change begins at home

It is interesting to see how our once solidly Republican neighborhood, Travis Country, one of the first suburbs outside Austin, has changed. The first year we lived there, 1998, we had a party for grad students and gave detailed directions. One of them said, "You could have just said the only house on the street without a Bush (for governor) sign."

Here is how the neighborhood, Austin precinct 354, voted this year. Here is a quote from an email from Barb Colvin, our wonderfully well organized and well tempered Democratic chairperson (rather like Obama himself, come to think of it):

....for all your good work which helped make this dream come true....

Hi all,

About a dozen of us worked at the polls on election day, some as judges and clerks, others held signs and talked to voters. It was fun. Even the voter who called us "socialists". Almost as good as when I was called a communist while handing out Lloyd Doggett literature in 2204. Makes me kinda proud.

[I was one of those -- it was pretty fun. I guess I missed the guy calling us socialists.]

Here are some interesting results for P 354. I've rounded off the percentages and reported only D and R numbers. Democrats are listed first. Remember that our precinct is roughly split between Rs and Ds. We got out the vote and changed some minds. We did good !

President, Obama 56% - McCain 42%
Senator, Noriega 49% -Cornyn 46%
Representative, Doggett 60% - Morovich 36 %
District 47 State Rep, Bolton 53% - Keel 47%
Chief Justice 3rd Court of Appeals, Jones 58% - Law 42%
Precinct 3 County Commissioner, Huber 51% - Daugherty 43% (big upset)

yes we could

It is a great day for the USA in lots of ways. A calm, competent, but visionary leader. A completely different image of U.S. leadership to the rest of the world. A potential giant step in healing U.S. racial divisions. And a nice reminder that this is still a country in which remarkable social mobility is still possible.

Wooooohoooo!

But now the real work begins. It was wonderful of Senator McCain to pledge to work with Obama. I just hope a lot of people join him. The country, and world, need it.

Athens

I went off to Athens, Ohio (not Greece, for better or worse) last weekend to go to the Global Fusion conference on international communication. It is one of my favorite academic meetings, fairly small 100-200 people, so you get to actually meet and talk to new people. Great place for internationally oriented graduate students to give their first paper and meet other grad students and faculty. Great place for me to learn a lot of interesting new things, like how young Indians (South Asians) are flocking to the Bollywood island in the virtual world Second Life to meet each other.


It was also just after the peak of the leaf change season in southeastern Ohio. So the foliage was glorious as you can see in the first photo above, taken right our the backdoor of the Ohio University hotel we were in.

Athens is only about 50 miles away from West Virgina. I heard a fabulous local bluegrass music show on the campus radio station on Sunday, as we were driving back to the airport--you can really see the cultural connection to Appalachia.

Here is another photo, taken from the van that took us back to the airport in Columbus, OH. (Athens is very pretty and charmingly remote, but it is also a long way from the nearest airport in Columbus.)

And here is one last photo also taken from the van on the way back. Let's hear it for the modest but not bad camera lurking in my iPhone, so that I am seldom without a camera anymore.

Amateur hour

Interesting how the amateur political videos are turning out to be much better than the official ones. One more strike for Web 2.0 (the rise of user-generated content) into the realm of politics.

Here are a couple of absolutely classic YouTube do-it-yourself amateur campaign videos. Andrew Sullivan says they are the best of the season.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/10/taking-back-t-6.html

He might be right. Interesting how they reflect the two great genres of modern U.S. popular culture: illustrated children's lit (remember that George W.'s favorite book was "The Very Hungry Caterpillar") and beer commercials.

Watch out -- all the new media are watching

One interesting thing about the election is how hard it is to deny it when you say something that you wanted to say to one group but not have another hear. True at the global level, too - as the Danish cartoons about the Prophet Mohammed (of Islam) last year showed: they thought they were having a nice, local exercise in free speech and their own brand of humor, that tends to parody and sarcasm, but once launched in almost any form, things can spread all over the nation or world very quickly.

