Polygon, the Dancing Bear

Occasional notes on politics, history, technology, architecture,
and the life of a county clerk

2002:
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August / September / October
November / December

2003:
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April / May / June / July
August / September / October
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2004:
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April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2005:
January / February / March
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November / December

2006:
January / February / March
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2007:
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August / September / October
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2008:
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Current entries

Friday, December 27, 2002, 2:15 am

I'm delighted to welcome Craig Cheslog's Political Parrhesia back to active blogging. I have moved the link back up from the "On Hiatus" section. Take a look -- he's done a lot just in the last few days.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum.

Thursday, December 26, 2002, 12:08 pm

This is your final warning. Almost all the email I receive about The Political Graveyard is polite and helpful. But there are occasional exceptions, such as the following:

Date: Mon, 23 Dec 2002 13:12:09 EST
Subject: Your web site

Mr. Kestenbaum:

What business does a Jew have in placing the name of my uncle on their website? You will remove it immediately and without hesitation. Failure to do so will result in immediate legal action. This is your final warning.

I am not making this up! The uncle, named in the letter, was a 1940 candidate for a state legislative seat. I replied as follows:

Date: Mon, 23 Dec 2002 13:20:48 -0500 (EST)

I respectfully decline to remove his name. Your uncle, as a legislative candidate, was and is a public figure, and I do not need his permission (or yours) to reference him on my site.

See also my privacy policy at http://politicalgraveyard.com/privacy.html

He responded as follows, implicitly retracting his threat to haul me into court:

Date: Mon, 23 Dec 2002 13:37:30 EST
Subject: Get your information right then

Mr. Kestenbaum:

If you are going to ignore my request and claim legal laws instead of moral issues (a typical Jew) then you should at least get your information strait concerning my uncle. Your "half-baked" biographical sketch for him is all missinformation.

P.S. We haven't forgot who murdered Jesus Christ.

Ignoring the slurs, I asked about the nature of the error:

Date: Mon, 23 Dec 2002 14:01:36 -0500 (EST)

I am always open to making corrections.

Everything I have on your uncle came from [a state legislative manual]. All I have is his name, and that he was listed as a [major party] candidate for [a state legislative seat], in the election on November 5, 1940. From this, I deduced that he was a resident of [county] at the time. If any of this information is incorrect, or should be supplemented with other factors, please advise.

Where I may have gone wrong -- and perhaps angered you -- is in assuming that someone who was a candidate 62 years ago is no longer living today. If he is living, I offer humble apologies and will immediately correct his entry. Please advise.

He did not reply.

In my database and web site, living or possibly-living persons are listed with a notation of "still living as of [year]", whereas those presumed dead are listed with a cemetery or other disposition, or "burial location unknown".

If the year of birth is 100 or more years before the current year, and I have no activity for them in the last 20 years, the person is presumed dead. Further, even if the year of birth is more recent than 100 years ago, but there is no activity in the past 60 years, the person is presumed dead.

If the year of birth is unknown, in the absence of some other evidence such as military service, education, relatives, etc., an estimated year of birth is calculated (automatically) as being 40 years before the first political activity in the database. (The estimated year of birth is used in calculations but not listed on the web site.)

The uncle of the correspondent above was a candidate in 1940, and there is no other information, so his estimated year of birth is 1900. So, both under the century-old birth-rule and the no-activity-in-60-years rule, he would be presumed to be dead.

Of course, he could have been as young as 21 in 1940, in which case he would be only 83 today -- and it's plausible that he could be living. But would it be reasonable to allow for this possibility by listing many thousands of entries with dates like "still living as of 1940" or even (because today's 99-year-old might have run for office at age 21) "still living as of 1924"?

My guess is that the uncle in question is actually long dead, and so all this is really moot as to him.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum.

Comments:

D.J. Jones, 12/28/2002: It's amazing someone as "off their rocker" as that cretin has the intelligence to turn on a computer. My cousin, Mayor Kiel of St. Louis, is listed on TPG, and I'm proud to see that, whether the site is run by a Christian, a Jew, or a Vegetarian.
David Weisman, 12/28/2002: Despite reading about your experience and my last name, I'll continue my political blog. I guess I wasn't really thinking about stopping, but reading this gave me a very unhappy feeling. Right now I don't post my e-mail address on the blog, though I'm thinking of starting, and I don't know if you would have read that if the writer had been obliged to leave it as a public comment.

The Art of Peace
Laurie Mann, 12/28/2002: You shouldn't have taken the name down. I get hate mail for being a feminist, and I simply stop reading it (and I can often tell within the first line!).

I got one threatening letter from the spouse of a semi-obscure actor who'd been diagnosed with cancer.

He was quite public about it. She strongly objected to seeing him listed on Dead People Server (even though I said "is alive, has cancer"), and I said, "well, he publically said he has the disease, so..."

