitous closeup camera shots of said cheerleaders' barely covered chests is also seen by young children.
An interesting reaction though, is Tony Dungy's opinion that the spot was racially offensive. Now, generally I would write a statement like that off as somebody looking to make an incident into something that it isn't, but Dungy is a guy I have a lot of respect for as an individual and he's not the sort of guy to spout off at the first sign of controversy. If he's saying something, then maybe there's something there. It is true that one of the oldest racist stereotypes of black men was that they had some sort of voracious desire to go after white women, and a lot of violence perpetuated by white people against black men was based on this stereotype. The KKK set themselves up as an organization that was protecting Southern womanhood from the evils of the predatory black male (and the corollary idea that white women needed to be protected from themselves because they wouldn't be able to control themselves in the presence of a black man). Now, I'm sure that ABC wasn't thinking of anything of the sort, but if you look at it in the context of several hundred years of American history, I can see how it would come across as offensive to certain people, especially a guy like Dungy who played the game in an era when stereotypes like that were something that he, as a black athlete would have to deal with. In any case, it's a different perspective on the whole thing and is worth thinking about.
I hate NHL commissioner Gary Bettman. He's a bum. He's ruined the hockey season, he's ruined our moment as fans to celebrate our team winning the Cup, because the lockout took away opening day and the banner raising won't be the same when it happens, and if he doesn't stop the direction he's heading, he's going to destroy the league. He needs to stop being so inflexible on the salary cap issue, a few teams are out of control (NY Rangers anyone?) but instead of instituting a luxury tax that would help reign in those teams, he wants to ruin it for everybody.
Plus, now I keep having to hear people like World magazine claim that nobody in the south cares about hockey because it's not being talked about enough on sports radio or something, when there's absolutely nothing to talk about, the coaches are under a gag order, the front office isn't arranging player interviews, and half of the players are out of the country anyway. Give us something to talk about, some progress in negotiations, some small sliver of hope to grasp hold of and we'll go to town with it. Otherwise, it's just too darn depressing.
The Lightning handed out championship rings to the players who were still around, but instead of a big ceremony opening night, it was some weird little event and only 15 guys showed up because the rest are off in Europe somewhere and the players wanted to have the Stanley Cup there for their lunch after they got the rings, but it was booked to be in Minnesota and the stupid idiot league couldn't even rearrange that so the team that won it could have it when they get the rings. It just sucks. The St. Pete Times has an article about the ceremony that has some extremely scathing comments from Tim Taylor about how Bettman's made this day, that should have been huge, into a joke and about what they've done to the fans. He said, among other things "I don't think we'll ever forget the treatment the NHL has given our team in trying not to let this happen," forward Tim Taylor said. "It was a joke. For this community not to share in this? I think it's a slap in the face the NHL has given our fans because they should've been involved. This should have been at the Forum in front of 22,000 people as we walk up and get the rings and open it up and show the fans. I personally feel the NHL has taken some of that away from us." The only reason they make any money is because of the fans, but we're the ones who are getting screwed over the worst in all of this.
We'll survive, hockey will survive, even in Florida, but it's not going to be the same. And just a warning, if anybody tries to diss hockey in Florida and say that this is going to make the sport disappear, prepare to get flamed, I'm not in the mood to hear that sort of crap. Hockey is entrenched in this state, and just like the baseball strikeout didn't stop kids from playing baseball, this isn't going to stop kids from playing hockey. In my county alone, we have everything from Mites to Junior hockey, and next year we're getting an ECHL affiliate complete with a brand new hockey arena, so whether you like it or not, hockey is here to stay.
This weekend's Saturday Night Live was virtually unwatchable (I could only stand two or three skits and flipped to other channels most of the time). It just isn't funny. The cast is terrible, with a few exceptions who don't have the presence to carry the rest of the cast, the only guy who can do a decent impersonation is Darryl Hammond, and the guy they have as a Bush impersonator is just plain awful. I know people have been saying for a while that it's gone downhill, but this season barely deserves to be on air. Ugh.
So, today I was in the mall killing time during my dinner break by browsing in the movie store, which just happens to be right across the way from the video games store, which appeared to be doing brisk business. I'm minding my own business in the foreign film section of the movie store, when out of the blue, some uber dorky nerdy guy who's about six inches shorter than me comes up to me and starts talking to me about how he just bought Halo 2 and it was the limited edition version and how it was totally cool and how he bought the Halo soundtrack too and it was on sale and all of this stuff, and I'm like "yeah, cool, I hear it's supposed to be pretty sweet" and he keeps going on and on about it, and I had never seen him before in my life and wanted to go back to looking at the foreign film section, so I tried to give him a non-committal "I'm not really an XBox fan" response and he totally wasn't getting the message. Then he remembered that he was in there to look for some anime dvd and started talking to the clerk about anime, and I could finally get away. It was all very random. Well, that's my Halo 2 story.
