Dispatches from the Flying M

Disenfranchised?

An interesting note on the Clinton campaign's argument that the decision today by the DNC's Rules Committee to seat half the Florida and Michigan delegations at the Denver convention "disenfranchises" the voters of those states, courtesy of Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo.

Disenfranchisement is an ugly word, particularly for a party (and a state) that is still smarting from the disenfranchisement of its voters in 2000.  When the Supreme Court decided honestly cast votes couldn't be counted, it was the most undemocratic move most of us have ever seen.

But the current Florida/Michigan debate isn't the same thing at all.  The "primaries" in those states were held without the blessing of the party, and with the understanding by the candidates--including Clinton--that those states would not be counted.  The states went ahead with their contests anyway, knowing they didn't count.  The voters also knew they didn't count, so many people didn't bother coming out to vote.  Why bother?  It had already been established that they wouldn't count.

The attempt to change the rules after the fact, to make contests that were not meant to count into contests that would count, thereby disenfranchises all those potential voters who--following the party's rules--didn't bother voting in meaningless contests.  Had they known the rules would be changed after the fact, many more would have turned out (there's a link in the TPM piece to a study backing this up).  Their decision not to vote was legitimate, given what was known at the time--the Clinton's campaign to then seat delegates chosen by only a portion of the probable voters is what's not legitimate.

The DNC threw her a bone today, awarding her many more delegates than she should be getting, considering she had agreed with the idea that those contests would not count, and only changed her mind after she fell behind in delegates. If she indeed takes this fight to Denver, as she has threatened, she will only make herself look petty.  It's not a noble cause, it's self-interest trying to masquerade as a noble cause, and that's worse than transparent self-interest, because it belittles genuinely noble causes.

River Runs Red cover

I saw that the cover for my new supernatural thriller River Runs Red (Penguin/Jove, October) was starting to show up at various places online--but it's the early "solicitation" cover, and it has Brian Keene's generous quote from the front of Missing White Girl on it instead of the correct David Morrell blurb, so I thought I'd post the right version here. The book earned some lovely blurbs from other writers who I'm honored to be linked with in print, and which I'll share at another time. RRR is the second book in the loosely linked "border trilogy" that began with MWG and ends next year with Cold Black Hearts.  You might have to click on the picture to enlarge it enough to read...

Growing fast

The fastest-growing things I've ever watched regularly are the soaptree yuccas around our house.  One day there's nothing, then there's the beginning of a stalk, then there's a towering stalk, in virtually no time.

We spotted two stalks growing from a plant that has never had stalks before, and I decided to keep track of them.  Here are two pictures the same plant.  The first was taken on May 14, the second today, May 26.

For reference, the tips of the highest leaves are about waist high on me.  The stalks, today, are taller than me by several inches.  That means they've grown nearly three feet in 12 days.  And they're still going.

Missing Link

I got home yesterday afternoon from a short visit to extreme southwestern New Mexico-speciflcally Hidalgo County, which is large and very sparsely populated, and which is the main setting for Cold Black Hearts, the horror novel that follows River Runs Red and Missing White Girl in my border trilogy.

Since most of you haven't read River Runs Red yet, you may or may not know that it takes place in El Paso, TX, and the west Texas border country.  Missing White Girl (which you can still pick up, if you haven't already) takes place in Southeast Arizona's border country, in the Douglas-Bisbee area.  Cold Black Hearts is meant to bridge them, setting-wise.

Which made it fun yesterday to come across this sign--literally connecting El Paso and Bisbee via a railroad built by the Phelps Dodge mining company, the town that built most of Bisbee and Douglas.

The sacrificial McCain

In the shower this morning, where I do my best thinking, I decided that McCain's real service to the Republican Party this year is as a sacrificial goat.

While McCain has the best chance of winning of any of the various candidates who ran in the primary--because the mainstream media likes him enough to keep repeating the "McCain Maverick" myth, no matter how many times it's disproved or how many times he flip-flops on those few issues where he did disagree with the Republican majority--that chance is somewhere between slim and none, in a year in which the war in Iraq is dragging on with no end in sight, the recession is looming larger and larger, the housing crisis continues to spread, the cost of gas keeps rising and the billionaires who run the oil companies keep getting richer.

