Matt Kohn

Quick Note

2009-02-03T14:06:00.002-05:00

Last night I was talking with a bartender about the bad economic times. How clients weren't paying their bills. How projects were being cancelled, curtailed, work was short and no new work was coming.

The bartender knows all.

Later, I went on a rant that this is going to be like the early 1990s. We're going to have to fight for everything we've got and people are going to act like animals keeping what they do have.

Happily, this morning, I received some good news, and I'm also very excited about three projects I am currently working on. I still need more work that's paid, but I'm going to use this blog to keep you up to date, and also just let myself breathe.

New Voters Unable to Register?

2006-10-12T11:53:00.000-04:00

Matt Kohn
ew voter registration laws leave thousands off the rolls
Updated 10/10/2006 11:04 PM ET
By Richard Wolf, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON - Some of this year's elections could be decided by those who can't vote.
Across the country, new laws restricting who can register and vote have reduced the number of people who are eligible. Some of those laws have been blocked in court. Even so, critics say, the damage has been done:

*In Arizona, about 21,000 voter registration applications were rejected because of inadequate proof of citizenship, required under a 2004 law. Most who were affected lacked up-to-date driver's licenses, birth certificates or passports.

A federal appellate court blocked enforcement of the law - which also requires voters to show ID at the polls - last week, four days before the registration deadline. "We're looking at an enormous disparate impact on people of color," says Linda Brown, executive director of the Arizona Advocacy Network.

*In Florida, a law setting up new requirements for independent groups that register voters prompted the League of Women Voters to suspend registration drives for five months until a court intervened. In that period, the league could have registered thousands of people, The registration deadline is Tuesday. "You've just got to assume it's going to have an impact," says Dianne Wheatley-Giliotti, the league's state president.

*In Ohio, a law that made paid workers liable for the validity of the registrations they collect caused several groups to stop signing up voters for two months this summer. By the time courts intervened, the opportunity had been lost for thousands of registrations.

The group ACORN, which advocates for low-income families, wanted to sign up 138,000 Ohioans this year; now it will settle for 100,000. "Those were really the critical months," head organizer Katy Gall says. "In past years, we've met or exceeded our goals."

Advocates of registration and photo identification laws say they are needed to prevent fraud. They say the rules apply to all potential voters, regardless of race, ethnicity, income or ideology. "This is a matter of voter confidence, whether or not the fraud is real or perceived," says Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita, whose state has one of the nation's strictest ID requirements.

Laws tightening the rules on registrations also have been passed in Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, New Mexico and Washington. Laws imposing photo ID requirements at the polls were passed in Georgia and Missouri, but courts have intervened.

Paul DeGregorio, chairman of the Election Assistance Commission, says the laws should not discourage citizens from voting. Far worse, he says, would be for states to ignore problems that cause Americans to distrust the process.

Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law disagrees. "All of them will have an impact in suppressing votes," she says. "Even when courts have overturned them, they have ongoing impact."

New Video from Call it Democracy

2006-06-29T18:49:00.000-04:00

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Free free to pass this video on - Go to youtube.com and copy the "embed" into your own blog...
You can read the background news the Washington Post below.
The story behind the story is here...
http://scoop.epluribusmedia.org/story/2006/6/27/14358/0575

Why this Video is on the Net ----------------------------------------------------------

When I interviewed Rep. King in May 2003, he seemed very concerned about voting rights, and running elections smoothly. He was in favor of paper ballots, which is generally a good idea. It was obvious that his bill was a "Republican version" of Rush Holt's (D-NJ). King's bill left it up to states to police their elections administrators and veryify the efficacy of voting machines.

But he didn't seem like a bad guy.

Last week, renewal of the Voting Rights Act was brought to a halt because King wrote a letter, which seeks to eliminate mulitlingual balloting from the guarantees the Act provides. 79 Republicans signed the letter, mostly from the South.

Following is an excerpt of the letter, published proudly on King's own site:

"Multilingual ballots divide our country, increase the risk of voter error and fraud, and burden local taxpayers. The multilingual ballot mandate encourages the linguistic division of our nation and contradicts the "Melting Pot" ideal that has made us the most successful multi-ethnic nation on earth. This increasingly burdensome mandate on state and local governments to provide multilingual voting materials also serves to undermine the election process. It contradicts the requirement that immigrants need to demonstrate the ability to read and understand English in order to become naturalized citizens. The existence of multilingual ballots increases the risk of election errors and fraud. Furthermore, not only are multilingual ballots an unfunded mandate, but they are a waste of taxpayer funds because they are mandated by the VRA without regard to whether they are actually used."

It's despicable that King, who claims to be a moderate concerned about counting every vote and making sure that every American who has the right to vote can get that vote counted, would author this letter, and lead this new movement which so obviously disenfranchise voters.

I've made this video in order to let people know a little bit about how this group can seem to speak about the Voting Rights we cherish, yet work against us behind the scenes. There are plenty of Republicans against this particular charade, including President Bush and House Leadership. We have to contact all our congresspeople, and the President, and let them know all Americans support multilingual ballots.

GOP Rebellion Stops Voting Rights Act

2006-06-29T15:29:00.000-04:00

GOP Rebellion Stops Voting Rights Act
Complaints Include Bilingual Ballots and Scope of Justice Dept. Role in South
By Charles Babington
Washington Post - Thursday, June 22, 2006

House leaders abruptly canceled a vote to renew the 1965 Voting Rights Act yesterday after rank-and-file Republicans revolted over provisions that require bilingual ballots in many places and continued federal oversight of voting practices in Southern states.

The intensity of the complaints, raised in a closed meeting of GOP lawmakers, surprised Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and his lieutenants, who thought the path was clear to renew the act's key provisions for 25 years. The act is widely considered a civil rights landmark that helped thousands of African Americans gain access to the ballot box. Its renewal seemed assured when House and Senate Republican and Democratic leaders embraced it in a May 2 kickoff on the Capitol steps.

But many Southerners feel the law has achieved its purpose and become more nuisance than necessity in several respects. They have aired those arguments for years, but yesterday they got a boost from Republicans scattered throughout the nation who are increasingly raising a different concern: They insist that immigrants learn and use English.

Hastert's office said the Republican leadership "is committed to passing the Voting Rights Act legislation as soon as possible." Several House members, acknowledging that the GOP leadership had been caught flat-footed by the intraparty ruckus, said it was unclear whether the issue will be revisited before the week-long Independence Day recess.

The postponed vote is the latest example of divisions within the GOP that have complicated House and Senate leaders' efforts to move legislation backed by President Bush. Social Security revisions died in 2005, and a proposed overhaul of immigration laws is in peril despite the backing of Bush, who also supports extension of the Voting Rights Act.

The immigration debate, which has preoccupied Congress for much of the year, included complaints that too many immigrants fail to learn English; the Senate version of the legislation declared English the "national language." House GOP leaders said the issues are unrelated, because only those immigrants who have become U.S. citizens are allowed to vote, while the immigration debate focuses on illegal immigrants.

But nearly 80 House Republicans signed a letter by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) objecting to the Voting Rights Act's provisions that require state and local governments to print ballots in foreign languages -- or provide interpreters -- in precincts showing a need for such services. The requirement is a costly unfunded mandate for many counties and municipalities, the letter said, adding: "The multilingual ballot mandate encourages the linguistic division of our nation and contradicts the 'Melting Pot' ideal that has made us the most successful multi-ethnic nation on earth."

The Voting Rights Act requires Justice Department preapproval of changes in voting practices in states that used techniques such as poll taxes or literacy tests to discourage blacks from voting in the 1960s. Some Republicans in Georgia, Texas and other states say such efforts to disenfranchise minorities disappeared long ago, and that continued coverage by the act is an unfair stigma.

Georgia has nine statewide elected black officials and other proof of ample minority participation in electoral politics, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) said in an interview. "If you move a polling place from the Baptist church to the Methodist church, you've got to go through the Justice Department," he said.

But Barbara Arnwine, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said a bipartisan commission found evidence of recent voting rights violations in Georgia, Texas and several other states. "These are not states that can say their hands are clean," she said.

The House Rules Committee had agreed to let Georgia lawmakers offer two amendments that would make it easier for states to become exempt from the Voting Rights Act. House leaders had expressed confidence that the amendments would fail. But the committee rejected King's request for an amendment to end the multilingual requirements.

That was "a gigantic mistake," said Rep. Charles Whitlow Norwood Jr. (R-Ga.), a leading critic of the act's renewal. "What people are really upset about is bilingual ballots," he said. "The American people want this to be an English-speaking nation."

GOP aides said the Norwood-King contingent was angry that House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) -- whose panel held hearings on the proposed renewal -- left yesterday's closed meeting without taking their questions.

House Democrats blamed GOP leaders for the bill's troubles. "Clearly, there are some on the Republican side who object to this legislation, and they forced the leadership's hand today," said Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.). "House Democrats stand in virtual unanimous support for this important bill."

Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, said in a statement, "We are extremely disappointed that the House did not vote today to renew and restore the Voting Rights Act because a small band of miscreants, at the last moment, hijacked this bipartisan, bicameral bill."

Staff Opinions Banned in Voting Rights Cases

2005-12-10T13:03:00.000-05:00

Staff Opinions Banned In Voting Rights Cases
Criticism of Justice Dept.'s Rights Division Grows

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 10, 2005; Page A03

The Justice Department has barred staff attorneys from offering recommendations in major Voting Rights Act cases, marking a significant change in the procedures meant to insulate such decisions from politics, congressional aides and current and former employees familiar with the issue said.

Disclosure of the change comes amid growing public criticism of Justice Department decisions to approve Republican-engineered plans in Texas and Georgia that were found to hurt minority voters by career staff attorneys who analyzed the plans. Political appointees overruled staff findings in both cases.

Sen. Arlen Specter might schedule hearings.
Sen. Arlen Specter might schedule hearings. (Mark Wilson - Getty Images)
Politics Trivia
What do Rep. Katherine Harris (R-Fla.) and Rep. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) have in common?

They are both graduates of Yale Law School.
They both represent their state's 13th Congressional District.
They both previously served as mayors.
They both previously worked for IBM.

The policy was implemented in the Georgia case, said a Justice employee who, like others interviewed, spoke on condition of anonymity because of fears of retaliation. A staff memo urged rejecting the state's plan to require photo identification at the polls because it would harm black voters.

But under the new policy, the recommendation was stripped out of that document and was not forwarded to higher officials in the Civil Rights Division, several sources familiar with the incident said.

