Hypothetical of the day
Courtesy again of cultural sage Mike McIntee of "The Late Show" website: If Hillary Clinton had run for U. S. Senator from her home state of Illinois, as she should have, would she have her Barack Obama problem today?
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"Lost" fans only: And this category now includes me. The fourth season of the ABC series begins Thursday night. Ken Levine blogs
a preview, but with numerous spoilers if you haven't caught up through season three.
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Why is no one concerned that Sylvester Stallone used-- and has publicly admitted using-- Human Growth Hormone during preparation of his new (but sort of old) action flick "Rambo"? John McCain, the former "straight-talking" head of the Senate Commerce Committee who has repeatedly threatened baseball with anti-steroid legislation and who once condescendingly shouted "Don't you get it?" at Donald Fehr during a televised hearing, just accepted Sly's endorsement of his presidential bid.
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They're erecting
a statue of "Fonzie" in Milwaukee. What better excuse for a "Happy Days" episode at the 2008 Moeller TV Festival.
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The new economic stimulus plan proposes giving $500 back to each person and $1000 to each couple, with $300 for each child. How many parents, though, do you think will be giving the $300 to their child?
Ducks, quacks, and buttocks
President Bush delivers his final State of the Union address tonight at the Capitol. The Huffington Post website referred to it as the "State of the Lame Duck" in a headline this afternoon, but Answers.com describes a "lame duck" as an outgoing political officeholder who "cannot garner much political support for initiatives." What exactly is it that President Bush desires from our legislative branch of government that he doesn't get?
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Salon's King Kauffman had
an interesting interview late last week with Will Leitsch, Cardinals fan and one of the most perceptive sports critics on the scene today.
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Jose Canseco
claims he didn't ask Magglio Ordonez for money in exchange for keeping the Detroit outfielder's name out of his next literary effort "Vindicated," an allegation that was referred to the FBI last week by Major League Baseball officials. What do you think, gang? Does Canseco deserve the same 'innocent until proven guilty' courtesy that the mainstream news media has afforded Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and others?
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This is how a powerful agency of our government chooses to spend its time and resource: punishing broadcasters for presenting a woman's "nude buttocks" on network television five fucking years ago. Unbelievable. At least the American Taliban acknowledges inadvertently the buttocks as "a sexual organ." I knew they were having more fun at home than they let on.
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This is
a really snarky article. I'm as critical of the Iowa caucuses as anyone else, but our social betters on the coasts aren't legally obligated to fall in line every four years and support the candidates of our choosing, and yet they do.
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Aaron and I are weighing a road trip to New Orleans for the Jazz and Heritage Festival, held the last weekend of April and the first weekend in May. Who's down?
The Kucinich and Wallace tradition
Thank you Dennis Kucinich.
The passionately liberal and populist Congressman from the Buckeye State bowed out of the presidential race this week after a year of coming up against every imaginable roadblock that the monied interests of our country could throw at him. The Democratic party bosses spit at him and at other lower-profile candidates with a nominating structure that weighs heavily on the certainly grass-roots, but completely undemocratic Iowa Caucuses, and excluded voters entirely in Florida and Michigan, the latter state being one that nearly borders Kucinich's congressional district. In my Iowa precinct caucus, similar I'm sure to others across the state, Kucinich registered roughly 5% of the tally on the first count (despite the media blackout,) but that otherwise modest total left him "nonviable" in the eyes of the party bosses, and he came away from the Hawkeye State without a single percentage of support under this totalitarian system.
In December, the Gannett Corp. newspaper branch in Des Moines excluded Kucinich from the statewide televised debate they sponsored because the candidate didn't have a "campaign office," by their standards, located in Iowa, and that was before General Electric, "the company with a heart," as Carson called it, and the fourth largest corporate producer of air pollution in the United States (and that's just Tim Russert), appealed a judge's ruling all the way to the Nevada Supreme Court to exclude the anti-NAFTA and anti-WTO candidate from a nationally-televised debate on one of their cable news networks. Dennis returns to Cleveland now to face a Congressional primary challenge from a quartet of Democrats generously funded by special interest groups in a concerted intra-party attack that recalls the 2006 primary assault on anti-Iraq War Representative Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, now a Green Party candidate for president.
Because Kucinich chose to wage a presidential campaign that focused on the powerless, jobless, insuranceless, and homeless, within the electoral apparatus of the center-right Democratic Party, he has been marginalized if not outrightly dismissed from the national policy debate nearly 10 full months before the election even takes place. It could be interpreted perhaps as at least a small sign of progress that, during this election cycle, one of the "major" Democratic presidential contenders, John Edwards, adopted and ran with much of Kucinich's anti-corporate political message, which is more than can be said for the 2004 campaign, but will be small consolation when Edwards falls to the wayside in short order also, excluded from the corporate shills' preferred and dumbed-down media narrative of
the blacks versus the broads. Indeed, we will have had multiple women and African-Americans serving us from the Oval Office before we get our first-ever
working-class president, which Kucinich would have been.
