The Blog Party

The movie is pretty much done! Check out The Promise of New York!

I need to clean up this site - there’s a billion spam comments and a really old version of Wordpress. But who knows when I’ll get around to that.

So if you want to see what’s been going on for the past three years - and its a LOT!! - go visit my main blog Culturebot.org!

Raul is filming me blogging for the movie. It is compelling cinema. Keep coming back for more. We’re talking about what blogs are and how they are changing the world.

Obviously not much activity here blog-wise. The Mayoral election was a blow-out for Bloomberg. I think this project is prett much done for now. So thanks for checking in and we’ll let you know when there’s some new adventures.

I just found out that Christopher X Brodeur was jailed. apparently Ben Smith of the Politicker got fed up with Christopher’s abrasive manner and filed some kind of charges against him. The city sent cops to arrest him and when he got to court his public defender didn’t even defend him at all. The judge denied him bail (!!??) and forced him to get a psychiatric evaluation. This is a total outrage! Even robbers and muggers get bail! Christopher may be a pain in the butt but he’s not dangerous and he’s not crazy. I’m trying to find out what can be done to help him out. Right now getting him a good lawyer would probably be the best thing. Know any good lawyers?

You can read Jessica Delfino’s account of the situation at her blog. If you can help CXB, email Jessica at jessdelfino@yahoo.com.

an article in the mercury news details harriet miers longtime affiliation with a fundamentalist christian church. it is going to be bad.

Even though the NY TIMES and other news outlet seem to think Harriet Miers is a cautious choice for Supreme Court, I can’t help but disagree. In many pictures, including those from the announcement of her nomination, she wears a conspicuously obvious crucifix. Among the credits Bush listed were “the young women’s christian association” and “exodus ministries”. He specifically spelled out “christian” rather than say YWCA. He took a long pause after saying the word “grace” - a woman of grace…..character, etc. He talked about “knowing her heart”. I may sound paranoid, but I think that a lot of what Bush was saying was barely-coded subtext that she, like himself, is a conservative, fundamentalist christian. And though Roberts, who was just nominated, is a Catholic, he too has a heavy strain of religiosity.

Bush is essentially trying to stack the court with incredibly conservative, backwards-looking, religious fundamentalists who will choose dogma over innovation, people who are “strict constructionists” looking at the letter of the law rather than its intent.

its not enough that he will destroy america for 8 years in a row. bush is planting the seeds for the long term erosion of the dream of an enlightened america.

A few weeks back the New Yorker ran an article on Anthony Kennedy talking about how his passion for foreign law could change the Supreme Court. It seems less and less likely. In the article was a very revealing paragraph that intimated a frightening and strong strain of conservative closed-mindedness and isolationism:

This spring, fifty-four conservatives in the House of Representatives sponsored a resolution criticizing the use of foreign sources by the Supreme Court, and, in August, Representative Steve King, a Republican from Iowa, completed an investigation of the Justices’ foreign trips, based on the disclosure forms that they are required to file. “Between 1998 and 2003, the Justices took a total of ninety-three foreign trips,” King told me. “And the implication is that there are at least a couple of Justices, chiefly Kennedy and Breyer, who are more enamored of the ‘enlightenment’ of the world than they are bound by our own Constitution.”

Yeah, that enlightenment was such a drag. What with inventing the whole idea of individual liberty and stuff.

with Andrew Rasiej coming in at 5% in the public advocate’s race i think its pretty obvious - as it was from very early in my own race - that bloggers are not to be relied upon as a political force or to deliver votes at the polls.

bloggers are just people with very little in common besides a need to write on the internet, overinflated senses of their own importance and, often, a love of drinking to excess.

that being said i think that the technological issues raised by rasiej and my campaigns, and the potential that blogging & new media hold for the future of politics, are importnat. I think information technology and new systems and models for communication will continue to be a factor in culture and government, both in how we interact with government and how government conducts business.

still, the future is the future. Today it is business as usual and very little is likely to change. Ferrer is an ineffectual bumbler and Bloomberg, spin or not, is still in the pockets of the big corporate real estate developers. Just witnes the debacle that is the Bronx Terminal Market redevelopment plan. There’s an article in the NY Daily News about it that says:

Alex Savinon, who runs a small restaurant supply company at the Bronx Terminal Market, is baffled and fed up. So fed up he went on rent strike yesterday.

Ross is not only one of New York’s biggest developers, he is also a former business partner of Mayor Bloomberg’s economic development czar, Dan Doctoroff.

Later on the article states that Ross collects $280,000 a month from the tenants while paying only $22,000 to the city.

Nice.

Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez plans to “cut out the middle man” and sell cheap oil directly to America’s poor!!
Read about it in the NY Daily News.

amazing.

We here at BlogParty.org/Andy For Mayor hope that if you are a New Yorker, you voted in today’s democratic primary. yeah, the choices were lame, but you’ve gotta vote anyway. use it or lose it.

as you know the “andy for mayor” project has concluded, but we will be back in the future with new politically oriented projects.

happy election!

