As CMCers watched the Vice Presidential Debate last Thursday, our excitement almost knocked over our chairs. Watching in the Athenaeum or playing drinking games in our rooms, we were sitting — quite literally — on the edge of our seats, waiting for Sarah Palin to say something ridiculous that would deeply undermine her candidacy. I even had a blog post planned ahead of time: “Ten Excuses Sarah Palin Could Use to Back Out of The VP Spot.” But no, Palin will not desert McCain; that would be GOP suicide. And she succeeded, to a degree, in not making a huge gaffe during the debate.

So why do we still taunt her? We’re not just baffled by her ignorance, but also by her incoherence. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who will speak at the Ath on November 17, wrote her latest piece on Palin’s “tumultuous… relationship with the English language.” Dowd notes that Republican voters seem to respond positively to folksy slang, like Palin’s “doggone it,” “you betcha,” and – a true gem – “say it aint so, Joe.” Spread randomly throughout Palin’s responses, these phrases might sound cutesy and homegrown (or obnoxious, depending on your political affiliation) in soundbites; nevertheless, they look ridiculous on paper.

If the folksy talk is a ploy to appeal to voters (the “hockey moms” and “Joe Sixpacks” of America, presumably), Palin’s motives make sense. But I’m a writer; I love and respect the English language. And like Dowd, it offends me when Palin takes the serrated knife of her grammatical errors and carves up the language’s fundamentals. One heart-wrenching example comes in the form of passive voice: “I do take issue with some of the principle there with that redistribution of wealth principle that seems to be espoused by you.”

Strunk and White would be as ashamed as Dowd, who writes: “[Palin] dangles gerunds, mangles prepositions, randomly exiles nouns and verbs and also – ‘also’ is her favorite vamping word - uses verbs better left as nouns, as in, ‘If Americans so bless us and privilege us with the opportunity of serving them,’ or how she tried to ‘progress the agenda.’”

The juxtaposition of the two Vice Presidential candidates’ rhetoric was entertaining. Joe Biden looked “articulate… and clean” – to quote his controversial February 2007 description of Barack Obama. And he managed to refrain from insulting his opponent with an untimely rush of verbal incontinence. Biden may have his idiosyncracies, but at least he does not end sentences in prepositions.

To be honest, I am sad that there is not another scheduled Vice Presidential Debate; it was the best entertainment I had in awhile (sorry, Gossip Girl fans). Though tonight’s Presidential Debate probably will not be as exciting (or even critical, given the overwhelming influence of the declining economy on voters), you can find me in the Hub at 5:45 for the watch party. I may take some notes so that next month at the Ath, I can ask Dowd about the debates in retrospect. Will she answer in coherent, grammatically correct sentences? You betcha.

Congress’s decision to bail out struggling financial firms reminded me of a speech given by Gov. Mario Cuomo at the 1992 Democratic National Convention. If you were to replace “Savings and Loan” with “Financial Markets,” this speech could be given today.

Here is a memorable quip:

“Remember the Savings and Loan? Governors and mayors had gone Washington and I was among them, to plead for help for education, for education, for job training, for roads and bridges, and for drug treatment. ‘Sorry, there is none,’ said the President. ‘We’re broke. We have the will, but not the wallet.’ And we put our heads down. And then Americans discovered that wealthy bankers educated in the most exquisite forms of conservative Republican banking, through their incompetence and thievery, and the government’s neglect had stolen and squandered everything in sight. The world’s greatest bank robbery. And we heard no moralizing about values from then our Republican leaders, did we?”

Stop facebooking, now you have a better online procrastination excuse: you can register to vote. Well no, not now, but soon, thanks to SB 381, legislation directing the Secretary of State to implement online voter registration measures by 2012. Signed into law today, the measure promises to streamline and increase voter registration in California. Put another way, you can’t complain that you didn’t have a stamp.

“Californians can pay bills and file their taxes online. Being able to register to vote online is the next logical step in making it easier for Californians to participate fully in their democracy,” said Secretary of State Debra Bowen, California’s chief elections officer. “This measure prevents fraud by limiting online voter registration to people who confirm their identity in a secure manner.”

It is currently possible to “register” online, but the process is neither automated nor immediate. After you submit the form, the SOS prints and mails a registration card to you for signing, which you then have to send back in. Damn those stamps.

Getting signatures was thought to be unavoidable, but SB 381 takes advantage of other technological advances in California’s government: the DMV digitally scans signatures when citizens received licenses or IDs. By connecting that database into the online registration system, the state can affix a digital signature to your registration card without the hassle of printing, mailing, and returning. All you have to do is login, validate your identity, and click submit. You’re set to show up your the polling place come November.

