Good Offense = Good Defense ???

I am going to continue to draw our attention to the attacks on the University because I think we need to engage in an aggressive internal debate about defending the Enlightenment values and ethics that HAVE indeed fared poorly in recent years among humanists.

Indeed one could say that since right-wing blogger Roger Simon is so ready to trash his own Ivy credentials, he and the Jerry Falwell law-schoolers are choosing to be marginal and to play on a politics of resentment that one of the commentators on Simon's blog attributes entirely to the "post-modern academy." Who doesn't like to make fun of the Ivy League?

What is at stake here is the destruction of the public sphere, which has become more like a hall of distorting mirrors -- and left and right are ready to cast each other in the role of the "mentally ill" or those whose discourse should be entirely ignored or discounted.

I don't think we can leave this problem to University Administrators or MLA presidents and their ilk to figure out --

This is where the problem lies as I see it:

1. We cannot just defend the University as such because there IS something wrong with the way in which they are administered, but it has nothing to do with postmodernism! It has everything to do with the nature of the undemocratic, corporate structure of management -- i.e. Lawrence Summer (President of Harvard) and Steven Rosenstone (Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnestoa) are basically not accountable in their decisions to either their faculty or their students. (these are cases that are the most obvious to me from my little corner of the world...)

We should therefore begin an aggressive campaign to demand reforms in the bureaucratic structures of University governance. Students, faculty and staff can participate in various ways to create different forms of public debate where questions of University life FOR EVERYONE are addressed.

2. Initiatives like Multiculturalism, Diversity, etc. have become entirely bureaucratic. If you have the right bright faces of minority professors and students at your University, you as an administrator assume that this reflects well on you and your job is done. How do we address this bureacratization of progressive issues and civil rights as problem of democracy and representation and not identity politics and representation?

3. The University IS an Enlightenment instituition, based upon a Utopic model of self-governance and liberal arts that has seen itself increasingly diminished by instrumental thinking and drive for profit. If the role of the humanities within the governance of Universities has been diminished, it certainly has not disappeared -- not for all the baleful predictions of Allan Bloom's or Stuart Hall's followers. If we indeed face a "university in ruins," do we appeal for reform, are we to be perpetually on the defensive? Do we abandon the institution, or do we demand reform?

The University permits the work of people who criticize both Humanism and the Enlightenment to take place within it. If deconstruction is a form of anti-humanism, it certainly is not for the destruction of all value, despite all the popular caricatures.

I invite all interested parties to take up these questions in public debate.

Conservative Diversity! Attack the University!

The cons are not going to let go of these stories on the predominance of Dems in the ranks of the professoriate .

They're demanding conservative diversity - so what do they suggest?

School Vouchers! What an original idea!

In addition, they suggest defunding public universities and making them submit to the test of market competition. Their big gripe of the moment : according to that bastion of fair and balanced journalism, The Daily News , Columbia University is filled with hate and Anti-Semites because of the presence of pro-Palestinian profs.

Brace yourselves, you're going to see a lot more well-funded conservative student's organizations demanding fake diversity.

I'm not saying that the Universities are filled with real diversity, but the con version of it is definitely phony.

the saddam conspiracy

Upon re-reading Mark Juergensmeyer's deftly written Saddam Conspiracy Theory in The Globalist, what made me feel so sad is that it more and more just reads like he's afraid to call it reporting, so he masks it as a conspiracy thinking: Those poor Iraqi clerics in their agency panic! Those woefully under-equipped war journalists with their paranoia! Those silly academic types in the reality-based community! Don't they understand that the newly evolved Rove-species of propaganda no longer needs to base the official account (of who built up Saddam, and who got rid of him) on history? - Thus history becomes conspiracy: when you can no longer admit there's truth to it.

Actually, it must make true conspiracy theorists weep to see their object of affection so denigrated.

anniversaries, conspiracies

According to a Reuters report on CNN, the JFK assassination is recreated in video game, timed to be released online on Nov 22, 2004, the anniversary of the former President's death. The developers say they want the game to dispel any conspiracy - players are rewarded for the accuracy of their three shots at Kennedy, measured against the Warren report.

weimar germany -- the first red state?

