Peter Krupa

I’m going to vote for Hillary. Can anyone talk me out of it?

I really would like to know the reasons to vote against her, because I haven’t heard any good ones yet. This is a person with tons of experience, with a moderate outlook on culture war crap, with a stellar international reputation, a pretty decent plan to overhaul the health care system, and no dark secrets lurking in her past that we don’t already know about it.

Hillary is a known quantity, and I like that. Her husband is more or less beloved all over the world, which would be a nice asset at this droopy moment in the history of U.S. diplomacy. Hillary is certainly a completely hollow person ideologically, lacking that famous “core of beliefs,” but coming on the heals of a president who knew exactly what he believed - intelligence reports, international opinion, and voters be damned - I wouldn’t mind trying something different.

The arguments against Hillary - well, I probably haven’t heard any of them in any comprehensive version. I can anticipate some of them though. The war vote thing will be one, but I’m not so sure that’s as important as what she plans to do now.

And I’m not very interested in debating whether our health care system needs reform. That point, at least, is beyond debate, and the question now is whether Hillary’s proposal is better or worse than the others.

So, what’s the score? Can you talk me down? In any case, whatever your demographic persuasion, you have to admit that a presidential election between Rudy Guiliani and Hillary Clinton would just be stone-dead fun as hell.

King of Spain to Hugo Chavez at the Americas Summit last week: “Why don’t you shut up?”

Story here. Video here.

Although to be perfectly honest I’m still not sure why Spain has a king, and why he’s at political summits rather than moldering away in some castle, counting his gold.

A taxi driver turned to me yesterday and said, “You guys don’t even elect your president, do you?” I blustered a little and gave him a five minute lecture on the history of representative democracy and the idea behind the electoral college.

He nodded thoughtfully and kept driving, and it was clear I had nothing. It’s rather depressing when a taxi driver in a tiny Latin American country so deftly pokes a hole in the U.S. system of government.

It’s even clearer to me now that I live outside the United States that the Electoral College system is a ridiculous anachronism, for any number of reasons, the clearest one in my case being that I don’t reside in any of the 50 states, so how the hell am I supposed to vote for a president?

In fact, I think I’m registered to vote in both Illinois and New York, neither of which are swing states, and therefore in neither of which my vote matters.

The Electoral College simply amplifies the greatest shortcoming of democracy (which is that a 51-percent majority gets to run things) by discouraging a presidential candidate from campaigning for more than 51 percent in any particular area, because 51 percent wins the pot.

I know that in the last few years the loudest voices calling for change in the Electoral College were people with a political agenda (i.e. - wounded Gore voters and California Republicans).

Still. They have a point.

I’m not sure what it was that made blogging in New York City so much easier. Perhaps my state of semi-employment. More than that, there’s the problem of topic. From New York City, you can post about all kinds of things in the universe because you are at the center of it (anyway, that’s what they told me).

From Costa Rica, however, people post about idiotic things, like how wonderful and kind are the Ticos in this cute little paradise of a palm-tree sprinkled wonderland, or, alternately, how they were violently assaulted/cheated/covered in black soot from a 40-year-old school bus on the Paseo Colon.

Is this making any sense? No, of course not, because you’re not here, you’ve never been here, and you probably think Costa Rica is an island. So how could I blog about fun stuff like free trade agreements and roads with potholes the size of a Hyundai when most of you still think I’m in San Juan?

Aside from the lack of interest/knowledge on the part of my audience (audience?), writing almost anything about Costa Rica would be a violation of the first rule of blogging: Don’t post about work. Since I’m a reporter on the politics/real estate/business/tourism/China/economy/trade beat, that pretty much means I can’t post about anything interesting that happens in this country because of all that “objectivity” nonsense impressed upon those of my profession.

I am, therefore, frozen in the headlights of my own destiny, loathe to post about the whimsical thing that happened to me on the way to work, yet grown weary of throwing up the perfunctory link to the New York Times with a line or two of sarcastic analysis.

Here we approach a crisis. A crisis of purpose. But I will figure something out.

No Country For Old Men:

At their best, and for that matter at their less than best, Joel and Ethan Coen, who share writing and directing credit here, combine virtuosic dexterity with mischievous high spirits, as if they were playing Franz Liszt’s most treacherous compositions on dueling banjos. Sometimes their appetite for pastiche overwhelms their more sober storytelling instincts, so it is something of a relief to find nothing especially showy or gimmicky in “No Country.” In the Coen canon it belongs with “Blood Simple,” “Miller’s Crossing” and “Fargo” as a densely woven crime story made more effective by a certain controlled stylistic perversity. 

I’ve had a fascination with trend stories ever since reading this essay by Daniel Radosh. Like campaign-trail stories and not-in-my-backyard stories and young-lives-cut-short stories, they have their narrative, their rules of procedure.

This story in the New York Times this morning about cellular phone blockers is a textbook example. First of all, you have several unsupported generalizations in the nut ‘graph to establish the trend. For example, there is a “small but growing band of rebels” using cell phone blockers, and you have commuters on public transportation using them “increasingly.”

Then, you throw in a quote from a rather bizarre expert that the reporter dug up in some university basement:

“If anything characterizes the 21st century, it’s our inability to restrain ourselves for the benefit of other people,” said James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University. “The cellphone talker thinks his rights go above that of people around him, and the jammer thinks his are the more important rights.”

Great! Thanks!

Then you pile on at least three anecdotal examples and presto! Trend sweeping America!

The final characteristic of a classic trend story is that the numbers cited in the article itself usually contradict the thesis that there is a trend happening, and such is the case with this story as well:

“The technology is not new, but overseas exporters of jammers say demand is rising and they are sending hundreds of them a month into the United States.”

Wow! Hundreds? I mean, wait, only hundreds? And what do you mean it’s not new? Doesn’t that mean it’s not, you know, news?

The really curious thing to me about trend stories is why editors and reporters feel the need to fabricate trends out of perfectly interesting bits of information. Part of it, I suppose, is the medium.

Reporters are dying to publish the equivalent of cocktail gossip, the “did-you-hear-about-X?” buzz, but it doesn’t fit the mission statements on their $40,000 Columbia School of Journalism Master’s Degrees. So they cobble those interesting bits and anecdotes into trend stories that vaguely resemble “news,” though they are generally not.

But aren’t the tidbits of information and anecdotes interesting enough on their own without the slathering of artificial context painted on by professionals?