Can Nevada voters really be this stupid? You betcha! Look at Senator Ensign.

Connecticut was once called (by its residents; who else would come up with such crap?) the Land of Steady Habits. That was then. Now we’re closing in on South Carolina for weirdness champion of the mid-terms. Setting aside the groin-kicking GOP senatorial candidate, Linda McMahon, the mogulette of pro wrestling, let’s concentrate for now on the governor’s race.

The Republican candidate is one Tom Foley, a money manipulator from Greenwich who drives a hundred-foot yacht named “Odalisque” which proudly flies the flag of the Republic of Marshall Islands.

Let’s set him aside, too, and return to the Democrats. The losing candidate in Tuesday’s primary was Ned Lamont, who came from family money, as we WASPs delicately say, and made millions more in cable television.

The winner was Dan Malloy, born in Stamford as the youngest of eight children. He got his law degree from Boston College and rose to become Stamford’s longest serving mayor. If he has a million dollars, nobody has heard about it.

So there’s the cast of characters as we close the first act in the race for governor. (If I mix metaphors, why then I mix metaphors.) As the second act opens:

1. Connecticut’s campaign financing law provides extra money to a publicly financed candidate who is outspent by a millionaire;

2. The Second Circuit recently ruled that the initial grants given to candidates who chose public financing were okay, but the law’s extra grants to match millionaires were unconstitutional;

3. The Connecticut legislature then passed a law that simply increased the size of the post-primary grants to gubernatorial candidates;

4. The outgoing Republican governor then vetoed the law increasing the grants;

5. So the Democrat-dominated Senate then voted to override the veto;

6. The gubernatorial primary occurred. Result: the GOP nominated Foley, a self-financed millionaire, and the Democrats in an upset nominated publicly financed Malloy;

7. Tomorrow, the Democrat-dominated House votes on veto override. The Democrats will be doing their best, that is, to benefit one single person in Connecticut: their own gubernatorial candidate.

To complicate the equation further, the Speaker of the Hous backed the losing Democratic candidate, the self-funded millionaire Lamont. And Malloy won’t be able to lure votes with the promise of jobs, having already promised all the good ones to win support in the primary. Or so rumor has it.

Are you with me so far? Good, because I’m not. Stay tuned.

Who could have guessed, only a short year ago, that mid-term elections would be so darn much fun? Yet here we are, five months away from elections that are usually a major snooze, enjoying all the political melodrama of a high school election for Prom King and Queen — and we’re only at the Primaries.

Some credit is due, of course, to the Tea Party’s transformative pseudo-populism that has turned garden variety conservatives into political contortionists trying to fit themselves into the Tea Party’s anti-establishment agenda — at least long enough to bag some of their votes. The Tea Party’s major contribution to electoral politicking, however, has been to legitimize the prospects of some seriously inexperienced, quasi-anarchic radical demagogues that couldn’t have won the proverbial office of dog-catcher in more rational times. But “the times, they are a-changin’…”

Just as we don’t have a clue how to fix the man-made disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, neither do we have any idea how to right our seriously listing “Ship of State,” in which our fearless leaders have decided to fire the cannons continuously over the bow, instead of bailing and plugging the leaks, to keep the ship from going down.

If one listens carefully to the campaigning of mid-term candidates (I know, I know, it can be quite disturbing) it becomes very clear that we no longer care very much what our political candidates think (or don’t think) about issues that theoretically impact life in America because, clearly, they don’t live in the same America that we do. Neither do candidates care very much about the general electorate’s thoughts on the issues because the general electorate doesn’t contribute enough to finance 21st century political campaigns — corporations and PACs do that.

The conundrum, for politicians, is that ordinary voters still provide the grease (tax dollars) they need to quiet the “squeaky wheels” that finance their political careers; so ordinary voters must still be courted. And it takes large amounts of money, and political capital, to persuade blocs of taxpayers/voters that the interests of corporate donors coincide with their own public interest.

Voting in America has become very much like playing the lottery — if you are extraordinarily lucky and beat all of the odds, it might pay off in a material way — but no one really expects to win. Meanwhile, for the losers, life goes on very much as usual, without any fortuitous assistance from the gods. Win or lose, millions of people will pony up for lottery tickets, week after week (whether they can afford it or not), because “you have to play to win.”

Politics, like lotteries, depend on a certain predictable level of participation and a great deal of hope and trust. Lotteries take your small contributions, which add up to huge amounts of money, and guarantee that someone will win big; all of those contributors who don’t “win big” can be comforted by the fact that their money has provided some amount of feel-good commonwealth, like better schools or assistance for the elderly.

Those are, I believe, some contributing factors to some of the more sophomoric campaign performances we are currently being treated to and, ultimately, the deadly voter apathy that can only make a bad situation worse; but then who cares to carve out a portion of their Tuesdays to go to the polls and choose between Dumb and Dumber?

Whether you choose to vote with a ballot or vote with your feet, it’s quite educational to take a look at the candidates and their efforts to win the “hearts and minds” of American voters…

Whether you choose to vote with a ballot or vote with your feet, it’s quite educational to take a look at the candidates and their efforts to win the “hearts and minds” of American voters…

Rand Paul, who recently won the Kentucky Republican primary for a Senate seat, gave us our first taste of a true Tea Party candidate floundering for a solid platform as spectacularly as the party that he aligns with. Paul came out of the gate, politicking like a pro running for President, à la Scott Brown; national media were only too happy to provide ample high-profile opportunities for Paul to trot out his half-baked ideological ramblings, committing political hari-kari in the process.

If the Tea Party, whose passion is for installing “newbies” in public office, had any misgivings about Rand Paul being the offspring of Congressman, ex-presidential candidate and Libertarian standard-bearer Ron Paul, Rand’s post-Primary victory-lap performance should dispel any notion that he knows what he’s doing in the political arena.

In the span of a few short days of peddling his “ideology” on national television Rand Paul has managed to be: unceremoniously excommunicated by orthodox Libertarians; publicly eviscerated by a reluctant Rachel Maddow for his stated support of business owners who have been stripped of their “right to discriminate,” by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, against clientele that they deem “undesirable”; mercilessly lampooned for his “accidents do happen” position on the Deepwater Horizon disaster along with his judgment that President Obama was treating BP in an “un-American” way by holding them accountable; excoriated for his view that the Americans with Disabilities Act is unfair to small business owners; and, last but not least, sued by the Canadian rock band Rush for copyright infringement for misappropriating one of their tunes as his during his campaign.

Someone with a little more political savvy than “The Candidate” finally pulled the plug on the Rand Paul Gaffe Machine and there was a brief quiet spell during which it is easy to imagine Paul being trained, by political handlers, to think before he speaks, because the American public is not as forgiving as loving parents or fraternity brothers who are inclined to indulge and, indeed, provide standing ovations for every pearl of pastoral wisdom that drips from the favored son’s honeyed lips.

Paul’s most recent tentative step back into the limelight is a little Op-Ed apologia that he penned for the Bowling Green Daily News that basically begs the public’s pardon for his excess of wonderfulness and pronouncing himself on an equal footing with Martin Luther King, Jr. That should dispel any rumors that Rand might be racist as well as casting himself in the role of the terribly misunderstood, but no less monumental, idealistic intellectual. Which, according to Rand Paul, is exactly what we’re lacking in American government today.

Paul’s “Ode to Himself” Op-Ed starts out like this:

“Kundera writes of a balcony scene in the winter snow of 1948 Prague. Clementis offers his fur cap to the new leader Gottwald. Later Clementis is purged by the Communists and airbrushed from all the photos. All that remains of Clementis is the fur cap on Gottwald’s head.”

Anyone who’s ever attended a pretentious, country club cocktail party knows this guy and also knows how his story ends whether he wins or loses elections. He’s right when he says that he’s not a pragmatist, but wrong when he defines himself as an idealist. He’s a narcissist — pure and simple, and professional politicians are poised to eat his lunch — if he gets a foot in the door.

A recurrent theme that is emerging out of Team Paul is that no matter what cockamamie thing comes out of the candidate’s mouth it’s tangential to the real issues which, I have to assume, he’s keeping “closer to the vest.” Jesse Benton who holds the unenviable position of serving as Paul’s campaign manager made this statement to USA Today regarding the Rush lawsuit:

“The background music Dr. Paul has played at events is a non-issue. The issues that matter in this campaign are cutting out-of-control deficits, repealing Obama Care and opposing cap and trade.”

But, wait a minute Jesse, aren’t Libertarians supposed to be all about respecting others’ property rights?

Then again, at the head of Paul’s Op-Ed piece he reminded readers that:

“I support the Civil Rights Act, but 2010 battles are about government overreach in lives.”

I vaguely remember hearing similar rhetoric, back in the day, from members of my generation who joined the SDS and who subsequently learned (the hard way) that the real world chews up and spits out ideologues for kicks.

The World According to Kirk

In an entirely different vein we have Mark Kirk, candidate for an Illinois Senate seat. Mark Kirk is one of those guys that believe that all you need to be a successful politician is good people skills like the ability to weave a good story — something along the lines of Mark Twain or Will Rogers. And so it is that Mark Kirk’s strategy for connecting with voters is to make stuff up. As a matter of fact, I think it’s safe to say that Mark Kirk finds the truth rather lackluster and lacking in political appeal which is why he doesn’t bother much with it as source material.

Rachel Maddow just did a pretty comprehensive (and entertaining) rundown of those areas in which Kirk has taken some “political license” that is well worth watching.

In the meantime, here’s a summary:

Kirk is now famous for “misremembering” the fact that he did not win the U.S. Navy’s Intelligence Officer of the Year award (Instead, Kirk’s entire unit won a privately sponsored, not a Navy, merit award). Undaunted by the need to publicly retract that “mis-rembrance,” Kirk went on to “mis-remember” that it was his staff that caught the error in his official bio, when, actually it was the Department of the Navy that demanded that he correct his record.

Other notable Kirk “mis-remembrances” include having served in Operation Iraqi Freedom, as well as Operation Desert Storm. And then there was the time that Kirk came under fire while flying a plane over Iraq not to mention his stint at “commanding the war room” at the Pentagon. All Flights of Fancy…

Clearly, Kirk believes that one’s military service is an important distinction when running for office so he has spared no embellishment in distinguishing his own military record. But Kirk’s “gift of gab” doesn’t stop there. As Maddow says: “He also makes stuff up about the world at large…”

Like Kirk’s rationalization that, of course the US should be drilling off its shores for oil, because, after all, the Chinese are drilling off the coast of Cuba and sucking up all the oil that could be ours (which assertion, of course, has no basis in actual fact). And while we’re on the topic of oil, Kirk promises to do his best to persuade the US government to stop getting oil from Iran — he even gives figures of 80 million barrels a day — which should be an easy sell, since the U.S. doesn’t get oil from Iran. Finally there’s the entirely fabricated story regarding the relationship between Somali pirates and France that is so convoluted that it makes me weary to think about it, so you’ll just have to watch the Rachel Maddow clip to hear it in all of its “fabulous” detail.

So. If Rand Paul is “simply a narcissist,” Mark Kirk is simply a liar.

What Happens in Vegas…

And, finally, there’s the three-ring Republican primary circus in Nevada, featuring party-backed casino owner Sue Lowden, a former Nevada GOP Party Chair; business executive and ex-UNLV basketball star, Dan Tarkanian; and Tea Party Express-endorsed candidate, Sharron Angle in a three-way extravaganza of Republican-on-Republican disunity. I have to assume that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid must be quite delighted by the entire production especially now that the Tea Party’s Sharron Angle is leading the pack and favored to win the primary in voting today.

Of the three Republicans, no one has been behaving particularly like an establishment politician, but then again we have to keep in mind that this is Nevada. The primary campaign has essentially broken down into a catfight with a detached bystander.

According to Brian Seitchik, Danny Tarkanian’s campaign manager, “Danny’s the only one who’s talking about issues, while Sharron and Sue club each other.”

I guess that’s why Danny was not doing as well in the polls.

Sue Lowden has snagged national attention for comments at a recent town hall meeting in Nevada in which she said that patients could barter with their doctors for health care — she suggested chickens as a once acceptable remittance for medical services. Easy for Sue Lowden to say since I’m sure that health care coverage is not an issue for her now and certainly wouldn’t be if she wins the November election and lands in the US Senate.

Sharron Angle, on the other hand, is of a more generous spirit, as Sue Lowden pointed out in her now-viral ad claiming that Angle had supported a program designed to use taxpayer dollars to provide prisoners with massages and spa treatments — a program of “detoxification protocols” attributed to the founder of the Church of Scientology.

Angle, who campaigned as a morally driven Christian crusader all about cracking down on government spending (and thereby securing the blessing of outfits like Tea Party Express and the Government is not God PAC), decided it might be best to purge her website of any whiffs of Scientology, like her fundraising work with celebrity Scientologist Jenna Elfman.

Elsewhere we have similar shenanigans in what has become known as the Polygraph Primary in South Carolina where Republican Nikki Haley is seeking to replace sex-scandalized Mark Sanford as candidate for Governor. As soon as Haley appeared to “show some legs” in the contest, rumors started to swirl about Haley’s own sex life. Not one, but two, men came forward to allege that they had known the otherwise married Haley “in the biblical sense.”

Both civic-minded champions came forward armed with evidence of the veracity of their claims: one provided text messages and phone logs to make his case; the other brought along polygraph results. Not to be outdone, another of Haley’s Republican opponents, Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer jumped on the polygraph bandwagon to prove he had nothing to do with any of it.

According to Alex Pereene, covering the story for Salon, one of the purported lovers is, “Larry Marchant, a local lobbyist and former strategist for Haley opponent (and dimbulb bigot) Andre Bauer, says he had a one-night stand with Haley at a ‘school choice convention’ in 2008.”

The local Fox affiliate was happy to administer a polygraph test to confirm Marchant’s story; the results — inconclusive.

Pereene goes on to note that, “Marchant, suspiciously, ‘admitted’ to the indiscretion the day he was fired from the Bauer campaign, less than a week before today’s election.”

“Haley told the local media that all these allegations happened as soon as polls showed her with a lead over her rivals.”

I don’t know about you, but I have no interest in seeing any of these Yahoos in high office. As parents, most of us wouldn’t want them teaching in our schools so why, in God’s name, would we let them run the country? Maybe it’s a lack of viable alternatives…?

This astonishingly cute little kid is my second youngest grandson, Wyatt (with his once-cute father, Ted). If you live in Connecticut, do as the kid says. Vote for Jonathan Harris for Secretary of State.

…when you could register low-income voters in far greater numbers with a national ID card?

As DDay reported, the Reid-Schumer-Menendez draft on Immigration Reform calls for a national ID card (which they call a “biometric” or “fraud proof” social security card). Perhaps in a move to placate civil libertarians, the draft insists the card will only be used for employment.

It will be unlawful for any person, corporation; organization local, state, or federal law enforcement officer; local or state government; or any other entity to require or even ask an individual cardholder to produce their social security card for any purpose other than electronic verification of employment eligibility and verification of identity for Social Security Administration purposes.

Now, let’s pretend for a moment that this national ID program would actually fix the problem of employers trying to hire cheap, vulnerable labor rather than paying market rate wages. Let’s pretend for a moment that this national ID program would avoid all of the security and privacy issues that such a program will be bound to have.

Why in fuck’s name would anyone with a “D” next to their name advocate for a national card — of any sort — without at the same time attaching it to automatic voter registration, also tied to the card? Why would the Democratic party propose any national program that did not, at the same time, insist on getting rid of our byzantine voter registration system that leaves large chunks of the population exposed to disenfranchisement?

Even if this is just a stunt designed to prove Democrats are “serious” about compromise so they can embarrass the bigots even more for their refusal to accept the compromise, why would you ever miss the opportunity to tie a universal registration card to a potential fix to the problems in our election system?