A few months later, he died, but I haven't heard from her since.
julia, 12/28/2002: Perhaps you said something about his uncle which suggested that he breathed through his nose?

Glory. Imagine if the freepers weren't on his side. He'd self-destruct.
D.J. Jones, 12/30/2002:To Julia:

What do you mean about "freepers" being on the emailers side ? Please clarify that, thank you.
Lisa English, 1/16/2003: Great post and terrific blog, Lawrence! I am just loving it.

This volley of correspondence you had with this guy is not really typical fare...at least not in my experience. Yeah, there are the occasional fruitcake, but for the most part, and just as in life...most people are wonderful.

But what a hoot you've got here. He seems to have a real issue with "Jews"...I wonder if he'd have been such a sh*t if you were agnostic or Roman Catholic.

Anyway...terrific blog. I look forward to your returning to the weblog template because you are a delightful read.

Lisa

Monday, December 23, 2002, 2:28 am

An Unenviable Situation. Maybe it's the lateness of the hour, but I am just reeling with amazement and appreciation at an iconoclastic new blog I just found (via Sam Heldman). It's called An Unenviable Situation ("On Art, Politics, and those things In Between"), by Seth Edenbaum.

Edenbaum has no patience for the common pieties or dogmas of the left, right, or blogosphere. His insights are sharp. A few examples:

I do not dismiss criticism of fundamentalist belief on principle. I'm a New Yorker and I'm not an idiot. But I am angered if the criticism is based on the vague moralizing of the habitues of the land of the leasured. Painful transitions are now being forced upon people who have no idea what is happening to them, and who feel that they have no control of the outcome. And there are intelligent cynics who will use that anger to create and maintain power for themselves, based solely on their ability to steer anger in one direction or another. Do I have to list the ones who have done it recently?

Of all the reasons I use to justify my hatred and contempt for the philosophy of Libertarianism -aside from it's economic and moral stinginess- the most basic is its relentless defense of the shallow. The purblind celebration of individualism is the most extreme example of the horse/cart inversion that I know; the moral and logical equivalent of arguing that the works of William Shakespeare are more important to history than the English language.

Every moment of the day we use rhetoric. Every gesture, every vocal inflection, every choice of clothing is a representation of our thoughts and ideas, our delusions and misconceptions about ourselves and others. These gestures are the manifestations of our dreams. And without meaning to be too hyperbolic -since people tend to discount the logic of points made with the help of pat phrases- we ignore their meaning at our peril.

There is no line that divides information and rhetoric. A flat plane leads from the logical to the illogical, and from the rational to the absurd. If it weren't the case there would be no need to judge one from the other or argue abourt anything; and newspapers could be written by computer.

It is a cliché to say that blacks are still affected by the legacy of slavery. But it is true. And it is not yet somehow a cliché to say that Southern culture is still affected by the bloody and barbaric history of Scotland and Ireland. What can we say about South Boston? What is the reason for the extremely high drop-out rate of Italian American high school students in New York City? Why are so many prisoners the products of violent homes?

Reformers will always have a problem with the way people behave. And with reason. And I will always have a problem with reformers. But that is not the same as having a problem with democracy, or trying to make a moral justification for greed. There is none. Nor, for that matter, is there one for wealth. But sometimes, often, the easiest solutions to our troubles run smack into the brick wall of what it means to be human. I am less interested in writing even or especially political writing that does not take this into account.

And there's a lot more to provoke outrage and/or delight. Keep an eye on this guy!

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum.

Monday, December 23, 2002, 12:49 am

Twisted and Sad. I didn't know (until I saw it in Sassafrass Log) that more than 60 women have disappeared in Vancouver, most or all of them streetwalkers in the impoverished Downtown Eastside area, many of them Aboriginal. Fifteen bodies have been found, and the disappearances may date back as far as 1983. Finally, this year, a man named Robert William Pickton has been charged with the killings. The families of the missing women have accused the Vancouver police of ignoring evidence and giving the disappearances a low priority.

Unfortunately, the murder of prostitutes is usually not even seen as news. In Detroit twenty years ago, a newspaper article seeking to explain an increase in the murder rate mentioned that the total of homicide deaths among the city's prostitutes was more than the "normal number," as if a certain level of killings among that group was only to be expected.

Prostitution is illegal nearly everywhere, but prostitution themes and ideas and images are frequent in popular culture, including movies, popular songs, and bestselling novels. One typical meme is that prostitution is too powerful to be suppressed by laws or propriety; as Bob Seger put it in The Fire Down Below: "One thing for certain, it ain't ever gonna stop."

