I’m Just Not Impressed

I find it interesting that one of the criticisms being leveled against the Obama administration is his appointment of various “Czars”. What evidently started as a birther/’bagger type theoryis now gaining ground in the Republican establishment. And like stories of President Obama’s fictional Kenyan birth certificate, there’s about as much truth to the idea that this is a new concept.

Reading  Kay Bailey Hutchison’s Sunday editorial over a morning bowl of cereal, in which she calls Obama’s appointment of Czars “unprecedented” and strongly implies that no such position has ever existed (no, she doesn’t say it, but absolutely nothing in the op-ed even begins to acknowledge the fact that such posts have existed for 20 years), I was struck by that thought – didn’t this defiance of the Constitution begin during a Republican administration?

The answer is actually more nuanced than I thought. I was thinking of the “Drug Czar,  a position that was created in 1988 (under Ronald Regan) and filled in 1989 (under George H.W. Bush), which was initially a Cabinet level position, and therefore, while still evocative of the Evil Empire, not a direct thread to the sanctity of liberty. Or something like that. Obama has made a change with respect to the Drug Czar, a move that is not entirely inappropriately called “unprecedented”, in that it is a move without direct precedent, of essentially decommissioning the position and removing it from Cabinet status.

But the first actual use of “Czar” as a title evidently goes all the way back to the Nixon administration, who, again, I’m pretty certain was Republican. Or does it go back even farther? Some of our lovely friends at Wikipedia would have us believe that the term has been used for more than 80 years, beginning with FDR. So, maybe it is the Democrats’ fault? Just for the record, this, kids, is why people mock Wiki as a primary source. Three different articles imply three different answers to this burning question.

What is not in question is that for the better part of a century, the White House made do with a handful of Czars. Then look at that jump – the leap not just back into double digits, but into the 30s, takes place not in 2009, as Hutchison would have us believe, but rather, in the 8 years prior. You know what that means, right?

Yet, where were all of these people when George W. Bush was was appointing “czars” right and left? I suppose no one actually thought that the poster boy for unremitting capitalism could ever be labeled a communist.

I have a growing fascination with the Shepard Fairey copyright case.  Part of what makes it so fascinating is that, unlike a lot of copyright cases where a close look at existing law and precedent makes it pretty clear who is likely to win, this one is a crap shoot to my mind.  Cases like this one, and the recent Harry Potter Copyright Trial of Doom, illustrate a trend in the U.S. federal courts to apply nuanced reasoning about what fair use really means and what it truly means to “transform” a work into something new that does not depend on the original.  I don’t think that Fairey will win on his declaratory judgement action.  There are too many questions of law and fact at stake and I suspect that it will require a full trial (provided that it doesn’t settle first).  At full trial, though, I think he has a decent chance.  Then again, so – potentially – does AP.  I suspect, though, that it would tip in his favor, since while his image is clearly derivative, it does not represent a market that AP was likely to exploit, nor does it supersede the value of the original image.  OTOH, he copied it.  AP has made it’s basic case.  Whether Fairey’s Stanford legal team can establish the fair use defense will be the real issue.  It’s a decent case, but not a slam dunk.  Fair use is a defense that applies only after the case for potential copyright infringement has been proven, after all.

In the meantime, how about that Shepard Fairey.  The more I learn about him as an artist, the more I sort of dislike him.  But, boy, is there a lot of interesting stuff there to think about it.  There are three different angles to look at this art through – legal, art criticism and social justice, all of which can lead to far reaching conclusions.

From a legal perspective, my feelings are mixed – on the one hand, probably 30-40% of the art referenced in that first link  is in the public domain and is therefore fair game for any sort of use.  OTOH, a lot of it isn’t.  So we’re back to fair use and whether the use that he’s making really transforms anything, particularly the work that largely shifts perspective on works that were overtly political to begin with and whether his works act as substitutes or damage the market for the original works.

