A Disorganized Party

If the Democrats ever have to blame anybody for their failure to break past such things as gerrymandering, distorted campaign financing, and Far Right extremism, they ought to start pointing at the disjointed crowd of elbow-shovers gathering at the mirror:

Ed Jany, the Marine and former police officer hailed by national and state Democratic leaders as an ideal challenger to newly elected U.S. Rep. David Jolly, dropped out of Pinellas County's 13th Congressional District race Tuesday.

The sudden and surprise announcement came days after a Tampa Bay Times report about him appearing to pad his educational background and resume. (insert /headdesking here)

Jany entered the race at the last minute, after Democrats aggressively moved to keep a prominent African-American minister from St. Petersburg, Manuel Sykes, out of the contest. In a statement, Jany said he realized he does not have the time to run for office...

The 13th Congressional District, which includes much of Pinellas County, is one of the most competitive in the country. But it appears now that Jolly will walk into a second term without a serious challenge.
With the filing deadline passed, the only other name on the ballot will be Libertarian candidate Lucas Overby, who received less than 5 percent of the vote when he ran for the seat in a March special election.

Darryl Paulson, a retired USF St. Petersburg political scientist, said the Jany saga should be a case study on how not to handle candidate recruitment.

"What have the Democrats accomplished?" he asked. "They have alienated their core constituency by assaulting Rev. Sykes and now are left with no candidate to run in what was considered one of the most competitive districts in the nation and a district that Democrats said was a must-win..."

What this looks like from the outside was a bad mix of a national/state group trying to impose its will on the county/city level of activists to dictate who the local voters had to accept as a candidate. Rather than work with the local groups, it seems from here that the Powers That Be either feared the preferred local(s) options, or just didn't care for those choices and went with someone with the shinier-looking resume (which turned out not to be a good idea...).

Where the Republicans have their own internal divisions, those factions still reside on the far side of the political spectrum, and still answer (even the Tea Partiers) to a core set of financial backers and political consultants who can keep them all on-message.  The Democrats aren't so lucky.  The divisions between the national-level Establishment types and the local Progressive types tend to hamper the Dems' ability to field candidates that could challenge the state-level political machines the Republicans have across too many Red states (especially throughout the Southern states).

The recent special election for this very district - FL 13 - is a perfect example.  Where there was a candidate in place in Jessica Ehrlich who ran previously - and almost successfully - against the long-term incumbent Bill Young, the party leaders pushed her aside for Alex Sink, the Democratic candidate who lost to Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott thinking she was the better campaign draw.  But where the party leaders liked Sink, not enough voters in Pinellas County could: she gave flat speeches and weak public appearances for one thing, but another was that her background in banking was a turn-off to the Far Left voters who feared she would be too pro-business at a time they wanted representatives who would force the banks to play by the rules.  Much in the same way her lackluster governor's campaign failed to turn out the vote, the special election failed - 39 percent?! - and Jolly ended up winning by two percent points.

When Sink refused to run again for the seat in the regular election, you'd think the Democratic Party machine would invite Ehrlich back, as a regular local face who'd bring her fanbase with her.  But they didn't.  They pursued a few other possibilities before settling on Jany, whose military and law enforcement background would seem unimpeachable going against a Republican (never mind the fact Republicans routinely go after Democratic candidates with solid military careers all the fracking time).  Too bad in Jany's case they didn't take a closer look at that resume before the Times did...

Making this worse is how the party leadership went after Sykes to knee-cap him before he could even pose as a primary challenge to whoever the Dems could prop up:

When Sykes prepared to run, Democratic officials from Washington to Pinellas sought to discourage him. Pinellas Democratic chairman Mark Hanisee left a voice mail for Sykes promising the respected minister he would be "persona non grata" among political leaders if he ran.

The Democrats' preferred candidate: Jany, a Marine Corps Reserve colonel and first-time candidate who lives outside the district in Tampa. While embraced by the state and national Democratic party, Jany would have been listed on the ballot with no party affiliation because he had not been registered as a Democratic long enough under state law...

