Spirits in the Night

On Election Night 2004, I was watching thousands of electronic ballots being run through a machine in Wisconsin Rapids after midnight when the Word came. On a tiny 20th-century monitor in the elections office, they had a primitive MSNBC electoral map on the screen, and every five minutes someone would hit the refresh icon. One time we did it that late night, my heart sank to my shoes -- Ohio turned red.

Last night, I was driving home from my voter protection assignment (more on that experience in my next post) and called my boy to let him know I was on the way. We were discussing logistics for the rest of our night when I got the Word again -- "Dad, they just called Ohio for Obama!"

Well, that was that. What was red was now blue. What was bad was now good. Ready or not, Change was here.

We went to a friend's house in time to revel in the moments to come with friends and my brother. We playfully argued about channel selection and volume. Where do we want to watch them call it when California polls closed at 10? Fox always tried to be first, said someone. No way, I said -- I'll take my memorable moments without Brit Hume, if you don't mind. I suggested we check CBS to see if they might bring back Cronkite for this. ABC? Get George Will and Cokie Roberts out of here. PBS? I'd rather not sleep through it, thanks very much.

As if by magic, whoever had the remote hit CNN at just the right moment. And there it was, blazing across the screen in High Definition: Barack Obama Elected President of the United States.

Although anyone paying attention could see this coming since they called Pennsylvania at 7, if not for the past month, it was still hard to believe. For once, the candidate matched the moment and the people recognized it. The ugliness that has characterized Republican campaigns since 1988 didn't work this time. The 24/7 free advertising for the Republicans on right-wing mainstream radio met its match in Obama's enormous grass roots support in the form of millions of small contributors, resulting in saturation advertising. As the storms behind the wake of the Bush Disasters battered the nation's economy and psyche, Obama characteristically kept his cool and McCain characteristically lost his. And, if you needed one more excuse to step into the future, there was the ridiculous Sarah Palin, whose cynical selection sealed the Obama deal for many serious people and exposed the unserious as the shills they are.

We watched the giant crowd in Grant Park, a mere 90 miles away, and wished we were there. Then a local station showed the celebration at the downtown Hyatt. Off we went, just Ken and I, to grab our piece of shared history.

The ballroom was packed and Obama was already speaking as we wound our way in, ending up next to the riser with the bank of cameras at the back of the room. The crowd responded as if Obama could hear us, with shouts and applause and cheers. His speech seemed to flow with our rhythms, feeding off our energy. Among other things, Obama is a great writer, but he really got me towards the end:

This is our moment. This is our time - to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth - that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we cant, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes We Can.

At that moment, the emotion of the long day at the polls and the joyful night got to me, and tears streamed down my cheeks. Ken knew this was coming and hugged me. We joined in spontaneous multi-cultural line-dancing with hundreds of others, hugged strangers and each other.

Walking back to the car, a crowd of Marquette students greeted us with high-fives on Wisconsin Avenue. We honked at everyone we saw on the way home, shouting and hearing shouts. We celebrated the end of a damaged past and the beginning of a promising future.

The Warm Winds of Change

I caught the rush hour this evening at the Shorewood Pick & Save on Oakland Avenue. At 5:30, in the strange early darkness of the first workday after daylight savings time, on a spectacularly warm, breezy November night, the entire community seemed to descend at once on the supermarket, clogging the aisles and overwhelming the checkout lines with the needs and wants of their everyday grocery lives.

Maybe I was just projecting my own sense of joy and relief, but it seemed that diverse group, brought together by the accident of their own shopping, was unusually upbeat and positive, as if they were all gathering provisions to watch and celebrate the elections returns tomorrow night. From the young men and women up from UWM; to the men and women in business suits, picking up something on the way home; to the Russian immigrants; to the kids sitting in the shopping carts – there was a palpable feeling in the air. And it was a good one.

It was the kind of feeling you get at the end of something bad and the beginning of something new – maybe even we didn’t know how hungry we were for Change. After eight years of the Bush Disaster – of war and profiteering, of greed and scandal, of incompetence and arrogance, of secrecy for them and no privacy for you – the passage of time and the 22nd Amendment put an end to all that. The McCain campaign was a weak imitation of the win-at-all-costs Bush steamroller that bullied its way into the White House in 2000 and managed to hang on by smearing a war hero in 2004. The thumping of McCain is a rejection of the cynical politics of personal destruction that worked too well for the Republicans and did the country so much harm in the first half of the ‘00s. The only better result would have been to let Bush run again and take this deserved beating himself.

We all seemed to be quietly celebrating today. Tomorrow, I’m guessing by about 10 p.m., the official pronouncements will be made. Then, we will celebrate loudly and party late.

LMAO

I pay attention to politics for a lot of reasons. Primarily, I’m interested in the advancement of progressive ideas and the defeat of Bush-era Republicans and everything they have come to represent. But, other than simple civic-mindedness, there are reasons to watch the quadrennial drama that is our national election process other than the constant parsing of positions and strategy. Not the least of these is entertainment.

Barack Obama’s 30 minute infomercial this week was one kind of satisfying political entertainment. It was a marvel of effective message delivery. From the beautifully photographed video of amber waves of grain and real people facing real problems to the live remarks by the candidate before yet another throng of supporters in Florida, it was a remarkably powerful presentation.

It also helps that Obama himself is a great communicator in ways that the transparent hand-puppet Ronald Reagan could only dream of. He had not only his total command of the medium and the message on his side; he also has the great benefit of totally on right side of every issue and – ultimately and very soon – of history.

But my favorite form of entertainment has always been comedy. And, for that, the Republicans in this election cycle have proven the funniest cast of characters to ever disgrace the national stage.

In the primary season, our sides split at the antics of hapless and fatally-flawed Rudy Giuliani; cartoonish robo-candidate with the magic underpants, Mitt Romney; and crazy uncle Ron Paul. Mike Huckabee actually had a genuine sense of humor and got off some decent lines, when he wasn’t off on some quack religious tangent.

Alas, the last candidate standing was the most boring – John McCain. McCain was somewhat amusing himself before he took the nomination. But, ever since then, he has locked himself into a hideous straightjacket, stuffing his modest personal charm so far down his throat he can barely talk. It seemed we were going to be subjected to another tightly-scripted, highly-disciplined Republican campaign, with all the entertainment value of a horror movie. When they are on their game, every day is Halloween for the Republicans. Scary is all they can do.

But that was before McCain pulled the Sarah Palin stunt. Ever since then, the campaign has been a laugh a minute. From the campaign hiding her from the press to her hilarious cluelessness in a couple of innocuous interviews, Palin was the gift that kept on giving. In the meantime, McCain himself melted down in public, careening like a car with no brakes at the height of the financial crisis; pacing around the stage, smirking and rolling his eyes during the debates; and throwing forty years of honor and hard work down the toilet of his own doomed campaign.

Now, the week before an electoral thrashing that was preordained years ago, the Republicans are at each other's throats. This is an amazing development after the eight years of the tightly-controlled Bush years, when the message discipline of Karl Rove extended from the White House, through Congress, and all the way through the talk-radio echo chamber. Now, the "party", if that’s what is still is, and even the McCain campaign itself has divided into pro- and anti-Palin camps. As Tom Waits sang: "Everyone’s looking for someone to blame". Watching the circular finger-pointing in a room where everyone is guilty is comedy at its finest.

Some close to McCain are calling Palin a "diva" and a "whack job". She has gone "rouge", Sarah-being-Sarah, and the campaign be damned, say those running an already damned campaign that didn’t need her help to get there. Meanwhile, Palin herself is supposedly already designing snow-machine paths for the Rose Garden in 2012, declaring herself, against all appearances, as a permanently national presence (this, at the same time 59% of those polled find her unqualified).

My favorite example of the coming Republican fratricide are comments made by Jim Nuzzo, described as "a White House aide to the first President Bush". Nuzzo reportedly "dismissed Mrs Palin's critics as ‘cocktail party conservatives’ who ‘give aid and comfort to the enemy’...There's going to be a bloodbath. A lot of people are going to be excommunicated. David Brooks and David Frum and Peggy Noonan are dead people in the Republican Party. The litmus test will be: where did you stand on Palin?" Now that’s funny. I can’t wait to see the nut-right try to nominate Palin in 2012. If they succeed, it will be the end of Republican party legitimacy.

I do think Nuzzo has one good point, but not the way he intended. "The litmus test will be: where did you stand on Palin?" This is an excellent question for those who might pretend to present reasonable commentary after the election. Nobody who is serious about national policy can possibly support the cynical nomination of such an unqualified nobody. If they did, they are simply Republican flacks, willing to say anything to defend the indefensible. Their judgement is thus extremely poor, especially if they knew better (and most did). It's like listening to Bill Kristol about the invasion of Iraq. Why would you give any credence to someone who has proven themselves so wrong about so much?

I think we all know who is going to have the last laugh in this election. And we do plan to enjoy it.

On Being a Democrat

I like a lot of things about being a Democrat.

I like being right about the war; right about health care; right about the environment; right about maintaining a social safety net. I like the fact that Democrats don’t have to lie about what they really think and what their goals really are. We don’t hide behind phony constructs designed to conceal our true motives and intentions. I like the fact that we spend most of our time just trying to establish the truth; believing in science and in objective study; identifying problems and working honest solutions.

Sure, there are many reasons to like being a Democrat. But I love being a Democrat most because we believe in democracy.

