Random Sunday

Back by popular demand (ha!):

• I've decided to side with the Dan Gelber camp in the 2010 Florida Senatorial campaign. Gelber was a former member of the Florida House and currently serves in the Florida Senate. He's an extremely effective, experienced, knowledgeable, and well-networked politician - all qualities necessary to succeed in what will likely be a hyper-expensive, grueling contest. Growing up I remember him being a giant thorn in the side of King Jeb, something not lost on me. There has been much less noise on the GOP side of this contest, but it seems almost certain that he'll be running against either Marco Rubio or Connie Mack (meanwhile, I'm guessing that CFO Alex Sink decided to opt out of this race because she has her sights set on the Governor's Mansion in Tallahassee.) With this being said, I have absolutely nothing against Kendrick Meek, whom I also greatly admire, and were Congressman Meek to win the primary I would jump 100% behind his campaign in an instant. Congressman Meek, in my estimations, has simply been shielded from competitive campaigns throughout his entire political career. Florida's minority-majority 17th Congressional district, covering northeast Miami-Dade and southeast Broward, is so incredibly liberal (87% voted for Obama in this district) that Republicans don't even bother competing for the seat. And add to this the fact that Mr. Meek was essentially handed his current seat by his mother upon her retirement, who basically failed to announce her retirement until very close to the filing deadline, effectively locking out other candidates. Again, with all of this being said, I have no doubt that Meek could be an effective Senator - I just feel much more comfortable throwing my support behind Gelber.
• I have a very complicated love/hate relationship with my current neighborhood, South Oakland. First of all, I must state that I have seen so many cities that attempt to boost their appeal by claiming to be "cities of neighborhoods", but Pittsburgh is the first city I have lived in that truly lives up to that claim. That is not due to the omnipotent hand of some centralized city planning effort, but it is rather a function of the city's deranged, chaotic topography (I once heard Pittsburgh described as the only city in the world where you can look out your window across the street at a building that is at a higher or lower elevation than your own building - sounds about right!) Pittsburgh's topography would make a Florida-style or Midwest-style city grid downright impossible to implement here, and most neighborhoods are effectively isolated from most other neighborhoods by a river, a valley, a series of very steep hills, or a combination of all of the above. This has allowed a rich local culture to develop inside incredibly small areas - whereas I could never in a million years differentiate between a random street in Plantation and a random street in Coral Springs in Florida's Broward County, I can instantly tell the differences between Oakland, Squirrel Hill, and Hazelwood, three Pittsburgh neighborhoods that share borders but are incredibly different. Getting back to my own neighborhood, Oakland is well-established as the cultural and academic hub of the city. Museums, two major universities (CMU and Pitt), plenty of "artsy" things, and yes, plenty of young students. I live in South Oakland (well technically "Central Oakland" but 99.999% of people see this neighborhood as being part of South Oakland), which is effectively the off-campus location of choice for Pitt undergraduates. It is the stereotypical student ghetto, effectively like taking Gainesville, FL or State College, PA and placing them within the larger Pittsburgh environs. I love so much about this neighborhood - extremely walkable (I rarely have to start my car), extremely liberal, about the only place in this godawful region where I've seen Hispanics and diversity in general, very very fun on weekends (need I show you my photos/videos of the drunken riots through the streets after the Super Bowl victory?), and just in general a young, laid-back section of a city that is anything but young and energetic. Not to mention that South Oakland is very close to CMU, while being largely devoid of CMU students. Since I have so, so, so much more in common culturally with Pitt students than I ever will with CMU kids, I never really feel out of place here even though I'm the only CMU student in my entire building (the rest are Pitt students, and generally downright awesome, friendly people.) But other things about this neighborhood drive me nuts. It is the trashiest, dirtiest place that I have ever seen - I honestly think that around 70% of the people in this neighborhood just somehow never learned how to use a garbage can (I mean, seriously! My trash ends up in a garbage can regardless of how drunk I happen to be.) The area attracts a nasty mix of absentee slumlords and negligent undergrad renters, and consequently most of the housing stock here is of poor quality and not exactly aesthetically appealing - my own apartment, while hardly a tenement, is definitely the ugliest, oldest, and most run-down building in which I've ever lived, and it is not uncommon at all to see trash (beer cans, old magazines, cigarette butts, you name it!) in the stairwell here. And forget about parking - I'm currently paying $65/month just to reserve a space in a lot (about 3 blocks away!) so that I don't have to parallel park off of the street, in spaces that are never, ever available. So while I generally cannot stand the City of Pittsburgh, I have very mixed feelings about South Oakland. If I could find a nicer, newer, better-maintained apartment here and a better parking situation, I'll probably live in this area next year as well. Otherwise, I'll move - North Oakland, perhaps? It maintains many of the young, student-oriented aspects of South Oakland, but is much, much better maintained.
  
