googlicious

it’s 2 am and i’m smoking another cigarette and gathering up the gumption to finish a writing project, the taxes are still undone, and i just spent $200 buying dinner for the leading lights of the election reform movement gathered here this week in sarasota - it’s a small world and a dense web, as i’m seeing lately more and more. looking over this blog i’m noticing, that for an ostensible techie, it’s pretty blah, no links anywhere to be seen, hardly… perhaps it’s the keith jarrett…

a rather strange week, what with a phone call from a guy that i haven’t seen since i was 20, an invitation to run for vice president on the american party ticket, from a certifiably insane guru, a wonderful call from a photographer friend currently on i-75 into vancouver, and of course the near total distraction of political flu for which i have paid dearly in household squalor, mondays encounter with kathy dent and crew - an intense experience which i am still digesting, an email from “zamboangafilms@…”, nobody i ever met, in search of a classmate i know somewhat, whose picture is captioned in my photogallery of a trip two years ago to sanfran, well, ok, except that i grew up in zamboanga…, and the profound cognitive dissonance experienced upon, and you will have to follow closely here, receiving an email containing a link to a quote from the spokesperson for the florida secretary of state stating that she had not received any complaints about the district 13 election and they had no investigation planned, this on friday following the disastrous elections here in sarasota, one jenny nash, which incensed me to the point of sending an email out to friends containing said quote and providing three phone numbers for contacting said spokesperson, obviously she had her head way up somwhere it shouldn’t be… anyways, tuesday morning, as i am writing the entry just below this one, an account of mondays recount, the one paragraph i have unfinished and left out of the entry is a somewhat apolitical aside about how viscerally attracted i was to this particular tall woman with short dark hair who walked around like she ran the world, but anyways, unfinished and half unwritten, and that night i’m watching a clip of the recount on cnn.com and there she is, jenny nash. hmmmm.

Tonight was the hearing at the sarasota hyatt, with People for the American Way, ACLU, and… ecchh, it’s late, and once again i didn’t take notes, and cannot at the moment remember the other two sponsoring orgs, though i did manage some pictures and a couple hours of minidisk which i delivered to http://wslr.org - they may have something up in a day or so… however the hearing was very well covered by my judgement, it was reassuring to see the network cameras sticking around for several hours and quite a few print journalists there till the bitter end, there were about 100 people who could not fit into the room - a huge turnout for this town, and the hearings went on for a solid 3.5 hours.

New College was represented by at least four people that i spotted and very likely many more, but notable for me Jono Miller and Mike Lasche. There were at least 200 people in attendance, 50 people that spoke and 20+ others who left written statements. what emerged from this mostly consistent litany of difficulty was a cross section of passionate belief that a vote was worth fighting for, and that this had been stolen from them, a man of 71 spoke unstoppably of fighting, and one could tell he meant it, for this country, and the fairness of it, and somehow when he took off his worn worn hat and pointed to the “i voted today” sticker he had altered to read “I voted, i think”, about ten people in the room, including myself and susan pynchon, the unspoken leader of the hearings, were wiping tears from our cheeks.

Dovey, a woman you could mistake for a slightly more stylish version of rosa parks with a phd, gave a succinct family history, her grandparents had drilled into her parents, and she had drilled into her children, that the very blood of her family had been greatly spilled to gain this power and by god they were going to exercise it, and she knew EXACTLY who she had voted for, and this machine had malfunctioned in a particular way, and she had though it a serious enough problem that she had filed an affidavit, and so had her husband, who happened to experience the same problem, and she checked with her daughter, and you may remember in close encounters of the third kind where suddenly all these people that have had this strange thing happen to them meet up with all the other people that have had the same strange thing happen to them, she knew exactly what they were talking about when she turned on the tv that night. A train of people who walked out of the voting booth with a very strange feeling that something hadn’t worked quite right, and found out over the following days that many hundreds of others had suffered that peculiar doubt.

the incredibly debonair and suave reporter from the miami herald was there - all i could think was that my beloved ms k would want nothing more than to have his babies, he’s older than me, but that wouldn’t stop her from at least thinking about it. I gave him scotts line, “compare the reliability of voting machines and atm’s and you see clearly where this country’s priorities lie.” which i shall now replace the original title to this piece with…. echhhh. diagram that sentence, eh? he also added, and you must imagine the context missing here… “no wonder china wants no part of our “sham, bourgeois, so-called democracy” (peoples daily, 11-10-06)”

speaking of ATMs, a particularly eloquent man with a long grey ponytail, a geek through and through, had the incredible experience of calling kathy dent’s office and having the official explain away his difficulties getting his vote to stick as the sort of mistake that might happen with an ATM, mr ponytail had never actually had, in many years of constant use, a single problem with an ATM and pointed out to dry appause, that every atm he ever used gave him a receipt.

Univision spent a couple hours at the hearings and did a lengthy spot en espanol, three or four times, getting it right, in the lobby.

After the last speaker was spoke, people disappeared fairly quickly, as it was way past dinner time, and you can’t get much going at the hyatt for less than $20 a head. $10.60 for four AA batteries from the lobby, but hey, they were convenient, and really nice. I attempted to steer everyone remaining, basically the panel, to my favorite restaurant, Esca, on main street, i can’t even give you a link to it, because they don’t have a website, and i promised kim i would get her a proposal but i haven’t gotten around to it yet, which i could blame on politics, but won’t. they were not to be persuade away from tommy bahamas however, which did a reasonable job of keeping ten people happy for two hours for $350.00. i really wanted to go to esca. these are my election activist heroes!

Before we go any farther into the evening, however, let me return to the second to last person to speak. it was a man who introduced himself as Dovey’s husband. As we reviewed some of the events and testimony around dinner, we never got as far as mr dovey, but his was *the* most radical and forceful note of the evening - he got up and said he had nothing to add the the testimony of election irregularities and turned to the panel of election activists and said, i paraphrase from memory, ” we need to know what you are going to do about this, because if you aren’t going to do something effective, and right now, we need to know, so we can seek out other means”. he said it at least three times in various ways just to make sure we all knew what he meant, which was that this was simply unnacceptable. remember, that this entire gathering was put together on a day or two notice, passed around via email, and 200 PEOPLE showed up for three hours on a thursday night! righteously mad. a controlled conviction that this would be fixed now, and thoroughly.

3 am and we sign out now…