I am in San Diego for a film festival. I have screenings here Tues. and Wed. Thursday is a big screening up in San Francisco. Check it out: http://www.9500liberty.com/..screening-sf.html

I just logged into MySpace for the first time in a while. I guess most folks are catching me on Facebook these days, as my message box was filled with spam. My twitter account is like a blog, sort of, but it takes way less time. twitter.com/EricByler

At the different festival stops, people ask me, "When are you going to go back to directing narrative features?" I say, "When I feel like our country is back on the right track again." One person smiled and said, "Then I have two reasons to hope that will be soon."

Our website is www.9500Liberty.com

Wow, there has been a lot of buzz about the question of whether Asian American citizens should have to change their names to be "easier for Americans to deal with," and, whether or not minorities should have equal protection with regard to the right to vote.

I say no for the first, yes for the second.  Click here to read an article that explains it all in a way that is fair to both sides.

And here is a video of the exchange between Rep. Betty Brown and Ramy Ko. Ramy is a friend of mine who did a great job responding to Rep. Brown, and has a really hard name to deal with.



PS:  Annabel and I are both more busy on Twitter and Facebook these days than on MySpace or our Through Our Lens blog on the AsianWeek site.

http://twitter.com/ericbyler

http://twitter.com/annabelpark

We are finishing up a documentary called "9500 Liberty" and looking forward to making narrative films again after some of our political goals are achieved, including comprehensive immigration reform.  I have been thinking a lot about marriage equality, as many Americans have been due to recent events.

Dan Choi is an Iraq veteran, an Arabic linguist, an honored patriot, and a brave American. He is speaking out, at great personal risk, to bring attention to the injustice of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

We have lost thousands of good soldiers because of this law, and thousands more are forced to live as second class citizens.


The law is not only an injustice to our soldiers, but also a risk to
our national security. Many of the 12,500 soldiers we have lost under
this law were linguists, and many of these were Arabic linguists.

It was because of a shortage of linguists, for instance, that we did not
translate an intercepted Al-Qaeda transmission about the September 11th
attacks until September 12th.

If you missed Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's dreadful performance on Meet the Press yesterday, click here to see a man with a promising future throw it all away for cheap political points.

Time Magazine's Joe Klein said it best, from both an economic policy and political perspective.

But to truly appreciate how foolish Jindal made himself look on Sunday, you need to watch the subsequent interview with Florida Governor Charlie Crist rejecting Jindal's petty partisanship.



Crist supported John McCain in the election, but says in "take 2" of his interview, "When the campaign's over, it's over."  He also praised Obama's first weeks in office, and said he hopes he succeeds. Jindal has another agenda. He is siding with the Rush Limbaugh wing (the extremist wing) of the Republican Party. If they howl and whine about Obama's efforts to rebuild the economy, they can say "I told you so" if their hopes come true and America falls deeper into recession. This is Jindal's path to the White House in 2012, or so he thinks. But how much pain is he willing to inflict on the people of Louisiana in order to get his chance?



NOTE: Jindal's performance in his Republican Response speech on Tuesday Feb. 24th, 2009 will sadly overshadow his performance on Meet the Press two days prior. Disappointed is not the word any longer. I'm embarrassed for him.

It's clear that Barack Obama has captured the spirit of civic engagement that awakened in millions of Americans, aided by netroots techonology, and propted by the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina, two of many disasters that have resulted from 8 years of partisan politics without effective governance. But it may be that the most important changes are taking place within the Republican Party.

That is why I enjoy reading columns by conservative Republican authors like David Broder, who are telling the story of the transformation of the Republican party from the inside out.

Anyone interested in American government should read this.

Words could not describe, so here is a video:



But this article in the Washington Post explains what a long journey it has been in Virginia to overcome Republican dominance that has existed ever since Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" of playing to white resentment by blaming Democrats for the Civil Rights movement. The article focuses on the more recent past, of which Annabel and I have been a part.

After reading this article in today's Washington Post, I've been thinking about how the collapse of the Republican Party directly corresponds to its abandonment of any pretension of reaching out to communities of color. But which came first?

The article in the Washington Post focuses on Colorado, where one of the nation's most notorious anti-immigrant politicians is a Congressman (former Republican Presidential candidate Tom Tancredo). In my research on the immigration battle from 2007 (on which my upcoming film is based), I found that it was electoral dread and desperation that led Republicans all over the nation to experiment with the politics of fear and resentment that fuel the anti-immigrant movement. We also saw it on Republican news programs and Republican talk radio. I think it's safe to say it backfired.

CNN reported yesterday that 70 percent of people of color in Florida are voting for Obama/Biden. Nationally, African American support is in the 90 percent range, and among Hispanics it is 66 to 70 percent. Asian American polls depend on the region, but I'm proud to say that in areas of the country where Asian Americans are empowered and informed, Obama/Biden is the preferred ticket by a 2 to 1 margin similar to Latinos (only with more undecideds).

My analysis of this is that Sarah Palin's hateful speeches and the hateful reactions from her followers have reminded people of color across the nation how ugly and how dangerous racism can be. I think a similar repulsion is reflected in the movement of moderates and independents toward Obama/Biden in recent weeks.

In contrast, you have Barack Obama, who's mixed ancestry and immigrant father say to all people of color that, if you look at America as a whole (as opposed to the factions of the Republican party) there is no longer a privilege or an advantage to being Caucasian, no, not necessarily. Obama doesn't have to say that in his speeches. We know this to be true because he is winning.

