Before I ramble, Ron Pitz over at the Knox Parks Foundation just sent me an e-mail entitled "Elm Trees." It's worth printing:

 

"By any chance have you had the misfortune to go by the old Mass Mutual building in Asylum Hill lately? Those 'caretakers' have destroyed most of the trees on that property which were some of the largest and healthiest trees in Hartford.

 

"That corner used to be the oasis in the urban desert for us. I would go out of my way to drive by that spot and show the inner city young adults in my program those specimen trees. This gave them an opportunity to see what kind of a legacy they are leaving by planting trees and what the small trees they are planting would look like at maturity.

 

"Just imagine the carbon that those giants sequestered and the oxygen that they produced. This is another huge loss for Asylum Hill and the city as a whole....."

 

Ron, I bicycled by there recently, and failed to see it partly because my indignation at that part of Asylum Hill is reserved for the demolition of the last of the old row house buildings on Fraser Place. That's what Ron meant by "another huge loss." Hey, why leave anything standing?

 

I also probably missed the trees because I bicycle at night - it is law school exam time, and you need a break when you need a break.

 

Law school exams represent the worst of the educational process. The system demands that you condense 120 hours worth of learning into a three-hour essay.

 

It's roughly 120 hours because the semester is 15 weeks of classes. Each class represents about three hours weekly of actual instructional time, bolstered by a minimum of five hours preparation (often more) for each class.

 

Compression is somewhat beneficial for real life, but it seems arbitrary. For my last exam this semester, I was allowed one – yes, exactly one – sheet of paper, for the most complicated class I have taken yet. At least we're not killing trees.

To the rest of my meandering column for print media...

 

T he verdict is far from in on Obama. I am trying not to form an opinion of his presidency yet. He hasn't even taken the oath of office.

 

Yet the soft changes his leadership brings are amazing. And I don't use that lightly. He almost sounds like Spiderman talking to Barbara Walters:

That if you're placed in a position of power, then you've got responsibilities to your workers. You've got a responsibility to your community. That if - there's got to be a point where you say, 'You know what, I have enough, and now I'm in this position of responsibility, let me make sure that I'm doing right by people, and, and, acting in a way that is responsible.' And that's true, by the way, for members of Congress, that's true for the president, that's true for Cabinet members, that's true for parents. I want all of us to start thinking a little but more, not just about what's good for me, but let's start thinking about what's good for our children, what's good for our country. The more we do that, the better off we are going to be.

Not only that, but he is calling for captains of industry to forego their end-of-the-year bonuses. His rhetoric of veiled redistribution is thrilling. When was the last time we heard that out of the White House?

 

Now how do we reconcile this language with his appointment of Clinton retreads into every executive branch office he has touched so far? Can the theory actually be right about his leadership being able to change the quality and direction of work produced by Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner.

 

More on Obama, Twice in One Week...

 

A t a recent freshman experience class for student athletes at the University of Connecticut, some wiseguy frosh asked athletic director Jeff Hathaway when they would get paid.

“I love all of you,” Hathaway said, and he told the students they are not at UConn to get paid.

 

Hathaway related this tale to about 50 UConn Law students at UConn's Davis Courtroom Wednesday, November 19, 2008. Hathaway and NBA lawyer Jeffrey A. Mishkin spun yarns about managing the cut throat world of Big East sports for a half hour or so, then opened the floor to questions.

 

My hand shot up, and I wondered if the scads of money - literally billions of dollars flowing into college athletic coffers from television and marketing contracts - forced us to abandon the myth of college athletes as amateurs.

 

"This is a difficult question," Hathaway said. "There are 343 Division I institutions, all of them are very different in a lot of ways.” Even in the 16-team Big East, public, private, Catholic, and secular schools compete, all with differing size budgets. It would be trouble dividing revenues, Hathaway said.

 

“Who gets paid and how much?” Hathaway asked. “There are only three sports that generate revenue for our school. I don't believe there is a time we will pay our athletes."

 

Mishkin, upon hearing my question aimed at Hathaway, expressed relief that I had nothing for him. Not so fast. The NCAA is the de facto minor league for both the NFL and the NBA, I said, do the NFL and the NBA owe a duty to college athletic programs?