You know what I am talking about. Extreme nationalism, fear of foreigners, contempt for political adversaries and legislative process. A willingness to use and escalate violence to get results. Appeal to patriotic character of the "mythic" people. Suppression of dissent. Consolidation of powers. Persecution of homosexuals. Fear of cities, and of cosmpolitanism. Generalized anti-intellectualism. Hatred of the French. Need I say more?

michael moore = ann coulter

Tonight, I found this comment by Greg Knauss on Waxy.org:

Michael Moore and Ann Coulter aren't opposed to each other, they are each other: determined propagandists, using the language and mediums best suited to strike at the emotional core of their audiences. They do not work from a common set of facts, and would ignore them even if they existed. When they speak well, they're Henry V on St. Crispin's Day. When they speak poorly, they're a spittle-flecked wacko with an "End of the World is Nigh" sign. But that's just a matter of presentation: they're all lunatics, asking us to stop thinking and start feeling. And to start feeling what they want us to feel.

This determined emotionalism - which is another way of saying anti-rationalism - is what drives us today. You can find it distasteful, you can find it depressing, but it's most important impact is that we have turned over the direction of the country - our future - to the part of our psyche that doesn't want to think.

It's not about smarts. The lunatics aren't stupid - just the opposite. It's about the willingness to abandon the deductive process in favor of epiphany. It's about the abandonment of the brain in favor of the gut.

Damn! He's right to admit that "Jon Stewart has said all this, of course, and said it better" - but still, the Daily Show never revealed this salient fact: Moore IS Coulter! As Moore, she is wearing Eddie Murphy's cast-off fat-suit! That explains everything...

take a load off

all right people, no more post-election bitterness, just settle down with one of these lovely Middle East - War Movies... I recommend this one:

damn those tenured radicals

According to the NY Times , the Republicans want not only to rule the airwaves, dictate our color combinations, fill the airspace with Fox News lies, they want our PATHETIC ACADEMIC jobs too. Well I've got some news for the conservative students' groups and Kelly Coyne in particular, quoted in this article -- conservatives are usually greedier than lefties -- and bizarrely enough, are usually not willing to accept the pathetic pay scale of the professoriate in addition to not being willing to go to graduate school and spend their twenties in PENURY. If you're conservative, some one is going to pay you a lot of money to spout your views --and you'll be recruited straight out of your college years.

I saw this happen in the Literature Major at Yale. The neo-cons took their own in, gave them cushy jobs in finance, consulting, think tanks, whatever, while the Lefties went to graduate school or journalism and activist groups. We were paid badly, but expected to keep up appearances.

You've got the House, the Senate, the Airwaves, the Presidency, -- now you want the University too!

But with the shoot ourselves in the foot skills that my academic brethren usually show, they will probablly cede this institution to the Right wing as well. And with the willingness of the Conservative philanthropists to throw money at fronts the Culture War in their endless battle against critical thinking, they'll probably buy enough brain time in the young to produce a whole crop of Dinesh D'Souzas and Allan Bloom/Milton Friedman clones.

If you think Tenured Radicals share an ideology, think again -- my colleagues at Minnesota hated each other with a primitive intensity I thought went out of style when Zeus replaced his father as the head of the Olympian Gods. I've never seen anyone go at each other like Marxist on Marxist, or post-colonialist on post-colonialist.

Perhaps the Right can keep some of us for gladiatorial spectacles or academic death matches -- where cheering crowds of NASCAR moms and dads watch as we take each other down, Andy Kaufman style.

Playing the Left

Sign up for your roles right now.

the infalllibles

In my day at the big state University where I taught for almost ten years, I once had to read a former's chair's self-assessment. Very revealing document insofar as it chimed in well with Bush's answer to a reporter's question, "Can you think of any mistakes you've made in the past four years?"

Bush said after a moment, "No."

My former chair when asked in his self-assessment if he could name any mistakes or weaknesses replied in the same manner as our President, perhaps a little less tersely.

Well, it must be REALLY fucking nice to be infallible, because I thought that it was only your Christian God who could make such a claim, but I must be WRONG. Silly me. Obviously, I'm not INFALLIBLE.

So now, for our new job description for positions of power in these United States: "Needed: Inflexible son of a bitch who believes in his own infallibility. Will know no self-doubt. Experienced at surrounding himself with "yes-men" and "women." Thin-skinned, self-righteous. Will demand absolute loyalty and ass-kissing from followers.Lies without blinking. Ready to purge dissenters as disloyal."