I renew then my call for people who proudly call themselves "liberals" to abandon the Democratic Party once and for all. Look at that fellow Democratic voter on either side of you and see that they don't even believe the same things that you do. This is the cold hard reality of the Party of the Clintons after a generation and more of so much compromise and triangulation that the cupboard of common man (and woman) ideas and idealism has gone bare. Americans suffer from what author and historian Studs Terkel calls "a national Alzheimer's." We're not taught in primary or secondary schools about those so-called "free market" forces that caused the Great Depression, or the New Deal policies that rescued us from social disintegration after that unrestrained capitalism fell on its ass. We're not given an understanding of the origins of Social Security, Medicare, the GI Bill, or any other extraordinary piece of collective, people-centered government action responsible for what we can claim as good and decent in America today.
In 2008, even the "progressive" candidate in the Democratic's preferred head-to-head presidential primary, Barack Obama, questions the solvency of Social Security, when the program is not only alive and financially sound, but so wildly successful in its operation, that it could be conceivably prioritized and expanded to cover every man, woman, and child in the 50 states and the territories.
The Democratic Party, responsible for the original enactment of the social safety-net programs in the 1930s, after various other "third" parties did the heavy lifting of placing them in the national debate, has been complicit in allowing them to disintegrate over time. When we look back over history, in fact, we find that the glory days of the party are pretty much confined to the time period of 1932 to 1944, and it's been a long downhill slug ever since, save for the efforts of public activists such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Betty Friedan, Malcolm X, Cesar Chavez, Rosa Parks, Howard Zinn, Ralph Nader, the Hollywood 10, and the Chicago 8, all of whom and others made their contributions outside of the power structure of the dominant political parties. Before Roosevelt's New Deal, Democratic power brokers in the 20th Century gave us unremarkable and often overtly conservative candidates like Alton Parker, James Cox, and John W Davis, and/or white supremacists like Woodrow Wilson; and since the New Deal, it's been more or less a parade again of well-packaged servants to Wall Street and the military-industrial complex.
In his 2007 memoir, Terkel opines that FDR's Secretary of Agriculture and later Vice President, Henry A. Wallace, was the heart of the New Deal, which led to the elimination of prohibition, and the establishment of the Civilian Conservation Corps and Social Security. Wallace pushed for the right to organize, as well as for the construction of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the National Youth Administration (NYA), Farm Security Administration (FSA) and Resettlement Administration (RA), each of which fell, in part, under the jurisdiction of Wallace's Department of Agriculture. (The RA migrant camps were depicted most memorably by author John Steinbeck in his novel "The Grapes of Wrath.")
The decline of the Democrats thus began in 1944 when a group of party bosses, as Roosevelt lie gravely ill, conspired to have Wallace removed as the party's vice presidential nominee in favor of Harry Truman. "By this time," Terkel writes, "Henry Wallace had become known as being too soft on the Soviet Union. Also, he was anti-agribusiness, although that word wasn't used then. The bosses were out to get him. They hated him because he represented the radical idea of people having a stake in things, having ownership. They called him a dupe of the Communists."
Truman was then thrust into the presidency; our former ally, the Soviet Union, becomes our enemy; and a Cold War commences that, despite the media's having declared its conclusion nearly 20 years ago, still actually exists in form and may yet steer us into financial and moral bankruptcy as we continue to fight our wars of political ideology in surrogate nations across the globe, now taking on our enemies two or more at a time.
At my precinct caucus earlier this month, the chairperson in attendance earned guffaws from the gathering when she announced to all that the Kucinich supporters were struggling to secure an unclaimed area for themselves in the school gymnasium. There was no room for Kucinich on many of the debate stages, and there was no room for his supporters on voting night. It's time for all of us to take our liberalistic passion and activism elsewhere; that is, to a third party slate of candidates. The Democrats are laughing at us. They rage in fury, slander and slime, and attempt to destroy a man of real progressive action like Ralph Nader, but they don't laugh at him.
The Florida no-count
The Democratic party blows my mind. Republicans in Florida stole the vote in both 2000 and 2004, but the first time through, Gore stopped the recount, and four years later, virtually none of the (many repeat) voting irregularities reported in the state were investigated. Now this election cycle, with the state of Florida seemingly still destined to swing in November, the party goes and
strips the state of its convention delegates because it moved up its primary date (this Tuesday, the 29th) in threatening proximity to the Iowa/New Hampshire first-in-the-nation party power structure. Floridians' votes "essentially don't count," says party chair Howard Dean. And rules committee member Donna Brazile added a mouthful, "This is about a process we're trying to keep some control over."
