Health care reform: The horse and the cart

There is an undercurrent to the current health care reform debate – a sneaking undercurrent of suspicion – that wonders if this nation can successfully insure every American when the health infrastructure does not exist to take care of every one of those individuals. Primarily among the deficits in the medical workforce are loci of primary care: family doctors, general internists, pediatricians, and mid-level providers like nurse practitioners and physician assistants who can effectively and efficiently take up the slack for busy offices.

This suspicion is not a paranoid fantasy. It is real, and the rush of patients into primary care if we did insure the 45 million currently uninsured Americans at large would put a rather onerous stress on clinics and providers currently in practice. The Washington Post ran a story this week on this very phenomenon, highlighting a small-town country doc in rural Texas whose bursting-at-the-seams solo practice would nearly double if the uninsured portion of the town (Texas has the highest uninsured rate in the nation) were to suddenly have paid access to his services.

"The system's going to be overwhelmed when everybody's insured," he says. "We're putting the cart before the horse. You've got your little insurance card and there's no doctor to show it to -- or you have to wait eight weeks to see one."

So this is the answer then: wait a generation or two until there are enough doctors for everyone, and then offer out insurance to the masses. Until then, understand that we can only service the lucky fraction that does have insurance, and hell with the rest. Yes?

No. This approach to the uninsured is a folksy-sounding, down-home, home-grown excuse for basic, unconscionable injustice. If we put the horse of sufficient providers ahead of the cart of health care reform, we are done for. Without the demand, primary care will continue to be considered the relatively low-paid, overworked dustbin of medical practices – the current circumstance that drives most medical school graduates to pick cushier practices like dermatology, anesthesiology, or the medical subspecialties. In the meanwhile, a growing number of uninsured Americans will be unable to access not only primary care, but also coverage for emergency care if needed. Overwhelmed primary care clinics will have to put the brakes on their own patient panels when they reach capacity – regardless of how many are clamoring at the door – until demand does it’s job in upping supply of providers. Keeping an underclass of uninsured patients around just to do the dirty work of deciding who gets priority in to see a busy provider in a small town is a cop-out of Herculean proportions: patients deserve insurance whether or not they have primary care access, because primary care is not the only measure of security that insurance provides.

It doesn’t matter which you label the “horse” or the “cart”: provider availability or insurance access. Whichever way it goes, one has to start moving, and dragging the other with it. If the horse can’t drag the cart, then the cart needs to give the horse a good strong shove. Leaving so many individuals uninsured simply means leaving the whole apparatus mired in a mud trap until neither is any longer viable. The horse and the cart have been stalled out for too long; it’s time to start flogging the both of them.

The most assinine distractor in the health care debate

Sarah Palin calls it “evil.”

Randall Terry of the tired old pro-life machine Operation Rescue calls it the “Kill Granny” clause.

The well-organized anti-reform conservative arms would have you believe that if the Obama health care package passes, government-sponsored panels will be convened to decide if seniors get life-saving treatments or get to die in the gutter.

That these panels appear nowhere in the actual bill seems to have no bearing on the panic flamed by the Randall Terrys and Sarah Palins of the debate.

That uninsured patients already live by the de facto, unacknowledged death-panel approach to care seems not to have entered into the debate.

That the origin of these myths lies in a clause that offers reimbursement to physicians who set aside visits for a sit-down talk about end-of-life care – something physicians already do, largely unpaid, every day – seems to stem the tide of rancor not at all.

As a primary care physician, let me lay out the case for full and just reimbursement for appointments dedicated to what (to steal from the right wing) amounts to “death care.”

In the last six months, I have taken care of a patient with advanced dementia whose daughter cares for her at home. The family is congenial but financially stricken, and tension remains over the matriarch’s care and the use of her remaining resources. The treatment for advanced dementia is minimal and mostly palliative, and we continue to pursue that at every visit, as well as a few minor other issues. But at every visit, I also ask the family (nay, plead with the family) to hammer out what their and the patient’s wishes are on the day that something unpleasant happens: pneumonia, a hip fracture, what have you. Do they want all measures taken? Do they want palliation over putting an elderly person through risky surgeries and pain that cannot be explained to a brain that has passed beyond the era of comprehension? And if the patient “codes” – heart stops beating in a manner that can deliver oxygen, lungs stop pulling air – do they want rib cracking chest compressions, shocks to the heart, a tube down the throat that will likely never come out of a her alive on the off chance she makes it coughing and sputtering through an ICU stay, or do they want to let her go?

I have broached the subject briefly at roughly every other visit with this family as they have dawdled along in their decisions as their elderly mother gets more ill and functional at every visit; this sounds something like, “Have you thought any more about what you might want for her care if something happen to her and she has to be hospitalized?” I do not get reimbursed for this; I bill under the diagnosis of dementia, we review and adjust some meds, and the talk comes as an afterthought. To my knowledge Medicare does not allow me to bill a visit to sit down and have a comprehensive talk about these issues currently; under Obama, it would…once every five years. These visits would be voluntary to the patient. They would be paid by Medicare. The outcome would be that the wishes of the patient would be documented and – in the best case scenario (barring the interference of family, the most frequent cause of unfulfilled end-of-life wishes I have seen) – honored. In medicine, we call this “patient-centered care;” it’s all the rage these days, or at least we like to talk about it like it is.

I want to be cared for in my death; I would put money on it that you want to be cared for at that final stage of life too. Most Americans die in hospitals with aggressive interventions still running at the bedside; when polled, most Americans express a firm desire to die at home, in the care of family with the support of the home health services like hospice (notably, finances and ethics are not at war here). Adequate, compassionate, dignified care requires some planning and some dedicated time to set aside the diabetes and the dementia and the aches and groans of the aged (and their families) to talk about the what-ifs and the what-thens of what will inevitably come for every one of us.

But these objections, these “kill granny” media campaigns, they are distractors. They are ways of mobilizing the AARP generation against a reform that is fundamentally beneficial to them: shoring up the enormous social and private financial burden that is healthcare in America is a fundamental part of rebuilding a flagging economy that at present threatens the stability of a retiring generation. By riling up seniors against the straw man of non-existent “death panels” and “kill granny” clauses, the right has shrewdly – and incredibly callously – used one of the most vulnerable cohorts to shoot their own selves in the foot.

Because, of course, the end is all economics. The neo-con right will always place private free-marketeering (in this case, the right of insurance companies to make a buck or two or a couple billion banking on your medical needs) over community health, and are entirely without conscience in doing so. The odious stink of money in the kill-granny media storm should turn any good Christian’s stomach; that Palin and Terry and their ilk wallow in it should be a good sign about the green face of the god that they worship most: capitalism.

That is not to say that there is no solid grounds on which to object to the Obama health care plan; there are many, on which I shall not even get started (ok, wait, I will: lack of a single payer plan, for one). But this red herring of death panels and kill granny tells far more about the media figures that promulgate the myth the health care plan itself. And it is not a pretty picture it paints.

