knowing better

In they waltz, minus the grace, minus the timing, right through the middle of class.

"You know," I say for the eight-hundredth time, "if you would just ride the bus that comes right to your house, you'd never be late."

The half of the duo who provides the ride wrinkles her nose. "I'm not gonna get up that early."

"Gas is expensive," I shrug.

Next class, the scene repeats.

"Or," I say, collecting the tardy slips, "you could leave five minutes earlier and always be on time." Detentions for being chronically late are mandatory. And so avoidable.

"Today we got up at 5 in the morning," comes the choral response. "We went jogging."

"You've been up since five, and you're still late." At this point, it's rhetorical.

"We went jogging. Can you tell?"

"Can I tell?" And while they may not be able to define incredulity, they recognize it on my face, drop the conversation and, for the moment, get to work. Perhaps this time they'll actually finish.

It's one of those young high school friendships: every decision is a joint decision, though two heads aren't better than one. Now a thirty-six hour health kick; later a trip to the hairdresser's for highlights that are blue and a red not found in nature. It's all very fourteen, which one of them is, for another month or two. But the other one is a mother.

More quotes

The real Palin's real response to the real Couric. Really:

"That’s why I say I, like every American I’m speaking with, we’re ill about this position that we have been put in. Where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh, it’s got to be about job creation, too. Shoring up our economy, and putting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade — we have got to see trade as opportunity, not as, uh, competitive, um, scary thing, but one in five jobs created in the trade sector today. We’ve got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation."

quote/unquote

"So what we now have is non-functional government in the face of a major crisis, because Congress includes a quorum of crazies and nobody trusts the White House an inch. As a friend said last night, we’ve become a banana republic with nukes."

--Paul Krugman

RIP Paul Newman

>

from the NY Times

Paul Newman, one of the last of the great 20th-century movie stars, died Friday at his home in Westport, Conn. He was 83.

The cause was cancer, said Jeff Sanderson of Chasen & Company, Mr. Newman’s publicist.

If Marlon Brando and James Dean defined the defiant American male as a sullen rebel, Paul Newman recreated him as a likable renegade, a strikingly handsome figure of animal high spirits and blue-eyed candor whose magnetism was almost impossible to resist, whether the character was Hud, Cool Hand Luke or Butch Cassidy.

He acted in more than 65 movies over more than 50 years, drawing on a physical grace, unassuming intelligence and good humor that made it all seem effortless. Yet he was also an ambitious, intellectual actor and a passionate student of his craft, and he achieved what most of his peers find impossible: remaining a major star into craggy, charismatic old age.

Mr. Newman made his Hollywood debut in the 1954 costume film “The Silver Chalice,” but real stardom arrived a year and a half later, when he inherited from James Dean the role of the boxer Rocky Graziano in “Somebody Up There Likes Me.” Dean had been killed in a car crash before the screenplay was completed.

It was a rapid rise for Mr. Newman, but being taken seriously as an actor took longer. He was almost undone by his star power, his classic good looks and, most of all, his brilliant blue eyes. “I picture my epitaph,” he once said. “Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.”

Mr. Newman’s filmography was a cavalcade of flawed heroes and winning antiheroes stretching over decades. In 1958 he was a drifting confidence man determined to marry a Southern belle in an adaptation of William Faulkner’s “Long, Hot Summer.” In 1982, in “The Verdict,” he was a washed-up alcoholic lawyer who finds a chance to redeem himself in a medical malpractice case.

And in 2002, at 77, having lost none of his charm, he was affably deadly as Tom Hanks’s gangster boss in “Road to Perdition.” It was his last on-screen role in a major theatrical release. (He supplied the voice of the veteran race car Doc in the Pixar animated film “Cars” in 2006.)

Few major American stars have chosen to play so many imperfect men.

As Hud Bannon in “Hud” (1963) Mr. Newman was a heel on the Texas range who wanted the good life and was willing to sell diseased cattle to get it. The character was intended to make the audience feel “loathing and disgust,” Mr. Newman told a reporter. Instead, he said, “we created a folk hero.”

As the self-destructive convict in “Cool Hand Luke” (1967) Mr. Newman was too rebellious to be broken by a brutal prison system. As Butch Cassidy in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969) he was the most amiable and antic of bank robbers, memorably paired with Robert Redford. And in “The Hustler” (1961) he was the small-time pool shark Fast Eddie, a role he recreated 25 years later, now as a well-heeled middle-age liquor salesman, in “The Color of Money” (1986).

That performance, alongside one by Tom Cruise, brought Mr. Newman his sole Academy Award, for best actor, after he had been nominated for that prize six times before. In all he received eight Oscar nominations for best actor and one for best supporting actor, in “Road to Perdition.”

“When a role is right for him, he’s peerless,” the film critic Pauline Kael wrote in 1977. “Newman is most comfortable in a role when it isn’t scaled heroically; even when he plays a bastard, he’s not a big bastard — only a callow, selfish one, like Hud. He can play what he’s not — a dumb lout. But you don’t believe it when he plays someone perverse or vicious, and the older he gets and the better you know him, the less you believe it. His likableness is infectious; nobody should ever be asked not to like Paul Newman.”

More than a movie star and a sometime stage actor, Mr. Newman was an entrepreneur, a philanthropist and, after he turned 75, a racecar driver. In 1995, as a 70th birthday present to himself, he raced at Daytona. When he won his event, he made the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest winner in his race class.

In 1982, as a lark, he decided to sell a salad dressing he had created and bottled for friends at Christmas. Thus was born the Newman’s Own brand, an enterprise he started with his friend A. E. Hotchner, the writer. More than 25 years later the brand has expanded to include, among other foods, lemonade, popcorn, spaghetti sauce, pretzels, organic Fig Newmans and wine. (His daughter Nell Newman runs the company’s organic arm.) All its profits, of more than $200 million, have been donated to charity, the company says.

Much of the money was used to create a string of Hole in the Wall Gang Camps, named for the outlaw gang in “Butch Cassidy.” The camps provide free summer recreation for children with cancer and other life-threatening illnesses. Mr. Newman was actively involved in the project, even choosing cowboy hats as gear so that children who had lost their hair because of chemotherapy could disguise their baldness.

Several years before the establishment of Newman’s Own, on Nov. 28, 1978, Scott Newman, the oldest of Mr. Newman’s six children and his only son, died of an overdose of alcohol and pills, at 28. His father’s monument to him was the Scott Newman Center, created to publicize the dangers of drugs and alcohol. It is headed by Susan Newman, the oldest of his five daughters.

Mr. Newman’s three younger daughters are the children of his 50-year second marriage, to the actress Joanne Woodward. Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward both were cast — she as an understudy — in the Broadway play “Picnic” in 1953. Starting with “The Long, Hot Summer” in 1958, they co-starred in 10 movies, including “From the Terrace” (1960), based on a John O’Hara novel about a driven executive and his unfaithful wife; “Harry & Son” (1984), which Mr. Newman also directed, produced and helped write; and “Mr. & Mrs. Bridge” (1990), James Ivory’s version of a pair of Evan S. Connell novels, in which Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward played a conservative Midwestern couple coping with life’s changes.

When good roles for Ms. Woodward dwindled, Mr. Newman produced and directed “Rachel, Rachel” for her in 1968. Nominated for the best-picture Oscar, the film, a delicate story of a spinster schoolteacher tentatively hoping for love, brought Ms. Woodward her second of four best-actress Oscar nominations. (She won the award on her first nomination, for the 1957 film “The Three Faces of Eve,” and was nominated again for her roles in “Mr. & Mrs. Bridge” and the 1973 movie “Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams.”)

