What better way to celebrate Sen. Obama’s recent win AND how much you like Battlestar Galactica with version 2.0 of our Adama for President t shirts and stickers.
And, given recent events on BSG, you can either be for Admiral Adama for President, or, ahem, Lee Adama….buy one today and be the coolest kid at the next Obama rally, Comic Book Convention, or other gathering in and around town!
Posted in Uncategorized
Plenty of geniuses can do all the political post mortems on how Carole Migden and her Sacramento crew invented a new way to lose a sure-win re-elect. For me, I have but one question: will the people who stole my photos of frakking Flickr at least have the courage to reveal themselves, and buy me a case of Schlitz Beer for stealing my photos?
Come on. You stole an image from me, and didn’t have the courage to post an email address or any contact info on your website. The election is over, Leno won, now come clean. It’s good for your karma, and I’ll happily forgive as a good Christian, but I can’t do so unless you ‘fess up.
While reading up on the results of last nights sort-of election here in the Bay Area, I wanted to see how things turned out in some San Mateo County races, and I was struck by two things:
1. San Mateo’s elections site is easily the best one out there. While all the other counties have some long boring URL, San Mateo’s URL is shapethefuture.org, and they even name brand their (excellent) results section as “RaceTracker.”
Beyond that, if you’ve ever had to deal with San Mateo County’s combined Assesor/Clerk/Record/Elections department, you know that this is easily one of the few citizen-friendly, efficient operations out there. Warren Slocum has long been recognized as a leader in applying innovation and technology to improve the elections process, and the function of the departments he controls, with amazing results.
While we in San Francisco continue to plod along with an Elections and Ethics system that’s half-assed, San Mateo has a model of honest, efficient government. In other words, how it’s supposed to work. Can we vote to get annexed by San Mateo County, or pay the brainiacs at the stem cell council to clone the awesome Warren Slocum? Pleeeease?
2. Anyone running in an open primary in most races really didn’t need a lot of votes out of the eligible voter ranks to win. Check out the results for the Assembly seat down south – the winner only needed 10,000 votes to win! So few people bothered to show up (as there was no presidential contest or statewide contest on the ballot) that really, only a handful of people voted at all, and the winner, who will now probably coast for three terms, got off pretty lucky.
It’s kind of funny to think for all the money the outside interests spent to support or oppose the candidates, the cost-per-vote must be huge. But those trees were gonna die anyway, so I guess they died for a good cause.
Imagine, for a moment if California’s legislators and Governor hadn’t bought in to the mania that suggested holding our primary in February, with 20 other big states, and instead kept it in June like God intended.
Imagine the mania that’d be the Democratic Primary right now as California’s voters would literally decide between Clinton and Obama. Imagine the shenanigans, the tricks, the events, the huge voter turnout, and the like. Imagine how fun/infuriating/exciting the season would be. California’s issues would be front and center, and we’d have candidates criss-crossing the state talking to voters – instead of just using LA and SF as a big ATM machine for junk mail in other states’ contests.
Instead we have Maximum Leader Daly’s penny-candy shenanigans and a handful of state legislative primaries. Oh and some lame-ass ballot measures.
Big whoop.
Posted in Uncategorized
So it appears that at the same hotel where the DNC Rules Committee was making decisions accompanied by the collective primal screams of bitter Clinton supporters, upset that the DNC was upholding rules, um, Hillary Clinton fully approved of, a young couple was having their wedding reception in the same hotel.
They took it all in stride and actually kinda had fun with it. Now, I’d sooner have my wedding reception in Hell than anywhere near a crowd of insane politicos of any stripe. But what caught my eye about this story was the fact that the young couple went to their hotel room, to be greeted by like, a ton of free food and champagne – courtesy of Howard Dean and the DNC, who appreciated their not calling the Riot Squad on the whole kit and kaboodle.
Sometimes Democrats can be classy, even when some aren’t. Progressives, take notes and learn – being nice has its advantages over dogmatic speeches and the Middle Finger Salute sometimes!
Posted in Uncategorized
While the conspiracy theorists and primal screamers come up with all sorts of hot air as to why Sen. Clinton’s campaign, despite all its money, high priced consultants and insiders, is losing, there’s a great story in the AP today that describes how Obama’s campaign won, mostly by taking the time to understand the arcane rules of the Party nomination process. Then they took the time to (gasp!) organize in those districts. Shocking!