• Spring is going to be interesting because radiators in old buildings do a very poor job of maintaining temperature inside when it goes from 10 degrees to 55 degrees to 20 degrees to 65 degrees outside in a matter of days - and that is the Pittsburgh spring, from what I've heard. It was so hot in my room last night that I had to open a window. Not that Spring is really here yet, of course - the average Pittsburgh high temperature in February is a balmy 39 degrees, only 2 degrees warmer than January. Yay.
  
• What exactly is the point of "compromising" with obstructionist Republicans like John Cornyn, Mitch McConnell, and Lindsey Graham? President Obama and Congressional Democrats have essentially stripped much of the effective infrastructure and structural spending out of the stimulus in favor of even more tax cuts (which don't work - how is a tax cut going to "stimulate" spending when people don't have jobs in the first place?!) Despite this desperate attempt at compromise they got not a single GOP vote in the House and will likely, at best, draw 5 Republican votes in the Senate. President Obama - I am not a Republican. If I wanted another 4 years of the Republicans' economic "solutions" - shipping middle-class jobs overseas, giving tax breaks to the wealthy, and running up the national credit card - I would have voted McCain/Palin, and so would the rest of America. From coast to coast and with the notable exception of that cultural cesspool known as the Deep South, we rejected the GOP on November 4 for very good reasons. There are indeed some areas on which you will be able to reach common ground with the more sensible and mostly non-Southern Republicans (things like global warming, earmark reform, anti-torture legislation, etc.) , but this stimulus is assuredly not one of those areas. To say that the modern GOP views tax cuts as a societal panacea would be a massive understatement - the entire domestic platform of that party could now be summarized as indiscriminate tax cuts, opposition to reproductive freedom, and demagoguery against gays and lesbians. That's all that they can offer, that is consistently the extent of their thinking on domestic policy. What is being achieved here is not bi-partisanship, which would require Republicans to abdicate at least some of their goals - instead, Republicans are being allowed to dilute effective legislation with their failed ideas, legislation that they will ultimately not support in any event, no matter how much they are allowed to dilute it. How long are you going to allow this to continue, Mr. President? Of course there are obvious dangers to overreach by Democrats and of course we cannot play the same dirty games that the Republicans played, but as Rachel Maddow so succinctly noted, if Republicans are just going to attempt to block everything in your agenda anyhow, can't we just ignore them?
  