Democracy should not be controversial. Regardless of the differences we have on issues and our frequent disdain for politicians who distort the issues and are politically and personally repulsive, at the end of the day, the votes are cast and the people decide. All the chatter, all the ads, all the polls are just so much blather, albeit often expertly informed. Ultimately, one man or woman has one vote out of thousands in a local community; millions in a state; a hundred million nationwide.

But there are those who don’t want to leave Election Day democracy to the whims of random, uncontrollable voters. And they are all Republicans.

I was thinking about this during the spectacular celebration of democracy called the Obama Voter Protection training on Saturday at a union hall in Milwaukee. All morning, myself and a couple hundred other lawyers were schooled on Wisconsin election law. On November 4th, we will fan out across the state as election observers with only one charge – to do our best to make sure every person eligible to vote who shows up at a polling place is allowed to do so, and to make sure their vote will be counted.

We were not instructed to protect only people we thought were Democratic voters. We were certainly not told to interfere in anyway with perceived Republican voters. In fact, we never discussed identifying anybody as anything. If someone appears to be an eligible Wisconsin voter – a citizen, 18 or older, who resides in the state – and is not precluded from voting because of felony supervision or some other legal impediment, they should be allowed to vote. It is very much the Wisconsin way, and we are to act as a resource to fulfill that promise.

I was in the Kerry Voter Protection operation in ‘04. I ended up going way up to Crandon, where the campaign had done some organizing in the Native American community. I spent the whole day in a small room with poll workers and a constant flow of voters. Late in the day, I protected the vote of a young woman who had no ID, but her residence was corroborated by a young man who knew she lived there and who could establish himself as an eligible voter through his own proof of residency. The well-meaning poll workers were going to make her do a provisional ballot. I gently asked them to review the law that allowed one voter to vouch for another, which, eventually, they did and the vote was counted. For all I knew, the woman could have been voting for Bush, but that was not the point. She was eligible, should have been allowed to vote and she did. It was the highlight of that very long and ultimately disappointing (to say the least) day.

For cynical, tactical reasons – because they know they would lose most fair elections – Republicans want to put roadblocks in the path of those who would dare to exercise the franchise of their citizenship. They want to require people to show a photo ID at the polls. They want to eliminate same-day registration in Wisconsin. They want to put police officers and other intimidating authority figures in polling places. They lie about voter fraud when none exists. They smear organizations with bipartisan support like ACORN who would dare to register the working-class and poor for mistakes made by over-anxious summer workers.

What does it say about a political party that is so afraid of eligible voters? You know what it says, and so do they. The difference is that they don’t care what you think about it. They believe only in achieving power by any means necessary. The outrage of Florida 2000 taught Republicans nationwide that they could get away with anything, right up to and including rigging voting machines or dumping them in the nearest river, if that's what it takes. With voter suppression at the front end and recount shut-downs in the back end, the Republicans have no shame. It puts the lie to all their phony flag-waving and red-white-and-blue posturing. They don't believe in American democracy. They believe only in power for themselves.

Democrats stand behind the honest vote in good times and bad. For us, Election Day is not just another opportunity for suppression tactics and manipulation; it is a celebration. That’s why I love being a Democrat.

Comments Now Moderated

I tried to avoid this, but some jerk who keeps posting offensive crap has forced me to moderate my comments. Now, I have to read your comment before I will post it for everyone else to read. I will try to do it quickly and I will allow comments from everyone that disagrees with me. I will not allow personal bullshit aimed at me or anyone else.

It is sad that I have to do this, but he knows who he is. Freedom's just another word for the opportunity to be an incredible asshole. As far as I can tell, only one twisted creep abused that privilege. Because of this, the World Wide Web is just a touch less random and posting comments is a little less instantaneous. All because of one stupid jerk. And I hope/You're happy now...

McCain’s Last Chance

....if he chooses to take it.

My fellow Americans:

I am appearing today to discuss some serious changes I am making, effective immediately, and for the last ten days of my campaign for president. I appreciate Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing radio shows allowing this time for free advertising, as they have throughout the campaign, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I mean, come on – I have to spend whatever money we have left in our doomed effort to turn Pennsylvania red. What do you expect me to do, have a press conference?

Anyway, first things first. I have replaced Sarah Palin on the ticket with Mitt Romney. Yeah, I know, it’s late and such a move is considered political suicide, but, you know what?...she’s a joke. We got her a one-way ticket back to Alaska and put her on the plane this morning, and I’ve never felt more relieved. Her selection was the biggest mistake of my political career. Say what you want about the issues or whatever – serious people who care about this country and otherwise wanted to support me simply could not get over the fact that I chose someone so obviously dim and unqualified. I’m deeply sorry for putting the nation through that.

The thing is, we knew well before the convention that we were screwed. We didn’t have any chance in the world of winning this race as Republicans with Bush having screwed so many things up so much and with the party itself being so devoid of a clue. We thought we had to throw a Hail Mary pass to change the dynamic of the race and wake up our lethargic base. My former campaign staff – yes, they are all gone, too – told me some stuff about her and I signed off on it even before they put me on the phone with her. After finding out about her Troopergate scandal, I started to wonder. Then, every time she opened her mouth, I thought, you know, what the heck is going on here? I sat there and grinned and pretended she was alright, but she wasn’t. She’s outta here.

So, now Mitt Romney is my running mate (yes, Palin is on all the ballots – we’ll get the 2000 Florida legal team together and fix that later, if we have to). And, yeah, I know Romney is an insufferable dick – really, you don’t know the half of it. But, with the weak talent pool we have in the GOP, he’s the best we can do, believe it or not. Who else is there – Giuliani? Give me a break. Besides, Romney has been waiting by the phone for this very call for the last two months, poor guy. I mean, at least he has a history of being able to work with Democrats when he has to -- and we'll have to. As for everything else, he’s more than pliable. He’s so hot for national attention and adulation, he’ll do anything I say or I’ll have the Secret Service steal his magic underpants.

I am also announcing today that I will not run for reelection if I win this time. In other words, I will be a one-term president. That’s what I was always thinking, anyway. With my age (I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the trail has been brutal!) and the mess we’ll have to clean up, I’ll be more effective if we can just pick up the pieces and work with the Democrats in Congress to get this nation back on track. I’ll be a caretaker president, without much of a political party to keep happy and only the good of the country to be concerned about. Make no mistake – I will sign a lot of the bills that make it through Congress; Democratic bills that make sense for the nation. You want maverick? I’ll give you a damn maverick in the White House, if you give me that chance.

My friends, I lost my way back in April when I won the Republican nomination, signed up with a Karl Rove disciple and took that long journey to the dark side of my soul. In the process, I lost many friends, my self-respect and my hard-earned honor. When Colin Powell made his eloquent endorsement of my opponent this past weekend, it broke my heart, not because of our friendship, but because he was right. Looking back at the absurd things I have asked you to swallow in this campaign – Sarah Palin, the hysterical attempt to cancel the first debate, our disgraceful smearing of Senator Obama with William Ayers and wild claims of socialism – I might not have voted for that guy, either. I can only hope that, as I try to recover a measure of my dignity, I can also recover my status as a serious person in Washington, a place where great things can and must happen in the next several years.

Senator Barack Obama is an extraordinary talent and has the potential to be a transformational figure in American history. Regardless of my smirking, pacing and eye-rolling in the debates, I have been honored to share the stage with him during this campaign. Frankly, I was thinking of just bagging the whole thing and asking the American people to elect him by affirmation, just to give him a running start at the dire problems we face at all levels. But I do think I would be a moderately better president in some areas, such as national security, so I figured I’d at least give people a choice.

But, make no mistake, my friends: if I happen to pull this off, the first person I will consult about the getting the nation out of this mess will be Barack Obama. Unlike my campaign, which has had no plan for anything and just spent five months trying to tear down an honorable opponent, Senator Obama actually has a broad, well-thought-out plan to rebuild the economy and get this country going again. I will work with him as closely as he will with me, even if it is only working with him from his position as senator. And, despite my disgraceful and unwarranted attacks on his character and motives, I hope he will bring me in if he wins, and allows me to take part in that historic moment.

My friends, I know that I’ve just announced some fairly dramatic, if not historic, developments in my campaign. I wouldn’t blame you if you thought this speech is just another stunt in a campaign that has lurched from one head-slapping moment to another. Actually, you wouldn’t be that far wrong. But these are changes I felt I had to make. I would rather lose while trying to claw my way back to respectability than take the increasingly remote chance of winning with an ugly, divisive message and a grossly unqualified vice president.

Thank you, and God bless America.

Liddy and McCain

In its increasingly desperate attempt to prevent the landslide that is about to come down on their tiny heads, the McCain campaign continues to plume the alleged depths of Barack Obama’s past associations. Although McCain himself and the ridiculous Sarah Palin have dropped the topic from their stump speech (Palin hilariously substituting tributes to whatever "pro-American" part of the country she happens to be visiting), Obama’s mild and long-severed acquaintance with education activist Bill Ayers in Chicago continues to be, as Obama rightly pointed out in his third victorious debate performance, the "centerpiece" of the McCain campaign.

In a suitably ironic use of dark resources, McCain has hired the same firm that the Bushies used to slander him in 2000 to send out millions of robo-calls to voters, warning of the Ayers connection and the unknown dangers thereof. Since recent polls show that such negative messages only injure McCain, it is hard to figure out what they hope to accomplish by this. Besdies, automated phone calls don’t have nearly the impact they did back at the turn of the millennium. People are much more sophisticated about unsolicited phone calls coming in – from just not answering to hanging up the moment they figure out that the conversation is, by nature, one-sided. Heck, I do it with people I'm agreeing with.