Have you hugged an authoritarian personality today?

election analysis paralysis

At the risk of dwelling on a topic that was shot down by the election
- the economy and its relation to the people's decision for this or
against that candidate - I took a cursory look at Wall Street
reactions (I mean intelligent comments, not hoorays, guffahs, and
other knee-jerks) to the election. Mostly, analysts have exercised
remarkable restraint - as if to say, so what.

Can this be right? While television spent tens of thousands of
program hours on pre- and post-election analysis, and the nation's
newspapers slaughtered entire forests to ship copious copy of
punditry, talking points, stump phrases and op-ed wisdom, the most
highly paid analysts in the country just shrug?

Indeed. They're not paid to take up airspace - they're looking for
calculable effects. How much influence does any president have on the
things that matter to financial analysis? Consumer debt, home prices
and the trade deficit are largely not within the power of the U.S.
President to solve. You may want to believe that an oil team in the
White House can control oil prices, but the reality is, they may
share that pipe-dream, but they still don't control oil. Does the
choice of president directly influence hiring and firing in the US
job markets? Hard to quantify how and why. Corporate capital
expenditure? About all of these it's easy to speculate how elections
might inflect results - but it's all just hot air.

Welcome to the distraction economy. Unless you're a media analyst
devoted to figuring out how many policy blogs Google can spider
before getting bogged down, or bent on pushing the still barely
tolerable ratio of highly priced advertising to mindlessly repetitive
posturing by talking heads, the election, for now, has nothing to do
with high finance, and to that extent, the voters perhaps correctly
ignored the economy and focused on the horror of dudes kissing.

However, once you remember that the Bush program - self-directed
social security funding, combined with lower income taxes for the
investor class, a low dividend tax rate and encouragements for
dividends - should spell out future demand for investments, you
realize that of course the election has economic consequences. Where
is the analysis? Not on the blogs; not in the papers; not on
television. - But enough already about the election. This is not a
policy blog, after all...

cold civil war

because you asked, anon, lemme tellya, if you don't go over 80 mph, the continuity becomes evident from tennessee to texas. what do they drink, you ask? they are drinking weak, but sugary brew in the day ("want mo' sweet tea, hon?") and weak hops at night ("beer built this body"). they like meat. for about 2000 miles, a staggering number of cattle are the big roadside attraction along the I-40. forget the old route 66, which tries to hide its wrinkly face alongside much of the same geography. once you get to arkansas, people show that girth is nothing: you gotta have heft. oklahoma and texas even look red: the very soil is ocher. I was glad to see snow in new mexico, just because it added a new color to the windshield panorama. everything yellows in arizona, as if entering a retro-technicolor movie scene. some awesome sights along the way are memphis, the pyramid by the river; and the rio grande at albuquerque, an amazing descent from the mountains. but everything in between was mostly toothless gas station attendants [ed: naw you cain't tawk like that 'bout them people, the PC police will object] erm, differently abled, differently bodied, happy creatures talking (as best I understood) about keggers the night before, and supersized boors yelling over their complimentary breakfasts about how malpractice law is a conspiracy, insurance a fraud, people should let people alone, let's kick some butt in iraq, and have the guvment really fix the guvment for good this time. really, it is spectacularly empty in the middle of the country, and very flat, both out there and in people's heads. nobody likes to listen to anyone, the daily papers all spout the same opinions, local coverage crowds out any mention of this week's war crimes or other (inter-) national affairs, AM radio is a reliably monotone rant across the spectrum, and even on FM radio it seems there are ten bible-thumpers for each lone NPR station, encroaching on the frequency so you can't quite make out the news from the state college because of the pro-life arguments shrieking from a local broadcaster. I was thankful for the kitschy sunsets, the tawdry tourist mementos, and the sad dying elephant congregations of RVs and fifth wheels near the cities, near the lakes, near Mexico, near the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, and Lake Havasu - at least some people somewhere engage in something other than culture war. oh yes, the red middle has its own culture. no, I don't wish there hadn't been that civil war. but you know what: this is a new cold civil war, and no end in sight.