 

No. But first Mishkin admitted the theory that Division I basketball and football players are athletes has been “strained." Yet he agreed with Hathaway that college athletes shouldn't get paid. Nor will contracts happen unless athletics and academics dissociate.

 

Such a dissocation may be the best fix. It was first proposed way back in 1989 by then-Sports Illustrated writer Rick Telander. Disgusted with the inhumanity he witnessed covering college football, Telander, who attended Northwestern University on a gridiron scholarship, suggested in his classic tome The Hundred Yard Lie that the top 50-80 sports schools should form a bona fide football minor league.

More on the myth of amateur athletes, and Obama, too...

 

If there's one day in your life that will always be with you, and you could not choose it, rather, chance, fate, destiny or coincidence chose it for you, what would you want it to be?

 

Lately, I've been thinking that one day has defined my life for the past two years, and I don't see that reality changing any time soon. I was arrested for standing on a streetcorner in downtown Hartford for taking photos on January 3, 2007.

 

Turns out I was on a terrorism watch list manufactured by the Connecticut State Police. For a pacifist, that is kind of an absurd principle. But everyday since it happened, I have thought about it, in some form or another.

 

Yesterday, Thursday, November 13, 2008, I thought about my arrest a lot, because aside from discussing with my friend the tax implications of any potential award I might get from my lawsuit for fale arrest, I was photographed.

 

Jennifer Osborne, who has this blog, works for Colors magazine, out of Italy, and she was in Hartford yesterday to take pictures of me.

 

Colors, which more than a decade ago, I think started out of a partnership with Benetton clothing, contacted me a few weeks ago. At first I thought it was a hoax. A revolutionary visual framework like Colors wants to write about me?

 

I love Colors, and was only too thrilled. Turns out their next issue will focus on one topic (like all their issues do - whether its war, birth, immigration, cities, one topic per issue): the absurdity of the war on terror, and how it has impacted people.

 

Apparently, one of the writers came across my story online, and they think what happened to me was pretty absurd. I'm glad they agree. So Jennifer stopped by condo last night to photograph me in a suit and tie.

 

I told her the whole story - she said, wow. Kind of crazy. Thing is, I'm worried that Obama doesn't think what happened to me is crazy.

 

Reading an AP story yesterday that maybe more than a million people will attend the upcoming inauguration, I became concerned that Obama will continue the ridiculousness of the high security state.

The inauguration has been designated a National Special Security Event, giving the U.S. Secret Service the lead in coordinating all law enforcement agencies to secure the event. There are 58 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies working together.

Those 58 law enforcement agencies will most likely work under the auspices of a fusion center, like the Connecticut Intelligence Center which fingered me as a possible danger.

 

Understanding that white supremacist groups are out there, and not happy about Obama's presidency, and that it is the duty of the Secret Service to protect Obama from such threats, I don't want them mixing up pacifists, and peaceful protestors in with that mix.

 

Understanding the difference between danger and dissent is a vital job, and I want assurances that when I go to the Inauguration, I won't be on a list. I know they are making up a list, and the Secret Service and its fusion center will have to make a chart of every white supremacist group in the country and try to get visuals on the most dangerous members, and look for them in a crowd of a million.

 

Not an easy job. But I think it would be an easier job if law enforcement didn't worry about Code Pink and the Green Party, who want to see an end to the war.

 

But is anything that threatens the two party system is considered an equivalent threat? I hope not. This morning, it made me think that Haile Selassie was wrong. The Ethiopian emporer, considered the second coming of Jesus by Rastas like Marley, wrote the words to reggae's 'War,' immortalized by Marley.

 

"Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned," according to Selassie, the African continent will not know peace. And everywhere is war. And I always expanded the meaning of that Selassie speech from 1963, to the UN, into a global statement, not just about Africa.

 

But with Obama, a black man at the helm of the world's largest military power, racism seems to be surmounted, at least as far as ascending to the presidency, yet he will continue to prosecute a war against black and brown people.

 

Colors, Selassie, Obama ...

 

Answer to Question 3: the president of the United States certainly should protect our clouds. It's called the Clean Air Act.