While Clinton’s camp spent most of 2007 raising money from wealthy donors and telling everyone “it’s inevitable,” Obama’s camp spent their time paying attention to the myriad of rules developed in the 70s and 80s. It helped, of course, that the Democratic party does not award delegates on a “winner take all” basis. It also helped that Obama had the money to put together a field operation, thanks to the ease at which he could solicit small and medium (and some large) donors, primarily online.
But more importantly, the Obama folks never conceded a state, no matter how well Hillary was doing, while Hillary’s people wrote off entire sections of the country to Obama. The era of focusing on a few big, or “swing” states is over, and whoever wins in November, Democrat or Republican, will have to run a more expansive campaign than in the past.
Posted in Democratic Party Chatter
Living in the Inner Sunset, and for some reason not on any mailing lists, I’ve missed out on most of the “fun” that is Political Dead Tree Mail this season. In particular, I’m missing out on the flurry of eastside mailers for the Democratic Central Committee, which include many current Supervisors as candidates.
The Bay Guardian’s blog reports that apparently the so-called “Change” Slate of candidates is sending out a slate card mailer with the Bay Guardian’s logo on it, implying an endorsement of Sen. Carole Migden (the SFBG in fact, endorsed Mark Leno.) There is a more detailed photo of the mailer in question over at the Wall discussion board as well.
I took a look at the pictures myself, and the “too-clever-by-half” design makes it rather easy for voters to be misled that it’s a Guardian slate card. Yes, it does say “all change initiatives and DCCC candidates endorsed by” above a logo that looks almost exactly like the Bay Guardian’s. At the same time, however, they use the logo as the return address as well.
Yes, there is a disclaimer, but to the casual eye scanning a pile of crappy junk mail, it seems to give the Guardian stamp of approval to all candidates. The fact that people are complaining about it to the Guardian indicates that whatever the alleged “intent,” if the end result is the voter is feeling misled or confused, the piece fails. Not being a mind reader, I don’t know if this was intentional or just plain dumb, but I wonder what progressives would say if the roles and candidates were reversed. I seriously doubt they’d be giving the Other Side the wink and a nod.
More interesting, though is how Supervisor Daly has taken a “do it my way or go F**K yourself” attitude, saving his best vitriol for people who’ve been on his side in the past. He has issued two heavy handed progressive fatwas on SF Labor Council director Tim Paulson – someone whom I’ve worked with in the past and always found to be an honorable, decent guy – and who, with the SFLC, did a lot to support Supervisor Daly in the past.
In the last few days before the Big Election, anyone like me who was foolish enough to put their email address on their voter registration form is getting all sorts of nonsense in their email in-box. I’d mentioned before this is not such a brilliant idea.
Interestingly enough, however, Big Evil Lennar corporation, which is spending a pile of cash to get that silly Prop. G passed, uses a company that voluntarily complies with the CAN SPAM law even though it doesn’t apply to political communications.
On the other side, I’m getting tons of spam from Cindy Sheehan (!), the No on G/Yes on F campaign, and the Chris Daly group trying to take over the DCCC, and it doesn’t even try to be CAN SPAM compliant. (And God help you if you dare say something to these paragons of virtue – they’re liable to rip your head off for daring to suggest they’re anything less than angels.)
Funny, that.
Posted in Uncategorized
In these final days before the election, I’m sure all kinds of shenanigan-bombs are going to be dropped, esp. in the District 3 Senate race.
Meanwhile, I , a regular voter, have seen virtually NOTHING in my mailbox, aside from these pieces…funny thing, I couldn’t tell the No on 98 piece and the Linux World pieces from each other, and when I went to pick up one, I had the other and didn’t realize it at first.
It’s really funny how California moved their primary way back to February, to be more “relevant” and oddly enough, if they’d just kept it in June we’d be seeing Hillary and Barry all over the state and turnout would be huge.
Instead….meh.
Carry on.
Posted in Uncategorized
Today I received the same voter survey (from “votersurvey.org” oddly enough) asking me a few questions on the June election. It’s not entirely clear if this is an actual survey, or a push poll (doesn’t seem like it) or why I’d get the same questions 3 times in a week…
Posted in Uncategorized
