(the fun starts at 00:40) Awesome energy on the streets last night after the Obama victory. We rode from 3rd street down Market to the Mission -- the whole way, people whooping it up on the streets and sidewalks, car horns honking, high fives and peace signs and huges smiles on everybody's face. Finally, we can get out of the dark ages of the 20th century. It's a new day, baby!!!

no djs, no band, no megaphones, no problems // just all-American exuberance

A good collection of other people's photos + videos is on sfist.com

Check out On the Street | After-Party - photos and narration by the New York Times’ Bill Cunningham (also a bicyclist-photographer!)

Vote Report: Help NPR Identify Voting Problems

NPR.org, November 4, 2008 · If you have any voting problems, NPR wants to hear about them. As part of Twitter Vote Report – a project born out of a collaboration of volunteer software developers, bloggers and the NPR social media desk – we'll be monitoring voting irregularities, everything from long waits and broken voting machines to polling places with insufficient ballots.

Here's how to participate:

Text: Send a text message to 66937. Begin the message with the phrase #votereport, include your ZIP code and a very brief description of the problem.

Twitter: Send a tweet with the phrase #votereport making sure to include your zip code and a description of the problem.

iPhone and Google phone: Download the iPhone app from the education section of the iPhone app store. For the Google phone, go to the Android Market and search for “votereport.”

YouTube: In conjunction with PBS and YouTube's Video Your Vote project, you can upload a video to report any problems you experience.

You can find or verify your polling location by looking up your most recent registration address at VoteForChange.com.

Read on (updated Nov. 6):

• Democracy at risk when ballots cast early — Stefan Passantino writing in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
• John McCain let Sarah Palin take us to the brink
• Joe The Welfare King
  
• Sarah Palin, freeloader. Also.

Technorati Tags: democracy, election, Election2008, vote

The worst thing that could happen on Tuesday, November 4 would be for McCain/Palin to win the presidential election. Not that disaster would ensue, but we'd be missing an historic opportunity to take this country forward, instead of slipping into the dark ages of anti-science conservatism and militarism.

See:

• Vote for Obama
• McCain/Palin info
• The Evidence Establishes, Without Question, That Republican Rule Is Dangerous
• From Midwest to M.T.A., Pain From Global Gamble
  
• Our economy is over-optimized and we are at risk because of it (YouTube) ~ PBS News Hour Interview with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, famous economist and author of "The Black Swan." They discuss how the complexities of our globalized economy might lead to the biggest collapse of society ever seen.
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb profiled by Time magazine

(By the way, I'm a small business owner and I'm voting for Obama.)

Technorati Tags: Democrazy, election, Election2008, McCain, Palin, politics, USA, vote

One of the primary reasons that investor panic and pessimism continues to tank the stock market (Dow at 8409 this morning of October 24, 2008) is because of the presidential election. We know the market hates uncertainty, and this election, while leaning to Obama, is a huge uncertainty. That will be resolved first with the election (hopefully clean, without scandal like that following Bush v. Gore), and again after inauguration.

I'll bet $10 that the election will be the bottom of the Dow's dropping.

That said, it’s breathtaking to experience this world-wide meltdown in real-time. The collapse of the financial markets and the revelation of how rotten our much-touted system is (democracy + free market capitalism, or can we shorten that to simply “imperial menace”?) will be remembered as a far bigger historical event than 9/11. This will be known as The Great Global Deleveraging or something like that, and this is going to change society far more than that ultimate pork-barrel project known as “homeland security” and the never-ending care and feeding of the military-industrial complex.

Technorati Tags: debt, Democrazy, economy

Live blogging the  October 15 presidential debate — Barack Obama and John McCain:

Did you get that? They’re hurting and they’re angry. McCain said so. Twice, right off the bat. This is classic garbage talk — the man can barely even speak coherently. NOT MY PRESIDENT, no way. We just endured a tongue-tripping President Bush for an awful 8 years and it didn't do us any good. Clear speaking equals clear thinking equals a better leader and better policy. Vote for the guy with the unscrambled brains:  vote Obama.

"Joe..." Wow, McCain is really desperate here. He goes right for the personal anecdote, and he doesn't sound good when he does. Obama comes back with clear straight-forward language.

"We're gonna take Joe's money, and give it to Senator Obama." Oh really? Is that what's going to happen?

McCain asks rhetorically  "Why would we increase taxes right now, on anyone at all in America? Anyone?" Well, because the gains of the super-rich may be ill-begotten. Hell yes, raise taxes on the super-rich now! I'm all for it! TAX THE RICH! Tax those insane oil company profits!  Take back the money that Wall Street's big players gamed from the system! Prosecute white collar and government crime: let's make New York's Elliot Spitzer a special prosecutor, let him rake the guilty over the coals! Bring on the justice.

They both talk too slow, but Obama especially. They need to shut their mouths about the "negative ads" and talk about their policies and answer questions about the war, taxes, health care, and economic and foreign policy. HELLO MODERATOR, get to the real stuff! Shut these two blokes up and ask some hard questions!

Why does McCain bring up Acorn & Ayers? WTF? As if we don't all know this? It's all over the news. We know all this stuff already. Move on to something of relevance to running the nation!

Why can't Obama answer whether he thinks Palin is qualified to be president? That was a clear question from the moderator, and Obama totally dodged it. Ugh.