Three cups of cheese

There's book going around these days, you might have heard of it, called Three Cups of Tea. It's by a guy named Greg Mortenson, who stumbled off of a failed assault on K2 'round about 1993 and into a small Pakistani village, where he promised to return the hospitality of those who helped him by building a school. He went home, he returned, and he built a bridge, and then a school. And then he made it his life's mission to build lots of schools, in one of the most contentious areas of a very contentious planet, at a fair amount of peril to self and soul.

Usually, do-gooder books by Americans (and other westerners) abroad do not sit well with me. Usually they are entirely too rife with the spoils of moral superiority, and entirely too charged with the self-important notion of one's own role in a moving scene largely too fast and furious for anyone but the self to take note of one blathering foreigner mucking up the landscape. The last foreigner who wrote a good tome about do-gooder'ing abroad was Paul Farmer - the Boston-based doctor who has spent about half his life establishing world-class community-based health care in Haiti - and even he has a few rare moments of such intense self-righteousness it makes the breeze blow backward.

But I digress.

So this Mortenson guy, he ain't all bad. Much of the gist of his book is that poverty is grist for the fundamentalist mill (he kinda glosses over the way that poverty is compounded in that region by the seasonal migration of the trekking crews, which juxtapose some of the planetary heroics of elitism over the sorest hot-spots of deprivation in the world, but hey, everyone's got a blind spot, right?), and that education is the key to opening up equality and quashing fundamentalism - and terrorism - before it even begins. This is pretty heady stuff. It was not a very popular notion right after 9/11; it's all kinds of trendy now, though in a fairly good way. Moreover, he emphasizes again and again the importance of educating girls; he didn't discover or pioneer the data on the effect of educating girls on improving standards of living in a community, but he champions this notion like nobody's business. Educating girls in some of the most conservative, fundamentalist regions of the world: tough stuff. Admirable, even. I kinda dug the book, western do-gooder-isms and all.

So I was fascinated to see the guy talk when he came through my town on his recent book tour. His talk didn't entirely disappoint; he does hammer some politics home, especially in his insistence that whatever Obama might get right, he's dead-on wrong if he thinks that what Afghanistan needs is another tens of thousands of American troops on its soils wreaking even more havoc than we've already wreaked over the last seven (count 'em, seven) years that we have already spent there.

But his talk is a lot more off-the-cuff than his book, and it's always a little disconcerting to see the disconnect between a controlled descent into a topic and a conversational parsing of opinion. First and foremost, he loses the gravity his own quest by delving into the sort of We Are the World feel-good rhetoric that is equal parts smarm and unadulterated schlock. Yeah, for anyone whose seen his talk, I know: his pre-teen kid helped write that cheeseball song (I'd link to it, but it's hard to find online...best I can do is the amazon page for the CD), it's not meant to appeal to adults. Problem is, once you stick it in your stock Power Point presentation, it becomes impolite for the adult audience not to cough a few times over it. Kids have the right to feel that they are doing great things by throwing pennies at poor people - that's part of being a kid who eventually grows into a compassionate maturity; adults who feel that way (gatherings of eighties pop stars entirely withstanding) generally are not nice people to be around, especially if you happen to be on the receiving end of those charitable pennies (and even moreso if you don't happen to show properly gracious humility for being the beneficiary of such enormous generosity as unwanted pennies thrown your way). I always find it awkward, then, to be asked to oooh and aaaah over what I largely consider to be an insult to people experiencing a whole lot of trouble in the world.

That personal bit aside though, he emphasizes the power of individuals to do great things, most often by using the stories of the Pennies for Peace campaign that engages children to gather up spare change for his school-building missions. That's all nice and good and all - I'm all for indoctrinating the young'uns as soon as you can get 'em - but in propping up that effort as a solution, it privileges charity over justice in that peculiar way that people do who want the world to look nicer while not giving up any of the privilege that caused the world to look sorta ugly in the first place. As if somehow wealthy white kids in Waldorf schools in Minnesota doing their holiday do-gooder project can ameliorate oppression...ya know, that kind of oppression that you can really only achieve from being batted around for thirty years between the Cold War super-powers and sundry warlording marauders gunning for control of the world's finest opium crop. Ya know, that kind of oppression. The kind that Mortenson demures from really delving into, because it really is more fun to talk about how the pennies in your pocket can save the world, when really, world save-age (to steal an apt phrase from the Whedonverse) is a whole lot more complicated than that. It doesn't take charity to save the world; it takes realizing that one nation using a quarter of the world's oil spells desolation for others that need those resources, or just don't need to lose a war whose main purpose is to see a pipeline run across a contested territory to feed the oil thirst of the west. It doesn't take pennies to save the world; it takes a mass down-ratcheting of our expectations of what kind of lifestyle some 300 millions Americans can reasonably sustain - how many SUVs we can drive, how many McMansions we can dwell in - to reasonably expect to house and maintain the world at large in a reasonable standard of living. It'll take a lot more than schools to save the world if those schools are routinely caught in the crossfire of trade made profitable purely on the prohibition of drugs in the western nations, a prohibition suspiciously profitable to large number of US corporations - especially those who sell high-tech police gadgetry and man high-tech prisons. To steal straight from Isabel Allende, it doesn't take charity, it takes justice. Justice for Afghanistanis, justice for every petty pot smoker picked up in a rather unjustified drug war. There's a lot of justice unmet out there, and pennies for schools in Pakistan are a small drop in a very large ocean of need - need that will be largely unmet as long as long as we rely on individual charity instead of systematic justice to prop up our sense of right and wrong.

Ninety percent of the US once supported George Bush during the era of his rush into Afghanistan; I wasn't among those people (if nothing else, I had too much to lose: immediate family in the line-up to the front), but you can't tell me that everyone who cheers on Greg Mortenson today when he yammers about pennies and peace was among the rarified ten percent that wasn't hooting and hollering for violence when the mood struck fancy. It's popular now to feel good about feeling good about the Muslim world; it hasn't yet become popular to do something besides throw the cast-offs of children at it.

Someday, maybe we'll get there. I'm not counting on the Greg Mortensons of the world to light our way.

Racism, homophobia, and Prop 8

The dust is settling on the California proposition, and with some degree of retrospect (and distance - California will always be my home state, but hasn't been my home for a good six or eight years now), it's tempting to try to start untying the thorny knot that is diversity in America.

I am certainly not the first to give a stab at that knot, and I imagine I will be eons from the last. Nor do I possess any particular insider knowledge; I am both white and unabashedly straight, sympathetic to all comers, but also not prepossessed toward one side or the other. So, dangerous turf. Let me tread lightly, please-I-ask-of-myself.