Then there is art criticism - and certainly reasonable people will differ on he question of is this art, although I certainly think it is.  I’m not sure how to categorize it, though.  My first thought is to forget the comparisons to Warhol and Lichtenstein – they copied iconic images, for sure – iconic images that were easily recognizable from their source.  And they transformed them into something else.  Warhol turned household goods into art objects (and did settle a lawsuit with Campbell’s for his trouble).  Lichtenstein took comic images from the 2×2 inch paper booklet and put them on walls.  Obama poster aside (which is somewhat like Warhol’s famous figure works), Fairey takes other people’s propaganda and turns it into…propaganda. 

This recasting of propaganda art from the 60s and 70s is the most problematic part of the work that I’ve seen.  Fairey borrows heavily from works made by people of color to publicize and fight their oppression and commodifies them into something easily consumable by an audience comprised primarily of white hipsters, while simultaneously marketing some of the actual emblems of their oppression right along side.  This is the real insidiousness of this work.  It is an exercise of enormous privilege for a white person to appropriate images by and of people of color for “art”, no matter how politicized and “in tune” with the original message.

President Barack Hussein Obama.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Shivers, I tell you.

It suddenly occurredto me yesterday that in five days George W. Bush will no longer be President of the United States.  I’ve known that, of course.  All of DC is abuzz with the inauguration.  I’ve been reviewing contracts related to inaugural related events – at least tangentially – for over a month.  Half the local news on NPR is about closings and crowds and the chaos that is feared as the enthusiastic masses amass on Tuesday.

But yesterday, something clicked.  In less than a week, we will have a new President.  That’s pretty damn cool.  It is exciting to see new faces in the news, or old faces in new ways.  Hillary Clinton’s remarks during her Senate confirmation as Secretary of State sent chills down my spine.  Happy, elated, my god, someone who really gets it kind of chills.  I wondered why Obama chose that spot for her.  Now I know.  There have been a lot of moments like that in the past couple of months – moments where I’m struck by how different our government leadership could be.  The DOJappointments especially, make me grin with glee.  Eric Holder, Elena Kagan, a formal NARAL laywer  – all excellent choices.

Sanjay Gupta, maybe not so much.  Warren giving the invocation makes me want to vomit, Robinson notwithstanding.

Eight years ago, like so many others – half this nation – I looked toward January 20th with dread.  This year I don’t.  I find myself looking forward to a State of the Union address for the first time in almost a decade.  But I also look around me and I know this – Obama is not a superhero.  He is not the messiah.  He can, and will, do wrong.

The morning of January 21, the United States of America is not going to be a whole new and different place.  The sun will rise, it will be cold as hell over much of the country and traffic is still going to suck on the Roosevelt Bridge.  The economy will still be in a shambles.  All Americans will still not be equal based solely on the anatomy of the person they love.  My library books will still be due.  But maybe, just maybe, change will still be in the air.

I woke up at 5:15 this morning.  It was dark.  It was chilly.  It was election day! 

I stumbled to the bathroom, threw on some clothes, stopped to make coffee, let the dog out and clean up some spilled apple juice, then I was out the door into the early morning dark and chill.  Happily, it was not yet raining.

I should have walked to the polling place – it’s only about 5 blocks away, but it was 5:30 and I was tired and not thinking clearly.  As it was, I got one of the last spots in the community center lot and joined a line that was already half a block long – at 5:35!  I’d guess that there were at least 100 people in line ahead of me. 

By the time the polls opened at 6, the line was starting to snake around the corner.

In one of those strange DC area coincidences, I started chatting with a couple of folks near me in line and it turns out that a man who had been voting at our polling place for 45 years used to live in NW Iowa near Sioux City and he would drive down to Springfield, Missouri every weekend fifty years ago to play at a country music bar there.   Two people behind him was a woman who grew up on a farm outside of St. Louis and who went to college at what was then called SMSU, where my mother worked for when I was born and later moved to Chicago.  So, we ended up chatting a lot about the Ozarks and Branson and Eureka Springs, Arkansas for the duration of our wait.  Maybe we live in a small town after all.

Once the doors opened at 6:00, the line moved fast.  Poll workers were on the ball, walking up and down the lines with portable electronic check in machines confirming that anyone voting at our precinct for the first time was actually on the voter rolls properly.  Check in was the most comprehensive I’d ever seen – they didn’t just check to see that our id matched a voter registration, but we had to give our full name and address – at least I did.  Again, this was electronic.

