You know you are reaching your audience when the performer at the event you are registering voters at starts signing a freestyle made up song called “I’m on the Bus!” This is exactly what happened when the voter registration crew worked the Willy Porter concert at the WOW hall earlier this month. Hearing in impromptu folk ballad about political change all revolving around getting on the Bus was quite a moment and the crowd was loving it. If we only could have convinced Willy to put on his bus button, it would have been perfect.

I’ve been spending some time trying to help out the voter registration efforts. The benefits are plenty; getting to see a show for free and getting to talk with young or new voters.

One of the most striking themes was at the Heiroglyphics/Blue Scholars concert where we ran into SO many 17 year old voters who were not going to be old enough to vote this time, but you could tell they were very engaged with what is going on.

As we get closer to the voter registration deadline, the crowds are getting more enthusiastic about the upcoming vote. Last night at the Hot Buttered Rum String Band show, instead of politely saying “yes” when asked if they are registered, they give a high five or say “you better believe it!”. The countdown nears so get involved if you haven’t yet. Thanks to our tireless voter registration team Alison and Kristina for all of their hard work!

If you are in Michigan and have foreclosed on your house, then you better have a new address ready to provide at the polls.

Printed on Sept 17, 2008 in the Register Guard:

By Anthony Biglan and Dennis Embry

Prevailing views about the “war” on terror are contrary to scientific understanding of human behavior. Human beings who are traumatized by attack become highly motivated to counterattack. Yet U.S. leaders pursue a strategy that pays little attention to these effects. As the bumper sticker says: “We are making terrorists faster than we can kill them.”

Trauma perturbs the brain’s hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. People exposed to stress become hyper-vigilant and prone to attack perceived threats. These reactions occur whether the stress results from a legitimate effort to fight terrorism or from a terrorist attack. They are the result of natural selection; those who are quick to counterattack were a bit more likely to survive in a dangerous world. It didn’t matter if some counterattacks were misplaced, so long as counterattacking generally contributed to survival.
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Complaints about the coverage of political campaigns are rife this time of year. Many pundits decry the lack of serious discussion of the important issues facing the nation, though they quickly return to speculating about whether a candidate’s latest attack ad will hurt his or her opponent. What never gets discussed is why reporting is so focused on trivia and attack.

The reason is that such reporting is profitable. All of the media covering the current election have one desire in common: they want a large audience. There is a collective benefit to the political media to have controversy because controversy and a close election result in a bigger audience.
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BEAVERTON, Ore. – A new invention could revolutionize solar energy – and it was made by a 12-year-old in Beaverton.

Despite his age, William Yuan has already studied nuclear fusion and nanotechnology, and he is on his way to solving the energy crisis…(more)

No, I’m sad to say that it isn’t, “Ask not what you can do for your country…” In fact, for my money, the best political quote of all time is from Gov. Arnold Schwarznegger, “I have behaved badly sometimes. Yes, it is true that I was on rowdy movie sets and I have done things that were not right, which I thought then was playful but now I recognize that I offended people and to those people that I offended, I want to say that I am deeply sorry and I apologize.” He made this statement in response to complaints from women that had been in movies with him earlier in his career that he had groped them.
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If you don’t remember that song from the Karate Kid, you were born in the wrong decade!

Why not take some time to go fill out the
BEST OF EUGENE ballot for the Eugene Weekly?

I’m not here to tell you what to vote for, but if you wanted some recommendations…

BEST ACTIVIST GROUP: The Bus Project!
BEST LOCAL POLITICIAN: Kitty Piercy
BEST BLOG: LANEBUS.ORG

If not for yourself, do it for Mr. Miyagi.

“The Wall Street Journal reports that Google News crawled an obscure reprint of an article from 2002 when United Airlines was on the brink of bankruptcy. United Airlines has since recovered but due to a missing dateline, Google News ran the story as today’s news. The story was then picked up by other news aggregators and eventually headlined as a news flash on Bloomberg. This triggered automated trading programs to dump UAL, cratering the stock from $12 to $3 and evaporating 1.14 billion dollars (nearly United’s total market cap today) in shareholder wealth. The stock recovered within the day to $10 and is now trading at $9.62, a market cap of $300M less than before Google ran the story. The article makes clear that Google’s news bot only noticed the old story because it has been voted up in popularity on the site of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper. The original thought was that stock manipulation may have been behind the incident, but this suspicion seems to be fading.”

I suspect that there will be a lot of back slapping in DC about the convictions in the London airline bomber case today. However, the acquittal of one of the members and the hung jury on four more should give us pause. Why? Because the White House’s decision to pull the trigger early on this case, despite the fact that it was a British intelligence case and all the members were under constant surveillance, led directly to the inconclusive verdicts. MI5 had the matter well in hand and was waiting to develop more information about additional conspirators before rounding up the London bunch. However, as well documented in Ron Suskind’s recent book, the Bush administration’s desire to get good press before the 2006 election caused the British to have to act before they wished, jeopardizing the case and our longstanding relationship with British intelligence agencies.

In short, this isn’t a triumph for the US. It’s an example of how this administration will risk lives for good press.

The amount of waste and financial carelessness in Washington D.C. is taken to new heights when we see how a wife of a lobbyist wraps her gifts.