OneMind

There was a time in American politics when the candidates for national and even state office were selected by party bosses in what were described as “smoke-filled rooms.” For the most part, that meant white men smoking cigars and choosing the candidate they felt would best take care of their needs, constituencies be damned. One side effect of this approach to partisan politics was that the people often ended up with a choice between two evils.

Fast forward 30 or 40 years and you find us at a place where popular conventions to which rank-and-file party members were elected or appointed are making the selections for the parties. On the surface at least this seems fairer and more likely to produce unexpected candidates.

But that has not, of course, been the case.

Today, we are engaged in the longest national election cycle in history. And yet the primary process — which has yet to start — has already been more or less circumvented by the superior fund-raising powers of Bill & Hillary Clinton. Sen. Clinton now enjoys double-digit leads in most polls. It is difficult to see, from this vantage point, how any other candidate can dislodge her unless she commits some serious faux pas or (perhaps more likely) her husband does.

What I find fascinating, however, is the notion that the candidates who win their parties’ nominations must do so by appealing to the core “base” of voters in their parties. I think this means that Sen. Clinton could still stumble in the primaries because of her gutless stance on Bush’s War Against Iraq. The core of the party is liberal and strongly anti-war. They may not be able to be won over by any amount of money, charm or political experience. While she may be the choice of large numbers of voters and nominal Democrats, the activists who end up on the floors of state conventions where the nomination is sewed up tend to be outside the mainstream.

Which leads me to wonder whether this new system is really any fairer than the old one. If a liberal elite on the Left and a conservative cabal on the Right will end up deciding who their parties will nominate for President, then aren’t we still allowing a tiny and self-selected minority to decide which options we’ll have next November? And doesn’t this reality all but eliminate moderate candidates, which in turn moves the country farther to one side of the political pendulum or the other?

My guy, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, could benefit from this reality, but I still wonder if it’s a Good Thing in the context of political fairness and representation.

My good friend Laurence Rozier slipped me some pointage to a cool video demo of Croquet, a great collaborative open source development universe built on Squeak Smalltalk.

Julian Lombardi has done a bang-up job of creating a video commercial for Croquet that shows you a large part of its potential.

Great stuff.

For what it’s worth, I thought the San Francisco 49ers looked better for a little more than three quarters today than they had in their two previous outings, which they won by a combined total of four points. Today, though, the Niners played the last 20 minutes of the game looking like the Niners of old. Just not old enough. Instead of harkening back to the glory years or even the mediocre year of 2006, the Niners fell to pieces in the closing quarter.

Down 23-9 and in possession with about 5 minutes to go in the game, they had a shot at making a game in which they’d played respectably on offense and quiet well indeed on defense turn into a close loss. But QB Alex Smith tossed his first INT of the season, which the Steelers ran back for a TD. That seemed to open the floodgates as the two teams combined for 27 fourth-quarter points. Unfortunately, Pittsburgh scored 20 of those and won the game going away.

Pittsburgh has a great defense. It had given up only one TD in three games and zero first-half points until today. But the Niners seemed to get the Steelers on their defensive heels early on as they ran off two sustained drives that bogged down in the Red Zone. Still, they were moving the ball and there were signs of hope.

I predicted the Niners would be 10-6 this year and that they would not be blown out of any games early. So far, that’s looking like a good call but they have to put together 60 minutes of football, not just 35 or 40.

The San Francisco Giants made public today what everyone has known for several weeks, if not months: Barry Bonds will not be in orange and black for the 2008 season.

I am disappointed but not surprised. This is a team with a long history of letting the superstars on whose shoulders the team has ridden for years go elsewhere to finish their careers. The Giants were, if not the pioneers at least very early players in the “loyalty has no place in business” twist on the sport of baseball. Like their cousins, the San Francisco 49ers, the Giants suck a player dry and then spit him out when he reaches a place where he’s being paid more than he’s worth.

