Ploafmaster General

Ah, presidential election season. Nothing builds up my sense of civic and political cynicism quite like it. Every four years I struggle with periodic feelings of rage and depression about the state of affairs in our halls of government at the national level. That’s really all I’m going to say about it at the moment, because I don’t really want to uncork the waiting flood of vituperation.

Why does all of this have to come to a head on my birthday?

Michael Grunwald’s Time article about McCain spends most of its time discussing the long odds against the Arizona senator in the 2008 presidential election. His last paragraph really resonated with me, however:

That doesn’t mean that anything’s probable. The media will try to preserve the illusion of a toss-up; you’ll keep seeing “Obama Leads, But Voters Have Concerns” headlines. But when Democrats are winning blood-red congressional districts in Mississippi and Louisiana, when the Republican president is down to 28 percent, when the economy is tanking and world affairs keep breaking Obama’s way, it shouldn’t be heresy to recognize that McCain needs an improbable series of breaks. Analysts get paid to analyze, and cable news has airtime to fill, so pundits have an incentive to make politics seem complicated. In the end, though, it’s usually pretty simple. Everyone seems to agree that 2008 is a change election. Which of these guys looks like change?

This explains almost exactly (though not entirely) how I feel about the media’s approach to this election cycle. Could it really be a close race? Maybe. But if it wasn’t you’d hardly know. Remember when it was practically fact that Obama had knocked Clinton out of the primary race, but the media still clung to every last vote as if there was some chance Hillary would find a way?

I think Grunwald’s right – unless there’s some dramatic mistake or world event or who knows what else, this election looks pretty locked up for the junior senator from Illinois. But a done-deal doesn’t make for good ratings or page views or sales of those dreadfully partisan books (from both sides) you see in the center tables at Barnes and Noble during election season.
(via Gruber)

Many folks close to me know my obsession with many things Italian. While I’m only one quarter Sicilian, the prominence of my full-blood grandmother in my upbringing and the associated happy memories have fostered a deep love for the food, language, culture, and country of Italy.

But lately, I’m kinda pissed at the Italian government.

You see, it seems that they’re performing a fingerprint census of all Roma (or Gypsy) people in their country – including the 90% which claim Italian citizenship – in an effort to “crack down on crime.” This fingerprinting includes Roma children, but doesn’t include any non-Roma Italians (sounds confusing, but this doesn’t refer to residents of Rome).

I hope this sounds as obviously horrific to readers as it did to me and many in Italy’s population. This is terribly similar in concept to how Germany treated Jews leading up to WWII; blame a minority ethnic group for societal woes (in Italy’s case, theft and such) and set them apart, treating them differently than the rest of the population. That certainly snowballed into one of the greatest human tragedies in history.

Thankfully this isn’t the 1930’s, and the European Union took notice early on, so I don’t foresee any larger-scale escalation without the intervention of the international community. There are currently political efforts within Italy and without to stop this practice, and I hope it picks up steam.