Rav Casley Gera

I don’t remember many people singing “God Save the Queen” in May 1997.

The election being over is… odd. Of course, there’s a transition to over-analyse and the future Obama administration to wildly speculate about. But that sense of urgency - the sense that it really is my duty, as a concerned citizen of the world, to spend an hour or so each day catching up on the latest Sarah Palin scandal / Joe the Plumber appearance / McCain campaign infighting / outrageous slur against Obama - is gone.

There is an upside - more time for pointless web crazery such as, for example, finding my-name-as-a-face:

Disapointingly dull, you may agree. But I like that it appears to have a moustache.

In other Web News, Metro’s Tom Phillips has pointed out that the forgotten (or in my case, never-on-the-radar) indie lot Johnny Boy produced a 2004 hit (ahem) that, as well as being pleasantly jangly in a sort of Retro Bar way, presciently predicts the current ongoing Collapse Of Everything:

“You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes & You Get What You Deserve”

Andrew Sullivan has a plethora of reaction from across the ’sphere, with a conservative leaning. These two really sum it up:

The analytical quote:

1. The modern conservative movement began with the crushing defeat of Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential race. The modern conservative movement ends with the crushing defeat of Arizona Sen. John McCain — who took Goldwater’s Senate seat upon his retirement — in the 2008 presidential race.

2. Modern liberalism began its implosion with riots in Chicago’s Grant Park at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Tonight, modern liberalism is reborn at Chicago’s Grant Park, where a black Chicago Democrat will celebrate winning the presidency.

- Rod Dreher

The personal quote:

Nothing in my life has actually changed in the 30 minutes since it was announced Obama will be our next president. I have the same bills, the same amount of money in the bank, my dishwasher is still broken, and my 5 month old beagle won’t stop peeing on my carpet. Everything in my life is exactly the same as it was 30 minutes ago; and yet I feel as though everything is different.

I feel so much hope.  I feel so much pride. I feel like my one vote was a single drop of water in a great Tsunami of change. I feel like I was one of a million voices screaming in the night, ” I love my country and I’m taking it back!” I’m so proud of the country that I love and have so much hope in my heart that we can together heal the wounds that have been such a source of pain and anger to us all.

I know Obama isn’t going to fix the economy overnight, I know he won’t be able to provide healthcare to all Americans by February ‘09. I know Obama isn’t a Messiah who four years from now will have turned this country into a fabled utopia. But I also know Obama will make moral decisions. I know Obama will try to unite where others try to divide. I know Obama will help to make America the beacon of hope it once was to others. I know that at 27 years of age, I witnessed one of the most important and hopefully glorious chapters in American history.

I know hope.

- Anonymous Daily Dish reader

What with all the fuss about the election for the office of what law blogs call POTUS, it’s easy to forget that today is also the day, not only of hundreds of US Senate and House of Representative races, but thousands more elections to state legislatures and of hundreds of elected judges, sheriffs and city commissioners across America. The world’s largest developed country really is an experiment in local democracy.

And, of course, there are hundreds of state and city referenda on particular issues. These vary from the vastly important to the - well, less so. This list of LA Times endorsements gives you the idea. You probably know about Proposition 8, the measure to amend California’s constitution to ban gay marriage (LA Times says: “No”). But what about Prop 5, introducing new drug rehabilitation agencies (LA Times: also “no”)? Or Prop 2, on the size of battery-hen cages (also, interestingly, “no”)?

The Guardian sums up some of the other, wackier, ballots out there. As well as waking up tomorrow in a world with a black US President-elect, we may be in a world where Colorado’s state constitution defines life as beginning at birth. I look forward to reading the coroner’s reports on the thousands of miscarriages that must take place in Colorado every year…

Dear God, it’s finally here.