Here is a new one for the USA.

Robin Hayes spoke at a McCain-Palin rally yesterday, about how "liberals hate real Americans who work and achieve and believe in God".

Quoting DailyKos:
Hayes had prefaced his comments by saying that he wanted to be sure "not to say something stupid". Apparently what he meant was, he didn't actually want to be quoted saying anything stupid, so as to retain plausible deniability.

Because he flatly denies making the comments. He claims that the national press were there and nobody wrote about it, so the New York Observer's Jason Horowitz (who broke the story) must have misreported.

Update: Hayes spokeswoman, Amanda Little, says that Hayes absolutely denies making the comments that appear in the Observer article. She noted that other national reporters were at the event and didn't pick up on what the Observer reported.

The Crypt called the Observer reporter in question, Jason Horowitz, and he said he stands firmly by his reporting. "I was there. That’s what I heard. I was taking notes while he was talking," said Horowitz.

But here is the soundbite captured by someone and spread all over the Internet. A little something to remember when speaking in public.

Race and the campaign in Western Pennsylvania: "We're voting for the n***er."

Sometimes the USA really does amaze me. I don't know whether this election will make race issues worse or better, but I am beginning to hope it will be better.

Here is a story from 538.com, which does great campaign coverage, particularly aggregating and making sense of the polls, but also interesting on the road type stuff.

"So a canvasser goes to a woman's door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she's planning to vote for. She isn't sure, has to ask her husband who she's voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, "We're votin' for the n***er!"

Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: "We're voting for the n***er."

In this economy, racism is officially a luxury."

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/10/on-road-western-pennsylvania.html

Blood sport

Whether you enjoy blood sports, like hunting, or find them problematic, is an interesting cleavage in modern society. For myself, I consciously stopped hunting back in Idaho at about 17, when I was also deciding on a bunch of other changes in where my life was headed.

There were two specific incidents that tipped me over into making the decision. One came from going goose hunting with two of my nephews, Andy and Dan Tiller, out near a bird sanctuary near Lake Lowell in Nampa, Idaho. Dan and I both shot at the same goose. We both claimed it, which is still the occasion of discussion. But the real lasting effect on me was to realize that I wished it was still up in the sky, flying magnificently along, instead of crumpled in a dead heap of feathers on the ground. I started losing my taste for the idea, particularly since the poor thing was so full of buckshot that it wasn't even edible. The real tipping point came a bit later, when I was hunting rabbits out in the desert, near my hometown, Kuna, Idaho. I shot one in the stomach and it screamed. Exactly like a child. I was too transfixed to even go put it out of its misery at first. That pretty much did it. I sold off my .22 and shotguns.

I was fine with other people hunting, particularly for deer, particularly when they actually intended to eat the meat. I was even happy to eat it under those circumstances. I just stopped seeing it as my kind of sport. I recognize that a lot of hunters, like my nephew Dan, who has established a private game preserve in an old farm along a river in Idaho, do a lot of good in preserving the habitat of the birds they hunt.

Still, for a variety of reasons, the image of Sarah Palin hunting wolves from the air made me sick to my stomach. Not much sport in shooting an animal from the air, particularly in winter when it has almost no chance of getting away. Might as well tie it to a post and then shoot it.

My wife Sandy had an even more virulent reaction. She dreamed that cannibal hunters, including Palin, were hunting people, including her, from helicopters and then eating them. I am sure Dr. Freud could have a real field day with that.

Hunting wolves has been a particularly hot issue in the west. A lot of the locals see them as dangerous pests who just prey on livestock. Outsiders tend to see them as a noble animal which ought to be preserved. I lean toward the latter, but can understand how a rancher might think the other way. But I think the blood sport shown in this video is pretty disgusting either way. If a hunter wants to go after a wolf, he or she at least ought to have do it on the ground, preferably on foot, to even the odds up -- maybe put some actual sport into it.