Andrew Golis

Does anyone know of other blogs at Harvard? I’m not looking for those “what mood I’m in” “oh no, my gf broke up with me!” types, actual blogs on politics, or music, or something more than a personal journal… Anyone?

Here’s part of the blurb I was emailed for a protest by the liberal/anti-war/radical community of Boston (and Harvard):

Anti-War Rally & Public Speakout

12:30pm – Park St. Sta., Boston

Demand:

Bring the Troops Home Now!

End the Occupation of Iraq, Palestine, Haiti & Afghanistan Fightback Against Racism, Sexism & LGBT Oppression $$ for Jobs, Housing, Healthcare, AIDS & Education not the Pentagon War Machine

This perfectly exemplifies what’s wrong with the “movement” right now. They have 8 different goals! Not just that, but some of them are HUGE! How does the media cover this? How do you leave this rally with something to do? How did they decide what to cut? What about the environment, Sudan or many other issues?

The community needs some damn focus and a PR agent. If you go to that rally and they just start to list their litany of demands it just looks ridiculous. If the goal is actually to effect change on one or more of these issues, a laundry list isn’t going to do it. A laundry list is self-indulgent and only serves the purpose of venting frustration, not affecting actual change. So the real question is, what’s the goal: feel good about yourself or get something done?

A heart-wrenching piece about returning from war. A reminder to all of how lucky we are for what we have.

These guys are so dishonest. They really break every rule in the book. The President is using employees and funds from the Social Security Agency to “educate” Americans on the need to reform the broken system. From the NYT:

But agency employees have complained to Social Security officials that they are being conscripted into a political battle over the future of the program. They question the accuracy of recent statements by the agency, and they say that money from the Social Security trust fund should not be used for such advocacy.

So, money that my parents and grandparents put into Social Security is now being used to “educate them” on Bush’s political agenda. Wonderful.

update: MyDD uses this as an example for the fact that we have become a “one-party ideological state.” While I think that’s a little hyperbolic, the point has a grain of truth. When what are supposed to be non-political government bureaucracies are enlisted into the political battles of the ruling party, we’ve crossed a dangerous line.

I’ll admit, I’m not as educated about what’s going on on the ground in Iraq as I should be. I’m starting to try to read up, and I found this blog. If you’re interested in learning more, check it out.

This article from the American Prospect pushes us to remember Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. not simply for those beliefs he held and preached that we are now comfortable with, but also those things that challenged us, that were controversial at the time: from his early opposition to the Vietnam war to his continual calls for radical redistribution of wealth. He spoke passionately against America’s “giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism.”

As a young white liberal, I was raised to understand MLK only in the most simple and inoffensive ways. For me, he was this saintly figure that stood up to racists in the South. Only now am I realizing that he was a much more complicated, and much more important, figure in American history. He wasn’t just preaching against the overt racism of Southerners but also the more insidious and discreet forms of racism and classism in America, including and maybe especially that which permeated white liberal communities.

In fact, the hypocrisy of the liberal establishment continues to this day. Those who speak of improving public education but choose to send their children to private school or won’t give up funding for their suburban public school to help schools from the city that are floundering. Those who say that corporations are hurtful to poor workers but still enjoy the lower prices of Walmart or Starbucks or Nike (to name a few…). Those who speak of mutual sacrifice, as long as they don’t have to give up their BMW. To be clear, I’m as guilty of some of these things as anyone and I don’t expect liberals to give everything away and wear hemp. Even so, we need to do better. We need to acknowledge our faults and struggle with them. We need to gain the perspective that Dr. King tried to bring us, even when it meant looking in the mirror and not being happy.

It’s easy to appreciate when Martin Luther King, Jr. for when he stood up to the Bull Connors of the world. It takes honesty and courage to appreciate Martin Luther King, Jr. for when he stood up to us.

ISN’T LIFE AWESOME!? Thumbs up everyone! How about that war, huh?

Here’s the latest info from MyDD on the DNC race:

Under the MyDD unorthodox method of polling methodology, we’ll add ‘em together:

Dean	  74 (40%)
Frost	  50 (27%)
Fowler	  17 (9%)
Webb	  17 (9%)
Rosenberg 15 (8%)
Roemer	  10 (5%)

The poll is of about 25% of the DNC members. Dean’s to lose?

Well no, because the poll is kind of ridiculously done (adding first and second place votes). The vote consists of multiple rounds where you drop the lowest vote total until only one person is left. So, hard to know what this means, but it’s a good sign.

For an explanation of what this series is all about, read here. For part 1 of the series, read here.

There have been multiple requests on what I write about for this part (here and here). The anonymous reader who requested this series, who I shall from now on refer to as Mystery McGee, asked whether or not I thought the Crimson endorsement cost Clay the election. To answer this question, I’m going to simply lay out the reasons I think Clay lost. I will try to answer Mystery McGee and Anonymous Reader #2′s other questions about endorsements, group politics and whatnot in a later post.

———–

So, why did Clay lose?

The simple answer is this: people lied, the Crimson let them and we didn’t do a good enough job setting the record straight.