Red vs Blue

Pundits can talk about uniters and dividers until they are, well, red, blue, or purple in their faces - I just crossed the United States by car, and if you're that close to the ground, it's obvious that the facts remain: this is a very divided country. Yes, statistics can be finely ground until it is no longer so easily discerned what's blue and and what's red - but what is going to be achieved with such weaponized relativism? It is decidedly NOT a purple country. Those triumphantly red states that look so great on the TV screen maps? They are yawningly empty... go to this site to see the true balance of red and blue. Or if you can't stand it any more, go to this excellent site : two full seasons of the (deliciously political) machinima sit-com, Red vs Blue!

justice

Yes, we need to make a bridge between the the two Americas , not red and blue, but rich and poor, but who am I to tell anyone how to do it? Read American Prospect.

Didn't I write something about the f-f-f's right after the elections? (Apologies to Beverly's mother about that one, but you're the only one I'm apologizing to.)

In the meantime, Tania and Liza have sent this link of apologies to the world. Say you're sorry -- add your own.

I'm disoriented, depressed by the power struggles in the Democratic Party, and wondering -- what the hell is this I'm not a political blog!

These are dark dark times, but the good folks blessed cause are spreading the good new. Jesus cares. Just remember, I'm on the no pray list.

revenge of the red states

People have been pointing out that former slave-owning states are "red" states and the abolitionist states are "blue" states -- sending around a map meant to fan our outrage at red staters.

But let's not forget that the blue states, with the exception of the Upper MidWest are almost all states that profited from Hi Tech -- from Silicon Valley to Silicon Alley, tech revived the ailing states of Massachussetts, Oregon and Washington, which was known when I was growing up for ruined factories and angry Red Sox fans and even angrier lumberjacks (respectively).

In the 1980s and 90s, the Dems, who having traditionally represented the interests of the working people against the Republicans, began to favor the new money of telecom and hi tech -- the urban and working poor, the middle class were in effect abandoned by the one party that throughout the past century put the brakes on the accumulation of wealth by overseeing a redistribution of wealth through taxes and government programs. But both Carter and increasingly Clinton, served the interests of a new constituency -- a high tech, media, and advertising elite -- whose fortunes were carved out of silicon rather than coal, oil or railroads.

In this climate, the Dems have focused on what Kevin Phillips in his book Wealth and Democracy calls, after Jeffrey Berry in The New Liberalism postmaterialist "quality of life" interests-- Abortion rights, Gay marriage, Gays in the Military, giving up the ground of economic outrage that fueled progressive insurgencies against the Money Power - to whom? to Ralgh Nader, perhaps. Postmaterialism was according to Phillips, both "premature and exaggerated" --

Is it a case of poor red staters cutting off their noses too spite their faces? Yes, but it is revenge by any other name as well and it is fueled by a class war in which we are all held hostage to big money.

taking a break

I'm taking a break -- I'll be back in four days.

Take a look a around, leave a comment.

wimps, wimps, and more wimps

Howard Dean taught the Dems how to fight Bush, but they're running back to their "safe" spots again -- Liberal Oasis with Obama and Pelosi trying to sound all conciliatory as Sunday talking heads.

Read it and weep.

upper body strength

If Kerry had won, I promised myself that I would criticize the Democrats and be ruthless about it-- but when he and the Dems were trounced, I found myself temporarily tongue tied. Everyone has offered their their two cents about how the Dems have to remake themselves with new slogans and new ideas (as if the two were comparable): Dems for human rights, Dems for community, and that, Dems for activism, Dems for common sense. Dems for justice and Dems for the poor...

It's my turn now.

I have one thing I've been holding back on since my precinct caucuses in Minneapolis. I'ven moved three times since then so don't try to track me down...

I think Dems should stand up for Upper Body Strength at least in the Upper Mid-West.

The flabby upper arms of my fellow precinct voters was blowin' the the cold Northwestern winds! I kid you not. While Minneapolis Dems are working out on their triceps -- they might consider being a little less smug, a little more angry. They might even well try to notice what goes on around them.

I was quietly disgusted by the scene -- I could tell that everyone was really into consensus and process and their little book of rules. There were some young voters there -- really young, first timers, we could have energized the eighteen year olds, but no, no, we hereby move to abolish violence and non-native plants from our neighborhood. Hear! Hear! No one commented on the massive turnout, no one mentioned the energy in the room. It dissipated after a while. I have had more fun in doctor's waiting rooms than I did that day.

Why were they so damned calm? People in this country are hurting and hurting bad! And conservatives have mined that vein of outrage -- why can't we?