Mr. Newman also directed his wife in “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds” (1972), “The Glass Menagerie” (1987) and the television movie “The Shadow Box” (1980). As a director his most ambitious film was “Sometimes a Great Notion” (1971), based on the Ken Kesey novel.

In an industry in which long marriages might be defined as those that last beyond the first year and the first infidelity, Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward’s was striking for its endurance. But they admitted that it was often turbulent. She loved opera and ballet. He liked playing practical jokes and racing cars. But as Mr. Newman told Playboy magazine, in an often-repeated quotation about marital fidelity, “I have steak at home; why go out for hamburger?”

Paul Leonard Newman was born on Jan. 26, 1925, in Cleveland. His mother, the former Teresa Fetzer, was a Roman Catholic who turned to Christian Science. His father, Arthur, who was Jewish, owned a thriving sporting goods store that enabled the family to settle in affluent Shaker Heights, Ohio, where Paul and his older brother, Arthur, grew up.

Teresa Newman, an avid theatergoer, steered her son toward acting as a child. In high school, besides playing football, he acted in school plays, graduating in 1943. After less than a year at Ohio University at Athens, he joined the Navy Air Corps to be a pilot. When a test showed he was colorblind, he was made an aircraft radio operator.

After the war Mr. Newman entered Kenyon College in Ohio on an athletic scholarship. He played football and acted in a dozen plays before graduating in 1949.

Arthur Newman, a strict and distant man, thought acting an impractical occupation, but, perhaps persuaded by his wife, he agreed to support his son for a year while Paul acted in small theater companies.

In May 1950 his father died, and Mr. Newman returned to Cleveland to run the sporting goods store. He brought with him a wife, Jacqueline Witte, an actress he had met in summer stock. But after 18 months Paul asked his brother to take over the business while he, his wife and their year-old son, Scott, headed for Yale University, where Mr. Newman intended to concentrate on directing.

He left Yale in the summer of 1952, perhaps because the money had run out and his wife was pregnant again. But almost immediately, the director Josh Logan and the playwright William Inge gave him a small role in “Picnic,” a play that was to run 14 months on Broadway. Soon he was playing the second male lead and understudying Ralph Meeker as the sexy drifter who roils the women in a Kansas town.

Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward were attracted to each other in rehearsals of “Picnic.” But he was a married man, and Ms. Woodward has insisted that they spent the next several years running away from each other.

In the early 1950s roles in live television came easily to both of them. Mr. Newman starred in segments of “You Are There,” “Goodyear Television Playhouse” and other shows.

He was also accepted as a student at the Actors Studio in New York, where he took lessons alongside James Dean, Geraldine Page, Marlon Brando and, eventually, Ms. Woodward.

Then Hollywood knocked. In 1954 Warner Brothers offered Mr. Newman $1,000 a week to star in “The Silver Chalice” as the Greek slave who creates the silver cup used at the Last Supper. Mr. Newman, who rarely watched his own films, once gave out pots, wooden spoons and whistles to a roomful of guests and forced them to sit through “The Silver Chalice,” which he called the worst movie ever made.

His antidote for that early Hollywood experience was to hurry back to Broadway. In Joseph Hayes’s play “The Desperate Hours,” he starred as an escaped convict who holds a family hostage. The play was a hit, and during its run, Jacqueline Newman gave birth to their third child.

On his nights off Mr. Newman acted on live television. In one production he had the title role in “The Death of Billy the Kid,” a psychological study of the outlaw written by Gore Vidal and directed by Arthur Penn for “Philco Playhouse”; in another, an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Battler,” he took over the lead role after James Dean, who had been scheduled to star, was killed on Sept. 30, 1955.

Mr. Penn, who directed “The Battler,” was later convinced that Mr. Newman’s performance in that drama, as a disfigured prizefighter, won him the lead role in “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” again replacing Dean. When Mr. Penn adapted the Billy the Kid teleplay for his first Hollywood film, “The Left Handed Gun,” in 1958, he again cast Mr. Newman in the lead.

Even so, Mr. Newman was saddled for years with an image of being a “pretty boy” lightweight.

“Paul suffered a little bit from being so handsome — people doubted just how well he could act,” Mr. Penn told the authors of the 1988 book “Paul and Joanne.”

By 1957 Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward were discreetly living together in Hollywood; his wife had initially refused to give him a divorce. He later admitted that his drinking was out of control during this period.

With his divorce granted, Mr. Newman and Ms. Woodward were married on Jan. 29, 1958, and went on to rear their three daughters far from Hollywood, in a farmhouse on 15 acres in Westport, Conn.

That same year Mr. Newman played Brick, the reluctant husband of Maggie the Cat, in the film version of Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” earning his first Academy Award nomination, for best actor. In 1961, with “The Hustler,” he earned his second best-actor Oscar nomination. He had become more than a matinee idol.

Many of his meaty performances during the early ’60s came in movies directed by Martin Ritt, who had been a teaching assistant to Elia Kazan at the Actors Studio when Mr. Newman was a student. After directing “The Long, Hot Summer,” Mr. Ritt directed Mr. Newman in “Paris Blues” (1961), a story of expatriate musicians; “Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man” (1962); “Hud” (1963), which brought Mr. Newman a third Oscar nomination; “The Outrage” (1964), with Mr. Newman as the bandit in a western based on Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon”; and “Hombre” (1967), in which Mr. Newman played a white man, reared by Indians, struggling to live in a white world.

Among his other important films were Otto Preminger’s “Exodus” (1960), Alfred Hitchcock’s “Torn Curtain” (1966) and Jack Smight’s “Harper” (1966), in which he played Ross Macdonald’s private detective Lew Archer. The character and film were renamed “Harper,” it was said, in the hope of continuing Mr. Newman’s line of hits with titles beginning with the letter H. He reprised the character nine years later in “The Drowning Pool.”

In 1968 — after he was cast as an ice-cold racecar driver in “Winning,” with Ms. Woodward playing his frustrated wife — Mr. Newman was sent to a racing school. In midlife racing became his obsession. A Web site — newman-haas.com — details his racing career, including his first race in 1972; his first professional victory, in 1982; and his partnership in a successful car racing team.

A politically active liberal Democrat, Mr. Newman was a Eugene McCarthy delegate to the 1968 Democratic convention and appointed by President Jimmy Carter to a United Nations General Assembly session on disarmament. He expressed pride at being on President Richard M. Nixon’s enemies list.

When Mr. Newman turned 50, he settled into a new career as a character actor, playing the title role — “with just the right blend of craftiness and stupidity,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times — of Robert Altman’s “Buffalo Bill and the Indians” (1976); an unscrupulous hockey coach in George Roy Hill’s “Slap Shot” (1977); and the disintegrating lawyer in Sidney Lumet’s “Verdict.”

Most of Mr. Newman’s films were commercial hits, probably none more so than “The Sting” (1973), in which he teamed with Mr. Redford again to play a couple of con men, and “The Towering Inferno” (1974), in which he played an architect in an all-star cast that included Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway.

After his fifth best-actor Oscar nomination, for his portrait of an innocent man discredited by the press in Sydney Pollack’s “Absence of Malice” (1981), and his sixth a year later, for “The Verdict,” the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1986 gave Mr. Newman the consolation prize of an honorary award. In a videotaped acceptance speech he said, “I am especially grateful that this did not come wrapped in a gift certificate to Forest Lawn.”