That's right: the Dems were trying to prop up a guy who wasn't even a registered Dem... /headdesk

And why was that?  It couldn't be because Sykes was a local Baptist minister (while Republicans would go after religious leaders the same as military types, it would be very awkward for them...). It could have something to do with Sykes being the president of the local NAACP chapter, which gets hit with the "librul" label in the regular media just as much on the Fox Not-News channel.

And so the Democrats problem comes into full view.  Where the Republicans have a problem with local extremist candidates challenging them in primaries (and winning enough of them to ruin their chances at the general elections), the Democrats have a problem finding any local candidates at all who would appeal to the actual voters.  And it has less to do with finding volunteers - why not ask Ehrlich? why not chat up Sykes to keep him in the loop rather than on the outs? - than with the Democratic leadership running scared from any candidate who's gonna make the wingnut media scream "SOCIALIST!"

Like that has even stopped the wingnut media from screaming "SOCIALIST!" at every Democratic candidate anyway.  It's a losing battle for the Democrats at the national level if they keep f-cking jumping at the shadow of the New Deal at every turn of the corner...

And now FL-13 has no Democratic option against Jolly (or the Libertarian candidate, who I now want to win just out of pure spite).  And now we're wondering why the Democrats in Florida don't put up more candidates at the state level to try and win back Tallahassee (how many GOP seats are unchallenged this election cycle?  I counted 40 state house seats either unchallenged or just primary-ing between Republicans, out of 120 seats.  That's a full third of the elections!).

And now it's left to the voters to try and stir up some positive encouragement to even get out the vote for the districts being competitive, for any of the elections at all.  I don't want to think it's because the Democratic Party at the state level is just that lazy.  I'm terrified to think it's because the Democrats are scared.

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Schadenfreude In Florida: Why Yes, It Does Involve Rick "MEDICARE FRAUD" Scott...

While I was lost in the halls of the Orange County Convention Center this weekend, this was taking place:

In a campaign shakeup, Gov. Rick Scott’s top fundraiser — billionaire healthcare CEO Mike Fernandez — abruptly quit his post late Thursday after weeks of behind-the-scenes disagreements.

Fernandez said he was quitting to spend more time with his family (NOTE: RED FLAG) and businesses. And he praised Scott's campaign in a letter to the campaign's leadership team...

Fernandez began expressing his frustrations at least a month ago when he sent an email to top Scott allies and complained about two campaign aides who had joked around in a cartoon-style Mexican accent en route to a Mexican restaurant in Fernandez’s home town of Coral Gables.
Fernandez, who is Cuban, wouldn’t comment about the email...

Leave it to the Republicans - a party having serious issues shaking off the public perception of being run by aging white men who hate gays, ethnics, and women - to find a way to piss off a member of the one voting bloc - billionaire CEOs - they try (consciously) not to piss off.

The official story is that Fernandez is really resigning because he's upset with the campaign's direction and poor messaging.  But the messaging can't be helped with this story about the tactless aides getting out.

When Scott's new Lt. Governor Carlos Lopez-Cantera - remember the other one had to resign?  I wonder what the current status of the criminal investigation involving her is at... - tried to go public with a new attack ad campaign today, the questioning got cut short because all the reporters would ask about was Fernandez's quitting over the possibility that the campaign staff was secretly mocking the very ethnic group the Republicans need to win this midterm.

One of the things a political campaign can ill afford is to look disorganized and in disarray.  It doesn't help that Scott's office has been hard-line on immigration reform for most of his tenure and that any attempt to start appealing to Hispanic voters is going to backfire.

This schadenfreude is a bit tasty, but it's an appetizer.  It's a long wait for the main course in November, and part of me wants to see how Scott's people can screw up even worse...

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The Massive Disconnect Between The Voters And The Elected

Among the many things bothering the hell out of me regarding Syria - the real need to focus first on the refugee crisis, the need to stop Assad's use of chemical weapons versus the inability to really do anything about it other than an outright invasion and all the horrors THAT would entail, the realization that the entire Middle East from Egypt to Libya is in total chaos and we're unable as an international power to focus on any of that - is this simple fact:

A vast majority of Americans are polling as opposed to any military strike or action on Syria... and our elected officials (and their friends in the Beltway media) are still poised to vote in favor of it.

