Schlagwort-Archive: US Politics

Iraq, US Politics

900 million Dollars.

That’s 900 000 000 Dollars, or 2 465 753,42 Dollars a day, on an annual basis ignoring all kinds of interest. It’s also the amount the current American administration wants to spend to search the weapons of mass destruction it could not find so far. A third, roughly 300 million US Dollars, has been spent already with, to be honest, discouraging results. Tonight, David Kay, US special WMD investigator is reporting to the US Congress about the results of the hunt for the smoking gun in and around Baghdad. And apparently, he’s not too confident about finding anything even slightly reminiscent thereof.

So let’s ask the inevitable question: If Kay is right, and 600 more millions will not help uncover WMDs, will they be enough to buy back the stuff Hussein managed to secure outside the country or sold to terrorists? Hardly. But maybe the amount is sufficient to credibly wag the dog and help President Bush keep the White House… [more: NY Times]

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media, quicklink, US Politics

Georgy Buzz.

As far as my sitemeter tells me, Georgy Russell must be doing some pretty good PR over in California – or she has bribed someone at Google.

Yesterday, she apparently was on the cover page of USA toda. And now someone has even set up a domain featuring a very likely fake picture of her. She writes in her blog: “As I see it, if people are talking about me, that’s better than not saying anything.” She’s right, it would certainly do more harm than good to go after the person who has set up georgyrussell.net/org –

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quicklink, US Politics

Georgy Watch.

Now look at this. Not only are more and more people coming to this site in order to find something about the Calfornian Gubernatorial candidate Georgy Russell, which I recommended recently, there is also a blog devoted monitoring her campaign – Georgy Watch. The author believes it’s pictures most people expect to find at his page, which might well be true. So just to let you know – there aren’t any. I don’t know what the motivation behind this blog is, or if it’s actually pro or con for that matter – but it seems the author knows your candidate in person.

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US Politics

Rational Choice Voting.

Did you know, my gentle Californian readers, that voting is actually irrational from a rational choice perspective? People who consistently go and vote are a mystery in political science. There’s just no real benefit for the non neglieable costs of doing so when your vote’s importance is infinitesimally small – that is, when you’re not living in Florida….

And here’s a reason to cast an unimportant vote in the Californian recall election:



Georgy Russell, the California Gubernatorial Candidate I recently endorsed, has filed her paperwork and paid the US$ 3500 necessary to have her name printed on the ballot. Go and check out her blog, she’s done some interesting math concerning the private value of a single, infintesimally unimportant, vote in this election…

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US Politics

Breasts, Obession.

Today Salon.com features a story about the Californian recall eletion’s party-dynamics, especially regarding Arnold Schwarzenegger, who’s views are not conservative enough for the Christian right, especially because Schwarzenegger does not deny the existence of sexuality, including his own. Apparently, this newly revealed picture of young Arnold carrying a topless woman on his shoulders is the worst blow to his campaign so far.


Most people, women and men alike, like female breats, for one reason or another. But why so many Americans are obessessed with breats as a political category, I will never get. In addition, the picture in all likelihood shows Arnold saving a surfer, don’t you think?


Oh, and should you wonder why I am not writing that much about the German equivalent to the Californian election, the Bavarian regional election – it’s simply because it’s the most boring election you can think of. I doubt any governing party in any free election has consistently been as successful as the Bavarian conservatives, the Christian Social Union (EU style conservatism with a Bavarian edge).

Seriously, the question this election is going to answer is simply the extent of their absolute majority. Governor Grey Stoiber is going to stay. Period. And now you know all there is to know about this election… although – come to think of it, I might write something about the fringe parties running in the election, although I have to disappoint you: There’s no porn star involved at all…

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US Politics

Beauty. Brains. Leadership.

You know, I might actually be one of the few people who are not running in this bizarre Californian recall election. Given that running is possible with only 65 signatures and 3500 USD, I am actually wondering why the election should be restricted to US citizens. If Schwarzenegger believes he can terminate the current American Constitution to become President, having a foreigner running for Governor of California can not be too difficult to achieve, don’t you think? So if anyone wants me to run, please contact me for my paypal details… or click on that google ad in the right column until you need a new mouse.

Kidding aside, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Jon Carrol probably gets it almost right in his critical assessment of the recall election:

“Oh, the East Coast media is having such a wonderful time with our recall campaign. It seems to think it’s just one more example of our brain- dead, hot-tub-addled, surfboard-using, movie-star-worshiping culture.”


As I said, almost right. It’s not just the East Coast media. It’s the world’s media. And we’re laughing. That’s what happens when a global actor tries to think locally – just remember how many people know the name of Carmel, California for the simple reason that Mr. Eastwood was the town’s Major.


And Mr. Carrol suggests another comparison –

“The possible replacement candidates are laughably bad. Old GOP retreads seem to predominate, but the whole “maybe I can be governor” thing has taken on an “American Idol” vibe.”.

I don’t know if all replacement candidates are indeed laughably bad. Schwarzenegger is getting some rather decent commentary here and there. Maybe he is a good politician, after all. I don’t know, and, honestly, don’t care. If grown up Californians believe a freak show is the right way to deal with the state’s fiscal problems – who am I to challenge their decision.