But, at least it looks like they're doing something in their lost cause. Perhaps they are trying to take the edge off of the angry mobs who were threatening to grab their torches and pitchforks and take over the campaign just last week. The last time that happened, local radio clown J.T. Harris shamefully "begged" McCain to take it to his African-American brother, and thus began his mercifully brief stint as a national laughing stock and local embarrassment. If you haven’t seen the pitiful scene he made on CNN early this week – pulling off his earpiece and lurching off-screen when he was mildly challenged by an actually thoughtful black conservative – you owe it to yourself to watch how lame and vacant Harris really is. Besides, times are tough – you need a good laugh.

The Ayers talking-points have served only to hurt John McCain. The Obama campaign has been very kind by not dragging up much of McCain’s bad buddy choices through the years, all of which were much more intimate, involved and corrupting. His close friendship with S&L criminal Charles Keating – who provided McCain with free airplanes and vacations, not to mention $112,000 in political contributions – is only part of the story. It took David Letterman, of all people, to confront McCain about his continuing relationship with unrepentant Watergate criminal G. Gordon Liddy.

In many ways, Liddy was worse than any of the Watergate actors – except maybe Richard Nixon himself. It was Liddy that came up with the plot to wire the DNC, as well as other bright ideas such as burglarizing the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist (done) and kidnaping anti-war protesters and shipping them to Mexico (not done – drat! Even Nixon wimped out on some stuff). In other words, Liddy was an unapologetic actor in the biggest threat to our Constitution in our nation’s history.

Since he got released after five years of his twenty year sentence by the too-kind Jimmy Carter, Liddy has been the poster boy for unrepentant thugs, from Ollie North to Karl Rove. After the Branch Dividians set fire to their compound and killed their children at Waco in 1994, the charming Liddy suggested that "if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes to disarm you and they are bearing arms, resist them with arms. Go for a head shot; they're going to be wearing bulletproof vests. ... Kill the sons of bitches."

"He paid his debt, he went to prison, he paid his debt," said McCain on Letterman, which is only one-fourth true as far as the prison is concerned and not at all true regarding his debt to society. People who subvert the Constitution and try to come up with creative and violent ways to serve a criminal president have a bit more of a "debt" to pay than making things worse by bragging about what he got away with. Liddy was a pioneer in the hyper-macho "I'm glad I broke the law" right-wing punk ethic.

G. Gordon Liddy did far more to threaten the very fabric of our government than Bill Ayers ever did. At least Ayers tried to make amends by becoming a positive person in the Chicago educational community. Libby continues to be proudly criminal and unconstructive, who will continue trading on his idiocy as long as ignorant people buy his books, listen to his quack radio show and enlist his services (for Sarah Palin in Alaska, no less). It reflects on McCain that he continues to associate with such people, but, hey -- he's a Republican. If you run in those circles, punks like Liddy is about what you get.

Burning Down the House

Civil rights icon and Democratic congressman John Lewis called out John McCain on Saturday for setting the tone and allowing his campaign rallies to descend into despicable hate-fests. "Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse," he wrote in the "Arena" comment area on the Politico site. Comparing the impact of McCain’s recent acceleration of the politics of personal destruction to that of southern demagogue George Wallace in ‘68 and ‘72, Lewis said the doomed Republican ticket was "playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all."

McCain responded to Lewis’ broadside by saying the comments were "shocking and beyond the pale" and calling for Obama to repudiate the remarks. I don’t think he has done so, nor should he. Despite his pitiful efforts yesterday to lecture the hotter heads at his rallies, McCain is reaping exactly what he has sowed. His support in the polls and the electoral college cratering since his erratic antics in the early days of the financial crisis, McCain turned to the kind of desperate tactics that can only inspire desperate men. He asked for it, he got it, and now he’s pretending to be surprised and concerned about it. He made his bed, rolled around in it with the worst sort of charlatans and fools on the far-right, and now he has to sleep in it, bed-spooning with the Limbaughs and Hannitys of his rented, putrid world.

We saw the ugliness first-hand right here in metro Milwaukee, where McCain and Palin made an appearance on Thursday. The right-wing crowd treated national visitors to good, old-fashioned Wisconsin hospitality by swearing and giving the finger to the traveling press corps. Some guy got up and was wildly cheered for squawking about the "socialist" Obama. "So go get him," he growled, the veins bulging from his neck. Part-time radio clown James T. Harris gave McCain permission, apparently on behalf of all similarly deluded black guys, to "take it to" the first African-American nominee of a major party. Harris, who can’t be called a sell out because he never had any convictions to sell out in the first place, was rewarded with a handshake from McCain and he decided to raise the cringe factor even further by kissing Palin’s hand.

"I got the message," said the smiling McCain, as he happily accepted the hateful passion of the engorged masses. Other places last week, similarly overheated crowds have called Obama a terrorist and yelled out "kill him." All in a days work for the man from Arizona, whose only question for his handlers since he nailed down his dying party’s nomination was "Is that what you wanted? How am I doing?"

The stage for all this was set not so much by McCain, but by right-wing mainstream radio, which has poisoned the political environment by universally treating an Obama presidency as not just unwanted, but as outright unacceptable. Obama has been regularly called dangerous to national security, a traitor to his country, a socialist and a radical extremist. What else is a god-fearing right-winger supposed to feel other than hate and contempt for the guy? Why would they allow for him to take office without a fight – and I don’t mean electoral. Ever since America started settling on Obama a couple of weeks ago, the desperate McCain decided to get in the gutter with the rest of the clowns and make it personal. He didn’t create the situation, but now he’s opened the door. What did he think was going to happen when the official campaign finally gave its imprimatur to this kind of garbage?

How bad is it? Well, right-wingers love to point to anonymous comments made in left-wing blogs to show how wack the left is. Let me turn that tactic on its head for a moment and point to one comment made on a left-wing blog: Mine. Here’s a comment (since deleted) that someone posted anonymously yesterday to my previous post:

Mike,Your an idiot and a liar, McCains was topping out all the time, Hussiens was less than flat. You heard it hear first. The October surprise that I am predicting this year is that someone (not ME LMAO) will assasinate the dumb socialist nigger. The domestic terrorist Nobama will never assume the Presidency, even if he wins the election!!!!

Now, I don’t think this is at all representative of right-wing "thought", such as it is. This person is obviously disturbed. But this is what happens when you present a mainstream political result as unacceptable and dangerous. Stupid people start to believe it. The fact is that, if you believe the crap about Obama put out 24/7 by the national and local wing-nuts on the radio, you would be unpatriotic if you didn’t take some extra-electoral action against this result. How could you let it happen?

This is the world John McCain has bought into. He may even realize that things have gone around the bend. But he can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. He has already lost his soul and his hard-earned honor in this campaign. And for what? So he can make history as the worst loser in U.S. history? The old McCain deserved better. This McCain deserves nothing less.

Dialed In

I have to admit I have a guilty appreciation for the real-time "audience reaction" monitor that CNN has been running on the bottom of the screen during the debates. They get 25 or so uncommitted people in a room to watch the debate, give them each a dial and tell them to move it left (bad) or right (good) depending on how they feel or think about what is being said at that moment. The composite results are displayed by gender – green for men, orange for women – on lines that move up and down in relation to the effect the speaker is having.

So, when Barack Obama was talking Tuesday night, the lines usually went up. With McCain talking, the lines stayed flat (these people are too nice – they never dial under 50%). Obama, up. McCain, flat. All night long. There were times when Obama’s orange line hit the top and stayed there for more than a minute. A couple of times, McCain’s line crept up to 75% (again, too nice), but then went crashing when he went after Obama on anything at all. The upward swing of the Obama line and the horizontal path of McCain’s were like watching a live, moving version of the last two weeks of national polling.

As far as statistical usefulness, the CNN line-graph stunt probably means nothing; an unscientific sample of an amorphous group making subjective judgements about carefully-coached rhetoric and stagecraft. As a respected member of the sub-prime commentariat, it is (or should be) beneath me to let myself get tickled by such ludicrous gimmicks. Alas, I cannot resist. Especially when the lines, the trends and the entire election are headed in the right direction.

After all, some of this is just for our entertainment, not necessarily for our education. I think the application of the pop-psych technology might lead to some other interesting applications. How about...

• Give the dials to 100 local fans during the next Packer game. See the lines go down on that Seattle kick-off return. Rodgers scrambles out of the pocket and finds Jennings downfield? Cool. If the lines go really south during a timeout, look over on CBS and see the replay of the touchdown Favre just threw for the Jets.
• Hand out dials to all twelve people who RSS Esenberg’s blog. Next time he posts another one making excuses for the pathetic Sarah Palin or trying to justify McCain's dishonorable last-minute smear job on Obama, watch the 45-degree diagonal swoop down to zero in record time as the professor loses more respect, self- and otherwise. Hey, Rick, you still want people to take you seriously after the election, right? Just checking.
• Give the judges in the Courthouse one of them things so I can see how I'm doing during sentencing arguments.
• Finally, hook up 100 right-wing nuts and chain them in front of their TVs (tuned to MSNBC, natch) to watch the election returns on November 4th. Watch the lines crater when the Senate goes 60 Dems (not counting Lieberman, who they should ceremoniously bounce from the caucus that night). See them spiral downward as they lose 30, then 35, then 40 seats in the House. By the end of the night, they will have sunk so low...they see the inevitable call for Obama before the polls even close in California. Something strange happens. All over town, one after another of the right-wingers decide maybe a glimmer of hope in their dark world isn’t so bad. Without consulting with each other, they all turn their dials to the right as one. Inexplicably, the line edges slowly, but assuredly....UP.

