politics
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Redemption, and disappointment
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 05 Nov 2008 | Tagged as: LGBT, marriage equality, politics, USA
Obama was elected US President yesterday, and there was a huge celebration at a bar in Yaletown near our house (see the photo). It felt great to cheer the good news. Ducky and I have both been weeping from time to time over the last few days as the news sinks in.
This is about more than politics. This is a step towards redemption.
“The Big Empty” (fivethirtyeight.com)
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 31 Oct 2008 | Tagged as: politics, USA
Wow. This is so good I have to pass it on. Sean Quinn posted a marvellous article, “The Big Empty“, at FiveThirtyEight.com. Part of what I like is that it elicited one of the best blog comments I’ve read in a long time:
Frankly, I’m appalled at the blatant journalism that is evident in this story. It’s almost as though you’ve gone around the country actually observing what is going on in terms of the ground game, and reported on it. Typical lefties. (Sedi)
Quinn has been visiting McCain and Obama field offices across the country for some weeks, and reporting how deserted the McCain offices were and how active the Obama offices. Today he put it all together, with a devastating sequence of more than a dozen photos of empty (and closed) McCain offices from New Mexico to North Carolina. Check it out.
Silicon Valley says No to Proposition 8
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 31 Oct 2008 | Tagged as: LGBT, marriage equality, politics
You know I am against California’s Proposition 8, which eliminates marriage, and I’m a Silicon Valley boy. I was really pleased to see over 50 Silicon Valley leaders take a public stand against Proposition 8, in the form of a full-page ad in the San Jose Mercury News today (October 31, 2008). One name really meant a lot to me: that of Chuck Geschke, co-founder and co-Chairman of Adobe Systems, where I worked for 16 years.
I heard about the ad in news stories, but I couldn’t find it on the newspaper’s site. (It’s funny that newspaper ads don’t make it to their websites. You’d think that for expensive full-page public statement ads, it would be part of the package.) But Techcrunch carried an image: “Silicon Valley Stands United Against Prop. 8“. (Oh, and the No on 8 campaign has a press release with the text.)
With respect to all the other notable people in the ad, Chuck Geschke’s name means the most to me. Like many Adobe-ites in the 1990’s, I learned about ethical, successful business from Chuck and from John Warnock, and from Adobe Systems, the company they founded. I was just a worker bee, but their ethics and culture permeated the place.
Funny that McCain and Obama didn’t mention Canada or NATO
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 27 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: Canada, politics, USA
I don’t really want to start commentary about the US Presidential race, since so many other people are already saying so much. But I do want to mention one thing that struck me, as a resident of Canada.
In last Friday’s debate (Sept 26, 2008) between John McCain and Barack Obama, they talked about the outlook for the war in Afghanistan. They both described it in purely US terms, as if the US was fighting that war alone.