Link to Pew Research Center's results:

Also wik:

Yet just right now, the Senate Foreign Relations committee overseeing such issues just voted 10-7 in favor of a "limited military response" to Syria's use of chemical weapons.  There's still a full Senate vote I believe and also a House resolution, but most of the experts believe that both parties may go along with approval (Dems because they have the need to back their party's nominal leader, Republicans because there's a sizable faction of neocon interventionists seeking to "tame" the Middle East through superior firepower).

Usually elected officials are more aware, more alert to the reality that voting whole-heartedly against their constituents' opinions tends to be a bad idea.  They're at least aware of the risks: even during the health care reform debates a good number of Democrats openly worried they would lose seats over passing any reform despite the fact that everybody knew health care costs needed to be controlled somehow.

Yet with the Syrian military strike as an issue, there's this kind of intellectual if not emotional disconnect to what's happening.  None of the politicians seem to be pointing to the poll numbers or worrying about how this plays "back home" with their voters.  If there are any, I'm not seeing them speak up on the news channels or websites.  (If there's at least one, please pass along the link)

Sullivan points it out clearly:

I cannot remember a war in which the public in the most affected countries is so opposed. And that opposition is not likely to melt in a week or so – certainly not if many people listened to John Kerry yesterday. And that poll is about the abstraction of “strikes” – and not about the open-ended war to depose Assad that the administration actually proposed in its own resolution. Mercifully, Americans are not as dumb as many think...

I don't consider the polling about invading Iraq in 2002 to be of relevance here: considering that Congress and the public were lied to about Saddam's having WMDs as an excuse to go in, the general public support for that invasion/occupation is kind of an illusion.

There's been times that the DC "establishment" were not in tune with the nation as a whole: the obsessive hate-on for Clinton (not just the GOP but the media elites and power-brokers operating in DC) that made many voters side with him when the Lewinsky scandal broke is a recent example.  But this time it's troubling.  This time, lives - ours and Syrians - are at stake.  The chaos of the Middle East may well get worse if military action takes place.  And there's no guarantee that the planned missile strikes will do anything productive.

In a situation where diplomacy makes the most sense - the possibility of getting with Russia and Iran, Syria's primary backers, both of whom are troubled by the gas attacks as well - it's terrifying that nobody in DC wants to argue for this as a sensible alternative.

This isn't Munich.  Like Conor points out - "For Hawks, it is always 1938" - there's no Chamberlain-esque appeasement here other than trying to find something that would stop the damn bloodshed:

Every part of that part of that argument is wrong. The war weariness of post-WWI Britain was very different from the war weariness of present day America, and an unwillingness to strike dictators who kill their own people is not the same as appeasement. By Hirsh's logic, it is imperative that we immediately invade North Korea because otherwise we are appeasing it, and inviting it to begin a blitzkrieg across the Western world, because Hitler. The approach he implies -- intervention wherever there is a dictator or a mass murder -- is a recipe for far more war, and far more misery from war.

One of our nation's biggest problems hasn't been the partisan brinkmanship, the incessant noise machine drowning out policy solutions, the sheer amount of money in the electioneering business (seriously, it's in the billions now), it's been the Lack Of Accountability.  We're having one of those Lack Of Accountability moments.  And everyone's failing the moment.

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Playing The Game of Thrones, and Why Nearly Every Character Can Lose At It

“Oh, I think not,” Varys said, swirling the wine in his cup. “Power is a curious thing, my lord. Perchance you have considered the riddle I posed you that day in the inn?”“It has crossed my mind a time or two,” Tyrion admitted. “The king, the priest, the rich man—who lives and who dies? Who will the swordsman obey? It’s a riddle without an answer, or rather, two many answers. All depends on the man with the sword.”“And yet he is no one,” Varys said. “He has neither crown nor gold nor favor of the gods, only a piece of pointed steel.”“That piece of steel is the power of life and death.”“Just so…yet if it is the swordsmen who rule us in truth, who do we pretend our kings hold the power? Why should a strong man with a sword ever obey a child king like Joffrey, or a wine-sodden oaf like his father?”“Because these child kings and drunken oafs can call other strong men, with other swords.”“Then these other swordsmen have the true power. Or do they?” Varys smiled. “Some say knowledge is power. Some tell us that all power comes from the gods. Others say it derives from law. Yet that day on the steps of Baelor’s Sept, our godly High Septon and the lawful Queen Regent and your ever-so-knowledgeable servant were as powerless as any cobbler or cooper in the crowd. Who truly killed Eddard Stark, do you think? Joffrey, who gave the command? Ser Ilyn Payne, who swung the sword? Or…another?”Tyrion cocked his head sideways. “Did you mean to answer your damned riddle, or only to make my head ache worse?”Varys smiled. “Here, then. Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less.”“So power is a mummer’s trick?”“A shadow on the wall,” Varys murmured, “yet shadows can kill. And ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow.”Tyrion smiled. “Lord Varyls, I am growing strangely fond of you. I may kill you yet, but I think I’d feel sad about it.”“I will take that as high praise.” - from the book source A Clash Of Kings