Parableman has an interesting discussion about how part of the reason that people in blue areas don't understand Christians is because people in those areas are much less likely to come in to contact with genuine Christians during the course of their everyday lives than people in red areas. He suggests that rather than abandoning those areas because they are so liberal and hostile to Christianity, Christians should be moving to those places to be salt and light and to engage the culture, not because of any hope for political gains, but because they need the light of Christ there too, and without a Christian witness, they're going to end up just as dark much of Europe is today. I think he makes a good point. After all, how are we going to communicate with people in the cultural elite on any real level if the only impression they have of Christians is angry protests against one thing or another? We need real dialogue, and you can't have that if Christians avoid the areas where culture is being shaped.
On to a slightly different subject.... Whether we like it or not, there is a genuine divide in this country, and it's not a particularly useful exercise to write it off as just the "Hollywood elite" not understanding "regular people." As those of you who read my blog with any regularity know, I grew up in Florida, which is ostensibly a red state, but, with the exception of parts of north and central Florida, it doesn't have much in common with it's red state neighbors. The area I grew up in is pretty cosmopolitan, what with our international sports academies, international tourism, and heavy dose of the arts (and even more art posers, but that's a story for another day). Anyway, when I went off to school at Covenant, despite the fact that Chattanooga is pretty up and coming, I went through some pretty major culture shock. The South (and much of the rest of flyover country) is a very different place, and if you aren't from there, you aren't going to instantaneously understand their outlook, even if you come from the same broadly evangelical tradition, much less if you're from New York or LA and have no religious background. A Massachussetts, New York or Southern California liberal comes from such a different world than a flyover country conservative that even with common religious ties, there's still going to be a huge communication gap. I can even understand why folks like that can identify more with Europeans than they can with red state conservatives, heck, I experienced less culture shock in the week I spent in Spain than I did in my first week at Covenant. The solution to the divide? I'm not entirely sure, but one big step would be if folks on both sides of the divide stopped throwing around buzz words and catch phrases and actually tried to sit down and define their terms so that this country could undergo meaningful dialogue rather than the current state of affairs where both sides are supposedly speaking the same language but it's so different that neither side has a clue what the other is saying. In any case, shows like Hannity and Colmes or Crossfire aren't doing anybody a service, they just contribute to the noise level without any meaningful dialogue taking place.
Because of this I just might need to get a new season pass to Busch Gardens next spring. It's the first diving coaster in North America, and it's opening May 2005. Just imagine, a 90 degree drop at 70 mph. Sweet.
On the evening cable news shows, the question of the hour seemed to be, "how did we get this so wrong?" with various talking heads arguing over why it was that Bush won, and how they missed it before the election. I figure that I have as much of a right as any of them to chime in, especially since I've been saying for a while that certain voting blocks weren't going to go as much for Kerry as conventional wisdom had it. I turned out to be right, especially on the Hispanic vote swinging much more towards Bush than people were expecting (while Kerry won the Hispanic vote overall, he did it by 9 points less than Gore did (Kerry got 53% according to CNN's exit polls), and in Florida, Bush won the Hispanic vote outright, a swing that handed him Florida by a nice margin).
Conventional wisdom has been that Hispanic voters vote Democratic. Historically, that's been correct, but what has happened over the past six or seven years, apparently without pundits noticing, is that Hispanic voters have been more favorable to Republican politics, particularly in certain key states like Florida. I started noticing a serious shift in Florida during the run up to the '98 governor's race, though I think that their has been a shift in the way that Republicans approached campaigning in that demographic at least as far back as '94, when George W. Bush was first elected governor of Texas, at least partly due to his success in campaigning among the Hispanic community. That year Jeb Bush narrowly lost the governor's race in Florida, and while it is often blamed on Lawton Chiles' last minute scare calls to elderly voters, the reality is that Jeb would have won handily if he had done what his brother did and made a significant effort to court the Hispanic vote (I still can't figure out how a guy who's wife is Mexican, who speaks primarily Spanish at home, and who's kids self-identify as Hispanic managed to ignore that demographic). In any case, Jeb and his strategists learned their lesson and when he ran again in '98, they campaigned hard for the Hispanic vote, and while he did not win a majority of Hispanic votes, it was a clear swing and enough to put him over the top. What was missed due to all of the Florida recount mess in 2000 was that although Hispanic voters went for Gore, they did so by a smaller margin than they have gone for Democrats in the past. By the 2002 Florida governor's race, the Republican party had done a pretty good job of locking up that demographic, and Jeb even won Miami-Dade. To make a long story short, the Hispanic vote has been shifting for quite a while, and while the Democrats and conventional political wisdom have taken their vote for granted, the Republicans haven't, and it showed big time in this election. In certain states like New Mexico which Gore won by under 400 votes, it's especially significant, because while Bush lost 2% of white voters from 2000 he picked up an additional 12% of Hispanic voters which is what gave him the lead there.
