San Francisco is a deeply flawed city in many ways (not to mention the whole voter initiative process, for that matter), but it also manages to come up with little gems like this. What started out as a joke is now going to be on the ballot this November:
San Francisco voters will be asked to decide whether to name a city sewage plant in honor of President Bush, after a satiric measure qualified for the November ballot Thursday.
[snip]
The measure, if passed, would rename the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant the George W. Bush Sewage Plant.
I was too tired to write about the end of the Democratic primaries, and Obama’s clinching of the nomination last night. A day later, though, I’ve had time to read the blogs (Steve Benen has a noteworthy post) and get a few thoughts down.
I am deeply proud of my party and of my country. Come what may — and Obama’s election is by no means certain — a black man is a major party candidate for President in this country. I’m not old enough to have any real memories of the civil rights movement. But I’ve seen and heard racism in action, and it’s ugly. That Obama could face it, and still win the nomination against some of the biggest names in politics, is amazing. Truly a milestone to feel good about.
Now, the hard part starts — the general election campaign. This is going to be good.
Not to make this a “pile on Hillary” kind of weekend, but a quote I saw a week or so ago has been nagging at me.
To feminist writer Linda Hirshman, Clinton’s likely defeat signals a harsh reality that future female candidates will need to consider.
“It shows how fragile the loyalty and commitment of women to a female candidate is. That’s a pretty scary thing,” says Hirshman. “She can count on the female electorate to divide badly and not be reliable.”
That’s a definition of feminism that I don’t understand. In act, it sounds a lot more like essentialism. As a woman who has spent a good portion of her life making her way in male-dominated fields - and as a Jew, to boot - I have an extreme distaste for any ideology that assumes that group characteristics are identical and unalterable.
And yet …. it would make me happy to see a woman elected President, I can’t lie. It would also make me happy to see a Jewish President, although frankly I think that’s even less likely to happen in my lifetime. Still, that doesn’t mean I’m going to put gender or religious characteristics ahead of everything else on the table. Especially when it comes to something as important as a Presidential election.
I’m one of the first generation of American women to be born and raised in a world where women actually had the option to escape the constraints they’d previously been limited to. Is that why I do not feel the pull of identity politics? I consider myself a feminist. Does being a “good” feminist mean that I must vote for a woman candidate solely because of her gender? I don’t think so, but clearly some other women do.
How did things get to this place? And more important, can we fix it?
It’s closing in on 10 PM and I’ve been watching the returns for almost 5 hours now. As I write this, Obama took 13 states to Clinton’s 8 (New Mexico has not yet been declared), and MSNBC has the two of them within 20 delegates of each other.
Of course, I would have liked to see Obama take California and/or New York in a resounding victory, but all in all, tonight was a good night. This race isn’t even close to being over.
In November of 2004, I donned a black zip-up hoodie and walked out into a grey, foggy San Francisco morning to go vote. I was scared, angry, and stressed out. We all know what happened.
Today, I’m wearing purple and the sun is shining after a week of rain. I’ll be leaving to go vote as soon as I finish this post.
I fear hope — it has let me down bitterly in the past — but right now, I’m cautiously hopeful about the outcome of today. Tonight, I could be looking at this post and wishing I’d never written it, but right now, I’m going to indulge in the luxury of hope for a better, brighter future. And now I’m going to go do something about it.
Get out there and vote today if you live in a primary state!
I think I’ve mentioned in passing that Obama is my candidate, but with Super Tuesday approaching, it’s time I came out and said so in no uncertain terms. There’s a lot of reasons why, but essentially it boils down to something Obama himself said in a speech today:
It’s not enough to say you’ll be ready from Day One — you have to be right from Day One.
I support Barack Obama for President, and if you’re voting in one of the upcoming Democratic primaries, I strongly urge you to vote for him as well.
Frankly, Hillary Clinton and Obama do not differ all that much in many aspects of their platforms and their voting records — except for one glaring difference. Obama was right about the disastrous war Bush got us into, and Hillary was not. All the experience in the world will not help you if you make the wrong choices on key issues like whether or not to go to war, and Hillary got it wrong.
And even more than that, Obama is one of those uniquely gifted leaders who can, despite how rough the last 8 years have been, make people feel good about being an America, make us feel confident about our future, and make us feel that yes, we can get this ship of state back on course.
An America with Barack Obama as its President is an America I’d very much like to see. Whether we’ll get there, I don’t know, but I’ll be doing my part next Tuesday to try to bring it about.
I’m a bit hesitant to link to The Raw Story but if this is for real … it’s a little disconcerting, to say the least:
“I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution,” Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. “But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.”
When Willie Geist reported Huckabee’s opinion on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, co-host Mika Brzezinski was almost speechless, and even Joe Scarborough couldn’t immediately find much to say beyond calling it “interesting”
Someone needs to ask Huckabee exactly what he means by that comment.
If he means we should add stuff about loving your neighbor as yourself, or about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and healing the sick … well, maybe he’s got a point. But if it’s the parts about killing homosexuals and making women into chattel, well, that’s another story.
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