His best-actor Oscar, for “The Color of Money,” came the next year, and at the 1994 Oscars ceremony he received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. The year after that he earned his eighth nomination as best actor, for his curmudgeonly construction worker trying to come to terms with his failures in “Nobody’s Fool” (1994). In 2003 he was nominated as best supporting actor for his work in “Road to Perdition.” And in 2006 he took home both a Golden Globe and an Emmy for playing another rough-hewn old-timer, this one in the HBO mini-series “Empire Falls.”

Mr. Newman returned to Broadway for the last time in 2002, as the Stage Manager in a lucrative revival of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” The performance was nominated for a Tony Award, though critics tended to find it modest. When the play was broadcast on PBS in 2003, he won an Emmy.

This year he had planned to direct “Of Mice and Men,” based on the John Steinbeck novel, in October at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut. But in May he announced that he was stepping aside, citing his health. It would have been his first time directing a stage production. (He was also part owner of a restaurant, Dressing Room, on the playhouse grounds.)

Mr. Newman’s last screen credit was as the narrator of Bill Haney’s documentary “The Price of Sugar,” released this year. By then he had all but announced that he was through with acting.

“I’m not able to work anymore as an actor at the level I would want to,” Mr. Newman said last year on the ABC program “Good Morning America.” “You start to lose your memory, your confidence, your invention. So that’s pretty much a closed book for me.”

But he remained fulfilled by his charitable work, saying it was his greatest legacy, particularly in giving ailing, often dying children a camp at which to play.

“We are such spendthrifts with our lives,” Mr. Newman once told a reporter. “The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”

In case you missed it

I picked a bad night to miss David Letterman. If you're lame too, here's what we missed.

I know all the words to this song

And if you had been riding to work with me lately, you'd know that.

Just sayin'.

The fine print

"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." -- Section 8 of the Treasury's $700 billion bail-out proposal

Just in case you'd forgotten we're still living under the Bush misadministration, here comes its parting shot: making a cataclysm worse.

Krugman. The Nation on John "Keating 5" McCain. The American Prospect.

Leonard Pitts: Do yourself a favor-- read a book

It took some time for the daughter to become a reader. Some time, and some funny exercises to help her eyes work together, and some colorful books about a mouse named Geronimo. The mother was relieved, though perhaps she needn't have worried. The child's life has become so full of so much reading and writing so quickly that surely it was inevitable. Whether nature or nurture, though, as ever it's hard to say. Perhaps as a control group we could check the habits of all those Palin kids in Alaska.

by Leonard Pitts
the Miami Herald

Of course, we all have questions for Sarah Palin:

Does she actually think living across the Bering Strait from Russia constitutes foreign policy expertise? Does she really take the parable of Adam and Eve as literal truth? How, exactly, does one field dress a moose? And why would one want to?

My first question, though, would not be one of those. I'd simply ask which books she wants to ban -- and why.

Yes, there's a list of titles floating around the Internet right now, but it's a fake. It is, however, established fact that our would-be vice president has in the past tried to pull books off library shelves.

The New York Times reports that as a member of the City Council of Wasilla, Alaska, Palin complained to colleagues about a book called Daddy's Roommate, described in promotional material as being ''for and about the children of lesbian and gay parents.'' Laura Chase, who ran Palin's campaign for mayor, explained that the book was harmless and suggested Palin read it.

Chase told The Times that Palin replied she ``didn't need to read that stuff. It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from the library and she didn't even read it.''

Later, as mayor, Palin reportedly asked the town's librarian three times whether she would agree to remove controversial books from the shelves. Three times, the librarian refused. Palin fired her, but eventually bowed to public pressure and gave the woman her job back.

''I'm still proud of Sarah,'' said Chase, ``but she scares the bejeebers out of me.''

And in that context, it seems apropos that next week is Banned Books Week.

As you doubtless know, that's the week set aside each year by the American Library Association to bring attention to attempts by some of us to regulate what others of us may read. The ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom reports that it has seen 9,700 ''challenges'' -- a challenge is defined as a formal written request to remove a book from a library because the content offends or is deemed inappropriate -- since 1990. Chillingly, the office suggests that's probably an undercount. It estimates that for every challenge reported, four or five are not.

So Palin has company, to say the least.

Count among that number the woman from a Cuban exile group who bragged to a Miami Herald reporter how in 2006 she checked out and kept an elementary school library book she felt painted too rosy a picture of life on that communist island. Like Palin, she thought she had good reason. Would-be book banners always do.

I'm reminded of how someone challenged me the other day on my contention that anti-intellectualism has overtaken this land. I mentioned by way of example Palin's Bible literalism, but really, there's so much more. There's the ''Jay Walking'' segment on Leno. There's this notion that ''elite'' is a four-letter word. There's the White House's censorship and politicization of science. There's the recent survey which found that more people can name all five Simpsons than all five freedoms enumerated in the First Amendment.

And there's this: as many as 50,000 incidents since 1990 in which a book was forced to justify its existence. We're talking books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, books like The Color Purple, books like Harry Potter and, yes, books like Daddy's Roommate, books that offended because they expressed ideas that made someone uncomfortable. As if any other kind of idea was worth expressing.

We are becoming the stupid giant of planet Earth: richer than Midas, mightier than Thor, dumber than rocks. Which makes us a danger to the planet -- and to ourselves. This country cannot continue to prosper and to embrace stupidity. The two are fundamentally incompatible.

So do us all a favor: Annoy Sarah Palin. For goodness sake, read.

Homecoming

Tonight is the high school homecoming dance and my son has taken an interest, in his second year. He's got a date, even, from a cross-town school, just like dear old dad way back when.

So I'm a nervous parent, after all, I was once his age. But I'm really not concerned. Zach may not always live up to his dad's impossible expectations, but he never let's me down. Besides, he's got a game tomorrow.

Can't get this song out of my head

No reason.


and most of the words are even right. But, "the other night I tripped a nice continental divide?" dreamed of knives, dude. isn't that easier?

I am a patriot and I love my country -- a welcome forwarded e-mail

I don't cotton to e-mail forwarders much. Especially don't expect me -- or threaten me -- to pass it along lest I'll suffer some unfortunate fate. Don't paint me as unpatriotic. Most of all, I'm not stupid.

After untold snopes.com reply-alls to everything imaginable -- and many things not -- my wife has learned over the years what is fair game and what isn't. So I, at least, open her forwards. This one came from a fellow Progressive Patriot for Peace (embrace the alliteration) from Iowa who now lives in Arizona. Author unknown.

I'm a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight ...

* If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're "exotic, different."
* Grow up in Alaska eating moose burgers, a quintessential American story.

* If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.
* Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're a maverick.

* Graduate from Harvard law School and you are elitist.
* Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you've got a well-rounded education.

* If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people
while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.
* If your total resume is: local weather girl (ED: actually, I think it was sports), 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.

* If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.
* If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a true Christian.

* If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America's.
* If you're husband is nicknamed "First Dude", with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group until 2002 that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, that represents what America is all about.


And, while I'm at it...

Stupid.Is@Stupid.Does.Gov

"WASHINGTON (AP) — Hackers broke into the Yahoo! e-mail account that Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin used for official business as Alaska's governor, revealing as evidence a few inconsequential personal messages she has received since John McCain selected her as his running mate."

