Liminal states

A lot of people have written great posts on why they support Barack Obama and his campaign; so I’ll keep it quick, and link out to others who have taken the time to give more details and say things better.

A lot of people say “they’re no different on the issues”. I disagree. There are major differences on four issues I care about a lot: civil liberties, the war, immigration, and LGBT rights.

• civil liberties: Obama’s good — not perfect, but better than any president we’ve ever had. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, supports garnishing wages and presumably other enforcement for her mandatory health insurance plan, wants to censor videogames, and did not object when her husband signed the CDA and COPA, expanded wiretapping, and approved warrantless searches. He supports net neutrality; she opposes it.

• the war. He advocates a firm timeframe for withdrawal, and his opposition from day 1 will help restore American credibility; he also, in my opinon, has a more accurate analysis of the situation. I also think he’ll make future wars less likely (for example his willingness, unlike Hillary Clinton, to engage personally with “hostile” leaders); Chris Bowers discussed this well. She still won’t admit that she was wrong when she voted for the war; for that matter, neither she nor her husband has ever disavowed the sanctions policy that led to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths and did nothing to prevent the war.

• LGBT rights: while far from perfect (both candidates oppose gay marriage and support the military’s exemption from campus anti-discrimination policies), Barack Obama is distinctly better than Hillary Clinton. He supports a full repeal of the federal “Defense of Marriage Act”; and he supports an inclusive Employee Non-Discrimination Act. More here.

• immigration: He’s marched on May 1; she opposes drivers’ licenses for undocumented immigrants. And this is as good a place as any to point out that she never spoke against her husband’s “welfare reform” policy.

There are some other important differences as well, but come on … isn’t this enough?

Of course it’s not just the issues. The Clinton campaign’s repeated racist speech is appalling, as is the voter-suppression lawsuit in Nevada and her decision to break the agreement with her opponents and campaign in Florida are classic Rovian — and Clintonian — maneuvers; I’m tired of politics like that. Obama’s ability to galvanize involvement from younger and first-time voters has a chance to rewrite the political map, starting with the 2008 election and building on it. His strategic and out-of-the-box thinking during the campaign (the use of social networks; his head speechwriter is a 24-year-old; actively going on Spanish-language radio after the Kennedy endorsement; going on The Billerico Project) has really impressed me. I think his ability to work across partisan divides, trans-partisan as well bi-partisanship, will help him be very effective at making progress on his platform.

Oh, and I like and respect his wife a lot better than I like her husband.

Ever since my first election, I’ve looked forward to being able to vote for a candidate who’s not a straight white male who’s got a real chance at becoming the President of the United States of America. And in November, I’ll have a chance to. How cool is that? But that’s not enough.

If Obama’s the Democratic nominee, I’ll also have a chance to vote for somebody who I think can really change the world.

A change is coming. I choose hope.

jon

PS: A few of the many other posts I read that had an influence on me: Matt McGinty’s letter to friends and family in the Facebook Obama discussion group, danah boyd, on the new/old media distinction; Jack Turner’s The Clintons , Black Folk, and America: A reckoning on Jack and Jill Politics; Michael Chabon’s The Phobocracy; Meteor Blades and DHinMi on Kos; the New York Times civil rights editorial; the many great analyses in the Women of Color and anti-racist blogospheres of Gloria Steinem’s “oppression olympics” piece in the New York Times; and endorsements from Oprah, Caroline Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, and Maria Shriver.

To avoid overflowing the blog, I’ll use this thread to collect various snippets about Super Tuesday. Stories and threads elsewhere:

• Twitter: supertuesday, Politweets, very cool Google maps mashup,
• Tag clouds for liberal and conservative blogs, from Virtual Vantage point.
• Live coverage of Super Tuesday, the feeling on the ground and letters to friends and family and the Wall on the Facebook Barack Obama discussion board.

Update, 6:40 p.m.: I’m having intermittent problems getting to the Facebook threads, so they may be having a hard time keeping up with the load.

