Law School!

Well, now that I've told my boss, I can put it in the blog.

I'm going to law school! It's looking like the University of Michigan, but other possibilities are Columbia, NYU, and Georgetown, depending on what the postal service brings me. I want to go be a constitutional or civil rights lawyer, to work on more issues than I can count, but two really big ones for me are voting rights and reform and and media accountability. Generally, I want to bring more power to the public to make the change they want to see, by giving everyone access to the right information and then making sure their votes count. We need to make sure the US government cannot abuse power like they have the last eight years (and more), and that is what I hope to help do.

An added bonus is that I'll be able to bring more legal insights and other ideas to the blog, which will be fun, at least for me. Not to mention a little more credibility so someone might actually care what I have to say. Anyway, that's where I am - I am now truly a recovering engineer.

Oh, and speaking of voting reform, I'd love to help with this if it's still going when I get there. It's a fascinating idea.

Obama's passport file and the Surveillance State

Since January, Barack Obama's passport file has been illegally accessed at least three times by employees of the Bureau of Consular Affairs, each time triggering an automatic investigation that can easily be leaked and turned into a media story. In fact, this is exactly what happened in 1992 with Bill Clinton. If this is a political move and not just employees' foolish curiously - given the administration's extreme disrespect for the law, I don't doubt it for a second - this is incredibly disgusting. But it's just the latest trend and not at all out of line with what we've seen from King George's Surveillance State.

...incidents like the snooping into Obama's passport file are not the exception, and are not even merely the rule, but are the pervasive and inevitable outcome of allowing government officials to spy on Americans without real oversight.

Yeah...

UPDATE: What on Earth is going on here? Does anybody actually believe it was harmless curiosity when it happened to both campaigns?

UPDATE 2: Make it a trifecta. Am I being too cynical to think they did it to McCain too to remove suspicion that it was political? I'm sure they would have known that the time this happened in 1992 would be uncovered, and that it'd be spun oppositely now, right? Wow, I sometimes amaze myself at how readily I can accept certain conspiracy theories with regard to this administration. But at this point, they've almost all turned out true, and just when you think it can't get worse, it turns out their imaginations are better than yours.

Richardson Endorses Obama

Daily Kos has it here.

Richardson's endorsement may be the beginning of a concerted push to pressure Clinton to acknowledge that she has fought a tough campaign but has come up short, that the race is over, and that it's time for her to recognize that our nominee for President will be Barack Obama.

Like I said before, the speech marked the end of the Clinton campaign.

Have I mentioned I dislike CNN?

Media adulation of Senator McCain has turned into manipulating the news to convince us he's better. Great.

Guilt by association is Old Politics.

I keep referencing this post in real life discussions, and the follow up is here. In them David Schraub gives an excellent framework for understanding how Obama's politics differ from his pastor, Rev. Wright's. Once you consider that this framework already exists, it is easy to see that Obama hears Wright's views as a familiar refrain, and can group them as a general viewpoint he does not agree with. Another, lighter, example would be if two friends agreed on most everything, but one was a vegetarian and one was not. In this case, one friend will hear the arguments for being a vegetarian (killing animals, environment), and nod and say "I know", but I just don't agree. Both examples involve a familiar refrain, and can thus be categorized as an opposing view that a friend holds, one on race, and one on vegetarianism.

More generally, one of Obama's persistent themes to his actions is the dismissal of the notion of guilt by association. He believes, and I agree completely, that everyone has something good to bring to the table, and a person can associate with others for that good, while not absorbing the bad. We've seen this repeatedly throughout the campaign, with "gaffes" such as hiring Donnie McClurkin, the "ex-gay," homophobic gospel singer, Tony Rezko, who he was never even accused of wrongdoing with, but went with him on a land deal, and now his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

Senator Obama feels he can associate with these people freely for their good attributes (being a good singer, giving him a good deal, or being a spiritual leader, etc.), as any person not in the public sphere would do. The reason for this is not naiveté, as some people would have us believe, but it is tied into his idea of rising above the old politics. He certainly knows that people see things differently and expect different things out of leaders and icons, but at the same time, his ideas of openness of government and honestly in politics suggest to us that he believes America is ready to accept that its leaders are human and have foibles. Moreover, he believes that we should all be able to see the good in each other and come together to solve problems despite our differences. His speech on race suggests the same thing - he's trusting in America to look at the actual issues that are important, and to believe that he will tell you his views, because he believes that he finally can.