Thomas Frank on the conservative revolt

On the NY Times Op Ed page, Frank sounds the following note of warning to the Dems that will go unheeded, especially after the Dem Senate minority leader is going to be pro-life and anti-war. I had been clinging to some kind of hope for the party, but Frank's prescience about the triumph of cultural populism and the left's abandonment of economic and social justice and populism trumps all my wishful thinking regarding the default party of the left.

"To short-circuit the Republican appeals to blue-collar constituents, Democrats must confront the cultural populism of the wedge issues with genuine economic populism. They must dust off their own majoritarian militancy instead of suppressing it; sharpen the distinctions between the parties instead of minimizing them; emphasize the contradictions of culture-war populism instead of ignoring them; and speak forthrightly about who gains and who loses from conservative economic policy.

What is more likely, of course, is that Democratic officialdom will simply see this week's disaster as a reason to redouble their efforts to move to the right. They will give in on, say, Social Security privatization or income tax "reform" and will continue to dream their happy dreams about becoming the party of the enlightened corporate class. And they will be surprised all over again two or four years from now when the conservative populists of the Red America, poorer and angrier than ever, deal the 'party of the people' yet another stunning blow."

For the full text, click here.

no pray list

When a right-wing commentator promised to pray for us lefties consumed by negativity and hate on skippy's blog , I realized that we need a national no pray list. It would be like the national no call list, but instead of blocking solicitation calls, it would allow us to block unwanted prayers.

stolen votes? voice of the unconscious?

I'm of two minds here in sorting all of this out --

first mind says to all the links I've gotten to evidence of stolen votes in Ohio and Florida -- The Right has stolen another Presidential election. The disconnect between exit polls, the use of the Diebold scanners in all the counties in Florida where the most discrepancies between Party registration and polling results offer almost incontrovertible evidence that electoral disenfranchisement happened again! Something must be done!

the second mind says -- it doesn't matter -- I have to accept the results as the eruption of the American unconscious. A posture of outrage is neither psychoanalytically nor politically correct. If the majority of Americans have been hypnotized by Bush's insistence on a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam, it's because he spoke to the unconscious, whereas Kerry spoke to our capacity for reason.

Forcing people to reason is doubtless going to appear authoritarian. The Right wing inflames the most primitive unconscious instincts, creating an illusion of "liberation," whereas the Left has been consigned the role of the censorious schoolmarm. "Don't hate all Arabs" we chide.

So there it goes, I don't know which one I should be listening to. I'm no Jungian, so no admonishments of reconciliation or Yin Yang bullshit! Please!

fundamentalists are the new avant-garde

Like "excellence" and “diversity," creativity has become a catchword in contemporary business management and government policy-making. It may at first appear that any appeal for greater tolerance (especially of homosexuality) even if it is perfectly mercantile should be welcomed and may in fact create some leverage for Democrats in the depressed cities of the heartland, where gay marriage proved to be such a divisive and decisive issue for voters in the heartland.

The argument for remaking heartland cities into gay friendly cities would go like this: if we cannot convince the residents of Ohio to support gay marriage on the basis of civil rights, perhaps we could convince them by showing how greater tolerance of homosexuality leads to more vibrant urban economies.

Neo-liberals would like us to embrace the ethos of market-driven capitalism with reckless disregard for the values of social justice while heartlanders, over-stimulated by talk of moral values and the Rapture can assume the heroic posture of the nineteenth-century martyr to art or avant garde– and reject commercialism and profit for Jesus instead of art. The justifications that Florida offers for a more tolerant social polity mask a politics of economic expedience against which we would all like to rebel. (from an article I'm writing on "Creative Industries" that will perhaps appear in the Baffler.)

blaming the victim

American Prospect gives us another reason not to trust the The New York Times. Greg Sargent takes on the post-mortem of the election and the Kerry campaign at that supposedly liberal newspaper: Instead of investigating the dirty tricks or even pointing to the relentlessly deceptive and inflammatory campaign tactics of the winner -- Elizabeth Bumiller decides to take apart the mistakes of the loser. Sargent says it best -- history will always be written by the winner. We just don't have to accept the winner's version of things

I'm thinking of Paul Wellstone tonight and it should be clear by now that standing up to Bush and his thugs is extremely dangerous. While Vince Foster's suicide was blamed on Hillary Clinton based upon the most circumstantial evidence, few of us on this side were willing to voice our deepest fears about Wellstone's untimely death.

liberal elites celebrate secretly

It was actually a liberal elite conspiracy that got gay marriage on eleven state ballots, forming a very effective wedge issue bound to bother bible belters into voting in the interest of Plutocrats!