This much is clear: Barack Obama's nomination brought out droves of voters from minority groups who have traditionally been less than entirely franchised; that force of legions brought victory for just about every progressive cause besides gay rights. The Prop 8 campaign is perhaps the most talked of but certainly not the only popular legislation that took advantage of this timing to spoil in favor of a very conservative social notion that retains a curry of favor among groups who are notably liberal on just about every other topic (even abortion: every state prop on abortion went down in resounding defeat, in states far more conservative than California). Prop 8 was largely funded by that unholy alliance of the Catholic and Mormon churches; it was duly supported by conservative black churches across the state, even as they spoke for a rather more liberal candidate in Obama. The split among black voters favored Prop 8 by some enormous margin - a forty-point tilt toward banning gay marriage, by some polling estimates.

So. Righteous anger, both sides: from gay rights community who (entirely rightly) protest that they alone have been left behind in the progressive sweep, that the party around the Obama victory reveals an even deeper homophobia - that sudden understanding that as long as a bunch of other progressive causes take home the cup, no one really cares about gay rights. Even in California. Flip side: from the African-American community that is fed up with decades of backsliding against the gains of the civil rights movement (to the place where we find increasing rates of incarceration among black men, and sky-high perinatal mortality rates among black women and infants) and which has expressed at times a whole lot of disinterest in being pinned with the responsibility for every civil liberties issue when this community is still one of the most beleaguered demographics in the United States.

**Sigh.**

Ignoring for a moment the fact that there are gay black people (which appears to have been totally lost in almost every public debate on this topic), some core issues have arisen that make the debate more bilious that it might need to be.

One is the actual effect of the African-American voting block on the outcome of Prop 8. According to the US Census Bureau, black Americans are cracking the demographic ceiling at a mere 7% of California's population. You can split that ninety-nine to one, and you still aren't going to call a majority for a proposition unless a much larger demographic is shoring up the race right behind them. That majority had to come largely from the massive demographic groups that dominate California: Caucasians at 43%, Hispanics at 36%, Asians at 12%. Homophobic African Americans did their part to pass Prop 8; but they could not have done it without the lily-white voting blocks of the inland empire. In fact, every African American could have stayed home on November 4th, and it still would have been a to-the-wire race (it passed roughly 48/52 - this is more math than I'm willing to do in my head, but even if whatever block of that 6% of African Americans that did vote that day had abstained on Prop 8 at that skewed ratio, it's a long stretch to say that would have overcome that gap between the overall yeahs and nays).

So, it's rather unlikely that African Americans alone - turning out in record proportion for their small population size - effected an enormous impact on Prop 8. Prop 8 was passed by the same demographics who always pass homophobic popular law: large blocks of conservative white voters (ya know, the ones who historically turn out to elections) with the backing of deep-pocket churches, solidified by scrapping together pieces of every other demographic they can get their hands on. (Colleen at The Swivet has done a much better job than I pulling the relevant data from the large southern counties - her post is worth a good visit.)

But still, it smarts: knowing that African American voters split so heavily toward the homophobic side. And therein lies the part of the debate that is precisely as bilious as you might expect, and rightly so.

From an outsider perspective, the crux of this hurt lies in the notion that every civil liberties movement has had to mature - usually quite painfully - to the notion the oppressions are bound up in each other. You can't have equal rights for women without having equal rights for blacks, because there are black women out there, and they count too. You can't become a shining beacon of equality for gay people without copping a nod to classism, because there's no kind of oppression like being poor, gay, and from the wrong side of town all at once. And because, from a nebulous metaphysical standpoint, you can't be free if you're still oppressing others. Legions of oppressed people might roll their eyes at the tragedy of the oppressors, but still: it's a nice sentiment, especially when it drives social movements.

Every one of these activist movements has been accused - ever so rightfully, not a doubt under the sun - of privileging their own private oppression over every other. That was the hallmark of race relations during the second wave of feminism: the demand that all women identify as women first in a movement dominated by individuals whose race and class lent lenses of invisibility to the idea that a woman can be raped, beaten, harassed, and discriminated against on the basis of her sex, and still consider race to be her primary oppression, or her primary identity above and beyond a sisterhood with women who don't face racism and classism. That was an ugly fight; it's been re-fought on the grounds of just about every one of these movements. The subsets of folks fighting these fights who haven't faced down this particular ogre yet? Ah, well then, you still have it coming. Good luck to you.

So third-wave feminism - a tenured generation very much wrapped up in this post-millennial era of gay liberation - feels like, ya know, this has been done. We got it: we get on the post for every issue on the block - race, class and gender are just the beginning. We hop to for disability rights, we marshal the battalions for gay rights. We swallowed hard when a woman president slipped from our grasp but we understood that other strides were equally important. We even get a little misty notion of species-ism and make a little noise for animal rights. I'm not making fun, I swear: this is good stuff. Even when we half-ass it, that noble notion is there: our oppressions, your oppressions, all wrapped up into one, my liberation is tied up in your liberation, fight the good fight for all, yadda yadda.

And so we are sometimes very surprised - and feel rather righteously betrayed - when it turns out that some other demographic of historically beaten-down peoples turn out to the polls to support their own causes, and none but their own. African Americans: turning out to root for a hometown hero; not so interested in giving props for gay marriage. It smarts. It really fucking does.

But that again gets to the crux of the matter: does this generation of feminists, gay rights advocates, and the like have the right to demand support from the African American community? Certainly, ya know, it would be real nice. It would be awfully reassuring to know that the years spent building bridges between civil rights advocates wouldn't evaporate the moment that particular demographic puts forth a stunning new landmark in political enfranchisement. One would really hope, for example, that a hypothetical first gay president wouldn't also turn out to be totally indifferent to racism, or worse yet, bring out legions of Aryan Nation warriors on election day to pass state-wide initiatives hostile toward minority rights; but one has no grounds to claim that for certain. We won't know that til we get there, if ever we do.

But thinking about what would be real nice and mediating the reality of what we can expect are two vastly divergent thought processes. At the moment, we are faced with the prospect of that slap-in-the-face reality that push to shove, the minority whose time it was to shine did not benevolently lend out a helping hand to others.

Here's the thing: I'm not sure this is a reasonable expectation. I'm not sure that, given the massive inequities rife on the American racial landscape today, it is ok to expect an activist commitment to equality toward people mostly not their own from a demographic still so deeply put down by the majority. Like I said: it would be nice, and hurt is justified - and not unexpected - that it did not come through. But I also think that leap between my civil rights and your civil rights - that linking of oppressions that was so hard fought and won between the waves of feminism - is a product of luxury. It's the province of those who have got theirs and willing now to part out spoonfuls to others. Do I wish we were one big happy egalitarian family fighting for the rights of all? Uh huh, yeah I do. But that isn't - and has never been - rhetoric coming from those scrapping around at the bottom. That's rhetoric coming from people like me: I got mine. I got mine enough that I can spend my weekends yammering away on this blog instead of working a second or third job. It's not really fair to ask people still suffering the unmitigated travesty of poverty and racism in America to come to the table for someone else's dinner party at which they will not be eating. (It's also not really fair - in fact, it is rather alarmingly racist - to expect some kind of solidarity from conservative of black churches, while excusing the mostly white Mormon church for being the fount of this Prop 8 nonsense because, well, Mormons always do this kind of thing. But that's another post entirely.)

