29 September 2005

California

After some thought over the posting I briefly had up yesterday, I've decided to not discuss work matters on this site until after the election that I'm working on. While I have no false opinions on the fact that this site gets about 2 views a day, I also know how easy it would be for someone to find it if they searched for things related to what I'm doing. So, as not to have anything blow up in my face, I'm going to be blogging to a non-live site on work matters until after November 8th, when the California special election ballot initiatives have been voted on. At that point, I'll be uploading all of my posts on this election, in diary form. Until then, I will be blogging, but on other matters...some of it may be indirectly related to the election, some not.

One thing that I cannot understate is the fact that I'm in California. For work. On an expense account. And it amazes and shocks me that anyone would allow this responsibility to fall to me, especially at the stage of my 'career' that I'm at. I don't know many other people my age that have been given such an awesome opportunity. Being out here is a great experience, and something that I will definitely look back on fondly, regardless of the turnout of the election. The people in this office, while I may not agree with them on professional matters, are good people. They all believe in some roundabout way on the issues that I feel strongly about. They just have different opinions on methods and effective uses of people's time.

Another interesting thing going on out here is the California wildfires, exacerbated by the Santa Ana winds. The Santa Ana winds gust up to 50 mph or so, and strike in the area I'm living. It's pretty crazy to have that large of a gust during an otherwise beautiful day. The weather's been at or close to 100 degrees for the past week, but the winds the past day or two have been up to 40 mph. The fires are just a few miles away, but there doesn't seem to be a fear that they will spread much. So far they've only destroyed one house and killed one firefighter, which seems to be a pretty good thing.

Other than that, work hasn't been too bad. We've finally opened up our phone banks, and hopefully volunteers will start to flow in. The people we are calling are much more receptive to us, especially when we relate to them by telling them we're union volunteers. Yesterday, we identified 315 favorable voters, and only 8 unfavorables...so it's just going to be a matter of reaching out to these people again during GOTV...hopefully that will be enough to defeat this thing.

12 September 2005

NYC Mayor reprised

So, months ago I posted a few items on the NYC mayoral primary and how I was rooting for Anthony Weiner to become the Dems' choice to face Bloomberg. Looks like he's doing much better:

After weeks pounding the pavement, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of campaign ads and a couple of strong debate performances, he has marched steadily up in public opinion polls. A Marist survey released yesterday shows him with a 30 percent share of likely Democratic voters, a statistical tie with Fernando Ferrer, who has consistently led most polls, giving Mr. Weiner his highest numbers yet in any poll.


The problem is that no one actually has any idea what will happen tomorrow in the primary. Who will show up? How many of them? From where? How many lower-income folks, minorities, upper-class, etc... Much depends on the GOTV operation, the paid media this past weekend, and other factors...I'll be keeping my eye on it though.

A retrospective...

Just a quick post on a Time article that I found to be rather interesting:

But when it did, he did not immediately show that he sensed its magnitude. On the Monday that Hurricane Katrina landed and the Crescent City began drowning, Bush was joshing with Senator John McCain on the tarmac of an Air Force base in Arizona, posing with a melting birthday cake. Like a scene out of a Michael Moore mockumentary, he was heading into a long-planned Medicare round table at a local country club, joking that he had "spiced up" his entourage by bringing the First Lady, then noting to the audience that he had phoned Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff from Air Force One. "I said, 'Are you working with the Governor?'" Bush recounted. "He said, 'You bet we are.'" But the President was not talking about the killer storm. He was talking about immigration, and the Governor was Arizona's.


Hm... so the day a hurricane is hitting, the President is eating cake and talking about immigration with people at a country club. And we thought My Pet Goat was bad.

07 September 2005

Katrina

First on today's docket: Hurricane Katrina

Yup, it's the most talked about story of the day, with inumerable angles to take in analyzing it. Being the hack that I am, however, and since I've already written about the nature of the disaster from a human standpoint, I'll discuss the fact that this simply did not have to be as much of a humanitarian disaster as came to pass. From the fact that our president was on an unprecedented 5-week vacation away from DC, to the fact that FEMA didn't even begin to mobilize people to the afflicted area til 2 days after the disaster, to the fact that our president took three days to get back to DC after the disaster, the fronts on which to batter the government for ineptitude is endless.