The policy helps explain why the Justice Department has portrayed an Aug. 25 staff memo obtained by The Washington Post as an "early draft," even though it was dated one day before the department gave "preclearance," or approval, to the Georgia plan. The state's plan has since been halted on constitutional grounds by a federal judge who likened it to a Jim Crow-era poll tax.

The policy shift's outlines were first reported by the Dallas Morning News. Sources familiar with the change said it was implemented by John K. Tanner, the voting section chief, who is a career employee.

In response to a request to comment yesterday, Justice Department spokesman Eric Holland wrote in an e-mail: "The opinions and expertise of the career lawyers are valued and respected and continue to be an integral part of the internal deliberation process upon which the department heavily relies when making litigation decisions." He declined to elaborate.

Tensions within the voting section have been rising dramatically, culminating in an emotionally charged meeting last week in which Tanner criticized the quality of work done by staff members analyzing voting rights cases, numerous sources inside and outside the section said. Many employees were so angered that they boycotted the staff holiday party later in the week, the sources said.

Under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Georgia, Texas and other states with a history of discriminatory election practices are required to receive approval from the Justice Department or a federal court for any changes to their voting systems. Section 5 prohibits changes that would be "retrogressive," or bring harm to, minority voters.

For decades, staff attorneys have made recommendations in Section 5 cases that have carried great weight within the department and that have been passed along to senior officials who make a final determination, former and current employees say.

Preventing staff members from making such recommendations is a significant departure and runs the risk of making the process appear more political, experts said.

"It's an attempt by the political hierarchy to insulate themselves from any accountability by essentially leaving it up to a chief, who's there at their whim," said Jon Greenbaum, who worked in the voting section from 1997 to 2003, and who is now director of the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. "To me, it shows a fear of dealing with the legal issues in these cases."

Many congressional Democrats have sharply criticized the Civil Rights Division's performance, and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said this week that he is considering holding hearings on the Texas redistricting case. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said in a statement yesterday: "America deserves better than a Civil Rights Division that puts the political agenda of those in power over the interests of the people its serves."

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and other Justice officials have disputed such criticism, saying that politics play no role in civil rights decisions. In a letter to Specter this week, Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella criticized The Post's coverage and said the department is aggressively enforcing a range of civil rights laws.

"From fair housing opportunities, equal access to the ballot box and criminal civil rights prosecutions to desegregation in America's schools and protection of the rights of the disabled, the division continues its noble mission with vigor," Moschella wrote.

New School Presentation

2005-09-14T14:09:00.000-04:00

How many of you have ever attended voter education sessions?

Read voter education material sent to you by your local precinct?

Decided not to vote because you didn’t read the information?

Decided not to vote because you DID read the information?

How many of you decided to vote because of political information?

How many of you decided to vote because of candidate-produced information?

How many of you have had trouble voting?

Who has ever ‘voted strategically?”

Who here is cynical about voting?

Who here is optimistic about voting?

Who here vascilates?

Tell my biographical story about why I made the film after the Presidential election in 2000.

Call it Democracy focuses on problems discovered in the 2000 election, the attempt to fix them, and the results of the 2004 election, all under the penumbra of the history of the Electoral College and Presidential elections. Breaking ground, CiD provides significant insights on mishaps of the Electoral College, including attempts to abolish or improve it and why they failed.

• CiD contains former Senator Birch Bayh’s first detailed interview about his attempt to abolish the Electoral College. He is also the framer of the 25th and 26th Amendments to the US Constitution, the first American to frame 2 Amendments since the Founding Fathers.
•CiD contains the first history of HAVA, the first major electoral reform measure passed in a generation. Indeed, the four major authors of HAVA have still never done detailed interviews and HAVA’s birth is shrouded in secrecy.
•The Bush v. Gore decision was the focus of three days of media attention before the America “moved on.” For the first time in a non-academic setting, CiD gives Bush v. Gore perspective; showing how it could be justified by some and worthy of condemnation by others.
•Few Americans are aware they do not have the right to vote for President of the United States

This content appeals to voters and non-voters, to people who are invested and aware of the permutations of the system, and those who are not. As I described in my interview for Buzzflash, “I wouldn't say that the system discourages people. I think that people understand the system and know of their ability to change it. Whether that happens or not is something else entirely.” Isn’t it apparent in the fact that battleground states have voter turnout rates significantly higher than those whose outcome is certain, regular, or outside the margin of error?

Stimulating Americans for Electoral Reform

Problem: few Americans understand the need for electoral reform of any kind. Even fewer understand the ways in which the current system perpetuates itself so that it seems impossible to change.

There is no shortage of electoral reform organizations. Their major issues include paper trails for electronic votes, the constitutional right to vote in Presidential Elections, the rights to vote for former felons, Election Day registration, instant run off voting and proportional representation. Some hope to abolish or end run the Electoral College. A consensus is developing to deny campaign workers the right to be senior election administrators. Yet others hope to insure that only legitimate voters receive ballots through increased Voter ID requirements.

Recent successes, as result of the Help America Vote Act, are widespread early voting, the beginnings of statewide voter databases, and the prospect of increased access for the handicapped. Awareness of “the ballot design issue” is a change for the better.

However, most Americans have no idea these changes are occurring. Even less have been aware of what changes could occur if they fought for them.

Election reform is daunting because it is largely questions of ideals versus practicality, of numbers in infinite combinations, of margins of error. Honest but imperfect solutions will always make the system better. But improving the system based on technological solution is very hard to translate into massive awareness of a civil and human rights problem. It almost seems like the oil in the machine of the Republic is a professional specialty akin to computer programming. So support is difficult to come by.

Different activist groups perform different functions.

Demos-usa.org is an excellent source of position papers on a whole variety of progressive topics. Specifically in the arena of voting, they specialize in Felon Re-enfranchisement, Election Day Registration, Voter Registration issues including better implementation of National Voter Rights Act, also known as the Motor Voter bill.

The Center for Voting and Democracy, available at Fairvote.org is a group that you can go to learn about alternative forms of voting such as instant runoff voting and proportional representation. One of the main brains over there is Steven Hill, who has written an excellent book about what’s wrong with elections and the book is called, FIXING ELECTIONS. You can take that both ways.

Electionline.org is an information clearinghouse, basically non-partisan, that provides a newsletter about reforms in general and in each state. It dwells in the realm of the wonky, but that’s where you want to go if you think you can make a difference in the state in which you vote.

Verified Voting.org, started by a Stanford Professor, galvanizes people who are spefically interested in learning more about electronic voting and stopping it.

Common Cause is mounting the largest extant effort to change legislation about Electronic Voting, featuring a push for New Jersey Rep. Rush Holt’s bill which would require a paper trial for every electronic voting machine. I attended their lobby effort in the middle of the summer and it was a great experience. If we have some time, I have some prepared remarks about that.

There are other organizations, both at my website, CALL IT DEMOCRACY.com and others.

Now I’m just going to sum up with a few big picture questions, because I think, even with the sudden awareness that we need federal authority to actually help people sometimes, its going to be a long time before the media and our politicians wake up to the need to have election reform that is actually non-partisan, that treats the process and something separate from the politics.

Is it possible to have a silver bullet pamphlet, book, event or film? Is it possible to have a a unifying means to educate each voter and simultaneously inspire them to take actions?

The answer is yes.

But I think ultimately, the only way to see real change will be a national effort, a combination of all these different organizations. The American Bar Association and the Federalist Society, the Knights of Columbus and the League of Women Voters. We will have to be present at every national meeting of the association of secretaries of state and every national meeting of governors.

The margin of error and the methods of counting votes might not always be perfect, but we must insure a means under perfect situations.

This will be a platform for “solution media, the legislation and a defined process which takes elections, in an effect way, out of the hands of politicians and judges.

We need solutions where Ds, Rs, and Is sit side by side, increase the democracy, can answer to the realities of the legislation in a way that every voter understands.

END HERE

Solution for Electronic Voting

2005-03-10T15:07:00.000-05:00

At various Q & A's after CiD screenings, people have asked me what I thought the solution to electronic voting is. This New York Times editorial articulates what I believe. Please take the time to read it, pass it on and educate. THANKS.

Matt

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/09/opinion/09wed3.html

Virtues of Optical-Scan Voting

New York is on the verge of selecting its next generation of voting machines. The Legislature appears poised to do one important thing right: to require that touch-screen voting machines produce voter-verifiable paper records. But it is in danger of doing another important thing wrong: giving short shrift to optical-scan voting, the most reliable and cost-effective of the current technologies. As it finalizes voting machine legislation, Albany should ignore lobbyists for high-priced voting machines and come out strongly for optical-scan machines.

The big voting machine companies, which are well connected politically, are aggressively pushing touch-screen voting. These A.T.M.-style machines make a lot of sense for the manufacturers because they are expensive and need to be replaced frequently. But touch-screen machines are highly vulnerable to being hacked or maliciously programmed to change votes. And they cost far more than voting machines should. If touch-screen machines are going to be used - and they have spread rapidly in recent years - it is vital that they produce voter-verifiable paper records of every vote to ensure that their results are accurate.

The better course would be not to use them at all. The best voting technology now available uses optical scanning. These machines work like a standardized test. Voters mark their choices on a paper form, which is then counted by a computer. The paper ballots are kept, becoming the official record of the election. They can be recounted, and if there is a discrepancy between them and the machine count, the paper ballots are the final word.

Optical-scan machines produce a better paper record than touch-screen machines because it is one the voter has actually filled out, not a receipt that the voter must check for accuracy. Optical-scan machines are also far cheaper than touch-screens. Their relatively low cost will be welcomed by taxpayers, of course, but it also has a direct impact on elections. Because touch-screen machines are so expensive, localities are likely to buy too few, leading to long lines at the polls.

The draft bills that the Legislature is working on do not rule out optical-scan voting, but they are far more focused on touch-screen voting. That may be because voting machine manufacturers have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying legislators, or it may simply be that optical-scan equipment has had a lower profile. Whatever the reason, the Legislature owes it to the voters - and the taxpayers - to promote optical-scan voting.

Moving the Desk

2005-02-27T15:14:00.000-05:00

Matt Kohn

I might not need a desk. Everyone needs a desk, but most of my time is spent, here, with the computer. Wherever it is. But this mac is so small and I don’t have enough space to organize the things I don’t use. Maybe the best thing to do is to get rid of the desk. Maybe I actually don’t even need it. Getting rid of it will create space I need.