Never mind all the years in his early career when he was being paid less than he was worth because of clever negotiating by the team. (I’m not specifically referring to Barry here, though the concept applies.)

I’m sorry to see Barry leave. I’m one of those fans who thinks that until someone proves in a court of law that he did something illegal, he was just a smarter tactician than some or most of his colleagues. He ought not be punished for that unless what he did broke the law or the rules. As far as I can see, he didn’t.

Presumably Barry will now go to the AL where he’ll play DH for someone, rack up the rest of the 3,000 hits he needs to be a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame, get to 700 homers (in another uniform) and ultimately return to the Giants for one day to retire. Except I hope Bonds has the class to tell the Giants to stick that idea where the sun don’t shine and retire as a Pirate or as a member of the AL team that picks him up now.The Giants do not deserve to have him honor them by retiring in their sorry-ass uniforms.

Want to know what’s wrong with baseball? Look no farther. Teams show no loyalty to players. Players show no loyalty to teams. Fans show no loyalty to or patience with teams. it’s everyone for him/herself.

The U.S. Senate, a body which has proven that it cannot pass even the most basic resolution that dares to run in any regard afoul of the Bush Regime’s wishes, has nonetheless found time to attack the First Amendment protection of a group opposed to Bush’s War on Iraq.

That once-august body, reduced to sniveling cowardice and organ-grinder-monkey behavior, voted this morning to condemn a newspaper ad by liberal anti-war group MoveOn.org that dared to criticize Bush mouthpiece General David Petraeus. I’m an active member of MoveOn.org. I thought the language in the ad — calling him General David Betray Us — was a bit over the top, but not outlandishly so.

But for the Senate to take the time to condemn this one ad and the organization behind it when it should be struggling with grave matters of national importance is beyond appalling.

Equally disgusting is the fact that one of my Senators — Diane Feinstein, who started her career as a liberal Democrat — voted for this inane and unpatriotic bill. I have called her office to voice my anger and disappointment. She’s been moving to the right for years; this is for me the straw that broke the camel’s back. I will work for her defeat when she comes up for re-election.

Hey, you bozos in the Senate! Go do some real freaking work. Get our troops out of a civil war we can’t win before another 1,000 of them are dead. Morons.

Democratic Presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich says on his Web site that Iowa party leaders are rigging the game by excluding him from major events despite the fact that he is ahead of two or three of his rivals who have been included.

Kucinich, who is my favorite candidate in the field and who is the only candidate to have proposed and submitted legislation to implement a completely not-for-profit health care system for Americans, has been left out of major Democratic gatherings. Iowa party leaders say it’s because Kucinich lacks a viable political organization in the state.

Not only is that a lie, it’s not an excuse even if it were true. As Dennis says, “The whole purpose of the primary and caucus season is to provide voters with opportunities, not to enable a carnival of interest groups to subvert the process. When Party leaders and their allies pre-select which candidates they will allow the voters to hear, it’s a disservice to the voters. Iowans deserve better than a rigged game.”

One thing that absolutely galls me is that the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) failed to invite Kucinich to a discussion of health care. Along with Dennis, I wonder if the fact that that association makes buckets of money selling insurance to its senior membership has anything to do with their attitude toward Kucinich.

This is a travesty. We will never recover from the staggering blows dealt to this country and its economy by a punch-drunk Bush Regime by confining choices to the mainstream Democratic candidates who can’t even summon up enough intestinal fortitude to face down the President on his illegal and immoral War on Iraq.

By all reasonable accounts, President Bush is (to quote him from a recent biography), “Playing for October and November.” His goal is neither victory in Iraq (which he can’t define anyway) nor a graceful exit strategy from a hopeless civil war. His intent is simple: make this the next President’s problem so that his role in history isn’t that of the guy who lost the Middle East.

In other words, he wants to saddle the Democrats with the war.

