Gates: If you don't want change, you don't want me.

The will of the people has been heard and the Democrats have been chosen to lead us out of the war on terror! …or perhaps in keeping with yesterday's pessimistic post, the Democrats have simply done a better job of framing the main questions of the day and the Republican incumbents have temporarily been psychologically rejected by the angry voters! No matter how you say it, there is reason for Dems to celebrate: Rumsfeld’s resignation. But alas, the Daily Kos crowd is moaning and groaning about his replacement, former CIA director Robert Gates, calling him the “most corrupt of retreads of past Republican administrations.”

The Daily Kos is wary of him because, according to this, “Owing to his senior status in the CIA, Gates was close to many figures who played significant roles in the Iran / contra affair and was in a position to have known of their activities.”

Hmm…“in a position to have known about their activities” is another way of saying “we don’t have any evidence of his involvement in anything.” So, before Gates is crucified because of what he may or may not have done 20 years ago, why not look at Gates in 2006? Luckily for us, this month’s issue of Texas Monthly magazine, for whom I intern, features Gates in a cover story entitled “Can this guy save the Aggies?” The article, written by Paul Burka, paints a picture of Gates that makes him seem like the best candidate Democrats could have hoped for from Bush.

Since 2004, Gates has been president of Texas A&M University, a place that is more wary of the changing nature of reality than even the Bush administration. This is because A&M, perhaps more so than any large public university in the country, is tied to its traditions. Any change in the makeup of the University—for instance, allowing women to enroll in the seventies, the name change of the Agricultural Department, and greater emphasis on recruiting minorities today—are seen by some Aggies as an attempt to diminish the Aggie tradition and spirit. Yet, when Gates came to A&M, he told the Board of Regents, “I am an agent of change…If you don’t want change, you don’t want me.”

And in fact he made a great deal of changes to A&M. Among them was a renewed emphasis on promoting diversity at the University. Although he rejected race as a factor in admissions, many minority professors have appreciated his efforts to recruit minorities by reducing ‘legacy-based’ admissions, opening recruitment centers in inner-cities, and starting scholarship programs for first generation students, such that 25% of recent classes has been comprised of such students. Gates also appointed the first ever female Dean of Texas A&M’s College of Agriculture, and began to dismantle the good old boy network that had maintained excess staff positions for years.

But does his out-of-the-box thinking as a University President translate to a similar approach in matters of defense? A few quotes from the article suggests that it does:

“Gates joined the CIA in 1966, during the Vietnam War…He opposed the war, as did most of his CIA friends, and even marched in protest of U.S. activity in Cambodia.”

“He also believed from the beginning that the Soviet Union could not sustain its vast military buildup and its foreign adventuring without risking economic collapse. In all of this, he was proved right. Gates occasionally allows himself an I-told-you-so, but he also owns up to his misjudgments.”

“Most Americans believed that Jimmy Carter was a weak president toward the Soviet Union whose emphasis on human rights was, as Gates describes the prevailing viewpoint, ‘naïve and counterproductive.’ Not Gates. By emphasizing human rights
violations, Carter ‘became the first president since Truman to directly challenge the legitimacy of the Soviet government in the eyes of its own people’”

So, according to this article, written well before Gates’ appointment and by a moderate and possibly left-of-center writer for Texas Monthly, describes Gates as an agent of change, an ex-anti-war protestor, an unconventional thinker who owns up to his errors, and an advocate of human rights. Sounds pretty good so far. If the guy can bring change to Texas A&M, then Democrats should let him try to do the same for Bush administration. The latter might even be an easier task (full disclosure: Hook 'em horns).

Newsflash: Democracy Not Perfect - Blame My Ancestors

Haven't posted in a while, but I figure what better time to get back on the horse than today because....It’s voting day, and all around the country people are going to the polls to exercise their god-given constitutionally-amended right to choose their leaders—to choose, based upon their intuition, their issue-based research, their conceptions of right and wrong, their critical and analytical thinking skills, their judgement of character, and any other tools granted to them by God and/or Evolution and supported for use in that great institution called the American Democracy…or to be more accurate, the American Republic.

I found out today that the very first Republic in the world was the ancient state of Vaishali, named after the Great King Vishal, in what is today Bihar state in India. In the words of wikipedia, “even before the advent of Buddhism and Jainism, Vaishali was a vibrant republican state; in fact, it was the first republic in the world, similar to those later found in Ancient Greece.”

