"I heard the news today, oh boy"

By Nancy Jane Moore

I woke up this morning -- February 18 -- listening to the news on NPR. And after listening for about half an hour, I had only one reaction:

Good God Almighty!

(You can take that as either a curse or a prayer, depending on your preference.)

[cross posted on Open Salon]

Ding, dong the witch is dead

By Nancy Jane Moore

The New York Times reports that Bush's posse was offended by President Obama's repudiation of their disastrous administration, apparently especially because Bush was polite to him during the transition.

To which I reply:

• Given that President Obama ran against the Bush administration, it should have been obvious that his inaugural speech would have to repudiate it.
• Given what a mess the country is in, President Obama had to talk about the problems and how he would address them.
  
• It seems to me President Obama has been very socially polite to Bush, too, and did as much as he could to stay out of his way even as the whole country was clamoring for Obama to start running the country way before Jan. 20.
• What part of "worst president ever" don't Karl Rove and company understand?
• Hee, hee, hee, hee, hee ....
  [updated to correct the spelling of my giggle; I blame cedar fever for my lapse]
  

Snow: another argument for an earlier inauguration

By Nancy Jane Moore

According to the latest DC alert email -- which I still get, even though I now live 1,500 miles away, because I can't figure out how to unsubscribe -- it's likely to snow at least an inch in Washington today, and the forecast for the Inauguration is mostly cloudy and temperatures of 26-30, with a wind chill of 17-19 degrees.

Of course, the risk of bad weather in January in Washington is pretty damn high. (The same can be said of July, from the other extreme.) However, there is a time of year when the weather in Washington is usually good: Fall, especially November.

If we'd held the inauguration of Barack Obama back in November, shortly after the election, we'd might have had the kind of crisp sunny day when it's a pleasure to be outside. Not to mention that we wouldn't have had to suffer through the last two and a half months of Bush, which, given the immense problems facing the country and the world, was a disaster of tragic proportions.

Anyway, we're less than 24 hours away from a sane, bright, and competent president. I just hope the country can recover from the Bush years and that we never again sink so low.

A Reaction to Jane Mayer's The Dark Side

By Nancy Jane Moore

I've just finished reading Jane Mayer's detailed and disturbing study of the Bush Administration's torture policies, The Dark Side, and I've got just one thing to say about all the officials who came up with these policies or applied them or sat by and let them take effect:

Prosecute 'em. All of 'em. Indict the CIA agents who handled the "extraordinary renditions" and actually tortured people. Make the people who had prisoners die in their custody explain what happened. Go after the people who let the clearly innocent be locked up and mistreated for years.

But especially investigate the people at the top, the high deputies and assistants who developed the policies, the cabinet members who either kept quiet or signed off on them, the lawyers who wrote top secret memos asserting that torture was legal, the Vice President of the United States.

Speaking as a lawyer, I say particularly go after the lawyers -- David Addington, John Yoo, Jim Haynes, Alberto Gonzales and many others. They swore an oath to uphold the Constitution when they were admitted to the bar. At a minimum, their bar associations should investigate their actions and determine whether they violated their oath and should be disbarred.

I don't just want them prosecuted because the policies as described by Mayer violated the U.S. Constitution, as well as U.S. and international law. I don't even want them prosecuted just because the actions were horrible and immoral. I also want them prosecuted because the actions were absurd and stupid and made the U.S. and the world much less safe while leading us into a disastrous war.

My brother-in-law, who teaches physics, says that he begins each school year by asking his students, "Why do you believe what you believe?" It's his way of introducing them to the scientific method, where you do experiments to find facts, and use those facts to figure out the truth.

The same sort of process should apply in law, particularly in criminal investigations, and also in gathering intelligence for national defense reasons. Get the facts, and then analyze the facts to determine the truth.

Instead Dick Cheney and his henchman Addington decided in advance what the truth was, and limited themselves to facts that supported it. And Bush and all the macho pseudocowboys at all levels of the administration (male and female, according to Mayer) jumped on the bandwagon, talking tough and ignoring any facts that contradicted their worldview.