Then it was get in the last and final line for the vote itself.  We had a choice between touch screen machines and paper scan ballots.  I ended up going electronic – it was a fight in my gut – part of me had been hoping for the paper option and evidently a lot of local media watchers are saying that is better.  Then again, a friend of mine is now worried that her vote won’t be readable because the election officers at her Fairfax County polling place didn’t have pencils or black pens, which the ballot claims to require.   She has thusfar been unable to get a satisfactory answer to that issue. 

The last time I felt such a thrill marking and finalizing my ballot was in 1992, when for the first time ever, I had a ballot in my hand.  I voted absentee from college, which was sort of a letdown, although, given the tales of long lines at the campus precincts, it definitely saved me some time.  I remember filling out the ballot with the little punch card thing, frantically worrying about whether I was doing it right before sealing the envelope, kissing it for luck and sending it off to McLean County with its votes for Bill Clinton and Carol Mosley Braun.  That year I helped elect the first Black woman to the U.S. Senate.  Here’s hoping this year I help elect the first Black man president.

As we wait for the election returns tonight, I will leave you with this.  That’s pretty much what it’s all about right there.

You know, it feels like just a few weeks ago that I was writing about what the heck the McCain-Palin campaign means by small town values.

Now it seems that not only are small towns (again…this means what?) the sole bastion of American morality, but in fact, in the bizarro world inhabited by John McCain and Sarah Palin and their cronies, somehow despite being at least five generations removed from “the old country” to the point where I can identify only the vaguest of non-American nationality, I am not truly an American by virtue of living in an area with more than, let’s say roughly, 5,000 people.

Hell, I don’t even live in a real state.  Which I suppose can be explained by the fact that Virginia is technically called a Commonwealth, however, those pesky income taxes that don’t go to the feds or to my local county seem to still go to Richmond to help support “real” Virginia. 

The McCain campaign is stooping to this bizarre Orwellian mantra of “All citizens are Americans but some citizens are more American than others” and I have an idea why:  Obama’s life completely belies the standard Republican narrative of the American dream.  Here we have a hard working, essentially self-made son of an immigrant and a woman from Kansas for god’s sake.  But the immigrant father was a dark skinned African man.  The mother was white and not particularly religious.  And the son had the audacity to go to the best schools that would accept him and to excel, to break down barriers, to find Jesus, to work to make the world a better place for black people in this country and to be a Democrat.  And really, it’s those last that are the real issue here.  Let’s be honest.

So, since they can’t harp on the self made American dream – which usually ties in nice and tight with the old-fashioned conservative values mantra – they’re looking for a different hook.  The tried and true “some of y’all just aren’t American enough for the rest of us” is not new.  But it is odd to see it trotted out in such force, not just by media surrogates, but by the candidates themselves.  In some ways this is another example of McCain campaigning like Bush, the original “uniter, not a divider.”

This campaign strategy has the odd effect of both being grotesquely offensive and almost relieving – I’m not entirely sure I want to live in Sarah Palin’s America.  But I don’t really appreciate her and McCain thinking they get to decide who really belongs here either.

Alas, I am on about a 4-5 minute time delay tonight, which is going to make timestamping a little difficult.
First impressions – Obama looks boring and has caved to the flag-pin mafia.  McCain is well served by a podium and needs a tie that looks like it was made in this millennium.

As for the actual debate…

…Wow.  It took McCain all of 5 words to get to energy independence.  Which is somehow going to bail out retirees?  He’s managing to stuff half the republican platform into one answer.

I sort of wish I was watching CNN with its independent Ohio voters.

Gee…McCain is not going to appoint Tom Brokaw to be Treasury Secretary…there’s a newsflash.  But, the head of eBay?  I guess it has Palin’s endorsement.  I’m surprised he didn’t try to attack Warren Buffet – he did take some of Obama’s wind there, I suppose.

And now Tom’s testy.  You will answer questions the way I want you to, gentlemen.