This is a problem having to do with creativity and where it resides. The concept of not having or maybe not even needing a desk touches on the very personal since it is where I would, in theory, be doing all of my thinking.

For example, If I changed where I work based on the computer – including cafés and parks, at producer’s offices and production meetings, I will not feel tied down, This is pride in movement.

At the same time, the desk feels like a responsibility that is not being taken care of. It is buried under “things I don’t need.” So I’m not even using the desk. But by moving “away from paper” and giving up the desk, I will have also given up the false hope that the clutter on the desk will get done. Someday.

That means I wouldn’t bury bills on my desk, I would have to file them away. Or Scan them. I never throw anything on the floor, so I would be forced to enter the new “hall of records” and be serious about this work of keeping up.

OK. I’m broke, or close to it. This creates a need, a desire to just “throw the bills on the desk. “ And then sprinkle some cultural items like film magazines or invitations, flyers, maybe an article ripped out of an actual newspaper, and receipts, and business cards. All mixed up, sort of piled up and left when this process of re-organizing the office started and stopped during two days of Christmas Vacation. That’s the first time I ever felt like I was on a break from work.

It’s now two months later. I had a really nice set up for the office while I was working on the movie this year. But now that it’s done, I want to re-prioritize the office because I want to re-prioritize my life. I want to be open to everything: job offers and my own creative life. I think. Either way, producing the movie and promoting the movie seem to me that I have to be in a different frame of mind.

Anyway, many different things are contributing to this kind of decision.

Meet The Electors

2005-01-10T20:41:00.000-05:00

January 6th, 2004

Four years ago members of the House of Representatives, doubly members of the Black Congressional Caucus, spoke out at the Constitutionally mandated January 6th joint session of Congress – a meeting designed to affirm or deny the electors from each state. These Members of the CBC – Conyers, Jackson, others, condemned the Florida electors but no Senator joined them. This closed the possibility of debate and as a result, despite the fact that there probably were more votes for Al Gore in Florida, the January 6th meeting of the electors confirmed the first term of George W. Bush.

Today is much different. The difference in votes between Bush and Kerry in Ohio was certified at over 100,000, not 537. And most of America never paid attention to what went wrong in Ohio after Kerry conceeded. The Green and Libertarian Parties’ partial recount has been nearly ignored. The details of whose votes were lost by an imperfect system is left to the geeks, wonks, sore losers, and political junkies.

But a few days after the election, Ted Kalo, a lawyer on the House Judiciary Minority (read: dem) Staff, asked the GAO to investigate the election. The GAO is regarded as non-partisan, saw the discrepancies between exit polls and results, saw the evidence of long lines in mostly Democratic precincts, and were filled with genuine wonder about the results produced by the 30% of electronic voting machines and 70% punchcards in Ohio. The GAO investigation is ongoing.

Meanwhile, the Democratic minority on the House Judiciary Committee, led by Rep. John Conyers,began a seperate investigation of misconduct and compiled a report, released last night. The report (http://www.house.gov/conyers/) is detailed factual analysis of what went. Each section concludes with estimates of how many people were disenfranchised by any specific action. The total could be construed to be close to Bush's lead. So, the report is a call to Congress to challenge the Ohio electors before they affirm a second Bush presidency.

Even though I have completed my film Call it Democracy, and it is set to premier in 8 days in California, I couldn’t help myself from coming to DC to see the Electors meet. Especially since I know that over the last few days, at least three Senators have expressed interest in calling for a two-hour debate on the seating of the Ohio electors. Other Senators have felt pressure. Will it be Byrd, who has nothing to loose? Barbara Boxer, as the Internet rumor would have it? Diane Feinstein, who, if not today, will soon promote her own bill to abolish the Electoral College? Will it be Evan Bayh, son of Birch Bayh, the Senator who features prominently in my film, who worked to abolish the Electoral College for over ten years? Would Senator Dodd come out of his father-of-HAVA shell and allow a debate that Republicans will say is not really about electoral reform and only about partisanship? Will it be a mystery Republican? Or Jeffords? I have brought my camera equipment in case something weird happens, but I know I am not going to be able to use it where the action is: at the joint meeting of congress covered by C-SPAN.

So my plan is to write about it. Last night I was sick in my stomach thinking I was going to miss this final action in my four-year trek after the 2000 Presidential Election. I called Frank Watkins, Jesse Jackson Jr.’s advisor and asked him to be a pal. Twelve hours later, and I am going to go to Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.’s office simply to “hang out” and see what happens. The joint session to count the Electoral Vote happens at 1. If I get it see it, no doubt I will be star struck – Vice President Dick Cheney presides….

I’m going over the Conyers report. Even more than I thought by reading newspaper articles since the election, it is likely significant votes were lost by the negligence of the Republican Ohio State elections officials. Given that its true, is it even possible to make this issue compelling and believable on television?

10:10 AM Rep. Jackson’s office - Jesse exits his office: Barbara Boxer has just confirmed that she will challenge the seating of the Ohio electors. What that means is: the two houses meet for until the challenge is issued. Then the return to their separate houses and debate whether or not to seat the electors. Each senator or representative gets five minutes, no more, and can only speak once. Like Clint Eastwood in a dead end desert town my right arm smarts for my camera.

Andy, Jesse Jr.’s office assistant has been getting a few nasty phone calls this morning. He asks Jesse, “Will Barak join her?” meaning Barak Obama, the new, and sole African American Senator. Jesse is ambiguous but excited, “I don’t know. Maybe Harry Reid, maybe Jeffords.” Harry Reid is the new Democratic leader, now that Tom Daschle is a citizen. Jesse’s energy comes from just talking to his dad, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who has just talked to Reid, who experienced a “sea-change.” Jesse paces his office making a sailor’s knot out of rope. No kidding.

Last year, when I interviewed Frank Fahrenkopf, former head of the Republican Party and now a co-chair of the Presidential Debate Commission, he told me a great story about a recount. This was in the 1970s. Harry Reid, who was the Lt. Governor of Nevada, was campaigning for the seat of Paul Laxalt, the incumbent Republican Senator. Their election resulted in a statistical tie, a difference of a few hundred votes. Fahrenkopf, who was Laxalt’s campaign manager, watched as the democrats pulled out a father and son team of recounting experts. Reid lost the election, but a lesson was not lost on Fahrenkopf. When he was the Party Chairman in the 1980s, he created the Republican National Lawyers Association, a group of volunteer lawyers who would be available to Republican candidates. And they played a big part in the Florida recount in 2000.

I wonder if Reid still feels the heat of his own close elections? Many elections for Senate in Nevada are so close that Republican John Ensign has joined Rush Holt’s call for a paper trail. Every year there are big and small elections that are so close that a careful recount would illuminate a different margin of error than the first count.

Calls from other congresspeople are coming in. Maybe something can happen: Jesse reports: “There’s going to be 20 or 30 speakers from our side!”

Are the media ready for this story? Do they have any idea? Did the Dems do this so last minute on purpose? Maybe the Republicans won’t be very coordinated in defending their ridiculous Federalism arguments. What clips will be on the evening news? It’s now 10:40.

At 11:12 on C-SPAN the House Chaplain makes some kind of invocation of the sanctity of the Electoral College. Some Republicans realize Boxer is going to make the complaint official and they begin to openly lament the evils of partisanship. Then it’s time for lunch. The party begins in an hour. Jesse is making boxing moves as he paces back and forth. He is actually a black belt in Tai Kwan Do and teaches a class of congresspeople, including Katherine Harris.

12:00 What the hell am I supposed to do? I think about visiting Conyers office, but when I walk past it is VERY quiet. I have a few telephone friends I’d like to meet in person, then I walk back into Jesse’s office and Frank sees me. “Here you are,” he says and hands me a press release. “There’s a press conference going on right now - with Sen. Barbara Boxer and Representative Tubbs-Jones.” I furrow my brow. “They’re going to explain why they are going to object.”

“Where is it?” I imagine all press conferences happen outside, rain or shine, with the Capitol behind them.

“In the Senate Radio and TV Gallery.”

Now I know I’m lost. I’ve never really been free to roam inside the Capitol. I grab the camera and run downstairs to the Maxwell Smart underground Subway that shuttles congresspeople and their staff between the Rayburn Office Building, where all the Representatives have their offices, and the Capitol.

First I’m told I can’t use the subway because I’m not “real press.” Then I walk back fifteen feet and get a special badge that, as it turns out, isn’t really that special because I’m supposed to get another one when I get off the subway. So I get on the subway and there’s no obvious other place to get a badge. I’m so glad I got a nice short haircut. So then I get stopped by cops and get directions to the press conference even though they kinda want to know why I don’t have the special badge. There’s yet more convincing to do before I find the Senate Radio and TV Gallery.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D- CA), a tiny white lady, is standing next to Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones (D-OH), a tall black woman. Boxer believes that the issues about Ohio must be heard. I start shooting but I know that everything I’m going to get is crap. Rep. Tubbs-Jones, a former judge, makes it very clear that her constituents feel disenfranchised. The mounting evidence in the Conyers report makes it incumbent upon her to speak out. In another second it’s all over. They’re off to the joint session of congress, to the counting of the votes, and a challenge to the to an entire state’s electors last seriously considered in 1877 (There was a challenge of 3rd party electors in 1968).

I’m not sure where to go. To view the joint session, which is actually going to occur in the House, you need a special ticket that seems impossible to get. Frank is going to watch C-SPAN. But when Boxer contests, then the House and the Senate are required to go back to their respective chambers for a two-hour debate. Should I wait in the Senate? Yes. So I wait in the empty, ornate room that is a center of American power.

1:30 Citizen observers of the Senate sit in a Gallery above the bulls and matadors below. First there’s nothing. Then a few administrative people. Stenographers testing out their equipment. Then from behind a velvet curtain, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), co-author of HAVA, Harry Reid, and Barbara Boxer, and a few white men stream into the pit.

When Dick Cheney walks in it is unfortunate that he resembles Darth Vader unmasked. He steps up to the dias in the front of the room and silently reads the papers prepared for him before he sits down and waits to start. Each speaker will only have five minutes. There aren’t many Republicans. They must thinking: why dignify this? Eventually, Cheney gives the chair to someone else and ignores most of the proceeding, chatting and laughing with a few friends in a corner of the Senate chamber.