We must prosecute these people because we need to send a message that the takeover of our government by zealots like Addington will not be tolerated, and that decisionmaking will be done rationally, by examining the facts and figuring out the truth. And we must prosecute them because their actions undermined our national principles and truly threaten the American way of life.

We have to clear the air, to make certain that everyone -- all of us here in the U.S. and the world as a whole -- knows that we do not tolerate these actions. Otherwise, someone else down the road will resurrect them and justify it by citing the Bush years.

We also need to know the facts, as many facts as we can get. A prosecution, after all, if conducted properly, is a way to establish the facts and come at the truth. I am advocating the classic legal process here -- not the kind of persecutions that Mayer documents in her book. A few bad guys will probably slip through the cracks, but with luck we'll nail most of the people responsible for the real harm. And maybe even some of them will be able to defend themselves.

I know it will be expensive, and that Bush is leaving the country in financial tatters on so many fronts. I know we have many other important things to do -- addressing climate change and health care, just to name two crucial things neglected for years -- along with solving the obvious economic and foreign policy problems.

But the Bush approval of torture and all the related horrors goes to the very heart of who we are. Unless we face what these people have done in our name, while so many sat idly by, we will leave a flaw at the heart of our country, one that will come back to haunt us.

[cross posted on Open Salon]

Get Rid of the Electoral College

By Nancy Jane Moore

An op-ed in the Dec. 15 New York Times suggests that states need to apportion their presidential vote by congressional district, so that in a state where, say, a winning candidate carried 8 districts, and the loser 7, the loser would end up with some votes.

The author, Randall Lane (editor of a slew of magazines for the affluent), says this would put more votes in play and be fairer, and suggests that red and blue states of approximate size -- say Texas and New York -- agree to do this together, so that nobody feels like they're giving up their power.

I say there's a much more practical solution: Abolish the electoral college. It's a relic of a time when even those who advocated democracy wanted to keep it in check.

Lane pooh-poohs the idea of abolishing the electoral college, saying the small states with clout will never give up their power. But his plan has even less chance -- the odds that a fractious body like the Texas Legislature will do something in coordination with an equally fractious body like the New York Legislature are very, very long. A few more states might join Maine and Nebraska, but I wouldn't bet on a wholesale response.

Lane's plan would increase the number of votes in play, true, but that's all it would do. It wouldn't address the basic unfairness of a system in which the winner of the popular vote loses the election. It wouldn't do a thing to stop the problems we've had in the last few elections -- Republican election officials making sure there are too few voting machines in Democratic districts, defective voting machines, and the more blatant vote count frauds. In fact, it would probably increase them, since it would increase the number of jurisdictions that political campaigns would have to monitor for fraud.

Electing the president by the popular vote wouldn't get rid of fraud, but it would make it a whole lot less useful. Switching a few votes one way or the other in close jurisdictions wouldn't have much effect.

And every vote in the country would be valuable to the candidates. True, they might focus on high-population areas -- i.e., big cities -- to the exclusion of places where there are more mesquite trees than voters, but that aligns with the current population pattern of the United States. Let's face, we aren't a rural nation anymore.

There's one thing Lane's plan would do: If enough states actually adopted it, it would make an overcomplicated system even more overcomplicated, providing lots of work for lawyers, lobbyists, and political operatives. The last thing this country needs is another "reform" like that.

Let's not waste time on half-baked ideas. Abolish the electoral college. Elect the president by popular vote, like a real democracy.

After all, Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000.

[cross posted on Open Salon.]

I want to be on Karl Rove's enemies list

By Nancy Jane Moore

On the Doonesbury page this morrning, there is a quote from Karl Rove:

There were people who never accepted the legitimacy of George W. Bush and acted accordingly. I'm going to name names and show examples.

My immediate response?

Pick me! [Waves hand in the air and jumps up and down.] Oh, please, pick me. I want to be included on that list.