Greg Palast tells us, in the article from which the following is excerpted. (h/t to Reconstitution 2.0)

What moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, US citizens all, who are daring to vote — and daring to vote Democratic by more than two-to-one. Unless this demographic locomotive is halted, Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast. Or, if you like, tortillas…

Brewer, then Secretary of State, had organized a racially loaded purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush. Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer’s command, no less than 100,000 voters, overwhelmingly Hispanics, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected…

The weapon she used to slice the Arizona voter rolls was a 2004 law, known as “Prop 200,” which required proof of citizenship to register. It is important to see the Republicans’ latest legislative horror show, sanctioning cops to stop residents and prove citizenship, as just one more step in the party’s desperate plan to impede Mexican-Americans from marching to the ballot box.

[By the way, no one elected Brewer. Weirdly, Barack Obama placed her in office last year when, for reasons known only to the Devil and Rahm Emanuel, the President appointed Arizona’s Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano to his cabinet, which automatically moved Republican Brewer into the Governor’s office.]

I didn’t realize how liberal the United Kingdom had become. Of course this is a country where the Conservatives are solidly for the National Health Service, an overtly socialist health-care system, so you know something’s up. Maybe it’s the Prozac in their water; in 2004 there were reportedly 24 million prescriptions for antidepressants in a country with just under 60 million inhabitants. But we’ve probably got at least as high a proportion of folks high on prescriptions in the US, and here they don’t stereotype as liberal.

Sure, you say, but the NHS there is like Social Security for us, the third rail. After all, look at how conservative Labour has become, leading the charge in Europe for the Iraq war everyone else was skeptical of, and attacking civil liberties with all the gusto of a Clinton or Bush. New Labour is to Old Labour as Clinton Democrats are to FDR Democrats.

Well, here’s what I offer as evidence, from an unimpeachable source. You might have heard that the leader of the third party, the Liberal Democrats, was generally agreed to have won the first-ever American-style televised election debate among the three party leaders, who would become Prime Minister if their party gained enough seats. Here in the US, of course, we deal with problems like Nick Clegg’s counter narrative simply by restricting the debates to candidates the two major parties approve.

So who are the Lib Dems, and what do they stand for? You can read the voluminous reports of the debate, or take a one-page quiz on which party you’d agree with most. I’m a Green there too, if Greens are considered, Lib Dem if not; and this has been my result in UK politics polls for years.

After all, in Britain right now the supposed liberal party, Labour, which had to scrap its plans for mandatory national ID cards due to widespread resistance, wants to extend the pre-charge detention limit, which I believe is a GWOT-era manifestation and thus a Labour invention, from 28 days to 42. Conservatives are fine with 28 days, but interestingly also propose such reforms as a Bill of Rights and stripping local authorities of surveillance power — actual conservative positions. Lib Dems want the limit reduced to 14 days, plus what the Tories want, plus some other stuff like protecting non-violent protest and extending the Freedom of Information Act. Who’s right wing here?

And it’s not just civil liberties: on transportation, environment, relations with Europe, foreign policy, I’m with the Lib Dems. Occasionally, according to the quizzes and comparisons, I’m with Labour, mostly on economic issues, and I think I ended up with the Conservatives on transportation, who want to build a bunch of new high-speed rail. Their damn Conservative party is so far to the left of our whole political system!

This entire rant was provoked by reading an article in the Times, and no I don’t mean the Murdoch paper. It consistently referred to the Conservatives as center-right, Labour as center-left, and the Lib Dems as centrist. No wonder Americans are confused about what’s happening abroad! The Times has always had certain blind spots, like Israel and Venezuela; but I thought they’d at least have someone who knew more about British politics than the readers.

To me the most interesting prospect is that of a hung Parliament, where no party gets enough votes to govern on its own. In the weird system Britain uses, Labour could actually poll third in total votes and still get the most seats in a hung Parliament. In that case, which looks increasingly likely, the Lib Dems will be kingmakers. What will they demand in return for coöperation? It’s been sugggested that they want election reform. Which will change everything.

Where’s the American counterpart?

From Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen:

On today’s episode of CNN’s “State of the Union,” viewers can tune in to find yet another Sunday interview with last year’s unsuccessful presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). For those keeping score, this will be McCain’s 14th Sunday morning appearance since President Obama’s inauguration in January. That’s 38 Sundays, for an average of a McCain appearance every 2.7 weeks.

Oldtimers will recall with what boring regularity Walter Mondale was invited onto the talk shows in 1985, Michael Dukakis in 1993, Al Gore in 2001, and John Kerry in 2005.

I run the following first as an admirable piece of snark, but also read Colin McEnroe’s whole posting here, for news on why Japan is buying up American political blogs — and for more on the wonderful candidacy of wrestling queen Linda McMahon for Chris Dodd’s senate seat.

While were on the subject of Chris Dodd, I wholeheartedly support his reelection, not in spite of the fact that he accepted a handcrafted mortage on his home from subprime grifter Anthony Mozilo but because he did.

Dodd’s indiscreet mortgage was pretty tame stuff as Congressional behavior goes, but nevertheless he is now obliged to be a bulldog on reform of the financial sector. And that particular strain of bulldog is pretty scarce on Capitol Hill.

Okay, back to the snark:

Alan Schlesinger was the Republican nominee for Senate in Connecticut, and it’s generally accepted that he would have found that experience a lot more enjoyable if the Republican Party had actually decided to support him. Instead, Joe Lieberman ran on the slogan, “There is no principle of the Democratic Party that I am not prepared to swap for a reasonably good chocolate chip cookie,” and Republicans took that as a sign they should probably vote for him.

Bad Attitudes has just hired, at the usual rates, a chief European correspondent. She is Jennie Erin Smith, a Florida journalist and author currently expatriated to Germany. Here is her first report from the dark heart of Sozialismus.

I left Germany for a month to attend to some business at home, and when I came back, ten days ago, it seemed more time had passed than I’d realized. The hills around St. Wendel, formerly wet and green, had dried to an ugly yellow, the whole landscape cocooned by an unfamiliar dry heat.

The one change I had eagerly anticipated, and was flabbergasted not to see any evidence of, was the end of a dubious excavation in front of my apartment. That minor project – the ripping up of about a quarter mile of street, changing out some pipes, and replacing a perfectly workable asphalt sidewalk with a decorative, woven-looking pattern of cement bricks, began in the spring, after the German government’s 50 billion Euros worth of stimulus really started flowing, and they flowed a good deal faster here than back home, though no one here has any real idea how all this will be paid for, either.

So every morning at 7 a.m. and no later the publicly funded jackhammers start, and though the heat is mild enough in St. Wendel that no one even bothers with air-conditioning, the work is over by about noon, when the guys sit around the tables outside the bakery looking very satisfied with themselves. This has something to do with Kurzarbeit, the shortened-workday program meant to keep unemployment from rising. There is no obvious reason this particular project couldn’t start later in the day, sparing us a lot of misery, but this is how it’s done.

My downstairs neighbor, a retired diplomat named Mertens, is far more pissed off than I am about the interminable project, because it’s his taxes. He goes to all the council meetings and said no one had ever mentioned the necessity of the decorative sidewalk until the stimulus. Every afternoon, when the equipment lies about dormant and unprotected, he walks the site with a serious expression, as though surveying casualties on a battlefield. “This — waste!” he yelled up to my window yesterday. “They will never finish. Never. Not for months.”

Angela Merkel and her fellow Christian Democrats were pissed off this week, too, by Vera Lengsfeld, a blonde, middle-aged CDU politician running for a seat representing Kreuzberg, a very left-wing Berlin district where Lengsfeld stands no chance in September.

A desperate Lengsfeld decided to use her melons to get votes, which would have been fine had she stopped there, but then she co-opted the Chancellor’s melons, too. The Lengsfeld campaign poster showed both women in low-cut evening dresses — Merkel’s rather striking photo was snapped at an opera last year. “We have more to offer” was Lengsfeld’s tag line (see below). This is how the German equivalent of Republicans behave.

“German economy unexpectedly grows in second quarter” was this morning’s headline, all over the place.

Speaking as one who was paying taxes back then, I would gladly have kicked in to give Todd Tiahrt’s mom the chance to deny us his great mind:

From McClatchy Newspapers:

…Speaking on the House floor, Representative Todd Tiahrt wondered: What if President Obama’s mom had had the chance for a taxpayer-funded abortion?

“If that financial incentive was in place, is it possible that his mother may have taken advantage of it?” he asked.

Tiahrt reasoned, “If you think of it in human terms, there is a financial incentive that will be put in place, paid for by tax dollars, that will encourage women who are single parents, living below the poverty level, to have the opportunity for a free abortion. If you take that scenario and apply it to many of the great minds we have today, who would we have been deprived of? Our president grew up in a similar circumstance.”

Tiahrt, who is running in the Republican Senate primary in Kansas next year, mentioned Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, too, asking “is it possible that we would be denied his great mind?”

Wonderful post on unions by Joe Bageant today. The taste below contains a quote — the one about one man, one vote — that was new to me. The unnamed speaker had nothing to worry about. In two short years the Supreme Court would solve his problem by ruling in Buckley v. Valeo that money was the functional equivalent of votes: the more of the former you had, the more of the latter you could buy.

If a few pricks and gangsters have occasionally seized power over the dignity of labor, countless more calculating, bloodless and malevolent pricks — the capitalist elites — have always held most of the cards — Gould could sneer, “I can always hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” And why a speaker at the U.S. Business Conference Board in 1974 could arrogantly declare, “One man, one vote has undermined the power of business in all capitalist countries since World War II.” And why that same year Business Week magazine said, “It will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow — the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more. Nothing in modern economic history compares with the selling job that must now be done to make people accept this new reality.”

George W. Bush came close to winning the 2000 presidential election by pretending to be a closet Democrat — this being the barely-coded message of his “compassionate conservative” nonsense.

And Reagan won the 1984 presidential election fair and square by doing the same thing, although this is less generally understood. A while back I went into the question in some depth. I’m dusting off that 1988 piece now not because it’s particularly relevant to anything in the news, but because I was reminded of it yesterday when I posted that old video from Ronzo’s pink period.

And because it’s my party and I’ll post if I want to. So here goes:

Now Ronald Reagan has beaten the Democrats twice — not because he was an elephant, but because he had done such a good job of looking like a donkey.

Most foreigners could no more tell a Democrat from a Republican than they could distinguish between the male and the female of the Galapagos tortoise. But just as the tortoises are able to sort themselves out, so can we Americans. In the narrow mainstream of our politics, ranging from kind-of-far right to pretty-far right, the Democrats are the liberals and the Republicans are the conservatives.

The normal way to tell a liberal from a conservative is that the liberal is an optimist, while the conservative is a pessimist. The liberal imagines that the world can be changed for the better. The conservative imagines that it can’t. He looks into his own heart, supposes that all hearts must be similar, and concludes that very little can be expected of mankind.

Others must be as ready to attack him as he is to attack them, and so praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. Government is bound to be organized theft, so that the only remaining question for the intelligent man is who gets robbed. Liberated woman would prove to be no better than liberated man has been, and thus, in the interest of reducing the general level of mischief, should be kept barefoot in the winter and pregnant in summer. Only a sucker would believe that faith could move mountains, but greed will do the job just fine. Look at Appalachia. The mark of Cain is on all of us, and we are none of us any better than we should be. “In Adam’s fall,” as the New England Primer said, “we sinnèd all.”

These things being so, the path of history must lead downward, and it would be useless to stand in the way of this general decline. About the best a conservative can hope for is to preserve the status quo; the absolute best is to turn back the clock for a few moments, so as briefly to recapture some status quo ante…

In his most usual guise, then, the conservative is full of gloom and pessimism. He knows our sloth will drive us to bankruptcy, our lust to license; our anger to war; our envy to civil unrest, our covetousness to crime; our gluttony to a triple by-pass; and our pride to a fall.

The point is not whether this view is correct. The point, politically, is whether such pessimism is appealing.

Someone with a more favorable view of mankind’s capacities — someone, in other words, more liberal — might indeed think that the voters were up to hearing a few unpleasant truths.

Carter and Mondale seemed to have thought the country was mature enough for a little castor oil, at any rate. In Carter’s world petroleum was running out and the American Century was in danger of ending before it was over. His was a complicated world that required careful planning to manage.

Nor was Mondale’s world a cheerful one. It, too, required planning and discipline if we were to cope with Reagan’s deficits while at the same time restoring fairness to American life. Carter’s and Mondale’s faith that the voters could grasp these concepts was essentially liberal in its optimism about the human condition. And it was essentially misplaced, as the country showed both men on election day.

Reagan didn’t seem to see the world this way at all. In Mondale’s America, as the Republican commercials said, it was always April 15; in Reagan’s it was always the Fourth of July. Whether by temperament or by design Reagan ran as an optimist, which is to say that he ran as a Democrat.

His issues may have been traditional Republican ones, but this misses the point. If you campaign in poetry but govern in prose, as Governor Cuomo likes to say, then Reagan’s poetry was Democratic.

In both campaigns, but especially in the 1984 one, Reagan went beyond poetic license and into outright theft. The bands at his rallies played “Happy Days Are Here Again.” He adopted Roosevelt and Truman as Republican saints, and it worked; he sounded more like a Democrat than Mondale or Carter did. He talked about tomorrow with the cheerful optimism of the Happy Warrior, Hubert Humphrey; he talked about America’s role in the world with the mindless, adolescent macho of the early Kennedy; he offered guns and butter with the fiscal abandon of Lyndon Johnson.

In fact he made Johnson and those other Democrats look like pikers. They wanted to tax and spend; by 1984 it was clear that all Reagan wanted to do was spend. He was the Peter Pan of politics, never growing up and settling down. He was the grasshopper and the Democrats were the ants. Never mind what he actually said; after four years, everybody knew he didn’t mean all that stuff anyway. What he actually was, in both races, was the Democrat.

But how could he be the Democrat when he opposed virtually every social measure the Democrats had passed, over the years and over his dead body? The trick was that he went the Democrats one better. He said we had once had all these good things for nothing, and we could have them again for the same attractive price.

Cut red tape and the mighty engine of American industry will provide jobs for all. Cut funds for libraries and some new Carnegie will build them once again. Cut taxes for the rich and revenues will go up. Cut Matilda off the Social Security rolls and her children will take her in. Cut funds to enforce environmental and safety laws, and voluntary compliance will go up. Cut forests and you cut air pollution.

Reagan offered no-fault government to the Me Generation and to their parents, who often enough were vagabonding around in their RVs with messages like “I’m Spending My Children’s Inheritance” on the bumpers. (The message on their children’s BMWs was likely to read, “The One Who Dies with the Most Toys Wins.” The apple, the French say, doesn’t fall far from the tree.)

The old folks liked it that Reagan, old folks himself, stood foursquare for God, the nuclear family, enforced pregnancy to term, creationism, prayer in schools, heterosexuality between married adults — none of which would cost a nickel in taxes.

The younger folks had grown up in a world of homosexuals and casual sex and abortion and divorce. They seldom went to church. They saw little of their kids. But they forgave their permissive and nicely naughty Grandpa Ron for all his preaching, because they knew his fingers were crossed. No way he could really mean all those terrible things he kept saying about what had been, after all, his own lifestyle.

Reagan sounded like an optimist because he was able to sell Americans the notion that to retreat to the past was to advance, that yesterday could become tomorrow. That this might not be such a good idea didn’t occur to people who had little knowledge of what yesterday had been like. Their memories were either too short or, like Reagan’s, too selective.