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As Candidate Clinton regains her only-temporarily-missing air of invincibility as the Democratic nominee-to-be, it's time for Barack Obama to "nut up"-- to borrow a Liz Lemon phrase. Our former Stainmaster-in-Chief has been calling Obama to the carpet for a pair of weeks now, and the only way to hit back at Clinton Inc. is to finally call out this inexplicably popular couple as the betrayers of progressive principles that they've always been.
The Village Voice's longtime conscience,
Nat Hentoff, suggests that the senator take a powerful stand for the restoration of our lost liberties. And note: Nat's looking for specifics here: that is, signing the Freedom Pledge that Clinton has refused to sign.
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It won't be finalized for months, but the CM Blog list of the top 5 movies of the year for 2007 may wind up completely overlapping the Academy Award Best Picture nominees. Either I'm going mainstream, getting old, or both.
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The owner of the St. Louis Rams football club, Georgia Frontiere, died Friday. She's recalled lovingly in the Gateway City of her birth, but she's also being remembered fondly this week by many in the city that the Rams used to call home. The
LA Times' T.J. Simers on
Madame Ram.
ML King Jr. and other topics
Martin Luther King Jr. had this to say about political bravery and conscience in 1967:
"On some positions a coward has asked the question is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular but he must take it because conscience tells him that he is right?Lost in our recollections of Dr. King is that his message of hope, to borrow a popular phrase, had as much to do with economic justice as it did with racial tolerance.
In today's climate, there's only one political attribute that has currency, and that's courage.
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I'm glad the Packers lost on Sunday. Football was not meant to be played in such ridiculous conditions (wind-chill 28 degrees below zero?). Football is best played indoors. Yes, that's right. Not the purist angle? Perhaps not, but football wasn't meant to be played during the winter either. Check the turn of the 20th Century collegiate records. Football was meant to be a six week campaign enjoyed from early September to mid-October, wrapping up just two weeks or so after the longer lasting and more important baseball season concludes.
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On the "Late Show" website Friday, home office contributor Mike McIntee, rather tongue-in-cheek, cited the ineptitude of the Chicago Cubs as the reason that television executives are today allowed to dictate starting times for all sporting events.
It was 1984. The baseball Chicago Cubs won the NL East. They were playing the San Diego Padres in the playoffs. Cub fans were filled with joy in hopes of winning a World Series for the first time since the Model T. What was happening on the field was full of hope and happiness for the Chicago Cub fan. But what was happening behind the scenes? Back in 1984, Wrigley Field was still without lights, the only major league stadium without. But Major League Baseball had a contract with the television networks to televise the World Series games at night. How could baseball be played at night at Wrigley Field if Wrigley Field did not have lights? The baseball commissioner at the time, Peter Ueberroth, said recently:
“The Cubs were in postseason play. And we were under contract to have the World Series at night or we'd lose millions and millions of dollars. Plus, we would have violated our contract. If they (the Cubs) had won, I had made the decision privately that we'd move to Comiskey Park. People in Chicago would not have been really happy with that.” That’s right. If the Cubs had gone on to play in the World Series (they lost to the San Diego Padres in the playoffs), the Cub home games would have been played at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White Sox, and not at the friendly confines of Wrigley. The outrage from Cub fans, and baseball fans in general across the country, would have been overwhelming. The Cub joy of winning the National League title would have been turned upside down when the announcement was made that the home games would be played at the hated home of the ChiSox. And why the change of venue? Because of television! And if this occurred, the public’s reaction to the influence held by television over our sporting games would have been riotous. The public would not let this ever happen again. They would have let sport owners know that it would be unacceptable for television to dictate when a game would be played. Moving it even 15 minutes later in the day would have been met with protest. Every move team owners made in regards to television would be scrutinized.Alas, now baseball playoff games have scheduled starts as late as 11pm eastern time and football playoff games played in arctic conditions kick off in the darkness of evening.
Suzanne Pleshette
Suzanne Pleshette died Saturday of respiratory failure in Los Angeles. Pleshette portrayed Emily Hartley, the wife of Dr. Robert Hartley, on the popular 1970s sitcom "The Bob Newhart Show" for six years, and brought to life-- to my mind-- a life partner so ideal in every way that I find myself looking for an Emily Hartley to fill the romantic void in my life. Every woman I date, whether she knows it or not, or likes it or not, is being compared with Emily Hartley, and to Suzanne Pleshette, whom I never met and so is therefore interchangeable to me with her character.