None of this leaves aside an alarming truth though: homophobia is a vast, understated, and persistent problem in the African American community. Obama's campaign probably had no intention of making national news out of that factoid, but the tricks of historical timing - that Prop 8 was on the same ballot as the first African American candidate for presidency - leaves no room for doubt. And plenty of room for a good dose of shame.

Where does this leave us all now? For one, anyone with a stake in progressive politics who took home any kind of victory on November 4th: you - we, us - owe an enormous debt of honor to the gay community that fell on the sword that day in the name of every other liberal cause on the block. The gay community took it in the throat for the rest of us, and it is time to return the favor: by putting your money and your mouth where your politics are. Write letters, donate to hopeful political campaigns in the next round, make your voice heard loud and clear in favor of repealing the don't-ask-don't-tell policy and the court battle against Prop 8 - the two most visible actions on the block in the next few months. Fight for the rights of gay individuals and families in the arenas of employment equality, marriage, military discrimination, safety for gay youth in schools, the family courts. This isn't just about interlocking oppressions anymore; this is about help making right the enormous screws put into the gay community on the day that everyone else celebrated liberation and renewal.

Under this new administration, we have some opportunities that have been entirely impossible to even dream of under the Bush years. I say this not because I think Obama is a miracle worker, or even because he is on the right side of every issue (indeed, no: I'm about sixteen shades to the left of most of his campaign platform, and we'll see what comes out of his first term of the presidency). I say this because without the raining down of hatred and hawkishness so marked in the last eight years, there are a few things we don't have to worry about anymore. I'm no longer worried, for example, that we might attack Iran next week - or that the man at the helm is hell-bent on ending science as we know it. Out from under that pressure cooker - with several hellfire-crazy scenarios just off the table - now is the time to push for the issues that weren't even possible to consider just a few months back, and for the issues on which Obama still lies too far right of center. First up on my list: allowing gays to serve openly in the military; expanding health care coverage; renewing commitment to a clean environment; and ending that half-assed notion that we still need troop build-up in Afghanistan, even as we begin to envision a withdrawal from Iraq.

This is far from the time to rest on any kind of laurels; this is the opportunity of a lifetime to make this country something we can all live with. The pressure is off, and yet the pressure is on: we only have two years before interim elections may bend congress right again. Time to start striving toward our potential as a nation again, instead of merely fighting to tread water. Our liberation, all of it: yours, mine, ours. Fractured or together, it's our ride this time around - let's make it a good one.

The flip side of history

So the election has come and gone, and with it the elation of a new day, a new administration, a new turn on the world stage. For the first time in years, the newsreels from around the world run a picture a planetary celebration around news coming out of America; instead of burning our flag, spitting on effigies of our leaders, throwing rocks at our consulates, there's a sort of cheer that matches - just maybe - the cheers coming off the streets of Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Seattle, the streets of America. Take a moment to fancy that.

The next four years will test a young president the way few have been tested before; the only comparisons that come to mind are JFK and Clinton, because few modern presidents have been so fresh out of the box and faced with such turbid waters. It is unlikely that Obama will be able to do everything he set out to; if he accomplishes half of it, if he merely makes the progressive left feel like we're not fighting a headlong upstream battle just to keep things from getting exponentially worse, well, I'll consider that a win given the steaming heap of economic and foreign policy shit he's been handed from the git-go. And if he manages to throw in some legacy-building health care reform, climate reform, sustainable energy policy, whatnot, more power to him. My expectations after the Bush years are mighty low indeed; it will be hard for an Obama administration not to exceed them.

But before looking too far forward, it might be interesting to take a quick look back to Tuesday, before the landslide came screaming down the mountain to sweep eight years of Republican rule to a demoralizing ruin.

Like thousands around the country, I worked in one of the local precincts on Tuesday. I was part of the local voter support crew (one woman raised an eyebrow and nixed the previous term, "comfort captain," saying it made her sound too much like post-war geisha). These were the people you might have seen handing out snacks and water in long lines at the heavily-tread precincts, lending out umbrellas in the particularly rainy and sun-shiny states, there to provide voters in long lines with whatever it might take to keep them there and cast their vote despite the odds of wait times and inclement weather and voter intimidation and the like. They wouldn't have been wearing Obama t-shirts or pins supporting their local Dem candidates, and you might have mistaken them for the local chamber of commerce for all the non-partisan talk they professed; we were under strict instructions to avoid mentioning our party affiliation unless directly asked, and not to talk politics with the voters in line. Just make sure they reach the head of the line and vote.

As you can imagine, this was all very strategic. There was no "voter support" in the historically red precincts; there were no democrats handing out bottled water in districts where registration is 75% GOP and prior elections show a heavy lean to the right. This was among the most data-intensive grassroots efforts I've ever seen; the national security apparatus and your local credit bureau alike would be cowed by the means with which data was put to on-the-ground strategic use.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in the half-launched, half-failed (but sure to be tried and tried again) "Project Houdini." Newsweek ran a blurb about it last week, so I assume the cat is out of the bag and all the hush-hush about it is so relevant as last week's bird-cage liner, so here goes: ya know those folks who knocked on your door so many times before the election, begging you to get out and vote? And all those folks who were peering over the precinct judges shoulder, checking off your name as you came in to vote? All that data, all that information, every bit and byte of it, was streaming into a real-time database. On election day, canvassers in the target blue precincts started out with a precise list of who had voted and who had not (naughty and nice, oh yes, you've heard this before), and they knocked on the not-yet doors. At three intervals throughout the day, every precinct in the nation was to live feed their lists into a central system, and that system would spit out new, honed lists for the canvassers to hit up. Five hundred canvassers in my podunk town alone. This was a massive effort, build from the ground up with volunteer true-believer labor, wratcheted into place by the technological prowess and mass communication infrastructure of the internet generation waking up to realize that we might just elect a guy who actually admits he's never used email. The effort was a wonder to behold.

Of course, in most states the system crashed at least once during the day. In my state, it hit the skids early in the morning and never picked up at all. It was replaced by hand counting, eyeball cross-checking, and the late-afternoon realization that come Tuesday, just about everyone in this town who was going to vote had already done so.

In my assigned precinct on Tuesday, it was so quiet that the epic lines we were expecting never materialized: a steady trickle of voters strolled in, took up their ballots from some very bored precinct judges, and strolled along their merry way. By the end of the day, the precinct judges were joking about our efforts out front that the only people we were supporting to stay through the chill of the day were ourselves; I know this because I ran into one of them at the local brewery during the McCain concession speech and we about it over a couple of beers (this is, as I mentioned, a very small town). Boredom was the goal, I reminded myself during some of the slowest hours: because of the push for early voting, the day itself ran smooth as silk in just about every precinct in town. I couldn't tell you the final numbers, but my precinct had an early voting rate of about 54%; we rough-counted the remainder who voted on Tuesday, and came up with a total around 80%. Eighty percent - in a state where a good year turns out maybe forty percent of the voting public. Whatever the turnout, when the winds drove us in just short of 7 pm, we couldn't help but think that this was democracy done right.