Another group that traditionally goes Democratic but that swung to Bush is Catholic voters, where Bush picked up 5% over 2000, to end up with 52% of the vote. (This also plays in to the swing in Hispanic votes, a group that is largely Catholic). The media has been reporting for months that Catholic bishops have been largely critical of Kerry on abortion, but it appears that the pundits didn't take that seriously, because today they seemed suprised by the swing.
The voting bloc that the media totally missed on was the black vote. The story line before the election was "majority of blacks support Kerry" when it should have been that the majority was smaller than it was for Gore. Nationwide, Bush picked up an increase of 2% over 2000, which comes down to somewhere around 250,000 votes nationwide, which doesn't seem like much until you consider that number makes up for half of the margin by which Gore won the popular vote in 2000. To see how that can make a difference, look at two of the key states that looked iffy, and which people were thinking would go for Kerry--Florida and Ohio. In Ohio, Bush picked up an additional 7% of the black vote, and in Florida, he picked up an extra 6%--that's a pick up of nearly 28,000 votes in a state that he carried by 535 votes in 2000.
Those were the three major factors that I was looking at that led me to believe that Bush was going to win, two of those three factors are ones that in retrospective, the tv pundits are saying that they missed. They still haven't noticed the significance of the small swing in black votes, and my guess is that they won't until they wake up the day after the election some year and discover that a Republican has picked up somewhere in the 40% range and won the black vote in certain states, and they'll be just as suprised then as they were this year when Bush swung the Hispanic vote to his side.
The other factor that I want to touch on is the youth vote. Some commentators (Scarborugh on MSNBC, for one) insist that the under-30 vote was a washout because it didn't carry Kerry to victory like people were saying it would before the election. Yeah, it turned out that the under-30 vote didn't turn out by as large margins as people were saying, but I think that the real issue is that they overestimated the percentage of the youth vote that would go for Kerry. Sure, Kerry won that demographic by 9 percentage points, but from what you heard before the election, people expected my age group to go for Kerry by margins that were much larger than that. Scarborough was going on and on Wednesday night about how all of the young people and the young bloggers were supposed to deliver Kerry the presidency, and it seemed to me that he has the impression that all young, blogging voters are leftist, and that just isn't an accurate portrayal, especially considering that it was young, blogging voters who helped push the whole 60 Minutes forgery story--the left doesn't have the corner on young bloggers. Actually, I'm tired of hearing the media act like leftist young people have the corner on the under-30 political activism market. It's like they think that people like me, and there are a lot of people like me, don't even count because we don't fit their sterotype of youth activists.
Note: All demographic data taken from CNN.com's exit poll data, which if anything is skewed Democratic, seeing as most of the exit polling turned out to be off in favor of the Democrats
I was right, Bush won Florida by a large enough margin that it wasn't contestable, and fortunately it appears that we have avoided a Florida happening in Ohio (though CBS with their constant references to punch card ballots was obviously hoping that would happen). Bush won the popular vote, and won more than 50% for the first time since his father in '88 (Clinton won it, but didn't manage a majority either time). And, fortunately, the Kerry camp had the common sense to realize that with the vote margins we have, there was no point doing a drawn out fight, and is conceeding. Politically, that's smart, because it's not good for the Democratic party if people start thinking of them as the party that decides that it's not over till the lawyers have their say (if they want to have a chance in '08, they needed to bow out graciously).
In the race for Florida's open Senate seat, Betty Castor decided to admit this morning that she lost (last night she had been leaving things wide open for the potential of a recount fight), so Mel Martinez has become the first Cuban American elected to the US Senate.