I'm going to have to say that again.

"the Yahoo! e-mail account that Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin used for official business."

Yahoo!! Seriously! (But not Yahoo Serious. And if you get that reference, well. I have no idea whether to award points or deduct them, so. Let's call it moot, yet essential.) Ye gods. The larger point here, of course, is not that using a spam-catcher address for official business not only looks like "the most nonsensical, inane thing I've ever heard of," as one activist put it, but that it only exists to subvert and hide and keep we the people in the dark!

Secrets and Lies! 4 more years! We cannot survive it!

Those Yahoo! exclamation points are contagious.

More laughing matters

I mean, it is a joke. A joke that, given a few more lies, a few Diebold machines, a few more lies, some hanging chads, some racist stupid people, and a malignant melanoma may mean holy war with Russia, but we'll freak out about that later.

In the meantime, I give you the Palin Baby Name generator, if you're wondering what folks would have called you if fate had been oh, so cruel. Me? I woulda been Chalk Revelations until I ran for my life.

But did she learn how to spell Ashwaubenon?

Did you hear the one about the thirty-three year old high school cheerleader, dateline (more or less) Green Bay? True story, at least for a day. But, hard to continue a felonious identity-theft-from-your-own-out-of-state-teen-daughter ruse after being locked up for some other crime--that one only a misdemeanor. And even if she coulda made bail, high school girls can be so catty. So it's probably just as well she didn't go back. Then again, if you ask me, if they truly want to punish this candidate for Hoos-oisie mother of the year, forget the $10,000 and six years she could theoretically owe the government for using documents that were not her own, take her at her "I wanted to live what I missed out on" word, and make her do high school until she graduates. Day after day after day.

Ok, so maybe it IS a laughing matter

the new kid

I do not know this boy, not really, not yet. It's only been a week.

I know that last year he caused us a fair amount of consternation when we went through all the enrollment rigamaroll and then he attended for one day, never to come back.

I know the first time I heard that note of quiet surprise in his voice is when I walked in to the guidance office, a year later, with the backpack he'd left behind. "You remember me?" Sometimes the best answer is a nod and a smile.

I know he has a sister and two brothers and a step-father who works out-of-town. I know last year he disappeared to work and buy the car which he drives without benefit of a license. I know the cafeteria food is beyond his budget. I know he sorts for FedEx under a different name. I know this is high school number four in state number three. I know that next week he will be nineteen. I know the odds. Perhaps even better than he.

I know that paperwork, ever the bane of his existence, may unravel this dream, if the wrong person tugs on the thread. Already the parking permit has become a protracted negotiation, my leverage mostly a figment. And the work program credits, well; I hesitate to guess. If it falls through at least there will be someone to break it to him who knows how to pronounce his name. Another surprise to him in itself. The smallest things make the connection, if only people would bother, if only people would notice the difference. He is, after all, a person.

A person who, after all, has walked in claiming the same goal so many others have abandoned. Who wants what we claim to deliver. I have to give him credit. Last year is last year, at least so far. I choose to believe, as long as there's reason, and maybe sometimes even when there isn't.

Krugman: Blizzard of Lies

from the New York Times

Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks” when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere?

These stories have two things in common: they’re all claims recently made by the McCain campaign — and they’re all out-and-out lies.

Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 — my first year at The Times — trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign’s claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.

But I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.


Take the case of the Bridge to Nowhere, which supposedly gives Ms. Palin credentials as a reformer. Well, when campaigning for governor, Ms. Palin didn’t say “no thanks” — she was all for the bridge, even though it had already become a national scandal, insisting that she would “not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that’s so negative.”

Oh, and when she finally did decide to cancel the project, she didn’t righteously reject a handout from Washington: she accepted the handout, but spent it on something else. You see, long before she decided to cancel the bridge, Congress had told Alaska that it could keep the federal money originally earmarked for that project and use it elsewhere.

So the whole story of Ms. Palin’s alleged heroic stand against wasteful spending is fiction.

Or take the story of Mr. Obama’s alleged advocacy of kindergarten sex-ed. In reality, he supported legislation calling for “age and developmentally appropriate education”; in the case of young children, that would have meant guidance to help them avoid sexual predators.

And then there’s the claim that Mr. Obama’s use of the ordinary metaphor “putting lipstick on a pig” was a sexist smear, and on and on.

Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well, they’re probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being “balanced” at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn’t say that he’s wrong, it reports that “some Democrats say” that he’s wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.

They’re probably also counting on the prevalence of horse-race reporting, so that instead of the story being “McCain campaign lies,” it becomes “Obama on defensive in face of attacks.”

Still, how upset should we be about the McCain campaign’s lies? I mean, politics ain’t beanbag, and all that.

One answer is that the muck being hurled by the McCain campaign is preventing a debate on real issues — on whether the country really wants, for example, to continue the economic policies of the last eight years.

But there’s another answer, which may be even more important: how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.

I’m not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team’s ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.

I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.

And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?

What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.





Type rest of the post here

Perspective

They were just little kids, back half their lives ago. It was just a day, just one September Tuesday, wherever they were in the world. Seven years ago, an oblivious Korean kid vacationed in Chicago; a hemisphere South, another boy waited impatiently for Digimon to resume in Rio. And now here they sit, side by side in Missouri. Life has gone on, or is just getting started. It was never their story, exactly. History learned, not life lived. It's not another difference between them and me, just the main one, illustrated.

I'm not saying it makes any sense

I'm saying it made me laugh.

Then again, it's early.

What are words for?

Politics and the English language, GOP-style
BY LEONARD PITTS JR.

"We need change, all right. Change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington. We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington -- throw out the big-government liberals.'' -- Mitt Romney, Sept. 3, 2008

And then the gorilla run knee socks paint porno on the Cadillac. But school laughed and didn't we sing hats?

Ahem.

Maybe you wonder what the preceding gobbledygook means. I would ask which gobbledygook you mean: mine or Mitt Romney's? If he's allowed to spew nonsense and people act as if he's spoken intelligently, why can't I? If he gets to behave as if words no longer have objective meaning, why can't I?

I mean, baffle grab on the freak flake. Really.

And again, ahem.


If you're a regular here, you've heard me rant from time to time about intellectual dishonesty. By this, I mean more than just your garden variety lie. No, to be intellectually dishonest means to argue that which you know to be untrue and to substitute ideology for intellect to the degree that you'll do violence to language and logic rather than cross the party line.

Yes, we're all intellectually dishonest on occasion. But no one does it like Republican conservatives. They are to intellectual dishonesty what Michael Jordan was to basketball or the Temptations to harmony: the avatar, the exemplar, the paradigm. They have elevated it beyond hypocrisy and political expedience. They have made it . . . art. Which returns us to the astonishing thing Mitt Romney said while addressing the party faithful in St. Paul. You want to walk around it the way you would Michelangelo's David, admiring the elegance of the workmanship. You hesitate to touch it, much less pull it apart. To do so seems almost an act of desecration.

Unfortunately, some of us are too plodding and earthbound, too blind to the seductions of art, too stubbornly wedded to some vestigial notion that intellectual honesty matters, to walk past a steaming pile of bovine excreta without calling it a steaming pile of bovine excreta.

So excuse me, beg pardon, so sorry, but I have to ask: what liberal Washington is he talking about? The federal government has three branches. The legislative, i.e., Congress, was under conservative control from 1995 until 2007. The judicial, i.e., the Supreme Court, consists of nine justices, seven of whom were nominated by conservative presidents. The executive, i.e., the president, is George W. Bush. Enough said.

