[Reposted from First Draft]

Something very interesting happened over on the Obama transition team’s Change.gov site a week ago.  It was the day before Thanksgiving, so it didn’t make as big of a splash as it might otherwise have.  An invitation was issued to Join the Discussion and tell the Obama team “What worries you most about the healthcare system in our country?”  Transition team members Dr. Dora Hughes and Lauren Aronson opened the discussion with a video request for feedback.

Making use of a system created by Intense Debate, the threaded discussion grew into 3,701 comments. Six days later, comments were closed, followed by an video response yesterday from Aronson and HHS Secretary nominee Daschle.

I know I’ve done my share of Obama cheerleading but that’s not what motivates me to find this chain of events pretty damned impressive. First, it’a a helluva change from what we’re used to.  As noted on techPresident.com

Second, I think it’s fair to say that it signals that Obama and Co. want the electorate to believe they are serious about those campaign promises regarding enabling citizen access to the process of government via technology.

I’m optimistic but still a bit cynical, or at the very least cautious. I am fascinated at the prospect of an actual meaningful exchange, but I use the word “signal” deliberately.   We obviously aren’t yet able to take full measure of the true extent of the interactivity, from both sides. The Daschle response video was short and shallow,  mostly intended to get the point across that “We’re listening!”

The signal’s been received, noted, and appreciated, but now what? What happens to that input? Having a forum makes a difference to the citizens but will it make a difference to the policy makers?  How do we know and what will we see as proof of follow-through? There’s a good argument made here that a more wiki-like approach would greatly enhance the conversation. It’s also likely that some system of revision control/notice will have to be put in place to demonstrate transparency.

Change.gov took another encouraging step on 12/1 by switching the site’s content over to a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license, which in effect, says that the content on the site is free to the American public to take and use as they want.  Imagine that…

We can assume that other issues will be opened to a forum on Change.gov. I think we can also count on the White House website morphing into something much more Change.gov-like after the transition of power.  Ideally, if promises are kept, this will bring information access, interactivity, and greater transparency into the daily business of governance. And what about us? Will we respond accordingly and participate?

Tags: Change.gov,internet,Obama,technology
Categories: Flea Circus, Metonymica
1 Comment »

[reposted from First Draft]

Watch this clip from a Fox News morning show featuring Fox News Blonde Jill Dobson doing a sort of hit and run preview of Milk. As noted in the excellent analysis by YouTube poster LiberalViewer, Dobson tidies up the Milk legacy, sweeping it right back in the closet in fact, by describing the film simply as  “a movie about a 1970’s politician, Harvey Milk.”   Not a single mention of WHY Harvey Milk was important enough to merit a biopic, and of course no use of the word “gay,” or even “homosexual.”

Further, Dobson dismissively glosses over the acclaim being given to the film, tossing off the following explanation: because Sean Penn is the star and “critics always love him,” Milk is getting positive reviews but “it’s expected to have a small audience because it’s not necessarily going to appeal to a very broad audience.” (Love the penetrating logic of that statement, Fox News Blonde.)

As it turns out, surprise! surprise!, Dobson was a bit off about the Milk box office. Even with its limited opening (36 theatres), Milk was one of the top 10 grossing films of the long Thanksgiving weekend, as noted by glaadBlog:

MILK averaged $52,627 per screen, grossing an estimated $1.9 million. Though this maynot seem like a lot of money, let’s compare with other films that opened the same day. The holiday romantic comedy Four Christmases brought in $46.7 million over five days, while the Baz Luhrmann epic Australia earned $20 million. Impressive, right? But if you look closer, those numbers only equal out to $3,310 and $2,642 per screen, respectively.

Now do you have perspective?

Milk opens nationwide December 5.

Tags: Fox News,GLBTQ,Harvey Milk,Milk
Categories: 365 Days a Queer, Persistent Illusion, Weasels & Vultures
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Someone asked me about my header image.  It’s a photograph of my maternal grandmother (in the middle), a great-aunt (on left), and possibly, another great aunt (in law). There is a corresponding set of pictures of their menfolk. The women are wearing the men’s hats and holding their guns.  I’ll try and find both pictures and post them side by side.