 

And why not our dogs, too? I've got good mind to write Weekly Reader and tell them that there are more than one correct answers to question three.

 

My friend Mike came by last night to discuss life, the universe and everything, and he showed me this civics lesson from his nephew in North Carolina. It's a reading comprehension tool for children from kindergarten through second grade.

 

I love stuff like this. It makes governance seem so simple, and clean. People do what they promise to do. It is not quite as sinister as teaching first graders that George Washington didn't chop down that cherry tree, that presidents never tell lies, they are constitutionally incapable of doing so.

 

No, as far as informing young people about self governance, and republican democracy, it translates pretty well. My teachers used Weekly Reader, and I remember one about the 1984 Reagan/Mondale contest from sixth grade.

 

While it made no mention of Reagan's secret wars in Central America, and everyone in the class voted Reagan in a landslide, I tend to trust Weekly Reader more than, say, Neil Bush's educational supplement company, Ignite Learning.

 

Obama promises to close Gitmo, continued...

 

Senator Dodd's mid-term cabinet position in 2010 looks further and further away every day, and the ignominy of his father - the only U.S. Senator ever to be censured - looks closer and closer each day.

 

Kevin Rennie over at the Hartford Courant reminds us that Dodd, who owns three houses, including one in Ireland, got a sweetheart deal from a failing mortgage company:

For nearly a year and a half, Countrywide failed (or declined) to secure its interest in Dodd's home by taking the ordinary and essential step of presenting the documents to the local town clerk and recording them in the land records.

This is exceedingly rare in the mortgage business. No wonder Dodd refuses to lift the veil on his deals with the generous lender that went bust this year.

Little Chris Dodd, like Jack Horner, stickes his finger in every pie. Dodd will be the keynote speaker at a bankers conference assembled by do-no-evil Google next week, according to document clearinghouse Wikileaks.

 

"With the world economic situation in turmoil, Google is assembling a who's who, including US senator Chris Dodd, for an intensive, one day executive gathering in New York on 19 Nov 2008. The document is a scanned imaged of the invitation."

 

The press release Wikileaks sent out Friday afternoon said:

US Senator Christopher Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, is to deliver the keynote address at Googles New York office. Senator Dodd was the Democratic party's point man ushering through the $850 Billion banking bailout last month.

'This invitation only event will bring together 200 Senior Executives for a day of information sharing with leaders from the financial and digital marketing communities to discuss how to capitalize on the current environment..,' the invitation, obtained, verified and released by Wikileaks reads.

Also billed as speaking is Mary Meeker, Managing Director of Morgan Stanley.

Wikileaks makes it clear: "Unless otherwise specified the document described here: At that time was classified, confidential, censored or otherwise withheld from the public." Yeah, Senator Dodd, can you help us understand this?

 

Sunday Morning Blogorama, Lieberman, Obama...

 

Forty-four years ago, when Fannie Lou Hamer and her Mississippi delegation of Democrats walked to Atlantic City to demand representation at the Democratic National Convention, the concept of a dark-skinned man as 44th president of the United States of America seemed an impossible dream.

 

So for a moment Tuesday night, I allowed myself the pleasure of reveling that racism suffered a deep wound – though not mortal. We have moved forward, progress is visible, I though as I watched the election returns in a friend’s backyard on a very seasonable evening.

 

The hoots of joy and hollers of excitement echoing across the West End testified to the end of the illegal Bush presidency, and the defeat of McCain's destructive politics. Watching his speech, I wondered where that man was the past six months.

 

McCain's eloquence concession acknowledged the tribulation of the African-American.

 

"But we both recognize that, though we have come a long way from the old injustices that once stained our nation's reputation and denied some Americans the full blessings of American citizenship, the memory of them still had the power to wound," he said.

 

McCain mentioned Booker T. Washington's invitation to dinner at the White House from President Teddy Roosevelt. Booker T. Washington believed in the theory of racial uplift – which posits that the black community can defeat racism and overcome oppression by developing citizens of impeccable intelligence and manners.

More on Racial Uplift and Rhetoric ...

 

I n summation, Obama can be dishonest yet transcendent, Joe the Plumber can boast of 340 videos about him on Youtube, and we just can't count on morning radio to do much.