So that's my introduction to this video demonstrating a strong collaboration between Latino and Asian American artists, including myself. It's a brand new English Language version of "Si Se Puede Cambiar" (With Obama, We Can Change).

The videos and writing below are my best pitch to get Americans, especially Asian Pacific Americans, to volunteer for Obama/Biden this weekend. Click here to volunteer through your local campaign office (or just look up the address and show up!). Click here to learn about a canvassing effort in Las Vegas with groups driving in from Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco.



Annabel and I have been volunteering three or four days a week for the Obama/Biden campaign in Northern Virginia, and will do the same down south in Charlottesville (home of Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia) this weekend. With only a few days left before election day, duties as a volunteer are as rewarding as they are fun. Barack Obama's vaunted get-out-the-vote effort has already narrowed the field down to people who are probably supporting Barack Obama, so as you go door to door, you'll be unlikely to be confronted with hateful idiots who still think Obama is "an Arab" (not that there is anything wrong with being an Arab of course). Your job as a volunteer is to make it more likely that people who already support Obama/Biden will make time to go out and vote.

Last weekend, Annabel and I visited the home of a 78-year-old woman who had immigrated to the U.S. from Afghanistan. She said she very much wanted to vote but was too old to leave the house. We helped her fill out a vote-by-mail application and explained to her that she will be able to vote after all. She was very happy about this, and it made us happy to know we'd given her the opportunity to participate in a historic election, and made a small contribution to the expansion of the American electorate.

Yesterday, I knocked doors in a forest neighborhood in Annandale, VA, where I met 8 very enthusiastic Obama supporters and only one guy who said "I'm the complete opposite of what you're looking for." In particular I'm happy about talking to a 22-year-old man named Jason who intended to take advantage of early voting, but had planned to go on a day when early voting is not available in Virginia (Monday, the day before the election). Thanks to my visit, he'll be making plans to go today, Saturday, or on election day.

Over the past two years, I have seen the American electorate expand by leaps and bounds to include immigrants and minorities and many others who had previously been left out of the process. Early on in this journey, Barack Obama has come to symbolize this national transformation, but it really is, as he will tell you, much bigger than just one person, even the future President of the United States. This entire movement was made possible by our great democracy and the idea of government for the people, by the people. Various measures have been taken to keep minorities from having a say in how this government should function, and the result has been disastrous, an electorate homogeneous enough to be blinded by fears and prejudices that cause them to repeatedly vote against their own interest, and against the interest of the nation. Asian Pacific Americans can and are playing a pivotal role in a seed change, where the American electorate is becoming too diverse to allow a fear or hate-based political strategy to turn large blocks of voters against any particular minority (gays, Latinos, Blacks, Muslims, Asians, the poor, etc.). With a diverse electorate, the only movements that can unite the country are based on values that we share across ethnic and religious barriers, across sexual orientation and cultural barriers -- in short, we will build a national consensus based on hope instead of fear. Different groups fear different things, but we all hope for the same things: equality, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That is the direction we can take America if all of us participate.

So go vote, of course, go vote. But voting is only one of the many ways that you can participate in your democracy. By volunteering, you can help others who are intimidated or discouraged from voting, you can show fellow Americans how to become part of the process, and help them gain a sense of ownership and responsiblity for our government and how it is practiced. Each person we bring into the process during this election will be an invaluable contributor to our democracy in the future (I'll expand on this in my first post after the election), all the more so because they forever remember that they participated in the historic election of 2008 -- and you will have made that possible. So go do it!

PS: I like the video above because it shows a great diversity of Asian Pacific Americans volunteering for Obama/Biden (I shot most of the footage but did not participate in editing). We are about to release a new English language version of the video below, which now has 363,686 views on our United For Obama channel alone. It still chokes me up, right when we see Ken Leung's cameo at the end:

If future historians ever wish to find a window into the American political zeitgeist prior to the 2008 election, they should refer to the op-ed page of the October 28th, 2008 Washington Post, which features yet another prominent Republican (this time a Republican dynasty former U.S. Senator) and a highly respected Independent woman explaining why they are voting for Barack Obama and not for John McCain. Today's op-ed page, which I savored over coffee and pancakes this morning, also features two superbly written deconstructions of the McCain/Palin campaign, one of which unmasks the plot to unleash upon America the "Palin mystique."

I recommend reading all four of these editorials. But in Palin's Love Boats, Richard Cohen unleashes the most devastatingly revealing words so far written or spoken about the Conservative intellectual elite who, despite all the evidence, continue to advocate for Sarah Palin.

"Palin is a down-the-line rightie, so her inexperience, her lack of interest in foreign affairs, her numbing provincialism and her gifts for fabrication...do not trouble her ideological handlers. Let her get into office. They will govern."

In Campaign on Empty, one of my personal favorite columnists, Eugene Robinson describes the fatal misjudgment of the McCain campaign:

"In choosing a running mate, McCain made an absolute mockery of his "country first" slogan and instead put politics above all other considerations. It suffices to note that the Anchorage Daily News -- the biggest newspaper in Palin's state -- endorsed Obama, saying that Palin was being stretched "beyond her range" and that she clearly is not ready to be "one 72-year-old heartbeat from the leadership of the free world."

"It's hard to imagine that a McCain presidency could possibly be as scattered, irresponsible, uninspiring and intellectually bankrupt as the McCain campaign. It's even harder to imagine that Americans, at this crucial juncture, will take that risk."