It’s worth recalling just how absurdly action-packed this two-year campaign has been. The First Lady Candidate vs the ambitious young black senator. The earliest-ever primaries. The shock in Iowa, Hillary’s tears. The Michigan-Florida farrago, which saw the term “Democratic Rules Committee” enter water-cooler vocabulary. John McCain’s campaign out of money, written off, and then reborn in New Hampshire. Guliani’s Florida gamble. Rev. Wright and “A More Perfect Union”. Bill Clinton’s “fairytale”. “Clean and articulate”. The pit bull, Katie Couric, Tina Fey and Joe the Plumber (say it ain’t so, Joe!). The dramatic Powell endorsement. Then - just as it all seems to be over - Obama’s grandmother dies the day before the election. You couldn’t make it up.

I’m 28, British, and have only been watching elections closely since the Bush era began. But surely this has been the most dramatic campaign since 1968. I wonder if anything - short of, God forbid, an inaugural assassination - can bring it to a suitably compelling climax.

But the next 24 hours should be pretty damn good.

Essential resources (besides the obvious):

• Twitter’s election portal offers stream-of-conscious commentary from its (Obama-centric) young user base
• Twitter accounts @866OURVOTE and @electionjournal have live reports of voting problems and fraud, while Twitter Vote Report offers voting reports from across the country (on a map!)

I’ll be twittering non-stop once the results start coming in. Happy voting, America!

You know in Star Trek, when Picard orders up a record, piece of data or video by speaking to the computer? Imagine if the computer replied, ‘this media is brought to you by Toyota Galactic’…

The travails of Twitter are a reminder that the model of the free internet - where users rarely expect to pay websites for services or content - is hard to make work. New services are cautious about introducing advertising for fear of annoying users. With more and more audio and video content on the web, sites have experimented with adding audio and video adverts, with mixed success. But when speech becomes the main method of interaction with computers - a switch which, thanks to vast improvements in speech recognition technology, is finally looking likely - it’ll become effectively impossible for advertising to provide the main income stream for content and service providers. [Read more →]

Proof that New Yorkers really are the bestest, funniest, most damn full-of-life people in the world. Listen to this and I defy you not to smile throughout.

American RadioWorks: New York Works

This starts well:

The election’s over.

Sure, the votes still need to be counted.

And yes, things could radically change over the next two weeks.

But let’s be realistic: Republicans are in a bad spot.

And it’s never too early to start planning for 2012…

So far, so sane. Just the kind of thing the soul-searching the GOP needs to do.

…and a ticket that actually inspires the conservative base.

Uh-oh.

And that ticket is Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber.

Pfffbwahahahaah!

Sure, laugh now. But the main reason the Republican base hasn’t completely ditched McCain is because of Palin and her Jane C-Cup appeal.

Joe the Plumber, meanwhile, has about as much political experience as Palin did four years ago and has immense Joe Six-Pack appeal.

For God’s sake– his name’s Joe! It works perfectly!

It goes on. Once the election’s out of the way, this is going to be one highly entertaining GOP civil war.

Has Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, saved the world financial system?

… Mr. Brown and Alistair Darling, the chancellor of the Exchequer (equivalent to our Treasury secretary), have defined the character of the worldwide rescue effort, with other wealthy nations playing catch-up.

This is an unexpected turn of events … the British economy is far smaller than the U.S. economy, and the Bank of England doesn’t have anything like the influence either of the Federal Reserve or of the European Central Bank. So you don’t expect to see Britain playing a leadership role.

But the Brown government has shown itself willing to think clearly about the financial crisis, and act quickly on its conclusions. And this combination of clarity and decisiveness hasn’t been matched by any other Western government, least of all our own. [emphasis added]

- Paul Krugman, yesterday. Earlier that day, he won the Nobel Prize for Economics.

What we have here is a Prime Minister who, thanks to his quick thinking, is literally leading the rescue of the world’s financial system; and we want to throw him out of office in favour of an untried kid because, a year ago, he dithered over whether to call an election?