Aw…McCain “suspended” his campaign.
Would reasonably informed people really have never heard of Freddie and Fannie? Really?  Am I just too entrenched in DC?
He is really hitting the buzzwords, eh?

Obama is actually hitting back at the FM attacks.  Finally.

And McCain just totally dodged the question of whether it is going to get worse before it gets better.

I’m wondering whether this fixation on Bush really going to serve Obama as well as he wants it to.
I’m hoping the meme about Obama actually being the most liberal senator falls flat.  And, that’s what planetarium projectors cost, dumbass.

This is all starting to run together.  Please, let McCain disintegrate in some spectacular manner.  PLEASE!!!

WHAT HIS HIS FIXATION WITH THE PROJECTOR…

“Some of you might remember 9-11″…nice one.  Shopping doesn’t equal leadership?  Damn.  I’ve been doing it wrong.

Wow.  Well, at least McCain is familiar with some Supreme Court jurisprudence…but Obama’s tax cuts like nailing a jellyfish to a wall…not quite porn, sorry.

How the hell does McCain plan to actually pay for all of his platform without raising taxes on anyone at all?  Obama is being rational – if we can’t afford it, we don’t cut.  And the people who can best afford it, pay more.  Why is this so hard to understand?

…the straight talk express lost a wheel.  Good one.  And now we get the real deal from Obama.  If only people will listen…

Oh god, please do not say that we should privatize social security…well, actually, please do.  Damn.  Evidently the solution to social security is to exhume Ronald Reagan?  And to distort our opponent’s record.

Tom, just give it up.  They are never going to follow the rules.

So…McCain is against safe nuclear power?  He wants the regular old unsafe nuclear power?  My brain cannot parse…

Oh snap!  Obama pwns McCain on the congressional energy record.  “Drill baby drill” is not the answer…I wish he’d said that instead of just implying it.

TOM – Give it up.
JOHN – Stop it with the “my friends” crap.  Just stop.
BARAK – The smug amused look cracks me up, but I suspect it is not working on the undecideds.

Ah, healthcare.  Obama says what I expect him to say…he’s going a little more on offense today, but is not blowing me out of the water.

McCain wants online health records to reduce “errors as they call them”…what?  Are the trial attorneys backing him or something.  It’s called malpractice and can be a question of life or death.
I think he is baldface lying about Obama’s supposed fees, but I have to fact check it.
I’m sure Obama will be personally hunting down every U.S. resident with no healthcare.

HEALTHCARE SHOULD BE A RIGHT.  Thank you.

Woah…was that a little dig at Arizona’s healthcare regulations?  And here’s Tom interrupting Obama again.  And…McCain buts in “But before we leave that, did we hear the size of the fine?”  Wow.  And, Brokaw lets him get away with it.  But, you know that liberal media, skewering the republicans.

America is the greatest force for good in the world…we keep the peace by shedding blood?  Good golly…lets all slit our wrists!  Evidently Obama was wrong about Russia by agreeing with almost every diplomatic leader?

Obama admits that he doesn’t understand…the GOP cuts tape here.  Too bad, because it’s a good overall answer.  At least he hasn’t agreed with him yet.

Ooh, we’re back to Doctrines…thanks to that Palin interview, it’s the new thing.  All the cool kids are doing it.
Can’t Angelina Jolie just take care of Darfur?
I have to admit, I just got totally lost on the Obama Doctrine.
The McCain Doctrine is…Cool Hand Luke?  I’ve heard “peacemaker” too many times and now I have Simon & Garfunkel’s “Benediction” going through my head.  It’s kind of discordant given the circumstance.  And, thus meaning I have no idea about the McCain doctrine either.

So, what is McCain going to say about Obama’s answer…ah, he’s going to harp on that whole being open about attacking Pakistan…which is different from Sarah Palin how?

Uh…what support of the people in Iraq?  It would have been great if we’d actually DONE that, but we’ve not been fighting Saddam for the past how many years?  Who are the insurgents if not “the people”?  Despite his early hopes, not only was the war not quick, but we were not greeted as liberators.  John, no amount of wishful thinking and nasty rhetoric changes the fact that you were wrong.