Put me on the list of people who believed from the beginning:

• The 2000 election was stolen;
• Congress and the major media let Bush get away with acting like he had a mandate;
• Bush did all the wrong things after September 11 (not to mention before September 11);
• The War in Iraq was wrong, not to mention stupid;
• The list of damage done by his policies -- from foreign relations to the environment and global warming, to civil and human rights, to the economy -- is so large as to be almost incomprehensible;
• And he and Cheney should have been impeached and removed from office for high crimes (screw the misdemeanors).

If more people hadn't accepted Bush's legitimacy, we might not be in quite this bad a mess right now.

In fact, I have only one regret in my response to the Bush years. In December 2000, after the Supreme Court gave him the election on a 5-4 vote, I was angry and disappointed, but I also thought: "At least we live in a country that accepts the rule of law. At least there won't be rioting in the streets."

I was wrong. The U.S. should never have accepted Bush. We should have rioted in the streets.

[crossposted on Ambling Along the Aqueduct and Open Salon.]

Celebrate our victory, but don't give up the fight

By Nancy Jane Moore

I have mused at length over the Obama victory and the need to keep up the struggle against the religious right and for progressive changes like gay marriage over on my new blog Blending on Open Salon. Drop by and comment.

A president we can be proud of

By Nancy Jane Moore


My friends Mark and Mary Gayle and I started to believe that Barack Obama might actually win this election when MSNBC told us he'd carried Ohio. But his electoral vote count stayed at 207 for about an hour and nothing seemed to be happening, so we switched over to Comedy Central to see what Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert had to say.

They were clowning around, occasionally interviewing some people (like Charles Ogletree of Harvard Law School, who was pretty damn funny for a law professor), and then the clock ticked over to 10:01 PM (CST) and Jon Stewart suddenly had an important -- and real -- announcement: "Barack Obama has been elected President of the United States."

Obviously every news outlet -- even The Daily Show -- was just waiting for the polls to close on the West Coast.

We confirmed things on MSNBC, made a quick check of Fox News, just to be sure, and then broke out the champagne and waited for the speeches.

McCain's concession speech was decent enough to remind me that in the past he'd had the reputation of being a more honorable man than his campaign suggested. But mostly I was just glad to know that it was the last word I'd have to hear from him for some time to come.

And then Obama made the kind of speech you want to hear from a president and I was moved. I wasn't just happy because I voted for him, or because I agree with him on many (though not all) of the issues before us or even just because it means Bush will soon be gone. I was deeply moved because he speaks so well and with so much depth and substance, and because his speech reflects an intelligent man who gives great thought to what he says and does.

And his victory reflects a man who knows how to bring the right people together to get the job done.

It occurs to me that for once in my lifetime, I might have a government that I can be proud of, one that at least reaches for the idealism that we were all taught about in high school while being competently run.

I was, in fact, so moved that I suddenly had the desire to go to Obama's inauguration.

You should know that I recently moved back to Austin, Texas, so going to the inauguration is a lot harder than it was when I lived in Washington, where I could just hop on the subway.

You should also know that as near as I can remember, it's always cold as hell in Washington on Inauguration Day. And I really hate large crowds. And it's easier to see and hear what's going on if you watch the swearing in on television.

In fact, I lived in Washington, D.C., for 28 years and never -- ever -- went to see the president inaugurated. Not even Bill Clinton.

But you know, I'm actually thinking about going.

This will be an historic election -- if Obama wins

By Nancy Jane Moore

I've had the radio going all day, and about every fifteen minutes someone mentions that this is going to be an historic election -- usually in the context of encouraging everyone to vote.

But it's only going to be an historic election if Obama wins. If he loses, we're going to get business as usual, not to mention four more years of failed policies that are likely to finish destroying our country.

So go out and vote for Obama and make some history.

Clio, the Muse of History
painted by Vermeer

A tie between the worst of times and the 2008 Election

By Nancy Jane Moore

In case you tend to think the U.S. Civil War is ancient history, here's a story to ponder: The Austin American-Statesman has a feature on the daughter of a slave who just voted for Barack Obama. She's 109.

