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Posts Tagged ‘we are political monkeys’

Prop 8 ruled unconstitutional

The decision on Perry v. Schwarzenegger has come down, and the ruling is that Proposition 8 (declaring that California only recognizes marriages between a man and a woman) is unconstitutional.

Which is hardly going to be the end of this; the case will end up in front of the Supreme Court eventually. But it’s good news for equal rights.

I’ve been following the court case off and on. If you haven’t, you really ought to take a look — because it’s astonishing, how incoherent the Prop 8 defense is. The incoherence starts with the proposition itself, I suppose; California only recognizes marriages between a man and a woman as valid, except for those same-sex marriages performed prior to the enactment of Prop 8. Why do those get exempted? Because the odds of it passing would have dropped precipitously if its supporters had tried to invalidate thousands of existing marriages. Then you get things like the motion the defense filed before this decision, trying to delay enforcement of the decision (which tells you they knew how it would go), wherein they claim in a single document both that “Same-sex relationships […] neither advance nor threaten this interest [of procreation] in the way that opposite-sex relations do,” and that “Not only would redefining marriage to include same-sex couples eliminate California’s ability to provide special recognition and support to those relationships that uniquely further the vital procreative interests marriage has traditionally served, it would indisputably change the public meaning of marriage.” So which is it, guys? Does same-sex marriage threaten the procreative function of marriage, or not? And that’s not even touching the point that we don’t exactly require fertility tests before letting people tie the knot; as the judge overseeing the case pointed out, he recently married a pair of geriatrics long past their procreative days.

To quote the decision, “Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California constitution the notion that opposite sex couples are superior to same sex couples.” That’s the coherent thread running through all the defense’s arguments. Every time they were pressed to cite evidence that same-sex marriage would cause material harm to children, the institution of heterosexual marriage, or the fabric of society itself, they failed — and tripped over a mountain of contradiction in doing so. You can cite religious arguments against the idea, and then we can have a theological debate, but when it comes to state and federal law, there is no defensible basis for this discrimination.

The White House Photographer

So apparently it’s been standard practice since Kennedy’s day to pick one official White House photographer, who then hires a flock of other photographers, and the minions shoot various public events but the head guy is the one allowed to wander around behind the scenes, snapping pics while the President is in meetings or on the phone.

According to this Daily Kos diary, Pete Souza is the current White House photographer, and previously held the post during Reagan’s second term. What’s different from Reagan’s day is twofold: first, Obama has apparently given the guy much more extensive access, and second, the White House posts his photos on Flickr.

Looking through them, what gets me is the role Souza’s work has in creating the narrative of a presidency. He’s not the only guy taking photos of Obama, of course, and photos are far from the only record we’ll have. But no matter how much you remind yourself that photos can be just as biased as any other form of art — timing, framing, post-processing — there’s still a subconscious tendency to accept them as “the truth.” And behind-the-scenes photos, doubly so: when the president is out in public, then of course we understand he’s performing a role, but surely in those moments when he’s alone, you see the real person behind the mask.

Except he isn’t alone, is he? The photographer is there. And just as the president is deciding, consciously or unconsciously, what face to show, the photographer is deciding — consciously or unconsciously — what to record.

There’s a startling amount of power in that.

When we see a shot of Obama with his feet on the Oval Office desk, it both frames him as a “regular guy” and connects him with a photographic tradition of other presidents. When we see his marked-up speech, it tells a story of intelligence and thoughtful preparation. When we see him standing alone before an event or while talking on the phone to some foreign leader, it reminds us of the burdens our nation’s leader bears; when we see him in a crowd, it connects him to the people. All of these things create a narrative, but a narrative always has a narrator, and in this case, it’s Pete Souza.

Let me be clear: I’m not bringing this up because I think it’s sinister. I think it’s an excellent idea to document these things, and given the circumstances, it’s amazing enough that one guy gets to run around in meetings and private moments, let alone the prospect of opening that up to multiple photographers. But it’s worth remembering that any documentation is always, always inflected by the person doing the documenting, and so it’s interesting to know who that person is.

two links of a political nature

I’m hardly the only person to post this one, but it deserves as wide a readership as it can get: Imagine If the Tea Party Was Black.”

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic?