I am choosing to not link to outside sources for this entry because, while much of these issues have been touched on, I want it to be clear that this is entirely a posting of my own opinions, not something that I feel I need authority to. That said, however, the media has done a pretty good job of attempting to get through the bullshit and find out who's been responsible for the multitude of errors in preparaton, rescue, and cleanup. Russert in particular did a good job grilling Chertoff on MTP Sunday, asking whether he would resign and not accepting Chertoff's bullshit responses.

Back from that tangent.
Breakdowns/Mismanagements:
1) LA state/NO local governments should have been more forceful in enforcing the evacuation once they realized how bad it was going to be.
2) People that had the ability to leave NO should have. By staying they not only harmed themselves, but they also took up time that first responders had to spend on their rescue. First responders could have been saving the poor, the indigent, that unfortunately had no other way out of town which brings me to my next point,
3) The federal government. What the fuck. How about sending in some...cruise ships, airplanes, buses, trains, fucking hot air balloons to help with the evacuation of the city. If we knew that there was going to be a major storm, why not make sure that these people got out. It's ok to invade these people's bedrooms through gay marriage bans but not to save their lives?.. And granted, we didn't know that this was going to be as bad as it was. Or even if we did, after the storm, it seemed like the brunt of the city was spared, BUT once it was quite evident that the levee was breaking, it still took too much mother-fucking time to get FEMA in there. What is the use of FEMA, and for that matter, DHS, if they are not going to be able to protect us from a natural disaster? With so much of the National Guard, troops who would foreseeably be helpful in a disaster like this, sent over to rebuild another country, what do we do about our own?

This is such a mess of biblical proportions, it makes one wonder what the use of the government is if not to protect its own people in times of a natural disaster. And with a President who is both oblivious ("I don't think anyone had an idea that the levee was going to break") and late to work, a FEMA leader who is utterly useless, and a head of the DHS who claims to be interested in saving lives but seems more worried about damage control, and a White House AGAIN looking to pass the buck (oh it was LA's fault), this is another headless horseman. Another instance where our government, FOR THE PEOPLE, is not being led by anyone with the proper capabilities. We are a country without anyone holding the reins, in a time where we need a leader more than ever. "There are problems that we will fix because we are problem solvers." That's useful rhetoric, Mr. President, but what the fuck do you plan on doing to fix the problem? Instead of utilizing first responders for purposes they are needed for, Mr. President, you are using them for PR purposes. You are having firemen come into Louisiana to 1) hand out flyers with FEMA's phone number on it, and 2) pose with you for a MOTHERFUCKING photo. Is this what Karl Rove had you do, sir? Instead of fixing the problem, you have to make sure it looks like youre in the middle of the action? Fuck you, Mr. President. It's a shame you weren't stuck in New Orleans on vacation. Then we would have seen how quickly you would have gotten your work together.

Here's the article about the first responders being sent into 'action.' It's quite interesting.

My Second attempt at a comeback

Well fuck, it's been another month since I said I'd start back up, but here I am. Major developments in the last month include an increasingly likely chance of me being sent off to California for a while to work on the AFL-CIO's anti-Schwarzenegger ballot initiative campaign, a hurricane, and me signing up to run in a marathon.

Should I be sent out to California, I will most likely be in one of three San's: Diego, Bernardino, or Joaquin. Now I don't know too much about the latter two, but I am under the impression that Bernardino is just outside of the LA area, and being that I have a number of friends in LA, my preference lies there. San Diego would be awesome, no doubt, but there is already a sturdy infrastructure there, which would mean less responsibility for me. Should I be sent to one of the other two locations, chances are I would be in charge of an office, or at least something more significant than being a minor foot soldier. Complicating matters is the fact that I have not been given an okay to go yet, but things seem to be heading in the proper direction. Labor unions, as I've learned over the brief period I've worked for one, move slower than the slowest bureaucracies one might imagine. It's like walking in a quicksand pit. Perhaps it's just the setup of my, and some of the other, older unions, but it seems to me that there are more layers of caution tape than is imaginable. Things move so slowly from the top-down, it's a headache to get even the most minor of initiatives approved. I am amenable to power and working with the old boys' club, as it is, but sometimes there has to be a change in the machine, an adjustment to the cogs. Instead of having a legislative/political department without authority to develop their own legislative/political initiatives to further the purpose of the union, sometimes I think we are just here for the slightest possibility that we might be needed to oppose legislation from the White House. While this is understandable in the type of anti-labor government we are facing, at some point, one has to cease being solely re-active, and pro-actively work for their core beliefs while fighting against the anti-labor initiatives: in other words, a fight on multiple fronts. When a union has the type of talent in its legislative/political department that we do, doing anything less is a waste. IE, what we are doing now is essentially a waste. Am I grateful to have this job? Absolutely. Do I feel like I could be doing so much more in this position? Absolutely. I've been given a great responsibility of being in charge of a region of this country, but I could do much more with that responsibility if given the opportunity to enact some of my own initiatives or at least work towards them. I feel bottlenecked by the immovable structure of the union, the fear to fight our own battles and start some campaigns that don't relate to the singular issue that we are wokring on. Ahhhh well. Guess I wouldn't have as much time to work on important things, like blogging.