In his 1986 State of the Union message, Reagan gave Congress an unusually explicit (for poetry) statement of his view that progress is just a question of retracing our footsteps:

Never has there been a more exciting time to be alive a time of rousing wonder and heroic achievement. As they said in the film, Back to the Future: ‘Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.’ Well, today, physicists peering into the infinitely small realms of the subatomic particles find reaffirmations of religious faith; astronomers build a space telescope that can see to the edge of the universe and, possibly, back to the moment of creation …

We are going forward with our shuttle flights. We are going forward to build our space station, and we are going forward with research on a new Orient Express that could, by the end of the next decade, take off from Dulles Airport, accelerate up to 25 times the speed of sound, attaining low-earth orbit or flying to Tokyo within two hours. And the same technology transforming our lives can solve the greatest problem of the 20th Century. A security shield can one day render nuclear weapons obsolete and free mankind from the prison of nuclear terror.

It’s all there. Magical time machines to take us back to the 1950s. White-coated scientists ranging out in front of the rest of us and stumbling over, of all the darned things, proof of God and His creation of the world. Trips to the Exotic East with Sidney Greenstreet and the gang in a sure-enough time capsule, this one so fast that you arrive hours before you started out. And the same science that gave us the space shuttle will soon give us a warm and woolly security blanket to keep us safe from the Russian bogeyman.

Never mind that the space shuttle itself just blew up a few weeks ago and that the majority of graduate engineering and science students in America are foreign exchange students. Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

That all this stuff is nonsense doesn’t matter, any more than it matters that the poem “Xanadu” doesn’t make much sense, either. They both invite us not to think, but to dream.

And Reagan’s dreams are appealing. Where Carter and Mondale offered self-improvement, self-criticism, and self-discipline, like a couple of country club conservatives advising the lower classes to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, Reagan offered no-fault government. High-paid volunteers will take your place in the armed services. Never mind about all those dead marines in Lebanon: look at the way our boys rolled over those commies down in Grenada.

Don’t worry, mon. Be happy.

Maybe it has been explained to everybody else’s satisfaction, but I don’t remember reading this odd fact about voter behavior anywhere before. Now, for the first time, I grasp what the hell has actually been going on in the Franken-Coleman mess.

Minnesota’s modern optical scan machines are astonishingly accurate when the voter completely fills the oval with a black pen. But 7 out of 7 peer-reviewed academic studies confirm that Democrats just do not follow this instruction as well as Republicans. Since the recount tallies any ballot with clear evidence of voter intent, Democratic candidate Al Franken’s march to victory was steady — just as predicted here. The State Canvassing Board, including two Supreme Court justices (and only 1 out of 5 members a Democrat), certified Franken’s margin at 225 votes after a hand recount.

Minnesota’s modern optical scanners had close to zero counting errors where the voter filled out the oval, as all obedient persons well-trained in taking SATs reliably did. But 6 out of every 10,000 voters didn’t follow directions, didn’t completely fill in an oval, or made other markings that the machine couldn’t be expected to interpret. That’s 1,672 ballots that were inspected by hand and interpreted by the Canvassing Board, many of them by less-educated or simply rebellious voters.

Mike sends this amazing Popular Science picture, taken from space, of yesterday’s inaugural crowd. It has to be scrolled through at full size to be appreciated, so click on the link above.

In re: Caroline Kennedy and Roland Burris, Dracomicron has said it for me at MyDD. So go over there and read it. Brief excerpt:

What I’m saying is, we need to stop being such outrage addicts. This election season was the most dramatic in modern memory, and there was a lot of stuff that we got outraged over, both legitimate and specious... I get that it will take some time for us to chill the hell out, but we need to do it. Barack Obama needs a functional legislative branch that can work on tackling the huge challenges he faces right away, and whether an appointee can effectively and honestly work at implementing his agenda is a bigger concern to me than if an appointee was selected in the dying throes of a corrupt governor’s career.

This was Hunter S. Thompson’s last dispatch from the presidential campaign of 1972. Try substituting George W. Bush for Nixon and John Kerry for McGovern. It isn’t a perfect fit, but it’s close enough for government work.

This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms about killing anybody else in he world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his imprecise talk about ‘new politics’ and ‘honesty in government,’ is really one of the few men who’ve run for President of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon.

McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.

Jesus! Where will it all end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?

It all ended on November 4 of 1972, when our nation of used car salesmen relected Richard Nixon in a landslide, George McGovern carrying only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

This in spite of the fact that almost a month before election day the Washington Post had led the paper with a story that began as follows:

FBI agents have established that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon's reelection and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President.

That’s how low you have to stoop.

My nephew Will Doolittle is an editor of The Post-Star in Glens Falls, New York. Like so many of us, he teared up on election night. But he had a special reason:

I haven’t felt this sleepy since 1996, when my daughter Zoe was a baby.

Back then, it was the nighttime excitement of having a newborn in the house that had me drowsing at my keyboard during the day.

When I got up in the night to warm a bottle for her, I would carry her down to the couch and turn on the TV and watch old movies while I fed her. My wife would find the two of us on the couch in the mornings — the bottle on the floor, Zoe slumbering on my chest.

Now, it’s the excitement of the election. I became a political junkie over the past few months — switching on CNN or MSNBC or C-SPAN every time I walked through the bedroom at home; checking an expanding list of Web sites every time I shifted in my seat at work (maybe something had changed in the last three and a half minutes!); tuning my radio only to POTUS ’08, the all-day all-politics station.

Back then, being a new father of a black baby, I was enamored of all things African-American. My infatuation with Zoe spilled over into an immediate affection for anyone with brown skin and curly hair. And the feeling seemed to be mutual. When I went out for walks with Zoe and passed black strangers on the street, their faces would inevitably light up and their eyes soften when they saw us.

It might have been my goofy smiles that moved them, but, more likely, it was the sight of the beautiful child accompanying me.

Zoe is much taller now, and I don’t flash that new-dad smile anymore. When she and her sister and her mother and I go out, we’re another family, bound by love and laundry, and that’s how everyone sees us.

Back then, sometimes when I was holding Zoe and trying to put her to sleep, I would read to her Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, because it was short and beautiful and, more than 130 years later, still resonant with truth.

But, when I reached the part about every drop of blood drawn with the lash being paid by another drawn with the sword, I would always get choked up, sometimes so much so that I couldn’t finish.

The last three days have been like that, as I watched Obama speak Tuesday night and saw people in the crowd crying; as I listened to people like Colin Powell talk about the way his entire family, sitting together at home and watching the election returns, wept when they saw Obama had won; as I read essays, even by conservatives, about how wonderful it is that America has elected a black president.

It is not out of happiness for Obama that we weep, but for our country, feeling, in some measure, we are redeemed.

We’ve already got Rahm, and I expect to see Dennis Ross’s name in the news soon. But please God, not Eric Holder as AG.

My sister Patsy went door-to-door for Obama in Michigan, as she wrote about weeks ago here. For weeks my brother Bill worked the phones for Obama in his Pennsylvania hometown, East Stroudsburg. Monroe County, in some small part due to him, went for the Democrat by 11,000 votes.

My lawyer son Ted took unpaid leave to travel to Pennsylvania work the phones as well, and on election day he did sentry duty at two polling places in Philadelphia.

And the blogger Papa Bonk went to Erie County, Pennsylvania to — cut up stickers. The thanks of a grateful nation (and world, for that matter) are due to all four of them, and to hundreds of thousands of others like them, and now here’s Papa Bonk:

Busch (sic) was a continual embarrassment … and finally an endless source of humor. That was his highest value.

Funny how I started getting the idea that it was my fault. Something my daddy told me one election night when he took me and my brother to the county courthouse to watch the election returns come in. “Politics starts with setting up chairs at the committee meeting,” he said, “Somebody has to do it.”

So I went to Pennsylvania…

Friday night before the election I am in Edinboro’s little store front office. I have a stack of sheets of stickers with a nice picture of Barack Obama that say Vote November 4. I am one of three people who are cutting them out and putting them into a box. I am using a little pair of scissors that hurt my hand. Someone asks,“What are you doing that for?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Georgia (the office manager) asked for them.”

“How many will you do?” I am asked.

“As many as it takes to win,” I said.

According to the Raleigh News & Observer:

Democrat Barack Obama is the unofficial winner in North Carolina, but the victory over Sen. John McCain won’t be sealed until provisional ballots are counted and certified next month.

Unofficial returns show Obama ahead by 13,746 votes.

Trends over the last 14 years point to Obama having a wider lead after the provisionals are counted, said Gary Bartlett, executive director of the State Board of Elections.

“I’m going to hold my breath until I die and then you’ll all be sorry” department: from The Kansas City Star—

As of late Wednesday, just more than 121 million votes had been counted in the race for president. In 2004, there were 122.3 million voters.

This year’s number may grow as returns from California and Oregon are added. Still, experts’ predictions that this year’s turnout would far surpass that of 2004 may have been too optimistic.

The main culprit: While Obama’s total vote exceeded that of George Bush’s four years ago by more than a million ballots, McCain’s total votes ended up far short of John Kerry’s losing effort in 2004.

In other words, Republican turnout dipped substantially.

“I always said there was going to be a downturn in the Republican turnout,” said Curtis Gans, a nationally known voting expert.

“There was discouragement about an election it didn’t look like they could win … and right-wing Republicans didn’t see McCain as one of their own.”

First I want to remind everyone once again that I predicted in May, 2007, that Obama would be elected.

However, I admit that I was wrong about who I would vote for. I’m probably gonna regret it soon, maybe even tomorrow, but it was glorious coming home on BART tonight.

San Francisco’s African-American population has dropped in percentage terms in recent years, but the neighborhood I live in is still largely black and Hispanic. Here, fireworks are going off. A black man about 70 was sitting by the BART door with a smile. A white guy in his thirties shook his hand out the way out, and I don’t think they’d even been talking. He and I exchanged smiles, both of us with teary eyes. A Hispanic kid about college age asked if I’d voted, and when I said yes, he asked, “Obama?” I said yes, and we talked about which states had been called.

San Francisco is happy today. I hope I didn’t do something I’ll be sorry for.

But hey, it can’t be that much worse than learning that you’re infatuated with someone who’s unavailable because of gender preference. I did that today, too. God, I love San Francisco.

Click image to enlarge

Ever wondered just what the hell a petard was anyway? Here’s a hint: “ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: from French pétard, from péter ‘break wind.’”

This clip, courtesy of Outta the Cornfield, was made at a GOP rally in Denver.

Funny piece from Ketchup Is a Vegetable. Sample:

We have decided that it is necessary at this stage in the game to RAMP THINGS UP a bit. We’re in the hole, and the old man is wandering all over the place stammering like an idiot. I’ve been tempted to make him lip sync, but our tech guys can’t figure out how to make that work. We tried him on an earpiece so we could direct him a little, but we put an end to it after the Brokaw debate; it just makes him wander around the stage even more, looking for that disembodied voice. No, what we need to do is to now is to employ a much-discussed theory that’s not yet been tried: The mythical “Rove Batshit Crazy Motherfucker.” Yes, it really does exist…

From Doonesbury’s daily feature, “Say What?” —

“For eight U.S. presidential elections during the period 1960-2004, the rapid blinker during debates received fewer overall votes than his opponent. In seven of these eight elections, the rapid blinker also lost the electoral vote and was defeated at the polls.”

— Journal of Psychology observation, cited on net in reference to McCain blinking 3,000 times during the third debate

From The Guardian:

Two hours later, they had filled the centre of the 8,500-seat stadium (though there were still empty seats in the stands) and were kept stamping their feet in the damp cold — first to a Christian rock group and then to Hank Williams, Jr, who sang one populist tune after another, some of them tailored to the current election.

In the original version of his song, Family Tradition, Williams defended his hereditary penchant for drinking Jim Beam and smoking dope. But rewritten as “McCain-Palin Tradition,” the song encourages voters to ignore the “leftwing liberal media” and support the Republican ticket “cuz they’re just like you and ol’ Hank.”

He goes on to explain the causes of the financial crisis: “The bankers didn’t want to make all those bad loans / But Bill Clinton said ‘you got to!’ / Now they want to bail out, what I’m talking about / Is a Democrat liberal hoodoo!”

Williams’s tribute in song to Sarah Palin compared her to a “mama bear” who could be counted upon to “protect your family’s condition” because “If you mess with her cubs, she’s gonna take off the gloves, / That’s an American female tradition.. It ended with a musical question to the vice-presidential candidate: “How can you be so smart and be such a good lookin’ dish?”

For a long time now it has been obvious that Democratic administrations, historically, are better for the economy than Republican ones. Why hasn’t the peasantry noticed, then? Why do so many of the chickens vote for Colonel Sanders?

Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly has an intriguing answer: that GOP presidents are able to pass anti-inflation measures and hand out money to their rich friends most easily during their first year, when their political power is at its peak.

These measures do nothing for the rest of us, of course. However:

Republicans, by contrast, tend to focus their honeymoon period on tax cuts for high earners and inflation-fighting measures. This may produce poor economic results on average, but it turns out to be timed to briefly produce a spike in activity three years in the future.

Add in some extra generous spending just before election years and a possible partisan boost from the Fed (research by University of Texas economist James K. Galbraith suggests that, controlling for economic conditions, the Fed’s monetary policy during election years is looser for Republican presidents than for Democrats), and you get consistently great economic performance during campaign seasons.

These odd and sad parallels hadn’t occurred to me, but they did to Jim Fallows:

The plotlines and character-motivations of the two Bush Administrations, 41 & 43, are perhaps too broad and obvious ever to support a first-rate novel. At least that is what reviews of Oliver Stone’s W suggest to those, like me, who have not seen the film. (Not yet on the pirate-video market here in Beijing. Maybe next week.) Or if could be simply that Stone and other Bush chroniclers have taken a family saga of Shakespearean scale and presented it without corresponding richness and nuance.

Still, someone will eventually do something compelling with the intersecting stories of John McCain and Colin Powell, including the latest chapter that began today.

Close contemporaries, born eight months apart; both headed toward military careers, but from very different starting points — immigrants’ son, versus son and grandson of admirals. Lives changed by the Vietnam War, including ultimately putting both on the track to top-level politics.

Powell declining to take what could have been a promising path to the Republican nomination in 2000; McCain trying hard for that nomination but losing out to a slime-rich campaign by GW Bush and Karl Rove. It was during a debate in this campaign that McCain delivered his famous and withering line directly to Bush’s face, about his campaign’s character-assassination ads. The line, spat out with more contempt than anything McCain later displayed toward Obama, was “You should be ashamed” — and, when Bush tried to answer, “You should be ashamed.”

After that, diverging arcs: Powell providing cover and legitimacy for the Bush-Cheney WMD argument in favor of the Iraq war, and despite acclaim for his record as Secretary of State clearly understanding how his historical standing had been diminished. McCain increasing his “maverick” reputation, before that term became a joke, right through his defense of John Kerry against the Bush-Rove Swift Boat ads in 2004.

And now the arcs reverse again. Powell, with his endorsement of Obama, taking a cleansing step not because he is endorsing a Democrat or the person who, instead of him, has a chance to become the first black President. But rather because Powell is at last free to say the many “Cut the crap!” things that his fealty to the Administration had kept him from saying publicly while in office or until now, ranging from the perverse effects of anti-Muslim hysteria to the dangers of scorched earth political campaigns.

Meanwhile, John McCain, once laid low by those very tactics, embracing them as his best chance for victory this year. Powell, tainted by his association with the Bush Administration, choosing at age 71 to restore his reputation for recognition of higher principles. McCain, who earlier opposed Bush tactics, choosing at age 72 a path that in the end is likely to bring him both defeat and dishonor. Maybe we need a Shakespeare to do this story justice.