With the recent much-ballyhooed episode of Game of Thrones that threw out all established tropes of heroes and happy endings, one thing that popped into my mind was how the whole series - both book and show - seem to be literally about "the Game of Thrones".  A Game over power and who truly wields it.

Partly I see the warning of Machiavelli in the series: the question "whether it is better to be loved or feared," and the answer "the real solution is to avoid being hated, which is the worst thing a Prince can accomplish." No finer example to be offered than Joffrey himself: the spoiled brat of a boy king who views himself perfect and noble and strong and yet everyone else - and whoa do I mean everyone - sees as weak, craven, worthless.  Made king only through rite of birth, Joffrey does nothing to prove himself: he immediately expects everyone to bow and scrape and follow his orders.  Of the flawed characters with a claim to The Iron Throne, Joffrey's the worst: the believer of the Divine Right of Kings and title holder of Zero Percent Approval Rating.  (Viserys is even worse than Joffrey, with the saving grace that he got himself killed in karmic fashion early enough that he doesn't leave the destruction that Joffrey does)

But Joffrey's not the only one.  Every character with an eye on that throne has a serious flaw when it comes to power and how to use it.

• The Stark family as a whole - Kings of the North - are a noble breed but rule with their hearts more than their heads.  Eddard Stark is too trusting; Robb Stark too impulsive and focused on personal honor.  Both suffer, both die, and the aftermath of each one's fall leaves their House in great disrepair (albeit still alive through respectful allies keeping certain children safe). 
• The Lannisters - right now the family of power in the Seven Kingdoms - are wealthy and feared (Machiavelli would be pleased) but each prominent member has issues: the patriarch Tywin is obsessed with the family name even as he disparages all of his children for their folly; eldest son Jaime is favored but is foolish and headstrong (and boning his own sister); Cersei imagines herself a player but is too vindictive and overplays her hand, and too much fears a prophecy of her children's fate that makes her commit acts that doom them anyway; Tyrion is the smartest character in the whole world, shows adept skill at manipulating ally and foe alike, and in all regards would be the best suited to rule... except as a dwarf he's dismissed by many of his fellow lords, is blamed for the sins of his nephew Joffrey, and his one strength - his wit - is also his weakness because Tyrion can't stop himself from saying the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time.   
• The Baratheons have the current, more honest claim to the throne through the accusation that Joffrey and Cersei's other children are not those of Robert Baratheon, the king who dies at the beginning of GoT.  But they start off divided even in their own House: the elder brother Stannis claims the throne but internally knows he's disliked for his stubbornness (if he ran for President he'd be an Active-Negative like John Adams); the younger brother Renly is the more charismatic and openly courts favor from his followers (he wants to be loved), but proves indecisive and disorganized and is ill-positioned when the moment comes to act.
• The Greyjoys aren't even really playing for the Iron Throne: basically a House of pirates and raiders, they're in it to deal their rival family the Starks a serious blow.  Short-sighted, self-serving, needlessly cruel (leading to the "hated more than feared" doom) with the only decent characters - Theon, Victarion - suffering or due to suffer massive humiliations.
• The Martells are either level-headed or honor-obsessed, and sometimes both.  They backed the wrong House in the last big war before GoT and suffered for it.  Opposed to the Lannisters, they would be formidable opponents except for their current leader Doran's fear of exposure (he's confined to wheelchair, fearing he would be viewed as weak) and proper paranoia that any move towards a deal could lead to betrayal... which leaves them incapable of making any deals at all.
• The Tullys own a key point of land - the Twins, a vital bridge linking the North lands to the other kingdoms - but not much else: they are used by the other families or ignored.  Except for when one of their minor Houses - Frey - takes revenge on one such slight against Robb Stark and his House... by violating the most inviolate rule in human history (Sacred Hospitality); by doing so the Freys become hated - having rarely been loved or respected, this essentially dooms their House.  And it leaves the Tullys with almost no players on the board at all...
• The Tyrells as a whole are quiet, watchful, intelligent, shrewd... and let themselves be manipulated by the other Houses - Lannisters especially - only because they came to power in their kingdom over more legitimate Houses, meaning they have little loyalty outside of their small circle of allies (again, the Lannisters).  They are good at playing the Game of Thrones (and are major characters because of it) but are playing for such long odds that they can miss every opportunity that arises to claim it...
• The Targaryens are the fallen House, the kings before the start of the story whose rule was dominated by arrogance and madness (sourced to their open inbreeding campaign of marrying brother to sister).  Driven by a variant of the Divine Right concept - that they are Dragons (literally) - the Targaryens created a hostile environment against their House leading to Baratheons' rebellion and the wiping out of nearly every Targaryen claimant to the throne.  Except for two (really three, but the third remains hidden): Viserys and Daenerys.  Already mentioned Viserys as unstable and worse than Joffrey, and got himself rightfully killed off for his folly before he could do serious harm; on the other hand Daenerys has proven nicer, genuine and respectful of the people she now leads in foreign lands building up an army to reclaim the Iron Throne.  And it doesn't hurt that Daenerys has her dragon pets, and has proved her invulnerability to fire (!) confirming her divine right as Dragon.  But she's easily distracted, obsessed with a form of justice that her contemporaries refuse to accept, and tries too hard to be both loved and feared, which Machiavelli noted was difficult to manage for even the best of Princes.