Barbara Boxer makes her case. “We have spent our lives fighting for things we believe in. Always fighting to make our nation better… We have fought for social justice, economic justice, environmental justice, and criminal justice. Now, we must add a new fight. The fight for electoral Justice. Every citizen of this country, this the greatest country in the world, who is registered to vote, should be guaranteed that their vote matters, and that their vote is counted. So now it seems to me that under the great Constitution of the United States of America, that we swear allegiance to uphold, which guarantees everyone the right to vote, we must ask certain questions: why did Ohio voters wait in the rain, why did students wait until 4 AM to vote? … Why did voters in poor and African American communities have disproportional long waits? …. I join with Stephanie Tubbs-Jones… to shine some light on these issues. Here’s the thing: we introduced HAVA - and then we didn’t do a thing… We understand that the centerpiece of this country is democracy, and the centerpiece of democracy is insuring the right voting.”

Sen. Mike Dewine (R-OH) disagreed. “I find it almost impossible to believe we’re actually standing on the floor of the US Senate engaged in a debate about whether or not George W. Bush won Ohio… Clearly he did.” There is not enough time to refute “All of the wild, incoherent and completely unsubstantiated charges that have been made about the 2004 Ohio Presidential Election.” Then, admitting he won’t talk about the details of the allegations, he claims them to have been proven false by newspaper editorials. The other Republican Senator, who spoke later, also positioned himself as a defender of John Kerry’s concession, propriety, and sanity. They would have done better to actually read and criticize Conyers report. The allegations in the report are clearly stated, but the conclusion of many of them, were too ambiguous to say that Ohio was “stolen.” Of course, then there was the threat of the “fringe” that you would be part of if you continued to talk about Ohio.

I take out some index cards and begin to take notes. I already had to shed every piece of electronic equipment, and then the cute page forbids me to write. Is the irony not obvious? I’m not carving my name in a desk, as many Senators are privileged to do.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson enters with an entourage. Among them is Bob Fitrakis, of the Free Press. Fitrakis has been an activist in Ohio, trying to call attention to the substantive irregularities there. (http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/995). Quietly, Rev. Jackson maintains a serious, owl-eye on the proceedings.

Dick Durban (D-IL), like the other Senators who would follow him, made a flourish that he would not vote against the Bush Ohio electors. But, he said, “Voters… can’t approach the polls with certainty that their vote will be counted or that they can vote in a fair or convenient manner….. Bush v Gore told us that people have no right to vote for President. Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. has a constitutional amendment” to fix that problem. Being “Loathe to join on the bandwagon for constitutional amendments” that are not proud moments. “ I will take this one seriously.” Ohio and other states raise serious questions, and he put the Conyers report in the Congressional record, which is one of the other reasons why the Republicans were very unhappy with this “unfortunate” debate taking place. Several months ago, a Democrat Representative referred to the 2000 election as stolen, and by vote, the Republicans had that reference stricken from the Congressional Record. As if it was never stated at all!

Ted Kennedy, who visably limps when he walks, contributed that “it is far from clear the extent to which these problems were” intentional or incompetence. “I commend the many thousands of citizens in Massachusetts and other states who insisted that treating today’s electoral vote count in congress as a meaningless ritual would be an insult to democracy unless we registered our own protest against the obviously flawed voting process that occurred in so many states.”

Ron Wyden, Frank Lautenberg, Hillary Clinton spoke about the need for bipartisan solutions. Hillary explicated a specific need to be serious about the need to fix our democracy as a part of our global policy. She also pointed out that the renewal of the Voting Rights Act Civil Rights, coming soon, will be a battle between friends and foes of Civil Rights.

I was impressed with something smooth about the way Harry Reid, the new democratic leader, kind of swam around the room but stood his ground quietly. Being in the minority humbles Democratic leaders, but there is also a softness to Reid’s voice that makes you strain to hear him. He eloquently explained that Republicans who oppose securing the right to vote to the satisfaction of both parties are also the ones sending American troops to fight for Democracy in Iraq. And he expressed dismay that Nevada solved many of it’s physical voting problems, including producing a paper trail, but still suffered from voter suppression when a Republican organization registered voters but tore up Democratic registrations.

Sen. Harkin (D-IO), who was once a presidential candidate, pleaded with DeWine to see this attempt to challenge the electors of Ohio was not an attempt to thwart the Presidency of George W. Bush, but that the reality on the ground was disenfranchisement. “Standing on line 10 hours to vote is like throwing Acid in the face of Democracy. It mars it, it scars it. Permanently… Now why were there lines?… There weren’t enough voting machines…. And who made that decision? The Secretary of State!” Harkin listed Secretary Blackwells’ partisan decisions.

Barak Obama credited his memory of meeting a 110-year old African American woman on the campaign trial, a woman whose right to vote in this election was of supreme importance to her, as the motivation for him to speak today. “There is no reason that at time when we have enormous battles taking place ideologically all across the world… that we have the legitimacy of our elections challenged. Rightly or Wrongly, by people who are not sure as to whether or not our processes are fair and just. This is something we can fix. We have experts on both sides of the aisle who know how to fix it. What we’ve lacked is the political will.”

For the speakers for and against, the prestige of the United States was at stake. Democrats believe if we can at least agree there were problems, then we can fix them. And there is a weird trump card in the reform atmosphere: the irregularities have been covered as extensively outside the US as here. Harvard Prof. Alexander Keyssar, author of The Right to Vote, has pointed out that in times of war, voting rights increase because of pressure to be the shining example of democracy we claim. His message was certainly felt in Jesse Jr.’s office. So it’s possible it was filtered through to the rest of the Senators and Representative speaking. This debate was the first time senators felt that they could use the war a positioning tool to get bipartisan support for voting rights.

Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CN), the co-author of HAVA who has never spoken publicly on HAVA after it became law, preferred to issue letters asking the public and eletions administrators to have faith in the reforms. He declined many opportunities to appear in my film, and I have always wondered why he was never invited, or denied opportunities to be on the News Hour, or some other serious program, in order to speak about the electronic voting machines, and the obvious problems that provisional ballots were going to cause when partisans were asked to interpret them.

Dodd appeared near the end of the session, first thanking Boxer for bringing up the problems with the Ohio election and then stating that “we are operating under a very imperfect system.” He promised to deliver a comprehensive package of fixes, but wouldn’t say what they were. Does that mean they’ll only be fixes that will pass? Or are there some fixes that will take fighting and educating the American public to achieve? Dodd is a man who has put himself into a position of power in the process of election reform. It’s no surprise, but somewhat sad, that he’s unwilling and uninterested in galvanizing the growing movement for voting rights, to aid his cause.

In the end, none of the Senators save Boxer voted not to seat the Electors. Boxer was making a symbolic gesture, and the Democrats used her gesture to talk about creating, for the first time, a federal standard for federal elections.

The gallery was filled with people who were from Ohio and who had felt that their state had stolen votes. I know because a nice lady sat next to me and she was very angry that none of the other Senators joined Boxer. As Rev. Jesse Jackson left the gallery, many reached to shake his hand, and to each person he said, “Only one.” Meaning, only one Senator voted not to seat the electors. Yet, as far as I could tell, Rev. Jackson’s effort had been the one that pushed Reid and others to contribute orally today. And they will be the necessary people to push reforms in this term.

I left the Senate and returned to Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.’s office. The debate in the House was just ending. It had been more lively than the Senate, and Jesse had given a stirring speech about the need for his amendment. The vote came and 31 Representatives voted not to seat the electors. The CBC gave a press conference where they claimed a victory simply for having this debate. Then counting of electoral votes continued, and President Bush’s second term was confirmed.

What happened on January 6th, 2005 was an important moment in American History. For a few hours, the absolute end of the American Presidential election system was in sight. If the Conyers report had the absolute smoking gun, if it had been more damning, then it is possible that the Electors would not have been seated and the election for President could have ended up in the House of Representatives.

Although Republicans can claim this debate happened for political purposes and for no obvious gain, one important lesson from this exercise of a Constitutionally available procedure is that questions about fraud, technology and turnout must be discussed in the open or electoral victory will be forever ambiguous.

Susan Moller Okin - Obituary

2004-11-05T19:06:00.000-05:00

Okin, feminist political thinker, dies

By Lisa Trei, The Stanford Report

Susan Moller Okin, a renowned political philosopher, was found dead at her home in Lincoln, Mass., on March 3. She was 57. The cause of death is unknown, but suicide and foul play have been ruled out, according to her ex-husband, Bob Okin.

Okin, the Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society, joined the Stanford faculty in 1990. At the time of her death, she held the Marta S. Horner Distinguished Visiting Professorship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, a one-year fellowship at Harvard University.

"She was perhaps the best feminist political philosopher in the world," said Debra Satz, associate professor of philosophy. "More than anyone else I can think of, she made it the case that consideration of the status and position of women must be part of political philosophy's concerns. She was very bold in her approach to the field and she was not afraid to take on the established view."

John Ferejohn, the Caroline S. G. Munro Professor of Political Science, said Okin invented the study of gender and political theory. "She revolutionized the field," he said. "She was an enormous presence on campus."

Okin's work focused on the exclusion of women from most Western political thought, past and present. She argued that gender issues belong at the core, not the margins, of political philosophy. Her book Women in Western Political Thought (1979) is considered a cornerstone of research on women in politics. She also authored two other books, Justice, Gender and the Family (1989) and Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (1999).

Labor economist Myra Strober, a professor of education, said Okin made "foundational" contributions to theories based on the economics of work and family. Okin took John Rawls' 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, which argued for a political philosophy based on equality and individual rights, and applied it to the family. "She was brilliant; she was one of the best brains around," Strober said.

Okin argued that if theorists fail to speak about the concerns of women in the domestic sphere, they thereby fail to take into account what it takes to have a public sphere, said Rob Reich, assistant professor of political science. In Justice, Gender and the Family, Okin asked whether the principles of justice should be applied to the family. "Her attitude was that the family could not be exempt from a conception of justice," Reich said. "After that [book], it was impossible for people to write about political theory regarding the position of women" without taking the domestic sphere into account. By doing this, Satz said, Okin offered a "brilliant internal critique of the field." Okin considered herself a Rawlsian, but argued the philosophy needed revision. "She cared about scholarship but also wanted to make sure that it interfaced with the real world," Reich added.

In recent years, Okin had turned her attention to the plight of women in the least developed countries. "[She] demonstrated that their extreme difficulties create a need to think differently about the complexity of gender issues in an international context where poverty threatens the lives of adults and children on a daily basis," said Joanne Martin, the Fred H. Merrill Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business.