Washington is already what Romney wants to make it. Our current state of affairs, love it or loathe it, is indisputably a product of conservative governance. I wish that mattered more than it does.

That it doesn't matter much at all you can credit to conservative politicians who have, over the years, trained their followers to respond with Pavlovian faithfulness to certain terms. Say ''conservative,'' and they wag their tails. Say ''liberal'' and they bare their fangs. More to the point, say either and all thinking ceases, so much so that a representative of the ideology that has controlled most of Washington most of the last 12 years can say with a straight face that his ideology needs to seize control of Washington to fix what is broken there. And people hear this Orwellian doublespeak . . . and cheer. Why not? They have been taught that words mean what you need them to in a given moment.

Sadly, it has proven an easy lesson to impart. Turns out, all it requires is a limitless supply of gall and the inherent belief that people are dumber than a bag of hammers.

And all it costs us is language, the ability to have reasoned and intelligent political discourse, the idea that words do, and should, have weight, dimension and intrinsic meaning. Maybe you disagree. In which case, let me just say this:

Piffle crack eat monkey snow. Really.

The more things change...

Oh, sure. That wasn't #4 out there. But #12 looked good in his starting debut.

In fact, I'm quite impressed how Aaron Rodgers has handled the whole Brett Favre matter. At any moment in the past few weeks, months, years, he could easily have slipped. Done something stupid. Said the wrong thing. It happens all the time.

Not this time, though. Rodgers coolly took the Packers' reigns and performed well, well enough for the win, which is all that ever matters.

His touchdown pass was Favre-esque.
His mobility was not (and that's a good thing).
His "Lambeau Leap" was fun, but troubling (you have to be able to put your butt on the railing).
His read-on-the-fly-touchdown-pass-called-back-by-penalty to Donald Driver was beautiful, and telling.

This guy is ready. Most importantly, he's not alone.

Again one of if not the youngest team in the league -- losing a 38-year-old quarterback will have that effect -- this is a team again. Everyone has a job. It's not on one guy.

I'm encouraged. Welcome back football season!

The fifth season: football

My love for baseball is well documented, but nothing compares to football. In the span of a Thursday-to-Monday weekend, I will have witnessed two games live and one (plus) on TV of my favorite teams. So far, "we're" 0-2.

The 3rd-ranked Warriors lost to 5th-ranked Iowa City High 27-23 Thursday night. The Kohawks lost 21-6 to Augustana Saturday night. The Packers host the Vikings Monday night in the first game of the post-Favre era.

Meanwhile, the Warrior baseball team crushed the Iowa Bandits 15-4 this afternoon in fall baseball. Not that I didn't care, but this has to be the least amount of NFL football I've watched on any single weekend since 1972.

Oh, and Iowa beat Florida International (though they'd prefer to be called FIU) 42-0.

And how about those Rams?!

Frank Rich: Palin and McCain's Shotgun Marriage

from the New York Times
September 7, 2008

SARAH PALIN makes John McCain look even older than he is. And he seemed more than willing to play that part on Thursday night. By the time he slogged through his nearly 50-minute acceptance speech — longer even than Barack Obama’s — you half-expected some brazen younger Republican (Mitt Romney, perhaps?) to dash onstage to give him a gold watch and the bum’s rush.

Still, attention must be paid. McCain’s address, though largely a repetitive slew of stump-speech lines and worn G.O.P. orthodoxy, reminded us of what we once liked about the guy: his aspirations to bipartisanship, his heroic service in Vietnam, his twinkle. He took his (often inaccurate) swipes at Obama, but, in winning contrast to Palin and Rudy Giuliani, he wasn’t smug or nasty.

The only problem, of course, is that the entire thing was a sham.

As is nakedly evident, the speech’s central argument, that the 72-year-old McCain will magically morph into a powerful change agent as president, is a non sequitur. In his 26 years in Washington, most of it with a Republican in the White House and roughly half of it with Republicans in charge of Congress, he was better at lecturing his party about reform than leading a reform movement. G.O.P. corruption and governmental dysfunction only grew. So did his cynical flip-flops on the most destructive policies of the president who remained nameless Thursday night. (In the G.O.P., Bush love is now the second most popular love that dare not speak its name.)

Even more fraudulent, if that’s possible, is the contrast between McCain’s platonic presentation of his personal code of honor and the man he has become. He always puts his country first, he told us: “I’ve been called a maverick.” If there was any doubt that that McCain has fled, confirmation arrived with his last-minute embrace of Sarah Palin.

We still don’t know a lot about Palin except that she’s better at delivering a speech than McCain and that she defends her own pregnant daughter’s right to privacy even as she would have the government intrude to police the reproductive choices of all other women. Most of the rest of the biography supplied by her and the McCain camp is fiction.

She didn’t say “no thanks” to the “Bridge to Nowhere” until after Congress had already abandoned it but given Alaska a blank check for $223 million in taxpayers’ money anyway. Far from rejecting federal pork, she hired lobbyists to secure her town a disproportionate share of earmarks ($1,000 per resident in 2002, 20 times the per capita average in other states). Though McCain claimed “she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities,” she has never issued a single command as head of the Alaska National Guard. As for her “executive experience” as mayor, she told her hometown paper in Wasilla, Alaska, in 1996, the year of her election: “It’s not rocket science. It’s $6 million and 53 employees.” Her much-advertised crusade against officials abusing their office is now compromised by a bipartisan ethics investigation into charges that she did the same.

How long before we learn she never shot a moose?

Given the actuarial odds that could make Palin our 45th president, it would be helpful to know who this mystery woman actually is. Meanwhile, two eternal axioms of our politics remain in place. Americans vote for the top of the ticket, not the bottom. And in judging the top of the ticket, voters look first at the candidates’ maiden executive decision, their selection of running mates. Whatever we do and don’t know about Palin’s character at this point, there is no ambiguity in what her ascent tells us about McCain’s character and potential presidency.

He wanted to choose the pro-abortion-rights Joe Lieberman as his vice president. If he were still a true maverick, he would have done so. But instead he chose partisanship and politics over country. “God only made one John McCain, and he is his own man,” said the shafted Lieberman in his own tedious convention speech last week. What a pathetic dupe. McCain is now the man of James Dobson and Tony Perkins. The “no surrender” warrior surrendered to the agents of intolerance not just by dumping his pal for Palin but by moving so far to the right on abortion that even Cindy McCain seemed unaware of his radical shift when being interviewed by Katie Couric last week.

That ideological sellout, unfortunately, was not the worst leadership trait the last-minute vice presidential pick revealed about McCain. His speed-dating of Palin reaffirmed a more dangerous personality tic that has dogged his entire career. His decision-making process is impetuous and, in its Bush-like preference for gut instinct over facts, potentially reckless.

As The New York Times reported last Tuesday, Palin was sloppily vetted, at best. McCain operatives and some of their press surrogates responded to this revelation by trying to discredit The Times article. After all, The Washington Post had cited McCain aides (including his campaign manager, Rick Davis) last weekend to assure us that Palin had a “full vetting process.” She had been subjected to “an F.B.I. background check,” we were told, and “the McCain camp had reviewed everything it could find on her.”

