Why It's Going to Be Obama

Despite the fact that only 227,000 people voted in the Iowa Democratic Caucuses last night -- oh, sure, record turnout, whatever, I can't get behind .07% of the population having any influence on who I get to vote for -- everyone is reading the tea leaves this morning. So I'll do it, too: Obama is going to win.

Not just the Democratic nomination, but the whole thing.

Here's why. People always say they want change, but they're deluded. Real change is scary, unpredictable, sometimes painful, and, this is the important part, almost impossible to achieve in our current political system. That's actually why it's set up the way it is; we're not supposed to be able to change things too quickly. (It's also why the Bush Administration has been aggressively asserting its right to broader Executive powers; if they played by the rules, they couldn't do stuff like warrantless phone taps.)

We all know, deep down, that whomever we elect is going to be playing by the same rules as always -- hopefully not by the expanded Bush rules, though I wouldn't put it past Giuliani -- and our best hope for significant change in the war in Iraq, or national health care, or global warming, is to let the system grind its way through a new set of priorities. Maybe in four years, or eight, things will be a little better and the United States can collectively look itself in the mirror again without hating itself.

But Obama. Now there's some real change, no matter how he governs. The combination of his youth, race, and relative inexperience in the entrenched Washington culture are, by definition, change. Yes, electing the first woman president would also be a big change, but it feels like that is canceled out by the fact that Hillary is a Clinton. Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton -- she'd do a decent job, but I think we're all tired of that crowd by now.

If we elect our first Black president, that's something to be proud of. It will no doubt help our image internationally, but within the United States, whether he makes civil rights a priority or not, a President Obama will change the way we view each other, and ourselves. We need that.

Iowa is practically an all-White state. I'm not as big on hope as some people, but the fact that so many of them chose a Black man as their first choice, is pretty damn heartening.

The Price of Feminism

I am getting married in February, but not changing my name. I wouldn't have thought that was a controversial decision in this day and age, but a couple of relatives have been surprised.

But that's nothing compared to my surprise when my fiance told me that, when he called Verizon to have them put my name on the account (in case, you know, someone calls information trying to find me), they told him that they are charging us $2.50 a month for this "service". If we had the same last name, no charge.

Are you kidding me?

I'm sure they have some super-acceptable rationale for this numskullery, having to do with the extra millisecond or two it might take their computer to parse the two names when someone calls just looking for one of us.

But really, isn't it time for the Verizon to accept that more and more households have different names these days and their system needs to keep up? My mother can manage this, but the phone company can't? Oh wait, they're a monopoly.* They don't need to do anything.

*Yes, Ma Bell was broken up 25 years ago, but if you can only get local phone service from one company, that's pretty much a monopoly. And don't talk to me about cable phone.

The Price of Oil: What Are We Talking About Exactly?

The rising price of oil is on a lot of people's minds these days. It hasn't quite hit $100/barrel yet, but it's getting close ($94 as of this writing). I was reading Elizabeth Kolbert's article about extracting oil from the Alberta tar sands in the New Yorker this morning, and it occurred to me, as I read that 4500 pounds of tar have to be dug and separated into their constituent parts to get enough of the bitumen that can be refined into one barrel of oil, that I had no idea how much oil was in a barrel.

I'd always pictured it like the one here -- it's the size we think of when we think of a generic barrel -- but that couldn't possibly hold enough oil to justify the expense of digging up the 4500 hundred pounds of tar, could it? An official barrel of oil must be much more massive.

Turns out, that barrel in my mind is an official barrel of oil, the one that costs nearly $100 now. It holds 42 gallons of oil, about half of which is destined to become gasoline. The rest is made into things like jet fuel, fuel oil, asphalt and lubricants. So, one barrel of oil yields about 21 gallons of gasoline, or about two-thirds of an SUV's gas tank.

The reason it's at all profitable to convert those 4500 pounds of sludge into a barrel of oil is that, all told, it costs about $30 per barrel to do so. It was only a few years ago that oil was at $38, making tar-sand extraction unattractive. The process isn't nearly as efficient as conventional oil extraction, though, so the environmental impacts are much worse.

Can I Have My Money Back?

There's a story in the New York Times today about the abysmal conditions at the barracks Iraqi Police Academy, built by an American contractor. The company, Parsons, did such a shoddy job that the building is "largely unusable".

That's an understatement. How would you like to live in a building where the bathrooms have human waste dripping from the ceilings? Is it any wonder the Iraqi Police Force isn't yet up to the job of policing Baghdad? We -- the American taxpayers -- paid them $72 million for this.

There is, of course, as there always is, a Congressional investigation underway. But there's no word yet as to when the company plans to issue its refund checks -- 55 cents for each of 131 million income tax filings last year. OK, that might not sound like much; but considering that the entire Iraqi reconstruction effort to date has cost $45 billion, and is, according to the Times article, and any sort of common sense, "widely considered a failure," a refund on the whole thing would be $343 each.

Alright, $343 isn't going to get me very far, either. But on principle, Parsons, Blackwater, Halliburton, and the rest of youz on this list of war profiteers, please make the check out to Cash.

Happy Goddamn Halloween

OK, sure, every other woman on the street last night was a slutty barmaid, or a slutty referee/umpire, slutty pirate, baseball player or cat. I even saw a slutty Sherlock Holmes. We get it; Halloween is firmly established as a safe time for otherwise only mildly slutty woman to become full-fledged slutty fantasies for men whose most creative costume attempt is carrying a football while wearing a football jersey and sneakers. If I were 15 years younger, I might think it was fun to do, instead of just funny to ridicule as the sluts pass.

But when the slut parade interferes with my ability to get home quickly, that's when it's gone too far. The cab we were in after the theater last night was held up for several light cycles and meter clicks too many on 42nd Street. The cause of this late-night traffic jam? A Halloween party at Cipriani, to celebrate the launch of Roberto Cavelli's new vodka line (doesn't he know that designer vodkas are so 2004? but get this, it's filtered through crushed Italian marble), at which there was a line of black SUVs standing in what would otherwise be a no-standing zone/bus stop, funneling the traffic into one lane instead of two, their drivers napping while the D-list celebrities they were waiting for slutted it up inside. People like Petra Nemcova and Katrina Bowden. Who? Right; exactly.

At least Petra's costume is a little beautiful. What's Katrina supposed to be? A slutty Donald Trump? Ew.