I think there's something very joyful about that. Here's a person who is tied by family to one of the ugliest parts of our history and yet she has been fortunate enough to live long enough to vote for an African American for president. I'm sure it will make her very happy if Obama wins next week.

The real problem with Palin's $150,000 wardrobe

By Nancy Jane Moore

Joan Walsh on Salon summed up the real problem with the McCain campaign spending $150,000 to outfit "the already beautiful Palin":

Sarah Palin didn't need the best clothing and stylists money could buy; she needed tutoring and coaching on the issues. ... The fact that the highest paid staffer on the troubled McCain team this month is Palin's makeup person is also ludicrous; you can't make this stuff up. But it proves that the campaign values Palin primarily for her star power.

It also destroys any remaining claim that the McCain/Palin ticket is "feminist." Obviously the campaign honchos think it's more important for Palin to look good than to know what she's talking about. You can't come up with a more traditional way of marginalizing women than that.

Of course, Palin was picked as the VP candidate to shore up McCain with the extreme religious right, not just to be attractive. And given the apparent depth of Palin's ignorance of the important issues of the day -- which appears to rival or perhaps even exceed Bush's -- perhaps the campaign figured coaching her on the issues was impossible. If so, that just emphasizes what a bad choice she was, given the mess the country's in.

It was a big enough insult to women in this country for the Republicans to assume that women would flock to a female VP candidate whose policies as governor and stated political and religious beliefs undermine the rights we've worked so hard to attain. But to now treat that candidate as if she were running for first lady instead of vice president is even worse.

Sarah Palin is nothing but a token. How embarrassing for the Republicans; how personally humiliating for Palin. I just hope this campaign destroys her political future so thoroughly that her current political office is her last one.

This country has just suffered through eight years under a person who holds extreme right wing religious beliefs, doesn't understand the important issues of the day, and prides himself on his lack of intellectual curiosity. It can't afford another president like that.

In fact, it can't afford any more senators and governors like that, either.

Houston Chronicle endorses Obama

The Houston Chronicle has endorsed Barack Obama. According to my inside source -- the guy who actually got to write the editorial -- it's the first time the Chron has endorsed a Democrat for the White House in 44 years, meaning that the last Democrat the paper supported for president was Lyndon Johnson.

The times, they are a changin', folks.

Arrogance is the first refuge of the incompetent

By Nancy Jane Moore

At a recent Aikido seminar, my teacher, Mitsugi Saotome, pointed out that the country where an idea developed tends to take the arrogant attitude that only its residents truly understand the concept.

He was speaking of Aikido and Japan -- I should note that he is from Japan, though now a U.S. citizen -- and pointing out that although Aikido was created by the Japanese genius Morihei Ueshiba, excellent Aikido teachers are now running schools in the U.S. and other countries. You don't have to train in Japan to become a master of Aikido.

The same analysis can be applied to the U.S. and our concept of democracy. We are arrogant in our promotion of democracy throughout the world, as if we are the only people who truly understand the concept.

And given that we have allowed the Bush administration to undermine some of the very foundations of our democracy, it is questionable whether we even understand our own ideas, much less have any ability to transmit them to others.

Isaac Asimov had a character in the first book of his Foundation series who often observed, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."

I suspect arrogance is the first one.

Schadenfreude v. Apocalypse Now

By Nancy Jane Moore

Bob Herbert nailed the truth this morning:

I would like to see the self-proclaimed conservative, small government, anti-regulation, free-market zealots step up and take responsibility for wrecking the American economy and bringing about the worst financial crisis since the Depression.

Both he and I know they won't. The true believers among them are busy proposing a cut in the capital gains tax to solve the economic woes! At least they're sincere enough to allow major companies to crash rather than part from their principles.

Meanwhile the big business core -- the pragmatists who will talk against government but use it to benefit themselves -- are running around reworking the bailout, trying to get the most for their Wall Street comrades without subjecting them to too much regulation or having to fix the harm they've done to ordinary folks.