Transparency, rising above the old politics, elimination of guilt by association, and voting on the issues rather than sound bytes are all tied together, and together they make up the message that Obama has been speaking about the entire campaign. His campaign is not primarily about any one traditional issue, but rather about rising above the old politics, and bringing public discourse to a new, more mature level. This is what he means.

CNN further misses the point.

This morning CNN had a poll asking whether after the speech, Obama (a) either still had more explaining to do, or (b) could put the matter behind him. Given those two choices, it's great that 68% of people voted for (b), but the choices themselves show CNN simply does not get it. This speech was not a rebuttal to a controversy, it was an address to a nation to solve a problem that plagues us. He cannot "put the matter behind him", and that's not the point. That's what everyone trying to declare we've solved racial issues has done, as it's gotten worse. The point is that none of us should put the matter behind us - we need to stand up and make it right.

A More Perfect Speech

Obama's speech on race: "A More Perfect Union"



I'm a little late to the game (I was at work), and this speech has been reviewed to death now. However, I'm just going to add my two cents anyway.

First, let me say that if you have not watched it yet, you absolutely need to do so. Your kids will be watching it in history class in the future.

This was not a campaign speech, it was a call to duty, both for him and from him. Obama saw the dangers in the racial campaign wars, and how the discourse itself was damaging the very idea of unity his campaign is beginning to sow. He felt this speech was his duty. As Americans, it is our duty to remember the spirit of the civil rights movement that we all celebrate each year with Dr. King's birthday and Black History Month. There was plenty more work to do when Reagan almost singlehandedly suspended the Civil Rights Era by polarizing the country along racial lines to get elected. Senator Obama today asked us to pick up where we left off, to get back on track fighting for what the Constitution already guarantees - true equality.

I also believe the reactions to today's speech are some of the biggest windows into the current hearts and minds of America. CNN did its best to illustrate how vapid the entire MSM is. During the speech and soon after, two headlines from CNN were "Obama speech: Former pastor 'like family to me'" and "Obama: Constitution stained by 'sin of slavery'". Neither title even suggests the scope or the purpose of the speech. This speech was not just a reaction to the media's attention on Obama's former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. That may have influenced the timing, but unlike the first headline suggests, this was not a speech about him. This was not a speech about how the Constitution is wrong, as the second headline suggests, but rather about how because of the guarantee that all men are created equal, we're still not where the Constitution needs us to be. The speech is about the fact that America has the ability to get there, and he knows that we have made some progress, and can make much more. It's about so much more than any one of the lines in his speech - it's about the very faith in a better America that is pushing him toward the White House. The very same faith that we all share when we go out in droves to support him, to hear him speak, and to cast our ballots.

Sadly, this brings me to Senator Clinton. If she can resist this tidal wave and somehow not immediately step down, realizing that she's now the foil in the way of history, I'm not sure what to say. A friend and Clinton supporter said to me today: "Eloquent as usual, but where's the substance?" after he watched the speech. This scared the hell out of me. Clinton's supporters have seemingly become so poisoned that they immediately equate eloquence with emptiness. I fear for the damage she has already done the the people that support her. The speeches we remember throughout history - King, Kennedy, FDR, were remembered because of their message and their delivery. This speech will join that list in the future.

The same Clinton supporter suggested that he only gave the speech because his poll numbers said he should. That certainly would have been Clinton's motivation, but I'll say it again: this was not a campaign speech. If he had wanted a campaign speech, he would have more directly addressed the attacks on Wright and left it at that. He might have used the time to talk policy, but then the speech would have lost its entire purpose. It would have become just another speech on the campaign trail. No, instead he used this opportunity to say what many people have been waiting years for a respected, powerful, black person to say on the most public of stages. This was not just a campaign speech. This was history.