John McCain, Without Honor

"Overheated rhetoric and personal attacks on our opponents distract from the big differences between John McCain's vision for the future of our nation and the Democrats'." – McCain campaign manager Rick Davis, 3/11/08

"Let us exercise our responsibilities as free people. But let us remember we are not enemies." – John McCain, 4/5/08

It has been months since John McCain has honored his now-laughable promise to run a "respectful campaign". Since the time he started running ads mocking Obama’s popularity, McCain has been willing to let his campaign do whatever his Rovian henchmen thought was necessary to save his doomed electoral fate.

From the wildly irresponsible selection of Sarah Palin as the heartbeat-away running mate for the melanoma-damaged 72 year-old to the wacky attempt to duck the first debate, McCain’s hired guns have been throwing Hail Marys since they attained the Republican nomination by default in April. They’ve known since the beginning that their goose was cooked under the intense flames of the Bush disasters and their own candidate’s severe rhetorical and personal limitations.

Now, wilting under the perfect storm of near economic catastrophe, the McCain campaign is reduced to throwing bombs about Obama’s thin association with William Ayers in one last attempt to win through Fear. But the flop-sweat dripping through McCain’s thick and expensive make-up tells the tale of desperation. And, now that Americans are increasingly settling on Obama and becoming comfortable with the entirely safe, nice, competent guy that he is, who is McCain to tell them they are wrong, at this late date?

Leading the Charge of the Light-Headed Brigade in this war of words is, appropriately, Sarah Palin; she of the winks, the smirks and the unresponsive answers to easy questions. Palin was rated a survivor of last week’s debate (as opposed to the winner, who all surveys said was Joe Biden) by simply showing up and not tripping over her tongue. The giant team that hunkered her down for a week at one of Cindy McCain’s palatial estates had the perfect plan for the clueless Palin that could only have come from a campaign with the requisite contempt for democracy generally and the debate program specifically.

They cleverly decided that she would ignore all direct questions and just recite the greatest hits from her convention speech or whatever other tripe they had drilled into her empty head. As Jon Stewart put it tonight: "It’s not what you want to know; it’s what I want to say." The former teleprompter-reading sportscaster came through like a pro, trotting out her phony folkyisms and spewing nonsense with a cringe-inducing perkiness that gave attractive professional women a bad name. She was rewarded with a pass by the too-easy-to-please national press corps who failed to call her on her machinations, happy to proclaim her rehabilitated, if no more qualified.

So, it’s the newly-rejuvenated SAY-rah who comes bounding back out on the trail this week, talking about Obama’s "dangerous" past association with "domestic terrorist" Bill Ayers and darkly ruminating with forever-wrong greed-head Bill Kristol (who, as the former chief of staff to national embarrassment Dan Quayle, should know a thing or two about bad VP choices) about how the specter of Jeremiah Wright should be "discussed more". "I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up," she said, bringing it up, while McCain’s aides, according to Kristol, audibly shushed her in the background.

Well, we knew this was coming, didn’t we? Not necessarily from the grating nasal voice of who-is-she-to-talk-about-anything Palin, but the desperation of the smear was always in the McCainiac arsenal, even if they are replaying crap from the spring. I always thought the GOP was making a mistake when they sicced their radio and other clowns on the Wright and Ayers "stories" as soon as it became clear that Obama had passed Clinton for the nomination. They shot their "best" shots trying to define Obama negatively, after talking him up when they thought Clinton was inevitable. If I were the type of devious, democracy-hating people they are, I would have kept those loony "stories" in my back pocket for just such a time as this – thus to spring an October surprise. Now, there is no surprise; people have made up their minds knowing full well about the Wright and Ayers distraction, and they are voting for Obama anyway.

The Republicans thought they had it all figured out, and they had the MSM commentariat playing along – this election would be a referendum on Obama. But then, some funny things happened. First, they created the Sarah Palin circus – now there was someone else to look at and wonder if she was qualified – it turned out to be a much better question (and easier to answer in the negative). Then McCain stepped forward, making a complete ass of himself in the middle of the bailout fiasco, proclaiming himself essential to the process, trying to back out of the first debate (then caving before anything was settled), saying nothing at the incendiary White House meeting where Obama took the Democratic lead, not even speaking from the Senate floor before the final vote was taken. At the first debate, he was surly, condescending and cowardly, refusing to face Obama or his own failures. For the past two weeks, John MCain has looked like a desperate fool.

Now, the election is a referendum on McCain. And Americans don’t like what they see. They compare McCain’s erratic flailing to Obama’s cool under pressure. They hear the echoes of McCain’s promise to run a "respectful campaign" as he wallows in the mud like a pig. They wonder what happened to that guy they liked from late-night talk shows, who was so funny and so honorable from his noble service and long sacrifice back in Vietnam. They can’t believe he has given all that up for a fading chance at a White House that, in the end, he never had the talent or the temperament for.

Increasingly, Americans look at McCain and ask: "Why?" Increasingly, they look at Obama and say: "Why not?"

Is This Heaven? No, It's Milwaukee

For sheer drama, you could not beat the last week of the Brewer’s amazing run to the playoffs. Left for dead – by me and others – after their epic fail in Philadelphia two weeks ago, this remarkable group of cheerful and talented youngsters somehow found a way, with the much-appreciated help of the Mets.

Although baseball accomplishments can usually be determined by raw numbers – the unfortunate but entertaining steroid era notwithstanding – I don’t think there is a category for the kind of impact that CC Sabathia has had in terms of dominant pitching and team spirit since the trade that brought him here in July. Whatever you call it, his performance in the last three months of the season is nothing short of historic. He might end up 5th in the Cy Young voting, but he should be the league MVP.

And then there are Prince Fielder and Ryan Braun. After the entire team sleep-walked their way out of the wild card lead in the first half of the month, Prince suddenly came alive in Chicago with two home runs on September 16th and stayed hot the rest of the year. He sparked this week’s magical run with his walk-off home run on Tuesday, followed by Braun’s grand slam walk-off on Thursday. Braun produced a similar blast today, breaking a tie while the Mets were losing and Sabathia was being nothing less than super-human on his third short start.

It remains to be seen how long the Brewers hang around in the playoffs. They stunk in almost every clutch series they had this year – from that fiasco at Fenway in May to getting swept twice by the Cubs at home and in New York and Philly this month. There is a difference between squeaking into the playoffs and being ready for prime time. But, in prime time they will be this week, and that alone is reason to party.

I know, I know...you can read amateur baseball analysis in hundreds of places and people come to my little blog here to ponder more weighty affairs. Please, gentle readers, allow me this slight indulgence.

The Brewers and I have been through a lot since they came to town in 1970. I’ve been to hundreds of games through the years, mostly in small crowds watching mediocre-to-bad teams in County Stadium. I’ve been to Brewers games with the three most important men in my life – my dad, my brother and my son – and with lots of lovers and friends.

Dad, who brought me to Braves games in the ‘60s, took me to a game on my birthday in 1971. They had some poor old guy in a trailer perched up on the scoreboard, and the deal was he couldn’t come down until 40,000 people came to a game – sort of a variation on the famous National Lampoon cover: Buy This Magazine or We’ll Shoot This Dog. I don’t know what was so special about August 16th, but the weather was nice and enough people showed up that whoever had devised this tortuous promotion set the guy free. They gave him a rope after the game and had him slide down with no gloves, burning his hands. It was the last baseball game I ever saw with my dad.

The Brewers were a very forgettable team for the rest of the ‘70s – except for Hank Aaron’s last laps in ‘75 and ‘76 – until 1978 when Paul Molitor came up and George Bamburger somehow got them to play some decent baseball for the next couple of years. My brother and I were in the left field bleachers at Game 5 against the Angels in '82, when the Brewers came from behind to win and go to the World Series. While the ball was still rolling to short on the last play of the game, Jimmy was already over the fence, running for the infield celebration, where, he claims, he patted Robin Yount’s head. I was way behind him but eventually caught up and we danced on the grass and deliberately joined a traffic jam on Wisconsin Ave., taking turns driving and walking, high-fiving complete strangers on the usually deserted street.

Through the years, I continued to go to games whenever someone wanted to go, with friends, girlfriends, wives, nieces, nephews, sisters and in-laws. Baseball is a mellow game in the first place and, with the Brewers most of those years, no expectations. You can sit and talk, look up at the crack of the bat, and go back to your conversation. I have never had a bad time at a baseball game.

I was there for the last hit in Molitor’s hitting streak and Robin’s 3,000th. I missed Easter Sunday in ‘87 and promised never to forgive Bud Selig for losing the ‘94 World Series to labor strife. [To the anticipated right-wing snipers: save it. I know the union called the strike. I also know that baseball’s historically inept management’s failed miserably with their tough-guy strategy and still got rolled when everyone got back to work.]