Making your life easier isn’t the bill’s only goal: it will cut costs, according to the State Senate’s fiscal analysis. For voter registration, the DMV currently has annual costs of about $370,000 for personnel ($300,000) and postage ($70,000). After a one-time IT cost of $150,000, the DMV would be able to interface with the Secretary of State online system as little cost. The Secretary of State, too, should net savings of $80,000 a year, after the first year and including startup costs. This sums to a yearly budgetary reduction of upwards of $400,000.

Maybe they can use that money to make it into a facebook app…

(Hat tip, Future Majority)

Crushing Dissent: No Laughing Matter

During the first Presidential Debate when asked about worries over Russia’s over aggressiveness when dealing with Georgia, Senator John McCain declared that he had looked deep into Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s eyes and saw only three letters: a “K”, “G”, and a “B”. Indeed, Putin, the former KGB agent and two-term Russian President turned Prime Minister by the controversially elected and puppet-like President Medvedev, seems to have no inhibitions about using KGB tactics to control the economically booming Russia. True, the gulags of Stalin which killed an estimated 40-60 million people no longer exist and and individual freedoms of Russian citizens such as the freedom of religion and to assemble have drastically increased following the fall of the Soviet Union. But what about the freedom of the press? Here, the dirty business of the KGB and Soviet-era suppression of dissenting voices is shamefully present.

On October 7, 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, journalist, human-rights advocate, and long-time critic of Putin’s tactics of bombing hundreds of civilian apartments in the Second Chechen War, was shot three times in an elevator in her apartment building. Understanding the brutal control which Putin keeps over the press, Politkovskaya seems to have predicted her inevitable death by state-sponsored terrorism; in her book, Putin’s Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy, she wrote:

“We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it’s total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial- whatever our special services, Putin’s guard dogs, see fit.”

Shockingly, Politkovskaya’s murder was not an isolated incident, but rather, a disturbing addition to an ongoing purging of journalists critical of the Putin and Medvedev administrations. The most recent in the purge was Magomed Yevloyev, owner of ingushetiay.ru, a website critical of Ingushetiya President and close friend to Putin, Murat Zyazikov. Immediately upon arriving in Ingushetiya’s capital city of Magas, Yevloyev was forced into a police car and hours later dumped on the side of the road with a bullet in his head. The Russian government responded to this issue, stating that the unlikely Yevloyev had reached for a policeman’s gun during the drive and the gun “accidentally” went off, shooting Yevloyev in the head.

Worse than the actual killings themselves is the lack of thorough investigation of these murders, a suspicious indication of state involvement. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) sites at least twelve murders of Russian oppositional journalists, not including Yevloyev, all of which remain unsolved and without competent investigation. Included in these killings is the particularly chilling murder of editor-in-chief of the investigatory Tolyattinskoye Obezreniye, Aleksei Sidorov. Reminiscent of the assassination of Leon Trotsky, Sidorov was stabbed in the chest with an ice pick outside of his apartment.

In fact, so atrocious are the human rights violations against vocal dissidents of the Russian Federation, that the CPJ has ranked Russia the ninth worst country in regard to freedom of the press. According to CPJ’s statistics (based on a ratio of unsolved murders of journalists per 1 million inhabitants), Russia is more repressive than turbulent nations such as Pakistan and Bangladesh, and is ranked only slightly more safe than countries such as Nepal or Afghanistan.

Not only does the Russian government repress and oppress dissidents, but it also pays a pretty penny to keep the mainstream media staffed with pro-governmental supporters who report the Putin-friendly version of the news. One of the effects seen of this was Putin’s approval rating during his presidency. As late as July 2007, he enjoyed a cushy and popular 80% stamp of approval. Undoubtedly, his photo shoots in the woods with his shirt off, holding an AK-47, or that of him in his Judo outfit, or that of him yet again appearing shirtless on fishing trips, have won him much popularity among the people. Ladies swoon at his beefcake-like photos and there is even a cult-following of the young in Russia who nearly deify him: Pop songs are written about him, propaganda praises his name, and many Russians feel that he has revamped national pride and identity, similar to that which existed during Imperial Russia. However, such strong feelings of national pride caused by Putin and the inflated high-approval ratings are a result of the aforementioned controlled media. During the Second Chechen War, when Russia’s military bombed purely civilian targets, carried out extrajudicial executions of prisoners and civilians, and was even accused of using tactics ranging from rape, abduction and torture, the average Russian citizen heard little of Russia’s atrocities. Only the victories of the Russian army were reported alongside the shocking and horrifying deeds of the Chechen rebels’ tactics, including the Beslan school hostage crisis in 2004, where rebels took approximately 1,200 people captive in a local grade school.