It never occurred to us was that people would lie. Call me naive, but I thought that in this kind of election, in a campus setting, people would tell the truth. We didn’t always say the nicest things about the other campaigns, but not once did we lie or even try to distort the truth. The other campaigns did, the timing and incompetence of some Crimson coverage reinforced those lies and we didn’t do a good enough job setting the record straight.

They said that Clay had bounced the checks. To be clear, Clay has never bounced a check. The checks bouncing fiasco happened when someone else was Treasurer. The first time we noticed them making this accussation was on the announcement board of their facebook group. If my memory serves me, the headline was something like “Clay Capp continues to bounce checks.” When we saw it, we gave the Election Commission a call and asked them to have the other campaign take it down. The Election Commission emailed them (and cc’d me) and said “If you do not remove this message, you risk being fined by the Election Commission for ethically questionable behavior.” They took it down quickly.

Now, I figured it wasn’t a big deal because probably only a few people had read that and probably most of them had been campaign folk who had nothing better to do (like myself!). Plus, the campaign manager of this campaign apologized to Clay for the post. Unfortunately, we heard later, both from individuals who spoke to this other campaign as well as groups who were lobbied by them, that they repeated this attack throughout the campaign. “Do you want more bounced checks?” they demanded to know.

All of this was supported by the Crimson. The day the campaign started they ran a story about an unpaid bill to the Science Center. A minor miscommunication between Clay and the Campus Life Committee resulted in a problem that Clay solved. The article ended with a quote that unfairly blamed Clay. As he said later at the debate, “[blaming him for the problem] was like blaming the janitor who cleans up the spill.” This, by the way, was the article the other campaign used to link to say “Clay Capp continues to bounce checks.”

Later, the Crimson supported this same lie in its article about the debates:

Council Treasurer Clay T. Capp ’06, who is Glazer’s running mate, came under criticism for the 93 council checks to HoCos and student groups that bounced last May.

““There are two checks out of a hundred that caused trouble”,” Capp said, adding that he had begun providing a weekly update of council expenditures and creating a reserve fund to prevent the council from overdrawing in the future.

Pretty damning stuff. The only problem was, it didn’t happen. Clay wasn’t asked about any bounced checks because the panelists, unlike the reporter, apparently, knew that he wasn’t the treasurer when the whole thing occurred and had nothing to do with them. He was asked about the Science Center checks, which is why he said 2 and not 93.



The fact that the Crimson didn’t endorse Clay also supported this set of false perceptions and outright falsifications. I have my own opinions about why the Ed Board made the decision it did, but I won’t get into those here.

Finally, some blame rests on me and the campaign as a whole. We didn’t realize until too late how prevalent these lies and misunderstandings were and didn’t do enough to fight back against them. I made a few calls to see if the Crimson would publish a correction about the debate article, but didn’t worry about it enough to push it through. We thought about sending out emails to house lists with the subject of “Fact Check” or something like that, but worried that it would just be another opportunity for the other campaigns to attack us and use the Crimson and it’s half-assed reporting to do so.

In some ways, this all points to the problem with the fact that the Crimson has such a complete monopoly. No one really reads the Indy, Salient or Perspective. Because of this, there is no competition to call out mistakes or make sure that their standards are higher. While the Crimson is fundamentally a good quality paper, it’s coverage can be extremely sloppy. It’s like my Dad says (he’s a newspaperman), “every story is 100% accurate except those of which you have personal knowledge.”

Now, some of these things may seem ticky-tacky. A quote here, a bad article there, that’s life. It’s true, that is life. Unfortunately for us, each of these things happened together and fed off of each other. Consider also that Clay lost by only 50 votes on the first count. When 4,000 are cast and you lose by 50, every little bit counts.

So there you have it: lies, bad journalism and not enough effort to counteract both.

New Deal Magazine, a new liberal online mag here at Harvard, managed to score an interesting and pretty extensive interview w/ Ho Dean that I found fascinating. My favorite section:

There’s so much power concentrated in corporate hands, which of course President Bush is rapidly accelerating. They have no understanding or faith in ordinary American people to be responsible for democracy, and I think that’s why we’re losing democracy in this country. With the concentration of corporate media, with the concentration of corporate industrial power, and the denigration and losses endured of both economic and personal status of the middle class and working people at the hands of anti-labor activities and so forth, [we are losing democracy]. I think a lot of that is because we don’t share power well. The country will be healthier if we de-centralize power and share it.

Might he actually be too intellectual for this job (DNC Chair)? I don’t know, when someone is that thoughtful in politics it scares me because I think it’s too good to be true.

Another hilarious part, when asked about the Democratic Leadership Council (a conservative Democratic think tank):

The problem with the DLC is that they’re largely the hand-maidens of their corporate donors. I think the DLC is sort of a cult built around a few of their founders. Initially they had useful ideas, but more recently, they’re sort of silly more than anything else; they’re inside the beltway rabble rousers rather than serious thinkers. I think we spend too much time worrying about the DLC. I know most of the people in the Democratic Party hate them, but we just ought to ignore them and they’ll go away. Nobody knows who the hell they are outside of the beltway, anyway.

What a guy.