In that capacity, Okin became a staunch supporter of the Global Fund for Women, a San Francisco-based grantmaking foundation supporting women's human rights. In January, Okin spent three weeks traveling as a member of the fund's delegation to the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India. During the trip, Okin wrote: "My view of Mumbai's and Delhi's slums has been transformed from seeing them [from the outside] as totally destitute and sordid places where no one could possibly lead a decent or hopeful life to seeing them as poor but vibrant communities, where with well-directed help from the outside, many people can improve their living conditions and hope for a better life for their children." Fund President Kavita Ramdas, who led the delegation, said Okin's "passion for women's rights and peace and justice were evident both in her academic work and in her philanthropy."

At the Radcliffe institute, Okin was expanding on her recent work on gender, economic development and women's rights in the late 20th century. She also planned to collect her work on multiculturalism and feminism, and to begin looking at the subject of evolutionary biology from a feminist point of view. On March 8, she was scheduled to give a public talk on her work at the institute, to coincide with International Women's Day. Instead, colleagues and friends met to commemorate her life. A family gathering also took place at her home in Massachusetts on March 7.

Okin was born in 1946 in Auckland, New Zealand. She earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Auckland in 1967, a master of philosophy degree from Oxford in 1970 and a doctorate from Harvard in 1975. She taught at the University of Auckland, Vassar, Brandeis and Harvard before joining Stanford's faculty. Okin was director of the Ethics in Society Program from 1993 to 1996. "Of any place at Stanford, this was her intellectual home," said Satz, the program's current director. "Her heart really lay here."

Okin received numerous awards during her career, including the American Political Science Association's Victoria Schuck Prize for the best book on women and politics in 1989 for Justice, Gender and the Family, and the Allan V. Cox Medal for Faculty Excellence Fostering Undergraduate Research in 2002.

According to Ferejohn, Okin had a caring, close relationship with many students and colleagues. "She was very good with students," he said. "She will be enormously missed. We were all looking forward to her coming back refreshed."

Satz said Okin was "very, very supportive of women, in particular her untenured colleagues." When Satz's own quest for tenure was under scrutiny, she said Okin stepped forward and backed her. "She spoke out when she thought something was wrong," Satz said. "She was really willing to go the extra mile. She was a champion of justice."

Okin is survived by a daughter, Laura Moller Okin of Boston; a son, Justin Moller Okin of New York; and two sisters, Catherine Pitt of Nottingham, England, and Janice May of Auckland, New Zealand. Her marriage to Bob Okin of Los Altos ended in divorce.

A memorial celebration will be held on campus this spring, followed by a major conference honoring Okin's work during the 2004 academic year. The family requests that donations in Okin's memory be made to the Global Fund for Women, 1375 Sutter St., Suite 400, San Francisco, CA 94109.

Donations in honor of Susan Moller Okin

The charitable organization closest to Susan's heart was the Global Fund for Women. A summary statement by the Global Fund describes its mission:

Your gift to the Global Fund makes it possible for grassroots womens organizations to defend and promote the rights of women and girls all over the globe. Your support elects women to political office in rural Mongolia, & educates and empowers women who are victims of domestic violence in Chile, and provides free education to girls in Kenya&. Over the past sixteen years the Global Fund for Women has awarded more than $30 million to seed, strengthen, and link over 2,400 womens groups in 161 countries and territories. These grants continue to sustain womens efforts to improve and implement education programs for girls, stop violence against women, achieve economic independence, strengthen womens political participation, and gain access to information technology.

Susan took a trip to India in January 2004, organized by the Fund. She wrote while on that trip: "My view of Mumbais and Delhis slums has been transformed from seeing them (from the outside) as totally destitute and sordid places where no one could possibly lead a decent or hopeful life, to seeing them as poor but vibrant communities, where with well-directed help from the outside, many people can improve their living conditions and hope for a better life for their children. I am inspired to give more $$ to the Global Fund [and] to help it whatever ways I can."

A memorial fund honoring Susan Moller Okin has been set up at the Global Fund for Women. Please designate your tax-deductible gift to this fund.

The Global Fund for Women
1375 Sutter Street, Suite 400
San Francisco, CA 94109
Phone: 415-202-7640
Fax: 415-202-8604
Web: www.globalfundforwomen.org
Email: gfw@globalfundforwomen.org

You will see this photo if you ask for it

2004-10-14T20:47:00.000-04:00

Here is a photo that won an award in last Year’s New York Times photography contest.

It depicts two people, maybe husband and wife, facing each other, sitting at a picnic bench glowing laptops the focus of their attention, while they are under a foliage canopy in an even larger, wildly grown suburban backyard.

Such a location, even with the chill in the air today, makes me long for the suburbs.

I often complain that the city has become the suburbs. I am sure this is true. Things we ran away from are all here now: strip malls and what they contain, how they model themselves, and how they revamp themselves to become current.

It used to be that cities were a year ahead in everything. And with the diminishment of the advancement of the city comes conservatism in all of us. A despair that progress is probably not a good thing since everything is so much better now than it used to be.

This conflict is playing a large part in the Presidential Election, but it is sub-narrative. The soccer moms versus the urban vote. There is the attempt to reach soccer moms in the city and urban moms in the suburbs.

I am using this picture as the screen saver tonight. I walked all the way across Williamsburg to Supercore, on Bedford Avenue, so I could write at the same time as I could drink. I wasn’t sure where else I could bring my laptop besides a coffee shop. I needed to be among people for a little while. And the reason why the screensaver is so appropriate is because Supercore has a beautiful garden.

Last night was the last debate. Kerry seemed to have done well. What we all wanted was some kind of literal knockout. And in the end Bush made fun of himself by saying Laura had told him not to scowl. If there was any moment when the loveable self affacing Bush was present it was then. The corollary, which is his power to not admit, is that we really hate him. He had said that there were years of division in America since Clinton and that he was aware of it and expected it. He justified his decisions by thinking that People hated Clinton!

Cities are the republican enemy. It is affirmative that they have evened the game in New York, despite the fact that prima fascia evidence that we are “liberals.”

Could the networks have shown enough of the protests to the RNC and detail what the protesters were thinking? Or was the reportage descriptive at best, with little analysis of what the activists were thinking and hoping for?

When they tried to stop the war, protesters had succeeded in letting the world know the war was wrong despite pathetic media coverage.

By making our cities more conservative, the powers that be are doing nothing to sell America to the rest of the world. New York is not supposed to be conservative. This is where people come for fun, privacy, play, knowledge, and money.

Are these people who turn tenement immigrant glory into bland repetitive architecture, Republican, Democrat, Libertarian and cynic, to be trusted with fighting over a small part of our total federal budget? The values, which drive this line up and down, dominate our politics, but no one you ask on the street can guesstimate let alone know which suggestions would actually fix our problems.

I think the American people need to see some pie drawings in a very dramatic fashion. Let Bush and Kerry both show them.

The amount of money needed to solve any of our problems is never really clear, or even explained as a percentage of the whole budget of America. What if Kerry turned to Bush and said, “You’re really being silly. What my campaign is talking about is solving most Americans’ complaints for about five percent of our total economy. That would be good publicity. Knowing that we care and take care of each and every individual American would be great propaganda against terrorism, don’t you think?”

Providing this is close to true, such an admission might diminish every president preceding them. This will be no less true if Kerry wins and we find out that Howard Dean had been the one pushing Kerry’s promise (essentially Dean’s Vermont coverage) that no one under 18 will go without medical care. We’ve been told it impossible, but this is a promise that every American wants.

When I hear economics talk, I think about how many paradigms of our culture are actually based on economic models of being and how all the people that each candidate has to appeal to are really numbers with faces. Once you really grasp this, how can you lie and how can you tell the truth? All this power is simply numbers shuffled to one side or the other. Pushing the herd on or off the really healthy grass.

Switching

2004-10-13T03:04:00.000-04:00

Tonight is the night I finally leave the Microsoft universe for my emailing life.

Since I learned about email about five and a half years ago, maybe less, I have been using Outlook or Entourage, to send and receive email. Now I am going fully Mac.

My learning curve on the internet was slow. There were people around me doing it, mostly my friend Mike Zohn, who has an antique and taxidermy store on East 10th Street (www.ObscuraAntiques.com). He was always on the internet and finding weird stuff. Twin goat heads, Victorian clothing. Right now in his store he has a three foot long photograph of the KKK at the foot of the Washington Monument from around 1937. In full regalia. If I had known such a picture existed, I would have put it in CiD in the civil rights section. Mike also has wax relicas of skin disease made for German medical students. And that favorite of my own childhood, a stuffed baby alligator. I have no idea why I had one.

Mike started finding antiques by going to flea marketes in the suburbs and far out the country. He could return with freaky emblams of lost American culture. Imagine anyone a hundred years ago scoffing that taxidermy was weird! No one would think of it the way we do today. So here was Mike out to meet the people who no longer wanted this stuff. Even though Mike bought from them, each person he bought from became his client because he hoped they might find more things for him down the line.

Growing up, Mike had always seemed to know more about the universe, and what people were doing. In the early 80s, Mike introduced me to John Waters' films. I'll never forget that night in the living room meeting Queen Carlotta the very first time. Like the rest of us, Mike was into post-punk hardcore, but Mike was so into the scene he was on the cover of a cheesy but well-read NYC magazine - he was always embarassed about it too.

Mike is in his 30s. These networks which he created, over and over in his life, probably opened his mind to the potential of how to make his business run. He is buying and selling things all the time. Real transactions occur because he makes them happen with others he has found ways of trusting. He had a life and a lifestyle on the internet.

Maybe his and other stories like his influenced all of us. What we heard were hearing stories that there was this communication device called internet which made computers human. Not a human being or a person. But a personality. Computers, "who" had been on the fringe of society, were the great humanizer. Because very soon we were going to get the communication we demanded our future to provide: personally important previously unavailable information and anyonymous friends unavailable in real life. We wouldn’t have done it unless it was in our self-interest. And I’m not insinuating that we should get rid fo the computer.

But frankly, this weekend I almost threw my computer out the window. Not because it wasn’t working, but because it was working too well. It is my most important tool, and I am chained to it. I go to it first when I am trying to find an answer when the question often involves some kind of escape. And I am realizing all this while using it.

I am no longer sitting in the green grass under the tall bush on the side of my parent’s house, writing my first science fiction story using the portable, 70s beige typewriter. Stamping each key into the tough paper. Looking deeper at the letters, wondering if I had better eyesight could I see like a microscope?

I am nearsighted. My Microsoft Entourage was often crashing. Today it finally started crashing everytime I sent and recieved. That was enough. I had an evening of mental space. Time to switch.

