Asked what he would say if he ran into Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela who had just spent two hours denouncing the US to a cheering crowd of 25,000, our president said:

“I will, of course, be polite That’s what the American people expect their president to do, is to be a polite person.”

A seemingly reasonable answer. We do, after all, expect our president to be polite. Then why does this strike me as so disconnected from reality as to constitute a reverse paranoia in which you think no one is out to get you?

1. I imagine Bill Clinton would have said something like: “I’d grab him aside and sit down with him. In the interest of maintaining the long and good relationship between our two countries, I would see if there were more productive ways we could address the issues together.” In that light, Bush’s answer sounds like what it is: “Go fuck yourself,” uttered over tea, with one’s pinky finger properly extended.

2. Imagine how this strikes the Venezuelan people. They can protest all they want, but they’re not going to get anything more than a “And how’s the missus?” from our polite president.

3. As an American citizen, do I expect our president to be polite? Yes, I do. But that’s not where my expectations end. I also expect him to be engaged. I’m also not sure that turning America into the world’s bully constitutes being polite. I don’t know — is “warmongering” even covered by Emily Post? [Tags: GeorgeBush bush politics argentina venezuela]

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A new CBS News poll puts Bush’s job approval rating at 35%, the lowest for any president at this point in the term since Nixon.

It seems to me that 15.7% of the country owes the rest of us an apology, in return for which we will promise not to waggle our fingers and say “We told you so.”

By the way, Cheney’s approval rating is 19%, an astounding figure since it means about 60% of Republicans are waggling their fingers at him. [Joho’s pledge: All math performed in this blog is guaranteed to be flawed.] [Tags: GeorgeBush politics cheney]

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David Berlind reports that a bill has been introduced in the Massachusetts legislature to keep the state from following through on its decision to require all state-purchased office products to support open document standards.

Yeah, wouldn’t want to have them open document standards when we can all be under the benevolent protection of Microsoft… [Tags: microsoft odf massachusetts]

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Micah Sifry has a long and frank analysis of what went wrong (and right) in Andrew Rasiej’s run at the office of the NYC Public Advocate. It was an experiment in grassroots, Web-based campaigning, but Andrew ended up with just 5% of the vote. I was disappointed, but still proud of Andrew, Micah and the other people who worked hard on the campaign.

Micah’s analysis is one of the good things that has come out of the campaign. [Tags: politics MicahSifry AndrewRasiej]

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Former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega in The Nation calls for the impeachment of Pres. Bush. Well, she actually calls for investigations that, if they were to be carried out fairly, would inevitably lead to his impeachment. (Am I prejudging the results of those investigations? Damn right.)

I know he’s not going to be impeached, much less be removed from office. But for the sake of democracy, as well as for our standing in the world, we need to show that we think lying to get us into a war is a more serious offense than lying about blow jobs. [Tags: GeorgeBush politics]

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It’s hard for a vegetarian — or, well, an inhabitant of the earth — to say something good about McDonald’s, but here goes:

McDonald’s is switching to Newman’s Own fair trade coffee in 658 of its New England outlets. And it’s pricing a cup lower than Dunkin Donuts and (of course) Starbucks to further entice people to drink coffee that’s better for others.

Of course, McDonald’s will be carving each cup out of a half pound of rare Amazon woods encased in styrofoam that’s been specially formulated to suck ozone out of the atmosphere, but, still, you have to give McD’s some credit… [Tags: mcdonald’s fairTrade coffee PaulNewman environment]

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When Pres. Bush accepted the letter of resignation, how do you think he explained to himself and to her the reason she wasn’t accepted? Since I can’t imagine what he was thinking when he proposed her, I can’t imagine what sense he’s making of it now.

“You would have made a great judge. If only they’d gotten to know you the way I do, Harriet, instead of being rushed to judgment.”?

“You were a victim of Washington insiders who’ll do anything to damage this presidency.”?

“Gosh, Harriet, I guess the Senate just isn’t ready to have a woman on the Supreme Court”?

And so we march on to a new nomination by a man who takes Clarence Thomas as a model Supreme Court Justice. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

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My children can’t imagine what it was like before Rosa Parks. They are appalled when we tell them.

I mean that as a tribute to her.

The story for which Rosa Parks is famous is not as I was taught it.

I was five when she refused to move out of the whites-only seats at the front of the bus. I was told that she was a humble Black woman who, after a hard day of work, was too tired to get up. In fact, she was a committed civil rights worker, a secretary in the Montgomery office of the NAACP where she recorded reports of racial discrimination and interviewed African-Americans with legal complaints. (I in fact was taught she was a white family’s maid. Did those telling the story just assume that that’s what black women do?)

It’s a better story the first way, but why?

The mythic version is so powerful because of what it doesn’t say. Obviously, the point wasn’t that she was tired, that she collapsed in the seat and was physically unable to stand up. Presumably she was tired every day. The point of the myth is exactly that this day was like every other except for what happened in Rosa Parks’ heart. On that day like any other, a woman like any other rose above the accepted condition. Like the first photo of the whole earth seen from space, Parks’ refusal to change seats transformed our perspective. What had been presented as an inevitable way of the world Parks revealed as a fragile system with which — suddenly — one did not have to comply. The heroism of non-compliance was, Rosa Parks showed, available to everyone.

That’s why the story works better the more “ordinary” the hero is.

We like stories of ordinary heroes because they tell us heroism is within our grasp as well. (Why we aren’t instead shamed by their implicit denunciation of our own failures to be heroic is beyond me.) But, while stories of the humble becoming heroes may appeal to us, a life like Parks’ is all the more admirable: She didn’t postpone heroism, waiting for the moment to happen to her. She became a worker for civil rights in a time and place where that took daily heroism.

Then, on December 1, 1955, she was tired of complying with a system that degraded her, so she came to a full stop, not knowing the consequences. She demanded the system either acknowledge her dignity or demonstrate its full depravity. It takes a genuine faith in human goodness to think that we will not let a system stand once its corrupt nature has been exposed.

I would be happy to celebrate Rosa Parks Day every December 1. We Americans would be better for explicitly embracing her true story as a mythic expression of our values. [Tags: RosaParks]

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David Berlind has a massively detailed account of how Massachusetts decided to exclude Microsoft’s Office products from the list of apps acceptable for purchase by the state government. He’s got the back and forth, the in and out, the he-said/she-said of the whole deal, with careful considerations of the claims and counterclaims. It’s a must read if you care about open source and the future of Microsoft.

One important conclusion:

In fact, one important point that has so far gotten no attention in the coverage of the Massachusetts decision is that the door is actually still open for Microsoft’s format’s get back on the list. In a telephone interview, CIO Quinn made it clear that if Microsoft fixed its patent license to meet the state’s requirements, the state would reconsider the Office XML Reference Schema for inclusion in its standards. “We would support multiple formats as long as they’re open” said Quinn. “If Microsoft were to do that, I would expect that we would add it to the list.”

David thinks the exclusion of Microsoft is big big news that could have a cascading effect… [Tags: massachusetts microsoft OpenSource DavidBerlind]

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Anil Dash notices that judging from the Web 2.0 conference, half of the Web is missing.

Shelley, in the wonderfully titled post, “A sudden weight was felt in the room,” finds it “ironic…that it took a post by Anil Dash to push the issue of lack of diversity at O’Reilly conferences into the tech.memeorandum.com hot tech issues page.” [Tags: diversity gender web2 ShelleyPowers AnilDash]

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