I worked for the Wisconsin Federation of Teachers in the ‘90s and my partner there was a huge baseball fan. Even though he lived in Madison, he got season tickets and I took a quarter of the games. As the Brewers moved to Miller Park (and he moved to Story Hill), his seats got better and much more expensive – I went from a quarter-season to 20 to 15 to 10 games a year until, a couple of years ago, just taking his increasingly rare cast-offs. Mark Simons has become one of the most familiar faces in the Park – earning the title Doorman by showing Sammy Sosa the door to his dugout after strikeouts – and I was (and am) lucky to be part of he and Stephanie’s loyal baseball family. The seats are right on the 3rd base dugout and it was a great place to take my son as he grew up, being close to the players and getting loads of game balls from players and umpires.

I watched most of the game on TV today – actually, I was in the car listening to Uecker’s classic call of Braun’s homer when that happened. I called my boy and we smiled over the phone; called my brother and asked "where were you in ‘82" as we celebrated another milestone. We’ll all be in the Park when the Brewers have their first non-World Series home playoff game since that day when Jimmy and I jumped the fence and danced on that day’s Field of Dreams. Maybe, if we’re lucky, we can have that moment again, and – in our imagination, anyway – my boy and I can go out on the Field, and maybe even have a catch.

Palin Fatigue

Tina Fey, the most talented producer/writer/actor working in televison, has already had it with Sarah Palin. After winning a bunch of Emmys for her work on the superb 30 Rock, the extremely attractive (OK, maybe it’s just me) Fey, making a personal and slyly political point, said "I want to be done playing this lady Nov. 5. So if anybody can help me be done playing this lady Nov. 5, that would be good for me."


Although I haven’t been asked to play her on SNL or anywhere else, I am also sick of Sarah Palin. After bursting on the national scene in the most cynical use of running-mate selection in U.S. political history, Palin has quickly moved down the road of becoming irrelevant and tedious. The McCain campaign’s strategy of keeping her shielded from media inquiry – culminating in an overdue rebellion in the press corps Tuesday while she posed for holy pictures with Hamid Karzai – will prove self-destructive as soon as next week, when Palin will be clamoring to be heard over the din of financial collapse, McCain's crashing in the polls and the thumping Obama will deliver on McCain’s bald head in the first debate Friday night.


While Palin gallivants around the country in her protective cocoon, speaking to various highly-selected gatherings of right-wing base-heads, reporters continue to do the vetting that McCain should have done on the near-absentee Alaskan governor. Apparently, even when she was near the seat of government in Juneau, she was playing with her Blackberry during meetings and sending her husband out on various retaliatory missions. She was for the bridge before she was against it, she hired a lobbyist while in Wasilla to go to Washington and stir up more earmarks, she and the McCain campaign are in full coverup mode over her vindictive actions in Troopergate, etc. Both in terms of her cluelessness, policy positions and her contempt for the media and the democratic process, she has been widely exposed as Bush in a skirt.

The usual right-wing echo-chamber has been remarkably silent in defense of her loony positions and her single-minded approach to government. Instead, they play their usual game of Defining the Worst as the Norm, finding snippets here and there of fringe personalities saying fringe things, and pretending like that is all the left is saying of Palin. However, like most Obama supporters, I couldn't care less about her family members or personal choices that she would not allow to others. Her public record, such as it is, is bad enough to expose McCain as blowing his first major decision by naming her his running mate.

Yesterday, Palin was trotted around New York City, getting advice from notoriously-wrong war criminal Henry Kissinger and chatting up any foreign leaders that the McCain campaign could dupe into posing with her. Imagine a Democratic campaign using whatever pull it had to get its running mate his or her first meeting with head of state at the UN. You would be able to hear the squealing from here to Afghanistan. Palin's vacant, uncomfortable smile was like a Little Leaguer suddenly thrust in her uncle's big-league clubhouse. Nice to visit? Sure. Belong there? You've got to be kidding.

Palin's selection has provided a gut-check for right-wing commentators, and very few have passed, especially locally. While some right-wing memebers of the commentariat are lending themselves a modicum of credibility by criticizing McCain for his reckless pick, others make excuses for her enourmous short-comings and toe the party line. When this is all over, those seeking legitimate commentary will be able to look at whether the writer played Palin defense or called her out for the cypher she is.

Showing their characteristic fickleness, the American public has popped the Palin bubble. Like a movie with lots of buzz before opening, Palin has suffered from a lack of positive "word of mouth" since then. Good opening weeks may be sufficient for Hollywood's bottom line, but they don't do much for politicians running a marathon. By the time she gets to the debate with Biden next week, Palin will be reeling, back on her high-heels, wondering why she has to answer all these damn questions. It's the democracy, stupid.

Sarah and Sean, Sitting in a Tree...

As I predicted, the Sean Hannity "interview " with Sarah Palin was a big, kissy-face love-fest between the two right-wing extremists. With Palin dolled-up in full shiny Fox Noise Female make-up, the two cooed and flirted with each other, as Hannity set the softballs up on the tee and Palin cautiously swung, hitting weak grounders to an infield that had already gone home for the day. As the ball trickled through the grass, Palin rounded the bases with no challenges. Hannity sat back in smug wonder and immediately declared a home run.

Here are the "questions" Hannity used to draw out Palin to her talking points. These are literally all the "subjects" covered:

• You said when you were asked to be Senator McCain's running mate that you didn't hesitate, you didn't blink. Tell us about the call, when that came....What was your family's reaction? Was there time to huddle and have a hockey team meeting? Subtext: Let's hear how warm and cuddly you are.
• Do you believe that the fundamentals of our economy are strong?...Is Senator Obama then using what happened on Wall Street this week? Is he using it for political gain? Is there a danger of a presidential candidate is saying to the world that America's situation of economic crisis is the worst that we've seen in decades — which was words that he was using yesterday — is there a danger in terms of the world hearing that? Obama = danger, get it?
• Who is responsible for these failing institutions, in your view?...We read this morning that AIG is going to get some type of government bailout. Was that the right call? Even though you said it was a wrong call the day before...well, never mind that.
• You have 354 lawmakers got money from Fannie and Freddie — 354. If you look at the years from 1989 to 2008, the second top recipient was Senator Barack Obama. Should there be an investigation in terms of the relationship between the political donations and then, of course, the bankruptcy that ensued and the impact on the economy? Release talking point on Obama's contributions. Don't mention McCain did exactly the same thing.
• How do you make [the elimination of earmarks] happen? Look how partisan it is in Washington right now. How do you get that accomplished? Tell us, SAY-rah, how tough you and McCain are going to be.
• The people of Alaska get — for example, there's no income tax, there's no sales tax in Alaska. The average citizen — if I was a resident of Alaska, you would write me a check every year for $2,069? And then you also gave recently an extra check for $1,200?...I have to move to Alaska. New York taxes are killing me. Ba dup bum
• For those that maybe buy into that class warfare agreement or think, why shouldn't the rich pay more? My question to you is the converse: why does everyone benefit if the rich pay less or if everybody pays less in taxes? Why is that good for the economy? Insert GOP taxes-are-bad points here.
• Do you think these attacks, ratcheting up these attacks by Barack Obama and by Senator Biden [on McCain] , do you think these attacks will be effective? I'm guessing "no".
• How did you take on your own party, specifically? And do you think you'd be able to do that, as well, in Washington? Have Republicans in Washington lost their way in recent years? The hero, the marerick, Sarah America...
• Governor, have you spoken with Senator McCain about your specific role in the McCain administration? No, really, have you?
• You know, it's clear I've heard you talk passionately about your love for your state of Alaska...You know, why then why then would you support drilling in Alaska? Why would that be a good thing? Why would you want to do that? How good is drilling? Drilling is good right? Drill, drill, drill...
• We're importing, what, 70 percent of our oil. Do you view this as a national security issue, an economic security issue? And what is the impact for Americans down the road if we don't do something to solve our energy dependence? Insert your energy-as-national-security-credentials here...
• Did you watch Tina Fey on "Saturday Night Live"? Yes, with the sound off, said Palin. Raise your hand if you believe that one. Not you, Esenberg.

Well, as it turns out, the air is out of the Palin bounce. And the New York Times poll shows that 75 percent of those polled said she was picked for cynical politcal reasons, not because she was qualified.

But don't tell that to Sean Hannity. He is still swooning over his date with Palin and hoping for more. He served his role as McCain campaign surrogate to the hilt, as expected. And Palin, even with his extraordinary help, continued to be remarkably bland and unimpressive. With his lame response to the finanical crisis this week and the new aggressive Obama hitting hard, the McCain campaign is in free-fall. And this embarassing make-out session between Hannity and Palin ain't gonna help.

Mark Belling: Clear Channel’s Racist Pig

One of my favorite comedy movies of the past ten years is Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. It is a hilarious send-up of America, stupidity and the combination thereof. The premise is that, starting in 2005, smart people stopped reproducing and stupid people reproduced too much. The result, in 2505, when most of the movie takes place, is that the entire nation is incredibly stupid. You have to see how Judge (Beavis & Butthead, Office Space) sets it all up, but it is a very funny movie.

In the America of 2505, the top TV show – maybe the only TV show, except for porn – is "Ow, My Balls". In the show, a small and very fearful man is repeatedly hit in the groin by baseball bats, wrecking balls, and everything in between. At home, the citizens of the future howl with laughter at every painful thud. It is the perfect entertainment for the deliriously clueless populace.

"Ow, My Balls" is the ultimate result of a heartless corporation giving the people what they want, without regard to moral standards or the effect of electronic garbage on society in general. Are the ratings good? Fine, let’s do that.

