Russell Shaw's Brainstorm Central

What Would Jesus Drive?

SUVs get less miles to the gallon than most other consumer vehicles. Less miles to the gallon means dirtier air, which pisses off The Power That Be. So, if you believe that Jesus was The Power That Be's son, you would have to take exception to SUVs. Why do so many true and sincere believers drive SUVs, and put fish logos on the back bumper to boot? The Evangelical Environmental Association recognizes this hypocrisy. Through their What Would Jesus Drive campaign, they are trying to educate motorists of faith. Well, I got two answers to their question. He was cited as having ridden a donkey (gee, does that make him a Democrat? But he was a carpenter by trade, and carpenters drive pick-ups.

The Pain In Stain

I voted for Al Gore and probably would, again. Yet these two new books about family life the Al and Tipper have just published strike me as the product of the same type of focus-group-tested political calculation that hobbled his last campaign. He lost the vote of married people by what, nine points? What better way to pronounce your family friendly sentiments than by writing books that address the subject? What he is really trying to say here is the same thing as that "spontaneous" (yea, right) Big Kiss at the Democratic Convention. Al, why don't you just come out and say it: "I worked for a man who committed adultery, but don't judge me by his behavior. I am no adulterer." If he wanted to be more frank, here's something else he should have said in the 2000 campaign cycle: "I worked for a man who stained a blue dress. They worked for men who stain the air. Now, if you want to talk about who is the more "Godly" candidate, answer me this: isn't it true that God made the air? I don't think he made the dress. And that wasn't my stain. So who of us is closer to God?

Happy Birthday To Me

Happy Birthday to me
Happy Birthday to me
I still throw away mail
From the AARP!!

I Left My Party In San Francisco?

What is going on in Democratic party has been seen before, actually for many decades.

On one side, the liberals say that the mother lode of untapped voters is to be found in those tens of millions of non-voting, or wrong-voting common folk who only need to be energized. People with no health insurance, those that have been victimized by unforgiving bosses, heartless big pharma, bigotry of all stripes. I hear the arguments that what is needed is a charismatic leader to get these people off their duffs. Actually, that was part of Nader's push, and Jesse Jackson before him.

On the other side are those that argue that a progressive agenda tends to be polarizing, that most American voters are in the middle, and Democrats should claim the middle while letting the Republicans go right, as they seem determined to. Worked twice for Clinton, they say.

Both arguments have their fallacies. The "go left" argument never seems to yield lasting results. Eugene Debs didn't last. The great liberal labor leaders (John L. Lewis, Walter Reuther, David Dubinsky, Harry Bridges) had followers, but they, and most of their followers, are all dead. The appeal of the New Deal wasn't intergenerationally durative. Neither was the Kennedy mystique-- hey, his niece couldn't even be elected in Maryland. Vietnam anger? Served only one portion of one generation. The 60s? Long-gone, now if addressed at all, as a blip in time or a pop-culture satire. Jesse and Ralph's arguments, so many of them valid, have been blips, a few points here and there. Gore tried to tap into this with "people vs. powerful," and guess what, lost non college educated white males by 16 points. You are dealing with the most ingrained, hard-packed apathy, as well as the counterveiling effects of conservative religion and conservative commentary. I know people who are pissed at the conditions of working people, angry at the healthcare bureaucracy, etc; but some of these same people get all their bad news from talk radio, and all their good news from the pulpit. A type of pulpit with a type of theocracy that condemns a stained dress, but not so the risk of a stained, and warming, atmosphere or tundra. And can you hear the sneers about "San Francisco liberal" Nancy Pelosi? Those sneers, which may already be starting, are meant to call to mind images of SF as a haven for hippies, homeless, gays, druggies, etc. If you want to go there I can talk stereotypes about the type of people who hail from DeLay's district.

The "go center" argument also has its fallacies. Democrat true believers say this is prostitution of ideals, a denial of party birthright and a supression of passion.

Better political minds than me will argue this.

Preaching *To* The Choir, Reaching *Beyond* The Choir

I am not all that upbeat on the ability of the Internet to rally millions. In the interviews I did for USA Today, no one could point to Internet as having made a tangible difference in a single election. It can rally the faithful, but the question I would pose to you is: how do you avoid preaching to the choir? Sites like Democracy Now and AlterNet don't only need to be visited by progressives: they need to reach the screens, the minds, and the hearts of those who don't vote, or whose votes are driven by dogma or selfishness as opposed to the commonweal. If these sites can reach the 35 year-old, suburban female Realtor, who is pro-choice but thinks the Republicans are better for business, then I will know things are moving.