But all was not quite so unruffled throughout the rest of the state. Because of the heavy early turnout, voting on election day was unusually light. At five in the afternoon, a wave of panicked phone calls came out from headquarters; too few voters were coming out in the target precincts, the number weren't crunching, the statistics weren't spinning their tales just right to guarantee the state for Obama. Every able body was being pulled off every other position to canvass for every available vote in the urban areas where the houses are close enough to go door to door trolling for those last few votes. The polls had just closed on the east coast, they had just called Kentucky for McCain and New Hampshire for Obama, and that didn't make it look too promising on the numbers alone. I polled my crew of four (one of whom was raised Jehovah's Witness and swore on her undead mother's grave that she would never knock on a stranger's door again), and we collectively decided the best we could do was uproot a four-by-six foot Obama sign from an unguarded corner, hike it down to the busiest nearby intersection, and wave it around like idiots in the wind hoping that by dumb luck a few souls would drive by and remember - d'oh! - that they hadn't voted yet.

By the time the polls closed and we had and turned ourselves back out onto the streets, the polls for the eastern states were coming in, then the south and midwest, and once you cross that threshold where all you have to do is add California's ridiculously large blue block of electoral votes, the night came to a thunderous head. My state did indeed go blue - and by a very comfortable margin - and the five o'clock panic was all for naught. There were few mourners on the streets around us that night, and even in this small town, the celebration ran dark into the night and light into the morning.

Nearly a week later, and for many years to come, November 4th, 2008, will be a date to reckon with. Not so much because the country swung so far to one side or the other (the electoral college may have slid home like mud from a clear cut forest slope, but the popular vote never wavers more than ten points off the midline), but because the Democratic party finally grew up to run a 21st century campaign. This is how the GOP has been running campaigns for thirty years - sophisticated, well-thought, well-organized; this is why red routinely comes out on top even in states like New Mexico, where registered Dems outnumber registered Republicans by half again their number but so few bother to go to the polls that the state's electoral weight often swings a dozen shades right of the state-wide sentiment.

Still, there is something tragic, something profoundly anti-democratic about the reality that winning a campaign relies on strategizing, planning, playing a game of Risk with your demographics and your people. Gone are the days when people could simply decide what they think, vote their conscience, and government could answer to their constituents on that basis. Maybe it is naive to think that ever existed anyhow. But if this is the game we are to play - the game of grassroots demographic man-handling - thank god the bare remnants of the progressive left that we have in Washington have learned how to play it too.

And so, bottoms up: to a Democratic executive branch, to a Democratic congress, to the promise of a reasonable Supreme Court into the foreseeable future. History is upon us, and suddenly - the unmitigated travesty of Prop 8 aside - it just isn't looking quite so bad.

Miles to go

I can't remember where I got this graphic from - I believe it arrived un-bidden in my inbox, and I think there's a citation on the bottom. I like it.

But it's not quite time for cheers and toasts and bottoms up, the time has not yet come to chill. That time may come - maybe not, we will see - but this morning, as the sun rises across each state, there's still work to be done.

So this morning, here's a post of praise and of thanks.

Thanks to every precinct worker who is out this morning in the cold of a northern November morning - or a hot Florida fall day - making democracy work for all of us.

A shout out to every canvasser pushing to get out the vote for progressive candidates everywhere.

A sigh of sympathy to every citizen of a foreign nation who is sitting on their hands tonight knowing that though they have no say at all in our election, their fate is profoundly bound up - for better or for worse - in who we elect to the American presidency today.

A thunderous cheer for the voter registration workers that have newly enfranchised thousands - nay, millions - of voters from traditionally marginalized walks of life, some of whom have been at the edges of representational democracy since the days of Jim Crow. Not since the beginning of the Civil Rights movement has there been such a push to see so many Americans take their rightful place among the voting public, and not since then have we had such hope for a government that truly represents an America that looks like all of us.

And to every poll worker, voter support crew, and door-to-door street canvasser, who will be working those dawn to dusk shifts today to ensure that voters are able to exercise their rights in those contested and crowded precincts: if there is celebrating to be done tonight, it will be in your name and in your honor. Until then, as the old poem goes, miles to go before we sleep. Miles to go before we sleep.

One way or another, the race is on: here we go. Any way it shakes out, November 5th, 2008 will be a hangover to remember. I'll see you on the flip side.

Vote. TODAY.

You might have read my last plea, last week, with a very similar title. If not, I'm going to direct you here and ask that you go read it. And I'm going to be so indulgent as to quote myself:

No one who has the ability and the wherewithal to vote before November 4th should be taking a space in line that day.

The argument goes that long lines on election day are a hindrance to the rights of working people, elderly people, and other people who can't stand in line for four hours to exercise their right to vote. Long lines are encouraged by strict republican vote watchers in districts known to go democratic in the past. Long lines on election day can be avoided by going to vote early. This is one way that you can help make democracy run smoother, and make your life easier at the same time. Read the original post; I yammered about it much more extensively over there.

So instead of yammering again, I'm gonna give you my top ten list of reasons why you should vote TODAY if you're in one of those states that allows early voting (my eternal pardons if your state does not - your job, my friends, is to get on the horn with your elected representatives after this election and demand that early voting be instituted before the next voting cycle). Now, there's a million top ten lists like this over the internet. I'm making most of this up (some I'm cribbing loosely from the one the dems are handing out in my town), but it may sound familiar.

To wit: ten reasons you should go out and vote, TODAY.

10. Because the weather might be bad today, and then you can go home and try again tomorrow. If it's bad on election day, you'll be stuck sitting outside in the rain and that's that.

9. Because once you vote, the democratic canvassers will get you off their list and stop calling you/knocking on your door/interrupting your dinner/making you wish you were signed up for some elitist party who didn't care about getting the populist vote out by hounding their supporters until every last vote is in. And really, who wants to put up with that until Tuesday?

8. Because once you vote you can make smug remarks to your friends about how you've done your patriotic duty, and have they?

7. Because early voting ends on November 1st in many states, so you can't do it on Sunday or Monday in those areas. It's today, tomorrow, Tuesday, or never.

6. Because today is a weekday. If you try to go tomorrow, you better bet that line is gonna be at least an hour longer.

5. Because the kiddies will be dressed up today. Cute! Tomorrow? Hung over on a sugar crash. Not cute. Who wants to stand in line with that?

4. Because the adults will be all jazzed up for a rager tonight. Cute! Tomorrow? Hung over on from last night's bender. Not cute. Who wants to stand in line with that?