I promised another Beatles song earlier this week and here it is, sung by the incomparable Nina Simone. Another Simone song will follow next week, a post in which I will explain why I don’t agree with my good friend and mentor, Jerome Doolittle, one generation ahead of me in age and several in wisdom, in his previous post. I believe that the pen — or perhaps the keyboard — is mightier than the click, and will explain why.

From AFP photographer Emmanuel Dunand comes the signature image of last night’s debate: the image that McCainiacs never, never, ever wanted to see:

Click image to enlarge

Ben Smith has an interesting post up quoting at length from an email sent by a Republican consultant he knows. The consultant has been pushing for hard-hitting anti-Obama ads, and recently got the chance to test the kind of ad he wants with a focus group from an upper-Midwest state.

He wasn’t particularly happy about the results:

The two most unreal moments of my professional life of watching focus groups:

54 year-old white male, voted Kerry ’04, Bush ’00, Dole ’96, hunter, NASCAR fan… hard for Obama said: “I’m gonna hate him the minute I vote for him. He’s gonna be a bad president. But I won’t ever vote for another god-damn Republican. I want the government to take over all of Wall Street and bankers and the car companies and Wal-Mart run this county like we used to when Reagan was President.”

The next was a woman, late 50s, Democrat but strongly pro-life. Loved B. and H. Clinton, loved Bush in 2000. “Well, I don’t know much about this terrorist group Barack used to be in with that Weather guy but I’m sick of paying for health insurance at work and that’s why I’m supporting Barack.”

I felt like I was taking crazy pills. I sat on the other side of the glass and realized… this really is the Apocalypse. The Seventh Seal is broken and its time for eight years of pure, delicious crazy…

Absolutely. What else can you call it when people want health care, object to handing over their life savings to a bunch of bankers whose scam fell apart, and aren’t comfortable with being spied on or sent to war on false pretences? Stone-cold crazy, that’s us.

The funny thing is, I can kind of imagine what the consultant might be thinking, or perhaps more accurately feeling. You saw, no doubt, the recently reported study that seems to show a genetic component to political leanings. Apparently conservatives are more easily spooked by unpleasant images, while liberals can see pictures of spiders on faces and not react as strongly.

So this guy is perhaps actually in thrall to his ideology, and has come to believe that Obama hangs out with terrorists and will destroy Truth, Justice, and the American Way, or at least the White American Way. He sees his influence waning as the team he tied his fortune to goes down big time. He’s afraid.

Welcome to the club.

Events and personalities are combining in ways that point to a very strong showing by the Democrats next month. With the last debate scheduled for this evening, it appears that Obama has calmed the fears of the late tuners-in that he might be too Other. So the competition for the White House is now mainly a prism for viewing the Senate races.

If, that is, the election isn’t stolen again.

Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. believe that the 2008 elections have already been stolen. What’s an American to do given these circumstances? They suggest: “Steal it back”.

[…]

Those who are at most risk for having their vote stolen are new voters, people of color, low-income, elderly and swing state voters, Palast told Truthout.

In 2006, Palast says that 40 percent of citizens who were purged from the voter rolls in California had Islamic, Vietnamese, Chinese and Hispanic names. These names were at most risk for misspellings.

The Steal Back Your Vote Guidelines promote the importance of going to the secretary of state Web site for your state to confirm that you are registered ahead of the election.

So make sure you’re registered, eh?

In a post from about a year and a half ago I began this way:

I continue to predict that our next President will be Barack Obama. Unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be able to vote for him.

A couple months back, I chipped in a couple more unsurprising predictions (“The price of gasoline will drop by at least a dollar between now and the election. After Obama’s election it will go back up.” Duh.) The only one that generated any discussion was about Obama winning big in November. This was about a week into August, which seems nearly a lifetime ago now. I was neither student nor teacher, Sarah Palin’s vault onto the stage was three weeks in the future, and I didn’t realize precisely what a piece of crap John McCain really is.

When he plucked Palin from obscurity, I initially considered it evidence of his unstable mental situation. That evening, I realized what was happening: “McCain hasn’t screwed the pooch; they’ve given up on him”.

Suppose Rove’s models show the Republicans bound for a historic thrashing in November. The only remaining question is whether they can keep the foothold of the filibuster. That requires retaining enough Republican Senate seats, which might be possible if the base turns out. McCain’s hopeless, so they can use the VP slot to rile up the base. They need those Senators re-elected, and they’ve got to get past all this corruption and scandal stuff ASAP. Republicans: the Party of Change! And Godliness! And the Democrats don’t have all the hot women, after all!

Today’s Steve Thomma piece for McClatchy agrees. His experts are looking at gains for Democrats everywhere, and they no longer consider a filibuster-proof majority out of the question.

Building on the Democrats’ sweeping wins two years ago when they seized control of both chambers of Congress, big gains this year would be reminiscent of the Republican gains in 1978 and 1980 that delivered “the Reagan Revolution.”

Former Reagan political adviser Ed Rollins likened today’s landscape to that in 1980, when voters were angry at President Jimmy Carter and the Democrats and turned to Reagan in droves once they felt comfortable with the idea of him as president.

“Barack has met the threshold,” Rollins said. “Once Reagan met the threshold, people wanted to get rid of Carter and they did in a landslide. This is going to turn into a landslide.”

The best news by far is how the Republican rot is affecting candidates nationwide. Who would have thought six months ago that Saxby Chambliss would be in trouble, and Elizabeth Dole actually behind? I thought I saw signs of bad moons rising for Mitch McConnell, and I’ve long felt that Norm Coleman is going down.

But it’s not just Republican rot. It’s also Democratic excitement. And fear.

A dispatch from Michigan, the state McCain forgot but my sister Pat Shure didn’t. She is an honest-to-God hockey mom who knew Bill Ayers slightly back in the 60s when he ran the Children’s Community PreSchool in Ann Arbor.

Lots of things can happen when you’re registering voters in the blue collar suburbs of southeastern Michigan.

Going from one little house to the next past the occasional American flag or tattered Red Wings banner or UAW emblem or “For Sale” sign, most people were friendly. Maybe they just weren’t afraid to open their door to a grandmotherly-looking person in the middle of a Saturday afternoon.

When I asked if anybody in the house needed to register, most said “Nope, we already are,” and as always a few answered, “Nah, they’re all crooks.” (Actually, a bit hard to dispute.) Obama supporters said so right away and seemed to know instinctively that I was one of them, maybe because I was THERE.

I was a little hesitant as I knocked on a door with a Police Officers Association decal:

“Sir, are you registered to vote?”

“Un, hah, but I’m not gonna, never do.”

“Have you ever voted?”

“Sure, I voted for Nixon.”

“How’d that go”?

He chuckled. “Not so good.”

An angry dog barking at the window of another house and the sign on the door persuaded me to move on. The sign read, “My shitty opinion is none of your *!#! ing business.”

Sometimes you get to end the day with something really sweet. I was standing outside a Dollar Store in downriver Detroit late one rainy evening, smiling and holding a clipboard that read REGISTER WITH ME, LAST CHANCE. I approached a woman and asked if she was registered to vote yet. Standing ramrod straight she replied, “Chile, I voted for Truman!”

Sarah Palin’s M.O. during her brief political life has been to cozy up to some unsuspecting mentor, then knife him in the back and step over him. Now she’s at it again. Colin McEnroe spells it out:

Palin is pretty clearly running a double campaign these days — one for Nov. 4 and the other for her future position as a leading Republican voice during the Obama era.

It was most noticeable when she openly questioned McCain’s decision to pull out of Michigan. What kind of language do you think McCain used when he heard about that one? This is not a guy who reacts well to being crossed or second-guessed, especially by a woman he yanked out of obscurity five weeks ago.

Since then Palin has announced a bare-knuckles strategy of denouncing Obama as a strange guy with terrorist pals and Stokely Carmichael attitudes. She has again questioned McCain’s tactics — this time his reluctance to brawl and spill blood and bring up Rev. Wright — and openly announced that she will advise him to follow her lead.

Do you not see a little needle directed at her boss in the way Palin worded this? Particularly the phrase “I guess”:

“I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more,” Palin said, “because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that — with, I don’t know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn’t get up and leave — to me, that does say something about character.”

“I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up,” Palin added.

You guess? That, my friends, is classic passive-ag[g]ressive criticism…

So that’s at least twice that Wilderness Woman has told her boss to man up. First she called him on the cut-and-run from Michigan. Then she told him to knock off the soft stuff. My guess is that McCain is steaming. He’d send her home if he could. No wonder he renewed his vows to Joe [Lieberman] last night.

Meanwhile, Palin’s no dummy. She can read polls, and she knows that a loss is more likely than a win. She has become a favorite Republican of Republicans…

If they lose this election, the GOP will probably want to get her out of Alaska and into a Senate seat where she can be closer to the limelight and more able to speak out for the loyal opposition. She knows this, and that’s why she’s running two races. McCain may go down, and, if so, she’s not going down with him.

Charlie Peters founded The Washington Monthly and edited it until his retirement in 2001. A “relentless centrist,” he focussed all his life not on party but on process. How does government actually work or not work? If the latter, how can it be fixed?

When Charlie speaks on this topic, he is worth listening to. Particularly when he speaks about a legislator who is being regularly accused of legislative ineffectiveness by a man whose own legislative successes, considering how long he has been in Congress, are negligible.

Enough already. Read:

…It had not been easy for a Harvard man to become a regular guy to his colleagues. Obama had managed to do so by playing basketball and poker with them and, most of all, by listening to their concerns. Even Republicans came to respect him. One Republican state senator, Kirk Dillard, has said that “Barack had a way both intellectually and in demeanor that defused skeptics.”

Obama proved persuasive enough that the bill passed both houses of the legislature, the Senate by an incredible 35 to 0. Then he talked Blagojevich into signing the bill, making Illinois the first state to require such videotaping.

Obama didn’t stop there. He played a major role in passing many other bills, including the state’s first earned-income tax credit to help the working poor and the first ethics and campaign finance law in 25 years (a law a Post story said made Illinois “one of the best in the nation on campaign finance disclosure”). Obama’s commitment to ethics continued in the U.S. Senate, where he co-authored the new lobbying reform law that, among its hard-to-sell provisions, requires lawmakers to disclose the names of lobbyists who “bundle” contributions for them.

Taken together, these accomplishments demonstrate that Obama has what Dillard, the Republican state senator, calls a “unique” ability “to deal with extremely complex issues, to reach across the aisle and to deal with diverse people.” In other words, Obama’s campaign claim that he can persuade us to rise above what divides us is not just rhetoric…

From Politico:

Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman thinks that in order for Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to beat her Democratic rival, Sen. Joe Biden, in tonight’s debate, she needs to keep it from turning into an “IQ test.”

“What she needs to do tonight is get this public consideration of her back to who she is and her strong points and, frankly, get it away from being a, kind of, IQ test — she's plenty smart — getting it away from being a, sort of, final college exam,” Lieberman said on MSNBC…

How much IQ does it take to avoid admitting in public that your vice-presidential candidate couldn’t pass an IQ test?

Here’s a great rant from Alicia Morgan, whose enemy you would definitely not want to be.

…George W. Bush, in celebrating his own lack of intellect and curiosity, has made a virtue of ignorance, and by breaking the glass ceiling on stupidity, demonstrated to those who already think this way that there are no limits to where ignorance can take you. He has also demonstrated that governing by ignorance is not only possible, but easily done, and that ignorance can beat intelligence, given the right set of circumstances…

Case in point is the love child of George Bush and Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin. While George Bush is a relative latecomer to the fundamentalist fold, he insisted that “God told him to attack Iraq.” He relies on his ‘gut’ instead of brains, and considers that a completely acceptable, even preferable choice.

Sarah Palin takes those traits to a whole different level. No Johnny-come-lately she, Palin was steeped in fundamentalist principles from birth, and is both far more radically religious and far less educated than George W. Bush. Which, in the Bizarro-World of right-wing logic, makes her...even better! According to the Bush standard, all you need is a mule-stubborn refusal to yield to be a successful world leader, and intelligence just gets in the way of that. Sarah Palin describes it as “you can’t blink.” What she means is “you can’t think.”

This demonization of intelligence is getting worse, not better, as the ignorant and venal are rewarded ever more richly in our society. If the unthinkable come to pass, with a McCain presidency Sarah Palin — would-be book-banner, science-hater, reproductive-rights-destroyer, Rapture-ready end-timer — will be a fibrillation away from being the leader of the free world. One would not think it possible, but she makes George W. Bush look like Noam Chomsky.

Hell, yes, I’m an elitist. You should be, too.

Some conservative thinkers are finally saying what needs to be said about Sarah Palin. They deserve some credit for coming around to reality at least on this issue. And if you want to, reach out to them and write them and tell them you appreciate their willingness to put country ahead of party on this issue. Read the rest of the story from The Grey Lady here for a more complete list of those conservatives who no longer support Palin. The Republican party is going to need more free thinkers to create a new ideology that puts country ahead of party and also one that works, and these folks might be some of their best and brightest. I don't know their complete ideological record but on this one issue they have shown good judgement. Good for them.

Kathleen Parker, a writer for TownHall.com, reversed her initial support for the Republican vice-presidential nominee and said Ms. Palin should drop out. Put the country first, she basically advised, by saying you need to go take care of your family first.

In a devastating assessment, Ms. Parker writes:

Palin didn’t make a mess cracking the glass ceiling. She simply glided through it.

It was fun while it lasted.

Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.

No one hates saying that more than I do. Like so many women, I’ve been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I’ve also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted.

I’m sorry, but I just can’t help myself. I’m in love. Here’s another of Sara Benincasa’s small masterpieces. In this one she discovers Africans, Joe Lieberman, and other exotic fauna native to the lower 48.

Close readers will know that I am a huge fan of lapel pins. Others may go here to find out just how huge. Naturally, then, I was impressed by the large, double-flag lapel device of the true Übervaterlandsfreund that Sarah Palin has been wearing since her anointment. God forbid we should think she was running for vice president of Brazil or the United Arab Emirates.

And yet it slipped past me that she has lately abandoned Old Glory entirely. It didn’t slip past Don da Man, who sends the picture below and wonders what the hell that thing is. My first thought was Gold Star Mother, except the star is blue. Anybody actually know?

Here’s Timothy P. Carney of the Evans-Novak Political Report. The noncrazy wing of the Republican Party seems to be in a state of deep despair.

3. Congressional Republicans and conservatives, meanwhile, are almost completely at a loss. Republicans are still finding their footing after denying for months that the economy is endangered. Frantic behind closed doors, they seem unable to propose any solution that approaches the magnitude of the problem. Promising more drilling, capital-gains-tax cuts, and full business expensing comes across as laughable — the same things the GOP was pushing while saying the economy was strong.
4. At the presidential level, it’s not only that McCain and Palin lack credentials and knowledge about economics, but McCain also lacks a real rudder. As the GOP nominee, he has taken up free-market talk, but does he really have any roots in a philosophy? Does Palin have the clout or the know-how to guide McCain? The answer to both questions is probably not.
5. When Republicans highlight the Democratic big-government programs that contributed to the mess — Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act directing private capital in low-income housing — they lack conviction and credibility, having long been champions of policies such as IRAs and 401(k)’s driving money to Wall Street, or the home-mortgage interest deduction and the “ownership society.”

By now, many of you have read that John McCain has suspended his campaign and said he wants to cancel Friday night’s scheduled debate with Obama.

The first polling results are in from SurveyUSA since this news came out and Americans overwhelmingly say: Let the debate go on!