Yet while the inevitability of prostitution seems to be widely acknowledged, the criminal law has, if anything, facilitated the exploitation and marginalization of the women who are caught up in it. An anguished essay about the Vancouver murders raises some interesting questions:

Maybe we need to step back and ask: why is sex, in general, so twisted and sad in our culture? Why is it vast numbers of people will leap on the opportunity to exploit the poor and addicted to get it? Scores of women are working the streets of Vancouver right now because of something fundamental in our society -- something that not just allows for this to be the case, but somehow requires it. How can it be that the most revolutionary technological advances -- that is, anything having to do with the Internet -- are essentially fueled by the demand for quick, limitless access to images of something as banal as naked bodies?

I'm not saying sex is bad -- precisely the opposite. My question is, why do we, as a culture, want so badly for it to be? Why does it spur us to such zeniths of hypocrisy?

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum. Comments

Monday, December 23, 2002, 12:03 am

The Wonders of Dust. No Watermelons writes about dust:

But what is dust? Just "little bits of stuff"?

That depends on where you are. In the house it's probably flakes of skin from people or pets (dander), dust mites or other small critters, pollen, spores, settled particles of smoke from cigarettes or other combustion, and silica from dirt. So it is highly nonuniform and comes from diverse sources.

This post reminds me that the heating ducts in this house are overdue for being cleaned.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum. Comments

Sunday, December 22, 2002, 11:45 pm

Books for Sale. In the course of collecting hundreds of state legislative manuals and biographical compilations for my web site, I have accumulated an inevitable pile of duplicate volumes. I'm finally getting around to listing them for sale on Ebay. If you happen to be in the market for New York Red Books or Wisconsin Blue Books or the like, take a look. I'll be listing a few more every day or so.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum. Comments

Friday, December 20, 2002, 11:57 am

On the radio. I have just been informed that the Todd Mundt Show on National Public Radio will air a brief interview with me (about The Political Graveyard) during today's show at 1:00 pm Eastern time.

Update: It's about halfway through the hour-long broadcast. It sounds a lot better than I expected. One section we taped separately was apparently integrated seamlessly into the middle somewhere -- the magic of editing.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum. Comments

Wednesday, December 18, 2002, 11:13 am

Philadelphia architecture. Rob Bender of Heaven, Hell or Hoboken has posted more than a dozen photos of the Victory Building in Philadelphia, a corner commercial block that is very reminiscent of the Philadelphia City Hall. It seems Beaux-Arts at first glance, with the dramatic curved corner and strongly stated classical elements, but up close, a lot of the detailing looks like 1870s Italianate -- and it apparently has a mansard up top.

John Molloy in Dress For Success cautioned that none of his dress rules applied in Philadelphia, which has its own peculiar local customs. No doubt the design of buildings there is just as eccentric. As someone with little knowledge of Philadelphia architecture, I can hardly presume to guess when this building was built. Some time between 1860 and 1920? That doesn't narrow it down much!

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum. Comments

Wednesday, December 18, 2002, 10:52 am

Gore's out: Late last month, Josh Marshall pointed to Al Gore's devastatingly low approval rating: only 19%. With that in mind, it's not very surprising that he dropped out of the presidential race.

Not that Gore's exit solves the problem for Democrats, as Avedon Carol points out:

It's not that I'm not willing to give Kerry or Dean a chance. It's just that I can already see that they have more minuses than Gore and fewer pluses. You can say what you want about needing a nominee who hasn't been tarnished by years of RNC spin, but you're in dreamland if you think the GOP can't make them up about your favorite candidate the same way they did with Gore. Remember, the things they said about Gore were lies. They said a guy who'd been captain of the football team was unable to make friends. They tried to pretend the Internet in no way benefited from Gore's input. They claimed that a man with a 20-year reputation as a straight-arrow was "a serial liar" with dirty hands. And these were things everyone in Washington knew were not true. They had to make it all up, because they had no head-start with Gore, he didn't give them anything to attack. So they had to take every good thing about him and turn it into a minus. He was known for his integrity, so they called him a liar. He inspired the lead character in Love Story, so they pretended that he just made it up and he'd been unpopular since grade school. He spent years working to see the piddly little arpanet turned into something we all had access to, so they made fun of his daring to say so and pretended it wasn't true.

So they can do it to anyone. They're already doing it to Kerry, and you can be sure they will do it with Dean. The spin on both is that they are arrogant and unpopular. Sound familiar? They've only just gotten started, and Dean isn't even particularly high-profile yet.

Interesting Times makes a similar point:

[O]ne of the key dynamics of the 2000 election: the GOP has an extremely sophisticated smear machine that is hooked into the establishment media (as well as the fifth columnists at FOX) at many levels. There is no Democrat out there, no matter how "comfortable he or she is in their own skin", that will be able to avoid getting the same kind of treatment that Gore got.