Actually, quite to the contrary. If I can’t run myself, I am going to endorse a candidate. Not an actor. Not a writer. Not a porn star. And I don’t even do it because she’s cute or because, at least in the picture above, she looks almost exactly like my fomer flatmate Lucinda. I guess the most important reason for this endorsement is that I suppose she’s doing something I sort of did when I was 18 – running for office to see if it is actually possible to beat the matrix.

In the case of “Handeln Für Mainz – Die STATTPartei”, the local party some friends and I founded back in 1993, it wasn’t. So I hope that Georgy Russell, a software engineer who graduated from Berkeley, will be more successful than we were.

“Beauty, Brains, Leadership” is probably not the worst motto for her unconventional start-up enterprise. But I hope she does realise that neither of these three elements are in any significant way correlated to gaining any office.

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quicklink, US Politics

Poor Tony.

Today’s NY Times editorial looks at Tony Blair’s credibility crisis and decides that opposing Washington on a number of important issues would be helpful for him right now. I disagree.

Opposing will not be enough. He will need substancial evidence that supporting the US administration against one’s own voters’ opinion does pay off eventually. If the American administration does not want to find itself completely unilateralized the next time it needs a hand from Whitehall, Bush needs to give Blair something that is costly and thus credible. I’m thinking Kyoto, or stepped up pressure on Israel. Whatever has lower opportunity costs for Bush.

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US Politics

The People For Larry Flynt?

In 1996, Milos Forman’s film “The People vs. Larry Flynt” showed the world that exercising one’s right to free speech can be dangerous. There were a lot of people who had a lot against Larry Flynt, the owner of Flynt Publishing, a company specialising in the production of visual stimuli like the rather well known “Hustler Magazine” [the first porn link in this blog…]. Even when he barely survived an attempted assasination that left him paralyzed, Flynt did not give up to defend his rights and challenge America with Voltaire –

“I may not like what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”


Now Mr Flynt seems to be about to make an expensive bet about how many people will not just let him say what he sees fit, but let him say it in their name – on Monday, he announced that he would enter the now likely Schwarzenegger-void race [the Terminator will make an announcement on Wednesday] for the succesion of Californian governor Gray Davis.


It would be easy to see this campaign as a passtime for a old and rich publisher, as the electoral system does not seem to impose too many restrictions on prospective candidates, according to CNN. And rather likely, it is just that.


But given Flynt’s record of fighting against the people, it would certainly be interesting to see what he would do for them.

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compulsory reading, US Politics, USA

Sex, Lies, And Dossiers.

Today, Salon.com’s Nicholas Thompson looks at recent examples of US-Presidential truth-tampering and decides that lying about war is worse than lying about sex. Many, certainly on this side of the pond, will agree with him that lying about the reasons for the sanctioned killing of human beings is actually lying in a league of its own.

But however much I believe that Mr. Thompson is theoretically right, I am not so sure about the political viability of his analysis.

After all, Mr Bush is President of a country, some states of which still criminalise ownership of sex toys and in which it is possible to seriously question the privacy of homosexuals – a case recently debated publicly following remarks of a US Senator and now settled by the US supreme court – in favour of their privacy.

Notwithstanding the annual San Franciscan group-masturbate-a-thon and Candice Bushnell’s “Sex and the City”, notwithstanding even unionised lap-dancers, in America, freedom of speech does NOT entail “obscenity” – but it does protect the depiction of violence.

It is certainly interesting to debate the cultural origins of this American particularity, but whatever the reasons – including the American media -, the fact remains that the American public has a special way of dealing with the sexuality of its public figures, above all the President.

A few weeks ago, I met Amber, a 20 year old Texan student currently pursuing an language study exchange programme in Bonn, the former West German capital. She adamantly defended the Bush administration’s policy on Iraq, and a lot of other things (excluding their tax and educational policies – because that’s where she is personally affected…). It wasn’t too long before we crossed the Clinton line – after all, it was the week of Hillary Clinton’s book release. Amber explained to me that she would always hate Bill Clinton for dishonoring the American Presidency by having sex with Monica Lewinsky – and also, because he lied about it. How could she, she wondered, trust such a politician?

Trust – the magic word when it comes to lying.

After hearing what she said about lying presidents, I couldn’t help but wonder if it were different for her if she was lied to about other things, say, the war on Iraq – if the President had decided he had to adjust the story to sell it to the public but if he *believed* he was doing the right thing for the country? [which is basically the story US Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, floated a few weeks ago].

And you know what, Amber said – yes, that would be less grave, as long as he believed he was doing *the right thing* for the country. She is right, of course. But this realisation has to be put differently to become useful in a political analysis- as long as most of his electorate trusts (or pretends to trust) that the President was *doing the right thing*, lying about the reasons will be forgiven and called leadership. And having sex with an intern can never be the right thing to do, however smart your PR people are. As Clinton realised, fighting this battle was pointless.

We might not like it, but in politics, sex, lies and dossiers are never judged by their factual truth, or by their moral gravity alone – these things matter if, and only if, they allude to electoral ramifications. This US administration knows that, however nervous some of their recent statements, however unpractical the unfolding drama around David Kelly’s death in the UK.

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