One of many examples, flipping the colors on Tea Party activity to expose the racism and white privilege that runs throughout the movement. This isn’t just about the hideously offensive signs some protesters have proudly waved; take those away, and race would still be a major element, however much they like to deny it.

And, on the class-warfare front: Profiling CEOs and Their Sociopathic Paychecks.

Only about 1 to 3 percent of us are sociopaths-people who don’t have normal human feelings and can easily go to sleep at night after having done horrific things. And of that 1 percent of sociopaths, there’s probably only a fraction of a percent with a college education. And of that tiny fraction, there’s an even tinier fraction that understands how business works, particularly within any specific industry.

Thus there is such a shortage of people who can run modern monopolistic, destructive corporations that stockholders have to pay millions to get them to work. And being sociopaths, they gladly take the money without any thought to its social consequences.

I can’t say for sure how strong the logic is; I wouldn’t be surprised if there are also social reasons, linking CEOs to shareholders such that the latter don’t mind paying hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to their friends. But at the very least, it offers an argument for why there isn’t enough competition to drive CEO pay down.

Last day of freedom

Tomorrow is the ankle surgery, after which I will be stoned on Vicodin for a while. So if you don’t hear from me, blame the drugs.

Before I go, some linky:

Generic Movie Trailer — oh god, it’s like “Title of the Song.” A hilarious (because accurate) structural breakdown of trailers for the kind of movie that’s trying to win an Oscar, done as a trailer. “And then the music . . . gets . . . hopeful . . . .”

An open letter to conservatives — less funny, but more useful in the long run. Your one-stop-shop for evidence as to what’s wrong with the Republican Party today. Conservatism as a concept, I often think is wrong in the sense of “I disagree with you;” conservatism as it’s most visibly being practiced today in America, I often think is wrong in the sense of “what the hell is wrong with you people?” The letter includes a billion and one links documenting, as it says, the “hypocrisy, hyperbole, historical inaccuracy and hatred” currently afflicting the party’s loudest voices.

Marissa Lingen on “fake swears” — back to the funny. Having recalled it during the course of commenting, I think I will revive “son of a hairless kumquat” as an insult in my repertoire.

“Scientific Romance,” by Tim Pratt — best love poem ever. (At least if you’re a geek.)

political linkage, all in one place

I’ve had various things open in tabs for a while now, but the truth of the matter is that I probably won’t have the brain-power to say anything substantive about them until, oh, November. So screw it. I’ll just toss them up in a single post, and leave it at that. If you aren’t interested in politics, cruise on by.

New Rule: Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit — Bill Maher, expressing a lot of my concerns about what happens when the profit motive becomes the governing principle of various fields.

Touching back to principles — Abi Sutherland on the need for the government to protect the individual against the corporation.

The GOP’s Misplaced Rage — pretty much a classic case of “I didn’t leave my party; my party left me.” Bruce Bartlett, long-time Republican economist and old-school developer of supply-side economics, on the ways in which our current problems are the GOP’s fault. I don’t necessarily agree with his ideas on how we could and should fix the problems, but this guy is exactly what I see lacking in the face of the Republican Party today: an intelligent, principled man whose views I can respect even when I disagree with him.

An Officer’s Experience in Our Christian Military — this worries me. A lot.

I like it when snark meets activism.

Those of you who don’t follow American political news may not know that the Minnesota Senate race — you know, the one from last fall — is still pending. Norm Coleman is behind in votes, and has been throughout the process, but keeps pressing the appeals and recounts and so on, such that Al Franken (the apparent winner) still hasn’t been seated.

At least one of the factors in operation here is that the longer it takes to seat Franken, the longer the Democratic Party is without their fifty-ninth Senator. Which matters a fair bit on close votes.

Well, somebody came up with an amusing way to give the Republican Party incentive to drop the appeals. To whit: the “Give a Dollar a Day to Make Norm Go Away” campaign.

The idea’s simple: you sign up to auto-donate a dollar a day to the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. They cancel your subscription when Norm Coleman concedes. (If you’re worried he’ll drag this out for months, you can also set it to end at a certain date.) So the longer he hangs in there, the more money’s in the PCCC’s warchest, to be spent against Republican opponents.