The Times had it right. The McCain campaign’s claims of a “full vetting process” for Palin were as much a lie as the biographical details they’ve invented for her. There was no F.B.I. background check. The Times found no evidence that a McCain representative spoke to anyone in the State Legislature or business community. Nor did anyone talk to the fired state public safety commissioner at the center of the Palin ethics investigation. No McCain researcher even bothered to consult the relevant back issues of the Wasilla paper. Apparently when McCain said in June that his vice presidential vetting process was basically “a Google,” he wasn’t joking.

This is a roll of the dice beyond even Bill Clinton’s imagination. “Often my haste is a mistake,” McCain conceded in his 2002 memoir, “but I live with the consequences without complaint.” Well, maybe it’s fine if he wants to live with the consequences, but what about his country? Should the unexamined Palin prove unfit to serve at the pinnacle of American power, it will be too late for the rest of us to complain.

We’ve already seen where such visceral decision-making by McCain can lead. In October 2001, he speculated that Saddam Hussein might have been behind the anthrax attacks in America. That same month he out-Cheneyed Cheney in his repeated public insistence that Iraq had a role in 9/11 — even after both American and foreign intelligence services found that unlikely. He was similarly rash in his reading of the supposed evidence of Saddam’s W.M.D. and in his estimate of the number of troops needed to occupy Iraq. (McCain told MSNBC in late 2001 that we could do with fewer than 100,000.) It wasn’t until months after “Mission Accomplished” that he called for more American forces to be tossed into the bloodbath. The whole fiasco might have been prevented had he listened to those like Gen. Eric Shinseki who faulted the Rumsfeld war plan from the start.

In other words, McCain’s hasty vetting of Palin was all too reminiscent of his grave dereliction of due diligence on the war. He has been no less hasty in implying that we might somehow ride to the military rescue of Georgia (“Today, we are all Georgians”) or in reaffirming as late as December 2007 that the crumbling anti-democratic regime of Pervez Musharraf deserved “the benefit of the doubt” even as it was enabling the resurgence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. McCain’s blanket endorsement of Bush administration policy in Pakistan could have consequences for years to come.

“This election is not about issues” so much as the candidates’ images, said the McCain campaign manager, Davis, in one of the season’s most notable pronouncements. Going into the Republican convention, we thought we knew what he meant: the McCain strategy is about tearing down Obama. But last week made clear that the McCain campaign will be equally ruthless about deflecting attention from its own candidate’s deterioration.

What was most striking about McCain’s acceptance speech is that it had almost nothing in common with the strident right-wing convention that preceded it. We were pointedly given a rerun of McCain 2000 — cobbled together from scraps of the old Straight Talk repertory. The ensuing tedium was in all likelihood intentional. It’s in the campaign’s interest that we nod off and assume McCain is unchanged in 2008.

That’s why the Palin choice was brilliant politics — not because it rallied the G.O.P.’s shrinking religious-right base. America loves nothing more than a new celebrity face, and the talking heads marched in lock step last week to proclaim her a star. Palin is a high-energy distraction from the top of the ticket, even if the provenance of her stardom is in itself a reflection of exactly what’s frightening about the top of the ticket.

By hurling charges of sexism and elitism at any easily cowed journalist who raises a question about Palin, McCain operatives are hoping to ensure that whatever happened in Alaska with Sarah Palin stays in Alaska. Given how little vetting McCain himself has received this year — and that only 58 days remain until Nov. 4 — they just might pull it off.

an open letter

So there we sat, your step-dad and I. The only two white people in the room. And I was so sincere and heartfelt, and he was so skeptical. But I plowed on, understanding that he and I see different sides of you, understanding that I'd known you longer, and in a different context, and really wanting--needing-- him and of course your mother to know how much I appreciated you. Wanting them to know that unlike the other kids who had just gotten older, theirs was the boy who had grown up. So gratifying, even as mere witness. The highest praise I had, my best gift to you--to tell your parents, directly, how well you were coming along even if it didn't always show on paper, and how much it meant. We were at a party, in the summer. That was Allison talking, not Ms. P.

Thanks for nothing, you idiot.

And then a year later, sitting again with your family because you asked me, because that's where I belonged, I watched you graduate with such pride and satisfaction. On my daughter's birthday, I was there without question: we'd been through so much, for so many years, and we both wanted to see it through. Good times.

Which, as I second-hand understand it, is what you're having now. I won't condescend to say, "You think you're having fun," because between the hormones and the drinking and the who-knows-what, oh, I'm sure you are. It would sound like a typical freshman year to me if you had bothered to enroll. Did we not just spend the last year getting you ready for college? Was that just not a mere matter of weeks ago that you were so excited to go? Am I missing something?

I already knew, by the way, that you had let me down. When the start of the semester passed without any contact or questions, well. That seemed to be a sign. That's not the way things go. I've got a folder full of Sent and Inbox evidence that show the contrary. And when my quick, "So, are you in school?" went days and days with no reply? Well. You know you know. Listen to yourself.

Because I'm sure, at the moment, you're not going to listen to me. Especially now that I'm serious rant mode, inspired by the news from our mutual friend that you don't even have a job. Good grief! No wonder your step-dad tried to throw you out; I should call him and commiserate. Or hear his I-told-you-sos.

I am so disappointed.

Not that this is about me. Not that you aren't smarter than this. I know you are only temporarily playing the part of the fool. Because trust me: this is seriously stupid. So far it's only a semester wasted --and, oh some goodwill of some people who love you--and money you haven't made, but you of all people should know life is hard enough without going and making it harder! And yet, there you are, doing exactly that, there on the road to nowhere.

As you surely must know. When you're ready to admit it and want to try to fix it, you let me know.

Krugman: The Resentment Strategy

from The New York Times
September 5, 2008

Can the super-rich former governor of Massachusetts — the son of a Fortune 500 C.E.O. who made a vast fortune in the leveraged-buyout business — really keep a straight face while denouncing “Eastern elites”?

Can the former mayor of New York City, a man who, as USA Today put it, “marched in gay pride parades, dressed up in drag and lived temporarily with a gay couple and their Shih Tzu” — that was between his second and third marriages — really get away with saying that Barack Obama doesn’t think small towns are sufficiently “cosmopolitan”?


Can the vice-presidential candidate of a party that has controlled the White House, Congress or both for 26 of the past 28 years, a party that, Borg-like, assimilated much of the D.C. lobbying industry into itself — until Congress changed hands, high-paying lobbying jobs were reserved for loyal Republicans — really portray herself as running against the “Washington elite”?

Yes, they can.

On Tuesday, He Who Must Not Be Named — Mitt Romney mentioned him just once, Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin not at all — gave a video address to the Republican National Convention. John McCain, promised President Bush, would stand up to the “angry left.” That’s no doubt true. But don’t be fooled either by Mr. McCain’s long-ago reputation as a maverick or by Ms. Palin’s appealing persona: the Republican Party, now more than ever, is firmly in the hands of the angry right, which has always been much bigger, much more influential and much angrier than its counterpart on the other side.

What’s the source of all that anger?

Some of it, of course, is driven by cultural and religious conflict: fundamentalist Christians are sincerely dismayed by Roe v. Wade and evolution in the curriculum. What struck me as I watched the convention speeches, however, is how much of the anger on the right is based not on the claim that Democrats have done bad things, but on the perception — generally based on no evidence whatsoever — that Democrats look down their noses at regular people.

Thus Mr. Giuliani asserted that Wasilla, Alaska, isn’t “flashy enough” for Mr. Obama, who never said any such thing. And Ms. Palin asserted that Democrats “look down” on small-town mayors — again, without any evidence.