Pleshette's death comes, quite coincidentally for me as well, during a three month period of time (so far) in which I am completely absorbing myself in "The Bob Newhart Show" on DVD. Watching always one episode per day, and many for the first time, my nightly entertainment and relaxation always begins with that famous montage of Bob Newhart leaving his Chicago office building, to the musical strains of Lorenzo Music's jazz composition, and riding the elevator train home to his beautiful high-rise apartment along the Chicago River and the sexy, short-haired brunette waiting in the window.
What other actress could convey such a fully-realized sense of feminine perfection unless she possessed it all herself: sophistication, independence, audacity, sexiness, tenderness, humor, patience, energy, excitement, and spirit. So indelible was her performance that, even after Bob was "TV-married" for
eight years to the luminous Mary Frann, audiences roared for the return of Pleshette to Newhart's connubial bed, when she appeared, to everyone's complete surprise, in the final episode and scene of the comedian's second long-running series, "Newhart." The staging of the final scene revealed that the entire second series had been a nightmare endured by Dr. Robert Hartley while digesting a late meal of Japanese food. Pleshette's
New York Times obituary made reference to the scene and recalled the 1999 headline of the humor magazine
The Onion: "Universe ends as God Wakes Up Next to Suzanne Pleshette." And who wouldn't want to, after all.
The corporate media's agenda
General Electric has embarrassed itself again, but to no one's surprise, by successfully pushing to keep Dennis Kucinich out of last night's televised Democratic presidential debate on MSNBC. The corporation had initially invited the anti-corporate candidate to appear when it opened the debate to "the top four" candidates, and then Bill Richardson backed out of not just the debate, but the entire presidential race (though Richardson already trailed Kucinich in a number of national polls.) The invitation was extended to Kucinich as fourth, then rescinded, and the corporation's appeal of a lower court ruling to allow Kucinich was overturned by the Nevada Supreme Court less than an hour before the start of the telecast, leaving the Ohio Congressman on the sidelines.
Another consequence of the court's ruling was that the debate could only be transmitted on cable television (the reason I keep avoiding the use of the words
aired and
broadcast) so the MSNBC telecast went out to a national cable audience, but the local NBC affiliate in Las Vegas,
broadcasting over airwaves owned by the public, had to pull its plug. Then the first words out of the mouth of corporate journalist Brian Williams on the telecast were, "It's down to three."
You can bet that regardless of who becomes the next president, whether it's one of the leading Republican candidates, Hillary Clinton, or even Barack Obama, we will see further deregulation of the telecommunications industry. That's part and parcel of the agreement.
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Slate has
a hilarious feature up on their site, juxtaposing Hillary Clinton with the character Tracy Flick, played by Reese Witherspoon, in 1999's "Election," one of the CM Top 50 American Movies of All-time (see blog postings 12/2004-1/2005). Forgive me for the 15 second advertisement you're forced to watch first. (Also, sound warning.)
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I've been on a lot of St. Louis Cardinals baseball blogs and websites, and everyone's got their own opinion about the trade of Scott Rolen to Toronto for Troy Glaus, but almost no one is talking about the fact that Glaus was cited in the Mitchell Report less than a month ago for having received mail shipments of Human Growth Hormone between September 2003 and May 2004. This is because no one outside of the mainstream sports media and a grandstanding Congress gives two shits. And obviously the Cardinals brass doesn't. They were more than willing to pick up Glaus if it meant unloading an unhappy and very expensive Rolen.
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Quote of the day 1: George Mitchell, Tuesday, to the Congressional committee on steroids in baseball,
"It has been settled law in the United States for more than 20 years that drug testing in the workplace is a subject of collective bargaining in those employer-employee situations where a recognized bargaining unit exists."Quote of the day 2: Players Association chief Donald Fehr, to the same committee,
"Let me begin by stating something which is obvious to labor lawyers but perhaps in this day and age isn't as well known. Under the law, we have the legal right but more importantly the responsibility to to negotiate all terms and conditions of employment."They're forced to speak to our Congressional representatives as if they're children.
Best American movies of the decade
This morning on the Huffington Post, online film critic John Farr
named the best eight movies so far this decade. It's not a ranking. Instead, one movie is listed from each year. It's worth a look. We even agree on one.
Here's a refresher on mine, but I'm leaving off 2007 until I get through about another dozen releases:
1) O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000)
2) Mulholland Drive (2001)
3) Lovely and Amazing (2002)
4) Capturing the Friedmans (2003)
5) Sideways (2004)
6) Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)
7) Half Nelson (2006)
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The Des Moines Register published an interesting story today in regards to a topic that has gone neglected for three years on this blog (despite its direct impact on some close friends and family): eminent domain, that is, the right of government to take over private property for the purposes of public use. The
situation in Muscatine speaks directly to the dangers of the current reading of the law. It seems to me the purposes of public use should be simply that, but increasingly, we're seeing city and county governments attempt to claim private property, then turn it over to private investors or private entities for economic development. What happens then when those private investors then bail out, like they did with this mall project in Muscatine?