3. Because if there's a problem with your ballot or your registration, you'll still have time to haul yourself down to the county clerk's office to fix it if you find out about it today. If you find out about it on November 4th, not only will it likely be sorted into the "provisional ballot" (aka the "fuggeddit") file, but you'll be slowing the line for others while it gets sorted out.

2. Because daylight savings ends on, like, November 2nd. How confusing is that? Don't be that person that shows up at 7pm at your precinct on November 4th only to find out that 7pm is really 9pm, or it's really November 5th already, or something like that. Come on, time just disappears on that day - how eerie is that?!

1. Because let's get back to the basics here: the GOP is relying on long lines in blue precincts to force those working voters, voters with kids in daycare, elderly voters, voters with health problems, voters with any reason (and there are many) to be unable to stand outside for four hours waiting to vote to leave before the cast that blue ballot. The left-leaning candidates are counting on early voting to circumvent the clusterf**k that is our third-world worthy local voting system. They are counting on every person who can vote early to do so, so that those who cannot have a place in line that day. This means Obama at the forefront of course, but this also goes for the congressional races and local races. In my town, these races also include a very good shot at putting a Green candidate in place of a notorious old-school democrat who needs to get the boot.

This will only happen if every person who can gets out there and votes, and votes now. Time is running down, the deadline for early voting in many states is tomorrow.

Vote. TODAY.

Vote. NOW.

You've seen the bumper stickers, you've heard your friends wax self-righteous that they've already done it. Now it's your turn: Vote, dangit.

Ten days to go, and here's why you want to vote now. Not tomorrow, not next week, and definitely not on election day.

I sat in on a meeting a few days ago for partisan volunteers who are aiming to work the precincts on election day. It was an interesting talk, from a strategy perspective. The on-the-ground democratic strategizers are predicting - assuming, preparing for - regular and systematic challenges to every voter with any iota of irregularity worth challenging in any precinct that has traditionally leaned blue. A misspelling of a long ethnic name, a discrepancy between "street" and "avenue" on your drivers license, a typo that transposes a couple of numbers in the address on your voter registration card. If you live in a heavily democratic zone, expect there to be any guff that can be cooked up over your right to vote. It may not happen, this may be a regional over-reaction to national scrapping between the big guns, but after Florida circa 2000? I'm not gonna call it conspiracy theory; the democratic brass aren't calling it that either.

In historically democratic precincts, it won't just be about throwing individuals off the rolls - that's small potatoes. The real goods are in a different goal: slowing down the lines at the polls until people by the handful or the dozen or the hundred get bored, cold, or compelled to go back to work/pick up their kids from daycare/return to the demands of their lives before they reach the front of the line to cast their vote in those blue-hued precincts. Even if your personal data line up like the moon in the seventh house, the time will be taken - if you are in those precincts - to inspect your credentials. Slowly. Carefully. Painstakingly. Just, ya know, to make sure you're legit. While someone in line behind you considers if they can really wait another five minutes before their kid's daycare closes, or their afternoon shift starts, or that chill in the November air turns out to be too much for their elderly lungs.

It is difficult to face this head on right there on election day. It's an effective strategy, one that is easily wrapped in the patriotic flag of protecting the integrity of the vote - wouldn't want all the Mickey Mouses that ACORN registered (that surely slid right through the voter verification process, natch) to actually cast any of those fraudulent votes, you know.

But there is a counter-strategy, and this is it: vote early before the deadline grows short on those long lines. Maybe you'll be that person who will leave the line if you have to wait more than half an hour that day; make your vote count by going to vote this weekend or some day between when you don't have that pressure on you. Maybe you will have all day and then some to wait in line on November 4th: doesn't matter, your presence in line that day will make the line incrementally that much longer, and you may be the straw in the camel's back that causes another voter to leave because the line is just too long.

No one who has the ability and the wherewithal to vote before November 4th should be taking a space in line that day.

Especially not in historically democratic precincts. Especially not with the stakes so high, and the potential so overwhelming for shifting not only the presidency, but the House, the Senate, and a whole raft of local races toward a more tolerant, peaceable, and progressive future.

Now, I know, not every state has early voting. So you can preemptively excuse yourself from my brow-beating if you are from Maryland, Rhode Island, or Washington (Oregonians: hats off to you for running another 100% mail-in/drop-off election - a great end-run around this kind of meddling in the rights of working people to cast their votes).

And if you are one of those people who have the time to take off a half day, or even a whole day? Consider hiking your own bad ass down to your local democratic headquarters this weekend to see if they are recruiting volunteers to work on election day. In my region, the main block of volunteers will not be used to defend vote challenges or get tangled up in arguments over whose driver's license is legit, but will be outside on the lines in target precincts bringing warm beverages, bottled water, snacks, chairs, coats, whatever might be needed to keep every voter from leaving that line before they have cast their vote. Even if you drop your ballot for a Green or an independent candidate, you can bet that protecting voter rights in democratic districts where the republicans will be targeting their voter challenges will be a likely way to protect the other independent-minded voters among us. It's a chance to participate in democracy in a larger way than just hanging your chad and moving along; you might even meet some interesting folk.

And if you can't afford to spend election day at the polls, even better reason: Vote. Now.

Wingman

If McCain is Maverick, does that mean that Palin is Goose?

Just asking.

Colin Powell backs Obama

Wow, here's a surprise that's not a surprise. I'm trying to figure out if I'm reaching for the word "hypocrisy" or the word "redemption" when I feel around for the right way to describe one of the main players who enabled Bush's homocidal, sociopathic intentions in the Middle East who has now flipped sides to back a candidate who was against the war from the start and now promises aggressive moves toward and unequivocal end.

I've always liked Colin Powell despite it all. I'll go with redemption.

P.S. In other news, CNN's down-ticket headline reads "McCain snags key endorsement." That key endorsement? The Tampa Tribune. I don't for a moment rest complacent on any laurels (not with the grand clusterf*** that is our voter system throwing the newly registered and long-time voters alike off the rolls), but this is just getting sadder and sadder for the McCain camp, isn't it? Obama snags the former Republican Secretary of State, McCain gets himself Florida newspaper endorsement. Almost feel sorry for the guy. Except not.

News flash: Self-proclaimed hockey mom decidedly unpopular at actual hockey game

That Sarah "Pitbull with Lipstick" Palin would be booed on the Philadephia ice at the Flyers game on Saturday was entirely - almost boringly - predictable. It was predictable because Philadelphia is not exactly a Republican stronghold. It was predictable because booing anything on the ice is a de riguer part of any actual hockey game, the prelude to any actual hockey game, and - quite frequently - the post-victory festivities of any hockey game. One would think, as a, ya know, hockey mom and all, she would not have needed to be apprised of this phenomenon in advance.