Likewise, the use of what Barack Obama in the September presidential debate deemed as “unacceptable” and “unwarranted” actions of the Russian military in Georgia were not widely publicized in the Russian media. Even Politkovskaya’s idea of the internet, where “information is freely available” seems no longer truly free: Putin continues to extend his long arm online this time by paying governmental supporters to release propaganda in his favor. For instance, European Digital Rights (EDR), an organization devoted to protecting the freedom of information in Europe, observed one such incident out of many. An anti-Kremlin march was being organized by bloggers protesting the Russian government. Within hours of finding out about the protest, pro-Putin bloggers swamped the internet with information about a pro-Kremlin march, so much so that they “crowded out” all oppositional blogs online. Included with Putin’s new task of controlling a new form of media, is his idea of starting a separate Russian internet, isolated from that of the rest of the global community. Under lightly veiled concerns about financial hacking and the spread of child pornography, this new “Russia-only” internet would greatly increase the ease at which it could be controlled, which is precisely what Putin intends to do.

With the ongoing suppression and murders of oppositional journalists adjoined with Putin’s dominance of the old media and seemingly inevitable domination of the new, one can only be reminded of the Soviet Union’s iron grip on the media and the duping deceit of its citizens. The exception is that the Russian Federation now considers itself a democracy. However, progress cannot truly be made and democracy cannot truly exist where the media is controlled by the government, facts are distorted or omitted, and opposition is crushed.

Below is a link to the CPJ’s list of murdered Russian Journalists:

http://cpj.org/Briefings/2005/russia_murders/russia_murders.html

Google announced its opposition to California’s Proposition 8 on Friday afternoon in a post on the Google Blog.

“Because our company has a great diversity of people and opinions — Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, all religions and no religion, straight and gay — we do not generally take a position on issues outside of our field, especially not social issues,” wrote Sergey Brin, Co-founder and President of Google.

But this hateful and discriminatory law was enough to get Google off the sidelines.

“While there are many objections to this proposition — further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text — it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8,” continued Brin.

It looks like Google gives its employees more than great benefits. It gives them its clout when their rights are threatened.

For those of you who hold accounts at Washington Mutual and watched Thursday’s news with horror, fear not: Your Washington Mutual account will be safe and you don’t even have to beg the FDIC to let you have your money back. For those of you who haven’t heard, Washington Mutual was seized by the FDIC and immediately sold to JPMorgan Chase for $1.9 Billion. Washington Mutual’s numerous branches in the area, and particularly its bank in the village, have meant that it is one of the most popular banks for Claremont Colleges students, including myself.

While I am mildly optimistic about the purchase, my only concern is that Chase will crimp Washington Mutual’s style. I like Washington Mutual’s bank branches because they don’t feel like bank branches. They are layed-out in an open format with tellers at little island stations rather than behind a counter (see below). In comparison, Chase, which is the Starbucks of banks in my hometown of New York, has very typical stale bank branches, with their only defining trait being very bright neon blue lights and blue design theme (imagine a Target store turned blue). Chase also tends to be more fee heavy, charging you for non-Chase atm usage, and monthly fees unless you’re a college student.  Wamu has none of these, and also has an excellent online savings account that pays huge amounts of interest compared to your normal savings account.

Wamu customers will benefit in the near future in one way though: access to Chase branches. For those of you who live in California, this will mean nothing as Chase has very little presence out here. But in Texas, Illinois, New York, Florida, as well as other states, WAMU customers will have access to branches and services they didn’t before. Additionally, Chase is a stable company with diversified businesses and a very low likely of failure, so your money will be safe.

For those of you wondering what the future holds, take a look at this memo from Chase about the purchase.

On October 24th, the Los Angeles Lakers and Oklahoma City Thunder will kick off the opening year of the new Citizens Business Bank Arena in Ontario. The new arena seats 11,000 and promises to offer additional sports and entertainment options for the Claremont Colleges and the Inland Empire. The arena will be the permanent home the Ontario Reign, a minor league affiliate of the Los Angeles Kings. Additionally the venue is hoping to attract major concerts to the Inland Empire, having already succeeded in booking Carry Underwood and Metallica.

The arena is located in Ontario, just north of the airport, and one exit further on the 10. Hopefully the new arena will prove a fruitful alternative to travelling to Anaheim or the Staples Center for major concerts.