On the left, people are angry about bailing out those who caused the problem. I sympathize with this view: For years we've been lionizing the high fliers of Wall Street, who make nothing but money -- amazing amounts of money -- and it certainly gives me a certain since of schadenfreude to think of them begging for spare change among the ranks of the homeless.

But somehow I suspect that if the Wall Street crashes lead us into the depression my father and others who lived through the 1929 crash keep predicting, it won't be the bulk of big business or high fliers that will pay. It will be you and me.

When I write near-future apocalyptic science fiction, I always assume an economic meltdown not unlike this one. I am not alone -- an economic crash as well as global warming underlies Gwyneth Jones's brilliant Bold as Love series.

But recognizing the coming of a depression doesn't mean I want to live through one.

Due to 401(k) plans and other laws encouraging investment, many ordinary people have their retirement and other savings tied up in the stock market. Most of the money is in some kind of fund and the investors don't even know if it's tied up in the shaky businesses or not. A significant crash can ruin a lot of lives. And crashes on Wall Street seem to trickle down to the rest of us a whole lot faster than good times on Wall Street do.

The best fix for the situation is to put regulations back in place and improve government oversight -- in other words, undo all the destruction of our government that started in the Reagan years. I don't say go back to FDR and the New Deal; those ideas were good for the time, but now we need some fresh approaches.

Of course, that's not something even a functional Congress can do overnight, and probably not something that can be done under the failed Bush administration. And I admit that leads me to wonder why this came to crisis mode at precisely this time, when the presidential election is at its height and Congress just wants to go home.

Was it just because the Bush administration kept putting off dealing with things until they got too bad to ignore? Or was it that they hoped to rush through a plan that would simply bail out the bad guys without protecting the rest of us?

Maybe this is our October surprise. Though for now it seems to be tilting things toward Obama, so it may not be the last one.

Right now I'd like to see a short term fix that gets the overall economy breathing easier and a significant plan under what I hope is an Obama administration to fix the excesses that led to this collapse. I hope that's what we get.

Of course, it could be that total collapse will open the door to a better society. On the other hand, since I'm currently reading Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, I worry that either total collapse or a badly structured bailout will just open the door to an even grimmer economy for ordinary people.

So I'm hoping for a fix I can live with. I don't really want to live in one of my apocalyptic futures.

Republicans, deregulation, and the current financial mess

By Nancy Jane Moore

Has anybody else noticed that three major financial crises -- ones brought on by excess, greed, and, most importantly, insufficient oversight -- came during Republican administrations?

I'm speaking of the Great Depression, the savings and loan crash of the 1980s, and the current mess, which, according to what Kevin Phillips said on Bill Moyers Journal last night, might be worse than the Depression. (I'm paraphrasing from vague memory -- Phillips' pessimism scared me so much that I couldn't stand to watch and switched to a DVD of Battlestar Gallactica instead of listening to him as I should have.)

These three crises happened after years of administrations that opposed regulation, took steps to deregulate institutions that cry out for regulation, and appointed people as regulators who oppose the whole idea of oversight.

I know there have been other crises in recent times, but most of the others strike me more as the usual ups and downs of a market-based economy. These three, though, came about because the administrations did what they could to block regulation, allowing as so-called unfettered market.

As near as I can tell, all an unfettered market does is allow people to make money doing things that provide nothing to the economy as a whole -- such as creating hedge funds and other financial instruments most ordinary people can't comprehend -- and to get insanely rich, until the whole thing crashes, at which point we the taxpayers bail them out so that our economy doesn't go down with them.

The Depression came about after the corrupt years of Harding following by Silent Cal Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, neither of whom did anything to get in the way of their money-making pals. It took a long time to rebuild after that, but rebuild we did, with increased regulation and protection for ordinary citizens. There were ups and downs after that, but on the whole, the economy did pretty well.

And then Reagan came along with his deregulation ideas, which were followed by the crash of the high-flying, over-extended, deregulated savings and loans. As crashes go, this one may seem like a blip, except that it so exactly presaged what we're seeing now.

