Length of the 2000 Florida recount crisis:

Five weeks.

Time from now until the Pennsylvania primary:

Seven weeks.

It’s going to be a long spring.

I wonder if the Pennsylvania Democratic Party can somehow move up its primary?

Have I ever mentioned that I have a crush on MSNBC’s Chuck Todd?

If it’s Tuesday, it must be primary day.

And so, as on seemingly countless Tuesday nights for the past two months, I’m going to be sitting in chorus rehearsal tonight anxiously wondering about the results, asking Matt to look them up on his Trio, then going home afterwards and switching on the TV before I do anything else.

By the way, if you’re wondering why so many states vote on Tuesdays, here’s why.

Weird. While exploring the New York Times archives, I found this 1993 piece by historian Michael Beschloss that attempts to predict the future from the fictional perspective of 2008. It was published three days before George H.W. Bush left the White House and attempts to examine his legacy. In the process, it shows us a creepy parallel universe that echoes across a dimensional rift…

Some excerpts:

[George Bush’s] defeat by Bill Clinton in 1992 ushered in a 16-year cycle of progressive activism. During an era dominated by two energetic Presidents — Bill Clinton and his successor, Al Gore — the stature of a right-of-center chief executive like George Bush, who recoiled from using the full powers of the Presidency, was bound to suffer.

After his term ended, Republican leaders instantly disowned him as an unwanted reminder of their flirtation with ideological moderation. At their 1996 convention in Salt Lake City, when Representative Robert Dornan of California was nominated for President, Mr. Bush was not invited onto the podium. Dornan and his running mate, Representative Newt Gingrich, rushed to the retirement homes of former Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan for endorsements but eschewed all invitations to be photographed with Mr. Bush.

After Noriega’s release from prison in 1998 and Saddam’s ouster by military coup in 1999, the two men held a joint news conference in Asuncion, Paraguay, during which they played tapes of private conversations with Mr. Bush. According to the tapes, then-Vice President Bush told General Noriega in 1985: “We love your commitment to democracy. Keep it up!” During a 1990 telephone call to Mr. Hussein, then-President Bush praised Iraq as “an island of stability in a troubled region.”

In 2002, for the first time in a half-century, Republicans seized control of both houses of Congress and quickly voted to strip the funds from numerous White House-sponsored programs, such as Clinton’s National Service Corps and Gore’s Global Warming Initiative (G.W.I.). This legislative drive drew the support of perennial Presidential candidate Ross Perot and nearly all of the other 38 billionaires who declared their candidacies for the White House in 2004.

President Gore appointed [Bush] to undertake special diplomatic missions to post-Communist Cuba, the semi-autonomous republic of Northern Moscow and to Monaco, where peace talks with France inspired by Mr. Bush were entering their 16th year.

When his Hispanic-American grandson, George P. Bush, was elected to the United States Senate from Florida in 2006 on an anti-secessionist ticket, Mr. Bush was guest of honor at the South Miami victory rally.

What a [parallel] world.

Hillary Clinton to appear on “The Daily Show” on Monday night.

(Matt wondered aloud what guest she’s bumping. He said probably some unknown history professor with a new book. I said no, it was probably Nita Lowey.)

(Sorry, too mean?)

Do the gays need a Martin Luther King?

I’ve wondered about this for a long time. It seems to me that there are so many lazy gays out there who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about gay rights.

Meanwhile, the major gay organizations, as Chris Crain points out:

are so focused inside the Beltway that gay-friendly ignorance is permitted to persist. When was the last time you saw one of our national groups mount an effective public demontration of the rights denied gay and lesbian Americans? The Millennium March on Washington, perhaps? That was April 2000…

I’ve been reading Parting the Waters, the first part of Taylor Branch’s history of the black civil rights movement. Where is our Birmingham? Where are the gay people willing to go to jail for what they believe?

Granted, it’s hard to see what laws we could break that could force us into jail. Showing up at the county clerk’s office for a marriage license doesn’t get you thrown in jail. Sit-ins at lunch counters in the ’60s could get you thrown in jail, because the segregation laws barred black people’s actual physical presence from lunch counters and libraries and so forth. There are no laws that bar gay people’s physical presence anywhere.

Without the threat of jail and violence, what can we do to further our rights?

The point of the nonviolence movement of Martin Luther King and his allies, transmitted to them through Gandhi, was to show that justice and love can prevail over injustice and hate. By practicing nonviolence, they let the segregationists become the aggressors and thereby created sympathy.

What can we do today?

One difference between blacks in the ’60s and gays today is that the two groups have had to fight against different perceptions. Blacks Americans had to fight against the 300-year-old stereotype that they were stupid and shiftless and scary. Gay Americans today have to fight against the stereotype that we’re rich and privileged dilettantes who don’t have to deal with the same problems that “real, hard-working Americans” face. We also have to fight against the stereotype that we’re all white.