This just amuses me. It’s kind of a “life -> lemons, you -> lemonade” kind of approach. And it’s just the faintest bit snarky, too, without being really mean-spirited.

I’ll be curious to see if Coleman files his new notice by Friday (the deadline) or not.

Correction: I got one detail confused with another race, so let me amend this to say: Coleman was ahead on election night, but (iirc) the margin was close enough to trigger an automatic recount under Minnesota law. Franken moved into the lead during that process.

Things that warm the cockles of my heart, #19

I didn’t watch Obama’s speech tonight, but I did just come across a thirty-second clip that put a big ol’ grin on my face. It consisted of two guys (I have no idea who they are, sorry; I am painfully ignorant of Congressional procedure) announcing loudly, “Madam Speaker, the President of the United States!” And then cheering and there’s Obama, heading out to make his first address to Congress.

Madam Speaker.

President Barack Obama.

The future is not so bright I gotta wear shades, but things like that do make it shine a bit.

a followup to that safety thing

I don’t know if all the details on this are right (I’m confident there’s more we aren’t being told about), but this diagram of the new presidential limo is eye-opening.

Sure, its mileage is in Hummer territory, and it won’t be winning any races — but this thing could eat Hummers for breakfast and keep on rolling.

And the bottles of blood are a nice touch, if more than a little creepy.

more inaugural thoughts, in no particular order

Probably my oddest thought of the morning, brought on by the (for me) early hour and the kind of research I’ve done these past few years: I find it interesting that while there were about five padded wooden seats for the key participants of the ceremony, everybody else up there was on plastic folding chairs of a type you might find anywhere. It’s a marked contrast with the physical splendor once considered de rigeur for, say, coronations. There’s no sense that the rest of the First Family are now too special for plastic folding chairs, and no particular glitz for the President himself.

In general, I know there was a lot of pomp and celebration leading up to and following the event, but fundamentally speaking, the inauguration itself is remarkably simple (in its performance as well as its furniture). As I said to kniedzw, the oath felt almost like an anticlimax: the handover of power had slipped by a couple of minutes previously, when the clock struck noon. The quartet finished playing, Obama stood up, and a couple of sentences later it’s done. As rituals go, that’s not much.

Rick Warren: I’m still not happy with that. But I am happy with Joseph Lowery (a civil rights activist whose take on gay marriage apparently boils down to “what in God’s name are you doing wasting your time on the private behavior of loving adults when there are starving children who need your help?”), and also with Gene Robinson, a gay bishop whose invocation on Sunday struck me as very poignant:

Welcome to Washington! The fun is about to begin, but first, please join me in pausing for a moment, to ask God’s blessing upon our nation and our next president. …

Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah. …

That’s a radical sort of prayer — by which I mean it makes me think, not of Christianity, but of Christ, and the pretty radical message he preached, which has been sanded down and made more comfortable over the centuries. Anyway, yes: Warren is something to be angry and disappointed about. But he shouldn’t be allowed to eclipse all the other clerical choices; their voices deserve to be heard, too.

Can anybody tell me what happened to Cheney? I caught some comment about an accident, that’s put him temporarily in a wheelchair.

And finally, the speech. If I were given it to critique, I could find things I would have done a little differently, but overall it was beautiful in both form and content. I love the rhetorical devices that elevate Obama’s words to a kind of poetry, and I love the fact that the hope he preaches isn’t an empty thing of “let’s cross our fingers and hope things get better,” but a call to arms, to roll up our sleeves and make it reality. He managed to criticize past action while maintaining a positive tone, which is a pretty deft trick, and one that I think will serve him well.

The only dark note: I breathed a sigh of relief once it was over, that everything went off safely. I’m going to spend the next four (or eight) years perpetually afraid for that man’s life, and the lives of those around him — sad, but also true. Pray to any divine power you think might be listening, and also to the good men and women of the Secret Service, that this historic change doesn’t end in tragedy.

Ladies, gentlemen, and others . . . .

. . . we give you the forty-fourth President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama.

Ye gods is that man a good speaker.