 

While I almost believe Obama is th great hope he makes himself out to be, the reptitive quality of discourse that bored to tears my two debate watching companions told me all I needed to know. Presidential politics are still meaningless to most Americans like Joe the Plumber.

 

And in the quest for power, no truth nor dream is so sacred as to not be sold. Hearing McCain trumpet the American Dream rang as hollow as the rock anthems his campaign has bought the rights to, the ones the musicians don't want him to use.

 

As for FM radio, WPLR had me on for three minutes this morning. I discussed the Bradley Effect - don't trust polls when it comes to a black candidate in white America because there may be a 7-point differential between those who say they'll vote black and those who actually do - and voter fraud.

 

The ACORN business in the debates last night, and over the past week, to me, is a matter of mere projection. The Republicans have stolen the past elections. Now that it seems pretty clear they are going to have to hand over the keys to the Democrats, they start crying voter fraud.

 

For those willing to look, the literature and investigations about GOP voter suppression in 2000 in Florida and in 2004 in Ohio could fill up a library. But most wouldn't know it because it is not reported. Yet the Republicans claim the Democrats are perpetrating the most massive scheme to undermine democracy in American history. Please.

Link...

 

So I hate driving my car. I am not a very good driver, and of all the lousy car culture trappings, I loathe when you break down in the middle of the highway at 4:30 on a weekday afternoon.

 

Yuck. It cost me $70 to tow to a garage, and I was 30 minutes late for law school. In education law, the class discussed the reach of the government into our daily lives. I argued that policy impacts behavior, and shapes the way we live, and made me late for class.

 

People said that I granted too much power to the government, that I afforded the institution more credit than it deserves. I tried to use the automobile as an example, how auto manufacturers bought up trolley companies and the laissez faire regulatory state let this radical transit monopoly emerge.

 

Yet I lacked time to delve into the subsidies our tax dollars give the auto industry – if the public fisc didn’t spring for roads, how would the private single-occupant vehicle transportation system work? In ways we don't even realize, government pervades all areas of our lives.

 

When we do challenge corrupt, dangerous policies, we pay a price. This Monday, I attended the wake of John Hogan of Hamden, age 73. I drove my rotten car down to the funeral home. I had never met John, but he inspired me.

 

Hogan and eight others doused hundreds of draft cards with homemade napalm in 1968, saving countless young men from war. They were the Catonsville 9, from Maryland, and they all did between two and three years in federal pens for their acts of conscience.

 

With another of the Catonsville 9, Tom Lewis, I once spent an afternoon in jail. The repercussions of that obstruction of free passage on a sidewalk charge from 2004 still haunt me. I missed Lewis’ wake when he died in May. I had to go pay my respects to John Hogan.

Link...

 

Considering that tonite's Town Hall-style debate is supposed be a wide-ranging discussion about all the policies that will impact our country in the next eight years, yet there exist a series of topics that are off-limits in mainstream political debate. Call is censorship. Call it palatability to mainstream American values.

 

Oh, he can't win if he talks about that _______. Well, why the hell not? It is a festering sore in my community, in my country, and it needs to be discussed.

 

So, in honor of enforced silence, here is a quick list of words and names that we will most certainly not hear tonite:

 

Legalization

Hemp

Prison-Industrial Complex

Perpetual Warfare

International Criminal Court

War Crimes

Nuremburg

Impeachment

Unitary Executive Theory

Resegregation

Glass-Steagall Act

Keating Five (although Obama has made a website...)

Lynching

Saudi Arabia ***OBAMA SAID IT*** Holy Cow! He must not hand out with King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz like some oligarchs.