This is the mistake that the Democrats have made repeatedly for the last two decades (at least). They continue to think the problem their candidates have has something to do with the nature of the candidates. Whether it is the blandness of a Mondale or a Dukakis, the philandering of a Clinton, or the stiffness of a Gore, Democrats like Kutner have convinced themselves that, if they just find the right candidate, they can avoid these problems. But the problems these candidates had were primarily due to the one trait they have in common: they are Democrats.

The Republicans have gotten so good at lying -- about candidates, about policy -- that it's hard to be optimistic about 2004, no matter how bad things get.

Belated update 2/1/2003: In the comments to this No-Watermelons post, "Jim" ridiculed the above posting as evidence that Democrats "are rooting for things to go terribly wrong for our country in hopes that it will enhance their electoral chances." I responded as follows:

I am NOT "rooting for" things to go wrong. Rather, I FEAR how bad things will be under the unfettered rule of GWB during the next two years and more. Civil liberties, eroded away to nothing. Legal abortion all but gone as soon as Stevens dies and is replaced by another Scalia. Budget deficits that dwarf Reagan's. Environmental laws dead letter. Labor unions smashed or powerless. Tremendous growth in the uninsured, barely employed, alienated (hence non-voting) underclass. Y'all may look forward to that world, but I don't.

I agree that war against Iraq may be necessary, but like Josh Marshall, I do not trust GWB and his pals to carry it out in a responsible way. And I don't look forward to spending trillions of tax dollars occupying Iraq for decades thereafter.

The fear that I expressed is that GWB and his friends will carry out all this crap, and yet NOT get tossed out on their ears in 2004.

But, hey, I could be wrong. GWB and the Congressional Republicans could govern more wisely than I expect. Indeed, I certainly hope they do. But I'm not holding my breath.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum. Comments

Tuesday, December 17, 2002, 2:29 pm

One of the nicer preprinted thank-you cards I have received from a political campaign:

In my short campaitgn for the U.S. Senate, I was astonished by the spontaneous outpouring of help, like yours, from all over America. Joan and I were blessed to have those wonderful days to make our case for justice and decency. Your help inspired us and made it possible. Thanks for your kindness, and above all, thanks for your commitment to the best in America. We really need you, now more than ever.

With profound thanks,
Walter F. Mondale

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum. Comments

Tuesday, December 17, 2002, 12:26 am

New, Improved Sidebar: Today's new version features many changes and updates to the blogroll, including new categories. Inactive blogs have been moved to the "on hiatus" category at the bottom.

Many thanks to those bloggers who have found my infrequent notes of interest recently, including A Dog's Life (November 23 and December 10); Sisyphus Shrugged (November 29), Delaware Law Office (December 1), and Sassafrass Log (twice on December 14).

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum. Comments

Monday, December 9, 2002, 5:14 pm

Brief notes:

Ink: The Ann Arbor News has come out with a front-page story about me and The Political Graveyard web site. The print edition features an awful color photo of me, looking numb from the cold, standing in the snow by the grave of former Michigan governor and U.S. Senator Alpheus Felch.

Covisint: The Detroit Free Press reports that Covisint is falling flat. Just a couple of years ago, Covisint was, as the Freep puts it, "expected to become the biggest Internet company in the world." Now, Covisint is laying off workers and moving into cheaper space; one prediction is that it will be gone "in as little as six months." Back in 2000, Washtenaw County was one of many areas angling to get Covisint's headquarters, but we were warned that such a huge arrival would change our community forever.

Michigan's economy is traditionally dominated by the Big Three auto companies, and there is a strong tendency here to look to large, centralized organizations to solve any problem. Indeed, the focus on the needs of big business makes Michigan one of the most hostile states for small businesses. In this case, Covisint's lumbering pace as a colossal start-up was so slow that smaller competitors quickly made it obsolete.

Lott: It's been pretty well covered in the Blogosphere, but most people I see in person have not heard yet about Trent Lott's shocking comment. Last Thursday, at a 100th birthday party for Strom Thurmond, Lott said:

I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."

According to the Washington Post, among the attendees at the party, who presumably were mostly Republicans and friends of Strom's, "there was an audible gasp and general silence." In 1948, Thurmond bolted the Democratic Party over Truman's desegregation of the Armed Forces and anti-lynching proposals. Atrios has posted a 1948 Mississippi election flyer which documents the point on lynching.

That liberals like Atrios and Josh Marshall disapprove of something Trent Lott said is hardly news. But many conservative and libertarian bloggers, including Greg Hlatky, Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds, Jonah Goldberg, and Virginia Postrel, have denounced Lott's comments, or even called for his ouster as Majority Leader. However, the mainstream press has taken little notice, and the New York Times hasn't yet mentioned it at all.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum. Comments

2002:
May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2003:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December