All of America is New Orleans. While Hurricane Katrina was an act of nature, the subsequent response, or lack thereof, has only brought into stark relief the pitiful husk of a country America has become. From the glaring patronage that put Mike Brown in charge of FEMA, to Bush’s incompetent platitudes and faux compassion to Mayor Nagin’s blithe abdication of responsibility we have seen corruption at its finest. The prominent listing of Pat Robertson’s religious fundamentalist charity, Operation Blessing, on the FEMA charities website demonstrates how deeply this country has been infiltrated by reactionary and dangerous conservative cultural elements. The scenes of previously-unimaginable chaos on the streets of New Orleans we have seen the return to the fabled America of yesteryear - a world of fear, hatred, racism and unchecked violence.

Like New Orleans America has been hijacked, looted, left a shambles, while its citizens sit here, stunned, punch-drunk and resigned. Our current Commander-In-Chief George “Dubya” Bush is a disinterested, self-absorbed, callow and wholly incapable buffoon who presides over one of the most spectacularly corrupt and incompetent administrations in the history of the United States. His reign marks the successful culmination of a vast, thirty-year effort on the part of political, cultural and religious conservatives to remake America. Welcome to the end of the American Experiment.

Our education system has been gutted, we have no National Health Care, our government infrastructure has been intentionally crippled, staffed with incompetents and turned into graft mills. All of the assets that are the collective property of a nation have been turned over to conservative cronies and corporations who receive outlandish tax cuts, government subsidies and no-bid contracts to sell un-needed subpar services back to the government that is already paying them.

Those services and responsibilities traditionally seen as government projects that have not been privatized and turned over to corporate interests have been handed over to religious fundamentalists under the rubric of “Faith-Based Initiatives.”

A country that was once a shining beacon of freedom, justice, equality, progress and enlightenment – or at least tried to live up to the glittering promise of its beginnings - has become a backwards, superstitious, Fundamentalist Christian Plutocracy. Led by a recovering alcoholic, America is on an abusive dry-drunk, wandering the world creating havoc, wantonly perpetrating wars and foisting injustice and its own dysfunction on the less fortunate. We go to Africa to “fight AIDS” but instead of condoms give them abstinence, we go to Iraq to “fight terrorism” while we let Al Qaeda and Bin Laden freely wander the world, we went to Iraq to “liberate it” while we support the ferociously oppressive regime in Saudi Arabia. We blithely ignore the commonly agreed-upon environmental policies Kyoto Protocols that nearly every other civilized nation on the planet acknowledged and adopted. We mock and abandon our long-time allies and cultural companions in Western Europe and go it alone in the face of very real threats to Western Civilization. We are not preparing for China.

America and Americans are deeply in debt and are doing nothing to fix it. The people are subjected to predatory lenders and the whims of corporate exploitation with no protection and little legal recourse. There is a vast and growing American underclass of uneducated, underemployed, debt-ridden people who see themselves only as consumers, not as citizens. With the erosion of the education system the population has little or no memory of a civic society or the idea of a social contract, the notion of collective responsible or the Greater Good seems like a quaint story, like a particularly embarrassing “where are they now” television show on VH1.

While I was away I talked to people in other countries who look at America in amazement and sadness. Since I’ve returned I’ve talked to foreigners visiting the States, some for the first time, some who have been here many times but don’t know if they’ll return. They too are shocked and awed by America and how far it has fallen.

Here in the birthplace of Modern Democracy we can’t even hold elections that can be held up as fair or representative. [see Andrew Gumbel’s book STEAL THIS VOTE]

I look out at America and I see this strange, sad, lumbering beast. I see a self-absorbed drunk who doesn’t understand why everyone’s angry at him, who soils himself and is too wasted to clean up his mess, I see an over-the-hill athlete who looks in the mirror and still sees himself in his prime, who deludes himself into overlooking his beer gut and receding hairline, his diminished capacity and his over-reliance on superstition and luck. I see a fading boxer whose only joy is re-hashing inaccurate memories of past victories, re-writing history, drooling over his drink at the end of the bar, mumbling to himself, “I coulda been a contender” while the rest of the bar looks at him in embarrassment and derision. They are moving onwards and upwards while he will stay here, content to wallow in his failure, convinced that he is just as good, if not better, if only you’d seen him back in the day.

I’m just some guy. I don’t know what to do or how to fix it. I don’t know how to take America back. It’s not about voting for Democrats, that’s for sure. The American Government is so wholly corrupt it is probably beyond saving. And we’re not going to be able to beat the corporations – they are a fact of life, they are the new future, the new government. We can’t all move to Europe. It might not hurt to learn Chinese, though.

I don’t know what to do or where to go, but something’s gotta give. Something’s gotta change. Gotta Revolution.