I hauled my sorry self out of bed way before my usual hour just to watch the inauguration live. That’s how much I love our new President. (Heck, if I’d still been living in Indiana, I would have strongly considered driving to D.C. for the day — though hearing the weather report this morning made me kind of glad it was out of the question.) I have a couple of thoughts about the inauguration ceremony, but as I also have a dentist appointment this morning, for which I should get out the door, I’ll save them until later.

But yeah. Happy day.

there’s a bad joke to be made here

There’s something appallingly Orwellian about the phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and the abuses it is used to cover. But if you’ve ever wondered how our intelligence agencies can get useful information out of detainees without torturing them, here’s how.

Critics of J.K. Rowling may be tempted to joke that the Harry Potter books are torture, but the real point is down in that last block quote. All it takes to “break” some people is kindness. And the intelligence you get in return is more reliable, not less — while also creating allies instead of enemies, bettering your national image, and generally behaving like a moral human being.

***

As long as I’m talking politics, I might as well also link to this set of asinine arguments against early voting. Seriously, most of this boils down to: 1) it’s better to be seen voting by your fellow citizens, 2) you might make an impulsive decision based on personal preference, 3) omg what if in the last week it turns out the guy you voted for kicks puppies but you’ve already cast your vote, 4) early-voting polls might influence people who vote later, and 5) if you can’t take some time on Election Day to go vote, screw you.

Cause, y’know, all those people working three jobs to make ends meet ought to be able to spare a couple of hours to stand in line.

The closest he comes to a legitimate argument is when he talks about the possibilities of voter fraud and non-secret ballots. But voter fraud is far from the imminent danger threatening to devour our sacred democracy that some make it out to be, and there are ways of handling those problems. Oregon votes 100% by mail-in ballot, and I haven’t noticed that state collapsing in a wave of corruption. Early voting, whether by mail or at polling places, increases voter turnout; I have trouble seeing that as a bad thing.

interesting linkies

For gollumgollum and all you others in the health-care field: an article on unlaundered scrubs and the transmission of bacteria. What I liked? Seeing Monroe Hospital in Bloomington held up as an example of how to prevent this problem.

For, well, anybody with a weird sense of humour and/or an appreciation for Edward Gorey: The Recently Deflowered Girl. (Some pages are funnier than others.)

For anybody pissed off at M. Night Shyamalan’s casting of lily-white actors for the live-action Avatar movie: addresses to complain at. The usefulness of complaining is, of course, very uncertain; but at least you can try.

For completing the schizophrenia of this link post: Change.org‘s ideas competition. Again, the usefulness is uncertain, but this is more than just a random web poll, and there are some very interesting ideas there. Also some that really don’t strike me as major priorities (do we really need to be worrying about dog breed-specific laws when there’s the Patriot Act going on?), and a bit of redundancy (spot how many candidate ideas have to do with the environment or marijuana!), but I got pointed at the competition because of the “End corporate personhood” idea, which is one of those random things that gets me all frothy at the mouth. So vote if you want to — you need to make a profile, but that’s quickly done — and while you’re there, if you want to click on the thingy for ending corporate personhood, know that it’ll put a smile on my face.

So true.

And it makes my academic brain glee over the way fanfiction has given us an entirely new vocabulary with which to describe the world.

campaign temperament

This journal will not be all politics, all the time for much longer, I promise you. But when one uncovers a motherlode of good reading, one naturally wishes to share.

Since I only just this cycle started paying any real attention to the details of presidential campaigns, this is the first time I’ve heard of Newsweek‘s “How He Did It” series, which is apparently a long-standing practice. They embed reporters with the various campaigns, but put them under a strict embargo, only releasing their articles after the election is over. The result is an abso-frickin’-lutely fascinating and human look at the road to the White House — not only for the victor, but for his opponents along the way.

Now, I’m sure there’s a certain similarity to VH1’s “Behind the Music” shows — you know, the desire to search out the dramatic “but behind the scenes, everything was falling apart!” moments. Having said that, what I’ve read of the series so far highlights something I find very telling, about the temperaments of Clinton, McCain, and Obama.

