Ok, I was wrong yet again. It what may be considered a pretty stunning upset, Jean Quan has taken the lead from Don Perata to be Oakland's next mayor. The ranked-choice voting system seems to have allocated a fair number of votes from my choice, Rebecca Kaplan, to Quan instead of Perata. I myself don't know the methodology behind how these votes are counted but it looks like there was some sort of round robin allocation spanning 10 rounds (confused yet?). Here are the results from the County of Alameda's website.

The tabulations have not yet been finalized so we'll have to wait another day or so before the registrar makes the official announcement. Still, it's a small victory given that I didn't think much of Quan (the lesser of two evils) but feel she would be more willing to work with people like Kaplan versus Perata who would cater to his cronies and be just an overall ineffective executor of the duties of mayor. He's good at playing the political game but Oakland has real problems that need to be addressed and not just someone looking for another item on their resume.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, I was watching Face the Nation and saw Colin Powell's interview re: how people like Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh think he should leave the Republican Party. First off, let me say that I'm not a Republican (not a Democrat, either). My voting record is best described as moderate with certain left leanings. However, I believe in multiple points of views in our government as a checks and balances against one set ideology. I think our government is best run when there are ideas coming from all areas, all people.
 
Back to Mr. Powell. He's probably one of the more sensible Republicans I've heard from in a long time. He's direct, articulate, and above all, logical. Add that to his sterling resume and you've got a person who could lead the Republican party to bigger and better things. To hear that people like Cheney and Limbaugh are against a person like this makes it clear why the Republican party is fast becoming the old man screaming at kids from the porch. I especially like how he didn't roll-over for Limbaugh and actually challenged him in a respectful and classy way. If Powell decides to run for President in 2012, it'll be a tough decision for me...

I'm having lunch at my local Vietnamese joint and I'm overhearing a political discussion (in Vietnamese) regarding McCain and Obama. One guy is saying that he's voting for Obama because he thinks Republicans have messed up the last 8 years and he wants a Democrat to be in office. The other guy basically agrees with him that the nation has been screwed up but said he would vote for McCain because he didn't "trust" a black person.

I have to say I'm pretty ashamed that a Vietnamese person would rather vote for a candidate who publicly used a racist slur to describe Vietnamese people than someone who was black. How fuckin' stupid are you? If you won't vote for Obama because you're a registered Republican or you think he'll raise your taxes or you don't think he has enough foreign policy experience, that's cool. Those are valid reasons. But to base your decision on someone based on race is just ignorant.

To be fair, McCain did apologize and tried to justify the use of the slur by saying it only applied to his captors. But as I've said to many a person before, once you have reached the level of hatred for a group of people to actual use a racial slur to describe them, it's not easy to distinguish individuals. You can't say, "I hate [insert racial slur], but not all [ethnic group] people. Just those who wronged me." Why not just say, "I hate the people who wronged me"?

And so I don't sound hypocritical, I'm not voting for McCain because of the racial slur. I don't agree with his tax policy, "my way or else" foreign policy, and his poor choice in running mate.