The public doesn’t see that gay couples aren’t all rich enough to hire lawyers to attain the same rights that straight couples get for free. The public doesn’t see that gay people suffer from employment discrimination. That gay Americans can watch their non-American life partners get deported.

The movements are not the same. Even into the 1960s, black Americans were denied the right to register to vote — they weren’t even allowed to participate in the political process. At least we don’t have to face that problem.

But we do have to face other misperceptions. As an uninformed straight person wrote to me in an email a few months ago:

As a group, homosexuals are portrayed in a significantly more positive light in the media than any other group in our culture. Homosexuals have the highest degree of societal acceptance of any community in the nation.

We’re like the Jews, apparently. While blacks were hated because they were powerless, Jews used to be hated because we appeared to have too much power.

We’re so entertaining, we gay people, aren’t we? How nice to have a cool gay friend, as long as he remembers that he’s just a court jester and doesn’t deserve equal rights.

Will and Grace did so much to hurt us. Rich, white, privileged Will Truman and his funny minstrel friend Jack. We never saw any gay bashings or any gay couples striving for the right to marriage on that show. I don’t mean to criticize it too much; it was a sitcom, and most sitcoms aren’t meant to be anything more than stupid trifles. (All in the Family notwithstanding. Maybe we actually need a gay Norman Lear.)

But last week on The View, the women were discussing a children’s book, And Tango Makes Three, based on a true story about two male penguins who cared for a baby penguin in a zoo because it had no mother. Sherri Shepherd stated that she didn’t want to teach her young son about such things “right now.” As usual, she didn’t know how to articulate it beyond saying that this was her child and she didn’t want him to know about such things “right now.”

Less than a week later, Mario Cantone showed up as one of the guests. As usual, he did his queeny little minstrel show. (Nothing against Mario Cantone; he’s a funny guy.) Sherri Shepherd enjoyed it like everyone else, laughing along with the other women. I would have loved for Mario at some point to have turned to Sherri and asked her, out of the blue, why she wants to “protect” her child from learning about non-traditional families and, by extension, gay rights. I would have loved to see her sputter something nonsensical in response.

They love laughing at us as long as we don’t, you know, make them uncomfortable by fighting for our rights.

I have to run. More later.

Happy Leap Day.

I know it’s 2008, but I love how February 29, 2000, was an exception to an exception to an exception.

Rule: February has 28 days.

Except for years divisible by four, when February has 29 days.

Except for years divisible by 100, when February has 28 days.

Except for years divisible by 400, when February has 29 days.

I would have blogged about this on February 29, 2000, but I didn’t have a blog then.

Or know what a blog was.

Unlike some people.

Caught up in a post-Oscar reverie, I went searching on YouTube for some Chuck Workman films. Chuck Workman has put together some wonderful movie montages over the years. Here are two. I love this kind of stuff.

(1) 100 Years at the Movies (1994).

Here’s a list of all the clips featured in it.

(2) Precious Images (1986). This won the Oscar for Best Short Film.

Here’s a list of all clips featured in it (in chronological order, not in the order in which they appear in the film).

Matt and I have to find a new apartment by mid-May and it’s causing me agita.

Neither of us has actually had to look for an apartment in Manhattan before, so we’re both heading into the unknown here.

Should we use a broker? We were discussing this last night.

Pros: it would save us the stress of having to use Craigslist and compete with tons of other people for the same apartments.

Cons: it would be pricey and not necessarily more helpful. When I lived in Jersey City, I found my first apartment through a broker and my second apartment on my own through an ad. My second apartment was better, quieter, and cheaper and I had a saner landlord.

But the idea of using, say, Craigslist, and having to compete with other people for an apartment, really drives me nuts.

What should we do?

[Update: 3 1/2 hours later. Really? Nobody has anything to say?]

Andrew Sullivan is fun when he’s brutal:

Clinton is a terrible manager of people. Coming into a campaign she had been planning for, what, two decades, she was so not ready on Day One, or even Day 300. Her White House, if we can glean anything from the campaign, would be a secretive nest of well-fed yes-people, an uncontrollable egomaniac spouse able and willing to bigfoot anyone if he wants to, a phalanx of flunkies who cannot tell the boss when things are wrong, and a drizzle of dreary hacks like Mark Penn. Her only genuine skill is pivoting off the Limbaugh machine (which is now as played out as its enemies)….

How did they come this close to losing this? They had all the money, all the contacts, all the machine levers, the entire establishment, the biggest Democratic name in decades, and they’ve been forced into a humiliating death-match by a first-term black liberal with a funny name. It seems obvious to me that the Clintons blew this because they never for a second imagined they could. So they never planned to fight it. Once put in a fair contest, they turned out to be terrible campaigners, terrible politicians, bad managers, useless executives, wooden public speakers. If you’re a Democrat, that’s good to know, isn’t it? All that bullshit about Day One and experience? In retrospect: laughable.