The riddle Varys presents at the start of this article remains potent: who truly is in power?  Who is best using such power?  Solve the riddle and you figure out who is going to be left standing at the story's end.

Personally, I got money on (discovers Littlefinger has poisoned his drink) WHAT?  NOOOOooooo...

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Reading The Beast of Political Thought

Also known as "oh no, we got a homework assignment on Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan."

Ta-Nehisi Coates, boss of bosses, has decreed that the Lost Battalion of the Horde should read Leviathan next as our social project of the season.  Hobbes is in the grouping of must-read political thinkers as Locke and Rousseau: Leviathan is spoken of as the serious tract on politics compared to the borderline satire of Machiavelli's Prince.

That said, as a librarian I heartily recommend everyone wanting to keep up with TNC's reading project to ask your local library for a copy of Leviathan for check out.  Better still, for those of you with ereader devices or a budding ebook collection should visit Project Gutenberg and download an ebook copy (most ereader formats available)!

To the bookshelves, Horde!

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Current Political Mood

I'm just not inclined to think much about politics these days.

Even with the sudden uptick in the Occupy Wall Street news - and the Far Right blowback to something that can successfully counter their Teabagger movement - for some reason I'm neither thrilled nor contemplative.

There's still a lot of protesting and military action going on in the Middle East for example.  Meh.

There's the economic meltdown in Europe still happening in slow motion.  Meh.

There's the anti-voting BS the Republicans are attempting at the state level to suppress minorities, the poor, and college-age voters.  Meh.

Just not feeling connected to the world at the moment, that's all.

Too much outrage burn-out?  Too much stress coping with unemployment?  Dunno...

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For All I Know About How the March For Jobs Turned Out

It would have been nice if I had gone so I could report in person what the crowds were like, how the scene was set, the mood of others worried for their jobs...

There's not much online I'm finding at the moment other than this article from The Atlantic Wire, which mostly just focuses on the debates on what the turnout meant and what turnout they actually had (and if the turnout was bigger than Beck's).