Procedural Due Process

Troy Davis

Clemency

Capital Punishment Moratorium

Instant Runoff Voting

Proportional Representation

Caging

Voter Suppression

Black Box Voting

Diebold

Coup d'Etat

Civil Disobedience

Corporate Welfare

Corporate Crime

Blackwater

Fallujah

Skin Cancer

The American Israeli Political Affairs Committee

Paul Craig Roberts

Free Speech

Ralph Nader

Cynthia McKinney

Bob Barr

"Loose Change"

Central Intelligence Agency ***Gosh, wasn't it funny to watch McCain dance around the history of Afghanistan and Pakistan without mentioning the CIA's involvement in creating the Taliban and the "freedom fighters" who overstretched the Soviet Union to the point of collapse.***

Substantive Differences

Nuclear Disarmament

Abolish

Universal Declaration of Human Rights ***Obama mentioned that health care was a right. He's getting there.***

Roosevelt's Economic Bill of Rights

Nazi

Operation Paperclip

Don Siegelman

Karl Rove

Alberto Gonzalez

Joseph Wilson

Valeria Plame

Donald Rumsfeld

War Crime

Harry Whittington

It would be too easy to throw a list of names of political prisoners, like Mumia Abu Jamal, Leonard Peltier, Jeffrey Luers and TreArrow, so I won't take up our time and space. America doesn't have political prisoners.

Saddam Hussein

Catonsville 9

Plowshares

Gilded Age

Imperialism

Fannie Lou Hamer

Goodman, Cheney and Schwerner

Todd Palin

Treason

Seccessionist - Not mentioned, as promised. But what is so bad about the word? So McCain wins because of the Bradley effect, Karl Rove and who knows what else. He dies in office. Palin takes over. She breaks up the union - she's a seccessionist. She won't start a civil war over keeping California in the Union. California is for god-hating fags. Home rule for Northeast and West coast liberals. We aren't dealing with Kansas anymore...

Alaska Independence Party

Polar Bears

Car-Free

Green Party

Constitutionalist Party

Libertarian Party

Individual Liberty

Pre-emptive detention

Guantanamo Bay

Abu Ghraib - How can McCain and Obama proclaim that out soldiers serve with honor, and know that their policies turn men into monsters, writ Haditha, writ Fallujah?

Baghram Air Force Base

Opium

LSD

MK Ultra

Crumbling Infrastructure

Lyndon Baines Johnson

Thurgood Marshall

Googling any of these words will give you a basic idea as to why they are unmentionable.

Link...

 

Watched what passes for political discourse in the United States last night, and walked away without vomiting on the sofa.

 

Obviously, it starts as a sham considering that the debate disincluded three other presidential candidates - Bob Barr, Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney. This trio have all qualified for enough state ballots to mathematically have a chance at enough electoral votes to capture the presidency. That they weren't included casts the entire exercise as a charade.

 

That McCain and Obama both thanked the corrupt Commission on Presidential Debates, the allegedly not-for-profit but very partisan body in charge of the debates, goes to show they are corrupt, too.

 

Pundits say Obama won, and I tend to agree with Sean Penn, that we all lost. No mention of Palestine, as Penn said. I'll add to that list Saudi Arabia, Bagram, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib.

 

How Obama could debate McCain and not mention the Keating Five is beyond me. The year of the Keating Five, 1986, was clearly in play, as the first question from Jim Lehrer - the terriblest moderator ever - rang up a quote from Eisenhower. Then McCain mentioned 1983 and plenty of other dates from his history.

 

I felt like I was watching Obama as a character inHarrison Bergeron,content with the handicaps placed upon him by a mad society. It was like Obama had NASCAR restrictor plates on his Constitutional Law professor mind. Or maybe he really does believe all the crap he was peddling.

 

McCain and Obama both suffer from visions of empire. When they talked about Iraq, they talked about casualties in terms of 4,000 American lives. The "We don't do body count" ethos has permeated this debate, and there was no mention of millions of dead and displaced persons around the world harmed by this "War on Terror."

Link...

 

Without demanding something, you get nothing.

 

If you’re a Zen Buddhist, perhaps that’s a great way of looking at life.

 

But shoot, not even Buddhists can find their nothing in modern America, which is why we must makes demands on the political power structure.

 

From local land use boards to the state Freedom of Information Commission to the presidential election, citizens must make concrete demands of those in power, lest they do nothing at all.

 

Last year, the Newtown Planning and Zoning Commission stopped the local Cambodian Buddhist Society from building a temple on land it owned in town. The Buddhists appealed, the superior court ratified the town’s decision, and the state Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling.