In Cedar Rapids, Coe College, a private institution, has attempted over the past two years to use the power of the municipal government to run out neighbors and buy up and raze as many neighboring homes as it can upon its determination that the neighborhood was drug-infested and dangerous. Well, there's two sides to that coin. Drug dealers tend to set up shop near colleges because these schools have a lot of drug
buyers. Maybe it's Coe that's the bad neighbor. Have we considered that? I've spent a lot of time in the impoverished neighborhoods near the private higher learning institutions of Coe, Drake University in Des Moines, and St. Louis University, and it seems reasonable to conclude at this point that one of the last for-profit businesses that a person would want to see open up in his or her neighborhood is a private college.
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So long, Scott Rolen. What a terrific player and competitor he was for the Cardinals, a great slugger, and if not the greatest defensive thirdbaseman of all time, then in the top two. It's a shame he has to go to Canada just because Tony LaRussa has such a difficult time communicating with his players. (Check the manager's very long rap sheet.) I regret to hear through reports in the Post-Dispatch that Rolen's departure also completes the dismantling of what was considered the "cynical" corner of the clubhouse, and which apparently included as well the likes of the recently-departed Jim Edmonds and Gary Bennett. And I read "cynical" to mean "anti-LaRussa." Oh well, commitment to youth... oops, except that LaRussa is still the manager so that means that, for example, a rookie upstart like Brendan Ryan can count on about 150 at-bats for the season playing behind Aaron Miles and Adam Kennedy.
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Quote of the day: Sportswriter Dwight Perry of the Seattle Times--
"Cesar Izturis' contract with the St. Louis Cardinals pays the infielder $50,000 if he is named most valuable player of the league division series but, as Kevin Baxter of the Los Angeles Times pointed out, 'There is no MVP award in the division series.' Designated hitters, realizing they've been duped, immediately demanded redress for their Gold Glove incentive clauses."
Goofus and Gallant
An energized David Letterman is back on his game in late night television. With Worldwide Pants writers back to work under a Guild contract, Dave has been given an opportunity to grab the top ratings spot again at 10:30 central time, as he did on Monday night. He paid his employees through the strike and honored the picket line, even as his competitors-- Leno, Conan, Jon Stewart, and Colbert-- each missed the chance to put their high-profile leverage to good use. It's inaccurate to call these other performers "scabs" as long as they don't write material for their performances or hire replacement writers, but no doubt, their potentially-powerful voices have been muffled. Dave in 2008 has been edgy, witty, and very funny, and were it not for his "Late Show," where else on television would you see a Writers Guild picket sign?
Dave has been both a champion of his union, and, it seems, a first-class employer, dating back to the 1980s when he was railing nightly against the corporate "weasels" at General Electric.
Here's
Dave's segment with Howard Stern last night. First-class entertainment.
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As the end of the year "prestige" films spread to theaters across the continent, it has become evident that 2007 has been one of the great years in cinema history. It might only be made better if the writers' strike spares us some or all of the tedious televised awards season.
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I guess I was right in my last post. Goose Gossage on steroids Wednesday: "Chances are, I probably would have done it too."
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I might stop locking my door at night knowing that Marion Jones will be locked up for six months.
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I don't buy into this phony debate about whether Hillary Clinton has fallen victim to a sexual double standard over the display of her emotions, though the double standard does exist. The narrative in this case naively plays right into the hands of the Clinton campaign. No being on Earth really doubts that Hillary Clinton has human emotions. The idea is ridiculous even on the surface. But at the same time, Clinton has attempted in the past to be every thing to every person in her career, and it's perfectly reasonable to question whether this always calculating candidate cried crocodile tears the day before the New Hampshire Primary to bolster her faltering get-out-the-vote effort. At the very least, as Maureen Dowd put it this week, "it was grimly typical of her that what finally made her break down was the prospect of losing."
Furthermore, as long as Clinton keeps injecting gender into the campaign, I say she's fair game. If my fellow feminists, like Gloria Steinem (in an op-ed piece this week in the NY Times), were really serious about minimizing the misogyny in our political process, they would have dropped Bill Clinton and his wife like sacks of wet cement a decade and a half ago. Hillary has championed the patriarchy time and time again in the Senate with her support for war against Iraq and Iran, and her silence and inaction towards our unholy economic partnership/dependence with/on the Saudi government. "Cheney in a Pantsuit, " as blogger Andrew Sullivan dubbed her, has been out to prove for 8 years that she's got bigger "balls" than anyone else in government, and that the size of her balls can be best measured by the proportionate size of her military hammer. And before her Senate career began (on the back of her husband's marital indiscretions), she was more than happy to occupy her time with the public sliming of her husband's various paramours, who tend towards professional subordinates and members of the economic underclass.