Climate control? Climate change! Good catch, McCain!

"Preventive care" notes Obama. YES! That's huge. We've got to take personal health seriously in this country. See 8 foods to eat every day.

I think they should both be banished from speaking to the camera. That should be dis-allowed by the debate rules. We the public are definitely screwed by these debates, by our lack of access to the candidates in a public inquiry setting. This isn't a debate (yet again), this is propaganda opportunity. Ugh.

Related posts:

• mydebates.org
• Vote for Obama
• The Bailout’s bad logic: we can’t trust the financial system

This dog-and-pony at the end is humorous. I'm watching this debate not on TV but on the New York Times website, and now that it's over, they're showing just a raw un-moderated video feed of the stage, and now the meet-and-greet that follows the debate, which seems to be McCain only. Poor guy — I don't think he actually wants to be president. (That's OK, he won't be. :)

At the end of the day, there's really no reason for hope. C'est la vie.

Here's the stinking thing about the bailout plan, and why I'm glad that Congress rejected it today: the same people who engineered the conditions for the failure of the economy are now telling us they should be entrusted to engineer its rescue, in the form of the just-rejected $700bn bailout plan. As far as I'm concerned, we the people have let these jokers on Wall Street and their allies in government de-regulate the markets and formulate a financial system that was destined to implode, as it has been doing quite predictably for the past 13 months. Now that the much-foreseen financial collapse is upon us, Paulson, Bush and the other top politicians are saying, in effect, “We need this bailout/rescue plan or else the economy will implode even further.” But are we really to trust them with either the analysis or the solution? As far as I'm concerned, they given us notably bad policy for years, during which we've gotten plenty of commentary from public intellectuals and journalists (see Gretchen Morgenson or Frank Rich in the New York Times) who described how obvious it is that the Bush  Administration's policies are destined to cause great harm to the country. Of course, this is true not only of the financial system, but of the Iraq War (going strong since 2003!). My, how poorly the U.S. has been led for the past 8 years. Blame the Republicans first and foremost, but don't let the Democrats off the hook either.

The people who created the big problems for our country cannot be trusted with its repair. Those pillagers of the public good who advocated the radical liberalization of the financial markets have only made it possible for a select few to grow obscenely rich by placing wild bets with investors' money. All involved should be held accountable. The  system needs to be so thoroughly exploded that it can never reconstitute itself again. 

Get-rich-quick thinking is destroying us, weakening the nation as a whole while allowing a very few to grow rich beyond all rationality. We are living in a period where wealth flows to the richest in ever wider streams, while more and more of America's middle class falls into disrepair, where the ranks of the impoverished grows larger by the month.  And all this happens in the distracting glow of the television, where the bearers of bad news always look so good that viewers can't believe what they're hearing.

Let’s not forget that the economic meltdown we're in is the result of actual people, known in the public record and often holding highly public office, who authored the laws of deregulation and made strings of bad decisions, while all along alarms were sounding (check out The Giant Pool of Money). We should hold these individuals accountable: Alan Greenspan, Phil Gramm, Henry Paulson and many, many others. They made hugely costly errors in judgment. They should not be allowed to continue making decisions for us.

Required reading:

• Lesson From a Crisis: When Trust Vanishes, Worry
• Washington Post's Pearlstein: Anyone opposing the bailout is ignorant
• Predatory Lenders' Partners in Crime -- Eliot Spitzer
• The Fall of Fannie Mae -- Fortune -- January 2005
• PANIC TIME: MARKET DOWN, REALLY DOWN, AS BAILOUT BILL TANKS
• FALLING INTO FALL
• Behind Insurer’s Crisis, Blind Eye to a Web of Risk
• Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait      

• Cindy McCain’s nontraditional campaign
• A problem for Sarah Palin
• Election coverage from The New Yorker
• Common Dreams
• Obama and the Palin Effect
• Gov. Palin’s Worldview
• Campaign '08 (The Nation)

Let's not elect the same incompetent Republican party that led us into this unnecessary horrible 5+ year war in Iraq, OK? Vote OBAMA!

As usual, Microsoft can just go to hell for cursing us with Internet Explorer, the browser that costs us billions.

On a new site I'm developing, I had a problem with IE 6 & 7 messing up my list that displayed fine in standards-compliant browsers like Safari and Firefox. Here's the bug, and here's the fix (links to my Sparklejet site).

Here's the ugliness that only Explorer gives us:

Thank you, Italy. The best solutions I’ve found for dealing with CSS problems have come from Italians: Bruno Fassino’s CSS tests and experiments and Alessandro Fulciniti’s Layout Gala.

What Americans eat: a steady diet of television. And: 1 in 5 meals eaten in the car.

Killed your TV?

TV // America // Democrazy

Technorati Tags: America, Democrazy, television, TV

I am working on a new site for Gray Brechin, an author and geographer of the San Francisco Bay Area. Gray is well known as a public speaker and frequent contributor to op-ed pages, letters to the editor, and various publications. He's also written several books about the historical geography of San Francisco, the most famous of which is Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin. I got to know him when he taught a class I took at U.C. Berkeley in the mid-1990s.

His new official site is www.graybrechin.net. (Note: graybrechin.com is not his site! Only graybrechin.net is authorized.)

Here's how his home page looks (a work in progress):

Technorati Tags: GrayBrechin, GrayBrechin.com, GrayBrechin.net