Which makes it kinda weird that she brought her school-aged kid onto the ice with her. Now, far be it for me to criticize Sarah Palin's mad mommy skillz; I've railed against this bizarre brand of sexism here and elsewhere, and I stand by that. I am also fully in favor of exposing kids to the great wide world of wacky humanity from more or less whatever tender age won't traumatize them into nightmares that you don't want to have to comfort them through at three in the morning, so I don't hold it against Palin on principle that she brought a six-ish year-old to a hockey game, even if the last hockey game I went to (in the terribly tame venue of a semi-pro team in the Pacific northwest) had more bloody noses and broken jaws than a Steven Segal movie - and that was just in the stands. (Though I do have to ask: geez, are these the same people who were criticizing the Obamas for exploiting their two daughters with a controlled, pre-filmed TV spot?)

What is so jarring is that anyone at all was surprised by the jeers, the boos, the prevalence of middle fingers, the whole crazy drunken scene. Or that anyone is so outraged by it. Or that anyone buys that the kid was brought for any reason other than to try (unsuccessfully) to preempt the absolutely assinine specter of a self-proclaimed hockey mom showing up to a city in which she is rabidly unpopular and expecting the rowdiest crowds this side of a British soccer match on a national holiday to treat her daughter like a lady.
Moreover, that anyone is actually trying to compare jeering Palin at a pro sports venue to the frightening and reactionary display exhibited by McCain supporters last week. You remember - that was the rally where reporters openly filmed McCain supporters shouting that Obama is a terrorist (and if you don't remember, scroll down a few days to echidne's post for a five-minute few screen shot of the rally in question), and another in Florida where "Kill him!" was heard echoing in the crowd, though with some apparent ambiguity as to whom we should actually be lynching on behalf of the shouter of said threat. Racist, threatening epithets hurled by people in political venues does not equal being booed on the ice at a hockey game. There are some salient differences, in case one needs to hear these pointed out. One is that no one - at least by all reports, including those from Fox News - made threatening remarks toward Palin. Two is that no one equated her with terrorism due to the nature of her middle name (Obama's is Hussein, spoken of course with a sort of spit and acid meant to make clear that his sort is not welcome around these parts). The third is that if you choose to appear in a venue where booing is practically a rite of honor, fer chrissakes, suck it up and enjoy the show...although maybe not with the kid in tow.

It kinda makes you wonder if the "hockey mom" schtick isn't just about as hollow as the rest of the McCain/Palin schtick: one more attempt to connect with the down-home, real folks of America by pretending toward something that your actions prove you know surprisingly little about.

P.S. Another fun part of this story: watching the McCain-ite blogosphere trip all over themselves arguing simultaneous that a) she wasn't booed that loud - it's just the biased liberal media over-reporting a couple of jeers; and b) that hockey-going liberals are a bunch of boorish thugs for booing a woman and child so vilely. It's amusing, really.

Pre-empting racism in the sub-prime debate

Apparently, if you don't follow the Faux News genre of the media (as I don't), you might have missed this odious layer of blame that is rapidly arising in the mire of the subprime crash.

I first got wind of this on MSNBC's first-person, main-street Gut Check, where Joe Sixpacks, Jane Hockey Moms, and real people too were sending in stories of life under the financial crisis; MSNBC was running the vignettes on the face page of their news site for several days a week or so ago. The original quotes are down now (sorry, no link), but a gentleman from a heartland city unequivocably stated that if we hadn't been pushed to lend to minorities and po' folks - what with the push for affordable housing for all and all that nonsense and whatnot - we would never be in this mess.

Huh. Minorities at fault for the subprime crisis? Affordable housing on the hook for banking failures, in a market bubble? This was the first I had heard of it, but this sort of rhetoric never comes out of nowhere.

Sure 'nuff, the theme of blaming the poor people and minorities is nothing new even in good times - but a frightening specter as the creep of bad times rises of over the horizon like the bad moon of a Creedence Clearwater Revival tune.

If you google "community reinvestment act subprime," you'll get a gander at this burgeoning debate. The Community Reinvestment Act was passed in 1977 to push banks and other lenders to be accountable for their historic discrimination against minorities and poorer demographics when deciding on who to loan out mortgages to; it's been amended a handful of times since then. The rightward-leaning elements of the media would have you believe that this Carter-era legislation was responsible for the 2008 crash - some thirty years after the fact - and that mortgage companies and lenders were simply forced, forced!, to hand over fistfuls of cash to the high risk pool that is poor minority families.

Not so fast.

There have been a number of very fine op-ed pieces debunking this racist, blame-the-victim rhetoric, and it behooves every progressive out there to keep one of these debunkings in their back pocket. As times get tough and the inevitable scrambling begins for the dregs of the recessionary economy, it is vital to remember - and be able to successfully argue - that racism has no place at this table.

To wit, Newsweek (yeah, go figure, Newsweek) ran a thorough and well-sourced piece on how and why the subprime crash does not fall on the backs of poor and minority owners:

"The Community Reinvestment Act applies to depository banks. But many of the institutions that spurred the massive growth of the subprime market weren't regulated banks. They were outfits such as Argent and American Home Mortgage, which were generally not regulated by the Federal Reserve or other entities that monitored compliance with CRA. These institutions worked hand in glove with Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, entities to which the CRA likewise didn't apply. The CRA didn't force mortgage companies to offer loans for no-money down, or to throw underwriting standards out the window, or to encourage mortgage brokers to aggressively seek out new markets. Nor did the CRA force the credit-rating agencies to slap high-grade ratings on subprime debt.

"Second, many of the biggest flameouts in real estate have had nothing to do with subprime lending. WCI Communities, builder of highly amenitized condos in Florida (no subprime purchasers welcome there), filed for bankruptcy in August. Very few of the tens of thousands of now-surplus condominiums in Miami were conceived to be marketed to subprime borrowers, or minorities - unless you count rich Venezuelans and Colombians as minorities.

"Third, lending money to poor people and minorities isn't inherently risky. There's plenty of evidence that in fact it's not that risky at all. That's what we've learned from several decades of microlending programs, at home and abroad, with their very high repayment rates. And as The New York Times recently reported, Nehemiah Homes, a long-running initiative to build homes and sell them to the working poor in subprime areas of New York's outer boroughs, has a repayment rate that lenders in Greenwich, Conn., would envy. In 27 years, there have been fewer than 10 defaults on the project's 3,900 homes. That's a rate of 0.25 percent.

"Investment banks created a demand for subprime loans because they saw it as a new asset class that they could dominate. They made subprime loans for the same reason they made other loans: They could get paid for making the loans, for turning them into securities, and for trading them - frequently using borrowed capital."

Well said.

There's an old adage liberally stolen from an old West bank robber, I believe it was Willie Sutton: when asked why he robbed banks, he simply looked sideways and said, "'Cause that's where the money is." How's about we employ a nineteenth-century tactic to sorting out the who and how of the fault for the subprime crash: we just look at who is holding fistfuls of cash at the end of the game, and there you might find your answer of who was rifling through the til while the regulators were asleep.