A lot has changed since my namesake first established the idea of popular rule in the sixth century B.C. The idea of the Republic has on several occasions flourished, died, been resuscitated, exported, imported, imposed, exposed, and it has undergone a seemingly infinite number of transformations over the centuries. At least one famous historian has suggested in more recent times that it is part of the final and ultimate form of human government—the end of history.

Whenever these types of governments come to an occasional climax in the form of large-scale elections like the sort being held today, they become the subject of innumerous praise and optimistic paeans (see here, for example), one after another, glorifying the ability of such systems to fix what is wrong in the world and remove all of the ills that afflict society from the top-down. After the elections, those disappointed with the results can only go so far with their criticism, because after all, the results are ‘the will of the people’ and by extension they reflect the people’s best interests.

In the run up to the election, however, a very small group of persons in power and their financial supporters spend large amounts of money into scaring the population into better understanding what their will should be. This is done because those few understand that the phrase, ‘the will of the people,’ is so mutable and moldable that it rings hollow and is often up for sale to the highest bidders or the best manipulators.

A recent New York Times op-ed recaps a psychological study in which people were asked to evaluate two candidates, the first of whom is described as having very average characteristics, and the second of whom has some very good and other very bad characteristics. When people were asked to choose which candidate they would accept, they overwhelmingly chose the second candidate, keeping in mind his very good features. However, when people were instead asked which candidate they would reject, they also overwhelmingly chose the second candidate, perhaps bringing his very bad features to mind. So, then, which is the will of the people? The first or the second candidate? The answer doesn’t depend on the candidate, but on how the question is asked.

Politics is all about framing questions—Do you want to protect the institution of marriage? Do you support the Patriot Act?—and not at all about the issues. The side that scares people the most wins—or sometimes loses if the people get offended. Somewhere in there, often lost amidst the sound and the fury, are the best interests of the people. And this manipulation is even praised by many, such as those who believe that the ridiculously negative personal attack ads during this election cycle—at the expense of informational ads about important issues—are a "gloriously refreshing" affirmation of the vitality of American democracy. In fact, these attack ads just change the pyschological framing of the election from "who do you want to elect?" into "who do you not want to elect?" The answer to both of these questions, if the study is believed, can paradoxically be the same.

The American democracy / republic is not perfect. It sometimes seems like more of a game than a system designed to help people and improve government. The results of elections may less reflect the free will of the people than they do the depth of politicians’ pockets and the shrewdness of their campaigns. It is perhaps ironically and ominously symbolic that the world's first republic, my namesake’s kingdom of Vaishali, is now located in the modern-day state of Bihar, the most politically corrupt and poverty-ridden state in India. Nevertheless, one definition of a Republic is ‘a non-monarchy’, and I can say with the certainty of someone who has lived in Saudi Arabia that, in fact, a democratic republic is better than a monarchy.

Therefore, here’s to us not being a monarchy, the mid-term elections, a continued critical analysis of our democracy, and a psychological rejection of the Republican-controlled congress (if not a psychological acceptance of a Democrat-Controlled congress).

Writing about Iraq and Torture...

I’ve been trying to avoid posting any thoughts about the ongoing fiasco in Iraq – you know, the one in which the death count is thus far up to almost 3,000 Americans and 600,000+ Iraqi civilians and fighters (aside: the latter number was just released as part of a new study by public health researchers from Johns Hopkins and an Iraqi Medical School in Baghdad. As pointed out by the Village Voice, "That's more than twice the 290,000 humans that Saddam Hussain is said to have killed during his 25-year reign." Ugh.) – It can be hard to write about the war in a calm, rational, articulate manner without getting riled up. The war can be criticized from so many angles that it's difficult to sit down and focus on a single, blogworthy aspect of the war without veering off into tangential asides like the one above, and without becoming frustrated at one's own ineptitude at using the English language to write about such a delicate and complex topic.

Moreover, when people write about a particular injustice that has been committed during the war, they risk the probability that a majority of their readers will forget about it the very next day. A single, unnecessary massacre of civilians gets chalked up to the 'horrors of war', or just gets thrown into a file cabinet in people's brains entitled "war sucks." As a whole, that file cabinet is not forgotten, but the individual atrocities lose all significance, save but one or two that become representative of the file cabinet as a whole.