 

Not far behind is the Meriden P&Z board, which denied a mosque a permit. Now imagine the Hartford P&Z rejecting the application to build Grace Lutheran Church or Asylum Hill Congregational Church, and then getting the highest court in Connecticut to stamp such religious bigotry with approval.

 

I can’t fathom it myself, but Dred Scott happened to, so it is not so far-fetched.

Link...

 

The funny pages have not been the same since Berke Breathed quit the daily Opus routine almost 20 years ago.

 

I wish I could see what story lines he would cook up around the Obama-McCain campaign. McCain talking into a dead cell phone line for 18 minutes the other day takes the cake for me.

 

The Sunday-only version of Opus or Outland or whatever Breathed calls it now lacks the daily wit and topical humor of the old Bloom County.

 

Take, for example, this prescient cartoon panel from 1988, when Frank Jones, the father of Oliver Wendell Jones, accurately predicts the political leaning of the first black American president.

 

Did Frank think it would be two decades before America saw a black man even come close to the White House? Who knows the recesses of Berke Breathed's imagination?

 

In 1988, Obama has just entered into Harvard Law School. He was just beginning his storied rise to the top of the law review to community organizer to U.S. Senate seat. But did he know he would someday be an American dauphin? As a conservative?

 

If I am a liberal, then Obama looks more and more like conservative. I wouldn't expect any other analysis of him at Counterpunch, especially from a civil rights attorney whose son is three-time national Ralph Nader presidential campaign staffer.

 

Yet when the Nation goes after Obama's economists, and the critique is reprinted at the Huffington Post, Obama's rightward tilt isn't a figment of the leftist imagination:

The economic advisors who are assisting Senator Obama's campaign are helping him stake out a position on the subprime lending crisis 'to the right of not only populist Edwards but Clinton as well.'

Link...

 

Mail Call! The spam filter works exceedingly well on the e-mails, but I still find plenty of strange items of communication in my snail mail box.

 

I've gotten one magazine subscription too many, and they sold my name to various lists. And so I get address labels garnished with orangutan photos, letters from Walter Cronkite pitching drug legalization and flat Earth brochures arguing against Copernican heliocentric models of the galaxy.

 

The information delivered by the postman is sometimes utilitarian, like the Hartford 2000 meeting minutes (they always thank Joe Barber for bringing refreshments!). Other times, I see sophisticated messaging, like the Americans United fundraiser stumping for a separation of church and state.

 

The most consistent mail campaign, after the credit card offers, is the onslaught of print materials from the Democratic Party. First, Al Gore sent me a plea on behalf of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. "We must not fail in that mission" to save America from the clutches of evil Republicans, Gore beseeched in the first graf.

 

"On November 4, we must end this assault on reason," Gore wrote, underlined. Sorry, Al, you had your chance to oust the Republicans eight years ago, but that’s another bag of apples.

 

Then the money ask envelope fell out, and while, I don't trust the senate to do anything of import, I sent them a little note back that said war creates greenhouse gas emissions. Let’s end it now.

Link...

Ed. Note: This is my print column, written on Feb. 5, run on Feb. 6 in the Hartford News.

 

Yep. I pulled the lever for Obama this morning. In the pouring rain, I moseyed to Grace Lutheran Church, filled in the appropriate bubble, and cast my vote for the freshman Senator from Illinois.

 

As I took pictures in the Hartford Civic Center Monday evening and listened to Obama, I was skeptical. I understand it is likely that Teddy "Camelot, Jr." Kennedy knighted Barack and brought him to the Round Table because of a personal grudge against the Clintons.

 

I understand that most of what Obama promises – affordable college, universal health care, regular raises in minimum wages, raises for teachers, an end to the Iraq War, an end to the War in Afghanistan, 40 mpg fuel standards - he may never deliver upon. But he's talking a language that isn't perpetual warfare, terror and fear.

 

I also understand that once the primary is over, and the corporate wing of the Democratic Party - the Democratic Leadership Council – assumes control of the Dems' platform, his rhetoric may change. Although Obama is not a member of the DLC, he has taken campaign contributions from them.

Link...

 

Obama has just left the building. I'll have some thoughts on it later, but here are some pix for the time being.

Clearly, it was emotional, hopeful and uplifting.

