I don’t really see myself getting sued and I don’t real have any assets anyway (my enormous collection of more than one hundred novelizations of Doctor Who episodes have a very limited resale value – even the ones based on episodes featuring the inimitable Tom Baker), but should any of you feel like, there is, apparently, liability insurance for bloggers (scroll down a bit once you open the link) who say terrible, mean, nasty and otherwise indefensible things like ‘Romney’s Anti-Obama ad running in New Hampshire is nothing by low down, lying bulls–t.’
Will He Or Won’t He?
Challenge for Iowa, I mean.
Romney, I mean.
So far, he appears to have been discreetly pulling a McCain, i.e., skipping the Iowa caucuses. Discreetly because he’s still putting resources and staff into Iowa, but just a fraction of what invested in Hawkeye state four years ago.
Like McCain, he says New Hampshire as being where he can really shine and as acting as his electoral firewall.
But he’s looking at a couple of issues.
On the defensive side, the ‘anyone but Romney’ vote just isn’t going away. In a multi-candidate race, Romney’s consistently been hanging around 20%. But that’s been more or less enough so far, so his staff aren’t panicking. But they’ve also got to be thinking that his New Hampshire firewall could start looking a lot more flammable if someone not Romney grabbed real momentum coming out of Iowa. Even a narrower than expected victory in New Hampshire could see his might fortress turn into a collapsing house of cards.
On the offensive side, they’re thinking, ‘we don’t really want to drag this out.’ Iowa could be a chance to finish this. I suspect that Romney’s campaign has the best organizational structure of any GOP candidate. He won’t win Iowa based on love, affection, nor on any real desire to see him be president. But he might win based on tactics and organizational discipline. And if he does, he probably has things wrapped up. If he loses Iowa, but wins New Hampshire handily, things are probably still pretty well in hand for the Romney campaign, but they’ll still have to spend precious television dollars in places like Florida. Money they could stash away with a double whammy in Iowa and New Hampshire.
I don’t pretend to know which way they’ll go, but I can guarantee they are wondering whether to continue ceding Iowa, bar a token effort.
OccuPoetry: Poets Supporting Economic Justice
Another group of poets coming out in support of the Occupy Movement and its emphasis on addressing the growing economy inequality in our country – OccuPoetry.
One of the founders is a professor at UC Davis – the university where police pepper sprayed students engaged in non-violent resistance.
The Public Library Under Threat
Huntsman Not Actually Running for President In 2012
In asking this question, The Atlantic seemed to miss the obvious answer.
Jon Hunstman isn’t trying to win the 2012 Republican primary.
Okay, I mean, he obviously filed to run for president as a Republican in this upcoming election, but it should be pretty obvious that, for months now, he’s actually been executing a different plan than one intended to win the upcoming primaries.
Sure, when he jumped in, he was going for it. He thought that there might be a space for him as someone with more constancy than Romney (not a high bar) and more sanity than Bachmann (also not a high bar).
But he’s not, at least not so far as I know, an idiot.
It’s been quite clear for sometime that he was just not getting traction and that there wasn’t enough oxygen left in the room for him to develop the necessary traction.
And around the time it became clear that he wasn’t going to win the primary, he began to make a series of public, rational, centrist statements acknowledging things like global climate change and the need not to engage in constant, endless wars. He might even have once said that an American without health insurance should not be allowed to die on the hospital curb (which is apparently a controversial stance).
He is betting that in either 2016 or 2020 the electorate will have sufficiently rejected right wing extremism that a moderate Republican in the mode of a Reagan (the real Reagan – not the Tea Party caricature of him), if not a Rockefeller, would be in fashion again within the GOP.
And he probably has a point. Even if a Republican wins in 2012 (which is looking less likely than it did a couple of months ago), the turn to the far right will have to end in the next few cycles – whether from natural evolution (something that, I believe, Huntsman has expressed a belief in) or from a reaction to a painful repudiation at the polls.
The Republican Healthcare Plan
As someone who had a kidney transplant, my ears perked up when I read a story about Congressman Paul Ryan basically lying to a man with end stage renal disease.
James Fenton and Mark Kraushaar
The Folger Shakespeare Library‘s most recent poetry reading featured the 2011 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize winner, Mark Kraushaar, who won for his second book, The Uncertainty Principle, and British poet James Fenton. Fenton was also the final judge of this Hecht Prize this year and selected Kraushaar for the honor.
Kraushaar was a somewhat awkward reader and his poetry not completely to my taste. I know that The Uncertainty Principle has wound up on several “best of” lists and I won’t deny its quality. It is just not my cup of tea.
His poems are very prosy and narrative with colloquial language. When introducing him, Fenton noted that his poems are indubitably “about something.”
Fenton suggested that too many poems are inscrutable for the sake of being inscrutable, or rather because of a vicious loop in the MFA community (there’s a lot of discussion about MFAs and their effect on poetry lately). He held Kraushaar as a counterweight to that.
Naturally, I am little unsure about that dynamic. I don’t mind – and frequently enjoy – poems that resist easy interpretation. “This poem is about X.”
However, when Fenton himself read, I was blown away.
Some years ago, in Alabama, I think, I bought a book of his poems. I don’t know why. I think that I barely touched them.
But listening to him read from his Selected Poems… intricate and compelling rhyme schemes, a fierce political ethic, and a willingness to put himself in the shoes of people far different from himself (a child soldier in Cambodia in the seventies, for example). Fantastic stuff.
Naturally, I bought his book and asked him to sign it.
Holy C–p!
Once you get through the first thirty or forty seconds, you can see Walsh start to scream at his constituents, getting into some poor woman’s face.
And in case you forgot, Congressman Joe Walsh is that upstanding guy who is refusing to pay more than $100,000 in child support for his two children.
Why Poets Should Be Part Of Civic Discourse
I’ll let David Biespiel explain why poets should be involved in national conversations.
And a special shout out to all the poets involved in the Occupy movement.
Alan Grayson
Alan Grayson was probably never going to win re-election in 2010. It just wasn’t the year for it. His opponent was a long time political institution (even if he’d been out of politics for a while), not visibly toxic, and with deep fundraising ties. In other words, an acceptable, well funded Republican in a swing district in a Republican wave election.
But, let’s be honest. It didn’t have to be as bad a defeat as it was.
Grayson simply refused to run a campaign suited for central Florida.
No one is saying he should have given up his principles or ceased to be a fiery advocate.
But some of his issues were more in tune with the district than others. Somehow, those issues (his Ron Paul-like mistrust of the Fed, I suspect, would have played surprisingly well) never got aired but those were not so in tune with the district (constant criticism of military actions in Afghanistan in a heavily military district, for example; while supporting a draw down from Afghanistan might have polled well, nothing that sounds even remotely like criticism of the military would) were a lot more visible.
At present, Grayson is angling to run for what will presumably be a new, swing district in central Florida (probably with a large Puerto Rican population).
He doesn’t appear to have learned any lessons.
In my inbox are appeals on his behalf from – get this – Ralph Nader.
Not only will this kind of effort not win friends from swing voters, a lot of dyed in the wool Florida Democrats are still a little miffed at Nader about 2000. This is the kind of campaign that could cause a former Congressman, with strong ties to the base Democratic vote to actually lose a primary, nevermind a general election.
I liked Grayson’s voice in the House. He didn’t win a lot of issues, but he never let up on reminding Congress of its obligations to fairness and justice. We need voices like that. But unless something changes, that voice isn’t going to his.
the coffee philosopher 