Back in business yo

Well, I just noticed my last blog post, and that's ridiculous! December 18th? My apologies to those of you who actually check this blog, I hope you will check it again sometime soon and enjoy finding new updates aplenty.

Soooo... I've heard back from two law schools so far, and each of them has admitted me! They are American in Washington DC, and Northeastern just up the road here in Boston. I have to be honest and say that I did expect to get into both of these schools... but it's nice to know for certain that I definitely will be able to attend a quality school like one of these, and it's also nice to be batting 1.000, at least for the moment!

Katie and I did the drive from Phoenix to here quite nicely... Didn't hit much weather, spent a great night in New Orleans (which we adore), saw some old friends, got to drive by the hotel that Barack Obama's been staying in, slept in some amazing hotel beds (oddly), and even hit decent traffic near rush hour in New York. Basically perfect!

So of course Katie is here with me now, and I'm just really happy. I missed her so. :) We are on the hard-core job hunt and are getting to know our (mostly) new friends who live across Comm Ave from us. I worked with one of them at Progressive in Phoenix and we happened to move to different sides of the same street in Boston! So Katie and I have been hanging out with her and her roomies & their other friends, who have proved to be delightful individuals that we get on really well with. So that's nice.

Other than that... Oh, yeah, inauguration's tomorrow! I gotta say, I'm really excited. Woulda been nice to go down there for it, but dang, there are a lot of people there right now, and apparently a lot of people making kee-raaazy money off of it. The hotels and vacation rentals were insane. And it's just a bit too far for a day trip.

I will stop here for now I suppose... But I'll be back soon!

Dream Team: Update

Some new developments:

"Secretary of State Hillary Clinton"
---As of today, the NYT reports that HRC will, in fact, accept the position of Secretary of State. Yay!




"Attorney General Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano"
---Since the naming of Eric Holder (a fine candidate) to AG, it has been confirmed that our beloved Janet is Obama's top pick for SHS. If she can't pass the vet, well, I don't know what to tell you. What are they gonna say- she's some kind of lesbian or something? Ha ha. I'll say this one's a done deal.

Dream Team

I am waaaaay deep in my law school apps right now, but a couple of things I'm hearing right now are making me so frickin' giddy, and drawing so near to my personal Dream Team, that I just have to remark:


"Secretary of State Hillary Clinton"






"Attorney General Janet Napolitano"








It's almost like I'm playing "Fantasy Presidential Administration 2008"!

PS: LOL@ Wolf Blitzer and his wrong sound bite just now!

Giddy-Making

Professor Obama
Marcia DeSanctis | HuffPost

Barack Obama is now the face of the United States - the photograph we will see when we go through customs at JFK airport, or when we go to any U.S. Embassy on earth. The impact of this image, particularly at first, will be subtle, but immeasurable and its iconographic significance is multi-layered. He might refer to himself self-deprecatingly as a "mutt," but he is in effect, Globalized Man. With parts coming from all around the earth, passing through Asia on the way back to America, our new President now seems inevitable - this is the way the world is in 2008. But perhaps of even larger importance is that the leader of the world's greatest democracy was a professor of constitutional law and above all, a teacher. The Constitution - as in, the foundation of any functioning democracy - is his area of expertise. As such, he embodies the best possible advertisement for democracy at a time when the world needs it most and our country could benefit from, as Bill Clinton put it, the "power of example" rather than the "example of power."

Read the rest of the article here.

Mutts Like Me

What a cutie... Our new President's a funny lil cutie. BTW, I thought the Nancy Reagan thing was funny. I'm sure she took no offense. Think she still holds seances? That's soooo 80s.

Presidential Flava

'November 4th, 2008' by artist Patrick Moberg. Hi-res view here.
Courtesy of Andrew Sullivan

Election Prognostications...

Oh, yeah....
Did I say over 350 and 51%?
How 'bout 364 and 52%?
Woot!