Even as she suggested on Wednesday that "the caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together," Steinem questioned in her piece whether Barack Obama would have the biography of a serious presidential candidate if he had been born the
daughter of a white American mother and a black African father, then spending some years as a community organizer and marrying a corporate lawyer, before serving as a state legislator for eight years and in the U.S. Senate for less than one term. My best answer to her inquiry would be yes, provided that the lawyer he married was Bill Clinton.
Fallon for Congress
One of the most important things that progressives can do in these trying times (post-New Hampshire?) is to challenge their failed Washington representatives in their home districts. It's time to put an end to the disastrous strategy of allowing the same ineffectual triangulators in the center-right of our government to run unopposed from the left (a la Cindy Sheehan opposing House Speaker Pelosi). Sherman Hill neighbor-- and former state representative and candidate for governor-- Ed Fallon
will make the formal announcement next week that he's challenging fellow Democrat Leonard Boswell for his seat as Iowa's 3rd district representative in the Congress. The primary will be held June 3rd.
The 73-year-old Boswell, when he's bothered to do anything at all in Washington, has repeatedly provided for President Bush the corporate and militaristic cover that he needs from the "opposition" party to run his illegal war on the Iraqi people and his bogus, politically-motivated "war on terror" on the American people. Fallon has fought for peace and against corporate greed throughout his political career. In the Democratic primary race for governor in 2006, he collected 26% of the vote after the Des Moines Register predicted he'd get 5%. In last week's caucus results, John Edwards, whom Fallon endorsed, carried six counties in the 3rd district, while Hillary Clinton, whom Boswell endorsed, carried none.
Now I have to put off changing my party registration again.
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Congratulations to Goose Gossage, baseball's newest Hall of Famer, for being born in 1951. The former New York Yankees closer got out of the game when the gettin' was good. Nearly one-third of the Yankees' 2000 team was named in the Mitchell/Selig steroid report, but I'm sure if the Goose had played with the team at the time, he would have been clean.
Healthy again
Sorry for the absence. I came down with either the stomach flu or food poisoning on New Year's Eve. (Doc says flu, I say Splash Restaurant in Des Moines is the culprit. A la Jerry Seinfeld, my 12 year no-vomit streak ended New Year's morning.) You'll be glad to know that, though the bug kept me from work for three days, it didn't keep me away from my caucus. I supported Dennis Kucinich in the first count, then helped to get John Edwards a delegate to the county convention, and I came home with a shiny new Iowa voter registration to change my party affiliation to the Greens-- though I'll also say that I'm quite warmed by the Iowa Democrats' wholehearted rejection of the Clinton campaign. Someday soon, I'll write about how fraudulent, outdated, and undemocratic the caucus process is. Maybe I already did once, I can't remember. Anyway, it is.
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There was a real-life Larry David story on an LA Times blog today:
As observed this morning by our colleague Maria La Ganga, who has spent so much time on the Obama campaign bus they're thinking about engraving her name on a seat:Barack Obama's first and only rally on election day came to a sudden and lengthy stop when a young woman in the Dartmouth College gym fainted, and was eventually rolled off on a gurney by emergency medical technicians.At first Obama half-narrated the episode, saying soothing things like, "She's OK," "She's talking." But the longer she lay on the floor, the quieter Obama got, standing on the podium, arms folded, looking worried as the medical crew worked.A gum-chomping Larry David, in town to help with Obama's get-out-the-vote campaign, paced the edge of the student-filled gym, muttering. "How can I restrain myself?" he said to anyone who would listen. "I have such a great line.... Should I yell something out?"Finally, he did: "Sinatra had the same effect on people!" "I was trying to break the tension," he said later. "I don't think they knew who Sinatra was."La Ganga reports that the audience didn't laugh, while Obama seemed to snicker -- and looked even more uncomfortable.---And this is the text of an actual used car advertisement that appeared in the Des Moines Register this weekend. If it hasn't made it to your office yet by way of one of those chain e-mails, it surely will soon.
OLDS 1999 Intrigue,Totally uncool parentswho obviously don't loveteenage son, selling hiscar. Only driven for 3weeks before snoopymom who needs to get alife found booze underfront seat. $3,700/offer.Call meanest mom onthe planet. 515-571-3622
Last thoughts before the caucus
It will be hilarious to watch the out-of-touch pundits talk through their asses today. This morning, CBS's Jeff Greenfield was the latest to describe John Edwards anti-corporate campaign rhetoric as "angry," but in doing so, he attempted a contrast to Iowa's 4-term Democratic Senator Tom Harkin, claiming that Harkin, the first Democrat in the state to be even re-elected
one time to the Senate, has a "softer" touch on the stump. Huh? Harkin
wishes he had Edwards' deft touch on the stump. Harkin has always been a rough-edged populist, but his long-time electoral success in one of America's "purple" states challenges the corporate media notion that voters are turned off by a populist progressive who stands for something.