In honor of tonight’s debate party in the Hub hosted by the College Democrats and College Republicans, it seems appropriate that we share a couple great moments from past presidential debates. Be sure to come by and check it out. I will be there. If you can’t wait that long, enjoy these clips from past debates:

Clinton and Bush:

Mondale and Reagan:

There is no strong reason that Barack Obama or John McCain should make a campaign stop in California. They both know who will win our true blue state’s 55 electoral votes (Hint: he is tall, healthy, and proficient in using “the Google”). Campaigning heavily here would misallocate resources and personnel that both candidates desperately need — especially with only six weeks left until election day. Nonetheless, they should have been at CMC tonight — not talking, but listening. They could have learned a lot from The Atlantic Monthly’s James Fallows, who discussed his views on America’s future foreign policy priorities at the Athenaeum.

Fallows began his presentation with a slideshow of photos he has taken during his two years in China. In some, heavy smog coated the subjects — elaborate, high-tech buildings in major cities —, making them difficult to discern. Others showed pictures of Chinese citizens. While their age, gender, and socioeconomic class differed, each had shared their personal stories and views with Fallows. The slideshow demonstrated that the world has misperceptions about China. China is not just a territorially huge economic powerhouse with bustling metropolises; it is a forward-looking nation working to solve its environmental problems, the byproducts of its economic boom. But much of China, particularly the West, remains culturally backwards.

The U.S., however, has a multitude of foreign policy issues aside from China. When the new president transitions into office, he and his administration will need to prioritize. And I recommend that they strongly consider Fallows’s checklist.

To summarize, Fallows believes that the 44th president should concentrate on four items:

1.  Developing big ideas in foreign policy — Though the U.S. faces many crises at the moment, the president should not allow the minutiae of domestic and foreign issues to monopolize his time. From the start, the president needs to declare a broad, new idea that completely shifts American foreign policy. (Note: When asked, Fallows said that the Bush Doctrine was the “wrong big idea.”)

2.  Ending the war of ideas — The Global War on Terrorism was an ineffective way to pursue the terrorist groups in the aftermath of 9/11. By combining all our enemies — Hamas, Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah — into one group, we strengthen them rather than divide them. Terrorists aim to scare their targets into harming themselves, and they have succeed; America’s heightened security and descent toward a police-like state contradict the freedom and liberty on which our nation was founded.

3.  Reviving the war of ideals — American society needs to be more open, both internally (with the diminishment of Big Brother tendencies) and externally. Among things, the U.S. should value diplomacy over hostile silence, welcome economically beneficial immigrants, and discard its interventionalist reputation.

4.  Starting a war for the world — The next ten or twenty years will be crucial in reducing and postponing the effects of global warming. The U.S. needs to spearhead global efforts toward protecting the environment. China, the world’s leading polluter, is commended for developing alternative energy sources, particularly nuclear energy. The U.S. should put forth even more effort.

To put it simply, Fallows’s arguments make sense. Whoever wins the election would err in not heeding at least some of his advice. As for the winner, Fallows spoke anecdotally about a high-level Chinese financial official who essentially said: given America’s criticism of China’s one-party state, wouldn’t it be prudent for the U.S. to elect a president from the other party (the one that has not demonstrated ineffectiveness for the past two terms)?

Ten days ago, I was watching you closely. I noticed you chatting nonchalantly on the way to class, stealing that last slice of pizza in Collins, and, dressed as a gaudy Olympian, playing flip cup at this year’s first TNC. No, I’m not a stalker. (To be honest, I have little interest in your mundane activities.) I was just trying to determine whether campus life would change at all in honor of the seventh anniversary of the September 11^th terrorist attacks, responsible for nearly 3000 fatalities. And I must say that you disappointed me.

There was no campus-wide moment of silence. There was no American flag flying at half-mast. I didn’t even receive a Facebook event invitation along the lines of “Remember 9/11!!!!!” In fact, the only iota of patriotism I noticed was the senior apartment residents’ American-themed TNC attire. This September 11^th was an ordinary day at CMC.

I remain critical of the Bush administration’s tactical use of post-9/11 patriotic appeal to engage in the Iraq War and to infringe upon civilian rights. Political views aside, however, it is astonishing how such a somber day’s anniversary could pass without memorial, or, at the very least, acknowledgment.

The following day was tragic in itself. On Friday, September 12, Hurricane Ike hit Galveston, Texas, resulting in the deaths of 50 people. At CMC, however, the Chatsworth train crash rightfully took precedence. We mourn the loss of a fellow student, Atul Vyas ’09, who was a passenger on the Metrolink train. In light of his passing, there were no official parties at CMC this week.

When death confronts CMC directly, we are prepared and eager to be respectful. But with a seven-year gap, we seem to overlook a tragedy that devastated so many lives and shook this nation’s foundation. In the future, let us hope that we will recognize the value of life without needing a direct reminder.