But because of his age, McCain isn't going to be a significant player in the party for much longer.  The other guys, Romney, Huckabee, maybe even Rudy, have years to go, and a humiliating defeat for one of them could damage them down the line.  Nobody in the party establishment cares how humiliated McCain is because this is his last hurrah.  When it's all over and his campaign goes down in flames, they can say, "Well, we never liked that guy anyway."  And should he accidentally pull off a victory--which none of them expect--they're pleasantly surprised, but they know they'll only have to deal with him for a single term.

I guess his biggest problem now will be finding a running mate who doesn't mind having his future tied to a losing candidacy (or who, like John Edwards, has a plan to restore his own credibility after that happens).  Right now, I'm wondering if it'll be Joe Lieberman.

Don't buy Motorola phones

By the way...many of the people I saw in San Diego last weekend heard about my cell phone woes. My phone decided, the day before leaving town (which is when I use my cell phone most, since it's not usable here on the ranch) to stop having an on-screen display.  It still dials, apparently, but it's hard to use when you can't see what you're doing--not to mention the fact that I think there are numbers in its memory that I don't have written down anyplace.

Anyway, the display died on May 8.

I just now checked on the warranty, and it expired May 4. 

You'd almost think Motorola had planned it that way, wouldn't you?  Especially since, on the same web page that told me the warranty is expired, there's a link titled "Time for a new phone?"

Yeah, I guess it is.   But it won't be from Motorola.

Full disclosure

From the beginning, this blog has functioned as my personal conversation with whoever out there bothers to stop by and take part--a conversation about books, movies, the media, writing, politics, ranch life, and whatever other aspects of our world catch my attention.  I've tried to be scrupulously honest with you about what's going on with me.

In that spirit, I have to report that, although I've been a supporter of Barack Obama's candidacy for the Democratic nomination ever since John Edwards dropped out of the race, as of yesterday, I have a professional, financial interest (not a huge interest, but an interest nonetheless) in Obama's winning the nomination.  It's pretty much a given at this point, anyway, and that interest does not extend to him winning the White House (although I'd like to see that, too).  But I didn't want anyone complaining, whenever the announcement of what that interest is can be made, that I've been plugging Obama because I hoped to profit from his win.   That's simply not the case.  At any rate, the nomination will probably be locked up by June 3, so it's only for a short while that I will be both promoting Obama's candidacy and expecting to profit from same (and no, should you wonder, it's not that I've made a bet--I might, but who'd be sucker enough to take Hillary at this point?).

But speaking of Obama, I have to add my voice to the general outcry over the sheer slimy repulsiveness of George Bush's use of an address to Israel's Knesset on the occasion of that country's 60th anniversary to compare Obama to Nazi appeasers.  Bush's exact quote, in case you've missed it, was: "Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

It's long been customary that American presidents would not engage in partisan politics on foreign soil--that the presidency is bigger than that, even if the man is not.  Bush has long since demonstrated his utter lack of shame, so I suppose we shouldn't be surprised at this shameless breach of etiquette.

But he's also wrong on the facts.  Perhaps it explains much that he doesn't know the difference between appeasement and diplomacy--between realistic engagement and the tough-guy fantasies underlying the moral and physical cowardice that have defined his life.  That lack of understanding is probably responsible for his administration making the worst foreign policy decisions in American history--decisions leading directly to a strengthened (although no threat to America yet) Iran and a more powerful and dangerous fundamentalist Islamic world.  His brand of foreign policy has made us less safe, and still he pretends that it's Obama who's a danger.  And that's not even taking into account the disastrous impact of his domestic policy.  We've never had a president who has done so much damage to the nation in so many ways.  Impeachment isn't good enough for him. He should be shunned, stripped of his citizenship, and forced to make his own way in a world where his family's wealth and connections don't protect him.

Bringing America back--if it can be done at all--will be a big job for whoever follows Bush.  McCain can't do it--he has already jumped on the appeasement train (if in fact he's not the engineer, and Bush not just repeating talking points provided for him by McCain's campaign), and he is too close to Bush in the fundamentals to reverse the decline of the past 8 years.  President Obama will have his hands full.  John Edwards as Attorney General could help--just imagine how hard experienced trial lawyer Edwards and former professor of constitutional law Obama would work to turn around the attacks Bush & co. have made on our constitution, the degradation of the Justice Department, and the system of checks and balances that give equal weight to the three branches of government. (Should President-elect Obama solicit my advice, which seems highly unlikely, I'll also suggest the nomination of Bruce Springsteen to a cabinet-level position as Secretary of the Arts.)