Well, the Democrats had damn well better saddle him with it in clear, unmistakable terms. Congress, under Democratic leadership, must adopt the following strategy immediately or risk losing what credibility it has left with an American public disgusted with Bush’s War:

1. Swiftly adopt legislation demanding the President bring all the troops home from Iraq within nine months. Tie this legislation to funding which prohibits its use for any purpose other than the safe withdrawal of American forces.
2. When Bush vetoes the legislation, re-submit it. Keep doing that as long as it takes.
3. Keep a very public presence to remind the American people that the Democrats, who cannot force the issue as long as too few Republicans side with their own constituents. are doing all they can to end the war but are unable to do so thanks to Bush and his minions.
4. Simultaneously, put the major portion of funding for the 2008 Senatorial elections into states where a GOP Senator in electoral trouble is refusing to help them stop the war.

The truth is clear and simple. Bush wants to play politics with 1,000 or more American lives. One of those could be your son or daughter, wife or husband, brother or sister. Or my granddaughter.

Americans have become followers of the Sound Bite. The Democrats should give them a memorable one:

“We tried 142 times to stop the needless loss of life in Iraq. The Republicans said no 142 times. And 1,209 Americans died as a result.”

There is no more important or urgent issue on the national agenda. Any Democratic presidential candidate who doesn’t agree with the above should withdraw from the race now and leave the playing field to those willing to sacrifice to gain the high moral ground.

Enough is enough.

I was diverted today to reading a piece on Wikipedia about a famed Seattle book critic named Nancy Pearl. She claims some fame for creating her “Rule of 50″, which says, in salient part, “If you still don’t like a book after slogging through the first 50 pages, set it aside. If you’re more than 50 years old, subtract your age from 100 and only grant it that many pages.”

I’ve had a similar, but slightly more forgiving, rule for years and years. If I pick up a book and begin reading it and it doesn’t fully engage me within the first 100 pages or 1/4 of its total number of pages, whichever number is lower, I set it aside. This has generally stood me in good stead.

But there was a recent exception. I bought The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen L. Carter. After about 100 pages, I decided the writing was too ponderous and the plot too slow-moving to keep me reading, so I set it aside.

A week or so later, I found myself without any leisure reading material. I have this obsession that prevents me from sleeping at night unless I’ve read something fairly light first. So I picked up the book again and began where I’d left off. Within another 30 or so pages, I was hooked. I now consider this one of the best-written novels I’ve read in a long time. It is, to be sure, extremely ponderously written. Mr. Carter seems enamored of his skill with the language, which is considerable, and determined to show it off for us. I was repeatedly reminded of Ernest Hemingway’s comment about writing: “When I’m reading over a manuscript I’ve written and I encounter a particularly well-turned phrase,” he said (I’m paraphrasing), “I immediately delete it.” Carter would have been well advised to do that here. His writing style is far more Agatha Christie than it is Hemingway or Robert B. Parker.

Still, the story line was unique and intriguing and the characters had a depth rarely found in modern popular literature.

If I’d actually stopped after 100 pages, I’d have deprived myself of a good read. I guess that is another example of the notion that exceptions prove the rules.

My new column on the way in which the notion of electability disrupts our free political process and choices has been accepted and is now available at OpEd News.

You know that I’m a supporter of Dennis Kucinich for the Democratic nomination for President. Here are a couple of great tidbits I picked up over at OpEdNews today while I was posting an article of my own on the issue of “electability” in the current crop of candidates:

In this piece David Summerlin points out that “The “unelectable” Kucinich won the [AFL-CIO] debate, hands down, before the traditional base of the Democratic Party, the working class and middle class people whose labor generates the profits that accrue to the capital that finances the big money, “electable” Democrats who gut worker rights and privatize our communities at every turn.”

Kevin Gosztola offers this view contrasting Kucinich and the other “maverick” Demo in the field, Ron Paul. He presents a very impressive — and as far as I can tell accurate — comparison of their views on Iraq, impeachment, 911, health care, immigration and a number of other crucial issues.

There are a number of other good comments and columns on Dennis on the site. If you go there and search for Kucinich, they’ll pop up.