America’s First Reaction: Friday's McCain-Obama Debate Should Still Be Held On Friday, But Perhaps with New Focus: Immediately after John McCain's announcement 3 pm ET today, Wednesday 09/24/08, that he was suspending his campaign and seeking to postpone Friday’s schedule presidential debate, SurveyUSA interviewed 1,000 adults nationwide. Key findings:

A majority of Americans say the debate should be held. Just 10% say the debate should be postponed. A sizable percentage of Americans, 36%, think the focus of the debate should be modified to focus more on the economy. 3 of 4 Americans say the presidential campaign should continue. Just 14% say the presidential campaign should be suspended. If Friday's debate does not take place 46%, of Americans say that would be bad for America.

I don’t usually pay attention to Herr Bush, but I must admit that I’m going to watch to see what kind of fraud he tries to pull over on us tonight. The Republicans must be getting real nervous with the results of the polls Jerry just posted. The election isn’t close enough to steal at this point and they’ll do anything to try to get their “cover up the theft” candidate into office. Watch for the weird to keep happening. We are living in perilous times. Too bad old Cut and Run McCain seems to be trying to avoid this debate. That old soldier seems to have lost his fighting ability.

…there’s a silver lining in that cloud over Wall Street:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Democrat Barack Obama has opened a 9-point lead over Republican John McCain in the U.S. presidential race amid turmoil in the financial system and growing pessimism about the economy, according to a Washington Post-ABC News national opinion poll released on Wednesday.

Among likely voters, the poll found Obama now leads McCain by 52 percent to 43 percent. Two weeks ago the race was essentially even, with McCain at 49 percent and Obama at 47 percent, the Post reported…

See what you think of this, via James Fallows. It’s by Chuck Spinney, retired Pentagon analyst, truth-to-power teller and all-around military affairs gadfly:

I am beginning to sense that McCain’s behavior is destroying himself and that Obama has the good sense or instinct to take a deep step back and let McCain dig a hole so deep he can not get out.

After all, McCain has spent years branding himself as a straight talker of truth who puts country ahead of self ... it was always a phony image, but now he is aggressively destroying that brand name and replacing it with the opposite Rovian brand.

This is something we have seen all too often — a man who will do anything and say anything to get elected, to include selecting someone for vice president who is obviously not qualified to be President, even though he would be the oldest person ever to be elected President, and is a cancer survivor to boot, with a heart condition and an abused body (from torture), and therefore, actuarially the most likely President in history to die in office, if elected.

Maybe Obama’s behavior is akin to subtly waving the red cape to lure McCain into reinforcing the rebranding operation. I think Obama did a cape job on Hillary, and she ended up up with the immoral alternative of either having to destroy the Democratic Party in order to win its nomination or quitting. I think (hope?) Obama is doing a similar thing with McCain, and McCain is walking into the trap.

In the end, this election is a battle that takes place within an overarching moral context, and as Boyd showed, you can not isolate your opponent in moral warfare…

Your opponent has to morally isolate himself, and he does that by destroying legs of the moral triangle, and in so doing, exhibits behavior that promotes his own well being by violating the codes of conduct or standards of behavior he professes to uphold and others expect him to uphold.

I have this vague sense that Obama’s goal (maybe instinct is a better word) may be to create an atmosphere (perhaps by looking weak, inter alia) that encourages McCain to reinforce this self-destructive behavior and thereby make his hypocrisy obvious to a majority of the undecided voters. But then maybe I am seeing visions in cloud formations.

…and so I won’t even try. These are excerpts from Women Against Sarah Palin, the wonderful website to which my sister Pat alerted me, and about which I blogged earlier this week.

Sarah Palin is the classic example of a woman being used by those in power to remove power from women.

I want to love a mother, governor and VP candidate, but Palin horrifies me, she seems to epitomize the American inability to be introspective, to polarize and see everything in terms of black and white, good or evil, right or wrong. This intolerance and inability to get out of a narrow perspective and see the divine spark in all is at the core of the danger America is creating for itself, and feeds the dissension in America. She has a sharp, but not a deep mind fast with the comebacks, but more interested in bullying an argument than in understanding the truth.

Even in this very red state of Alabama, we know the difference between a show horse, a hobby horse, and a work horse. You do not represent working class women, farm wives or single mothers — ALL of whom turned to Hillary Clinton with great hopes. You charged women for their own rape kits when you were mayor in Wasilla. You use housekeepers and nannies to care for your kids. You don’t want sex education in schools, but you let your daughter get pregnant! You do not now, nor will you ever speak for us!

I can hardly begin to express the depth of my anger at hearing Ms. Palin denigrate the many community organizers I worked with and proudly call my friends. Community Organizers make the world a better place, doing God’s work day in and day out, night after night. To hear that convention audience laugh in response to her snide remarks really pissed me off. I didn’t realize just how steamed I was until a dear friend (another longtime community activist) sent me an e-mail with this message: Jesus was a Community Organizer. Pontius Pilate was a Governor.

Sarah Palin represents the slap of the dinosaur’s tail — a deadly, horned swipe of a breed going extinct; quite likely, in her throes of excited thrashing, to kill off many individuals, many careers, many dearly held gains, won since 1963, for which many of us fought with our brains, our convictions, our blood, our time, our eloquence, and our money…

Are we ready to stand idly by while an old, ill man, watches Sarah’s shapely behind, while fingering his wedding ring? Are we ready to give up our time to choose, our right to decide and let this mockery of a modern woman, this poorly educated bigot tramples our civil rights? Are we ready to die if our life is endangered by an unhealthy pregnancy? Are we willing to let Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and the other megalomaniacs at the helm of the Republican party decide the course of our lives, our daughters’ and granddaughters’ lives?

Even the power she gained as the mayor of a town of a mere 5000, immediately corrupted her; her wide swipes through the administration she inherited were so disruptive to that small government entity that an immediate remedy was set in place — an administrator had to be hired to do the job of running the town while she was mayor. And still, the surplus she inherited turned into a deficit — IMAGINE the damage she could orchestrate on a national level.

The Alaskan legislature took to wearing buttons that said, “Where’s Sarah?” because she spent so little time in Juneau. Once again, the GOP is deceiving the American people in a most callous and calculating way — just because they put a skirt on this time doesn’t change a damned thing!

Women in particular should project hope and love and caring for others, and Ms. Palin does none of this, choosing instead to be mean-spirited and accusatory in every single speech and action. I can only hope that with time, people will recognize this and realize that we need someone quite different from her to take us down the road to respect and REAL morality.

But she is not the problem — our problem is the white old men that insist on running this country with their need to control, their archaic laws and ideas. Their lives are based on fear and ridiculous needs to dominate our pocketbook, our bodies and to shoot before thinking and talking. They also have a great need to distort the truth — in other words LYING. This young woman from Alaska is being fooled with — she is their decoy — but she might be elected and then she could be a heartbeat away from being in charge of our lives.

The American people have become distracted. Palin, participating in this election as a trojan horse, has come with phrases that involve animals and lipsticks, bridges to nowhere, and eBay, leading americans in to an abyss of distractions pulling away from the very sobering facts that who she represents and the policies she supports are a complete replica of the current Bush administration, on paper, and without personality mud-slings, the Palin/MCCain ticket represent four more years of the same policies the world has come to hate.

Here we have the ideal ticket for anyone who supports women’s rights — Obama and Biden — versus two people who think women are brainless fools. The fact that Palin wears a skirt doesn’t mean she has respect for women. On the contrary. It just means that she uses her sex to stop any questions about her competence by accusing the questioner of sex-discrimination. Frankly, I didn’t buy that argument when Hillary made it and I’m certainly not buying it from Palin.

This classic bait and switch move has the electorate once again focusing on the culture wars instead of the real ones, on pseudo-feminism instead of tolerance and equality.

Her extreme beliefs regarding abstinence-only education did not work even for her own daughter! and yet she wants to force it on our daughters! We will not have it. We can do better, there are stronger, more thoughtful and fair minded women in this country who are fit to run it.

Is Ms.Palin really the best the Republican party has to offer in terms of a female? I guess there are slim pickings for a woman who will support an antiquated and sexist Republican agenda.

The cruel irony of Senator Clinton blooding herself on that glass ceiling only to have a puppet escorted through on the arm of a warrior…

These people are two loose cannons on a rolling deck and I genuinely fear for the future of our great country. If John McCain is unable to see his term through, Sarah Palin is next in line as leader of the Free World.

“To the families of special-needs children all across this country, I have a message: For years, you sought to make America a more welcoming place for your sons and daughters. I pledge to you that if we are elected, you will have a friend and advocate in the White House.” Really? Because the parents of children with disabilities in Alaska don’t have much of a friend or advocate right now. Even in years of great surplus, she actually cut state funding for special education services and Medicaid — the program that children and adults with disabilities rely on for health care.

Ms. Palin is also well documented as a local bully who tries to fire anyone who disagrees with her. After eight years of an unqualified President who has done everything in his power to position America as a global bully, this characteristic is the last quality we need in the White House for four more years.

Sarah Palin sees the hand of God in a $30 billion Alaskan national gas pipeline. “I think God’s will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that,” she has stated.

Ms. Palin and I clearly worship very different gods. I see the hand of God not in the wallets of the oil companies, but in the pristine Alaska coastline, its majestic polar bears, whales, and glaciers — all of which Big Oil will despoil. Perhaps Ms. Palin has made the mistake that afflicts a frightening number of our citizens: confusing God with money.

Sarah Vowell, in today’s New York Times:

During a gubernatorial debate in 2006, Governor Palin claimed that if her daughter, then 16, were impregnated as the result of being raped, Ms. Palin would hope that the girl would “choose life,” which is a polite way of saying she would expect a tenth-grader to give birth to her rapist’s baby.

Here’s a not-so-polite fact about the United States: According to Amnesty International, a woman is raped here every six minutes.…

This year, Senator McCain himself didn’t bother to stand up to the right wing of his party to insist that the rape and incest exception be written into the Republican Party platform.

Couldn’t make it to St. Paul? No problem — Ramin Talaie did it for you. Here are a few selections from his photo blog of the RNC convention:

One thing about the Brits, they know their snark. A self-described “liberal European elitist journalist” — Oliver Burkeman of The Guardian — live-blogs last night’s performances in St. Paul:

8.18pm: [Quoting Romney] “I know what makes jobs come, and I know what makes them go.” What made jobs come and go often enough in the past, as Ezra Klein points out, has been the noted private equity firm chief executive Mitt Romney.

8.32pm: Mike Huckabee actually just said this: “My Dad lifted heavy things”. And this: “I was in college before I found out it wasn’t supposed to hurt to take a shower.” It’s something to do with having to clean himself with stones, because he grew up so poor. But this is an almost entirely crazy speech, I’m afraid to say. That’s an unbiased opinion.

8.50pm: Themes of the evening so far: xenophobia, “anti-elitist” rabble-rousing, media-bashing, smalltown boosterism versus liberal city people. Pretty unpleasant, all told.

9.05pm: Wait, wait, wait, WHAT? John McCain was a prisoner of war. He has proved his commitment with his blood. On the other hand, Obama worked as a “community organizer”. “What?” says Giuliani, pretending not to understand. He laughs unpleasantly. The crowd laughs. “Then he ran for the state legislature — where nearly 130 times he was unable to make a decision yes or no. It was too tough. He voted ‘present.’ I didn’t know about this ‘vote present’ when I was mayor of New York City. Sarah Palin didn’t get to vote present when she was mayor or governor.”

“Barack Obama has never led anything. Nothing. Nada. Nada. Nothing.” This is real, jeering anti-Obama stuff, the nastiest we’ve heard, and the delegates are loving it — yelping and whooping.

9.18pm: If you say the war in Iraq is lost, you are saying that Osama bin Laden has won, and that makes you a terrorist. Or something like that.

There’s something rather troubling about the way in which Giuliani enjoys the roiling up the audience. He claps softly to himself, and chuckles.

10.12pm And in a parallel to Obama’s surprise arrival at the end of Joe Biden’s speech, here’s John McCain. “Tremendous, tremendous, fantastic, tremendous,” he says, vaguely hugging the Palins. “Don’t you think we made the right choice for the next vice-president of the United States? And what a beautiful family!” Militaristic music. McCain and Palin are both doing an awful Republican version of Hillary Clinton’s already sufficiently awful pointing-and-smiling thing.

Shortly, these psyched-up delegates will hold a roll-call vote officially to nominate McCain. First, three country singers including John Rich are reading out random bits of famous American speeches and documents, in between lines of the national anthem. Extremely strange.

Brilliant, now Rich is singing his criminally stupid song Raising McCain.

This is from Hunter Thompson’s last piece on the presidential campaign of 1972. That campaign ended with the reelection of Richard Nixon some three months after every sentient American voter was in possession of every significant fact about Watergate. Of course Watergate was trivial compared to what the American voter knew about George W. Bush in 2004.

This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his imprecise talks about ‘new politics’ and ‘honesty in government,’ is really one of the few men who’ve run for president of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon.

McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.

Jesus! Where will it all end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?

From the Washington Post, this portrait of the straight shooter as a young man:

McCain was closer to Richey than to any other Episcopal [High School] student, and during a summer night after McCain’s sophomore year, the two found themselves cruising in a car, with Richey behind the wheel. As Richey remembers, he and McCain spotted a couple of older girls near Arlington and called out to them, asking if they wanted company. The girls laughed. Insulted, McCain leaned across the driver’s-side window and shouted an expletive at them. “Our feelings were hurt. They unveiled our masks and revealed us for the boys we were,” Richey says.

Minutes later, a car stopped them on the road. Police were called, and McCain and Richey were ticketed for what Richey remembers as public nuisance and profanity. Soon they were standing in an Arlington court, with Richey hoping that McCain would tell the truth: that he alone, not Richey, had shouted the profanity at the girls. As Richey recalls, McCain said nothing — explaining to Richey later that he didn’t know what good it would have done to speak up.

Now let ’em argue that God’s on their side.

Historians will note many failures in the Bush presidency, obviously led by the invasion of Iraq. But nothing is more stereotypically Bush than the bungled Katrina response: incompetence writ large, cronies everywhere, complete cluelessness at the helm of every vessel, promises made and not kept, poisonous trailers, and the general impression just as Kanye said: that George Bush doesn’t care about black people. I would add, or poor people of any color. But especially dark-skinned, and especially Democrats. N’awlins was doomed, or rather abandoned.

Of course God has sent hurricanes as messages to the GOP in the past, but the American disaster of Katrina wasn’t God’s fault, it was the Bush administration’s. We’ve had hurricanes before; Bush’s father no doubt remembers Andrew hitting Florida in 1992, to which he similarly responded without enthusiasm.

So is Gustav, currently on track to hit the Gulf Coast as a full-force hurricane next week, just as the Republicans convene in Minnesota, a condemnation?

Staging a convention during a major natural disaster would be a public relations challenge for either political party. But GOP officials say the burden could be especially heavy for their party, whose reputation was tarred by the Bush administration’s bungling of Katrina and its aftermath in 2005.

A hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico could also cast unwelcome attention on the offshore oil rigs that McCain has championed as a solution to rising gasoline prices — they are now being evacuated in the face of the coming storm.

Or an opportunity?

Former White House spokesman Scott McClellan, who said in a recent book that Hurricane Katrina left “an indelible stain” on the Bush presidency, said Bush should be making plans to cancel his speech.

“If it’s a major hurricane, I think that they certainly need to show they learned lessons from three years ago, both from a policy and perception standpoint,” McClellan said.

He also suggested that McCain could benefit politically from such a scenario: It would allow Bush to mount an effective GOP response to a disaster, while removing the unpopular president from the convention roster. “It could be a two-fer,” McClellan said.

I can totally see Bush’s Homeland Security team riding to the rescue. More likly this will just turn out to be an excuse to avoid the visual of Bush and McCain together. In partial compensation for which:

“This may be the October surprise in September,” said George W. Foresman, former undersecretary of preparedness for the Department of Homeland Security. “Public messaging and attention to the public affairs part of the response is going to get added attention.”