Abu Ghraib seems to be one of the few phrases that has, for many people, become representative of the war as a whole. At least for now, the name Lynndie England persists in our consciousness and is equated with everything that is wrong with the American (preemptive attack? liberation? invasion? occupation?) of Iraq. But how many of us still remember that American civilian contractors played an important role in the abuses of prisoners? How many of us ever read the details well enough to find out that a civil lawsuit is being carried out against CACI and Titan, two government-contracted corporations that are implicated, because of military reports, of horrific acts of torture against which the American government has attempted no criminal action.

Ali Eteraz is therefore correct to name this article about corporate torture, "The Forgotten Conspiracy." Here is how it starts:

In 2003, Haider Muhsin Saleh, was living in Dearborn Michigan. A former opponent of Saddam Hussein, he had once been imprisoned and tortured by Saddam's secret police in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Upon being released he had fled to Sweden and become a Swedish citizen. When the Hussein regime fell, Mr. Saleh heeded the United States' call for expatriates to return to and rebuild Iraq. He did so with his own funds. Upon his arrival in September of 2003 he was detained and sent to the same Abu Ghraib prison where he had been previously tortured by Saddam Hussein. Instead of getting a chance to rebuild his country he became prisoner #151138 and was subjected to "interrogation."

Mr. Saleh's genitals were roped to those of other prisoners; his penis stretched with a rope and beaten with a stick; his own semen poured on his head; his naked body poured cold water upon it in the dead of winter; his naked body shocked with an electric stick; his neck wrapped with a belt which allowed him to be dragged; his head beaten with a pistol and slammed against a wall; his anus probed; his body urinated upon. Yet this "interrogation" was different than the others. It was conducted not by soldiers but average American citizens, serving as contractors with major American corporations, CACI and Titan.

In the author's own personal blog, he interviews the lawyer who is bravely taking up the civil lawsuit against these contractors, at the risk of her being labeled a friend of the 'other-side'. I highly recommend reading the whole interview, but here's how it ends:

...I think that [the] rise in the use of mercenaries and this erosion in the distinction between government and non-government functionaries is a very troubling development.

Right now what they have done is that they have passed a law giving the contractors immunity from Iraqi law. The contractors are not immune from US law. However, if you have the current attorney-general that we have, it is unlikely that you will have the private parties that have engaged in the torture be prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Now I may be wrong on that. I hope I’m wrong on that and I hope that we actually see some prosecutions because criminal prosecutions are what is needed here. We are talking about criminal acts and they should be prosecuted criminally. Since they haven’t been so far, we have our law-suit going in which we allege a civil recourse — where we allege a series of criminal acts and racketeering — and we will certainly do our part to try to bring these culprits to justice. But it would certainly be appropriate for the Department of Justice to take an active role and criminally prosecute these people.

So, there you have it; yet another way in which to criticize the way in which the war is being run (putting it mildly and awkwardly). And, when considered along with my last post, another reason to aspire to be a lawyer fighting for the powerless against the big, bad, wolf-corporations that dump toxic sludge on innocent Africans and urinate on (purportedly) innocent Iraqis. Okay, maybe that's taking it too far and falling into the same us-versus-them mentality that cause such atrocities in the first place. But this is why I try to avoid such issues altogether.

Toxic Sludge and Law

Between the book that I'm currently finishing up (A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr), and this recent article in the New York Times entitled "Global Sludge Ends in Tragedy for Ivory Coast," I've become excited at the prospect of going to law school in New York, a center of International Human Rights law, and someday being able to fight against the big, bad wolf-corporations that kill children using toxic chemical sludge. Hyperbole? Not Quite:

"A Civil Action" is a true story about a couple of companies in Massachusetts that dumped chemical waste on their property, which contaminated the town water wells and ultimately caused several children to develop Leukemia and die at a young age. The familes affected were represented by a young lawyer who spent all of his firm's money and more on the case, "nearly losing everything--including his sanity" (back cover blurb), but who ultimately had his story chronicled in a book as well as a Hollywood movie, in which his character was played by John Travolta.

The Times article, dated October 2, about a "highly toxic cocktail of petrochemical waste and caustic soda" deposited in Abidjan, the capital city of the Ivory Coast, is framed as a sort of allegory in which the dark sludge represents all that is wrong with globalization:

It came from a Greek-owned tanker flying a Panamanian flag and leased by the London branch of a Swiss trading corporation whose fiscal headquarters are in the Netherlands. Safe disposal in Europe would have cost about $300,000, or perhaps twice that, counting the cost of delays. But because of decisions and actions made not only here but also in Europe, it was dumped on the doorstep of some of the world’s poorest people.