People are not nearly as universally stupid as the characters in Idiocracy (however, according to Judge, we still have 497 years to go), but there are apparently enough stupid people in the Milwaukee radio market to make Mark Belling’s talk show the highest rated afternoon show. Belling’s frequently racist poison is broadcast by WISN, a formerly respectable radio station, now part of the notorious and mammoth Clear Channel radio chain. Clear Channel has been allowed to purchase 6 stations in the Milwaukee market, including, remarkably, a soul station (V-100.7). Do they work in the same building? Does Belling ever leave work with a bloody nose?

There used to be a sense of corporate citizenship, even for out-of-town companies with big local footprints. Companies might be able to make more money doing things that might have been more destructive to the community, but they didn’t. For one thing, they didn’t want to incur the wrath of other corporate citizens and other local leaders. For another, they had a moral compass and knew the lines they didn't want to cross in any event.

Not Clear Channel. They keep Belling on the air because of his ratings and couldn’t care less what racist tripe he spins into the air and the effect on the community. And Belling is transparently arrogant about his position with the company and his power to poison the city he inexplicably lives in.

The latest outrage from Belling was his show yesterday, in which he bloviated for an hour about how black people in the bars on Water Street are a danger to the area. He called for bars to stop playing hip-hop music and suggested the city may have to require bars to install metal detectors. "The more places you have on Water Street that play that kind of music, the more trouble there’s going to be." he said. "Now, nobody else will say that other than me." Fine. I’m sure Bull Connor felt equally brave.

The spark for Belling latest racist fear-mongering was, as usual, a tragedy that he chose to capitalize on. An incident between three Marquette students resulted in two of the young women being stabbed (one in the face, one in the shoulder) with a knife, allegedly by the third. All three students were African-American and underage. "There is a racial implication to the story," announced Belling, ominously. "I’m the guy that tell you what’s going on and doesn’t try to cover things up because of political correctness." You always know that, when Belling and other racists pull out the PC defense that simple incorrectness is coming. Sure enough: "Water Street...is far more racially mixed than it used to be...Water Street appears to be getting more violent."

There is a way to quantify this – Belling at least says he used to be a reporter and he could check with the District 1 police station and he’d have the information he pretends to know. But, like all good racists, he doesn’t want to be confused with the facts. Or, he just makes some stuff up. "There is a perception on the part of some bar owners [I’ll bet he can’t name one] that young black people tend to act far more aggressively than young white people."

This is all utter nonsense. But it goes on because it makes Belling’s angry-white-male demographic feel more comfortable in their own racist skin. I hear some of this stuff and think, jeez, is the program manager of the station (fill-in wing-nut Jerry Bott) or anyone in the corporate offices in San Antonio concerned that they have someone poisoning the community airwaves every day?

Nope. They like it. And, if they thought a radio version of "Ow, My Balls" would get big ratings they’d do that too. Maybe they could get Mark Belling to be the host; he could do it in blackface.

Interestingly, during his racist diatribe, Belling blamed some of Water Street’s imaginary problems on some owners of bars that don’t live in the area. "They’re pigs....They make a lot of money real, real fast, and then they walk away." Sounds like Clear Channel to me. Except they are not going anywhere, unfortunately.

Fox and the Palins: Big Wet Kisses

Now that the extremely unqualified Sarah Palin has (barely) gotten past her first media interview with the very tepid Charlie Gibson, she has headed back to the Lower 48 for glittery campaign appearances before inexplicably adoring supporters. With a slightly revised script (the lie about the Bridge to Nowhere remains), Palin has been put back in the protective cocoon she has been in since she was announced as McCain’s running mate, screened off from any human contact with the press corps traveling with her. You wonder how long that media contingent will put up with this before they throw their pens and microphones at the stage and refuse to distribute the pretty pictures nationwide. There is such a thing as self-respect, you know, although you wouldn’t know it to look at Palin herself.

"She will do interviews, but she'll do them on the terms and conditions" the campaign decides, said McCain manager Rick Davis on September 7th on Fox Noise Sunday. And when might that be? At "the point in time when she'll be treated with respect and deference...We run our campaign not the news media." Well, alrighty, then. But, with those standards – respect having to be earned and royal "deference" not regularly conferred to mere mortals – Palin would never get to appear before the public except in campaign commercials and SNL parodies. The McCain campaign still needs to build on the Palin mystique by giving us glimpses of Her Wonderfulness without paying for it. What to do, what to do?

Enter Fox Noise, the RNC conduit that has featured outright GOP advocacy in its "news" and talk shows since its inception. Sarah Palin’s next "interview" will be televised this Wednesday with Sean Hannity, as partisan a hack as exists on any cable channel, anywhere. Fox makes a meaningless distinction between its "news" personnel and it "commentators", although both kinds of on-air personalities infect each other’s programs. Now, it will use its most rabidly Republican talking-head to make "news" by giving a beyond-friendly forum to Palin. One can only hope, for her sake, that they keep her away from the Fox make-up artists, where the women of Fox are lipsticked, hair-teased, rouged and tarted-up within an inch of their vacant lives.

We got a taste of what Hannity’s "interview" of Palin might look like last night, when the formerly-respectable Greta Van Susteren all but jumped into bed with Palin’s husband Todd in a fawning puff-piece. "What should I call you? First Dude?" "Just call me Todd." You can almost see Greta swooning...How about First Hunk, big boy? The most probing question, on Todd’s trip to Washington: "You got to meet the president? That must have been fun." Sheesh. The rest of it was just how cool is your house, how cool is your plane, how cold is it on the North Slope, how cool is it to have your wife as McCain’s running mate... You couldn’t tell it by Van Susteren’s ridiculous down-vested who’s-yer-buddy tour of the Palin estate, but Todd himself is a legitimate news subject, with recent reports that he plays an integral – if unofficial and unpaid – part in the governor’s office in Alaska. It was embarrassing to see Van Susteren, who grew up in Appleton and used to have a real show on CNN before getting her famous nose-job and moving to Fox, fall so completely off the edge of the journalistic earth.

Sean Hannity won’t have the same problem "interviewing" Sarah, having never done a lick of responsible work, pimping for the Republicans for all of his professional career. I never understood how Republicans get away with appearing with such dramatically partisan, lying shills like Hannity and Rush Limbaugh without getting tainted with host’s regular body of work, which includes the worst kind of lies and poisoning of the political climate. Imagine if a Democratic candidate allowed himself to be interviewed by Michael Moore (an unfair comparison – Moore is a real journalist). There would be three weeks of howling by the GOP echo-machine just for being in the same room with him. Yet, GOP candidates can get big wet kisses by any old reactionary wing-nut and be rewarded for "submitting to an interview".

I can already see Hannity’s smug smiling face asking Palin probing questions like "why do you think the mainstream media has been so unfair to you?" and "after all you have been through, how do you stay so wonderful" and "are you comfortable? Can I get you a soft cushion?" It will make news – one good thing about it is that Hannity will help Palin continue to paint herself into a right-wing corner.

But then what does the campaign do? Will she ever appear on a Sunday talk show? Is the debate with Biden the only time she is going to subject herself to independent questioning? The novelty of having the unknown Palin on the ticket, along with McCain's convention poll surge, is already wearing off, just like the Ferraro bounce in 1984. Then what do they do -- throw her out on Meet the Press to sink-or-swim? I think Palin will be spending a lot of time in the warm bosom of Fox, hoping the partisan network can save the doomed McCain from his own bad choices and wild gambles.

Ralph Plaisted, Polar Explorer

It was somewhat jarring to see a headline starting with the name "Plaisted" on page 6 of the front section of the Journal Sentinel today. I thought at first it might be about me ("Plaisted post convinces paper to bring back Doonesbury") or my brother Jim, who is always quoted in the paper about his excellent work on east side economic development issues. But, no....

My dad’s first cousin, Ralph Plaisted, passed away in Minnesota at the age of 80. Back in the ‘60s, he was drinking in a bar with some friends and they all decided they would try to get to the North Pole by snowmobile. CBS newsman Charles Kuralt went along on their first try with a film crew, resulting in a prime time special and Kuralt’s first book: To the Top Of the World: The Adventures and Misadventures of the Plaisted Polar Expedition, March 28 - May 4, 1967. They failed that year, but made it the next, in 1968; becoming the first explorers to indisputably make it to the Pole (Robert Perry said he did it, but no one outside of his party was entirely sure). So, he got an obit in papers all over the country. Cool.

Ralph came to visit us in New Holstein once after he made it – as I recall he had some speaking engagement in Fond du Lac. He stayed overnight and, actually, I was kicked out to the couch so he could use my bedroom. I don’t think Dad knew him very well; I think he lived a little further north in Minnesota from where Dad grew up in Mora. But he was a nice enough guy, just salt of the earth with a little hard-earned celebrity under his belt.

That’s my family’s little brush with history and fame – a guy, a few beers and some snowmobiles.

Sarah Palin: Deer In the Headlights

Holy, moley. Two weeks of intensive preparation, briefing books, talking points, schooling...and that’s the best she can do? Set afloat from her strict script for the first time in two weeks, Sarah Palin showed tonight how totally unqualified she is to be vice-president of the United States.

