With my publisher hat on, I’m doing, well, this:
and I’m trying to spread the word. So I’m bribing people to put that on their blogs, offering up free books. Click here for details. (And feel free to enter the contest yourself!)
I'll bribe you to help me
America unites to remove only African American from Senate!
Well, I was going to entitle it America Unites to Put John McWhorter Out of a Job, but I saw John on the TV this morning, so that clearly didn’t work.
I’m not going to hide it. I’ve support this guy, that one, whatever you want to call him, for a long time. (Hmmm, hadn’t thought of this before – McCain has gone from saying “that one!” to “that won?!?”. No, that’s cheap, and as bad as the McCampaign was at times, in his concession speech McCain reminded us of the guy many of us thought we could vote for in 2000.) Mrs. Nat’s TV picked up on him first, really. I mean, we both noticed Obama’s speech at the 2004. Hard not to. But she focused on him again, before he through his hat into the ring; there was some NPR interview where she found value in his willingness and ability to be nuanced. And I bought her one of his books as an audio book, and she laid her hands on the other one, and we both went through them. We were never for anyone else at the nomination level. And even though there were regular reminders that he was a politician, and that his values did not 100% match ours, he seemed that best match for us in terms of competency and ideology. It wasn’t because of matters of skin that we backed him.
But I’ve got a mixed race stepmother who I think long assumed that she would not live to see this day come, and I’ve got a not-yet-four-year-old daughter who will probably never get to fully understand the momentousness of this, because the world she will know is this new world. And as much as I’m in pain from some backward steps I felt were taken on other fronts yesterday, this is the way the world progress, in chunks sometimes rough-hewn and ugly. Beautiful castles are made from rough-hewn and ugly stones.
How to rig a poll
I just got a robo-poll call from “Smart Voice” or somesuch. I figured it was going to be a push poll, but I was interested in hearing what the script was. First question was about whom I was voting for for president, and I selected correctly. Second question was about proposition 8, the California constitutional adjustment that would yank away the right for same-sex marriage and likely dissolve thousands of extant marriages. I was told to push 1 if I was voting definitely Yes, 2 for probably Yes, 3 for undecided, 4 for probably No, or 5 for definitely No. I reckoned this was likely what they were really after, and had some string of push-poll questions for the folks outside of the definite range. So wanting to hear their script, I lied and pushed 4 (I’m not only in the Hell No category on this, I’m in the already-voted-No category.) And… it went through the choices again. I hit 4 again and again, and it just kept reading the choices. As it went through the options a third time, I had an idea. I pressed 2… and, apparently having gotten the answer it wanted, it hung up on me.
So if you see some poll showing sudden vast support for Prop 8, or indicating that Obama supporters are against homosexual marriage, or any such thing in the next 48 hours, you can bet this is where it came from.
