Category: Politics

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Wow… a new issue of Rising Stars! To be honest, it was a bit of a let-down. Usually JMS is better at showing, rather than telling. He’s infamous for laboriously laying groundwork in the B-plots and character moments of what seem like “ordinary” stand-alone stories, then kicking the arc into high gear and making use of it all. He did it with Babylon 5 and Crusade, with the first arc of Rising Stars, seems to be taking the same approach in Supreme Power, and from what I’ve heard (though I’ve seen very little of it) he did the same with Jeremiah as well. If you’ve seen B5 once the story got going, go back and look at some of the first season episodes, and you’ll be surprised how early some elements are established.

This issue, however, though it had some nice moments, was basically a plot summary. “Poet tells the story of…” It seemed an odd narrative choice, particularly for an issue so near the end of the story (#22 of 24) and for the first issue to hit the shelves in nearly two years. Maybe it’ll read better in context.

Anyway, that’s not what I really wanted to talk about. What’s interesting is that in this issue, one of the Specials runs for President. It reminded me of something about the way comic books tell campaign stories. When a fictional character is in the race (or the office), he (it usually is a he) is almost always running under one of three circumstances:

  • As an independent.
  • On a fictional third-party ticket.
  • On an unidentified party’s ticket.

As we all know, third party candidates are rarely high-profile, and they rarely get significant numbers of votes, and I don’t think one has ever won the office*. Yet in comics, it happens all the time. Of course, heat vision, teleporters, and people who wear purple tights to fight crime are also commonplace. Continue reading →

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Veeery interesting! By now everyone’s seen maps colored in red/blue by state, which make the vote look very regional (the South and Midwest pull red, and the northeast, the West Coast, and the Great Lakes area pull blue). A map by county makes the country look extremely red, until you realize that many of the blue counties are the more populous ones, highlighting the fact that the split is primarily urban/rural.

A Princeton professor has taken the election results and produced a shaded map by county, with a full red-purple-blue continuum. Looking at this map, it’s clear we’re a lot more integrated than we think we are.

Thumbnail of map

Hat tip: from a comment on peterdavid.net.

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Despite Bush’s appeal to Kerry supporters [in his acceptance speech], Cheney said the popular vote victory gave Bush a mandate and the Bush White House would continue pushing for the Republicans’ “clear agenda.”

Excuse me, but how the #@*! is a 51% victory a “mandate?”

In any other race, that would be called “barely squeaking by.”

Yes, it’s unusual for a presidential candidate to actually get more than 50% of the popular vote, but that still means 49% of the voters preferred someone else. If you broke a cookie in half, and got a 51%/48% split with 1% of crumbs, you wouldn’t notice the difference.

Last night there were state propositions hovering at around 53%/46%, and the LA Times thought they were too close to call. That kind of victory in a state race would never be considered a mandate, or a repudiation, etc. — it would have passed by the skin of its proverbial teeth. A 66% win? That would be a mandate. A 60% win? Maybe. But 51%? That’s a sign that you’d better look at what people wanted from your opponent, not a blank check to ignore half the population of the country.

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Perhaps you’ve heard of electoral-vote.com. Over the past few months, the site’s author has been collecting data from various polls and trying to predict which candidate is likely to carry each state. Each state’s support is classified as strong, weak, or barely there, or a straight tie, making it a more useful gauge than a simple red/blue map.

Yesterday’s data showed a strong win for Kerry, 298 electoral votes to 231. This morning it shows a virtual tie: 262 for Kerry, 261 for Bush.

This morning the “votemaster” also writes about dealing with a simultaneous denial-of-service attack and Slashdotting (or “flash crowd” as he prefers to call it), and he talked about his previous Slashdotting experience… with a rebuttal to claims that Linux was stolen from Minix.

Yes, the “votemaster” is none other than Andrew Tanenbaum, author of the MINIX operating system, one-time teacher of Linus Torvalds, and an interviewee for Samizdat, the Microsoft-funded study that attempted to prove that Linux couldn’t possibly have been developed honestly. Tanenbaum was disturbed by the leading questions, and incensed when his responses were taken out of context and used to support a position he categorically refuted. He and others posted rebuttals before the book even saw print, and by the time it was actually published, it was essentially a nonissue.

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One thing that always stuck in my head about government, way back to elementary school, was the idea of checks and balances. You see, our government was designed deliberately to prevent any one person or group from getting too much power and becoming a de facto monarch (or oligarch). For instance, Congress passes laws, but they don’t go into effect until the President signs them. The President is commander-in-chief of our armed forces, but only Congress can declare war. The House and Senate are designed with different representations so that neither the most populous nor the most numerous states can overwhelm the others.

This principle extends further. Competing businesses keep each other in check (word of the day: free market). Business and government keep each other in check through lobbyists and regulators. Conservatives and liberals, playing tug-of-war, should together keep us trying new things without completely losing track of the old things we should keep. This can usually be managed by having one party in charge of the White House and the other in charge of Congress. The last thing you want is for the extreme right or extreme left to control all branches of government. (We’ve seen what a conservative-controlled country is like over the last few years, and a lot of people don’t like it.)

So it was interesting to see J. Michael Straczynski (a.k.a. JMS), best known as the creator of Babylon 5, talking about the breakdown of civility in politics in terms of the breakdown of checks and balances. If you have 10 minutes to read this tonight — especially if you’re an American citizen of voting age — I recommend that you do. You may nod in agreement, or you may shake your head in disbelief, but it should at least make you think.