If it were a question of spending huge sums on deceptive advertising to a distracted audience, I might be concerned about the electoral ramifications. But a skeptical public will be watching the Department of Homeland Security’s response to a hurricane very closely. Closely enough that every success will emphasize the previous failure — in a non-election year.

[UPDATE, 6:08 PM ET:]

President Bush today declared a state of emergency for Louisiana and Texas, as former tropical storm Gustav strengthened to become a hurricane and continued on a collision course with the U.S. Gulf Coast.

The president’s declaration came three years to the day after Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi, overwhelming levees designed to protect New Orleans and inflicting record damage on the region.

Is there a level of dishonesty that would embarrass Nancy Pelosi? It appears not.

Asked whether she classified herself as a “Washington insider” at a briefing sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, Pelosi answered, “Oh, absolutely not. No.”

Who could possibly imagine that a mere 22 years in Congress made the daughter of a “prominent Maryland political family” part of the system? Just because she’s spent her time as Speaker of the House making sure Bush and Cheney get everything they want?

Pressed for an explanation, Pelosi said that being an insider is about a person’s “state of mind,” not their tenure in politics.

“Inside, outside — you have to know the territory so you can work it, but you never become a part of it”, she said.

This kind of dishonesty with herself helps us understand why she’s been so dishonest with us.

Cindy Sheehan for Congress! Honesty, for a change.

One thing about rising stars, they don’t hang albatrosses around their necks:

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Rising Republican star Bobby Jindal — the young Indian-American governor of Lousiana — on Sunday ruled himself out of the race to become John McCain’s vice-presidential pick…

His youthful enthusiasm and ability to bridge the divides of race and party has led some to see him as the Republican party’s future answer to the Democratic Party’s Obama.

The Obama campaign seems to have learned a thing or two from John Kerry’s passivity when a slimeball named Jerome Corsi swiftboated him in a lie-filled book.

Here’s the campaign’s prompt 41-page response (pdf file) to Corsi’s attempt to do the same thing to Barack HUSSEIN Obama.

James Fallows on the 2008 presidential primary debates, in The Atlantic:

When politicians do try to lay out a new thought or policy, they tend to do so from the safety of incumbency, rather than as part of a campaign. For instance: when Carter ran for office, he talked about the importance of human rights around the world. But not until six months into his presidency, in a commencement speech at Notre Dame, did he explain in the fullest sense how the United States could balance an emphasis on human rights with awareness of its practical interests and obligations. It is a speech that survives re-reading 30 years later. (I am biased, having been involved, but Jerome Doolittle was the main writer.) Nothing from [Obama’s] campaign does so. I expect some of the addresses Obama has already given will, whether he is elected or not.

Who knew it was possible to hurt the oil industry’s feelings? Well, it is:

A Barack Obama ad ready to air at Florida gas stations that have pumps topped with TV screens was nixed at the last minute because the advertising company's chief said it reflected poorly on the oil industry, according to the presidential candidate's campaign…

Paris Hilton faces John McCain totally:

Leonard Pitts Jr. captures the essence of the hysteria over the New Yorker cover.

Unless you’ve been in a cave for the last week, you’ve heard about and probably seen the cartoon showing Barack and Michelle bumping fists in the Oval Office, he in Muslim garb, she in Angela Davis, while a portrait of Osama watches an American flag burn in the fireplace. To me, even a straight description is humorous, and the cartoon is hilarious; but many Obama supporters apparently find it offensive.

Or perhaps it’s the long article about him in the same issue they’re worried about. But if they were offended by the cover, they probably wouldn’t read the article.

Which, to me, is part of the point of the cover.

To be effective, satire needs a situation it can inflate into ridiculousness. But the hysteria surrounding Obama has nowhere to go; it is already ridiculous. In just the last few days, we’ve had Jesse Jackson threatening to castrate him and John McLaughlin calling him an “Oreo.”

Add to that the whispers about Obama’s supposed Muslim heritage (not that there’s anything wrong with that), the “terrorist” implications of bumping fists, and Michelle Obama’s purported use of the term “whitey” (a word no black person has uttered since The Jeffersons went off the air in 1985), and it’s clear that “ridiculous” has become our default status. What once were punchlines now are headlines.

So, as absurd, as over the top, as utterly outlandish as the New Yorker image strikes the more sophisticated among us, there is a large fringe out there for whom it will represent nothing more or less than the sum of their fears.

Most of the arguments people made against the cover in the various comment sections I perused were strikingly weak. Anger certainly tends to cloud logic; as Bertrand Russell said,

The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction.

One person applied the theory of democracy to that of humor, proclaiming that it’s only satire if “at least” a majority thinks it is. (I’m not sure what’s more than a majority in this case. Since by definition at least the artist and the editor consider it satire, there’s no possibility of unanimity. But that’s how the argument was worded, so I reproduce it in case others grasp what I missed.) Another person argued that the November vote is a life-and-death matter, and the need to elect Obama, who presumably represents life, precludes Barack-mocking in the interim.

Speaking of which, Andy Borowitz has written a fake Obama statement of sympathy with those who struggle to make jokes about him. The statement includes five officially sanctioned Obama jokes.

Barack Obama and a kangaroo pull up to a gas station. The gas station attendant takes one look at the kangaroo and says, “You know, we don’t get many kangaroos here.” Barack Obama replies, “At these prices, I’m not surprised. That’s why we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.”

This kind of thing is why Colbert has to push it so far, play such an over-the-top character, to satirize the current state of our various media. As Pitts says, “These days, there’s nothing more ridiculous than the truth.”

Since I unflaggingly rag on the Democrats, it’s incumbent on me to praise when I see them do something praiseworthy. And they’ve managed to keep Hans von Spakovsky off the Federal Election Commission, so here’s a heartfelt Bravo! going out to the Democrats for that achievement. Since I read this in an AP article, I dare not link to it, though it was on the New York Times website; but I’m sure you can google up someone else’s article on the same topic.

It’s a small enough victory in some ways — I mean, considering

• the war, in which most of the Democrats were complicit
• the economy, especially the housing meltdown, resulting from long-term as well as short-term policies, most of which had strong bipartisan support in Congress over the last several administrations
• the environment, and preparation for disasters in general, problems for which Republicans are more responsible, but the Democrats haven’t been stars either
• the cave on telecom immunity, plus previous caves on habeas corpus, extraordinary renditions, etc.
• the inability to do anything about torture until the courts made Congressional action unnecessary

But it’s real, and it’s likely to have some positive effects on the honesty of the election. One might even dare to hope that the backbone shown in standing up against the Spakovsky nomination is a harbinger of things to come. In any case, it’s certainly a win to remove this smiling dirtbag from any office, organization, or assembly he’s in, or indeed near.

The lesson appears to be that the Democrats can make a stand on principle, and succeed in forcing the White House to act (at a minimum) according to the law. In the end, the administration withdrew Spakovsky’s nomination as a means of returning the Commission to working order: there are normally six commissioners, there’ve only been two since the beginning of this year, and decisions require a minimum of four votes.

Now we might hope for the laws to be faithfully executed. McCain has been combining attacks on Obama for opting out of public election financing with open violations of the very same laws himself, and getting away with it because the FEC only has two members.

But is this really the lesson? McCain’s campaign is expecting a pile of public-financing bucks. Problem is, he can’t simply grab the money and run; there’s got to be a vote by the FEC. Which, you recall, requires four votes, which haven’t been available. So McCain may have to eliminate the campaign-finance law violations, but he’ll get $85 million to cover his transition costs.

Maybe I’m too cynical, but I see in this saga not a harbinger of hope, and certainly not one of audacity, but one of compromise extended to the horizon. The Democrats won the day not by standing up for what was right and organizing support and holding fast to their beliefs, but by in effect holding hostage the public campaign-finance funds the McCain camp anticipates.

Not that I complain about extortion as political method; it happens all the time. In fact some form of extortion is pretty much basic tender in politics. What I’m trying to do here is puzzle out the behavior patterns of the party and see if anything can be done to influence it in positive directions.

What seems to have happened in the Spakovsky case is that the Democrats used their control of the money to force compliance. I’m fine with that strategy. I just want them to use that strategy when it counts. Which they haven’t in the past, and didn’t in this case. Democrats won this battle because the other side decided they wanted $85 million in public funds more than they wanted Spakovsky on the FEC. They changed plans, and the Democrats claimed victory.

Here’s exactly what I’m afraid the Obama dream might become. The Democratic party has always fought internal battles with at least as much ferocity as it employed against the opposition. But since the Reagan administration brought what Obama has called new ideas into the White House, the Democratic party has synonomous with — well, I’ll spare you the invective and limit myself to “spinelessness”.

Which is bad enough when we’re talking about domestic issues like where the wealth goes and who gets education and health care and who goes to prison. California used to have an educational system that was the envy of most of the world, nearly free as far as your work and your smarts would take you. The point was clearly to educate as much of the population as possible.

Then came the Republican Revolution, much of it starting here, and our point is once again clear: we’re scared of everybody. We’re educating fewer and imprisoning more, and passing the savings on to the very rich. What savings, you say? There are no savings from educating fewer and imprisoning more? True. Thus we must create savings, which we do by changing the tax structure so that wealth flows up the ladder, increasing inequality and thus providing more work for the prisons. Synergy, I think they call it.

As Americans we have the God-given freedom to crucify ourselves on whatever cross of gold strikes our fancy. But when the Democrats’ spinelessness extends to complicity in criminal wars, that’s a different thing. Going by the peer-reviewed and apparently methodologically sound Lancet studies, about a million Iraqis have been killed one way or another by the American invasion, plus about five million “displaced”, driven from their homes, nearly half of whom have left the country.

If Mexico invaded the US, it would have to kill 11 million Americans and displace 55 million more to match these percentages. Such actions might be expected to leave a certain amount of disgruntlement behind. Thus blowback. Thus 9/11. Thus fewer civil liberties and greater concentration of wealth. Producing more disgruntlement, and so on. As I said a year ago, it’s a great business.

I suspect the best hope for maintaining the current structure of power and privilege (if that’s your goal) is to allow the insertion of a soul into the juggernaut of capitalism. Otherwise, our trajectory seems headed for something between another Depression and another Paris Commune.

My fear is that the Democrats are too heavily invested in the business of American Business to realize what’s going on: the business has morphed into a war machine, and is attempting to set itself up as a modern Colossus. This business model is bound to fail. The country must disinvest. The question that remains is whether the Democrats continue to resist the obvious necessity.

Here, for your viewing pleasure, is Not Alex. It’s the antiMcCain, antiwar ad from MoveOn.org which is being called tasteless by the conservative punditry. Being called tasteless by it/them is of course like being called ugly by a frog.

Personally I thought the ad was (1) tasteful, (2) fair, (3) well-produced, and (4) effective. What’s more, (1) the baby was cute, and (2) I fell in love with the young mother.

So, as Thomas L. Friedman might say, and did, Suck on this, okay?

The Obama campaign has put up a web page to rebut the smears, calumnies, false rumors and innuendos, anonymous charges, viral emails, libels, defamation, slurs, sleaze and slander that are standard in GOP presidential campaigns.

In fact the Swift Boat operation is already humming along nicely in high gear. Slime-lovers will find prime specimens at Obama’s new site, Fight the Smears.

All right, horndogs, here’s the first film from TruthThroughAction.org — “a new political organization founded by independent filmmakers in New York. By bringing the Indie community and political activists together, we're creating edgy short films and online videos that support the Democratic Party.”

It’s called Blue Balled.

Just finished listening to Hillary’s speech, which struck me as graceful and useful. And from as much of the subsequent pundibabble as I could endure, this seemed to be the consensus.

So I’ll only bother to add two things that are unlikely to come up in everybody else’s instant analysis.

First, both Hillary and Chelsea clapped back at the audience. New rule, as Bill Maher says: Keep your hands to yourself. Otherwise you look as stupid as every show biz jackass who bounds into camera range clapping for — well, for whom?

If for your own wonderful self, it amounts to an unattractive act of public masturbation. If for the audience, it is the gesture of a desperate suck-up.

The second thing was Hillary’s juxtaposition of two words that I doubt have been uttered in sequence by any major presidential candidate, Democrat or Republican, for 30 years. They are “promoting” and “unionization,” presented as a desirable goal.

Not “recognizing the importance of” unionization. ” Not “backing” or “championing” or “defending” it. Promoting it. Maybe the word was carelessly chosen or insincerely spoken. But if not — if the active promoting of unionization by government has become mentionable once more in mainstream Democratic rhetoric — this could turn out to be huge.

Having written for a president who was terrific at town meetings and terrible at prepared speeches, this Gail Collins op-ed made me feel a tiny — barely perceptible actually — twinge of sympathy for McCain’s speechwriters. McCain, you’ll remember, wants to do a sort of buddy road flick with Obama, the two of them spending the summer together doing weekly town hall appearances:

But for all the talk about McCain wanting a “higher level of discourse,” the bottom line is that he is begging to be rescued from the big problem his campaign has encountered: which is that the only thing their candidate is good at is town-hall meetings.

This was driven home Tuesday night when the Republicans decided to try to insert a McCain speech into the Democrats’ final primary night. They were hoping to steal thunder from the moment when Obama clinched the nomination. The actual effect was to offer viewers a chance to compare the skills of the greatest orator in modern American politics with a guy who has never really learned how to read a teleprompter…

MDC at Foreign Policy Watch dissects McCain’s various nuclear disarmament stances. Excerpt:

Tuesday’s speech, on the whole, is a bit of a mixed bag. As for nuclear testing, McCain wants to appear tough:

“This would include taking another look at the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to see what can be done to overcome the shortcomings that prevented it from entering into force.”

Well, one of “the shortcomings that prevented [the CTBT] from entering into force” was McCain’s own vote against it in the Senate, when it was up for ratification by the US in 1999. And it’s not certain just how he wants “to take another look at it” in a “dialogue with our allies.” 144 states, many of which include staunch allies of the US (the continent of Europe, for example), have already ratified the treaty. Good luck revisiting that.

Want to remove all slime from the election this fall and limit debate strictly to the issues? Rick Hertzberg knows how:

The solution is obvious. Obama should ask McCain to be his running mate. McCain should ask Obama to be his. And both should say yes.

A campaign pitting an Obama-McCain ticket against a McCain-Obama ticket would absolutely guarantee a general-election campaign that would be about The Issues and nothing but The Issues…

Is this the end of Nixon’s Southern Strategy? (Incidentally, note the lapel pin in the photo below. Do we see a pattern emerging here? For instance, did Mussolini wear a lapel flag?)

The result in Mississippi, and what Republicans said was a surge in African-American turnout, suggested that Mr. Obama might have the effect of putting into play Southern seats that were once solidly Republican, rather than dragging down Democratic candidates.

Maureen Dowd today:

Obama breezed through West Virginia, the state he couldn’t charm even wearing a flag pin and promising to invest in “clean coal.”

Jimmy Carter was an expert at this sort of thing, too. His Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare had lately been enraging the tobacco belt by his attacks on smoking — but North Carolina’s support had been a key element in Carter’s election. So during the 1978 midterms the president visited a tobacco warehouse there and and delivered himself of this wonderful straddle: “We must find ways to make cigarettes even more safe.”

And when Carter was governor of Georgia he unveiled a portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the state capitol and soothed the crowd with, “The time for racism is past.” The subtle beauty of this bank shot may be clearly seen by substituting “slavery” for “racism.”

Let’s say you’re in favor of letting the states legalize abortion and and drugs and same sex marriage if they want to. And you favor an immediate start to our withdrawal from Iraq. And you think the telecom companies should be punished for warrantless wiretapping. And you hate the Patriot Act for its gutting of civil rights. And no matter what the Creep from Crawford thinks, you think habeas corpus belongs in the Constitution after all.