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For you Ron Paul acolytes, here's
an enlightening article about your man from the pages of the New Republic. I think Tucker Carlson's capable of being a damn good reporter. He was the man who exposed then-Governor Bush's mocking of Texas death-row inmate Karla Faye Tucker when she pleaded to him for clemency in 1999-- (sneering, "Please don't kill me.") And I really enjoyed an article he wrote for Esquire magazine a few years back in which he traveled to Liberia with Al Sharpton, Cornel West, and some members of the Nation of Islam. You're on your own to find it.
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Did you catch
this story last week? Possibly a new low in Clinton stonewalling tactics. They're maniacal about press control, and it seems the candidate's campaign still hasn't learned a thing from the failure of her ultra-secret health care initiative in 1993. Dick Cheney would be proud.
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The Hillarys are already
pre-spinning tonight's results. Their campaign has the feel of a sophisticated operation, I'll give them that. Everything from the phasing out of the question and answer sessions at the rallies to the smearing of Obama on his long-ago drug use by Clinton staff underlings. You've got to work overtime on these details when your candidate has no inner-core.
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The new Iowa voter registration forms are available
on-line. The Greens and Libertarians are listed not as "parties," but as "non-party political organizations." Can you keep that straight?
The Vichy Caucus-goer
I've been shifting back and forth to various options on how best to handle the Iowa Caucuses, but trying to make something democratic out of this most undemocratic of political events might be a fool's errand. As Slate's Christopher Hitchins
points out, the Iowa rules are arcane and "in a genuine democratic process... Tammany tactics"- like shoveling someone's sidewalk or babysitting their kids- "would long ago have been declared illegal," while the mainstream news media, which I've struggled against my entire adult life, takes the caucus structure and runs straight to the bank. When my downstairs neighbor stops by and invites me to a pre-caucus eat and drink for candidate Obama, I simply nod and smile, but what I really want to say is "If you forget that I turned down free alcohol and an hour of fellowship with the newly-formed condo association, I'll forget that you just tried to bribe me."
Over the course of a year, I've weighed the following options in relationship to the 2008 caucuses, which arrive tomorrow night...
a) Supporting John Edwards, the newly-populist progressive candidate, going so far as to write an endorsement for his campaign on the blog.
b) Skipping the caucuses altogether, boycotting a party-organized event that not only props up our nation's unconstitutional and demonic two-party system, but roots out and crushes less-financially-heeled candidates within the party that the establishment-appointed precinct chairpersons so fascistly deem "unviable."
c) Supporting Dennis Kucinich, who largely shares my worldview, but who has absolutely wasted his time attempting to be taken seriously within an increasingly conservative and corporatist Democratic party, and who was completely ignored by Iowa's largest newspaper-- nothing if not the state's self-appointed cheerleader-- because he didn't operate a political office out of the state. (Strangely though, Republicans Rudy Guiliani and John McCain were routinely included in candidate features in the paper despite announcing they would not be campaigning in Iowa upon dropping out of the GOP Straw Poll last summer. McCain even ultimately picked up the newspaper's endorsement.)
...and most recently, d) Going to the caucus but only getting as far as the door so I could see if they were handing out the state's new court-mandated voter registration forms in which you can now register as a member of the Green Party, saving me a trip to the courthouse.
I think I've come up now with a solution that combines three of these four options. Three things happened on New Year's Day that helped to crystalize my mission for caucus night.
Firstly, candidate Kucinich made another of his last-second appeals yesterday for his Iowa supporters to back a 2nd choice candidate. In 2004, I thought he erred in choosing the (at-the-time) more conservative John Edwards over the anti-war candidate Howard Dean, and now he's done it again, giving his 2nd-choice endorsement to Barack Obama over Edwards. Kucinich's action, though, helped to drive home the point for me that at the party primary/caucus level, when a progressive and liberal's participation and support is not being taken for granted, choosing a viable alternative to the corporatist's agenda can be grounded in logic and practicality. A registered Democrat, as I remain until I can get my hands on one of the new voter registrations, can strike an important blow in support of the resurrection of the party by casting their vote, in this case, against Hillary Clinton, the coldly-calculating, triangulating, unprincipled closet Republican favored by the party's corporate paymasters.