Who to Drink With?

2004-10-08T16:42:00.000-04:00

The first Bush/Kerry debate was high political drama but because of terrible reporting over the last three years, most reporters and citizens missed the real story.

Few people know enough about the character and background of each man enough to appreciate it, but something, in the words of Debate Commissioner Frank Fahrenkopf, “Came through the screen.” In my interview with him about the Presidential Debate Commission he had said, “People want a President they can like.”

The reporters staged the event in terms of each man’s political aspirations. Kerry and Bush representing two sides of America that oppose each other on the fundamental issue of Iraq.

It happens often enough that candidates reflect their every motivation through campaign rituals and verbal signifiers intended to attract small groups into the juggernaut of American political party system. But because of the division within the country on Iraq, Bush and Kerry represent more than political clichés. And for the first time in a generation, voters on both sides will not tolerate anything but brutal honesty.

Shortly after the debate began, it became obvious that unlike Dukakis or Dole, Bush and Kerry don’t believe in taking a sucker punch for the good of the country. They are playing for the America they hope to create. Watching them, you could feel reality sliding around underneath your feet.

The debate revealed two candidates with very different personalities. One attacked and the other fell. People who watched the debate could see President Bush crumbling, literally melting as he belted out repetitive answers like a little PR attack dog. It was pathetic because the television brought him within arm’s reach. This is the really sad version of the W we have come to know throughout the last four years.

Why didn’t President Bush’s own supporters feel more sympathy for him?

Bush can have a love-biting personality when he is in room full of reporters. That is, when he’s up close, he’s sarcastic but affable. This is the "Who would you rather have a beer with?" idea. This works more for a presidential candidate than most other politicians because we implicitly know that we can’t get anything out of a President. So we lower our expectations: could we stand an hour or two in a bar with this guy as he slowly gets wasted?

His drink-ability is the essence of GWB on a good day. In public statements he is always seems self-assured and brief. Good, we think, he won’t talk to long when he’s slurring his words. Many have speculated that this is because he doesn’t have anything to say. And it’s true that he has made fewer press conferences than any other President. But the sober press has never speculated that Bush simply dreads talking about poetry or policy to reporters. He gets nervous, cocky, and sarcastic. It’s a deflection that speaks to a higher truth. The power to shut up. People love it.

Instead of exposing this personality trait – fear of spilling your drink in public - which most of us must surely share, the press spent a lot of time treating him like any other President: Bush is very busy doing something very important. He can’t talk now.

In the first debate, this perception left him at a disadvantage when confronted by Senator Kerry. Bush was forced to talk about “hard work” because the press had failed to do that over the last four years. Every day of a President’s term is a time when a well-spoken human being could be speaking truth the American people. The Press simply can’t handle the truth.

This debate is a long way away from how he appeared to us in his first Presidential Campaign. Bush oozed sincerity, feeding us the impression of a guy with a moral center who wanted to learn everything he needed to become President. In essence, he said to us that if he got the opportunity to fill that position, he would lead with an open mind about what he needed to learn. Lead me to learn, he beseeched us, and I will lead you.

Anyone who still held this impression saw the other side of George Bush in the debate. A learned man, ill at ease with the knowledge that has been imparted to him. Expressing anger through petulance. Expressing exasperation that people have not grown with him and he doesn’t know how to get us up to speed.

What was in it for Kerry? Why was he so mean?

Because the Press did the same thing to him. They made him into the hero he is and they refused to accept that 18 years in the Senate amounts to anything. Why? Because few Presidents have been Senators. And they refused to adequately explain why his vote for the war was within moral, and political acceptability. Is this how patriotism is repaid by the corporate media? Kerry was forced to explain that he voted for the war if Bush was going to wage the war he promised. It was very clear in his statement when he voted so why are all the press acting like “its just words.” Bad, bad press. In essence, Kerry “gave him enough rope” which is really interesting strategy but no one cares. So Kerry was relentless.

As a result of all these missed communications, something paid off for those Americans who wanted to see a debate.

In the past, when Bush was angry, like at terrorists or abortionists, it was hard to say he was angry with them personally. But in the debate, he was angry at Kerry for not acknowledging all his “hard work.” Kerry laughed at him in a serious way. Kerry fought many Bush-family initiatives from Iran-Contra onward. Kerry is the only mainstream Presidential candidate to have been a leader of a peace movement. Iraq is a mess. I always ask myself; why aren’t there 30,000 Arab-Americans in Iraq helping rebuild the country? Translating? Then Kerry attacked Bush on China.

Bush outright said that the interests of China in regard to North Korea are as important or more important than our own. Did anyone hear him say that? This is the most significant plaintive wail we have heard yet from this son-of-the-ambassador to China. Who is the Manchurian candidate now? And why did no one who wrote about the debates cover this? Bush looked especially weak trying to explain why we should cede our interest to China because he hasn’t been good at expressing gray areas. Even though I agree with Kerry for my own reasons - I believe that the long-term threat to freedom in the world is a country that controls a third of the world’s population- Bush was terrible at articulating his own highly defensible position. Oh, I know, the press didn’t tell Bush that China might come up in the debate, so he had to tell the truth.

To represent himself and the United States in Black and White was not a decision Bush could have made alone. He makes like it was, and the election swings on whether the public believes this to be true and “good.” As it turns out, the public only turns on the Press in polls, never in the voting booth.

Now Playing Every Movie Ever

2004-09-27T10:05:00.000-04:00

On Friday, September 24th, the Independent Feature Project’s Market held a special closing day program, free and open to the public called “Copyright vs. Creativity: How the Independent Film Industry Can Avoid the Fate of the Music Industry.” The fate of the music industry is well known: large corporations, noticing that their margins slipped simultaneously with arrival peer-to-peer sharing, began a quiet war against software creators and the individuals who used them. This had various results: facing the wrath of it’s fans, Metallica defended its ownership of copyright in front of the US Congress; judges effectively put Napster out of business; record companies proceeded with lawsuits against 14 year old downloaders.

Filmmaking is now at the digital crossroad. Independents have to consider the essential meaning being creator, owner, user and re-user of digital materials.

Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine (and the co-sponsor of the program) was very optimistic and sort of turned the “fear” angle on its head. He opened by asking a simple question: Of the top 10,000 film titles sold in the United States, what percentage of them are rented at least once a month? The answer: every single one. Then he pointed out - quite obviously to anyone who has broached the blue and yellow décor - many of these titles would never have been rented from Blockbuster. He held up a chart: the niche market served by Netflix, which has just about any title, is cumulatively as large or larger than a hits-based storefront. Netflix can have everything and it’s still profitable, in fact more profitable.

So, if things that sell once a year are still profitable, it’s worth carrying everything. That’s rule #1: put everything out there.

He took the example of the book industry. More than half of Amazon sales are what you can’t buy at B & N. These books, often scholarly and expensive, are cumulatively bigger business than the bestsellers. “We have been thinking (about our economy) for in the last century as a scarcity model. But this is over. With digital delivery we have infinite shelf space.” Eventually books will be printed on demand. The new lesson out there: make everything available.

The physicality of the market has always presented a mismatch between supply and demand. The most successful Bollywood films could not sustain theatrical releases in the United States because the 1.7 million Indian-Americans are not located near Indian-American theaters. Now the community is successfully serviced by Netflix.

Documentaries are also an expanding market. There are 10,000 docs on the imdb and Amazon carries 17,000 titles, most on VHS. But less than 200 are available at Blockbuster and about1280 on Netfli. So, after looking at the excellence of festival catalogs and noting how few documentaries achieved distribution, Netflix began a program of manufacturing DVDs titles. When Netflix began to distribute Daughter from Denang, a highly regarded doc that never played in theaters, it was discovered by a diverse nationwide audience. If the audience exists anywhere they can receive mail, they are an ‘addressable market.’

So once you start thinking that way – "I don’t have to pass the threshold needs of shelf space" – what do you think about?

Rule #2: “price it right” by asking what should it cost to be downloaded. Price no higher. But this does not mean reverse engineer the price you always charged. The lesson the music industry learned by pricing individual songs at 99 cents (because they didn’t want to conflict with CD costs) is much illegal downloading. But the actual cost of the song is only 79 cents because none of the production costs apply. At this price, everyone on the creative and production side makes as much money as before, or more if you assume elastic demand (over time). He laments that Tower Records has to figure out how to justify its higher price.

While college students will pay only 20 cents per song, they have less money and more time to deal with disruptive, inconclusive downloads. Anderson’s moral: don’t let channel conflict screw up your business, price according to digital costs, not analog ones. And don’t fake it, building in unnatural margins, because the market will wear it away.

Rule #3: Draw people to your niche. Use recommendations, word of mouth, or automated collaborative technology, marketing that costs nothing because online services use recommendations. Recommendations are powerful and more compelling than traditional advertising because if a product is good, the recommendation engines will kick in and the product will find it’s audience. “It’s the end of the hits monopoly and tyranny,” Anderson believes.

In the music industry, Rhapsody and iTunes serve as positive examples, because they use hits to draw audiences to products they never heard of. Anderson showed a slide which showed a sort of Bell Curve with Ms. Spears at the top: “If you like Britney, you’ll like Pink; if you like Pink, you’ll like No Doubt; if you like No Doubt, you’ll like The Selector.” But the bottom three-quarters equals the top quarter. “Tomorrow you are only going to have the hits that deserve to be hits…(because)… The niche market will be the hit market.”

Someone from the audience pointed out that with a future this bright, “We should thank the tyranny for giving us the need to have this creativity and vision.” And that brings us back to the tyranny.

OTHER PANELS

Despite Anderson’s comforting predictions, almost every other panel demonstrated drama and conflict. Eliza Dichter, Director of Programs at the Center for international Media Action (www.mediaactioncenter.org) and a media activist in her own right, MC’d the panelists throughout the day. Their message was clear: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is largely considered a failure, and the implications for filmmakers are writ large.

This is what it does do (http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/iclp/dmca1.htm):

"Makes it a crime to circumvent anti-piracy measures built into most commercial software. Outlaws the manufacture, sale, or distribution of code-cracking devices used to illegally copy software. Does permit the cracking of copyright protection devices, however, to conduct encryption research, assess product interoperability, and test computer security systems. Provides exemptions from anti-circumvention provisions for nonprofit libraries, archives, and educational institutions under certain circumstances. In general, limits Internet service providers from copyright infringement liability for simply transmitting information over the Internet. Service providers, however, are expected to remove material from users' web sites that appears to constitute copyright infringement. Limits liability of nonprofit institutions of higher education -- when they serve as online service providers and under certain circumstances -- for copyright infringement by faculty members or graduate students. Requires that "webcasters" pay licensing fees to record companies. Requires that the Register of Copyrights, after consultation with relevant parties, submit to Congress recommendations regarding how to promote distance education through digital technologies while "maintaining an appropriate balance between the rights of copyright owners and the needs of users."