Categories: Domicilium, Retinal Hearsay, Texanstantinople
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I’m thankful

for the Democratic victories in the 2008 election. Mistakes will be made, things won’t be perfect, there will be disappointments, but the Bush regime has been put down, and there are opportunities for growth and change.

for having an income, employment, food, clothing, shelter and other small securities as we look forward to a very uncertain future. Will these things last? I don’t know but I am grateful I have them now. I do not take them for granted.

for having a fixed rate mortgage.

for the trust and affection of my friends

for learning and growing and having moved past where I was a year ago, and even farther from where I was a year before that. After my life sort of fell apart, there was a time when I honestly believed I wasn’t fit for human company and I’d said goodbye to that idea and resigned myself to simply try to be as useful as possible. I’m grateful my health and balance returned and I saw that life was bigger than that, even though the transition was awkward and imperfect at times.

that I live in a location with no light pollution and can see the stars. When I moved here I had no idea how much I would come to love looking up at a sky full of stars. After a bad day, or when I’m feeling tired, or especially broke, I look up at the night sky and things get put back in perspective.

that I live with these nutty animals, even when my spazzy, at-risk teen, younger dog wakes me up at 4 in the morning and I let him out and he just wants to sit there and take the air.

Categories: Domicilium
3 Comments »

Reposted from  First Draft.

If you’ve not yet seen David Modigliani’s documentary Crawford, it can be viewed in its entirety at Hulu. Highly recommended, and entirely apropos now, during the lame-duck End of Days, and in light of the election 2008 bullcrap about Real America.

The pic above is part of a great post about Chicago real vs. Crawford real over at BAGnewsNotes.  Athenae riffed on this stuff a few days back in this post:

I’m pretty damn excited about a president who comes from where I come from, who sees cabs and bikes and elevated trains and subways and buses every day, who doesn’t have an “estate” or a “compound” or a “ranch” someplace “real.” People always say they want a candidate they can relate to, after all. As a girl so white she’s practically transparent, I can’t lay claim to a connection to history near as strong as those African-Americans who’ve been waiting their whole lives for a president who looks like them, but I can take a certain amount of joy in having a president who sees my skyline every day from his front sidewalk.

I’m fine with small towns, suburbs, you should do whatever you want to do. But we do America no favors when we assume the qualifications for leadership include coming from one place and not another, and we need not only diversity of race in our leaders but diversity of experiences.

By actually being “real,” which for him meant being really different, and still winning the election, Obama  has potentially shifted the rules. It’s a question of degrees: candidates will always be marketed and branded, there will always be stagecraft involved in the game for sure, but in post-Obama politics, there may be a “base” for whom reality is actually a plus instead of something to compensate for or disguise. Or, if not an outright plus, something that is simply what it is and nothing more. Obama served on a board with Wiliam Ayers and lived near him. Even though McCain never succeeded, even though it was flimsy, he never stopped trying to pin more than that on Obama.  He never had a choice because his role dictated it: since it was an undisputed fact that there was an Obama-Ayers connection, it was likely also factual that Obama would lie about it and McCain had to keep calling him out, even though it never stuck. Not enough people ever believed Obama was lying — about anything, much less Ayers.

Again, it’s a shift, not an entirely brand new game, but it’s a big shift, I’m not saying Obama isn’t above kabuki, but he never occupied an entire town to try to prove he was something he wasn’t.

W. bought the “western white house” in Crawford so he could appear real enough to win the 2000 election, so he could look like he was from somewhere, like he was of a certain culture. It didn’t fool all of us but it worked for a lot of people. At least he looked like he was trying. Eight long years later, now that  pretty much everyone can seen through the holes in that cheap illusion, now that he’s run the country into the ground just like the rest of his endeavors, now that he no longer needs it, he’ll be leaving Crawford behind for the bright lights of Dallas, where I suspect he’ll feel right at home.

Dallas is a rich man with a death wish in his eye.

A steel and concrete soul with a warm hearted love disguise.

A rich man who tends to believe in his own lies.

Dallas is a rich man with a death wish in his eyes.

Tags: Bush,Chicago,Crawford,Election 2008,Obama
Categories: Flea Circus, Metonymica, Texanstantinople
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In large bowl:

E.V. olive oil

red pepper flakes (I like a lot)

sea salt

dried Italian seasoning (needless to say, you could sub fresh)

couple of handfuls fresh spinach leaves

stir/mash all the above up and let sit while pasta is boiling

I used veggie rotini pasta

Drain pasta but not too much- a TB or so of cooking water is good.

Mix with oil/herb mixture.

Simple, but the sea salt and red pepper combo really lends a brightness (and nice texture bits) to the spinach/olive oil bottom tones.

Tags: cooking,pasta,recipe
Categories: Domicilium
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A cold front will bring strong northerly winds of 20 to 25 mph with gusts to 40 mph to much of south central Texas before midnight.