The most important point in all this is that it does not matter that he was running for president when he gave this speech. He spoke about a pandemic that has infected this country since its inception, and that as a public, we seem to have forgotten our mission to cure it. These words simply needed to be spoken. I just consider myself fortunate that I can now cast a vote for the man who said them in the next presidential election.

UPDATE: I meant to flesh out the Clinton stepping down bit, since I really believe this speech drew the party together around Obama and marks the true end of Clinton's candidacy. But this comment on Glenn Greenwald's post about the speech (also worth reading as always) makes my point perfectly for me.

The Bear Stearns Collapse: Triage and Opportunity

It wasn't really a bailout for them. It was good for all of us that the economy didn't collapse.

No one who owned Bear stock was protected. This was to protect the small guys who don't even realize they were at risk. To decry this deal means you just don't get how dire a mess we were almost in. It is all well and good to be rich or a theoretical purist and talk about how the Fed should let the system collapse so that we can have a "cathartic" pricing event. Or that the Fed should just leave well enough alone. But the pain to the little guy in the streets who did nothing wrong would simply be too much. The Fed and other regulatory authorities leaving well enough alone is part of the reason we are where we are. First, get the water out of the boat and fix the leaks, and then make sure we never get here again. (Emphasis mine)

When it's an issue of total economic collapse, we do not have the luxury of a moral judgment, to see that the people making the risky decision get what they deserved. The moral facts of another Depression are just too much worse.

And in a related note, from Salon's Andrew Leonard:

Liberalism is no longer a dirty word, [Krugman] thunders; it's high time for government to get back in the business of governing. He might be right. As we review the wreckage created by Wall Street's finest minds, it is tempting to entertain the possibility that the impulse to deregulate and privatize and "trust" markets to be their own best guardian -- that epochal reimagining of government launched by Ronald Reagan -- has finally run its course.

And this:

But whether or not the current ills afflicting the economy do bloom into something much worse, it's hard to argue with the thesis that the rhetoric of market fundamentalism hasn't looked this threadbare since Ronald Reagan won office in 1980. Deregulated markets were given their chance. They didn't work, or, at least, they now look to be in need of serious overhaul. The question is whether Americans will seize the opportunity to rethink and reshape how government manages the economy. But will a President Clinton or Obama or McCain seize the day?

Finally, for the first time since Reagan, we have a chance to alter the discourse significantly. This crisis has finally woken us up to the fact that Wild West, top-down economics doesn't work, and now it's up to our leaders to reshape the discourse to something much more responsible. Senator Obama understood this very well when he called Reagan an agent of change - he profoundly changed the very way we think about economic regualtion and taxes. We need a movement to change it again. I can only hope we get that.

Divorcing Drug Development and Distribution.

I like alliteration.

Anyway, this is an interesting and creative idea - I want to read more about it.

However, there's a major catch-22 in the way here. This is a proposal to keep the politics out of drug making, but the current drug makers control the politics and will be out a lot of money, so it'll never get passed. And once again this brings us to a government not controlled by the drug companies - maybe it is possible, if we get that.

Bursting the Bubble of Racial Tension In the Campaign?

This is big news. The racial tension has been building, and the media and Clinton campaigns are getting away with too much. Hopefully a speech on the issue will diffuse what's been bubbling under the surface (if not actually the sticky stuff that's coating the surface) for this whole year so far.

Murdoch owns the entire Fourth Estate

The MSM is basically one unit, and its smears start with Fox. I'd say Fox needs to be shut down, but in reality, at this point, the virus has spread, and the MSM just needs to be ignored.

Transparency in action

He released his tax returns, unlike other candidates. He released all his earmark requests, unlike a certain other Democratic candidate, and now he's explained the questionable associations he's had, even with a land developer in connection with he was never even accused of any wrongdoing. Most remarkable about the last interview is that he went in to answer all the questions he would be asked, and he did exactly that. When Obama talks about the need for transparency, he is showing it by not hiding from the truth in this campaign.