Charlie Gibson is the oldest and most bland of what now passes for the network anchors. After getting advice from everyone in the blogosphere, he ignored it all and came to his Palin interview with the simplest of questions. He started one big fuzzy softball – "Can you look the country in the eye and say ‘I have the experience and I have the ability to be not just vice president, but perhaps president of the United States of America?’" Well, duh – what do you think she’s going to say, no? But Palin even seemed to struggle with that one, denying that she hesitated at all when asked. "You have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission...you can’t blink." Oh, great. Haven’t we just suffered through eight years of Mr. Non-Blink, Mr. Committed to the Mission? Do we really want even one more year of people leading themselves down blind paths just because they made the stupid decision to head that way in the first place?

But that was just the start. Palin failed on every substantive question Gibson floated out there, from Russia (sure, Georgia should be in NATO; sure, we would have to defend it if...no, wait...) to Iran (she repeated three times that we should not second-guess Israel if it decides to take out nuclear facilities) to Pakistan (coming out, as far as anyone could tell – "is that a yes?" asked Gibson – in favor of unilateral strikes into the country). She clearly had no idea what the Bush Doctrine (strike first, ask questions never) was, asking "in what respect" Gibson was asking her that damn question. She even punted the issue after Gibson graciously told her what it was, saying that a president should act if "a strike in imminent", not realizing imminence has nothing to do with the dumb and hopefully dead doctrine.

Throughout the session, Palin was leaning forward in a defensive crouch, the file cards of her training shuffling in her head for the right category, subject and bullet point. Away from the safety of her script and the cheery surroundings of her stump speeches, she was much smaller in stature and presence, not that she was all that great to begin with. The look on her face was often one of confusion and impatience. Palin was in a tough situation. She had to do two things: 1) pretend she knew about things about which she did not have a clue; and 2) hide her true feelings about international relations, mostly, as much as she’s thought about it (obviously not much), having to do with "god’s plan". She failed miserably at both.

She was clearly out of her depth in the world of serious thought, even on the fairly lightweight issues broached by Gibson. She wasn’t even mildly conversant in any of the subjects regularly discussed by real and armchair politicians at all levels of government and in blogger basements all over the country. She didn’t have a clue and you couldn’t tell from her defensive posture and demeanor whether she cared that she didn’t.

Palin obviously cares about many things – mostly having to do with religious nuttery and using her position as governor to extract family vengence and to have her kids fly around with her at state expense -- but, still, she cares. But during the interview, it was clear that, until she had to, she had not given the great policy questions of our time any thought whatsoever.

If Gibson had put the same questions to Barack Obama, Obama would bat one and then the other out of the park, in the back of his mind wondering "what’s with the soft stuff?", waiting for the real interview to start. So would anyone in Washington at a rank above summer interns. Her lack of depth reveals an entirely different perspective on "experience" and its relevance to those who aspire to the presidency, vice- or otherwise.

It is one thing to manage the nuts-and-bolts of a town or state. It is quite another to act as the figurehead of a government that pretty much runs itself. A president has to manage the Big Picture of the country's direction and its role in the world. It really is essential to have talked and thought a lot about it; your ideas challenged in public and private debate. You can't just jump into it in a month or even a year, especially with the kind of obvious intellectual uncuriosity displayed by Paliin in the interview.

The interview with Palin tonight showed how utterly irresponsible John McCain was for putting this lightweight on his ticket. I sense, from the lack of celebratory clucking on the right-wing tonight, that his supporters, deep in their hearts, feel the same way.

Journal Sentinel Dumps Doonesbury, Readers

This morning brings us the new, thinner Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Apparently, the J-S has decided to continue the self-fulfilling prophesy of dead-tree decline by making itself even less essential to our need for information. The paper wants us to read more by making itself less irrelevant.

From a news perspective, the biggest change is in the second section. The former Metro section (in Milwaukee, anyway) is now titled Local. The J-S apparently has eliminated the targeted editions for various parts of the state and will try to cover all local stories in the state in two or three short pages of content (minus obituaries). "This move is an important step that recognizes a simple truth: We are all part of one local community," writes Editor Martin Kaiser in a Dear John letter to the jilted readership on page one today. Oh, there’s a simple truth, alright – the "zoned geographic editions" were just too expensive to continue. Why not just say that rather than pretend you are doing us a favor?

The fact is that our local paper has now officially abandoned its focus on the Milwaukee area. It has done to itself what it did to the various community newspapers it ate up and spit out into the pathetic Now tabloids – blended and pureed the important facts of our world into a jumble of irrelevancies. Strangely, Kaiser directs those starved for local news to the Now papers and websites, which is like sending a hungry child to the hardware store. The Journal Company that spent tons of money and expended a lot of what was left of its community goodwill in the ‘90s by gobbling up and destroying dozens of vital independent local newspapers now offers the bland results as a substitute for the abandoned content of the parent paper. What a joke.

Some of the pain of the ill-considered changes the Journal Sentinel has made this year might be easier to take if the paper was doing more with the less it has created for itself. For instance, Stuart Carlson’s unfortunate demise is felt the most of all the recently departed J-S writers, leaving a surprising hole in the soul of the newspaper. Now, there is no way local or even state politicians can be lampooned in the way only a local cartoonist can.

But, if you are going to become a second-class newspaper by forcing out your editorial cartoonist, you might want to bring in some of the better syndicated cartoonists, such as Tom Toles the Washington Post or maybe the Cincinnati Enquirer’s Jim Borgman. But no. Instead we are seeing far too much of the repulsive right-wing nut, Michael Ramirez. Ramirez, who the defensive wing-nuts will tell you somehow managed a Pulitzer Prize for his undistinguished and unoriginal body of work, has a ham-fisted way of illustrating right-wing talking points, such as his recent drawing of a hurricane with the phrase "Tax & Spending" imposed over the clouds and the caption "Hurricane Obama". Clever insight, no? Er, no. Ramirez appears to be alternating with Chip Bok, a middle-of-the-roader with no discernable genius.

But, if you are talking about cartoon metaphors for the accelerating decline of the Journal Sentinel, there is nothing sadder than dropping Doonesbury. Ever since it started running in the old Journal Green Sheet way back in the ‘70s, the newspaper has never done right by Garry Trudeau and his strip. They never ran it according to Trudeau’s size specs so the art looks right. Then they caved in to right-wing pressure and moved it to the op-ed page. In recent years, they have run it next to the putrid Mallard Fillmore, a ridiculously unfunny right-wing strip, implying a creative and moral equivalence that exists only in the twisted heads of the clueless J-S editors. Now – starting today – Doonesbury is gone, even from the Sunday comics, squeezed out by the apparent elimination of the op-ed page on Saturday and Monday.

Doonesbury is the greatest comic strip in the history of publishing (challenged only by Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County). The development of the characters over time has been incredibly deep and believable, as they grew from carefree college students to late middle-aged adults. Most interesting has been B.D., who started as a hard-core right-wing quarterback trying to keep stoned Zonker on track in the huddle and now struggles with PTSD after being hit by an IED in Iraq. Trudeau has taken the daily strip and turned it into a living work of art with heart and brains. His political points still get made – from Mark Slackmeyer’s "guilty, guilty, guilty!" during Watergate to his deserved jabs at Bush and Cheney – but it always comes from a world we recognize and characters that we know.

The Journal Sentinel should be honored to be a home for Doonesbury, rather than treating it like so much surplus For Better or Worse. It's one thing for the J-S to be battered by economic info-market realities; it is quite another for them to be the victim of their own bad choices.

I Know You Are, But What Am I?

Rick Esenberg makes an argument in his latest post to eliminate the charge of hypocrisy from political discourse. While admitting the obvious by allowing that "intellectual consistency is a virtue and an important discipline" (which would seem to eliminate the need for the rest of his post), he worries out loud – as he often does when something in happening that he doesn’t understand or, more often, is a threat to his right-wing ideology – that the charge of hypocrisy has become "a preferred form of political attack".

Since hypocrisy is a necessary component of right-wing complaints and arguments, the attempt to remove the comparison between what somebody says and somebody does – or what somebody on their side does – is disingenuous and an effort that only would benefit one side. The self-righteous throwing of stones from within glass houses and the casting of stones by known sinners is part and parcel of inert wing-nut behavior. Without their constant squawking about people doing things in public that they are doing behind their closed doors, they would have nothing to talk about.

Take Sarah Palin – please! While the quietest candidate in U.S. history hides behind the ten-foot wall constructed by the McCain campaign and sends out hired guns to delay an investigation into her gubernatorial acts of vengence against a former brother-in-law, enough is known about her to know that she has all sorts of characteristics that have driven Esenberg himself just wild when they are supposedly also identified in Barack Obama. Given her thin record and lack of qualifications, her meteoric rise, at least in the eyes of the types of wild-eyed nuts and elitists who attended the Republican convention last week, can only be attributed to undue celebrity. Esenberg’s own "A Star is Born" post was an embarrassing swim in a sea of self-convincing hyperbole (update: and, this morning: "the killah from Wasilla ... the Barracuda .... Sarah America") Yet he is the first to criticize Obama for his own popularity, freely indulging in the ridiculous "messiah" and "anointed one" nonsense. Gee, I don't know anyone more recently "annointed" than Sarah Palin, do you?

Then there is Palin’s wack religious background; she is in all likelihood a Dominionist, who followed her religious advisors’ advice to change the world by infiltrating secular government. Among other entertaining anecdotes, her current church has entertained at least one anti-Semitic speaker (Palin was present and did not walk out). Esenberg, who waxed hysterical about Obama’s attendance at Jeremiah Wright’s church – and is bound to do so again several times before the election – was too over-the-moon to find room in his "Star" post to address the issue of Palin’s religious zealotry. I won’t hold my breath to wait for him to admit or recognize it.