There's a point in time common to freelancers--when you know there's a check coming in the mail, but each day you check the mailbox and it's not quite there yet, and you really, really need it.  That's how I feel about America right now.  There's change on the wind, but we still have to put up with eight months of Bush before it arrives.

Witch Season 2

Today the Barnes & Noble exclusive edition of Witch Season 2, the specially bound edition that contains the two teen horror novels Winter and Spring, goes on sale at B&Ns everywhere and online.

It's 584 pages of witchy, creepy goodness for a low, low $6.95.  To learn more about the Bram Stoker-award nominated Witch Season series, you can go here.

And so you know what the cover looks like in the stores, here it is.

It ain't over till it's over...

...but last night, it sure looked over.

Hillary Clinton's "victory" speech in Indiana (it turned out to be the narrowest of wins, but when she was giving the speech she didn't know how it was going to end) sounded more like a concession speech, with lip service to the idea that she was going on to win the nomination and the White House, but that tossed out without confidence or enthusiasm.  Mostly, it was one of those "it's been a long struggle, and I appreciate your support, and I'll campaign for the other guy" speeches candidates give right before they officially drop out.

Early reports were that Hillary had canceled all her appearances for today, but at the last minute she added one back in, in West Virginia, which votes next Tuesday.  Apparently she also recently loaned her campaign another $6.4 million--hence her appeal for contributions at her website.  Rumor is that she'll hit Obama up to pay off her campaign's debts as part of a final deal.

At this point it looks like she'll stay in it through May 20, the day she'll win Kentucky and Obama will win Oregon, giving them each a solid victory to close the campaign on.  Then Obama will have a brief victory lap in Montana, South Dakota, and Puerto Rico, and the party can get busy healing the rifts this campaign has caused.  If the Clintons hope to salvage anything of their once-beloved status with a lot of Democrats, especially black Democrats, they had better campaign like fiends for Obama.

It's been a long, long road.  My preferred candidate got out of it a long time ago, but both Clinton and Obama have been sounding like Edwards on the stump lately, really addressing populist issues, talking about the squeezed middle class and the poor.  His impact on the campaign has been profound, and the ultimate winner will have to put some of his ideas into the mix at the White House.

On the other side of the coin, the Arizona Republic has studied McCain's voting record long and hard and puts to bed the idea that he's some kind of maverick.  In fact, he's slightly more conservative than his fellow Arizona Republican Jon Kyl--when he bothers showing up to vote at all.  Independents and moderate Democrats need to understand before they swing to McCain that he is not one of them.  More than anything else, he's just a continuation of the right wing leadership that has failed this country so dismally for the past 7 years.

Saturday at Mysterious Galaxy

These days most of the news about independent bookstores seems to be bad. Stores close, forced out of business by the difficulties of competing with giant national chains, discounters, and online merchants.  Troubles in the economy hit independent businesses harder than the better capitalized giants.

But not all the news is bad.  Mysterious Galaxy turns 15 years old this month--15 years of providing books of mystery, science fiction, fantasy, horror and more to a local audience in San Diego and a wider audience around the world.  When we started the store, it was at the tail end of the first Bush recession, before the boom times of the later Clinton years, and it was a gamble.  Through the years of good economy and bad, through times of terrible national tragedy and righteous rejoicing, the store has churned along, thanks to a staff that knows their genres inside and out and an unwillingness to ever settle with doing things the way they've always been done when their might be a new approach out there that can put more books into the hands of more happy readers.

Saturday, May 10, we're celebrating that milestone with a full day of author appearances and other festivities.  You can read the details of the day at the Mysterious Galaxy website. I'm kicking off the day's signing slate at 10:30 am, signing Supernatural: Witch's Canyon, and of course Missing White Girl and whatever else comes up.  I haven't decided yet if I'll read a little of River Runs Red, or just talk about it and Cold Black Hearts and the rest of the books on the way.

I'll be followed by Savannah Russe, Susan Hubbard, Charlaine Harris, Robert Tanenbaum, Jeri Smith-Ready, Samantha Somersby, and Timothy Zahn.  A little something for everyone. There will also be cake, prizes, and other fun.

If you can make it to the bash, do so--you won't regret it.  If not, you can still order signed books via the store's website or toll-free number.   With the help of our dedicated readers and fans, these first 15 years will just be the beginning of a much longer story.