Folks, have I got a candidate for you! He’s an Iowan born and bred. He went to high school in Iran. He’s a former CIA spook and federal prosecutor. Plus he’s a proud member of both the NRA and the ACLU.

Ladies and Germs, let’s hear it for the only candidate who’s really got your back — Big. Bob. BARR!

From the normally mild-mannered Bob Herbert, in his New York Times column today. Wow.

…class is not a Clinton forte.

But it’s one thing to lack class and a sense of grace, quite another to deliberately try and wreck the presidential prospects of your party’s likely nominee — and to do it in a way that has the potential to undermine the substantial racial progress that has been made in this country over many years.

The Clintons should be ashamed of themselves. But they long ago proved to the world that they have no shame.

Pollster John Zogby thinks it’s all over but the face-saving:

The Illinois senator showed himself to be resilient in the wake of three weeks or so of crisis and, much more importantly, he got back on the winning track. This is the evidence that some super-delegates have been waiting for.

Many of them — most of them — had clearly made up their minds that they would not support Mrs. Clinton, and so this had become a case of whether or not Mr. Obama could close the deal. That is what appears to have happened last night.

Where do we go from here? My understanding is that probably today, but certainly within 48 hours, about 30 super-delegates will endorse Mr. Obama. That should give him further momentum.

Mathematically, this will widen the gap between him and Mrs. Clinton. He has a bigger share of the popular vote, more pledged delegates, and will now overtake her in terms of super-delegates too.

I honestly believe that she will find a way to get out of the race before the next primaries — so as to not hurt her future and to not be blamed for hurting Mr. Obama and his chances in the general election.

Here are the reasons:

* There really is no mathematical chance for her to win

* Her campaign is virtually out of money - and it will be difficult for her to raise significant amounts of money after last night

* Not enough happened last night to give her any hope, so continuing would only give the appearance of wanting to damage Mr. Obama

Confused by all the blabber last night from Tim and Keith and Chris and Pat? Want to find out what actually happened in Indiana and North Carolina? Go here for your reality pill from Jay Cost, Doctor of Politics. Excerpt:

As you can see, North Carolina performed roughly as we might expect, falling in between Virginia and Tennessee. Nevertheless, it is surprising that the results were closer to the Virginia end (i.e. Obama +29) than the Tennessee end (i.e. Clinton +13). What might explain the difference?

Unlike Indiana, it doesn’t come from Clinton’s core voting group. She did extremely well among white voters in North Carolina. Obviously, she didn’t do as well with them as she did in Tennessee. However, she still trounced Obama among white men and white women, regardless of their religious affiliation.

Clinton’s problem was with the African American vote, which came in at about 33%. Her trouble in North Carolina, as well as the South in general, is that white voters are more likely to be Republican than in decades past. This has given Obama a demographic edge in the region — one that has actually grown in the past few months. Note that African Americans in North Carolina went for Obama more strongly than they did in either Tennessee or Virginia. In fact, we can see a general trend in the African American vote toward Obama — not just in these states, but nationwide. It has not been much commented upon — most likely because African Americans have been supporting Obama more strongly than any other group. Nevertheless, as time has gone on, the African American vote has clustered around Obama much more tightly.

As usual, the Rude Pundit comes right out and says it about Obama’s chances today in Indiana:

Ah, fond memories of living in a town northeast of Indianapolis, of car rides past homes that that flew the Confederate flag on poles on their front lawns (and this was in a medium-sized city, not a small burg), of towns with black populations so disenfranchised and isolated that they are practically invisible, of migrant workers regularly abused by employers when violence wasn’t being committed against them by townspeople. And that’s not even to get into how flat and gray and ugly most of the state is for most of the year, after harvest and before planting season.

When a large swath of a state is populated by people from the Appalachian region who migrated northward for factory jobs decades ago and then those factory jobs dry the heck up for the most part, what you are left with is a bunch of resentful crackers looking to play “where’s the scapegoat?”

By all means go and read the whole screed, but bear in mind that I had to look hard to find an obscenity-free passage as long as the one above. And even then I had to make a substitution, since the word “heck” has never made it out of the Rude Pundit’s computer. What he really wrote, I am sorry to report, was “*uc*”.

What less can you expect from a court once headed by a GOP hack who got his start by intimidating black and Hispanic voters in Arizona? Rehnquist would be proud of today’s ruling.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that states can require voters to produce photo identification without violating their constitutional rights, validating Republican-inspired voter ID laws.

In a splintered 6-3 ruling, the court upheld Indiana's strict photo ID requirement, which Democrats and civil rights groups said would deter poor, older and minority voters from casting ballots. Its backers said it was needed to prevent fraud…

The case concerned a state law, passed in 2005, that was backed by Republicans as a way to deter voter fraud. Democrats and civil rights groups opposed the law as unconstitutional and called it a thinly veiled effort to discourage elderly, poor and minority voters — those most likely to lack proper ID and who tend to vote for Democrats.

From the Charlotte Observer:

RALEIGH — The N.C. Republican Party says it will not back away from a planned TV ad that uses footage of Barack Obama’s controversial former minister, despite objections from the expected GOP presidential nominee, John McCain.

The ad, released Wednesday on the Internet, tries to link the minister to two Democratic candidates for governor, both of whom have endorsed Obama…

McCain called the ad “offensive” and said it “degrades our civics and distracts us from the very real differences we have with the Democrats.”

“From the beginning of this election, I have been committed to running a respectful campaign based upon an honest debate about the great issues confronting America today. I expect all state parties to do so as well,” McCain wrote in an e-mail to Republican chairwoman Linda Daves, asking her to pull the ad.

Actually that’s only part of the story, as Bad Attitudes has learned from a source within the McCain campaign who could not to be identified because he is not authorized to talk straight to the press. Here is the rest of McCain’s email:

Suck on this, you silly bitch. If that ad runs even one more time, the first day I’m in the White House your ass is grass and I’m the lawnmower. Your taxes will be audited from now until death do us part. Your body cavities will be searched every time you get so much as get near an airplane. I will veto any spending bill containing funds for North Carolina until such day as the North Carolina Republican Party drives you from the leadership post which you presently disgrace. And then I will burn down your garage and if it is is an attached one, so much the better. Are we clear now?

Bad Attitudes, for one, is not about to pull down such a shitstorm as this on our own head. Consequently we will do exactly what the Straight Talker wants us to do, which is to give Ms. Daves’ ad a little more out-of-state exposure:

The excerpt below is by Joe Bageant, the bard of Winchester, Virginia, and the author of Deer Hunting with Jesus. His fuse has been lit by the media tizzy over Barack Obama’s mostly accurate look at white working-class resentment. Read the whole essay here. (The photo below is not of Joe, but of the younger and more photogenic Larry the Cable Guy.)

In any case, Obama has proven you cannot even use the innocuous word bitterness in conjunction with the national lie of white American culture. In the officially sanctioned media lexicon, Blacks can be angry, disillusioned and even bitter enough to burn down Watts. But the white race, being blessed by a Christian god and divine providence, never harbor bitterness in their hearts. The reason the word bitterness has caused such horror is because what is really going on out there is the sprouting seeds of class animosity. And no candidate or pontificating media mugwump dares touch that one because they are in the class that benefits from our classist society.

There are many positives about the British political system as compared to the one we use in the US. Perfect example: in the British system, the Democrats could cast Joe Lieberman out of the party, no matter what he calls himself. Not that they would, but it would be possible.

Since JoeMentum had the last laugh, it’s particularly fun to catch ’em on the little stuff. Like when his campaign claimed that supporters of Ned Lamont had instituted a denial-of-service attack on, or DOSd, his website on the eve of the primary election.

When the Web site went down on Aug. 7, 2006, the Lieberman campaign asserted it had been hacked in “a coordinated attack by our political opponents.”

But the F.B.I. saw it another way.

“The server that hosted the joe2006.com Web site failed because it was overutilized and misconfigured,” the newspaper said the F.B.I. wrote. “There was no evidence of (an) attack.”

The Lieberman campaign workers probably caused the site to crash themselves, to judge from the report. The campaign site was configured to allow only 100 e-mail messages an hour, but when that limit was exceeded many times on the day before the primary, the site crashed, according to the report.

Yet the campaign did not realize that at the time, and said it had been the target of what is known as a denial-of-service attack, in which a server is purposely crippled by a flood of data.

It all sounds reasonable to me. If I’d been a Lieberman groupie, I might have figured that he wouldn’t be a big email recipient.

But at least I would have checked the basic stuff before accusing my opponent of dirty tricks. Perhaps it’s this that keeps Lieberman at the top of the list of Democrats Republicans Love.

Just think, if Al Gore had had the run of the White House kitchen all this time, we might have been stuck with JoeMentum invading Iran.

I offer up for what it’s worth, and you’ll notice I’m not charging for it, my candidate for the bottom half of the McCain ticket. He is shown at the United Nations, holding up a vial which does not contain anthrax so that the world would tremble at the thought of how many people could be killed by a little vial like that if it did in fact hold anthrax. Remember Anthrax and how much fun we all had with it? What ever happened to old Anthrax anyway?

The sad thing about the attacks on Senator Obama for things said by his wife and by his pastor is that attention was paid to them by anyone except Jon Stewart. It was as if the Senator were being pilloried for consorting with persons who claimed that grass is green and — the horror, the horror! — that water runs downhill.

Reverend Wright and Michelle Obama may, for all I know, harbor private beliefs as evil as those which lurk in the minds of Richard Cheney, Osama bin Laden or, back in the day, Vlad the Impaler.

If so, however, the fact has not been reported. What has been reported proves only that both the Obama pastor and the Obama wife are guilty of truth-telling in the first degree. For example, anyone who believes that American foreign policy bore no causal relation to the 9/11 attacks is simply a fool.

And as to Michelle Obama’s deplorably recent feelings of pride in her country, I will refer you, as Judy in Canada has referred me, to this efficient evisceration of the whole issue by Rick Salutin of The Globe and Mail. I’ll add only this from Edmund Burke: ‘For us to love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”

The problem of patriotism really comes down to one question: Are patriots permitted to be critical of their nation, or must they be proud and unquestioning at all times? Once that’s answered, the puzzles dissolve.

Take Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle, who said: “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback..” That’s Position 1. Candidate John McCain’s wife, Cindy, took Position 2: “I have and always will be proud of my country.”

It’s odd that no reporters put Cindy McCain on the spot, named dubious things the U.S. has done, like its genocidal assault on aboriginals, and asked: Are you proud of that? Michelle Obama is the one they keep saying has dug her and her husband a big anti-American hole, one she still hasn’t got past.

But under Position 1 — criticism allowed — her words imply she is a true patriot, and one with a generous spirit. She didn’t wait for solutions to what presumably blocked her pride in the past: like failure to deal with the ongoing problems of race in the U.S. She was ready to be proud on the fairly flimsy basis of reactions to her husband’s campaign. She’s not just a patriot, she’s an optimistic one.

Under Position 1, the patriot test is: Does she continue to want to be proud of her nation, while demanding it live up to standards. By that test, she is a patriot with no hole to climb out of, and so probably is her pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who has taken a lot more stick than she has.

What did he say that anyone could object to on patriotic grounds — that the chickens are coming home to roost in events like 9/11? That’s just foreign policy analysis, stated metaphorically. You can disagree, but it isn’t unpatriotic. Or: “The government ... wants us to sing God Bless America. No, no, no, God damn America ... for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human.” That is utterly in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

According to the Hebrew prophets, God consigned his beloved chosen people to exile for allowing social injustice, allying with evil nations — i.e., shabby foreign policy — and religious infidelity. (The black church in the U.S. has always had a preferential option for the Old Testament parts of the Bible.)

Another way to put Position 1 is: You cannot say, Blessed is the nation, unless you can also say, Cursed is the nation — they go together under love of nation. As political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote: “There can be no patriotism without permanent opposition and criticism.”

She said that in 1963, under fire from other Jews for her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. She was a lifelong Zionist but critical of the direction Zionism had taken. In fact, Jews often split into the two positions over loyalty to Israel. It’s odd how that, too, has now been woven into U.S. politics. Candidates for president are required to show unquestioning allegiance to Israel as much, or more, as to the U.S. The same is becoming true in Canada.

Of course, we also have unique Canadian versions of unthinking patriotism. When the “loyal” opposition criticized the handover of detainees by our forces in Afghanistan despite possible torture, Stephen Harper and his instruments replied: Why do they criticize what our troops do? Why do they care more about the Taliban than our brave Canadian soldiers? Got that — it’s unpatriotic to ask if our country did anything to be ashamed of?

Hannah Arendt also wrote about Judah Magnes, a Zionist pioneer and founder of the Hebrew University. “Being a Jew and a Zionist, he was simply ashamed of what Jews and Zionists were doing.” The sense of shame is what can save the honour of the group and the nation. It is what Position 1 patriots provide. If there are no patriots capable of shame for what is done in the nation’s name, so there is only praise and pride everywhere, then patriotism easily slides into stupidity and worse.

BBC moved this story at 10:22 p.m. (EST) Thursday, and the 11 o’clock news only carried a sentence or two on it. But it will be all over the news by Friday morning, barring massive media misconduct. Which of course we can’t bar at all.

The US Department of State has fired two contractors and disciplined a third for accessing the passport file of presidential hopeful Barack Obama.

A spokesman for the department, Sean McCormack, said the cases were likely caused by “imprudent curiosity.” But he said it was not clear what the employees may have seen or what they were looking for.

A spokesman for Mr Obama suggested that the government could be using private information for “political purposes.”

The BBC’s North America editor, Justin Webb, says it is an extraordinary lapse in security which allowed temporary state department employees access to personal information on a man who is guarded by the secret service day and night .

The state department tracks those who access its passport database. Breaches occurred on three separate dates — 9 January, 21 February and 14 March.

“We believe this was out of imprudent curiosity, so we are taking steps to reassure ourselves that that is, in fact, the case,” Mr McCormack said…

Grace Nearing at Scriptoids has a depressing but unfortunately accurate description of the Hobson’s Choice facing us in this election season.

It’s called “Why, you’d almost think this election actually means something,” and it’s addressed to “Obamaniacs and Clintonistas.” I’ll go one sad step further and add McCain. I’ll add this, too, from Edmund Burke:

“There never was for any long time a corrupt representation of a virtuous people, or a mean, sluggish, careless people who ever had a good government of any form.”

This piece of mine ran several days ago in Salon. com. To see it in its original home, go here. One of the commenters, Blueturtle, made a point that hadn’t occurred to me, but seems aesthetically solid:

Beyond the Left's often correct belief that wearing the flag is facile posturing, there is a larger, deeper problem with the lapel pin.

Isn't it the great unspoken truth that the American flag is simply ugly? Bold, primary colors parceled out in too small stripes and indeterminant stars. It has always paled in comparison to the understated tricolor of France, the composite crosses of the Union Jack, or the beautiful exoticism of any number of developing nations' standards.

The stars and bars speaks for a nation that never could really figure out what it stood for. In response, states' rights and muddled federalism left us with a compromise guidon of cobbled together symbols.

Obama knows that will clash with any outfit that is not made for preschoolers in their bold jumpers.

Flag Pins are for Losers — Literally

Is a man fit to be commander-in-chief if he won't even fly the flag from his buttonhole?

Does that man, Barack Obama, think he's "too good — too patriotic! — to wear a flag pin on his chest?" Because that's what William Kristol believes.

Grow up, the Chicago Sun-Times advises: "Oh for Pete's sake, Senator Obama, pin the darnn American flag to your chest. Otherwise, the poor dope will "catch a world of hurt for ... polarizing comments [that] make him sound like a hardened leftist."