The New America

A Black dude... more accurately, a multi-racial dude: the product of what some might refer to as "miscegenation".







An Irish Catholic.







A Jewish guy.

Suck on that, KKK!

Actual footage of the crowd I was in on election night!

I managed to find some clips of the crowd I stumbled into after wandering around on election night. What an experience... what unbridled joy.

This was my posse LOL... At this point the cops were moving us out of the Park and some kind of crazy conga line had broken out. The kids in the front were singing to the tune of "This Land Is Your Land", singing "Oh yes we can, oh yes we can... Barack Obama, Barack Obama"and the people in the back couldn't hear and were mostly just singing the regular song. LOL! This reminded me of a kind of strange inverse of when I was in high school choir and if you didn't know the words, you'd just sing "watermelon"!


Heh, this is us at the Christian Science Center Park, enthusiastically butchering the national anthem. Note the poor guy trying to conduct, and I also think you may catch a glimpse of the life-sized Obama cardboard cutout that was crowd-surfing!

Thanks to YouTube user michellezwi for posting these clips of what will no doubt be one of the most memorable events of my life.

To be in Boston on Election Night 2008...

Was an unexpected and powerful blessing.
A few tastes of the vibe up here last night that mirror what I experienced (I will keep searching for footage of the actual crowds into which I got swept):


I asked a cop who was working the crowd in the park where we were what he thought about a bunch of kids spontaneously breaking into the national anthem, and he just grinned. I could tell that he was trying to stay unaffected, but he was pretty moved.


This is pretty much what it was like on the street all night, even in JP where I was. Every car was just honking like crazy and all kinds of people were running and biking around hooting and hollering, hugging each other, high-fiving, etc.


When I left JP and went into the Back Bay, I ran into some of these kids. Everyone marched around aimlessly, we congregated in a few places for a while but the cops kept sweeping us along. Bad policy if you ask me, because then we just impeded traffic as we crossed the streets. The people in the cars didn't care, they got up out of their windows and moon-roofs and chanted and whooped it up with the rest of us. What a night.

More to come. I'm sure in the next few days I'll find some footage from the Christian Science Park where I was with the group the longest and the national anthem was sung!

A mixed bag

So. I'm obviously elated about Obama... and frustrated about Prop 8.

But.... I just spent a good little while poring over the petition that was filed today to prevent the enforcement of Prop 8 and, hopefully, to overturn it.

Let me tell you, it's good. It's really, really good. This single petition holds up a whole basketful of different reasons why Prop 8 should not stand. It's really... pretty dope! Not to mention, I have to believe that the Court would be frustrated by the efforts of a group of people, largely comprised of religious organizations and out-of-staters, to subvert its decision and to keep it from doing its job. The point is, even with things up in the air, there is a good deal of hope on the horizon. And it all makes me just gnash my teeth with eagerness to become a lawyer.... if only I could skip law school LOL.

Should anyone else wish to read the petition, it's available here.

Also: a really interesting non-technical legal analysis from Slate.com

I am one giant goosebump

I'm sitting in a bar in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and history has just come f'in crashing down all around me, around all of us. I'm in the street and there are strangers running by hugging me and crying. Today's the first day of the rest of it. Yes we did!
Sent wirelessly via BlackBerry from T-Mobile.

Obama Pie

Courtesy of Andrew Sullivan

Dixville Notch: results are in!

Obama 71%
McCain 29%

So... Obama got 15 of 21 votes! Wooooo! LOL.

At this time I'm gonna make two predictions: Obama will win with over 350 electoral votes and 51% of the popular vote, and Prop 8 will NOT pass.

Those are my prognostications of hope, and of risk. I know Obama will win, and I know that the Prop 8 vote will be reasonably close. But I'm going out on a limb to predict that, yes, things are gonna go my way.

We'll see!

Thanks, General Powell. You still rule. (the evidence)

Thanks, General Powell. You still rule.