Rod, and Real(ity)

Right to give MVP to Tejada. A-Rod is a player for the ages, and should be player of the year, but as harsh as it sounds "valuable" should connote tangible results, and last place in division is not tangible. Kind of like a great actor with an amateur cast. But Tejada was the best player on the team with the best season record --a team that was projected to stumble after Jason Giambi left.

Out Of Their League?

I think TCU is quite underrated. Weak sked, yes, but they seem to roll over most. Same rap two years ago against them and their running back LaDanian Tomlinson; was said he didn't face major oppo. Now leading the NFL in rushing yardage.

Osama Is In Karachi

In terms of expeditious delivery of a tape, as apparently has taken place here, somewhat logistically easier to get one from Karachi to Qatar, then from some remote cave to Qatar. That leads me to be even more convinced that he is in Karachi, a speculation I authored in a previous post, updated here:

Apparently OBL is still alive, but I think that if he were on Afghan-Pak border he would have been spotted by satellite. It would take just one of thousands who would have seen him to rat him out. With those types of numerical odds, you would find a malcontent in any crowd, almost like a closeted atheist in a conservative small town in the American south. And malcontents sometimes like to monetize their alienation. So that leads me to think although he is apparently alive, he is not moving around in that region. If he's alive, I'd bet he is in Karachi, city of 14 million where it is easy to hide. The fewer eyeballs that see him, the less chances of confirmed sightings. I'd bet he is sequestered away in some simpatico Saudi or Egyptian ex-pat mansion. True, Paks have helped us nab some mid-to-senior folks, but I'd say his presence there is known by few, and the few that know either are protecting him or have been bought off. As commentator Richard Reeves once told the Atlanta Press Club when asked why more people didn't know about JFK's cheating, "the rich have long driveways."

I See "Read" People

Went to the Oregon Book Awards on Thursday. Author and social commentator Sherman Alexie was the master of ceremonies. Alexie, who takes great pride in his Native American ethnicity, told the assemblage of an incident that happened not after 9/11. While walking in downtown Seattle, Alexie was taunted by some redneck in a pickup. Obviously confusing Alexie's physical appearance with that of some Middle Easterners, the redneck said, "why don't you go back where you came from." Alexie -- implicitly noting that his people were in the Americas for tens of thousands of years before his taunter's forebears, told the crowd that he felt like saying to the guy, "you first."

Do Environmentalists Spank Their Brats?

With some empirical justification, I have long believed that the great majority of parents who spank their kids are social conservatives. You know, "spare the rod, spoil the child," that stuff. Well, today, outside Lloyd Center in Portland, I saw a young child of about four being hit in her fanny by her mother (presumably). Her grandmother (again, presumably), then said: "now you have something to whine about."

I figured these two solid citizens out to be "spare the rod" fundamentalists. Then, I noticed the Sierra Club bag the grandmother was carrying. I always thought that environmentalists were gentle people. If this stereotype played out, an environmentalist parent with a whining child would have more of a nurturing solution. Oh, well, so much for sociopolitical generalizations.

Roe On The Go

I gotta tell ya, the notion I've previously expressed of process-servers at the feminist health center isn't far-fetched any more.
Here is what will happen. After this current term, we will see the resignations of Rehnquist, and *at least* one of: O'Connor, Ginsberg and Stevens. Keep in mind that the latter three pro-Roe justices are all older than Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

Now, we move to late spring or early summer of 2003. We are fighting the Rev Guard in the streets of Baghdad, but that is a discussion for another post. On C-SPAN, we view the heart-rendering tale of a Latino Supreme Court nominee who was born into a family of eight kids, worked his way through law school, graduated near the top of his class, and eventually found his way to a state or appelate judiciary. In Judiciary Committee hearings, ranking minority member Patrick Leahy asks him his opinion on abortion, and the nominee says that he "understands Roe is the law of the land," but as to his own personal feelings, "it wouldn't be appropriate" for him to comment. Lexis searches of his record reveal a blank slate on this issue.

What happens next? Democrats, sensing the nominee comes from ranks of one of their strongest ethnic constituencies, don't really have their heart into a filibuster. Nominee gets out of Justice committee 11-7, and gets confirmed, oh, maybe 58-42.

