I hope to bring you some detailed musing on these experiences in the months to come, but expect things to be a little sporadic in the meantime.

1 – Click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random. The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 – Click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3. The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3 – Click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days. The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 – Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.

Here are some of my results:

More to come!

TJLP is striving for a new vision of society not based on violence, racism, and sexism; while working to educate and empower individuals and communities to transform the system, they are also providing direct assistance to inviduals that experience the worst of our current system due to their race, gender, class, etc.

I would encourage all of you, especially lawyers, social workers, and people in other relevant professions to get involved, learn more, and try to find a way to contribute your expertise to TJLP’s work.

TJLP Website link

1. Transparancy. When tax dollars are flowing into private hands in order to bring about some benefit for the public, we need to know who’s getting it, what they’re doing with it, and whether the desired benefit is being achieved. Counterexample: TARP.
2. Accountability. The people and institutions who advocated for deregulation and went on to run the financial system into the ditch when given the opportunity to run the system free of regulation cannot be allowed to benefit from the bailout.
3. Acknowledgment of market failure. Those public services that society depends on but which the market is unable or ill-suited to provide must be provided by government, through collection of taxes and organized deployment of those tax dollars. Examples start with police and fire protection, and go from there. It is now clear that health care falls into this category: we have attempted to provide health care through market mechanisms (i.e. private for-profit health insurance companies), and we’ve seen the results: growing ranks of the uninsured, and massive waste in the system, much of which consists of efforts to shift costs to other participants in the system. Subsidizing access to the existing system is not the long-term answer. We need a single-payer system. Naomi Klein and others have argued that the financial system is also suffering from this kind of systemic failure and needs to be nationalized.
4. Stimulus as public investment, not private give-away. Instead of rewarding the entrenched interests that have been benefiting from government expenditures for the past generation, the Obama stimulus package should focus on our national rail infrastructure, universal access to health care, clean energy, and strengthening labor.
5. Rule of law. Perpetrators of war crimes and violations of international law must be prosecuted if our system of laws is to have any legitimacy. The investigations — and indictments, if warranted — should start with Bush and Cheney, and extend to Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Yoo, etc. Looking at Obama’s DOJ appointees, there is some cause for cautious optimism on this front. More on this to come.
6. Elections have consequences. Obama won decisively, running on a platform that, while not progressive enough for my tastes and many others’, did emphasize progressive values and goals. Among these was the idea that our nation’s problems must be solved through a collective approach, rather than the every-man-for-himself approach that has characterized the past eight years, and arguably the past generation going back to Reagan. This is what the country wants and needs, and our representatives from Obama on down must deliver.

For example:

• “The world is simple, and there must be a simple explanation for everything.”
• “Admitting alternatives is undermining one’s own belief.”
• “A successful person’s explanation of the means of his success is highly credible by the very fact of his success.”
• “Bad things are never consequences of one’s own action or inaction.”

Click here for the full article.

Among them: “at the end of the day”, “absolutely”, “it’s not rocket science”, and “24/7″.

One they didn’t mention, but which has become a pet peeve of mine recently, is the insertion of the word “look” at the beginning of sentences. It seems that any interview on any of the political talking-heads programs must contain a quota of “looks” and it bugs me to no end. Frankly, it comes across as combative and insulting, and most sentences would be better off without it.

It’s hard to pin down when and where it started, but I seem to recall hearing Senator Barack Obama doing the “look” thing several years ago, before it became a widespread trend. I’ll try to find some examples of this…

Clearly, this election represents a symbolic milestone that dwarfs the significance of any previous presidential election in the nation’s history. While racism is still alive and well in America today, I expect that we will some kind of shift in racial dynamics, although the precise scope and nature of that shift remains to be seen.

From the perspective of politics and governance, I think Obama has the opportunity to usher in a new era in American politics, as Michael Lind describes in his recent Salon.com article, “Obama and the Dawn of the Fourth Republic”. Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt both assumed the presidency at a time of crisis, when the previous governing structure of the country was in disarray, and they had the ability to forge a new way forward that shaped the country for generations. All we can do at this point is hope that Obama, and the team he assembles, is able to put the right policies in place.

The honeymoon already seems to be winding down, I think. With the appointment of Congressman Rahm Emanuel, a ruthless political operative and a militarist to boot, as his Chief of Staff, and with deregulators like Lawrence Summers in the running for Treasury Secretary, Obama is making me and others wonder how much change we’re really going to see. Also, the passage of Proposition 8 in California, depriving same-sex couples there of their equal marriage rights under the state constitution, and the refusal of Obama and Biden to support same-sex marriage (despite their lip service to gay rights), remain a dark cloud inside the silver lining of the 2008 election.