Ah... 7 minutes so well spent. This nicely frames my thoughts about the importance of the choice we will make on November 4th.
Powell said: "I think we need a transformational figure. I think we need a president who is a generational change and that's why I'm supporting Barack Obama, not out of any lack of respect or admiration for Sen. John McCain."

Ah..... transformation.

There's this wishful part of me clinging to the notion of the McCain I used to know and love, and that part of me secretly wonders if Good McCain realized that Evil McCain has been tearing this country apart the last couple of weeks (Mickey Mouse's name on voter reg cards threatens the fabric of democracy? Puh-leez), and sent General Powell to fix everything. It's a silly notion, I know, but it has its roots in the nice "family-man, citizen" remarks made by McCain. I think that if the guy I used to know is still in there somewhere, he knows two things:
-He AIN'T gonna win this here thang
-A House divided against itself cannot stand.
Based on that, who knows? Maybe he is trying to fix things, I do believe he loves this country, and if he can kiss Bush's behind after SC in 2000, he'll work with President Obama (ee!). Not to take anything away from General Powell, who in all probability made this decision on his own. I know it's just my brain trying to level the wild waves of cognitive dissonance created by Evil McCain. Something in me still hearts the old guy.

Been a busy weekend, sorry no posts. Not that anyone's reading lol! Sorry, myself, I didn't post anything for you to read. :) Working hard to win NH for Obama, though I personally feel the matter's closed up there. You wouldn't know it from calling around though. It's amazing how people who can't commit to the choice of a President can commit to being uncommitted, like bulldogs commit to raw steak. LOL

One man's propaganda is another's really cool dorm-wall art.

The WorldNet Daily site is using this poster image in their article about Louis Farrakhan essentially claiming that Obama is the Messiah. Now, I don't really care about WorldNet Daily OR Louis Farrakhan, except that they represent extremist viewpoints, with which an informed position compels me to familiarize myself.




Having said that, I REALLY LIKE this poster! If it evokes a sense of propaganda, perhaps it is just a bit ironic... it twists those existing notions to present something new in a familiar way. That's, um, art! Actually, that's also how I feel about this other popularized image of Obama, which was meant to evoke the dramatic old propaganda posters, and has accordingly had EVERY possible kind of message Photoshopped beneath it, from the optimistic to the obvious to the upsetting. I personally like this version, one of the two originals by Shepard Fairey of Obey. (Don't know yet who did the first poster but I will find out.)


If you ask me, which you didn't, these are two of the most beautiful political art posters I can remember. Food for thought: even if one evokes messianism or (GASP!) Africanism, and the other evokes revolutionary socialism, isn't the characterization truly in the eye of the beholder? And... what candidate in our lifetimes has inspired the myriad forms of creativity that Senator Obama has? Just chewin'.


NOW I'm taking the night off. :) Heh heh.

UPDATE: The Dream poster is by artist Ray Noland. Found this info originally on the blog of Steven Seidman at the Ithaca College Department of Strategic Communication. It also appears in a few different versions; in one, the same depiction of Obama appears surrounded by megaphones instead of rays, in another before a blue background (which, funnily enough, still kinda has rays). Interesting! The posters can be seen at http://gotellmama.org/, a Chicago-based organization on the stump for Obama.

Happier-Making

I just...
love this.

Barack Obama - Dream

Yeah, I'm one of THOSE Obama people. He just gets it. I heart him AND his magical unicorn.
I feel pretty good right now, all warm and fuzzy. Revisiting that convention speech is kind of intoxicating. It's so funny, I always used to say (when I was supporting the powerfully pragmatic HRC) that the only thing I didn't really like about Obama was his goofy-headed supporters. Now, many months, lots of pragmatism, and both of his books later, I'm all goofy-headed. Bring out the unicorn!

Don't know whether to laugh or cry....

NY absentee ballot mix-up: 'Barack Osama' on the ballot

Zoicks!

Happy-Making

Barack-O'Lantern | RBC