At least I understood what happened with the savings and loans. I don't really comprehend the financial side of how the investment banks got into all this trouble -- and I actually do know something about real estate financing. The most obvious thing to me -- especially given that the ratings organizations continued to rate investments in and by these firms at the highest levels -- is that everybody took care of everybody else and nobody paid attention to the fact that housing prices couldn't go up forever.

I'm currently reading Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, in which she explains Milton Friedman and his argument for completely free markets, and points out how "shocks" -- both economic and political -- paved the way for other countries to try his methods. By rights, here in the land of Friedman, we shouldn't bail these companies out, but just let them fail and our economy with them. Supposedly our society would end up better off, never mind how many of us might suffer.

Of course, even Republicans don't do that. With luck, along with this massive bailout we'll get some revived and even improved regulation.

Though as Klein warns us, don't think you've seen the death knell of the "free market uber alles" argument. It'll be back as soon as we get things put back together and it could screw up the other things we need to deal with, like climate change for example.

Given the depth of the crisis, many of us may not live to see the next round.

Here's another suggestion for something we can do -- besides voting Democratic this time and making sure Congress actually passes some meaty regulatory schemes: Lobby the high schools to teach economics. Make it a required course, just like civics and history. Given the complexities of modern finance, everyone needs at least a basic grounding in how economic systems work.

Used to be everyone needed to know how to raise food, build houses, cook, and sew. These days, what everyone really needs to know is how to manage their own money -- and how to control those who manage vast amounts of it.

Another reason to vote for Sen. Obama

By Nancy Jane Moore

I'm traveling, so I get my news in lumps. This morning I read about the Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers collapses; now I see that the Dow dropped over 500 points.

The NY Times reported the reactions of the two presidential contenders to the financial news.

Barack Obama said the current situation was "the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression" and added, "This country can’t afford another four years of this failed philosophy."

John McCain said that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong."

I can't respond better than Sen. Obama did: "Senator McCain, what economy are you talking about?"

Is Palin Mrs. Pritchard and other entertaining bits from the news

By Nancy Jane Moore

Joel Achenbach has the best take so far on the Republicans:

So far the Republican National Convention has gone according to script. Unfortunately the script was written by John Waters.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert makes a good point about the Palin pick:

Palin is the latest G.O.P. distraction. She's meant to shift attention away from the real issue of this campaign -- the awful state of the nation after eight years of Republican rule.

Herbert cautions us to avoid getting caught up in the distraction.

On the other hand, is anyone else besides me taken with the parallel between Sarah Palin and the main character of the British program on PBS, "The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard"? For those of you who don't watch PBS -- I only saw this show because it comes on after the British mysteries, which are much more satisfying than "CSI and Order" and their many clones -- Mrs. Pritchard is an ordinary working class British woman who gets outraged and ends up as prime minister. (I've only seen bits and pieces, so I don't know how all that happened.)

There are lots of differences between Mrs. Pritchard and Palin, of course, the most obvious being that Mrs. Pritchard is actually trying to do something about global warming instead of cheering for the oil companies. And clearly a strong network of women politicians has rallied around her, because virtually all of her ministers and assistants are women. It's hard to watch the program and not root for her.

But Mrs. Pritchard represents that desire many people have for so-called "common sense" leaders who speak their minds (and often shoot from the hip) and Palin's public image is precisely that: an ordinary woman taking care of business. Of course, Palin is actually a pretty ruthless politician -- not to mention a religious right extremist -- judging from what I've read about her and Alaska politics, but image has a tendency to overpower truth in these matters.

Inspiration comes to the deeply cynical

By Nancy Jane Moore

Oh, hell, I'm inspired. I listened to Barack Obama accept the Democratic nomination for president tonight, and I started to believe that we really could solve the multitude of problems that confront this country -- problems that would have been challenging enough even without the incredible failures of the Bush administration.

I already knew Obama was a smart man with good ideas who could give a great speech, but now I also know he's tough and willing to take strong stands. And even though I'm a cynic when it comes to politicians, I found myself moved. I found myself shouting "Yes!" I found myself crying. (OK, so I noticed a couple of compromise positions in there -- as my father keeps pointing out, Obama is a politician. But he's a damn good politician.)