What the G.O.P. is selling, in other words, is the pure politics of resentment; you’re supposed to vote Republican to stick it to an elite that thinks it’s better than you. Or to put it another way, the G.O.P. is still the party of Nixon.

One of the key insights in “Nixonland,” the new book by the historian Rick Perlstein, is that Nixon’s political strategy throughout his career was inspired by his college experience, in which he got himself elected student body president by exploiting his classmates’ resentment against the Franklins, the school’s elite social club. There’s a direct line from that student election to Spiro Agnew’s attacks on the “nattering nabobs of negativism” as “an effete corps of impudent snobs,” and from there to the peculiar cult of personality that not long ago surrounded George W. Bush — a cult that celebrated his anti-intellectualism and made much of the supposed fact that the “misunderestimated” C-average student had proved himself smarter than all the fancy-pants experts.

And when Mr. Bush turned out not to be that smart after all, and his presidency crashed and burned, the angry right — the raging rajas of resentment? — became, if anything, even angrier. Humiliation will do that.

Can Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin really ride Nixonian resentment into an upset election victory in what should be an overwhelmingly Democratic year? The answer is a definite maybe.

By selecting Barack Obama as their nominee, the Democrats may have given Republicans an opening: the very qualities that inspire many fervent Obama supporters — the candidate’s high-flown eloquence, his coolness factor — have also laid him open to a Nixonian backlash. Unlike many observers, I wasn’t surprised at the effectiveness of the McCain “celebrity” ad. It didn’t make much sense intellectually, but it skillfully exploited the resentment some voters feel toward Mr. Obama’s star quality.

That said, the experience of the years since 2000 — the memory of what happened to working Americans when faux-populist Republicans controlled the government — is still fairly fresh in voters’ minds. Furthermore, while Democrats’ supposed contempt for ordinary people is mainly a figment of Republican imagination, the G.O.P. really is the Gramm Old Party — it really does believe that the economy is just fine, and the fact that most Americans disagree just shows that we’re a nation of whiners.

But the Democrats can’t afford to be complacent. Resentment, no matter how contrived, is a powerful force, and it’s one that Republicans are very, very good at exploiting.

I stand corrected, most appropriately

Excerpts from an e-mail from moveon:

* Palin recently said that the war in Iraq is "God's task." She's even admitted she hasn't thought about the war much—just last year she was quoted saying, "I've been so focused on state government, I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq."
* Palin has actively sought the support of the fringe Alaska Independence Party. Six months ago, Palin told members of the group—who advocate for a vote on secession from the union—to "keep up the good work" and "wished the party luck on what she called its 'inspiring convention.'"
* Palin wants to teach creationism in public schools. She hasn't made clear whether she thinks evolution is a fact.
* Palin doesn't believe that humans contribute to global warming. Speaking about climate change, she said, "I'm not one though who would attribute it to being manmade."
* Palin has close ties to Big Oil. Her inauguration was even sponsored by BP.
* Palin is extremely anti-choice. She doesn't even support abortion in the case of rape or incest.
* Palin opposes comprehensive sex-ed in public schools. She's said she will only support abstinence-only approaches.
* As mayor, Palin tried to ban books from the library. Palin asked the library how she might go about banning books because some had inappropriate language in them—shocking the librarian, Mary Ellen Baker. According to Time, "news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full support" to the mayor."
* She DID support the Bridge to Nowhere (before she opposed it). Palin claimed that she said "thanks, but no thanks" to the infamous Bridge to Nowhere. But in 2006, Palin supported the project repeatedly, saying that Alaska should take advantage of earmarks "while our congressional delegation is in a strong position to assist."

The plain fact of the matter is that Sarah Palin did a bang-up job delivering a Karl Rove-style political attack speech last night. That makes her a skilled politician but it doesn't make her views any more palatable for voters. Americans don't really want another far-right, anti-science ideologue in the White House.

That's what I meant to say.

An innoculation against all the Republican thoughts in the air

You have likely heard the voice, either as Violet Incredible, or on the radio, or perhaps Letterman. It is not a beautiful voice, quite the opposite, really, but her writing often is. I'd love to be able, really. But nearly a year ago I did drive up, my friend and I did drive up to Iowa City to hear her read her words. That and it was a bonus day off, and a Fall weekend in a college town with my friend and how is that not fun, regardless of the giant two dollar cups of beer.

Though I did have a scholarship and student jobs, I never got a Pell Grant, attending, as I did, a second-tier state university that at the time cost about a buck-fifty per ten week quarter--some day my friend and I will have to rhapsodize about the beauty of a ten week academic term for you, as yes, that's where we met--but so much of this resonates with me. Education is good. It can change your life, and not just because you meet your best friend while writing a paper in a group with stupid people. And government--a Democrat government--theoretically, potentially, in a perfect world-ly--can be a force for good, too. It has happened before.

So here's some Sarah Vowell. And bonus, you can use your own voice in your head.

Bringing Pell Grants to My Eyes
By SARAH VOWELL
from The New York Times

ON Monday night at the Democratic National Convention, Caroline Kennedy introduced a tribute to her uncle, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, by pointing out, “If your child is getting an early boost in life through Head Start or attending a better school or can go to college because a Pell Grant has made it more affordable, Teddy is your senator, too.”

To my surprise, I started to cry. Started to cry like I was watching the last 10 minutes of “Brokeback Mountain” instead of C-SPAN. This was whimpering brought on by simple, spontaneous gratitude.

I paid my way through Montana State University with student loans, a minimum-wage job making sandwiches at a joint called the Pickle Barrel, and — here come the waterworks — Pell Grants. Thanks to Pell Grants, I had to work only 30 hours a week up to my elbows in ham instead of 40.

Ten extra hours a week might sound negligible, but do you know what a determined, junior-Hillary type of hick with a full course load and onion-scented hands can do with the gift of 10 whole hours per week? Not flunk geology, that’s what. Take German every day at 8 a.m. — for fun! Wander into the office of the school paper on a whim and find a calling. I’m convinced that those 10 extra hours a week are the reason I graduated magna cum laude, which I think is Latin for “worst girlfriend in town.”


Twenty years after my first financial aid package came through, I have paid off my college and graduate school loans and I have paid back the federal government in income taxes what it doled out to me in Pell Grants so many, many, many, many times over it’s a wonder I’m not a Republican.


But I would like to point out that my perfectly ordinary education, received in public schools and a land grant university, is not merely the foundation on which I make a living. My education made my life. In a sometimes ugly world, my schooling opened a trap door to a bottomless pit of beauty — to Walt Whitman and Louis Armstrong and Frank Lloyd Wright, to the old movies and old masters that have been my constant companions in my unalienable pursuit of happiness.

I’m a New Yorker now. Every now and then when I have time to kill in Midtown, I duck into the Museum of Modern Art to stare at Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” I love looking at the picture, but I also love looking back on when and where and how I first saw it — on a slide in a first-year art history course in which some of my fellow students were ranchers’ sons who wore actual cowboy hats to class. It was a course I paid for, in part, with a Pell Grant, a program always and as ever championed by “my senator,” Ted Kennedy, a program so dear to Barack Obama’s heart that increasing the maximum amount of Pell Grants for needy students was the first bill he introduced upon arrival in the United States Senate.