The identification of such obvious hypocrisy is not "a form of political attack"; it is an important way to evaluate the legitimacy of the right-wing attacks in the first place. There are lots of ways to get at the right-wing’s attempt to portray Obama as an empty celebrity, but few are more effective than their attempt to pump up an empty celebrity of their own. Either "intellectual consistency is a virtue", or it’s not. Esenberg seems to be saying that those without virtue should not be called out while they harangue about everyone else’s.

Even more fun and instructive is pointing out hypothetical hypocrisy. This is the concept behind my soon-to-be-bestselling board game, What If A Democrat Did It? For instance, what if a Democrat decided to pick a running mate with a pregnant, unwed 17 year-old daughter. You would hear the caterwauling from coast to coast. If it was a Democrat, the weird speculation by one blogger that Palin’s youngest child is actually her granddaughter wouldn’t be restricted to just that one guy – it would be broadcast as fact on talk radio 24 hours a day like so many Clinton murders. Palin was for the Bridge to Nowhere before she was against it. Are you kidding me?

So, according to Rick Esenberg, we should not point out the hypocrisy of those who are hypocritical. Oh, I don’t think so. Hypocrisy is pretty bad and pointing it out where it exists is quite illuminating. Esenberg would be better served going back to just drawing distinctions and making excuses for the hypocrits.

The Return of Queen Esther

One of my favorite scenes in Recount, the excellent HBO movie about the theft of the Florida vote by the Bushies in 2000, is when the delicious Laura Dern, as Katherine Harris, claims divine guidance and biblical validation for her manipulation of law and process to install her governor’s brother as president. "I have been reading my Bible quite a bit lately, and I have been feeling this extremely strong kinship with Queen Esther," coos Dern/Harris. "You recall Queen Esther. [Uh, no.] She was willing to sacrifice herself to save the lovely Jewish people. [Oh.] And that's exactly what I'm doing right now." The dreamy combination of cluelessness and determination with which Dern delivers the lines brings home perfectly everything that was wrong with Harris, as she was lead by the nose to do the Bushes’ bidding.

Well, guess who else feels guided by the unseen hand of the ancient Persian queen with her very own book in the Old Testament. That’s right – none other that the GOP’s It Girl, Sarah Palin.

The New York Times this morning reports that after she took office as governor of Alaska, she went to some other old guy, the former pastor of her former nutty church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, for spiritual advice. "‘She asked for a biblical example of people who were great leaders and what was the secret of their leadership,’ Mr. Riley said", according to the Times. "He wrote back that she should read again from the Old Testament the story of Esther, a beauty queen who became a real one, gaining the king’s ear to avert the slaughter of the Jews and vanquish their enemies. When Esther is called to serve, God grants her a strength she never knew she had."

Well, you can tell he didn’t have to tell her twice. After that, she was off and running, trying to purge the state service of bad ex-brothers-in-law, demanding resignations of state agency heads, putting the fix in to get a pipeline done so Big Oil could continuing funding Alaska’s unique form of socialism, etc. All, no doubt, with god and Queen E on her side.

That Palin is a religious whack job should not be news to anyone – that’s why the out-of-touch, refrigerator-white Republicans who gathered in St. Paul this week just looove her so much. Her career path in government began right where the Dominionists tell their followers to start infiltrating the sinful secular government – on a school board. You could see it in her ditzy YouTubed talk just this past June to young and sadly impressionable A-of-G students about how "god has sent me from under the umbrella of this church throughout the state" and how the Stupid War and occupation in Iraq was a "task from god" and that Bush’s plan, such as it is, is "god’s plan". Hey, trouble in the Middle East? Hell, let’s send Sarah over there. Nah, they won’t care that she pretty much admitted that our Iraq disaster was just part of a New Crusades. Talk about your new era in foreign relations.

The Times’ story relates that the A-of-G stuff became a little too much for the Palins in 2002, right around the time she began her political career. I guess attending a church that claims "speaking in tongues and miraculous healings" was too much, even for the notoriously tolerant Alaskans. But that didn’t stop her from calling up its former pastor for the Esther tip.

All the wing-nuts who pretend to be sooo concerned with Barack Obama’s membership in a church are spending all of their time talking up the flash-in-the-pan known as Sarah Palin and ignoring or applauding her religious affiliation, even when she sat through a talk at the A-of-G by some asshole who described terrorist attacks on Israelis as god's "judgment of unbelief" of Jews who haven't embraced Christianity. Listening to goofballs with a tight grip on the pulpit is something all church-goers have to put up with from time to time.

But the difference between Obama’s former church and that of Palin is that Palin’s church, as part of its mission, sends its followers out into the world to deliberately infiltrate secular institutions. All Obama ever got from Jeremiah Wright is the name of a book and a headache.

Quick Draw McCain

Since their self-proclaimed "revolution" in 1994, the Republicans have pioneered a new kind of politics in the United States. Whether you think this is a good thing depends on what subjects you think should be discussed in a presidential campaign and otherwise and, as always, whose ox (or, in the case of rugged Sarah Palin, moose) is being gored.

For instance, with all the members of the right-wing echo chamber playing constant defense for all these years during the disaster that is Still-President Junior Bush, how are they going to complain about every dip in the economic cycle when a Democrat is in office? Every recessionary tic, every massive job-loss, every rise in gas prices, every Enron or Abramoff or sub-prime mortgage scandal was excused as either out of Bush’s control or caused by Bill Clinton two, then three, then seven years ago.

I know, I know...these hacks hardly pride themselves on consistency and will saddle President Obama with responsibility for every bad thing that happens anywhere, even if they defined the same as a good thing under Bush. Without the capacity for that kind of hypocrisy, these people couldn’t exist.

Now, with John McCain’s spectacularly un-vetted nomination of the less-than-rookie Sarah Palin as his soul- and running-mate, the GOP has re-written the rules of the game once again. Campaigns for both major parties can now forget about spending hundreds of millions of dollars on lawyers, accountants and investigators to vet their desired candidates. If Palin’s tenuous nomination survives, all those things that used to keep campaign managers awake at night – religious nuttery, the purging of disloyal city and state managers, attempts at book-banning, unwed teenage pregnancies, contributions to indicted an senator’s 527, even participation in a secessionist cult – just don’t matter anymore. What a revelation! What a gift to future campaigns!

No longer will "the first important decision" of a purported presidential candidate be judged by the standard of whether they proposed a vice presidential candidate can be ready to take over in a crisis or, at least, manage not to embarrass a campaign. Now, who cares if she’s ready; the 72 year-old cancer survivor is promising to last at least 6 months while she gets trained, I guess. And, embarrassment? Bring it on! We’re bold, maverick, risk-taking! We’ll see if the gamble pays off. It's as if McCain didn’t find Palin in Alaska, he found her at a high-roller craps table in Vegas. Come on, baby, roll a seven – baby needs shoes!

The standard now must be not whether the candidate gets it right, but how talented the candidate’s staff is to stave off the inevitable "reporting" by those pesky news organizations, who not only poke around about irrelevant stuff like the state-imposed vindictive punishment of a former brother-in-law, but also want to know how and why the candidate tried to pull this rabbit out of the hat in the first place. With the training by but none of the evil talent of Karl Rove, McCain’s henchmen have their leaden talking points in place about the supposedly sexist treatment of Palin (like they should talk – have you ever any Republican talk about Hillary Clinton?), the fact that she has "executive experience" (and never you mind how she used it) and blah de blah blah.

But, although they found themselves moderately capable of keeping the wolves from Palin’s door (at least until her first press conference, which, I’m guessing, will be in about a month), they were unable to explain themselves and how they got themselves in this situation.

The story in the Washington Post this morning about the accelerated, incomplete and inept vetting process on Palin was all too much for McCain senior campaign advisor and Rove wannabe Steve Schmidt, who pronounced today that "this nonsense is over" and claiming that the campaign will answer no more questions about the failed vet. Which is fine – why talk about something you can’t defend? Then the Post version stands as the final version of this part of the failed candidacy of the impulsive, not-ever-ready John McCain.

It is obvious what happened. McCain put an artificial deadline on the process. They finally came around to Palin last Wednesday (after McCain was talked out of his first choice – the now, after last night, officially pathetic Joe Lieberman – and with Tim Pawlenty as the only other possibility). The staffers met with her for the first time Tuesday and on Wednesday she let them know her unwed teenage daughter was preggers (Did she also tell them her daughter changed high schools and was living with her aunt this spring? Inquiring minds want to know...). But by that time, she was all locked in and McCain couldn’t go back and still meet his timeline.

It makes you wonder what they found wrong with Pawlenty, a safer choice and, I’ll bet, more fully vetted. But it also identifies a trait with McCain that we have seen too much of from the Bushies in the past eight years: Locked into a course of action, he’ll ignore any information telling him not to do it. We saw such a thing play out, in spades, in the Stupid War in Iraq. Do we really want to deal with this quick-draw, don’t-confuse-me-with-the-facts attitude in the White House again?

This is all about McCain, not Palin. Palin will get a wild reception from the convention crowd tonight -- I mean, what else do they have to shout about? But the far-right Palin's popularity with the GOP base just shows how out of touch they are with normal people.