And I hope this conveys some of the magnatude of the event. He rented the Civic Center, and more than 16,000 people showed up to see a presidential candidate. It was impressive. Families, children on shoulders, the elderly, the disabled, heck - I even saw one campaign volunteer on his way to emptying a bed pan, carrying a full little portatoilet across the floor of the civic center.

 

It was dedication and certainty, belief in something large. Barack's rhetoric is convincing. He says all the right things, like withdrawing the troops from Iraq, energy independence, funding education, etc etc.

 

I could sit here and nitpick with his policy proposals - I think college education should be free - he wants to make it affordable. Paul Krugman in the New York Times today said that Hillary's health care plan was better than Barack's. But Hillary is well funded by the health care industry she purports to regulate.

 

Nor does Hillary have a story like Obama's - child of a teenaged mom, raised by her and grandparents - and she died at age 53 of cancer. The crowd responds to that. He's one of us, or so it seems.

 

Hillary, on the other hand, spoke in front of a select audience at Yale today. Could she have filled the Civic Center? I don't know. It seems like she packed people into the Learning Corridor last week. But this was something different. Does she generate this kind of excitement? I don't believe so.

 

Listening to him talk about my country in terms like he employs - this language of hope, previously the domain of Bob Dylan and Woodie Guthrie - makes me want to like him, even if he is going to go back on his promises (some of them, for certain, which ones, it remains to be seen).

 

Obama's biggest applause of the night came not from talking about health care, constitutional restoration, 40 mpg cars, or ending the war, but about humanitarian intervention to end the genocide in Darfur.

 

I have been thinking alot lately about linear history and how we judge events too swiftly after they just happen. I want to sleep on this one, and think about how this fits in with what has come before, and what will follow it. Symbolically, how do we interpret this?

 

In the coming days, many will weigh in on it. I saw tons of journos there - everyone from John Murray at the Waterbury Observer to blogger CTBob, to Ken Dixon of the CT Post, Chris Keating, Rick Green and Mark Paz from the Courant, the Yale Daily News, and a ton of others. Ctnewsjunkie and the New Haven Independent will have stuff, too.

 

Link...

 

W hat marks professional graphic design? A photo and text interplaying to convey trust and confidence in a particular candidate's ability to lead.

 

The designer did just about everything right here - Barack's million-dollar eyes face the text, a solid facial expression projecting "Constitutional Law Professor," and simultaneously says "Trust me with my finger on the nuclear button."

 

The photo screens out nicely for textual legibility. A subtle drop shadow highlights the red pull out box to the left.

 

Yet the combination of word and image here makes me a little uncomfortable, not like Dukakis-in-a-tank anxiety, but a kind of unacceptable incompetence, a misunderestimation, as it were, of mettle that residents of 1600 PA Ave. can't reveal.

 

With change being the central focus of the Obama campaign, couldn't they at least get the whole word on the page?

 

It's new, because on the front, a January 3, 2008 quote from Barack appears on the front, so I imagine they had thousands of images to choose from for this particular four-color piece.

 

It seems to be a national distribution because of the way the Connecticut for Obama online addreses are printed in. And of course, it features a union bug.

 

But would Hillary's campaign send out a direct mail piece with "C" missing from "Change"? I doubt it. I've gotten Hillary mailers. I thrown them out, but I've never seen anything so poor.

 

And no, I'm not making too big a deal out of this, considering the work that goes into stage managing the executive office. It would be like if the famous photo op said "Ission Accomplished."

 

Link...

 

Hillary Clinton thinks I am her friend. At least that's how she addressed a letter to me the other day. "Dear Friend," it said.

I have no idea how she got my address (perhaps she bought a subscription database from some magazine, or maybe Russ Feingold gave her a list). I really don't want any mail from her either.

But since she thinks we're buddy-buddy, and she asked me what was important, I was honest with her. On the lines her campaign staff provided, I wrote that she needs to renounce her support for the Iraq war, that Bush needs to be impeached, and that AIPAC's dominance over Israel-Palestine-US policy demands to be challenged.

I sent her a small campaign contribution in the hopes that my thoughts will be taken more seriously because of it.

Link...