From the Wisconsin State Journal:

In the 2004 presidential election, 93 percent of voters in this Near East Side community chose John Kerry, making it the most Democratic ward in Dane County, according to state voting records. Less than 5 percent backed winner George W. Bush.

Willy Street is lovely but it’s important to get out of town regularly. The reporter notes that “living among so many like-minded people can make it harder sometimes to understand the rest of the country.”

He spoke to one resident who said, “I cannot figure out the 51 percent of the population who voted for Bush. Who are these people? Where do they live?”

This was my favorite book as a kid. As I remember it, Flat Stanley gets squashed by a bookcase (hence the name). He ends up sending himself around the world in an envelope. How cool is that?

A teacher in Connecticut asked her students to send a letter with Flat Stanley in the envelope to famous people. A few boys sent Flat Stanley to Barack Obama. Obama was the only one to reply.

Here’s an excerpt from the Hartford Courant:

Obama’s three-page letter . . . described Flat Stanley’s visit with him and his staff in Washington, D.C. It chronicled their busy day together, which included coffee with constituents, a Senate committee meeting and a trip to the gym. It also had historical facts about the U.S. Capitol, details of Obama’s job and a confession from Obama.

“Sometimes I get a little nervous before talking in front of a crowd, but Flat Stanley helped me practice the speech,” Obama wrote. “He made me recite it in front of him and then even gave me some advice so the speech would go smoothly. Flat Stanley is really a great coach.”

I love Flat Stanley, even though the story gave me a fear of bookcases that exists to this day.

Politico reports that Sarah Palin has been on a spending spree since becoming the GOP’s V.P. candidate. She spent, compliments of the RNC, $150,000 on clothes, hair, and make up and other “campaign accessories.” (How much does a red blazer cost anyway?)

What would Joe Six-Pack think of that? Do pro-America shoppers drop $75,000 at Neiman Marcus?

Seems to me that if she were a “real American” she’d shop at Wal-Mart.

Oh, wait, all that stuff comes from China now!

Too bad Project Runway’s Heidi Klum isn’t hosting election night coverage. It would be great to hear Klum say, “auf Wiedersehen, Sarah, you are out.”

“Democracy is incomplete in Iran,” said Noble Peace Prize winner Dr. Shirin Ebadi, who spoke yesterday at the UW campus. But democracy in Iran, she said, must come through Iranians and not foreign troops.

Ebadi was the first woman to become a judge in Iran in 1969. But the laws imposed after the 1979 revolution forced her from the bench. She became a secretary in the courtroom she used to preside over. She left and went on to become one of the greatest human rights lawyers in Iran. (The Progressive interviewed her in 2004.)

Wearing a black double-breasted suit jacket with slacks, her brown hair cut short, Ebadi spoke with eloquence and searing determination.

She began her talk discussing how the Iranian government discriminates based on gender. Women are not equal to men under current Iranian law. She listed examples, including unfair divorce laws and travel restrictions, but noted that 65% of university students are women. “These laws are not compatible with Iranian culture,” she said.

Ebadi also noted that, “Freedom of speech is severely restricted.” In the last year alone, several newspapers have been shut down by the government.

What is source of these laws, post-revolution? The government claims the source is Islam. “Their interpretation of Islam is wrong,” she said, saying it was possible to have human rights under Islamic law.

As for democracy, majority rule is not a good enough definition. Democracy must exist within a framework of respecting human rights, she said. For example, discriminating based on gender, like Iran, is problematic, as are restrictions on free expression (Cuba, China). And the U.S. government uses national security as a way to curb civil rights, she said, mentioning the illegal domestic wiretapping by the Bush Administration. (She seemed more concerned about eavesdropping than some members of Congress.)

Human rights cannot be a pretext for another war in the Middle East. “We love Iran and will not allow it to become another Iraq,” she said.

She went on to discuss the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, back when Saddam Hussein was the U.S. government’s friend.

Ebadi said that Saddam was indeed a dictator, but it wasn’t as if he were the only one. “The difference between Saddam and other [dictators] is that Saddam happened to sit on a lot of oil.”

The U.S. has had a “misguided” foreign policy in the Middle East. People in the Middle East do not like their governments, many of which are U.S. allies (Saudi Arabia, UAE). So people are then suspicious of U.S. policy. The only exception is Iran, she said.

Due to human rights violations, the Iranian government is unpopular with its people. But outside the country, Iran is popular due to the decades of U.S. government’s misguided policies.

“Anyone who says ‘Death to America’ is popular in the region,” she said.

“The only solution is for the U.S. to give up protection of anti-democratic governments in the region,” she said and outlined a few simple and brilliant steps:
–stop selling weapons in the region
–no diplomatic relations if there is no parliament.

If the U.S. government took these measures, anti-U.S. sentiment could subside, she said, adding, “so people can see that saying ‘Death to America’ does not fill stomachs.”

She ended her talk with a bit of poetry. “Let us be as forgiving as the skies. Let us spread friendship like the wind, let us rage against discrimination and ignorance like fire.”

She added: “Let us be kind to one another, really kind.”

After hearing Ebadi talk, I went a few rooms over to hear the Palestinian hip-hop group DAM. They were amazing, blending Arabic rhythms with booming bass lines.

What I love about hip-hop is how it gets tweaked internationally by its local adherents. Someone in the crowd asked if the kids break dance in the Occupied Territories. No, DAM explained, they do their own hybrid: a mash up of hip hop and the dubka, a Middle Eastern folk dance.

Anheuser-Busch was a key sponsor of the presidential debates, reports The New York Times.

“Francine Katz, vice president for communications and corporate affairs at Anheuser-Busch, declined to say how much the company spent on the debates, except that it is “a very significant sum.” ”

So why would a company want to sponsor a boring debate?

“A lot of what we do is as a corporate citizen and not for recognition,” Ms. Katz said.

Right.

The International Bottled Water Association was another corporate sponsor of the debates. It provided bottled water for the debates and the services of its top lobbyist, said Joseph K. Dobbs, the president of the trade group.

Thanks to big business, water is now being transformed from a public asset to a private commodity. The Republican ideology of deregulation and attacking the “commons” supports this privatization.

So it was a big disappointment that the water crisis was not a topic of the Presidential debates. According to Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians, 36 states in the U.S. will be experiencing serious to severe water problems in the next 3 to 5 years.

In an upcoming interview in The Progressive, Barlow says that a group of retired military leaders in the U.S. reported to President Bush in April of 2007 that water shortages pose a serious threat to U.S. security.

So why no national discussion? Water is a bigger national security issue than Bill Ayers.

For more information check out Know Bottled Water.

Is Obama really going to win the presidency? It’s mind boggling.

Everyone seems to be thinking about the election. Just look at today’s e-mail.

My dream ticket this year wasn’t Obama-Clinton. It was Obama-?uestlove. (As long as we’re dreaming, I pick Russ Feingold as Attorney General.)

And then there’s an e-mail from my brother, entitled “Keep It Simple”:

Before Congress has even approved the Wall Street bailout, Rudy Giuliani is positioning his law firm to cash in on it, reports the New York Daily News. Bracewell & Giuliani announced on September 25 that it has set up a financial industry task force to guide firms through “legislative, regulatory and enforcement challenges” posed by “impending actions by Congress, the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve and the SEC.” The task force consists of employees with deep connections to the Bush White House such as Marc Mukasey, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan and the son of U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey.