After I unsubscribed from moveon's mailing list a couple days ago, their form asked for my reasons. Here's how I responded.

Do you remember when moveon started? I certainly do. It was to ask Congress to stop spending all of their time talking about President Clinton's sex life. We (for I signed on early) wanted them to regain some perspective, and move on.

Today you sent me this "emergency petition" to reject the nomination of Samuel Alito -- a nomination which was announced fewer than 12 hours ago. As you yourselves said in the message, "the battle lines are already clear." It'll be a long, protracted battle, where almost everyone has already made up their minds and won't budge. So what, exactly, will be accomplished by engaging in gross hyperbole this early?

Conservative commentators already use moveon to insult Democrats by association: "you and your moveon cronies' crazy ideas," etcetera. Are you actively TRYING to not be taken seriously?

After a few days, though, I realized what they were trying to accomplish.

Hooray for absentee voting; I'm done already.

Last year, I was kinda surprised (and touched) by how many people said that they followed my voter guide. This time, I agree with most of Speak Out California's voter guide and have been pointing people in their direction -- but I'll devote a few sentences to why I agree below, and also explain why prop 80 feels wrong to me.

You'll notice that my rationale for the first few is more about gut feel than research. To my mind, that's a testament to how obvious many of these initiatives seem to be this time around -- and for none of these did it seem that preserving the status quo would be worse than the risk of changing things via initiative, where our elected representatives' ability to fix any mistakes would be severely limited.

Mark Hosler from Negativland was speaking here at Yahoo! today, and I come away inspired. I think there's one quote that sums it up for me; he said, regarding copyright, "...we go on creating art as if the world IS the way we want it to be."

And it got me thinking...that's where the best art seems to come from, from a sense that the results will speak for themselves regardless of whether they "make sense" to a more conventional view of the world. This is the art that leads -- perhaps in spite of itself -- towards evolution.