• MTV Street Team (23 video bloggers in 23 states!) and Brave New Films/Young Turks Super Tuesday coverage
• Results threads:Georgia on Kos, Georgia on the Facebook board, in the Million Strong for Obama Facebook group (Facebook account required). tip sheet for watching tonight’s results from Marc Ambinder.
• Predictions: Ambinder, Kos, Bill Clinton, Jerome Armstrong,
• Netroots open fire on Hillary for legitimizing right-wing propaganda (and breaking ranks with Henry Reid and other democrats) by accepting Fox’ debate invitation: on Kos, TPM, OpenLeft, Firedoglake,

The Yes We Can/Sí Se Puede video’s already got at least a million hits on YouTube — 566,000 for the one I linked to here, a couple more instances with 285,000 and 140,000, and then a long tail curve …

How many people will watch it if we get it all over Facebook? I dunno, but it seems worth trying to find out. So after some consultation with a friend, late last night I put a message on the Obama discussion board with these suggestions:

Here’s how you can help:

1) post it (using the “posted items” link in your applications list on the left hand side). This way, it’ll be on your profile and in your feed.

2) tell your friends about it, and ask them to do the same

3) if you’re in any Obama groups on Facebook, please post these instructions in their discussion boards and wall.

4) if you’ve got a blog, blog about it

Thanks!

I also send a handful of PMs, including one to a 20-person “friend list”, and put it in the One Million Strong for Obama group. [In the process, I ran into a couple of people with complementary ideas — I’ll add those to the comments here.]

Within fifteen minutes, two people replied in the thread saying “done”. By the time I woke up this morning, there were ten replies in the two threads … as they say in election season, “early returns are promising”.

So please: take a moment to get involved and help!

Update on February 12: Final votes were today. Barack Obama voted against telecom immunity — as did Harry Reid and 29 other Democrats. John McCain along with every single Republican Senator, Joe Lieberman, and 19 Democrats voted for. More here.

Update on Super Tuesday: Ari Melber’s Nation article gives the current snapshot; read the thread for more.

Russ Feingold’s video on YouTube sums it up perfectly:

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I thought the Clinton Attacks Obama wiki was a great idea the first time I heard about it, and it’s steadily grown since then.  Here’s the welcome message:

This is an experiment in community information gathering. My name is Baratunde Thurston. I’m a comedian, writer and social media junkie. As a contributor for Jack & Jill Politics, I’ve seen the strong black community reaction to what looks like a pattern of race-themed attacks against Obama by Bill, Hillary and other members of her campaign. As folks have questioned the number and validity of these incidents, I thought I’d put together a place to keep track of them.

Blog posts are not good places to keep a running list, and I’m too busy to do it all by myself, so like a multinational corporation, I’m outsourcing this bad boy.

Not only does opening it up to the community means that sources any one person would miss keep flowing in, it’s an excellent use of the automatic list generation features available on most wikis, too.  Seeing the list of race-themed attacks that are being flung around really highlights how extensive the pattern is.  Baratunde’s also the Jack of Jack and Jill Politics (blogging as Jack Turner), and his The Clintons, Black folks, and America — a Reckoning gives some great perspectives that don’t usually make it into mainstream coverage.

The wiki’s starting to get some press attention and this’ll probably steadily increase, no matter whether or not the attacks stop.   And deservedly so: the general technique is something that supporters of candidates from any party can use to surface repeated uses of code words or images as part of smear campaigns.   Swiftboating will be a lot harder this year …

All the Democratic candidates have shown a willingness to discuss LBGTIQ issues, and there are some very clear litmus tests. The Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy mandating discrimination against gays in the military and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) restricting marriage to heterosexual couples are great lenses for discovering the candidates’ views on LGB issues, and last fall’s craven decision by Democratic leadership (endorsed by the Human Rights Campaign) to advance a non-inclusive version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act [ENDA] has added an equally good one on the trans front. So it’s unusually clear where they stand — and there are some significant differences.

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On the heels of posts by Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein yesterday, Kos has an excellent short post highlighting how Bill Clinton and Edwards both completely distorted Obama’s quote about Reagan as a transformative politician.

Huh. I didn’t see the part where Obama said the GOP’s ideas were “all the good” ones.

In fact, Obama isn’t saying anything that couldn’t come straight out of Crashing the Gate — that the GOP build a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy that used its think tanks to create ideas, a media machine to sell those ideas, and a modernized campaign operation to win elections on those ideas. Yes, the GOP was the party of ideas. They were crappy ideas. But they were “ideas”.