Change. It’s in the air. From the Change Election to the End Of Capitalism, the very smell of the world has gained a top note of transformation of late. Or something.

Sometimes, though, change is bad. Sometimes, it doesn’t work. Importing comments and tweets, while a fun idea, didn’t work. It was confusing and made the site seem odd and inconsistent - moreso than it already did. So I’ve turned it off. As before, you can find my comments on other sites, and my tweets, in the left-hand sidebar.

Hi. I’ve been having one of my periodic redesigns. One result is that all the content that used to only be on the main casleygera.com is now also in the blog. The main site is now a showcase for my best writing, or at least the stuff I like best.

That renders the old feed for the main site - http://feeds.feedburner.com/ravcasleygera - pretty much redundant. So I’ve repurposed it as a “firehose” - one feed combining every photo upload, blog post, bookmark and video - a total web 2.0 extravaganza.

I can totally understand that this may be of no interest to you, in which case you should switch to the blog feed, which is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/ravcasleygerablog.

The main site’s comments feed is no more. If you’re still subscribed to that, switch to http://feeds.feedburner.com/ravcasleygerablog-comments.

And don’t forget you can subscribe to any type, series, theme or topic - or the comments on any post - by sticking /feed at the end of the URL.

If this all seems really irresponsible and wacky of me, bear in mind that according to feedburner, I have, like, ten subscribers. Sob.

Pundits are calling it for Obama, and in response, McCain has gone on the attack. The next four weeks are likely to get heated and nasty as the candidates sling all the mud they’ve been hoarding while talking about upending politics as usual (Obama’s sudden willingness to dredge up the 20-year old Keating Five scandal suggests he’s going to go on the offensive himself).

It’s a natural instinct for Obama supporters to leap to his defence in the face of every attack by conservatives. And there is a lot of crap being thrown around. But as polling day looms, it’s worth remembering that there are some real problems with Obama and his candidacy. Whether any of them is a dealbreaker, I’ll leave up to you. [Read more →]

First John Snow called it. And now this:

Perpetually fretting Democrats will not want to accept it. The campaigns themselves can’t afford to believe it. Many journalists know it but can’t say it. And there will certainly be some twists and turns along the way. But take it to a well capitalized bank: Bill Ayers isn’t going to save John McCain.  The race is over.

John McCain’s candidacy is as much a casualty of Wall Street as Lehman or Merrill… Before Wall Street’s collapse Senator McCain was ahead. His approval ratings remained high, his VP pick had generated excitement and interest, and his campaign operatives were capable, on any given day, of winning news cycles and giving their opponents fits. And then the underpinnings of American capitalism begin to sink — and with them sunk McCain.

An election dominated at its inception by the war in Iraq is now overwhelmingly focused on the economy. More than half of voters in polls say that the economy is their top concern and Senator Obama enjoys double digit leads among voters asked who can better fix our economic mess. Put simply, there is no way Senator McCain can win if he continues to trail Senator Obama by double digits on the top concern of more than half of voters.

Howard Wolfson, “It’s Over: Why Bill Ayers Won’t Save John McCain“

What could turn things round? Wolfson points to a domestic terror attack as the only thing that could seriously shake things up now. I think the “Bradley effect” is likely to mean Obama’s vote will be smaller on the day than the polls suggest now, potentially making things very tight. And the danger is that overconfident Obama supporters will stay at home. The democrats have to warn against complacency and focus all their efforts on getting out the vote.

Still, it’s true: a McCain victory now would be a stunning turnaround.

Track the latest odds on the race

Biden wasn’t as loveable as Palin, but he didn’t need to be; Palin wasn’t as competent as Biden, but she didn’t have to be.

"Hey, can I call ya Joe?"