Obama is an unlikely combination of charismatic and disciplined, of idealistic and practical. If anyone can pull off the kind of change we need in this country, he can. (See, I told you I was inspired.)

The last politician who moved me this much was John F. Kennedy when he said "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." I was 11 years old at the time. It was a lot easier to inspire me when I was 11.

I've got to say, it scares me a little to feel so inspired. I've been hurt so many times before. But I can't help it tonight. I actually believe that electing Obama might fix this country's problems.

We've been talking about race and gender throughout this campaign. Discrimination on both fronts has affected my life. I went to segregated schools until my senior year in high school. And I've been told all my life that I couldn't do certain things because women couldn't do them. The fact that the Democratic Primary came down to a fight between a woman and a black man meant a lot to me, because it showed a real sea change from the country of my childhood.

A friend of mine, speaking on a panel on women writers at a science fiction convention a couple of weeks ago, said, "I don't want an editor to buy my story just because I'm a woman." To which I responded, "I don't want an editor to reject my story just because I'm a woman, either."

All people of any consequence want to be judged on their merits, not their race, not their gender. It is to the Democrats' credit that they are now ready to nominate a black man. It is to their credit that they gave serious consideration to a woman.

But the reason the Democrats nominated Barack Obama is because he has the kind of ideas this country needs now. And in the end, that's the most important criteria for selecting a president.

If I'd been out on that football field, instead of watching on television, you'd have seen me clapping my hands and yelling, "Yes, we can."

"Iraq is a corpse."

By Nancy Jane Moore

So said the great investigative reporter Seymour Hersh (pictured at left) at a lecture in San Antonio April 4.

He was speaking as part of a series named in honor of another great iconoclast: Maury Maverick Jr. (pictured at the bottom), who lived up to his name. (In fact, the term "maverick" evolved from his family name -- he came from a long line of mavericks as well as Mavericks.)

Hersh is blunter as a speaker than he is as a reporter. In his excellent coverage of U.S. foreign policy in the pages of The New Yorker -- here's a recent example -- he puts together a set of damning facts and lets the readers draw their own conclusions. But in person he counts down the remaining days of the Bush administration and warns that Bush will be dangerous until "11:59 AM on January 20, 2009."

Hersh, who opposed the Iraq war from the beginning (as I did), thinks journalists as well as politicians let us down. I have been grateful for him and the few other brave souls who kept giving us the facts that no one seemed to want to hear until a couple of years ago.

He discussed a lot of things in his speech -- including the scary idea that the Bush administration hasn't given up on war with Iran -- but what really grabbed me was his emphasis on just how big a mess our government has made of Iraq. There are millions of refugees, both in other countries and even within Iraq. The U.S. military is perceived as just another militia in a country full of armed camps. The Iraqi people are more and more segregated by religious belief -- Sunnis and Shia no longer live in the same neighborhoods. Baghdad doesn't even function well, much less anyplace else.

Cleaning this up is not as simple as just pulling out the U.S. troops, Hersh says. It's just too big a mess. He didn't have a list of ways to solve this problem, but he did challenge the Democratic candidates (he had no hope that McCain would listen) to talk honestly about how difficult it was going to be to fix things and to come up with ideas.

Much as I wish we could just bring the troops home and pretend the Iraq war never happened, Hersh is right. This isn't just a moral issue -- even though all that human suffering should keep us awake nights. Iraq and the Middle East as a whole is a volatile area of the world, with problems rooted in a couple of centuries worth of outside interference by a variety of superpowers. All mistakes made there come back to haunt not just the region, but the entire planet.

So we can't just walk away, though it's possible that anything we do will cause new problems down the road. As I've said more than once, the only useful solution I can find to the Iraq mess is time travel -- go back to 2003 and stop the invasion (or better yet, go back to 2000 and prevent Bush from stealing the election). Unfortunately, time travel violates physics as we know it, so we need to work with the messy current reality and try to do our best.