I haven't stepped foot in law school yet, but I'm guessing that this is a dream scenario for professors of International Law looking to teach their students about jurisdiction. Appallingly, the sludge has already been blamed for eight deaths and hundreds of people are still being treated every day for various health problems arising as a result of exposure to the sludge. The Dutch public prosecutor has opened a criminal investigation regarding the dumping, and my guess is that it will be a while before any party is held accountable for this, whether that party is the company that produced the sludge and authorized the dumping, the laboratory whose limited analysis on the sludge incorrectly showed little to no toxicity, or the waste management company in the Ivory Coast that offered to take on the waste disposal project, even though everyone knew they had no capabilities for doing so.

Hopefully, more will be done for the victims of this mess than that other big (perhaps far bigger) disaster in Bhopal, India, 22 years ago, when the families of the thousands who died as a result of Union Carbide's toxic gas leak were given an average award of only $2,200, and the site of the accident continues to be highly contaminated and disease-inducing, with no one taking responsibility for the clean up. The head of PR at Dow Co., which now owns Union Carbide, was quoted as saying "$500 is plenty good for an Indian," referring to the amount that many of those who need lifelong medical care received.

If $500 is plenty good for an Indian, I'm scared of what may be deemed plenty good for an African.

My Congressman

Many Americans, particularly younger ones, don't care to know the first thing about their Congressperson. There are lots of reasons not to care about one's congressional representative. Some in Texas feel that their district is so uncompetetive that their opinion and vote would make no difference in the next election. For many college students or people recently graduated from college, like myself, apathy towards a representative might stem from the fact that they may never be moving back to their hometown, and even if they did, they might be far more concerned with national or state-wide issues than with how their own unimportant suburban district is doing. Prior to meeting my Congressman, Ron Paul, I really only knew of two congresspeople in the Houston Area. One was Sheila Jackson-Lee, who for some reason is always engaged on national issues concerning Indian-Americans or American foreign relations with India and Pakistan. The other was Tom Delay, whose interestingly shaped district covers Sugarland in West Houston and magically curves around all the way to a town called Nassau Bay next to my own town on the southern side of Greater Houston. I found this out last year at Nassau Bay's fourth of July parade. I often go to the town, where some of my best friends live, to drink beer on the fourth of july and watch their small-town parade and small-town fireworks. During last year's Fourth of July celebration, I was surprised when one of the floats was a flashy red convertible with none other than Tom Delay standing in the back throwing out pieces of candy to the kids (i warned them to not eat any) and passing out little hand-held fans that said "I'm a Tom Delay Fan!" on them. This is true. I have the fan still.

However, I met a third Congressman from the Houston area this summer. His name is Ron Paul and he is the Republican Congressman from Texas's fourteenth district, which includes my hometown suburb, League City. He came to the grand opening of my dad's new clinic, handed out several copies of the U.S. Constitution with a special prologue that he authored, discussed some medical issues since he used to be a practicing doctor himself, and we all had a big photo-op at the end.

During his visit, while staff at the clinic urged him to support various initiatives regarding medical issues, I heard him make several cutting remarks to the tune of "Well, perhaps if we weren't spending so much abroad on wars and such, we'd be able to do things here." I remember thinking that, for a Republican, he seemed pretty agitated towards the Bush administration's foreign policy, and this made me like him. After he left, I took a glance at the constitution he gave me, and grew frightened by the prologue. I wish I still had a copy I could quote, but I don't. Basically, however, his introduction to the constitution had some incredibly harsh words for U.S. government in general and mentioned something about wanting to abolish several components of our government, including the I.R.S. I threw down the book before it bit me and immediately dismissed Paul as a crackpot worthy of being interviewed on Stephen Colbert's "Get to Know a District" segment.

Since then, however, I've read a bit more about him, and I've found out that, if nothing else, he is one of the most interesting and consistent people in Congress. He is a libertarian, which explains why he wants to use government to abolish government. In fact, he once won the Libertarian nomination to run for United States President and came in third after George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, albeit with 0.5% of the popular vote.