…”As I have acted responsibly throughout my military career”…what?  What?  Dude, you haven’t been in the military in 30 years and when you were, you FAILED.  FAILED.  Really, it’s not that impressive.

Wow.  He just acknowledged that Obama actually is right about something.  McCain is obsessed with this surge.

And, McCain just trotted out the “looked into Putin’s eyes and saw K.G.B.”  Dude, you said that already.

“Part of the job of the commander in chief is keeping all of you safe” – nice line.  Nice acknowledgement of the fact that the job is about safety and security, not ego.

Does Russia even really qualify as an empire right now?

And, now we move to Israel…and McCain gets touchy feely with the Navy guy. 
“Of course we would not wait for the security counsel.”  What would the Israelis do?  And we’re back to the meeting with Iran thing.
Am I the only one who thinks that while absolutely tragic, the destruction of Israel is not the same as the Nazi holocaust?  (Godwin took a lot longer this time, though.)  Genocide, yes.  So is Darfur.

Obama, however, never seemed to quite answer the question.

“What don’t you know and how might you learn it?”  This would be the Achilles heel question.
I am not sure that talking about the diminishing of the American Dream is really a winner.  I like the “it’s not what you expect, but what you don’t that takes us your time”.

And McCain dodges by not actually talking about himself.  “What I don’t know is what none of us know and what is essentially unknowable.”  But everything else – I know it all.  There is nothing I don’t know.  And he brings it around to the country first slogan.

And the candidates block the teleprompter.  That may be the best part of the whole debate. 

And we have schmooze.  Good night and good luck and all that.

Or something like that.

With some regularity of an evening, I’ve been turning to my husband with a comment along the lines of “thank goodness for The Daily Show” and their analysis of Republican hypocracies.

Courtesy of Lessig Blog, I saw the following today in the same vein:

The video, and others like it are sourced to Brave New Pac.

I am sure that people more dedicated than I have combed through these videos to make sure that the metaphoric liberal “we” are not resorting to distortions to counter distortions.  Because you know that the other side will grab whatever straw we leave them, short or long.

August has sucked.  I’ve several posts shaking around in my head and absolutely no time, but before these thoughts are completely irrelevant, I figured I’d throw them out here.

Clinton rocked the house last night.  I alternated between proud and excited and sad that she came so close.  She hit all the right notes and (hopefully) effectively closed the book on the whole “Clinton Loyalist” bs.  A vote for Obama is a vote with Clinton – she hammered that home.  Keep going, keep going, etc.  If the media has any say, they will milk it for a while yet, but here’s hoping we can forget that one for a while.

One thing that struck me on a larger level, that has nothing to do with Clinton and everything to do with our totally wacked out culture – it is perfectly acceptable to talk about trailblazing as a woman.  Thousands of people were moved almost to tears when Clinton tied into the intro video with the line about her mother being born before women had the vote and her daughter getting to vote for her mother.  (As an aside, I loved Bill being identified as “Hillary’s Husband” in the vid and his mouthing “I love you, I love you” as she spoke – he looked so damn proud of her in the exact same way that political wives look whenever the camera shows them during their husband’s speeches.)  Feminists may get shot down when they try to call out privilege, but at least we can talk about it.

OTOH, race still seems to be the elephant in the room, even at Obama’s convention.  As noted by The Rude Pundit, Michelle Obama never once really spoke about race, even though her entire speech was designed to – as seen on The Daily Show - turn her from the New Yorker black panther caricature into Laura Bush.  No one that I’ve seen so far is talking – on stage - about how amazing flipping historical it is that a black man is the Democratic nominee.  I don’t for one minute believe that it’s because the U.S. has conquered racism.  Jeffrey Weisberg at Slate has the measure there. 

If anything, the fact that no one has yet gotten up on that stage and talked about how it was almost unimaginable when Martin Luther King, Jr. was marching in Chicago that one day a black man would be a frontrunner for President.  Pundits, bloggers, writers – sure.  But it has not been a theme of the convention.  And it should be.  It should be just as much of a theme as gender would have been if Clinton had a million more cracks in the glass ceiling.  The fact that it’s not says volumes about the United States in 2008, and none of it is very positive.