Overall, though, I am happy that conservative ideology, which has dominated since the Nixon years, finally reached it logical conclusion and was repudiated by the American electorate. I’m hoping that Obama’s charisma, brainpower, and strong mandate will be sufficient to set a new course.

This is a McMansion in the northern suburbs of Chicago that I drove by a couple of weeks ago. There are literally thousands of examples of this sort all over the suburbs of Chicago and other cities, no doubt, but what made this one noteworthy to me was the columns.

If you can tell from my crappy camera-phone image, the columns are not even pretending to hold anything up! On the top of each column is a “decorative” sphere, and the actual roof is a few feet above that.

WHY?!?!?!?

The idea of abolishing the Electoral College and electing the President based on the nationwide popular vote has been bandied about for some time now, but that would require a Constitutional amendment, a rather daunting task even though the vast majority of Americans, including lots of current and former politicians, support the goal. Constitutional amendments are just hard to pull off. But there is another way.

What a lot of people don’t realize is that the current winner-take-all rule for each state is not in the Constitution! Constitution merely says how many electoral votes each state gets; the states decide how to apportion those electoral votes. Most states today use the winner-take-all method, awarding all of their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote in that state. (Nebraska and Maine award some electoral votes based on the statewide popular vote, and some based on the vote in each congressional district.) The point is that each state is completely free to decide on its own how to award its electoral votes.

Which brings me to the National Popular Vote movement. The aim is to have individual states pass laws saying they will award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote – regardless of the state winner. The law only takes effect if enough other states pass it, though. “Enough” states means states possessing 270 or more electoral votes: enough to elect a President. (There are 538 total electoral votes out there; a majority of that is 270.) When enough states pass the National Popular Vote agreement, then it kicks in and for the next election, the national popular vote winner will be guaranteed to be the President. The Electoral College would still exist, only the criteria for awarding their votes would change. Click here for more detailed explanations of how it works.

Enough about the technicalities … what would this mean for the country? Many people think that the current system favors small states, because they get more electoral votes per person than large states. (For example, Ohio has 20 electoral votes, but there are about a dozen small states that get a total of 40 electoral votes even though their total population is about equal to Ohio’s population.) However, this numerical advantage doesn’t really carry over into actual political power. The states that are empowered in the current system are the battleground states. The majority of states vote reliably for one party or the other in Presidential elections, and thus neither party wastes time campaigning there. Their attention is focused on the battlegrounds that could go one way or the other.

If we had a nationwide popular vote, each citizen’s vote would be equal and the candidates would have to spread their attention across the entire country, not on any particular state or region. Republicans would have an incentive to campaign in California, and Democrats would have an incentive to campaign in Texas. (and vice versa). Besides moving our political process in the direction of more fairness and equality among the voting population, there would also be a smaller chance of a recount and a reduced incentive for vote-suppression tactics.

So where do things stand now? Four states have enacted the national popular vote law – Illinois (yay!), Maryland, New Jersey, and Hawaii. These states have 50 electoral votes, 19% of the 270 needed. Several more states are on the way to enacting it: they have passed the law in one or both houses of the legislature, or in the relative subcommittees (Including New York and California). All of these states together would make a total of 247 electoral votes, which is within shouting distance of 270.

Hopefully, by the time we’re re-electing Barack Obama in 2012, we’ll be doing it on the basis of the nationwide popular vote.

Check out NationalPopularVote.com for more info.

(California has a history of being at the forefront of equal marriage rights; sixty years ago, it became the first state to strike down laws preventing interracial marriage, about twenty years before the U.S. Supreme Court did so for the whole country.)

This fall, a proposition has been put on the ballot for all California voters to decide whether they want to eliminate marriage rights for same-sex couples. I don’t live in California, but I hope that any Californians who read this will vote against Proposition 8 and, in doing so, help to preserve an important step forward for civil rights and human rights in this country.

There was a time when interracial marriage was viewed as contrary to people’s religious beliefs and, as a result, banned by state governments. Thankfully, we have since progressed to the point where we (most of us, at least) no longer view interracial marriage as immoral or wrong in any way.

The equivalent moral question of today is whether the government should grant equal marriage rights to same-sex couples. I believe that discrimination by the government in granting marriage rights only to couples of the opposite sex is morally and ethically no different from the denial of marriage rights to couples of different racial backgrounds. No matter what your religious beliefs may be, no governmental agency should have the right to discriminate on the basis of race or sex (among other categories) when it grants rights and privileges to citizens. If government got out of the business of recognizing marriages completely, that would be fine with me. But our federal, state, and local governments grant numerous rights and privileges to people on the basis of their marital status and relationships and it’s simply wrong to do so in a discriminatory fashion.

I can assure you that there will come a day when we look back on this present struggle the same way we now look back on the struggle over interracial marriage and other civil-rights issues. Vote for equality, not bigotry: vote No on Proposition 8.