Besides wanting to get rid of the IRS, Paul also wants to do away with the FDA, the Federal Reserve (and go back to the gold standard), the Department of Education, the CIA, Drug Laws, and most any kind of government intervention. According to this article about him in the Washington Post that I came across, Ron Paul didn't want to give congressional gold medals to Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, or Rosa Parks, because that would cost the taxpayers the price of minting the gold. He suggested instead that house members contribute money from their own pocket to create those medals. He also voted against sending money to victims of Hurricane Katrina, saying:

Is bailing out people that chose to live on the coastline a proper function of the federal government?...Why do people in Arizona have to be robbed in order to support the people on the coast?

Wow! Those are some libertarian views, alright. In terms of foreign policy, he describes his views as 'non-interventionist', meaning that he not only opposes the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he also is against any kind of intervention anywhere, any time, for any reason. He is against giving any foreign aid, and he doesn't even like to issue national statements taking a 'side' in a foreign conflict, as he believes that can cause us to get involved later on, as evidenced in this speech against the Israel Resolution.

The Washington Post is critical of his harking back to a golden age of the days before Income Tax or Social Security prior to 1935, about which he said "Prices were low and the country was productive and families took care of themselves and churches built hospitals and there was no starvation." The Post quotes Michael Katz, a historian of poverty who pretty much blows those assertions out of the water, which isn't hard to do considering the Great Depression: "Where to begin with this one?...The stories just break your heart, the kind of suffering people endured..."

But, despite the fact that the Post is critical of him, and despite the fact that I don't like his libertarian ideas one bit (I think that some libertarians deal with their mistrust of the government in the wrong way - instead of attempting to improve it and make it more transparent and accountable, they seek to tear it down completely), I'm pretty impressed with just how consistent and true-to-his-values Paul remains at a time when everyone seems to be in one of only two camps.

Bollywood Dreams

The Charlotte Observor had a piece earlier this month on a Bollywood movie that was partly shot in North Carolina, and that holds a very special place in my heart (keep reading). The plot? Apparently it chronicles the ups and downs of a race car driver's career. I'm not sure if the makers of this movie got the idea from Talladega Nights, but both of the movies were partly shot at Rockingham Parkway in North Carolina and copying Hollywood does seem to be a common tactic in Bollywood. The article introduces the world of Bollywood to its North Carolinian readers by quoting the following graphic in Businessweek:

Many Indians, myself included, wouldn't be too surprised to see that Bollywood makes more movies and sells more tickets a year than Hollywood. However, this graphic, as well as the common refrain about the size of Bollywood, is apparently wrong. Bollywood refers to Hindi movies made in the Bombay film industry, the largest in India. However, the above-graphic refers to movies made in the entire Indian film industry, including Tollywood (Telegu language film industry in Andhra Pradesh) and Kollywood (Tamil Cinema). Bollywood, Tollywood, and Kollywood (for the record, I really hate these dumb names) each make about 150 and 200 films a year, and all of the Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu films together account for only 60% of films made in all of India, as suggested in this graphic. In his blog, Amardeep Singh points out this and other surprising facts that he gleaned from a recent book about the Indian film industry.

Back to "Don't Worry, Be Happy." The article in the Charlotte Observor also charmingly compares the eating styles of the American-born racing crews (fried chicken, baked beans) to the Indian cast and crew (spicy!) before making a brief political comment:

OK, by now you've realized a bit of irony about this movie project:
It is a case of "in-sourcing," bringing jobs and money from India to the Carolinas.

and then an erroneous one:

But more than anything, it might speak to the popularity of racing, worldwide.

I doubt it.

The article ends with a quote by an Indian-born North Carolinian film intern named Setu Raval who seems lovestruck by the movie's hero, Saif Ali Khan:

"I didn't believe he could really be here," says Raval, a filmmaking student at N.C. School of the Arts in Winston-Salem. "I just couldn't believe it. Not until I saw him in person. And then, there he was. So very, very handsome."

Anyway, the reason I'm writing about this movie is because it features not only veteran pin-up Rani Mukherjee and up-and-coming heart throb Saif Ali Khan, but also yours truly. While touring India a few months ago, myself and a friend were asked to be extras on a film that was supposed to be set in America whose working title was "Don't Worry, Be Happy". Actually, my white friend was asked to be an extra, and I was told that they already had more brown people than they knew what to do with. I went anyway and both of us were made to dance around on the balconies of fire escapes on a set that looked vaguely like a stereotype of 1980s Manhattan for about 12 hours while Rani and Saif shot a minute and a half of a music video. When this movie gets ready to break box office records, look for me at the end of a dance sequence, where I'll be visible directly behind and above Saif with my fist pointing towards the sky screaming "Yeah!!"