I can see why people such as Melissa McEwan at Shakesville are offended that Obama would refer to Reagan without explicitly criticizing his ideas (although as Greg Sargent points out on TPM, he has been a lot clearer in the past); and of course I can see why Clinton wouldn’t much care for the notion that Reagan was more transformational president than he was (although for what it’s worth, I agree 100%). However, that doesn’t give license to distort his statements — and this mischaracterization has been floating around both the progressive blogosphere and the mainstream media. Good on Kos for calling it out so clearly.

I summarized the Economist’s debate on social networks in education on the Tales from the Net blog, but I wanted to focus more on the race and gender aspects here on Liminal States. To start with, check out the participants and their roles. Superficially (and to the extent we can tell from the pictures and pronouns people use), it seems gender balanced: three male, four female. Look a little more closely though:

1. the “speakers”, presenting the arguments for and against, are both male.
2. the “moderator” (who frames the issue, provides commentary on both speakers’ arguments, and “will peruse all correspondence from the floor and raise points that are of particular interest or merit with the two speakers”) is also male.
3. the women are all “guest participants”

Marginalized much?

Things are even more extreme in the “age” dimension — in a comment in the debate, I asked whether there were plans to involve any current or recent students as guest participants. And although it’s much harder to infer reliably from photos and language, there appears to be even more extreme marginalization in the race dimension … it’s a mighty white-looking bunch of folks they’ve got.

One of the thing that makes this lack of diversity more acute is the Economist’s “Oxford 2.0” debate rules:

In our reconception, the proposition and the opposition are each represented by individual speakers—experts in their fields chosen by The Economist‘s staff to match the proposition at hand.

Because, after all, we wouldn’t want those (nudge-nudge) other perspectives to get equal standings with the guys hand-picked by The Economist’s staff.

Now that’s a story you don’t see every day!

A Texas Supreme Court justice and his wife were charged on Thursday in an arson fire that destroyed their suburban Houston home last June, the judge’s lawyer said.

But in a bizarre reversal, prosecutors plan on Friday to seek dismissal of the indictments against the justice…

It appeared, the lawyer said, that a grand jury had voted the indictments precipitously over the objection of prosecutors.

District Attorney Charles A. Rosenthal Jr., who has been fending off calls for his resignation over amorous e-mail messages to his executive secretary and other sexually explicit and racially charged messages, issued no statement.

Good thinking on the ‘no statement’ part.

Update on January 18: it’s not just any DA, it’s the guy who defended the Texas law that criminalized homosexuality in Lawrence v. Texas at the US Supreme Court!

EFF’s 17th birthday party is tonight at 111 Minna in San Francisco.  Cleverly timed to coincide with Macworld, it features Adrian and the Mysterious D of Bootie fame, and is sponsored by Louis Rosetto’s (of Wired) new chocolate company TCHO.  And they’ll be beta-testing TCHO’s new dark chocolates!

[Hmm … DJs, mashups, chocolate.  What does this remind you of?]

A great cause, great DJs, in a great party space.  What’s not to like?

Happy birthday, EFF!

There are a couple of excellent posts up on why even though there are plausible explanations for the discrepancies in candidates’ results between hand-counted and machine-counted precincts, the recount in the New Hampshire primary is a good thing.

In Off the Bus on the Huffington Post, after giving some background on the vulnerabilities of the Diebold (now renamed Premier Election Services) voting machines used in New Hampshire, Kirsten Anderson puts things in a broader context:

The demand for a recount isn’t about the New Hampshire primary–anything short of a result showing Obama winning by more than say, 5% would still put the vote within the realm of a Clinton “comeback” from Iowa. It’s about the amount of distrust that voters have in the machine voting systems–machines which studies have shown to be not just hackable, but often poorly conceived and constructed.

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Boing Boing has stories on not one but two five-year-olds whose names are on the no-fly list and so get treated by the TSA as a security threat.  Cory Doctorow comments

You know, if you wanted to systematically discredit the idea of a Department of Homeland Security, if you wanted to make an utter mockery of aviation safety, you could not do a better job than this.

although I think that’s not giving the TSA enough credit: DHS continuing to employ the company that wrote the TSA web site filled with vulnerabilities asking for traveller’s social security numbers and other personal information is equally effective at discrediting themselves.