Category Archives: Politics

The Candidate We Want, and the Candidate We Need

Howard DeanPart of my recent diffidence towards design is the looming fear that George W. Bush is going to be re-elected in next year’s presidential contest, and that sitting here at my desk and designing Web sites is probably not a sufficiently effective way of doing all I can to prevent that from happening. That’s why I have been spending a lot of time trying to parse the recent media buzz that’s dramatically increased the attention paid to former Governor of Vermont Dr. Howard Dean, once an awkward long-shot and now a kind of lightning rod for the Democrats’s hopes and fears for 2004.

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Fuel for the Fire

Oil BarrelYou can hardly argue that there’s no connection between oil consumption and terrorism, but even if you can ignore all the evidence pointing to gasoline-fueled cars as the crucial link between American culpability and third world enmity, I still don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to make cars more fuel efficient. Led by Republicans and backed up by Democrats from auto-producing states, the Senate yesterday rejected a proposal to increase the mandated fuel-economy of passenger cars to 40 miles per gallon… by the year 2015. That’s a dozen years from now, and the opposition argument is that this sort of legislation is a danger to American jobs. C’mon! Saying that the American auto industry is incapable of gearing up for a new fuel economy standard over the course of twelve years is a kind of insult to American ingenuity and resourcefulness, isn’t it? Or maybe it’s a testament to laziness, greed and an obstinate unwillingness to really address the reality of our role in the world.

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Email Your President in Several Easy Steps

Seal of the President of the United States of AmericaIn order to send an email to President George W. Bush, it’s no longer possible to simply break out your favorite email client and dash off a message to president@whitehouse.gov. Those concerned citizens wishing to express some opinion or pose some question to the most secretive administration in modern times must now jump through a series of technological hoops in the form of an unnecessarily complicated and laborious series of forms on the White House Web site.

Email Form

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Looking for WMD in All the Wrong Places

Bush & PowellKnowing that I am a bit quick to cry foul over anything the Bush administration does, I have tried to reserve judgment on the current, somewhat desperate, so far unsuccessful search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that the run-up to the recent war there was predicated on half-truths, falsehoods and specious intelligence; a decent overview of the situation as it stands this week is available at The Economist. Clearly, any WMD program that Saddam Hussein may have had in place does not live up to the tremendous advance billing given to it by the Bush administration. If weapons of mass destruction are indeed found in Iraq, I’m convinced it will be a discovery guided by serendipity rather than intelligence.

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The Day the Music Died

FCC Chairman Michael Powell and his two Republican cohorts sent a powerful message today to companies that already control much of America’s television networks, newspapers, radio stations, and cable television systems: ‘No more will we coddle you in your duties in upholding the First Amendment. From now on, media companies had better grow up and learn how to promote the values of free speech and democracy all on your own.’ At first shocked by the sudden turn of events, the media companies are expected to rise to this great patriotic challenge by further consolidating the principle venues for broadcasting, publishing, communication and discourse. It’s a great day for this great country. Ugh.

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Weekend Worrier

The number one thing I will be doing this weekend is worrying about the impending vote at the FCC on relaxing the rules of media ownership. Most people who know me will readily agree that I am starting to harp on this subject, but it pains me greatly. The vote takes place on Monday, but the attendant media coverage is so wildly disproportionate to the vote’s significance to the health of American democracy for the next generation (which is to say there’s very little coverage ) that it’s all I can do to just complain aloud about it.

Actually, it brightened my day a little today to see Ted Turner come out publicly against relaxing these rules, even though he is a major shareholder in and board member of AOL Time Warner, a company that will clearly benefit greatly from these proposed changes. But I still dread Monday afternoon and the almost assured kick in the groin of free speech that the results of this vote will bring. Have a nice weekend!

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Take Note

The NoteUnexpectedly, one of the sharpest sources for political commentary on the Web is The Note, from the ABC News ‘Political Unit.’ Written with a tart, often gossipy insider’s tone, this daily journal is a heady fix for hardcore political junkies and those who, like myself, are merely enticed and not quite yet enraptured by politics. A friend turned me on to this several weeks ago, and I was at first overwhelmed by its loquacious onslaught of links, commentary, analysis and rumors, all of which revolve mostly around the 2004 Presidential campaign. Though its length is still daunting (I would say that the page for each day’s Note is as tall as ten or fifteen screens), I find myself eagerly reading as much as I can of it each morning. That’s also a sign that I’m starting to get worked up for next year’s Presidential race.

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Consolidation without Representation

FCC Chairman PowellA major defeat for democracy is imminent at the FCC, which is just three weeks away from voting on significant changes to the rules that govern media ownership. FCC Chairman Michael Powell, the son of Secretary of State Colin Powell, has not only withheld information on these changes to the agency’s five commissioners, but he has also refused to make documentation on them available to the public. In all likelihood, they will relax these rules, allowing even greater consolidation of media control among the huge corporations that already dominate television and radio.

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Cuts Like a Knife

Congress is set to approve the third-largest tax cut in history … yet another political victory for the Legion of Doom that is the Bush administration and its collaborators in Congress. Everything that was bad about the second-largest tax cut in history, also engineered by this administration just two years ago, still applies to this one: deficit spending, disproportionate benefits for the rich, deferral of fiscal responsibility to the next generation of tax payers, and a general absence of plausible logic.

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