Already at the ready, several suits are then drafted to do things like enable parental notification laws. No *overt*, prima facie effort is made to overturn Roe, just to render it irrelevant by taking bites out of the edges. The bites become a feeding frenzy, especially in the culturally conservative "Red" states. The fall of 2003 and early 2004 see these edges nibbled away, until the shell of the decision itself is left exposed and bare.

With these Roe-corrosive decisions already in law by early 2004, that dovetails with state legislative sessions. More culturally conservative states follow the lead of the Court and draft laws that erode abortion rights. Spring, 2004 sees circumvention, and in at least a few cases, outright defiance, from a few feminist health centers. Then come the process servers.

The timetable of these likely events will dovetail with the 2004 Presidential campaign season. If there is a war and it goes badly, that will add fuel to the fire. It will cycle back to 1968, and at least in terms of the political discourse, be the "mother of all battles."

Which goes back to the mathematical reasons why the man who will nominate these judges was in office to begin with. Those fucking 77,000 votes in Florida for you-know-who.

Ralph may have been an effective campaigner for efficient safety belts. I'm usually no alarmist, but you want safety belts? How about those that will be worn by ob-gyn physician's assistants in the back seat of the police car?

I'd Rather Have Been Wrong Than Right


I felt it blowing in the wind. A chill wind at that. I wish I hadn't, but I did. Turned out even worse than I had feared.

It is times like this when I must seek solace within the redoubt of my own state's borders. A redoubt and a refuge it is. It is very tight, as I expected, but it sure looks like will have four more years under a liberal Democratic Governor, Ted Kulongoski. A nice 20 years in a row. His elected cabinet will be a solid bloc of 5D. My D Congressperson won in a landslide, and House delegation is still 4-1D. I didn't vote for Gordon, but it is good to have at least one elected rep from the majority party. And close to home, a pro urban growth boundary candidate beat a sprawl-friendly real-estate developer puppetress by 60-40 for president of Metro, the intercounty agency that unlike some other metro areas I know well, does a right fine job a-regulatin' development in these heah parts.

Funny sometimes about how Gov elections sometimes are not a total fit with an overall state's persona. I mean, in 2000, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maryland and NY all gave Gore huge margins. They have R Govs, and apparently Hawaii will as well. But Wyoming, where Bush won by the largest percentage, as well as Oklahoma, another huge Bush 2000 state, now have D Govs. I will say it again: all politics is local.

Now to the big picture.

What did I see? What did I feel?

*The overarching feeling among much of the swing voters that the Republicans are not to be blamed for the market slump, or even for corporate greed, and that the markets operate in its own space-time continuum, outside political fiat. One might argue the D should have pushed a contrarian view more forcefully, but we know they did not.

*The very real perception that any semblance of political balance in the Intermountain West has been rendered asunder by the mass in-migration of Californians -- who, in most of the northern tier of Rocky and Intermountain states, outstrip the new Latino immigrants in terms of voting strength and clout. That's why Wayne Allard won. I've got to think that some of Allard's voters were transplated Californians who can be found on Sunday morning at the mega-churches of Douglas County, Col., or Colorado Springs.

Some of my friends envisioned a different outcome. They seemed to attach an overarching importance to mid-term election history. I have argued that this nation has changed in such profound ways, that history is becoming a template at most, in danger of becoming irrelevant. Some assigned too great a degree of predictiveness to those generic polls about who you would like to control Congress, or who you are planning to vote for by party. I told you the math between D-winning districts (which tend to be very solid) and R districts (which tend to be fairly competitive) render those polls non-predictive. And they underestimated my points about the fact that swing voters were not gonna blame their 401 (k) crash on Republicans -- as well as my point about the transplated conservative Californians.

But I am counting on blowback in 2004. Maybe this needs to happen to destroy the conservative agenda.

Twenty-Nine Years Later, My Cat Stevens Album Review Resurfaces!

I have just had what I must call the most vicarious experience. While vanity-surfing on All The Web, I came upon a link to a Cat Stevens album review that I wrote for the August 30, 1973 issue of "Zoo World." When he or she was a teenager, the Webmaster for the Majicat site had collected some Cat Stevens album reviews. He kept them around, and reproduced them on the Web. I was barely out of college then, with a wordy and convuluted writing style that was a mixture of faux academic, a spliffed mind, horny, after-effects of lonely college days, and the constant effects of a rocky, generation gap move back home. Gosh, look at all the time that has passed. The Florida-based magazine folded two years later. Cat Stevens now practices Islam. But I am still stringing consonants and vowels together. OK, if you want to read the article, here it is