I am a registered Democrat. That first night’s convention speech by Senator Kennedy about his life’s work reminded me what being a Democrat means. I have spent the last eight years so disgusted with the incompetent yahoos of the executive branch that I had forgotten that I believe in one of the core principles of the Democratic Party — that government can be a useful, meaningful and worthwhile force for good in this republic instead of just an embarrassing, torturing, Book of Revelation starter kit.

When Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke on Tuesday night, she brought up some of the people she met in her thwarted campaign for the nomination, including a young marine beseeching her for better medical care for himself and his comrades, and an uninsured single mother with cancer rearing two autistic children.

Imploring her most ardent supporters, some of whom have been, let’s say, a tad tepid about backing Senator Obama, Senator Clinton said, “I want you to ask yourselves: were you in this campaign just for me, or were you in it for that young marine and others like him? Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids?” In other words, in a fine display of adulthood, she asked her delegates to decide whether they are in a cult of personality or members of the Democratic Party.

Barack Obama is the best possible presidential candidate to campaign for traditional Democratic ideals because of his ability to stir party diehards and rally new voters, because of his backbone, his gift for oratory, formidable intelligence, compelling back story, swell wife, adorable offspring and no small amount of cool. I mean, the morning after that acceptance speech in front of 80,000 people, even Richard Nixon’s personal Rasputin, Pat Buchanan, was on MSNBC calling Senator Obama “manly.”

Honestly, when I think about how Senator Obama would handle the nuts and bolts of governing I have no more and no less faith in him than any of his major rivals for the nomination of the Democratic Party. This is actually a huge compliment. They were a seriously solid group. Compare them to the incoherent Republican primary field, a set of candidates expressly invented to make the average Republican voter nervous: the businessman was too Mormon-y; the evangelical might worship Jesus more than money; Senator McCain has campaign reform cooties; Ron Paul was Ron Paul.

But I would have been content with any one of the Democratic candidates in the Oval Office — Bill Richardson, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, even John Edwards (because it is possible to make bad decisions about one’s private life and still have good ideas about health care). Each one has his or her gaping drawbacks, of course, but that’s always going to be true of people seeking a job only a damaged lunatic would want.

When Barack Obama talks about an America as it should be, I’m guessing the best of all possible countries he imagines would look awfully similar to the ideal America just about every registered Democrat would dream up. Picture this: a wind-powered public school classroom of 19 multiracial 8-year-olds reading above grade level and answering the questions of their engaging, inspirational teacher before going home to a cancer-free (or in remission) parent or parents who have to work only eight hours a day in a country at war solely with the people who make war on us, where maybe Exxon Mobil can settle for, oh, $8 billion in quarterly profits instead of $11 billion, and the federal government’s point man for Biblical natural disasters is someone who knows more about emergency management than how to put on a horse show. Is that really too much to ask? Can we do that?

As Senator Obama, the plainspoken former editor of The Harvard Law Review would answer, yes, we can. As the recipient of a partly federally subsidized, fancy wallet-size diploma from Montana State, I prefer to put it this way: Indubitably, we shall.

McCain imPalin?

Not after what I just saw.

After all the media vetting this week, I can only conclude John McCain may be on to something with his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. She can certainly deliver a fine speech -- maybe a bit sarcastic, but consider the target audience -- and, as a Repugnant friend said, ain't bad to look at.

I never fell for the theory that she was selected to woo Hillary Clinton supporters. They couldn't be more different. Except in this respect. After all the suppositions and innuendo of the past week, Palin hung tough and delivered a rousing speech. At it's conclusion, she was joined on stage by her typical American family (except none were obese).

Even with a friendly audience, that's tough duty after what they've been through. The same could be said of the Clintons.

So I take back my assertion that McCain doesn't really want to be president. I still think, hope, expect, demand, etc. that Barack Obama wins. But at least now the VP debate will be compelling.

Pretty sharp for 80

I have been surprised. I have been amused. I have been fascinated. I have been pissed off and offended and a little too well acquainted with the organization of the Anchorage Daily News. I have been through the stages of Palin. By rights it shouldn't be over, as tonight's her big speech and the frenzy's just really beginning. But today I really, really, really need this headache to go away, and thus I'm checking out of that bizarre-o world and instead offering up the voice of reason:

Walter Mondale on Sarah Palin

By David E. Sanger

MINNEAPOLIS – Walter Mondale has only one official title these days: Honorary Norwegian counsel-general here in his home town, a post that he owes to his heritage.

But as a former senator, former vice president, and, of course, the first presidential candidate to select a woman as his running mate, Mr. Mondale was brimming over on Wednesday morning with a few thoughts about Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, who is scheduled to accept her nomination as vice president this evening.

“There’s nothing a presidential candidate does that remotely compares in importance to picking the vice president,’’ the 80-year old Mr. Mondale told a visitor to his law office high above the Mississippi River here. “And you have to be ready to answer a few questions about whoever you pick.’’

With a twinkle in his eye, the old Democratic pol added, “I’d like to hear McCain answer these.’’

The first, he said, is: “Is she ready for the presidency? And how does she strengthen the President? Because you know, there are some tricks to this job.’’

Whether Republicans or Democrats win in November, he said “there will be messes on the Hill. And that’s what I did a lot of as vice president,’’ he said. “I spent a lot of time cleaning up messes on the Hill.’’

The second is to act as an early-warning radar for brewing problems – which means having deep connections in the government, with people honest enough to say things they might not say to the president. Ms. Palin, he said, “seems like a lovely person’’ but is so detached from Washington that she is unlikely to serve in that role.

The third, he said, is to “extend the president’s power abroad.’’ When he was vice president to Jimmy Carter, he noted, he spent a lot of time in the Middle East, and dealing with the Chinese. (Under President Clinton, he came back to government to serve as ambassador to Japan, and he played a significant behind-the-scenes role managing the first nuclear crisis with North Korea, in 1994.)

Dick Cheney, he said, “took the vice presidency off the rails.’’ But, he added, at least he is in Georgia today, bearing a billion dollars in aid for Georgia in the wake of the Russian invasion last week. He suggested that Ms. Palin might not be quite ready for that role, even if, as an Alaskan, she is accustomed to living on the borders of Russia.

Then there’s the unglamorous part of the job, he said. “Remember, the vice president is the only other officer of the government without a bureaucratic constituency. You have to be able to hear out all sides, and know how what you’re hearing is being affected’’ as members of the cabinet maneuver for more budget, or more authority.

Ever since the announcement of Ms. Palin’s selection on Friday, there have been endless comparisons to Geraldine Ferraro, the congresswoman that Mr. Mondale chose as his running mate 24 years ago – only to discover that there were a few questions that should have been asked earlier, mostly about her husband’s willingness to let the world see his financial dealings.

Mr. Mondale argued that his staff had vetted Ms. Ferraro “for probably three weeks’’ before he announced her selection. “She was a known quantity,’’ he said. “She had been a leader in the House. I had known her for a long time.’’

While Mr. McCain surrounded his choice in nearly obssessive secrecy, Mr. Mondale recalled that “we deliberately leaked almost every name we were considering.’’ The reason, he said, was to “find out ahead of time if there’s anything we might want to know.’’

Still, Mr. Mondale was in for a surprise: Ms. Ferraro’s husband balked at releasing tax returns that would expose his financial dealings. That drama played out for weeks, he recalled, ending in a press conference “where she answered questions until everyone was exhausted. But the damage was done. “We lost momentum,’’ he said.

He also lost the election.