The first norther of the season.  Entirely expected, yet momentous. And by me anyway, forgotten completely till it started.  I come in to work, and leave, an hour later than the rest of my office and I stayed at work even later than usual tonight, not because I was slaving away, but rather catching up on tweets and other happenings in my corner of the world. Hey, it’s Friday.  The world outside my big window at work was completely dark, I was oblivious. The time changed last week and I’ve already gotten re-acclimated to driving home in the dark again.

Then I remembered I had to pick up a prescription, and that there was nothing I was doing that I couldn’t also do at home, so I bundled up my stuff and left. I stopped to turn off the lamp left on by a coworker, then walked out into the hall and it was like walking into a dream. I knew, just knew, the entire 11-story building was empty. It wasn’t scary that I felt, more like a frisson of pure emptiness. I was wary but not afraid being in this void yet public space, all the lights on, the elevators working, all just for me and my lonesome. The elevator dinged louder than usual and I got in and rode down, every footstep and building creak audible as I walked through the first floor lobby past the lighted portraits of long-dead university presidents, then out into the fresh air.

I saw the wind before I felt it, before I’d even gone outside. My building is surrounded by a series of ponds, lighted at night, and there were crazy ripples blowing across the gleaming water’s surface. I pushed open the door and the wind ripped it out of my hand and slammed it back, then forward and closed. It was the perfect puncutation for the sudden change of scene: leaves swirling everywhere, students walking past in their sweaters and jackets, hollering at each other, cars whizzing by. Friday night in a college town, all around ebullience.  I felt invisible moving through it, I certainly wasn’t part of it, but I didn’t begrudge it either.

I drove to pick up my meds, waiting at the drive-through window longer than I wanted to, watching the citizenry stream in and out of the grocery store. Payday for a lot of these folks, merely a beer run for others. Everybody was dealing with the crazy wind, little kids squealing,  plastic bags flying around, dust whipped up and hanging over the whole parking lot, holding weird patterns from the milling headlights.

I was glad to turn toward home, and get out of town. The moon not yet up, it was pitch black as I headed west.  I drove with my windows open, enjoying it. Definitely a norther, buffeting my car as I drove up through the winding hills and home. At the house, the dogs were giddy and crazy. Anyone who lives with dogs knows that happy wild barking.  I’m usually cautious about keeping them quiet when possible because of my asshole neighbor, but tonight I let them get their ya-yas out for a while. How could I not let them bark? The tall cedars around my house were whipping around and creaking in the wind.  The moon, absent all the way home, wobbled up though the crazy dancing boughs and silhouettes of leaves.  Like a bowl of butter, waning gibbous, but mighty bright still. Between the gusts, I heard the windchimes of the neighborhood pealing out their tones, and my dogs were not the only ones baying.

My two cats came streaking one after the other out of scrub at the back of the yard, each leaping up on separate fenceposts, then across the rocky yard and up the steps of the deck. In their wake, a group of yearling deer clattered out of the brush and came to a standstill, their noses up in the air, whuffing and snorting in this new chill rolling out of the sky.

Tags: Hill Country,norther,weather,Wimberley
Categories: Domicilium, Get Out!, Persistent Illusion, Texanstantinople
1 Comment »

At the end of the day, Prop 8’s passage was more a generational matter than a racial one. If nobody over the age of 65 had voted, Prop 8 would have failed by a point or two. It appears that the generational splits may be larger within minority communities than among whites, although the data on this is sketchy.

What we are protesting is the injection of that faith into public policy, not the church’s views or their leaders’ right to convey them!

Tags: Election 2008,GLBTQ,National Protest,Prop 8
Categories: 365 Days a Queer, Flea Circus, Metonymica, The Blind Lady
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Lot of it going around.

Change that is.

I found my initial theme template cumbersome to manage, In addition, I had been wanted to try a different approach for a while, something that fit me, the whole of how I communicate online, better. Also, given that a great deal of my traffic is RSS driven, something that fit readers better.

And so. This part, the blog part, reserved for longer posts, and when the camera comes out of rehab, photoblogging. Simple and clean, though I of course cannot refrain from tinkering with widgetry and plug-ins.

And this part, the tumblr part, for more instantaneous, off-the-cuff, gadfly stuff.  I considered combining the two in one place but the hybrid templates I test drove seemed just as cumbersome as my previous one.

As for your RSS feeds:

• if you just want writing, use the blog feed.
• If you want all of it, the blog posts PLUS  twitter, music, and other esoteric impulsivity, grab the tumblr feed.

And so, we carry on.

Tags: Blogs,feeds,tumblr
Categories: Domicilium, Mise en Place, Persistent Illusion
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