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.

A disaster affecting millions upon millions of people is bad enough, but the federal response...I've been trying to figure out what to say, yet every day the outrage is compounded.

Here's a few choice quotes, and perhaps the first glimmerings of making sense of it all. Other folks will chronocle each additional bit of horrible news as it arrives; I'm aiming, as usual, for perspective.

(sent to adbusters; they never responded)

As my girlfriend and I were driving around San Francisco today, we noticed all the closed stores and empty parking lots, and imagined people sitting happily with their families at home, and had an interesting idea.

Imagine a picture of a mall, with a sign saying "closed for the holidays"...maybe you can see the parking lots empty. The caption would be "don't you wish every day was like Christmas?"