Who won Thursday’s vice-presidential debate? It depends on who you ask. The initial poll, from CNN’s panel of undecided Ohio voters, saw the Democrat Sen. Joe Biden rated as the winner 51-36. But conservatives have been crowing all weekend about the performance of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. “She was polished, direct, folksy and on message,” said one Republican strategist. Right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin put it more succinctly with a post titled simply, “Sarah Rocks!”

“I would like to see all the Sarah doubters and detractors in the Beltway/Manhattan corridor eat their words,” Malkin wrote. “Sarah Palin is the real deal. Five weeks on the campaign trail, thrust onto the national stage, she rocked tonight’s debate.”

Certainly, Palin’s confidence took the audience by surprise. The internet messaging service Twitter offers a live stream of users’ election-related updates. Before the debate, it was, well, a-twitter with messages gleefully anticipating the meltdown of Palin in the face of Joe Biden’s experience and grasp of the issues. As the debate wore on, they grew increasingly quiet, to be replaced by crowing republicans exulting at Palin’s performance.

So who won? Perhaps the real question is: what does it mean to ‘win’ an electoral debate? [Read more →]

Hello Philly,

I am glad to be here today for this voter registration drive and for Barack Obama, the next president of the United States.

I’ve spent 35 years writing about America, its people, and the meaning of the American Promise. The Promise that was handed down to us, right here in this city from our founding fathers, with one instruction: Do your best to make these things real: opportunity, equality, social and economic justice, a fair shake for all of our citizens, the American idea, as a positive influence, around the world for a more just and peaceful existence. These are the things that give our lives hope, shape, and meaning. They are the ties that bind us together and give us faith in our contract with one another.

I’ve spent most of my creative life measuring the distance between that American promise and American reality. For many Americans, who are today losing their jobs, their homes, seeing their retirement funds disappear, who have no healthcare, or who have been abandoned in our inner cities, the distance between that promise and that reality has never been greater or more painful.

I believe Senator Obama has taken the measure of that distance in his own life and in his work. I believe he understands, in his heart, the cost of that distance, in blood and suffering, in the lives of everyday Americans. I believe as president, he would work to restore that promise to so many of our fellow citizens who have justifiably lost faith in its meaning. After the disastrous administration of the past 8 years, we need someone to lead us in an American reclamation project. In my job, I travel the world, and occasionally play big stadiums, just like Senator Obama. I’ve continued to find, wherever I go, America remains a repository of people’s hopes, possibilities, and desires, and that despite the terrible erosion to our standing around the world, accomplished by our recent administration, we remain, for many, a house of dreams. One thousand George Bushes and one thousand Dick Cheneys will never be able to tear that house down.

They will, however, be leaving office, dropping the national tragedies of Katrina, Iraq, and our financial crisis in our laps. Our sacred house of dreams has been abused, looted, and left in a terrible state of disrepair. It needs care; it needs saving, it needs defending against those who would sell it down the river for power or a quick buck. It needs strong arms, hearts, and minds. It needs someone with Senator Obama’s understanding, temperateness, deliberativeness, maturity, compassion, toughness, and faith, to help us rebuild our house once again. But most importantly, it needs us. You and me. To build that house with the generosity that is at the heart of the American spirit. A house that is truer and big enough to contain the hopes and dreams of all of our fellow citizens. That is where our future lies. We will rise or fall as a people by our ability to accomplish this task. Now I don’t know about you, but I want that dream back, I want my America back, I want my country back.

So now is the time to stand with Barack Obama and Joe Biden, roll up our sleeves, and come on up for the rising.

Bruce Springsteen, Vote For Change rally, Philadelphia, October 4

Think of any sci-fi film you’ve ever seen with a scene where a character uses the TVs of the future. There’s always about seven mini-screens, isn’t there? Ever since the introduction of computers with multiple applications in moveable window, split-screen has been used as lazy shorthand for an information-overloaded future. It’s a lesson CNN have learned well. Its daily politics show, the absurdly-named Situation Room - hosted by the equally surreally-named Wolf Blitzer - is like a transmission from the starship Enterprise, with a vast screen showing footage from the day’s press conferences and campaign stops, along with a bizarre array of polling data and micro-analysis.