Why is this important to filmmakers? If you want to use recorded music or an image, copyright owners notoriously use rejection and red tape to make it difficult for budget-challenged projects to be completed in a wholly legal manner. The thrust of the problem for filmmakers in the new millenium is that the advance of technology makes intellectual theft more tempting than ever, but insurance companies will withhold “Errors and Omissions” coverage almost always necessary for broadcast and theatrical release. Is the term “fair use” effective?

The “Death of Creativity” panel approached these questions. Rick Karr from NPR (www.technopop.org), Entertainment attorney and author Michael C. Donaldson (www.donaldsonhart.com) , Jed Horowitz, filmmaker provocateur (www.willfulinfringment.com) , and Carrie McLcaren, editor of Stay Free! And the curator of Illegal Art Exhibit (www.illegal-art.org and www.stayfreemagazine.org) seemed to disregard the question of whether or not “creativity was dead” and elaborated their own idea of a copyright gray area.

The shades: from don’t do anything that puts you at risk to ignore your cease and desist orders; from feign ignorance to protect yourself; from do what you need to only create what the legal community will absolutely defend.

They honed in for a moment on the issue of logos, rather than general material that might be copywritten . Do the corporations have to defend their trademarks? Is it more important for CBS to defend its “eye” than the actual material it broadcasts? Colin Mutchler (www.colinmutchler.com) believed he had the right to use logos when commenting on the corporation itself. Others believed logos will be litigated first.

But the majority of federal judges have not heard “fair use” cases. “It’s a rapidly emerging area of the law,” according to Donaldson. “The definition of fair use is expanding all the time” and cease and desist letters aren’t begin followed through with because a lot of corporations are losing in court.

What does Donaldson recommend? Take only what need, take no more than what you need, and be sure you can afford the fight.

Jed reminded the audience that a cease and desist order can make it impossible to get your product out in the world before you have your day in court. This is the danger of using the fair use argument. This is why he feels like using material owned by others is an issue of free speech.

The only performer on the dais, Colin likes to quote and quote the quoters. That increasing referential material may shrink the size of an audience interested doesn’t matter to him because creating something for a small audience matters. “This is about the death of creativity that reaches a large audience.”

DJ Dangermouse (who was not on the panel) sampled the Beatles’s “White Album” and Jay-Z’s “The Black Album” for his “The Gray Album,” a tape he mostly distributed to friends. In response, Dangermouse got a cease and desist from Capital Records (while Def Jam totally got the joke). As an act of artistic defiance, Carrie posted the whole album on her website. From that “illegal” act began a prominent discussion of sampling and fair use. Now “everyone” knows who DJ Dangermouse is.

Jed's concern is not for his film, which samples Disney on purpose: the film is a dare. The Mouse would be insane to sue him. His point is not only should you be able to comment on not only on the media itself in a “fair use” sense or in a protest sense, but that you should be able to treat any piece of media like “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” – as a kind of folk item we can recycle and make our own. That this is already happening and the law should change around it.

Rick brought up the possibility that material created by individual artists or even corporations could get flipped on its head – something created by a liberal can be turned into pro-Nazi, pro-Mussolini propaganda. The dais, which seemed pro-fair use when used against corporations, seemed to draw the line in the case where it is “misused” to imply something personal or the use ascribes values to the creator that the creator doesn’t believe in. The panelists were most disparate about whether or not a single individual has “more rights” to deny copyright than corporations.

The final panel, called “Response to the Crisis: Creative, Technical, Legal and Business Models” was moderated by David Bollier (www.bollier.org) and focused on political action and filmmaking. There was a consensus that filmmakers should begin to challenge the primacy of the MPAA.

Jeffrey Levy-Hinte is a producer (www.antidotefilms.com) whose film Thirteen was prevented from sending out VHS and DVD screeners by the MPAA until a lawsuit (of which the IFP was a part) re-instated that right. He was disturbed by the way the “drumbeat” of piracy was used by the MPAA, noting that the MPAA stoked fear that the industry will be destroyed by piracy while DVD sales are going quite well. He wants the debate to focus on the fact that the war on piracy is also a war on the opportunities to distribute media. From Orin Hatch to Patrick Lehey, this ‘obnoxious’ control of distribution is supported by the law.

That the FCC would spend time on a cultural distrtraction like Janet Jackson's breats, Marjorie Heins, of the Brennan law Center at NYU, formerly an ACLU lawyer with a background in traditional free speech rights of artists (author “Not In Front of the Children”) points to systemic problems. Copyright is a big one. They (www.fepproject.org) have two primers on the balance of copyright law and community solutions for filmmakers.

Heins believes one of the problems of fair use is that although the courts have embraced some of this doctrine, it’s vague and subjective. It’s unpredictable whether something will or will not be acceptable under fair use. The published rules are oppressive, even for teachers. Since the guidelines are only negotiated with the industry, rules will not come out on the side of free expression. She recommended the mobilization of the film community to force acceptance of a neutral tribunal that doesn’t include draconian copyright penalties

Glen Otis Brown, Executive Director of Creative commons (www.creativecommons.org) believes he his organization offers a way for artists who don’t mind letting people use their material to get a new kind of copyright license. If you sign onto this license, you can get a metatag to put on your media which explains the new restrictions of your media. On the other side, if you want to license material, you can go to the website and search through the kinds of restrictions you would like and pick material to use. The license is innovative because allows you many more options than traditional copyright. . A million webpages carry their license. All the original material for Outfoxed was released on Creative Commons so that anyone could use and recut it.

After looking at the international markets, Jonathan Taplin of USC believes that the United States, in its trade negotiations, is now having a negative effect on international goodwill. Indian pharmaceuticals, unwilling to bow to pressure to only use American drugs, now sell AIDS medicine for 10% of USA costs. Taplin believes that if all we sell is knowledge and we take a fundamentalist view on copyright and pricing, whether it’s drugs or CDs, the rest of the world has enough ability to recreate our products. At the end of the day, the artist or the chemical is the brand. You never say, “Lets go see a Warner Bros. Movie.” He believes it’s the end of corporate copyright as we know it.

So how do we mobilize the film community?

Levy-Hinte: show the filmmakers this is relevant. The various independent filmmaking groups need to get together. The only way it can emerge is if we can handle the overall legal structure which is being imposed by the government. The MPAA is afraid of the future and wants people to be afraid of these delivery methods.

Heins: part of the problem is that the largest number of experts in this arena, outside of legal academics, are corporate. And they don’t look to defend the fair use side. Maybe they need to be recruited.

Taplin: Compulsory licenses may be a solution. In the same way that when a radio station or a restaurant music system plays “musak” they don’t have know in advance, they pay out afterwards. In terms of music and video clips, this would be an obvious solution but it will be fought till the dying day.

Heins: (disagrees) This means that a copyright holder can’t refuse. That might be a problem, too, because then the artist had to give the license whether they agree with the end result or not. It abandons the idea of fair use, and the wide range of uses that material can have. It also does not really acknowledge copyright.

Brown: compulsory licenses are only good as a last resort because it will turn out that only a few big guys will end up setting the level of costs and it won’t be cheap.

After the panels the final speaker was the inspiring and provocative lyricist of the Grateful Dead, John Perry Barlow. He coined the term “cyberspace” and was one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) In 1997, he was a Fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and since 1998 he’s been a Berkman Fellow at Harvard Law School.

Years ago he proposed in Wired that copyright only worked as long as you had physical copies. He thought the idea would be easily accepted but underestimated the “hairball” of existing law developed for different pieces of media. The highly monied corporate interests are in conspiracy with congress to use the copyright law issue as a means of paying and raising campaign contributions. Jack Valenti, the MPAA's President since the Johnson Administration, is in the process of retiring. Barlow believes now is the time to look forward for means to undo what the DMCA has done.

Barlow relates to the crisis the MPAA is going through. At first the Grateful Dead were not happy when they found out that fans were taping their concerts. But this allowance became their trademark and endeared them to fans. “Little did they realize they were inventing viral marketing. Everyone who tries it finds out it works…. You have to trust this and find some lawyers who trust this too.”

Barlow began to have new answers to questions of what a saleable object was and what its worth was. He came to believe that for something to be worth anything it had to be “Severable in the sense that once it’s sold, only one person owns it.” Would commercial information - a song or a digitized film - be less saleable if it was already distributed non-commercially? With many products, Barlow believes, familiarity is more important. Whether it’s ripped off or not, familiarity increases worth. Despite concert taping - all the Grateful Dead albums went platnum - eventually.

Barlow worries that 90% of all music and filmprints created in the last 60 years are now unavailable, under copyright and in the vault of studios where they will turn to dust. He believes we have a responsibility to this old work and our own new work not to let this happen.

SUNY Brockport

2004-09-26T13:15:00.000-04:00

The plane from Cleveland to Rochester was nearly empty. It’s not loneliness you feel. It’s the being forced to surf the air in a chair. I fell asleep before the plane took off and woke up five minutes before landing.

I was first person to arrive at the baggage claim, and ultimately, one of only 5 people searching for the unique mark which will betray who the luggage belongs to. And the other four are a group. I look around. For first time in my life, I was supposed to be met by someone carrying a sign that said “Matt Kohn.” There are two student-looking guys sort of slouching toward the baggage claim. One has a piece of paper in his hands and then gives it to the other guy. Is this the paper with my name? The paper gets passed back to the first guy. I pretty much realize these are my guys, but they’re gently kidding each other, “No, you hold the paper.” Of course no one wants to hold up a paper when there are only 5 passengers getting off the plane. So I introduce myself to Mike, the vice president of the student government and his buddy and we’re off.

When we get to SUNY Brockport, I have found out that Mike, the vice president of the student government leans Democrat and Frank, the president is a Republican, with Bush/Cheney posters in his office. In student government they seem to get along well without losing their earnest beliefs. This is cool. They have a humorous and genuine respect for each other. Frank and Mike tell me they saw our trailer and decided that showing “Call It Democracy” (then still EBF) would be a great way to get everyone together to talk about the important issues of the election process. This is exactly my hope.