• Michael Steele's election to GOP Chair sort of surprised me - I assumed that Ken Blackwell was more or less the dauphin - but his election fully supports the analysis that I presented a few days ago in the post "Republicans still are clueless about black people." In fact, the similarities between Blackwell and Steele are amazing. Just as Blackwell managed to lose the black vote in an election against a white man, so did Steele; in the 2006 Maryland Senatorial race, Mr. Steele ran against current Senator Ben Cardin - a white Jew - and exit polls show that he lost the black vote 74% - 25%, even while Mr. Steele won the white vote narrowly by 50% - 48%! Think about that - the black candidate and the white candidate basically split the white vote 50/50, but the white man overwhelmingly wins the black vote. Maryland also provides a potent refutation for this "liberal plantation" nonsense that one often hears espoused by conservative "scholars" to explain black support for the DNC, and the repudiation comes by looking at Mr. Steele's lackluster performance in Prince George's County. Prince George's County is majority African-American - blacks make up 63% of the population - and yet it is affluent (median household income is around $62,500), making it in fact the most affluent county in the US with an African-American majority. It is also a highly educated county, with just over 30% of the population having a BS degree or higher (for the entire US, this figure is only around 27%.) And in this county dominated by educated, high-income blacks - people who would effectively pay higher taxes under Democrats, people who do not need to be educated about personal responsability and work ethic - Mr. Steele was massacred, losing 76% - 23% to Senator Cardin. So let me repeat what I said on the first of this month: Republicans cannot win the black vote simply by placing a "token Negro" on the ballot - they will not win the black vote until they thoroughly expunge their party of its rather prominent racist element, as well as becoming supportive of the types of social services and government programs that the vast majority of African Americans support. It boils down to values. Simple.
• The Advocate had a very interesting article this month, accessible here, about the legal obstacles that gay couples face when trying to jointly own assets and transfer them upon death. So much of this is rendered incredibly complicated, if not entirely impossible, without marriage or civil unions that function as "marriage with a different name." As I was reading this, I have to admit that I got a little exasperated - do people even understand the consequences of their bigotry? It is just so incredibly ridiculous. How in the living hell does two men wanting to jointly own a house invalidate the sanctity of somebody's marriage? How in the living hell is it going to destroy the "moral fabric" of our society by allowing a lesbian to easily pass on her assets to her lifelong partner upon her death, without effectively attempting to circumvent the legal system through complicated contracts and expensive lawyers? And this isn't even mentioning the notorious examples of gay partners denied hospital visitation - there was just recently an example of this in Florida, which you can read about here, in which a lesbian was denied the right to be with her dying partner because of an asinine policy that only allows "spouses and immediate family members" inside the room. The couple were in a union permitted under the law of liberal Miami-Dade County, but it is a union that is nowhere near the legal equivalent of marriage. If this is the type of behavior that your God decrees as appropriate - allowing a woman to die alone while her loving partner must suffer in agony outside, not even knowing what is happening - then I cannot state how proud I am to be an atheist, and I would rather rot for an eternity in Hell than accept this type of "love" from your pathetic and incredibly bitter god-figure.
• Speaking of gay rights issues, my grandmother (mother's side) remains a bit of a mystery to me. She is 73-years-old, was born and raised in Kentucky, and has spent 50+ years of her life in the Bluegrass State. She finished high school but never went to college. And yet, she is just as supportive of full gay equality as any random Ivy League-educated 20-year-old from New York City that I might happen to meet. There is absolutely no logical reason for this to be true in her case - there's really not a hell of a lot that differentiates her from any other senior citizen from Kentucky, although she was raised in an urban environment (between Bowling Green and Louisville) in a state that is overwhelmingly rural. And it certainly wasn't the act of me coming out that transformed her viewpoint - for as long back as I can remember, if the subject of gay rights or gay marriage would come up in the news, she would almost invariably make some comment along the lines of "they need to just leave those folks alone and let them be." Unlike my mom's generation, she is hardly a product of social liberalism and anti-establishment thinking; she was married herself very young in life and spent much of her life as a stereotypical Middle American housewife. I'm probably going to flat-out interrogate her about her stances on this issue when I'm passing through KY over Spring Break, because her thinking on this issue really mystifies me - and if she sees things this way, why don't so many other old people?
• Even as a Floridian temporarily leaving in Pennsylvania, I have learned that while temperature itself is absolute, our perception of temperature is very much relative, at least to a certain extent. Case in point: after months of weather in the -15 to 25 degree range with wind chills, it has been remarkably mild the last few days, even getting as high as 55 degrees yesterday. Today it was about 45 degrees when I stepped out to get the newspaper a bit ago, and it felt remarkably mild - even though 45 degrees is still unquestionably cold! I even saw one kid walking up Atwood Street in short-sleeves, cargo shorts, and flip flops - in 45 degree weather! (On a side note, after eschewing them for years and years, even I now wear and in fact enjoy wearing shorts and flip-flops - partially because I live in South Florida where they are ubiquitous and general wear year-round, and partially because I can fully appreciate the comfort and simplicity of these items after months and months of having to wear 5 layers of clothing and clunky snow boots.) But this "temporary temperature tolerance" is all only within a certain limit. 50 degrees to me is still cold, and always will be cold - I'm still wearing a nice thick coat in this "relatively mild" period, and I would never, ever again accept living in an area that had average winter temperatures that didn't even reach 50 degrees on average. I still consider 75 - 85 degree weather to be ideal, and I'm not really terribly irritated by 90 degree plus weather, while I still abhor weather under 40 degrees. So while I can appreciate this temporary thaw - and it is only temperature, because the average Pittsburgh high in February is 39 degrees and forecasts have us back in the 20's by next weekend - I haven't in the least bit lost my uniquely Floridian orientation to climate. And I like it that way :-)
• And speaking of Florida, 85 days till I'm back there for the summer - 85 days too many! - and less than a month until Spring Break, during which I will (hopefully!) go on a cruise with some of my closest friends from the UF era. Sort of like a "last senior hurrah" of sorts, and something I can frankly benefit from immensely after the collective beating of living in Pittsburgh during winter combined with being a CMU student.

And then after this summer, only one semester left in Pittsburgh...life isn't that bad, after all!