Of course, amidst the noise, all actual thought is in danger of being drowned out. [Read more →]

A small boy asleep on his right side, the right arm stuck out, the right hand hanging limp over the edge of the bed. Through a round grating in the side of a box a voice speaks softly.

“The Nile is the longest river in Africa and the second in length of all the rivers of the globe. Although falling short of the length of the Mississippi-Missouri, the Nile is at the head of all rivers as regards the length of its basin, which extends through 35 degrees of latitude …”

At breakfast the next morning, “Tommy,” some one says, “do you know which is the longest river in Africa?” A shaking of the head. “But don’t you remember something that begins: The Nile is the …”

“The - Nile - is - the - longest - river - in - Africa - and - the - second - in - length - of - all - the - rivers - of - the - globe …” The words come rushing out. “Although - falling - short - of …”

“Well now, which is the longest river in Africa?”

The eyes are blank. “I don’t know.”

“But the Nile, Tommy.”

“The - Nile - is - the - longest - river - in - Africa - and - second …”

“Then which river is the longest, Tommy?”

Tommy burst into tears. “I don’t know,” he howls.

-Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Twitter’s scarily addictive election portal has inspired a handful of pleasingly bonkers right-wingers with time on their hands to sign up purely to respond to the stream of Obama-love (and Palin-hate) that it offers with a remarkable array of illogic, cant and irrelevancy. Here are some of my favourites, but you need to see the Twitter feeds themselves (follow the links) for the sheer quantity and madness of it…

Obamalies offers:

RTW Obama, what people are not allowed to know!!! http://tinyurl.com/3g57fb << The Truth Finally Comes Out - Video Proof! OMG!!!!!!!!!

(The link leads to an old video of cobbled-together coincidences, fury over Jeremiah Wright, and insinuations about Obama’s middle name)

If Biden isn’t drunk tonight I will be shocked! http://twurl.nl/3b2xd0 enjoy! pass it on!! LOL

(This one’s a possible gaffe by Joe Biden about the 1929 stock market crash, with no apparent slurring of speech)

@ursulas looks like your avatar is praying….you are going to need more than an avatar praying for you if you support abortionists

Katie Couric is a skidmark on the panties of CBS. She will be gone before her contract ends. Spineless Liberals can wait

Sarah4Prez, though slightly saner, has a lawyers’ knack for getting it technically right, but meaningfully so, so wrong:

Palin is the only candidate that has run anything larger than a debating society

We still have not seen Obama’s “original” birth certificate.

I wonder if Obama always threw is cigarette butts into a proper receptacle instead of on the ground as most liberal “green” smokers do.

If you examine his family tree, you will see he isn’t African American, though he has never mentioned this…more like Arab-American

“Obama Socialist” returns 3.2 million Google hits. Link #2 is Hillary saying he is.

Palin can’t remember a magazine, but at least she can read. The liberal run school system has a 50% dropout rate in many cities. Dems fault.

Save the Polar Bear, don’t kill terrorists, but go ahead and kill babies still breathing amniotic fluid….

etc etc

I’ve never really decided quite where the irony-balance lies in this song. After all, David Byrne is as self-consciously urban (in the pre-MTV, racially neutral sense) as anyone. Certainly, as someone who regularly chafes at British culture’s knee-jerk for a nostalgic vision of country life, I can’t help but thrill at such unabashed horror at a back-to-nature future that many people at least claim to long for.

But that line in the last verse - “as it fell apart, nobody payed much attention” - hints at a darker interpretation. After all, one of the central ironies of the modern environmental movement is that the very close-to-nature lifestyle which some of its proponents call for is probably exactly what we’ll wind up with if the kind of “civilisation” Byrne eulogises here continues to run out of control.

Anyway, it’s funky. Enjoy.