Regardless of what happens in Iraq itself, the fallout from this war will haunt our country for many years to come. The $3 trillion or so we've spent will have to be paid off somehow. The large number of injured soldiers -- particularly those with brain injuries -- will be a painful legacy, and I fear there will be even more PTSD in Iraq veterans than there has been in those who fought in Vietnam. Our military has been badly damaged.

Our economy is in the toilet right now. Actually, I don't think that has as much to do with the war as it does to many other bad policies from the Bush years -- the erosion of regulation and lack of support for crucial areas -- and the lionization of wheeler dealers on Wall Street coupled with the insane idea that the housing market (like the dotcoms before it) couldn't crash.

But the incredible waste of this war will definitely harm us down the road. We're going to be paying off that war instead of rebuilding our infrastructure and making sure we have an educated populace ready to face the future. I often fear that Bush has led the country so far down that we will never come back, even if we should elect several gifted presidents and end up with a Congress full of people interested more in the common good than their own careers.

Still, it's not just the fault of Bush or Congress or the journalists, though all have let us down. The latest New York Times poll says 81 percent of the American people think the U.S. is on the wrong path. They're right, of course, but why did it take them so long to figure it out? The country's been on the wrong path for seven years now.

We sure do need a lot more mavericks.

Will Rogers: "I don't belong to any organized party. I'm a Democrat."

By Nancy Jane Moore

I experienced the truth behind the famous quote from Will Rogers (pictured at left) last Saturday at the Travis County Democratic Convention.

Though the problem wasn't infighting among the candidates; on the whole, Obama and Clinton supporters were quite civil to each other. Supporters of both candidates made speeches from the platform, and while they praised their candidates, they also all said the party was lucky to have a choice between two good barrier-breaking candidates and reminded us that the stakes in this election are huge.

The lack of organization was logistical, mostly because just about everybody showed up. There were somewhere between 7 and 8 thousand people there. Just getting to the venue was a problem: it took the people from my precinct about 15 minutes to get across town to within a mile or so of the county exposition center (I think it's for rodeos and such), and then at least another hour to actually get into the parking lot. And that was with carpooling.

Then we stood in line for another hour or so to get badges. Everything was supposed to start at ten, but it was well after noon before things really got underway. And it was after four before we finally did the most important thing of the day: electing the delegates and alternates from each precinct for the state convention.

My precinct only had one of each, but both the people we sent off are pledged to Obama, as were a significant majority of all the delegates chosen in Travis County. It was obvious from the crowd -- when Obama supporters Congressman Lloyd Doggett and former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk made speeches, they got loud support from the crowd. Clinton supporter Terry McAuliffe got polite applause, but a great deal less noise when he made his pro-Clinton comments.

The Texas Two Step isn't over until the state convention in June, when delegates to the national convention will be chosen, but it's obvious from Saturday's results that Obama will win the delegate count. The Austin American-Statesman reports that Obama is likely to take about 60 percent of the delegates.

Meaning, as I said earlier, that Obama won Texas. He got the delegates. And it's important to understand how he got those delegates: grassroots organizing. My precinct was entitled to 18 delegates to the county convention. Because many more Obama people turned out at the precinct, 13 of us were pledged to Obama. And we all showed up. Only three of Clinton's five delegates showed up.

I was originally an alternate, but I moved up to fill a vacancy. That's why we got all 13 of our delegates -- our leader made sure all the delegates and alternates were kept informed. We even met in advance.

That's what organizing is all about -- communicating with volunteers and getting them to show up. Our group of Obama delegates was diverse: male and female, black, white and Asian, and young and old. Of those I asked, one was a nurse, another a chef, one worked for the state, another as an assistant to a TV reporter. The main thing we have in common, outside of supporting Obama, is that a large chunk of us live in the same apartment complex (it's a big complex). But none of us knew each other before the Obama organizing started.

Now we do. Now we know where to start if we want to organize more political activity in Austin. The Democrats need more of this kind of organizing if we're going to clean up the mess Bush and his cohorts have made of our country.