Burnin’

Fall Saturdays in South Carolina are known for big hits and rough play. But not in January. January is more genteel. Except for yesterday. Yesterday, as the votes were counted in the Presidential primary, all the sporting analogies came out.

John O’Connor at The State got in on the action with a racing allusion.

Barack Obama left the Democratic field in his red clay dust Saturday, easily winning South Carolina’s first-in-the-South Democratic presidential primary.

Second place finisher, Hillary Clinton jetted off to Nashville, wanting to put South Carolina behind her, quick like. Despite his third place finish in the state he won four years ago, John Edwards pledged to continue to fight for those with no health insurance, the poor and those worried about their jobs.

“Your voice will be heard in America and it will be heard in this campaign,” Edwards said.

Obama supporters, such as former Gov. Jim Hodges, said the margin of victory bodes well for later states. Obama’s win, he said, cannot be written off as Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 S.C. caucus victories were. Sadly, for Bill Clinton, he did suggest just that yesterday afternoon, mid-route.

“It was a first round knockout,” Hodges said. “(Jackson) didn’t win like this. Nobody’s won like this.”

BONUS CLICK: Obama’s victory speech from Columbia, SC.

Tomorrow is the South Carolina Democrat primary. I have the opportunity, along with many other citizens, to vote for the Palmetto State’s native son, John Edwards. His daddy worked in the mill. You might have heard.

It certainly does not appear that he’ll be elected President, but Edwards would make a great VP or Attorney General, in my opinion. So, a vote for Edwards tomorrow is a vote to keep him in the race, where he can win delegates and wield some bargaining power as the field heads to the nominating convention.

I like Obama too, but I don’t buy that he’s a real change agent. I see him as more of a player, a careerist, willing to say and do what needs to be done to get ahead. In other words, he’s like the Clintons.

Of course, I’d prefer to cast my ballot for Cleveland’s radical dreamer, Dennis Kucinich, but sadly he withdrew from the race the other day.

A political reporter showed up for work yesterday. His name is Glen Johnson and he works for Associated Press. While covering the Mitt Romney for President campaign, Johnson tripped up the candidate, not with a line of questioning, but with a direct challenge as to the truth in a Romney claim.

Romney said he didn’t have any Washington lobbyists running his campaign (the presumption being that others do). Johnson begged to differ. “That is not true. Ron Kaufman is a lobbyist,” said Johnson. The fact that he did so publicly inside a Staples store in Columbia, South Carolina with cameras rolling, confounded the man who would be President. And it angered his travelling press secretary, Eric Ferhnstrom, who scolded Johnson repeatedly, saying, “Don’t get argumentative with the candidate.”

Ferhnstrom’s response is maddening and outrageous. What would Mencken say?

How about, don’t lie to the press unless you want everyone to know about it.

I’ve never been one to favor the incompetence argument when it comes to our present day administration. I’ve always figured they’re doing exactly what they want, and that it must take considerable skill to do that in Washington, even if it’s not readily apparent to the layman. But a good documentary film can jar a stance from the arms of its carrier. No End In Sight by Charles Ferguson is such a film.

After getting his Ph.D. in political science from M.I.T., Ferguson conducted postdoctoral research at MIT while also consulting to the White House, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the Department of Defense, and several U.S. and European high technology firms.

In 1994, Ferguson founded Vermeer Technologies, one of the earliest Internet software companies, with Randy Forgaard. Vermeer created the first visual Web site development tool, FrontPage™.  In early 1996, Ferguson sold Vermeer to Microsoft, which integrated FrontPage into Microsoft Office. After selling Vermeer, Ferguson returned to research and writing. He was a visiting scholar and/or lecturer for several years at MIT and Berkeley, and for three years was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC.

In other words, this guy knows his shit and so do the long line of ultimate insiders who detail for Ferguson the many mistakes made in Iraq by the Bush League. It’s scary stuff.

The Library of Congress has a new Flickr page, where they plan to share some 3000 images with no known copyright restrictions.

If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity.

In other words, the Library is seeking to enhance its metadata and is turning to the wisdom of the crowd for help.

The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flickr members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images.

Flickr hopes this pilot can be used as a model that other cultural institutions will pick up, thereby increasing the sharing and redistribution of the myriad collections held by cultural heritage institutions all over the world.

Chris Corrigan walks some pretty literary streets–the kind that don’t exist in strip malls.

A few months ago as I was walking in Government Street in Victoria I met a woman standing beneath a tree outside Munro’s Books. The tree had small pieces of paper attached to them and when I looked closer I saw that they were poems, hanging on a “poet tree.” The poet turned out to be Yvonne Blomer and she asked me if she could read me a poem. When I said, with delight, “of course!” she asked whether I preferred any particular subject. I replied that I wished her to read me a poem about the territory of the open heart. She looked at me for a second and then reached into a file folder and pulled out this one:

To watch over the vineyards

O carrion crow, pulpy skull of scarecrow

going soft in your black bill,

in this fetish-orange field lies worship:

the sweep of glossed plumage over glistening

membrane; lies the sweet blood of purple skinned grape

cut on your sharp edged tomia,

shimmering there; sun-light on wet earth.

You too sweet to ripe; you black in the shadows, calling when you’re calling - -

the herds fly in dust gone crow, gone scare,

gone trill in clicks and shouts of krrrkrrr.

It seems to me that poetry belongs outside, in the town square or on the street, like this. It’s a spoken form that doesn’t always translate well from the page, nor make the kind of impact it might otherwise.

Even the tears are calculated.