John Edwards is that opposition candidate, leading me to point number two: public advocate Ralph Nader expressed his "strong support" for Edwards this week, saying that Edwards "now has the most progressive message across the broad spectrum of corporate power damaging the interests of workers, consumers, taxpayers, of any candidate I have-- leading candidate I have seen in years." Adding, "the key phrase is when he (Edwards) says he doesn't want to replace a corporate Republican with a corporate Democrat. It's the only time I've heard a Democrat talk that way in a long time."
Many of Nader's corporate and turn-coat detractors on the left, still so enslaved to their unfocused anti-Bush anger to reason like adults, have already denounced Nader's action, blind to the fact that just like in 2000 and 2004, Nader is hand-delivering a group of voters and a winning electoral agenda to the Democratic party if they're only willing to take that agenda and run with it. (My guess though is that, once again, they'll choose the path to quick corporate fundraising instead with the same results come November.)
His critics argue that Nader's pull in electoral politics continues to be low, and to a certain point that's true. Nader's supporters are not "ditto-heads," to use a once-popular Republican phrase, and Nader has never asked his backers to follow him into the fires of hell (though some of us would.) Nader is instead an advocate of active citizenship and the democratization and diversity of ideas and voices, demanding nothing more of people than what he has given himself, which is the highest ideal. But of course, his principled voice and a Nader endorsement does carry a tremendous weight with me, and he makes a very strong case this time for Edwards.
When a candidate sounds a trumpet against the corruption by the corporate state, the mainstream media that the state controls will lash out against the candidate, and in the case of Edwards, they have this time. In recent weeks, pundits have accused Edwards of being increasingly "angry," which will always be the spin du jour when the issue of class conflict is waged by someone with their heart in the camp of the lower economic class. In these instances, it is important that we rally around the message to show that it has resonance.
Edwards has strongly established himself as the anti-Hillary candidate, where sadly, Barack Obama has not. Clinton's unapologetic vote for giving President Bush war authority on the Iraqi people was bad enough, but her judgement was even worse when she voted a second time to grant war authority to Bush and Cheney this summer on
Iran, and she looked like an even bigger fool when later intelligence reports, like with Iraq, later contradicted the reports of imminent danger the neo-cons and the Liebermans were trying to hawk to the American people. (Hillary's been fooled more times by this president than she was the last one.) It would have been nice to have an opposition candidate of Obama's stature that could have called Clinton out on this preposterous voting record, but unfortunately, Obama didn't show up for the Senate vote on Iran.
Furthermore, despite Obama's initial opposition to the Iraq war, he has subsequently backed all of the military funding measures, and he's shown a lack of political sophistication by falling for the conservative rhetorical lies about harnessing nuclear energy and
questioning the long-term financial viability of Social Security, whose destruction, if and when it comes, will be the ultimate betrayal of the New Deal. If these are some of Obama's ideas for "transcending partisanship" in Washington, than he can take his entire agenda back to Illinois. Also, I resented his recent attack on Edwards in which he attempted to brand and denigrate his opponent as "a trial lawyer." Edwards' record on fighting corporations in the courtroom is nonpareil, and the courtroom has been one of the few places, thanks also to the efforts of Ralph Nader and the like, where the country has still been seeing progressive action (except, of course, from the Supreme Court.)
The third thing that happened yesterday to help coalesce my caucus plan is that John Edwards finally
delivered an Iraq policy that I can get behind completely. President Edwards would immediately withdraw 40,000 to 50,000 troops from the country. Nearly all of the remaining troops would be out in 9 to 10 months, with the only remaining contingent there to protect the American Embassy and in humanitarian efforts, and the military would only train Iraqi forces from outside the country. "I absolutely believe this to my soul: we are there propping up their bad behavior," Edwards says, "I mean really, how many American lives and how much American taxpayer money are we going to continue to expend waiting for these political leaders to do something? Because that is precisely what we are doing."
So this is what I've decided, and of course, it's subject to change up until the very last moment: I'm going to attend my caucus at the Edmonds Academy at the top of the hill as a member of the Democratic party. I'm going to slip a voter registration form into my pocket on the way into the meeting (assuming perhaps naively that they'll be providing the new updated forms.) Then, I'm going to caucus for Dennis Kucinich in deference to his extraordinary progressive record in the Congress. Then assuming that he will not be deemed "viable" by the caucus nazis, I will shift my support to John Edwards.
The only element of this plan in which I still need to reconcile myself is that I'll be choosing to play ball within a terribly corrupt system. To express this guilt on my conscience, I'm going to
link again here at the end of the post to the Chris Hitchins article I linked already at the beginning. If you're an Iowan and you choose to stay home on caucus night, don't let anyone tell you that you're ignoring your civic duty. You'll have my respect. I leaned both ways, but decided to go.