Ha ha ha, Massachussetts Supremes make a lot of money and they just wanted to keep their Bushie tax cuts!

They're pretending to weep as they toast each other behind the green velvet curtain with Veuve Clicquot cappucinos.

if ohio is the new florida...

is unemployment the new sabbatical? political exile the new vacation? the army reserve the new temp career? is the web the new fox news channel? comedy central the new cnn?

looking at cnn's break-down of the exit polls, suggesting an utter disconnection of large parts of the population from the direction the u.s.a. are drifting - do you begin to think the united states are the new soviet union?

is a moderate or liberal outlook no longer what determines your vote? is advertisement the new opinion? is the g.o.p. the new refuge for the worker? the democratic party the one for the higher incomes? nader the only choice for the well-intentioned?

is the old culture war the new culture war? and is iraq, is afghanistan, finally the beginning of the end of an american era?


if ohio is the new florida, and black-box voting is the new hanging chad -

then is karl rove the new mark hanna? if religion is to be the new political philosophy, then is jesus christ the new leo strauss?

is homophobia the new patriotism? is hateful provincialism the new global force?

we're fucked

OK, we're fucked. So I was optimistic as were so many of you who read this blog and whose blogs I've been reading. But I'm defiant -- there is no self-flagellation right now. But we were wrong.

We were wrong because we were too optimistic about Americans and their ability to reason beyond fear and pseudo-morality. We were wrong because we believed that most Americans believe as we do that there should be a separation of Church and State -- that this is the true spirit of our Constitution and our Nation.

So now, I don't know how to proceed -- I'll write, I'll keep blogging and teaching, but how do I go on as a person and a citizen? Do we stand together as Americans, do we engage in constructive debate and constructive dissent?

PLEASE at least for one day, I'm going to be less than constructive.

I can't believe that we have been fucked over by a bunch of fat fearful fucks in the middle of this country whose brains have been so addled by fast food and self-righteous Christian preaching that they don't understand that while their famous values against modernity are being promoted by the President and his cronies, their wallets are being picked by Bush and Co.

I went to the doctor here in Taiwan with my almost four year old because he had strep throat -- cost of visit and meds? $7.00 US. That's National Health Care for you. That's what you fat fucks might enjoy if you weren't so fucking stupid. Health care costs tripled under Bush's watch -- and you know which stocks went up on the stock market yesterday? Halliburton and big pharma!

So they're laughing at you Bible belt diabetics all the way to the bank! And you know what? Me and my bleeding heart liberal friends will not be crying over you when you go bankrupt on the meds and health insurance costs.

interfacing with W

Index this quote back to whichever year you like: life never imitates fiction. Right?

There's no way William A Cozzano can lose the upcoming Presidential election. He is a likable Midwestern governor with one insidious advantage. An advantage provided by a shadowy group of backers. A biochip in his head hardwires him to a computerized polling system. The mood of the electorate is channelled directly into his brain. Forget issues. Forget policy. He's more than the perfect candidate - he's a special effect.

(Cover blurb for Stephen Bury's novel Interface, NY: Bantam 1994).



Image care of Salon.com:

George W. Bush tried to laugh off the bulge. "I don't know what that is," he said on "Good Morning America" on Wednesday, referring to the infamous protrusion beneath his jacket during the presidential debates. "I'm embarrassed to say it's a poorly tailored shirt."

Dr. Robert M. Nelson, however, was not laughing. He knew the president was not telling the truth. And Nelson is neither conspiracy theorist nor midnight blogger. He's a senior research scientist for NASA and for Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and an international authority on image analysis.

hm...

zogby has good news

Be cautious, be cautiously optimistic as the votemaster posts results of Zogby's cell phone SMS poll which showed STRONG support for Kerry 's 55% vs. Bush's 40%. It's not in my nature to be cautious however -- I think something important is happening right under Karl Rove's nose. The people of America are revolting by voting.

That's it for now, but from southern Taiwan I feel a new day dawning in the USA.