Next, the hurricane. I'm going to devote a full post to this later today, but at the moment, I have something to get off my chest. The hurricane's aftermath has been beyond the worst handling of a natural disaster by this country's government. If we were unable to protect our own people in a time of crisis, if we could not so much as bring in buses, planes, trains, cruise ships, and mother-fucking cars, to evacuate those people that would willingly leave their homes; those poor people without their own cars, without the means to afford a plane ticket out of town; we should not be sending a dime to another country to support their rebuilding process. Why in the fuck should we be rebuilding Iraq's infrastructures, and Afghanistan's infrastructure, when we cannot even protect our own nation's infrastrcuture; when we cannot protect our own indigent? Our own people are now commonly being referred to as mother-fucking refugees. In this, the supposed most advanced country in the world. I will save the political, partisan view of this for my later post, but initially, it seems prudent to view this as what it was: a disaster. On the natural level and at the governmental level.

Finally: I'm planning on running in a marathon. Yes, I know, shocking. I have never run competitively; in fact, I've shunned it. I never wanted to play soccer because I thought it was too much aimless running around. I guess as one grows, their views change. I am in need of motivation. I need to better myself both physically and mentally. Challenging myself mentally is sometimes difficult, due to a variety of reasons, but challenging myself physically is something I've hardly ever been able to accomplish. Simply because I typically quit if it gets to be too tough. The closest I've been to a properly trained physical specimen was during my freshman year of college, during which I rowed for the crew team. I managed to force myself out of bed at 4:45 in the morning, and run 3 miles down to the Gtown boathouse by 5:30, and then rowed for an hour or two, all before the sun even came up. Since then? I quit after one semester, for a variety of reasons, not all of which were of my own choosing...due to family circumstances and other issues, I was unsure of my ability to afford a club sport. Nevertheless, the very next year, my sophomore, I joined a fraternity. From that point on (and honestly, a bit before then), my social life improved at the cost of my physical one. Instead of working out, I'd lay about, watch tv, drink beers, or who the fuck knows what. Four years later, here I am. Oh sure, I've tried working out on my own; in South Dakota, Jason, Scott and I even joined the Rapid City YMCA; we worked out in the Travis Tritt gym for fuck's sake. And, since I've moved back down to DC, I've been on-again, off-again working out on my own; mainly off-again. I decided that it was time to motivate myself and figure out a way to get myself in shape. When the AIDS marathon came up, it sounded like a good idea. Basically, I've got to raise $2,700 for the Whittman-Walker clinic, all the while, training to run 26.2 miles. The irony? The marathon is supposed to be held on February 5, in New Orleans. As of now, that is still the set location, but I would not be the least bit surprised if it's moved within the next month. We've already been told that there is a possibility of us running in another alredy scheduled, undetermined marathon. However, I love the city of N'awlins, and will be sad if it's not held there. There are a million other things that have to happen in the city before ours comes up, but I certainly hope the city has regained at least some of it's old shape in the next few months, and we're able to go there. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem the least bit likely, but I'll hope, both for the residents of the great city, and for selfish reasons. I'll be getting a marathon packet soon, and probably have to start raising $$'s soon, so I'll certainly be posting information on here soon. If you do know me, I will likely be personally emailing or writing you, soliciting you for $$. Be assured that it's a good cause, because you'll be both helping people with AIDS and motivating me to lose some of this beer gut I've developed over the past 5 years. I'll even show it to you if you want to see before and after pictures.