Daily Chai

Much of this is clearly bogus, but...

In case you still haven't caught Loose Change 911, the conspiracy theory film (not exactly sure I can call it a documentary) about the events of Sept. 11, 2001, you ought to check it out (which you can easily do, online).

I recommend the film not because it convinced me that all the events of that day were a big lie masterminded by our own government; indeed much of what the filmmakers assert, like that United Flight 93 never crashed in Pennsylvania, can be easily refuted. I really liked the film anyway, because it did raise some troubling questions for me about what the U.S. government did or did not know.

The biggest weakness of the film: it gives equal weight to the most ludicrous claims asd to the reasonable ones, including the curious collapse of World Trade Center 7, which was located across the street from the Twin Towers, and collapsed even though it was not directly hit. The film's biggest strength: it questions just about everything we've been told about that day, and does so in a way that's quite gripping.

Bush, Obama and the E word (that's experience)

Speaking during a recent appearance on Charlie Rose, former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown came up with the perfect answer to those critics of presidential candidate Barack Obama, who say the Illinois senator is not ready to be president because he does not have enough experience.

"George Bush has been president for seven years and he's not ready," Brown replied to a question from Rose.

Now there's a line Obama has to remember for the debates.

Global warming and UFOs in a dead heat

Some people wondering why global warming isn't being talked about more in the ongoing U.S. presidential election and debates have started keeping score.

The tally: Of the 2,769 questions the major television networks had asked all the presidential candidates as of this count, well into the election season, just three of them were questions about global warming. That's the same number of questions that were asked about UFOs, following Dennis Kucinich's claim that he'd encountered one.

As someone who's pretty cynical about the political process, I am still rather stunned by that figure, and it's worth stressing that I'm quoting a conservative count: other stats I found showed UFOs garnering a lot more attention than global warming. I guess the biggest surprise for me is that one of the most talked-about subjects this year is illegal immigration. Not to dismiss that, but why are we so concerned with people crossing our borders and not with our coastlines potentially being eradicated by glacial melt?

Equal time for the "we do need a woman president" camp

I hope I didn't come off as too anti-Hillary in the last post. That was definitely not my intention. While I agree with Lorrie Moore that the notion of a female president being a significant milestone is somewhat passe in the year 2008 (meaning not that we don't need a female president or shouldn't have one, just that in this day of Nancy Pelosi and Ruth Bader Ginsburg and even Oprah, electing a female president would not be the watershed moment it once was), I also agree with Meghan Daum, who argued in today's L.A. Times that our dislike or ambivalence toward Hillary is more sexist than we care to admit.

Once again, an excerpt:

For a lot of people, Hillary Clinton just wants this too badly. Her Achilles heel is not that she cries (or doesn't) from disappointment, but that she is visibly salivating from hunger. That may be OK for male candidates, whose appetites tend to be selling points. But if there's anything that's drilled into women's heads before we're old enough to even ask for something, it's the importance of playing hard to get, of pretending we don't want anything at all.

For those whose romance with the Clintons has been eclipsed by the sudden and urgent desire to build a nest with Obama, the crucial factor may have its roots in age-old mating rituals as much as modern-day campaign strategy.

As difficult as it to say out loud (which is why you haven't heard it), Clinton's aching need for the presidency is freaking voters out. Like a bachelorette whose obsessive focus on finding a mate has reduced the other aspects of her life to blank, negligible spaces, Clinton has somehow managed to give people the feeling that, should she not get the nomination, she has nothing to go back to. The fact that Clinton is not only a senator but is likely destined to be a figure of historical importance seems nothing more than a parting gift should she not win the presidency. At least, she appears to see it that way.

What we want from Clinton is the impossible. We want her to pursue the nomination without looking like a pursuer.

We want, on some level, for her to win the White House according to the dating guide "The Rules" -- acting aloof to the point of indifference. We might even want her to borrow a page from "Bridget Jones' Diary," in which the heroine resolves not to "sulk about having no boyfriend, but develop inner poise and authority and sense of self as woman of substance, complete without boyfriend, as best way to obtain boyfriend."

As counterintuitive as it sounds, we want Clinton to assure us that she has plenty of other fish to fry if things don't go her way.

The problem is, political campaigns aren't won by following "The Rules." That's why we may be further from electing a female president than we'd care to admit.

Why we don't need a woman president

Readers of contemporary women's fiction are, no doubt, familiar with the works of Lorrie Moore. This Sunday, she published a very politically astute editorial in the New York Times which really helped me to understand why I am not more excited about a woman president.

An excerpt:

"In my opinion, it is a little late in the day to become sentimental about a woman running for president. The political moment for feminine role models, arguably, has passed us by. The children who are suffering in this country, who are having trouble in school, and for whom the murder and suicide rates and economic dropout rates are high, are boys — especially boys of color, for whom the whole educational system, starting in kindergarten, often feels a form of exile, a system designed by and for white girls.

In the progressive Midwestern city where I live, the high school dropout rate for these alienated and written-off boys is alarmingly high. Some are even middle-class, but many are just hanging on, their families torn apart by harsh economics and a merciless criminal justice system. Why does it seem to be the Republicans who are more vocal about reforming our drug laws? Why has no one in the Democratic Party campaigned to have felons who have served their time made full citizens again? Their continued disenfranchisement is a foolhardy strike against these men and their families.

Perfect historical timing has always been something of a magic trick — finite and swift. The train moves out of the station. The time to capture the imagination of middle-class white girls, the group Hillary Clinton represents, was long ago. Such girls have now managed on their own (given that in this economy only the rich are doing well). They have their teachers and many other professionals to admire, as well as a fierce 67-year-old babe as speaker of the House, several governors and a Supreme Court justice. The landscape is not bare.