We eat in the cafeteria (rated best in the SUNY system) and get into a series of altneratively serious and humorous conversations. One is about free speech on campus. Republican students are opposing restrictive anti-hate language. I’m a Libertarian on free-speech issues, so I would probably agree with their attempt to change anything that restricts language. Another is about whether or not people really have the ability to electrically sense one another. We all sort of agree they do, whether we’ve experienced it or not.

Joan Linder (http://www.mixedgreens.com/mixedgreens/art_and_artists/artist_about.jhtml?artistId=44) one of the producers of CID, is also a visiting professor at University of Buffalo this year. She is the subject of what may be my next film, especially since it’s already been shot. It’s a 45 minute drive and she arrives just in time to grab some fries, salad, and to see what I’ve done for the last four months.

The professors arrive. Frank introduces the movie, while the movie starst, keep reminding me that I said I would be able to provide him a few questions he can ask the panel later. I am nervous about this. We screen the film. I made a few technical notes from the back of a large auditorium. I totally let Frank down. I have no idea exactly what questions people should ask. Won’t the movie produce questions of it’s own? Obvious questions?

What I realize now, and I didn’t realize then, is that in addition to our panel discussion Q & A, I should have invited the students to post their thoughts somewhere. So now, jump ahead in time: I created a new blog for comments on the film:

http://www.callitdemocracy.blogspot.com

The audience seemed to enjoy the film. No one left. They were wondering, “Where do we go from here”? What about the courts? What about the electronic voting machines? What about the Electoral College? This is exactly as it should be. Students struggled with the apparent dichotomy between the hair-pulling problems of the system as it exists, the need to understand the specifics of, say, “what it means to vote in New York State” and the need to vote. And somewhere, some time, have every vote counted equally.

So, thanks to the student leaders and professors who set up and were on the panel and who were, so I heard, equally Republican and Democrat. I honestly couldn’t tell. Dr Lynne Parson, History, Chairman of the American Democracy Project, Dr. David Staveley, Professor Political Science, International Studies, Dr. Cynthia Boez, Professor, AMerican Politics Mike Pusaterri, Vice President, Brockport Student Government, Nick Catanzaro, President, College Dems, Kevin Hall, Chairman, College GOP and Rob Blair, Campus Life, Former BSG President.

Planes Taxi

2004-09-21T07:09:00.000-04:00

When they are ready to bring you to a new destination. But only when they are ready.

In descent, red eye flight hovers over towns making working class headlights into small bugs. Trucks are "caterpillars." Most especially on unlight roads. They course.

I used to write poetry by hand in the dark on large sheets of blank white paper. Keytboard killed this method. It's hard to justify writing in the dark without seeing the keys or the monitor.

Airport workers all seems to be wearing kneepads. No joke. The Continental check-in outbound from LA was slow and dreary like the DC Grayhound terminal I've grown so fond of. I've spent more than a few hours at the Arby's, not enjoying hash browns and orange juice near the videogames replaying their loud tutorials over and over again.

I am mostly ignorant of sports, especially football. Through Greg's Playstation obsession, and Chris' turtorial, I discovered the internet and that most teams only play 16 games per season. Suddenly the pressure on the players and the ritualistic pomp and circumstance made complete sense. And that there are only 11 guys on each team, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Personalities! Whoah. It's like boxing, which I used to enjoy, enmasse. How many teams are there? How many players? Not too many. This is why people can keep track. Never realized.

Plane taxis into Cleveland. The home of rock and roll. The birthplace of Pere Ubu. They existed. They went away. The singer did solo work. They reformed. They changed. They exist. http://ubuprojex.net/ Is Pere Ubu in the Rock and Roll hall of fame? Not this world of sound, not yet, I don't think. Pere Ubu wrote the song "Final Solution" about love and at the time, people thought it was "about the Holocaust." Pere Ubu wrote the love angst song called "Non-Alignment Pact" but everybody got it. Pere Ubu has not yet written a car commercial although they have a sad song with the lyric "I don't have a car/ I don't get around much." (My Dark Ages). This would be the soundrack for a car commercial that would only play for people who can't sleep and still watch tv looking for romatic TV movies, not infomercials.

Was on radio yesterday for the first long interview. With Dan Efram the other producer on this project. Don't know how long this will be live but here it is. This is the best way to get something serious from me right now. http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/krcl/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=686763

I am Cleveland until the plane taxis me to the screening of Call it Democracy at SUNY Brockport. Exciting. The first time I'll be on a panel with a group of professors and not filming them.

NOTE: AT FIRST I ENDED THIS BLOG WITH
Wrote 140 emails to professors - is it spam if I write each one individually? Paying wifi fee at airpot, find I am once again @#$%ed by microsoft. Left with 140 emails in my outbox!!!! Everyone has been urging me to switch to the mac mail server. Less headlights, caterpillars, vermin, and bugs! In what life can I be away from the computer? Can I download my way out of the computer? Living is like swimming compared to computing which is....

BUT I FIGURED IT OUT. Thanks, professors, if you got this far.

Sunny Day

2004-09-18T20:29:00.001-04:00

Brian and ate celebration food at Atomic Diner in Los Angeles. A burger and fries for one of us a tangerine salad for the other. Both are celebratory.

The edit was finished on Wednesday evening and now we are letting it sink in. What is there to tweak in the tweaks? Thankfully, the music issue has gone away. We haven't had time for a real music edit for the university screenings, but Chris worked real hard to get the sound better than it's ever been. Even in New York, almost a month ago (!) it was sounding better. And now the original music composed by Erik Carlson and the previously released tracks by Suicide's Martin Rev sound very well positioned. When is music there, not out of the way, not in the way, but actually interesting to listen to when not attached to the movie itself? That's what we're working with, happily in my opinion.

We talked very seriously about including one last voice over scene about the Equal Protection clause as in introduction to the debate of the constitutional scholars. If we include this piece, what we are trying to do is get the entire legal history of race relations, state and federal relationships, and the civil war into a segement we know really can't last longer than 90 seconds. Well, maybe it can. But how long can we listen to my simple, authoritative voice and look at pretty pictures from the national gallery? I hope 90 seconds, with after affects. Next time, maybe I'll get mimes to stage re-enactments on the steps of the capital. Mimes were cool once, weren't they?

Also, other important cleaning up to do involves re-inventing our website itself. I met with Brian's next door neighbor, photographer Geoff Cordner. Geoff created an amazing American flag image for the top of the "Call It Democracy" website and now I have to get a lot of information to him like bios on the experts, how to get their books. Where on the net is information about the topics covered in the film, like the electoral college, HAVA, and constitutional history. I'm building a pro-active one stop shopping for democracy in our republic. This invovles a bit of organization. I have files, much better than I used to when I didn't have file. I also have a ton of bookmarks. So if you get this far in the blog, I cross my heart hope to die that you will get the best information possible when you check out the links at www.callitdemocracy.com.

On a very technical note, I realized I had to download an upgrade to "Entourage" in order for it to make sense with mac wifi. I don't know why this is. it's been driving me crazy for weeks out here in any attempt to reply, and forward emails. Don't let this happen to you! Days have gone by that are now really gone. If I knew this weeks ago, I could have had hundreds of emails sent out properly. Download the updates! After I did so, I sent 90 in one day. And that's just a start for the out reach we need to do to get this puppy to the thousands of Americans hungry for real information about their election system.

It's a sunny day heaing toward sundown and I'm still getting ready for Brockport. We had a screening in Hawaii eariler this week. Wonder how it went. It must be sunny there too!

Matt Kohn

2004-09-15T20:09:00.000-04:00

Now it's time to catch up to the blog-world. Is it a bubble rolling down the hill? Up the hill? Is it a valley full of wonderfull people on the other side of the hill?

Its 5:08 PM in Los Angeles. I'm sitting behind Chris Boscardin the editor of my documentary Call It Democracy. I'm watching him putting final details on the film which I started two weeks after the 2000 election ended. Since then, I've met a lot of people and spent a lot more time with them as footage. You get to know people really well in the edit. And in the last two months, I've spent more time with Chris than any single real human in the last year.

Chris is finessing some of the edits. Right now we're both listening to the young female Naderite we hear over the image of President Bush (43)'s motorcade arriving at his dad (41)'s home in Kennebunkport, Maine. She said, "When you see something on the news, you don't really have time to process it, you don't have someone to bounce it off of." News passes us by without the time for us to understand it in depth. Well, this movie has taken it's time. When you get a chance to see it, you'll see the unfolding story of electoral reform. From 1789 to 2005.

Just a few minutes ago we were looking at footage of former Sen. Birch Bayh, who worked hard for ten years to abolish the Electoral College. In his successful efforts, he wrote the 24th and 25th Constitutional Amendments. When I called him and said, "I can't believe I never heard this story before!" He told me that if he would have won his battle against the entrenched mechanisms of a system which allows a President to be elected with the unpopular vote "We would have a different President right now." This short conversation inspired me to think of the 2000 election in the broadest way - a history of near misses.

Watching the footage run in front of me, I am feeling that slim onset of depression that something is ending and the prosiac awareness another challenge beggining. The challenge of bringing this story to the American people.

This film used to be called Everywhere But Florida. And you or a friend of yours might have seen it at NYU, Cardozo, or somewhere like the Visions Theater in Washington DC. And EBF was a good title for the post-election 2000 period. But the last few months, since I hooked up with Brian McNelis (Better Living Through Circuitry) and Udy Epstein (7th Art) and Chris, a lot of the "old long film" has gone. In the editing process the themes were refined until the major points are clearly defined. A lot of the "Everywhere But Florida" footage - including tens of hours of people on the street and some scholars who didn't make it into the film - will make it onto the website or DVD. Whatever you see from here on out is the "Call It Democracy" version of the film.

So there is another question to ask: do I need to have a public diary? Well, I think that what's going to happen here is I am going to let people know where I am going, what I am doing and what my experience is on the college tour, activist screenings that are happening until the election is over. If the election ends.

Maybe audience members can be encouraged to put in their two cents on a "Call It Democracy" blog. In the last two weeks there were a total of six university screenings and three at the Imagine Festival. Right now I'm looking forward to my first personal appearance, at the University of Brockport, NY September 21st.

Will every screening have the potential to be revolutionary? No one knows what really will happen in the Kerry Bush slugfest. Will it all end in tears, and for whom? Whatever happens, no matter how close the election ends up, what I'm hoping to do is raise awareness in all of us that we can and must make the system better.