The problem is that "official" numbers from the National Park Service aren't given out anymore, so it's left to the rally leaders to proclaim GREAT VICTORY in the millions of people who turn out for their shows.  For Beck, he was gloating he had 500,000 at his rally (CBS did their evaluation and got it at 87,000.  Other observers did their own math and considered numbers between 100,000 to 150,000).  The One Nation crew is pushing that they got better numbers than Beck, but on-the-ground reports are suggesting they got a smaller turnout (like 80,000 to Beck 87,000 kind of comparisons).

The one thing that does seem worthy to note: the largest amount of representation - and what was the stronger effort at the local level to organize buses - came from the unions.  This pretty much got to be a March for Unions than a March for Jobs by the sound of it.  Which makes sense when you think about it. Unions are all about jobs: keeping the union jobs they've got and wanting more jobs created for workers to join unions later on.

The phrase "enthusiasm gap" is going to get played up nowadays: comparing the eagerness of the Far Right to the lackluster responses of the whole Left toward the current political mood and potential results this November.  All I want to say on this matter is WAKE THE HELL UP AMERICA.  You don't want the Republicans to reclaim control of Congress and drive us back to the economic horrors they created from the 1990s and through the Bush the Lesser years.  Okay?  Do I need to re-hash what I've said about the damage the Republicans have caused with their insane obsession with tax cuts and deregulation?

One month to go.  Please DON'T VOTE REPUBLICAN.

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Michael Been of The Call Died Recently

Well they blew the horns/
And the walls came down/
They'd all been warned/
And the walls came down...

This is, sadly, another tragic reminder that we are all mortal.  And yeah, it sounds petty, but The Call was a band I knew and liked.  So this is a death that hits closer to home than most other celebrity passings...

The Call was one of the early 80s New Wave bands out of California (although two of the bandmates, Been especially, hailed from Oklahoma).  They had some decent success but nothing that was chart-topping, more of a cult fave among the hip kids among the Gen-X crowd, and among their fellow rock artists they'd impressed.  You'd probably remember them from this video:




Pretty much their best-known song, although Everywhere I Go, I Still Believe, and Let The Day Begin were well-known minor hits.

From The Walls Came Down video, you'd think The Call were just another Protest Band from the dying days of the L.A. Punk scene.  Not really.  Most of their songs tend to be spiritual, almost Christian in lyrical tone.  But it wasn't the hard evangelical Christianity they evoked: what they sang came out as moral outrage against corruption of power and the forces of darkness:


Sanctuary fades, congregation splits/
Nightly military raids, the congregation splits/
It's a song of assassins, ringin' in your ears/
We got terrorists thinking, playing on fears...


Finding an article online about The Call's Christian stylings wasn't hard:

Unlike much of "contemporary Christian music," The Call uses no religious rhetoric and attempts no proselytizing. Their style is at once driving, confrontational, rhythm-oriented, vulnerable and self-deprecating... Their records show not a trace of the self-righteous theologizing and Bible-quoting that ruins so much "Christian music."  Instead, the band has consciously chosen to use gripping and gritty images of conflict, cataclysm and deliverance, giving their music a genuinely provocative sense of the suffering, struggle and vision of their spiritual adventure. Been and keyboardist Jim Goodwin say this complexity reflects their belief that life contains extremes that cannot be addressed with a pat approach. Almost every one of their songs describes battles with the weapons of love and reconciliation, passing through death to life again in the span of a song. Been says his songwriting hammers away at the spiritual indifference in his own life, and his search for spiritual answers. Sounding a little like a voice crying in the wilderness, he said, "I just keep writing the same song over and over..."

I don't think there are any Russians/
And there ain't no Yanks/
Just corporate criminals/
Playin' with tanks...

This is the closing stanza from The Walls Came Down: moral outrage at the hypocrisy of global politics in four simple lines.  Me and my brothers whenever we'd hear this song would shout out the last two lines, easily remembered and easily repeated.  But those just weren't cool words of protest to chant, like we were screaming "Fuck 'em all" during any other godawful 80s Punk song.  The Call, and Michael Been, were trying to preach to us, letting us know who the enemy is.  Not the Russians.  Not us Yanks.  Just the Corporate Criminals.

If only the Teabagger Crowd grokked that and started railing against Wall Street instead of Pennsylvania Ave.

Safe journey for your soul into the Afterlife, Michael Been.  Say hey to Emperor Norton for me.

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