Has Obama's failure to wear a flag pin really done "more damage to his White House hopes than a bomb bursting in air?" The New York Daily News thinks so.

Or is it just possible that Barack Obama knows more about getting to be president than all of these pundits laid end to end, as they probably should be? Is it possible that an empty buttonhole might actually help a candidate of either party, now that the nation's number one flag-wearer is circling the bowl with the lowest presidential approval ratings ever recorded?

Let's go beyond the Beltway and take a look. Out there on the campaign trail, who's actually been wearing lapel flags in this race and who hasn't -- and how's that been working out for you guys anyway?

On April 26 of last year in Orangeburg, South Carolina, the Democrats held the first debate in the campaign that never ends. First thing that morning the candidates were all in a hurry to throw on their clothes, grabbing any old thing that came to hand. Yeah, right.

It was the most important day of their political lives to date, and they agonized over each tiny sartorial decision. Windsor knot or four-in-hand? Blue or red?

Here's where everybody came out on lapel flags. The photo coverage of the debate shows that only Joe Biden decided to wear one. The other seven -- Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, Bill Richardson, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and Chris Dodd — went without.

Of course you'd expect that from a bunch of surrender monkeys, wouldn't you? So let's turn to the Republicans, tough-talking patriots to a man. Their first debate came a week later in Simi Valley, California. And sure enough, Tommy Thompson, Tom Tancredo and Rudy Giuliani, nonveterans all, were careful to pin on their flags.

Wait a minute, though. Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Sam Brownback, Jim Gilmore, Duncan Hunter, and Mike Huckabee all left their little flags back home on the bureau. And so did John McCain. Hmm.

By May 15, at the Columbia, South Carolina Republican debate, Tancredo had stopped wearing his flag. By June, Democratic candidate Joe Biden had deflagged as well.

The only candidate of either party who chose to add a flag in the course of the campaign was Bill Richardson, who flagged up toward the end of the summer. With Biden's flag gone by then, Richardson had become the only Democratic candidate to wear a flag in the debates.

On the Republican side Tommy Thompson continued to wear his flag till the bitter end, which came in August when he placed sixth in the Iowa straw polls. The empty Thompson slot was filled the following month by Fred. The lobbyist/actor picked up Tommy's banner, so to speak, and was still wearing it in January when he, too, dropped out.

Rudy Giuliani, who probably wears a flag to bed, dropped out a week later after racking up a pathetic 15 percent of the vote in the Florida Republican primary.

Do we see a subtle pattern emerging here? Every presidential candidate of both parties who ever wore a lapel flag during the debates, even as briefly as Biden, bought himself a one-way ticket to Palookaville.

And every major party candidate who remains viable today — John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — has seldom if ever been spotted with a flag in his or her lapel.

Don't think the press hasn't been noticing, either. To this day there has been a steady drumbeat of silence in the media over the flagless-ness of Huckabee's, Clinton's and McCain's lapels.

Nor would Obama's disrespect have made news if only he had thought to point the finger at everyone else still in the race when a TV reporter posed his trivia question back in October. But instead he gave an honest if incomplete answer.

Obama said he had worn a pin after 9/11 but stopped once he began to notice, and here I paraphrase wildly but no doubt accurately, that most of the people still wearing lapel flags were assholes.

On the evidence of the campaign so far, Obama wasn't the only one who noticed.

Clinton, Huckabee and McCain, we may say with confidence, would wear anything or even nothing at all if they thought it would help them win the nomination. Then why, when it came to miniature flags, did the three join Obama in opting for nothing?

Dosed with Pentothal, each would most likely come up with a variant of the answer Obama had hinted at: that lapel flags no longer signify simple patriotism, but something that you don't want sticking to your fingers these days..

For these past six years and more, men with those bright little flags apparently riveted to their lapels have fed the voters a daily diet of fear, secrecy, lies, and a cruel war with neither point nor end.

No sensible politician would want to march under this tiny, metallic banner. Just look at all the fallen stars who did.

James Fallows passes along a participant’s perspective on the so-called crucial role of so-called organization in Obama’s recent string of stunning victories. Read the whole thing here.

My note re organization: At 11 AM I got a call asking if I could be the Obama “lead” at our [Washington state] caucus location, which had 12 precincts caucusing. Someone delivered to me a few hundred campaign pins, a few posters, and lots of stickers. When I showed up, a few minutes after noon, the place was plastered with Hillary posters. Obama early-arrivers volunteered to take all the materials off my hands. The materials were all snapped up before 20% of the ultimate attendees arrived. There were 2,000 people there. They voted at least 5 or 6 to 1 for Obama over Clinton overall, if not higher. I was the only “organizer” for Obama, and I did almost nothing nor could I. We were simply swamped with people.

Today, when I didn’t have any info on the Maine caucuses, except that she was expected to win, I read that Obama had addressed an overflow crowd yesterday, with 3,000 people not being able to get in and being forced to stand out in the snow. Note that this is just what happened in Seattle at Key Arena on Friday. The giant overflow crowd left outside in foul weather is a sign of an organization that has been overwhelmed, not an organization that has been successful. As soon as I read that, knowing what had just happened in WA, and having seen the amazing demographic diversity of the Obama supporters in our caucuses (which made me think, “This is not a regional phenomenon”), I told [xx], “He’s going to carry Maine.” It didn’t take a genius!

Rick Hertzberg clears the whole thing up:

We’re awash in numbers from yesterday’s primaries, but there’s one number that nobody ever seems to crunch: how many votes did the candidates get?

I don’t mean how many delegates, or how many states, or the margin in this or that state. I mean: across the nation, which is to say in all 23 states that held Democratic primaries or caucuses yesterday (I’m focussing on the Dems for the moment), how many human beings voted for Clinton and how many for Obama?

I just spent some time with a calculator and the latest CNN state-by-state totals, and here’s what I came up with:

* Hillary Clinton: 7,347,477 (48.8%)
* Barack Obama: 7,293,887 (48.5%)
* John Edwards: 408,622 (2.7%)

One way to look at this: Clinton crushes Obama by more than fifty thousand votes!

A second way: Despite trailing Clinton by five to seven points in national polls on the morning of the primaries, Obama finishes within half a percentage point!

A third way: A majority of Democrats voted against Clinton.

A fourth way: A majority of Democrats voted against Obama.

A fifth way: If Edwards’s votes split 57-43 for Obama, Obama wins.

Then there’s my way, which is also the high way:

It was a tie.

John Edwards, sadly, is out. With him went what seemed like the only chance to end our occupation of Iraq before 2012, when a presumably Democratic president will presumably be reelected.

If Edwards had been able to end the occupation next year — Bush’s warhogs are right about this — the results would have been the shameful abandonment of our allies there, a bloody civil war killing thousands or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and a destabilized Middle East descending into God knows what new horrors.

If Clinton or Obama is elected, exactly the same things will happen, only four years later. By that time we will have lost another trillion dollars or so and thousands more American lives. In addition the Iraqis would have lost — Oh, well, who cares?

Obama or Clinton will happily pay such a price for reelection, just as Nixon did before them. The awful irony is that this time it might not even work. Bush has left his successor a far worse mess to clean up than Kennedy/Johnson did. We could wind up with a Republican president in 2012, or even a Scientologist. On the evidence so far this century, we’re dumb enough to elect anything.

The only bright spot in today’s announcement is my suspicion that Edwards has cut a deal with Obama and will wind up as vice president. This would halfway realize the advice I generously offered on December 16: “As between Edwards and Obama my considered opinion is that they should swap wives and then flip for the nomination.”

As usual, read Bill Greider in The Nation. Immediately. Brief taste below. Full meal here.

Bill Gross, the insightful managing director of PIMCO, the major bond-investment house, has called for virtually doubling the federal deficit in order pump hundreds of billions into new economic activity. When bond holders are more alarmed about the economy than political leaders, you know something is backwards in American politics.

Edwards, alas, probably restrained the size of his stimulus package to convince the media gatekeepers he is not wacko and thus win some coverage for his forward thinking. No such luck. Edwards has his own shortcomings, but he has been victimized by the shallow political culture that empties meaning from presidential campaigns. The press early on consigned him to the “populist” stereotype and largely ignored the serious content of his agenda.

This is the curse that leads to enervating, brain-dead presidential cycles. Substance bores political reporters. Most of them do not understand economics or even know much about how government actually works. Given their ignorance, they prefer to play the role of theater critics and imagine that readers are desperate to hear their highly subjective and utterly unreliable reviews of the sideshow.

The excerpt below is from a piece at Smirking Chimp by Paul Rogat Loeb. His argument seems pretty sound to me. In fact I said something along vaguely similar lines last month, although more briefly and with an added integrationist twist.

As media commentators proclaim Hillary Clinton's rebirth from the ashes of defeat, they miss a critical story--Obama and Edwards won the New Hampshire primary. Add together Obama's 36 percent and Edwards's 17, and they beat Clinton's 39 percent by 14 points…

Those who make up the Obedwards constituencies recognize the problems with so many of Clinton's approaches and stands. That's part of what's driving them, along with a genuine passion for Obama and Edwards, and a sense, confirmed by the polls, that either of the two has a better shot at beating the leading Republicans than does Clinton.

If we look just at delegates, both Iowa and New Hampshire advanced the Obedwards combined cause. But because the coverage has focused so exclusively on the Obama/Clinton match-up, they've missed that a solid majority of Democrats in both New Hampshire and Iowa rejected a candidate who a short while back was proclaiming her nomination as nearly inevitable…

Here’s an old classic, updated.

Is it the year before a presidential election again? If I am a self-loathing Irish bully presidential wanna-be Democrat who never herself had the guts to go into politics, then that means it is again time to begin the quadrennial tear-down of any and every Democrat with a reasonable shot at winning.

Since the Democrats in the past few cycles by and large have put forth a steady stream of capable and impressive candidates, the key here is to focus like a laser on personal foibles of the candidates. Anything less than a total focus on the personality of the candidate in question risks inserting context into the equation. That is to say, it risks the reader thinking, for instance, something like, “Hey! Isn’t this the same spiteful asshole who savagely tore down Al Gore in 2000 without the slightest glimmer of acknowledgment that his opponent was — George W. Bush. And, ditto, re John Kerry in ’04?”

I don’t know if Obama is ready or not. But I do know that Maureen Dowd (scum-sucking paid link; sorry) thinks he has a shot at the presidential seat that by rights should be hers. Why else would she say awful, viperous, and irrelevant things like:

Using the dreaded third person that some candidates slip into, he told the press that one of their favorite narratives boiled down to “Obama has pretty good style, he can deliver a pretty good speech, but he seems to prioritize rhetoric over substance.” After an ode to his own specificity, he tut-tutted, “You’ve been reporting on how I look in a swimsuit.”

He poses for the cover of Men’s Vogue and then gets huffy when people don’t treat him as Hannah Arendt. …

and:

After talking to high school journalists, he took a sniffy shot at the loutish reporters who were merely whispering where’s the beef: “Take some notes, guys, that’s how it’s done.”

No fewer than three times last week, Mr. Obama got indignant about the beach-babe attention given to a shot of him in the Hawaiian surf. …

and:

When The Times’s Jeff Zeleny asked him on his plane whether he’d had a heater in his podium during his announcement speech in subzero Springfield, Mr. Obama hesitated. He shot Jeff a look that said, “Are you from People magazine?” before conceding that, unlike Abe Lincoln, he’d had a heater.

Take some notes, senator, that’s how it’s done.

Slow down, Mo. We know how it’s done. Where “it” means denying election to any Democratic candidate, no matter how qualified or capable.

We know because we have for years watched you tear down basically decent men, like Al Gore and John Kerry, who had the temerity put themselves in the public arena and get in line for the job you crave but never had the courage to pursue.

Good luck, Sen. Obama. You’re going to need it. Yes, there are no snakes in Ireland; but that’s only because Dowd’s forebears emigrated to America. So she was born here instead.

The Biggest Loser out of the ’06 elections? Any GOP presidential candidate who has spent the past five years in an accelerating attempt to become the mainstream GOP heir-apparent to President George W. Bush, especially in terms of embracing the Iraq war.

McCain’s clumsiness and lack of political timing now stand exposed as never before: he was an independent, critical, truth-telling outsider in 2000, at a time when the GOP needed a mainstream, establishment candidate. (We’ve since learned that Bush is a crazed millenialist, but he ran then as a moderate who could keep his pants on.) Now, when it is clear that in order to have any chance of retaining the White House in 2008, the GOP will need an independent, critical, truth-telling outsider who is distanced from a profoundly incompetent and increasingly unpopular Republican administration, John McCain is locked into a new, awkward-fitting, mainstream, establishment, heir-apparent candidacy. Not to mention that he is tar-babied to the electorally fatal Iraq war.

If the GOP is stupid enough to nominate McCain in ’08, the commercials write themselves: simple voice-overs of McCain’s thousands of quotes defending and pushing stay-the-course, playing over the grotesque visuals of the awkward hugs between Bush and a toadying, insincere McCain.

The most dangerous possible GOP candidate, and he or she simply does not exist among the front ranks of those reported to be considering a White House run, is an anti-war, anti-Bush strict fiscal and social conservative. (Possible exception on substance: Newt Gingrich, but he is so personally unlikeable and tainted as to be unelectable.)

Actually I am the one responsible for the Democratic takeover of the United States Senate.

Let’s have some fun with numbers, all right? Saddam Hussein was captured on December 13, 2003. So 365 times three less 38 less another day for leap year gives us 1,056 days from that day to this one.

Now all join in and count along with me. One, two, three, four, etc., etc., etc. and so on and so forth, keep going now, still a long, long way to Tipperary. Count, count, count, don’t give up now …

Oh, man, at last, we made it. One thousand and fifty-six. Take a couple of deep breaths and now let’s wind down with something easy. Count the days between Saddam’s death sentence and the midterm elections. All together now!

One.

Two.

Well, I’ll be damned. What are the odds of that happening?

The Rude Pundit provides us with this link to selections from Lynne Cheney’s erotic masterpiece, Sisters: The Novel of a Strong and Beautiful Woman Who Broke All the Rules of the American Frontier. So sin-sodden am I that I wasn’t at all offended by these excerpts. But then I wasn’t offended by James Webb’s novels either.

Nor was I offended when I heard Webb speak at a 1985 conference of The Asia Society on “The Vietnam Experience in American Literature.” The conference brought together such writers and editors as William Broyles, Asa Baber, C.D.B. Bryan, John Del Vecchio, Nan Talese, Osborn Elliot, Joe Klein, Ron Kovic, Myra McPherson, Kevin Buckley, Tim O’Brien, and Wallace Terry.

As well as James Webb, who at the time was an assistant secretary of defense in Reagan’s Pentagon. In that crowd, he was the Christian and we were the lions.

Webb didn’t give an inch in the hostile questioning that followed his speech. Politely, intelligently, and with quiet dignity, he defended a war that most of his audience loathed.

Like most everyone else I didn’t agree with him. But I admired him. I wasn’t surprised when he later quit his job with Reagan; nor when he eventually became a Democrat. If you live in Virginia, I urge you to help send him to the Senate. It desperately needs him, and more like him.

My wife’s friend Marie passes along a message below. Pete Seeger, appearing on YouTube, adds to the message.

Unless you’re dead or moribund, you’ve noticed that a number of Democrats have a good chance of winning, but most of them still need money. If you have a few bucks go here.

You can give to selected candidates or to all of them.

Please feel free to pass the link on or post it on your blog if you have one. It’s a lot more pleasant to part with a few bucks now than to stand naked in a cold room and have cold water poured over you later because someone thinks you’re supporting terrorists.