I had reasons to like Clinton; I think she could have won the election, though probably not with Obama’s margin of victory, and I don’t think she would have sucked as a president. But my confidence in her ability, I must admit, is much weakened by this account of her campaign: she appears to have had no gift for managing her team. She failed to balance conflicting personalities and bring her fractious underlings into line, and the result, at least for a while, is that nothing effective got done. Ads against Obama were made and then shelved, because nobody could agree on what line they should take. It says elsewhere in the series that candidates are not supposed to micro-manage their campaigns, but I do imagine they’re supposed to provide leadership, and Clinton seems to have failed at that. Which does not inspire confidence in her hypothetical presidency: if she can’t forge consensus out of her campaign team, would she fare any better with her administration?

And then there’s McCain. I’m glad they had fun with their wacky pirate bus road trip, and I’m sure he’s a great guy to hang out with when he’s in the mood, but nothing I read about his temperament makes me think he belongs in the White House. He, too, had trouble getting his people to pull together, and has a really passive-aggressive streak to boot, never firing anybody, but making them so miserable they leave on their own — and then calling them up for advice long after they’re gone. He doesn’t like to listen to advice, and while he may be happy as the scrappy underdog gritting his way to the top, that’s a bad mentality for leading a country that has not been a scrappy underdog for at least a hundred years. I could also say a lot about his selection of Palin — and maybe I will, once I get to the part in the series that discusses it — but even before he made that monumental error in judgment, I just don’t think he was the right guy for the job.

Which brings us, of course, to Obama. It’s been said before, but the things I’m reading in the article reinforce it: the guy is smart, thoughtful, and disciplined. His campaign made its share of errors, but the instructive thing is how they reacted to them. They learned. They adapted. And they worked together. Before the Wright thing started blowing up, they decided they needed to look over all the guy’s sermons for potential sources of trouble, but it never happened. And when it came back to bite them? Axelrod blamed himself for not following up on it. Contrast that with the backbiting in Clinton’s and McCain’s campaigns, where everybody was more than happy to blame somebody else. The difference lies in the individuals, but also in the people in charge, who both chose those individuals, and created the dynamic of their interactions. Obama’s advisers didn’t always agree with each other, and he didn’t always agree with them, but they listened to each other, and examined their own judgment. When discussing VP picks, Obama didn’t want Clinton; the two of them did not get along. But when his advisers gave him a list of reasons why she would be the wrong choice, he kept questioning them on it. Were they sure? It wasn’t him second-guessing; it was him making sure their reasons (and his own) were practical, not personal.

That’s a temperament I want in the White House.

Anyway, I’m not done reading the series yet (and two chapters have yet to be posted), but those thoughts were rattling around in my head and preventing much else from getting done, so I figured I’d get them out. I highly recommend the series; it’s a lot of reading, but very, very good.

I’m going to get to work on this book, and stop reading political news. Really I am.

Eventually.

In the meantime, check out this map, by way of The Daily Kos:

Red is counties shifting more Republican than in 2004; blue is more Democratic.

Check out how dark Indiana is. That doesn’t mean the state has suddenly become a Democratic stronghold; it just means the vote swung strongly leftward from where it had been (which resulted in it landing almost perfectly balanced in the middle). Virtually the only part of the nation where Republican sentiment gained in strength was Arkansas, stretching into Oklahoma and up through Appalachia. Even chunks of Alaska went more Democratic this time around, some of them quite sharply.

Even Wyoming, which last night had one of the strongest McCain margins of victory, is mostly blue on that map.

The information I’m waiting on, incidentally, for the substantive post I mentioned before, is electorate stats. I’ve seen exit poll data on electorate share for young voters, African-Americans, etc, but a) exit polls are not great data and b) electorate share isn’t that useful metric, since it’s a zero-sum game, where gains in one area must be matched by losses in another. What I want to know is how much the total number of votes cast by each group changed, and what the turnout rate was for each demographic. That’s where the interesting meat is.

Prop 8 info

Just as a heads-up to interested folks. (No, I haven’t gotten to work yet. Surprise!)

First of all, they’re still counting provisional/absentee/early/etc. votes, so the result is not official. However, it’s highly likely that the measure will pass.

But, its passage in the election isn’t the end. Lawsuits have already been filed. Short form, as I understand it, is that same-sex marriages were recognized in California because the CA Supreme Court ruled that opposing them was unconstitutional. Amending the constitution, according to more educated opinions than mine, doesn’t remove the conflict with Article I. So on legal grounds, the amendment itself may be struck down as unconstitutional. Getting around that would require revising the original text of the constitution, which is much harder to do.