Tim Wise: Might wanna adjust your hairshirt, your sexism is showing

Apparently I'm the last liberal on the block to get forwarded a copy of Tim Wise's latest missive on racism in America. I hadn't heard of Tim Wise before, but maybe you have. He is, self-proclaimedly, "among the most prominent anti-racist writers and activists in the US." Judging by a strangely come-hither picture attached to the bio on his site (as well as a lot of titles that indicate that his racial background up front), he is a white dude. Aside from the usual questions that brings up (like, say, why is a white dude sucking down so much media time - what with his bragging bio noting that he's been "a featured guest on hundreds of radio and television programs worldwide" - when an actual person of color could be getting some air time), there is some credit to be given where credit is due: he makes a lot of good points.

Chief among those good points are things like the comparison of what reaction you typically get when a young white man (versus a young Hispanic man or young black man) pontificates publicly on their enthusiasm for guns, gun ownership, and gun rights. Racism: hard to argue there.

So might might not seem necessary, even though he seems to think it is, to spend more than half the essay bagging on Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin's daughter. Sarah Palin's extended family. And, oh yes, Sarah Palin's vagina. Uh huh, you didn't read that wrong:

"White privilege is when you can take nearly twenty-four hours to get to a hospital after beginning to leak amniotic fluid, and still be viewed as a great mom whose commitment to her children is unquestionable, and whose 'next door neighbor' qualities make her ready to be VP, while if you're a black candidate for president and you let your children be interviewed for a few seconds on TV, you're irresponsibly exploiting them."

I'm sorry, but who the hell is this guy and what the hell is his business judging the personal obstetrical practices of a woman he's never met? And fer chrissakes, but where did this tidbit about Sarah Palin's amniotic fluid come from, how was it confirmed, and why on god's green earth was this made fodder for any kind of public debate?

Unlike some of his finer points, this one does not even provide a one-to-one match between the white privilege he is criticizing and the moments of oppression of people of color he is highlighting (come again, what does amniotic fluid leaks have anything at all to do with children on television?). In fact, these have nothing to do with each other. And in fact, I've never heard of a woman of color being criticized for taking too long to get to the hospital while leaking amniotic fluid - and I've worked labor & delivery in two major metropolitan areas and a handful of small rural towns to boot; women of color certainly get criticized for all kinds random criteria that wealthy white women get a free pass on (don't for a second believe that poor white women don't face down similar drive-by critiques of their mommying skills), but to make up extra points of contention just so you can get a few extra digs in at Sarah Palin? There was no anti-racism content in this paragraph at all; this was pure put-her-in-the-stocks-and-throw-tomatoes-at-her crap from a white dude toward a white woman.

And so once again, the take-down of racism against men of color (as Obama is the main target of his defense, just as Palin is the main target of his attack) will be performed on the backs of the nearest woman. The entire column consists of roughly 22 paragraphs of similarly pithy comparisons, of which no less than thirteen are dedicated to bagging on Palin, her educational record, her family, what have you. Number of paragraphs dedicated to George Bush? One and a half. Number of paragraphs dedicated to McCain - ya know, the guy that's running this campaign? Six, sorta maybe seven. In case you thought he would generously spare McCain's family, nah - Cindy McCain even gets a nod for her prescription drug addiction...again, terribly lovely fodder for debate.

This kind of rhetoric, it doesn't sit well for so many reasons.

It forces me into the untenable position of feeling obligated to defend the likes of Sarah Palin, which is something I am loathe to do.

It forces women of color to engage once again in that counter-productive, ridiculous, second wave-crushing question of whether race or gender is their primary source of oppression, and conversely, whether race or gender is their primary loyalty. This only has to be an either-or question when someone who pretends to be on the side of either women or people of color drives a wedge this deep and forces loyalties to split - otherwise, it's a question that does not ever need to be asked or addressed. You can be faced with multiple sources of strife; you can have split loyalties; reasonable people can maintain all this in the same brain and not implode. It does no one any good to pit race against gender; this is a loser situation all around.

It forces the undermining of his very real and important points - which should be able to stand on their own without the blunt force repetition of just how much we should hate Sarah Palin and what goes on her family and her vagina.

But most of all, it forces me to realize - once again - that whatever the perspective (pro-racism, anti-racism, whatever, you name it), women will always be little more than grist for the mill when a white dude wants to make a point. A good point, a bad point, a self-righteous point, an important point, an inane point, whatever kind of point he wants to make: a stranger's vagina is his bizness to make it with.

P.S. In case you don't believe me, here's another paragraph:

"White privilege is being able to convince white women who don't even agree with you on any substantive issue to vote for you and your running mate anyway, because all of a sudden your presence on the ticket has inspired confidence in these same white women, and made them give your party a 'second look'."

Good going, Tim. Way to believe that liberal white women actually flocked to Sarah Palin - thanks for the confidence in our ability to think for ourselves and withstand the undeniable temptation of voting for a pro-life, anti-environment conservative just 'cause she's got a vajayjay just like us (would it be too hard to convince him that hey, most of the women who flocked to Sarah Palin really have little to no substantative disagreement with her philosophy? nah, that would cause him to have to address real racism, instead of just bagging on women for the sake of bagging on women). And way to totally dismiss the desire that some of us women have to actually see a woman in the White House before the end of our lives; it is this kind of bull that made the clash between Clinton and Obama so profound - thanks for reminding us all over again that racism is justifiable if it's in offense against sexism, and sexism is justifiable if it's in the offense against racism. Really, we could have lived without banging our heads against that wall over and over again.

Sarah Palin: Staunch union supporter?

Holed up in McCain's shabby little shack in Sedona in preparations for the VP debate, Sarah Palin took time out to grant an interview to a radio show where she tried - once again - to Relate To The Little Guy. Geez, man, she lost, like, $20,000 in the recent Wall Street fiasco! Thank goodness she has a six-figure income to cushion that tough blow.

But that's a line any politician could tow these days. Here's the real groaner:

“We’ve gone through periods of our life here with paying out sAof pocket for health coverage until Todd and I both landed a couple of good union jobs,” she added. “Early on in our marriage, we didn’t have health insurance, and we had to either make the choice of paying out of pocket for catastrophic coverage or just crossing our fingers, hoping that nobody would get hurt, nobody would get sick. So I know what Americans are going through there.”

Awesome. Plugging unions on the Republican campaign trail...who woulda thunk!

Of course, this would be a little less crass if she weren't speaking for the party notorious for policies that do everything possible to undermine organized labor - ya know, the party shunned for just about every union endorsement across the nation for their anti-union policies.

Pro-union? Nah, methinks this is just a case of I got mine, now screw you and yours.

Oh, and while I'm on the topic of unions? In the midst of the current headline grabbers-du-jour, the Employee Free Choice Act - that would reduce the barriers to forming and joining unions - hasn't gotten much press. It's worth knowing about. It's worth supporting. It's a good time to give it a quick look.