The Future Governor of Texas

Many Texans know that the Texas governor has limited powers compared to the governors of other states, partly because he or she has to share executive power with several other elected officials. However, the current governor, Rick Perry, put himself right in the middle of the Texas redistricting fiasco by calling special sessions of the legislature to push through the new congressional district map and vetoed more pieces of legislation in one session than any previous Texas governor. He also helped cut taxes by spending nothing on anything, making Texas one of the stingiest, if not the the stingiest state in the country. The governor before Rick Perry became President of the Country. I think, therefore, that this is a race worth paying attention to, even if you're not from Texas.

Media outlets have recently been making a big fuss over Kinky Friedman, an independent candidate whose facebook support group is entitled "He's Not Kinky, He's my Governor." I, like many other young people, became interested in Kinky's flaunting of the Red-Blue divide (he is for prayer in schools as well Gay Marriage--he says that Gay people have the right to be 'as miserable as the rest of us'). I joined Kinky's facebook group and read interviews about him and the 'issues' section of his website, kinkyfriedman.com. His appeal is immediately recognizable: a) he is not a politician, b) he is politically incorrect (very, very much so), c) he likes animals, d) he seems pretty intelligent (he was in Plan II honors at UT-Austin as an undergrad, he writes novels and had a column in Texas Monthly), e) he wants to make Willie Nelson, Texas legend and champion of Biodiesel Fuels, his energy czar--seriously, f) he has made raising teachers' salaries one of his top priorities.

I have a few concerns, however. First of all, in an interview with Ruminator Magazine he stated that he's a fan of Bush's foreign policy:

Well, actually, I agree with most of his political positions overseas, his foreign policy. On domestic issues, I’m more in line with the Democrats. I basically think he played a poor hand well after September 11. What he’s been doing in the Near East and in the Middle East, he’s handling that well, I think.

He likes what Bush has done overseas? That's just messed up. Second of all, his political incorrectness is kind out of out of control. I understand that this makes him popular. But might it also make him a kind of a nutjob? Judge for yourself. Here are a few quotes, not from jokes or books, but from interviews (or defended in interviews) after he stated he was running for governor:

If you don't love Jesus, go to hell
My immigration policy is 'Remember the Alamo'
'Negro' is a charming word.
[regarding Sexual Predators]: Throw them in prison and throw away the key. And make them listen to a Negro talking to himself.

Well no one's accusing him of being too PC, but some of that seems a little...intense. Regarding the immigration policy quote, he once advocated having five Mexican generals patrol the Mexican border by giving them each a trust fund and deducting 5,000 dollars for each Mexican that gets across. Creative yes, but seems kind of out there. He was serious. I think he's backed off of that approach now and his official immigration stance seems pretty in line with Bush's, and includes Amnesty for many illegal immigrants already in the country as well as a guest worker program. This policy is really different from the very tough stance he promised to take early on in the campaign, which brings me to another point: How are we supposed to know what Kinky is actually thinking? He says something crazy and then his campaign staff tones it down or changes it altogether for his official policy. I guess it's a sign he's learning the political ropes and getting caught up in the game.

Anyway, for those of you who think that all of this is moot because Kinky doesn't stand a chance, check out these latest polls:

Rick Perry (R): 34.8 %
Chris Bell (D): 23.1
Kinky Friedman: 22.7
Carole Keeton Strayhorn: 9.6

Considering that the non-Perry vote is split THREE ways, Neither Bell, the democrat from Houston, nor Kinky are doing too badly. And there's a lot of time left. The practical problem with Kinky taking down Perry right now is that many of the people who aren't on his side yet are actually against him winning. He's the kind of guy you either love or hate. Bell has an advantage because many of the people who aren't on his side just don't know who he is yet. Bell's voting record is really liberal...I bet democrats for Kinky are going to start looking at Bell more closely soon, and if that happens, a democrat could end up governing Texas this year. Methinks that would be even weirder than Kinky winning!

Perhaps not weirder than Chris Bell's creepy ad, however.