Moreover, as that link points out, the CA justices said back when they made their decision that there were two ways to solve this problem. The easier one was to legalize same-sex marriage. The much, much harder one was to say, “to hell with this; civil unions for everybody, gay or straight.” Which in some ways I’m in favor of: I don’t think what the government says about a relationship and what a given religion says about it should have anything to do with one another. If we could actually push through a terminology change that would recognize the difference, I’d be in favor of it. But (as noted in the comments to that post) this creates a massive inter-state problem, since civil unions are not simply marriage by another name, not under the variety of state laws the U.S. has. So this may be more of a nuclear option than anything else: do all the people who voted for Prop 8 really want to go down that road?

Let’s be pessimistic, though, and say the amendment stands, and the legal fight continues. This analysis lays out the basics of how it would fare in the U.S. Supreme Court. Short form of that one is, this could be the queen sacrifice (no pun intended <g>) that wins the chess game. There’s a strong body of federal law and precedent and so on that can be mobilized to support gay marriage rights, and a Supreme Court decision in that direction would address this question in all fifty states at once. And while we may be worried about conservative justices, conservative or not, they have to respect the implications of the law. kittenrae suggests those implications would, in the end, be in favor of acceptance.

So: while the proposition will likely pass, the results may not be as bad as you fear. And the fallout from here will be interesting to watch.

(Links by way of zellandyne.)

aneurysm time

And now I have to disengage my brain from thoughts about modern America and participatory democracy and post-racism and the disintegration of the conservative movement and all that stuff, and go back to thinking about the philosophical underpinnings of seventeenth-century monarchy.

Brain. Hurty.

There are a lot of things to say about last night. Some of them I’ll have to wait on, since I want actual statistics to discuss, rather than exit polls (which are a statistical mess).

But a few scattered thoughts:

I’m glad Jon Stewart was the one to tell me. ^_^ (We were watching Comedy Central’s hour-long coverage special at the time.)

McCain supporters at the concession speech: not cool. Speech good, but I wish he had been a little more energetic in quieting the boos.

Part of me wishes I were still in Indiana, not only so I could be part of flipping that state blue — seriously, the results aren’t finalized, but it looks like it happened! — but so I would have had a real possibility of hopping in the car and driving to Chicago. Because a part of me really wishes I could have been there in Grant Park.

Sadly, my being in California does not appear to have made a difference in Prop 8. But there are already legal battles being prepared; we’ll get rid of that thing, and I hope sooner rather than later.

As moving as the headlines from around the country are, what get me more are the international reactions. Very nearly the entire world was rooting for Obama. And while he’s going to have a four-year uphill battle, trying to fix the many things that have gone wrong, the simple fact of his election is enough to make many nations look more kindly upon us. That alone is worth the weight of the White House in gold.

Now? The real work begins.

I am perversely disappointed that I did not have to wait in line to vote. ^_^

(It’s the advantage of being free to wander in at 10 a.m. Sadly, it is also the advantage of living in an affluent area. That latter point is one that really needs fixing; being poor has enough problems, without also meaning you have to stand in line for six hours due to insufficient voting equipment.)

Election Day

In a few hours, the polls on the East Coast will open for the 2008 United States election.

You may be tempted to stay home because you believe your candidate’s victory is a foregone conclusion, or because you believe his defeat is. Or because you look at the scale of a presidential election and conclude your vote does not matter. And the further west you live — as I’m realizing, now that I’m in California — the stronger that temptation becomes.

Get out there and vote anyway.

Vote because this is your first chance to elect someone other than a white man into the White House. Or if that isn’t your cup of tea, try one of these.

Vote because you can keep a good representative or senator in office, or dump a bad one.

Vote because you can do the same for governors, state legislators, mayors, judges, town councilmen, and dozens of other local officials.

Vote because you can change the laws of your state, county, or city.

Vote because you can.

One vote alone will probably not decide the next President of the United States. But we’re more than just our head; all the rest of the body matters, too. And you can always make a difference there.

Vote even if they call the race when the East Coast polls close. Even if you have to stand in line. Be a part of this.