I'm just happy that there's no recounts this time around. Whoo hoo!
If they're right (and they've been the last station to call every other state but this one), then it's pretty much a Bush lock. It's now at 266 for Bush, and there are several other states that are likely going to go for him.
I doubt that we're going to know the final reality until Wednesday afternoon at the earliest, unless of course, we have the "nightmare" 269 to 269 scenario, which would send it to the House of Representatives (oh goody, Katherine Harris can get blamed again, indirectly {grimace}), which would be pretty darn historic, but a major pain in the neck.
Certain bloggers who shall remain unnamed need to stop spreading fear, if Bush is reelected, you aren't going to get drafted. Period.
Some people from MoveOn.org were outside my polling place offering people cookies if they told them that they voted for Kerry (they were recording all of the Kerry votes, probably in preparation for calling for a recount). Technically, I think that offering people cookies for a Kerry vote counts as buying votes, but when my dad called the Supervisor of Elections office, they weren't terribly concerned. After I went and voted, I told the MoveOn.org folk that what they were doing was not a statistically valid polling mechanism because it's not a valid poll when you offer somebody a cookie if they tell you they voted a certain way. They didn't say anything.
Also outside the polling place were some people handing out the Democratic ballot recommendations, they asked me if I wanted it, I pointed at my Katherine Harris for Congress t-shirt and asked them "look at my shirt, who does it look like I'm voting for?"
Speaking of Katherine Harris, this morning I was out waving signs for her. Street corner sign waving is an interesting study in American politics. You have the ardent supporters driving by screaming their support, you have the people who are supporting the other candidate driving by and yelling things that they obviously think are witty and creative, but which nobody can understand. Katherine Harris made an appearance, and fortunately people in Bradenton aren't as psycho as people in Sarasota and nobody tried to run over her. At one point, in an excercise that was pretty obviously staged, a guy who claimed to live in a nearby house came over with his toddler daughter and had called the police complaining that everyone should be made to leave because the honking traffic was bothering him and his kid. He had a notebook with him and was trying to get people to give him their names and addresses. The police officer told him that we all had a perfect right to be there and that if he didn't like all of the honkingan thought it was disturbing his daughter, he shouldn't have her out there and should go take her home.
If you aren't from Florida, you can disregard all but my Presidential endorsement, and if you aren't from Manatee County, disregard all but my State and National endorsements.
National:
President: George W. Bush
State (Florida):
US Senator: Mel Martinez
State Supreme Court (should they be retained):
--Kenneth Bell: Yes
--Raoul G. Cantero III: Yes
Second District Court of Appeal
--Charles Canady: Yes
--Patricia Kelly: ?
--Stevan Northcutt: No
--Craig Villanti: ?
Constitutional Ammendment 1 (Parental notification on abortion):
Vote Yes
Constitutional Ammendment 2 (Constitutional Ammendments proposed by initiative):
Vote Yes
Constitutional Ammendment 3 (Caps on Attny fees in medical liability cases):
Vote No (this should be a law, not an ammendment to the constitution, and the dollar values mentioned will be ridiculously low in a few decades)
Constitutional Ammendment 4 (Slot machines for Miami-Dade):
Vote No (and don't be snookered by the "help the children" language, it won't)
Constitutional Ammendment 5 (Raises the minimum wage):
Vote No
Constitutional Ammendment 6 (Repeal the highspeed rail ammendment) :
Vote Yes (we don't want to pay for what has turned into a govt. financed express shuttle to Disney and little else)
Constitutional Ammendment 7 (Patient's right to know about adverse medical incidents):
Vote No (sounds good in theory, but bad for patient privacy because it means lawyers will be digging through patient records without their permission--and you can't guarantee that they won't accidentally not black out names or SSNs)
Constitutional Ammendment 8 (three strikes and your out for medical malpractice) :
Vote No (it will discourage doctors in high risk fields from coming to Florida and will encourage doctors to settle frivolous lawsuits so as not to risk losing and getting a strike on their record. This will drive up healthcare and insurance costs)
Local (Manatee County)
Clerk of the Circuit Court: R.B "Chips" Shore
Sheriff: I don't like Charlie Wells, so I don't know what I'm doing, because Kevin Murphy isn't too swift either.
12th Circuit Court Judge: Diana Moreland
Congressional District 13: Katherine Harris
Florida House District 68: Bill Galvano
West Manatee Fire District tax issue: Vote No, they keep trying to force this on us and nobody wants it.
