Mixed doubles
If nothing else, John McCain's choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate is a victory for the modern industry of consultant-driven politics. Choosing a little-known and little-experienced candidate may make it more difficult for McCain to make his claim that Barack Obama is too inexperienced to be commander-in-chief, but choosing a woman from the working-class ranks helps the GOP in its courtship of both blue-collar voters and disgruntled Hillary Clinton loyalists.
As always, it's a race to the "mushy middle" of electoral politics in which We the People are regarded as numbers and itemized voting blocks listed on a dry-erase board-- "message" running a distant second to "perception of message." The Democrats did the same thing last week by pairing the relatively unseasoned Obama with Joe Biden, a senator that's been entrenched in Washington for so long he's got bird shit on his shoulders. I'm sure voters will be as mobilized by the tactic as they were 20 years ago when Lloyd Bentsen, a war hero from Texas, was recruited by his party to "butch up" Mike Dukakis.
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Is it all that mindblowing that Palin is a former beauty contestant? What was Reagan?
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The War on Drugs is about to turn a corner:
16 were arrested yesterday on Forest Avenue in Des Moines after an eight-month police investigation.
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Book recommendation: Matt Taibbi's humorous and unfiltered first book (2005) "Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season," recalling the author's experience as a correspondent on the 2004 presidential campaign trail. Taibbi travels along in New Hampshire as John Kerry courts the votes of veterans, Howard Dean repeats the same stump speech over and over, and Joe Lieberman publicly celebrates his mother's birthday. He goes undercover at a Bush/Cheney campaign office in Orlando, before arranging a few of his fellow reporters into a single-elimination tournament to determine America's worst campaign journalist. (Summary examples:
Newsweek's Howard Fineman- "the patron saint of media hypocrites,"
Time's Karen Tumulty- "a third-rate sportswriter, a serial poll-humper, an arch-priestess of conventional wisdom, the unrepentant human embodiment of the lowest common denominator, the sworn enemy of all political substance, and incidentally, ugly," and Ann Coulter- "Like her predecessor, Joseph Stalin, she has her funny moments.")
Taibbi's explicit thesis (and complaint) is that political reporters make their living selling the campaigns to the citizenry, not speaking for the people to the campaigns. No one gets left off the hook in Taibbi's book, including us. Our national elections, he writes, "are gladiatorical spectacle in which individual dignity is ritualistically destroyed over the course of more than a year of constant battering and television exposure. Whether this is a trick of the elite to deliver a frightening object lesson to the population, or whether it represents the actual emotional desire of an impressively mean and stupid citizenry, that's hard to say. Either way, it sucks."
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At least
this guy places a value on his vote. 99 cents per vote is a bargain for any office-seeker in this day and age.
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Speaking of office-seeking, my profile as an Iowa House candidate in District 66 has gone up at
this national site.
History on the other channel
Every traditional newsmedia outlet is "representin'" and the talking heads are declaring a hit, but
fewer than 10 percent of Americans have tuned in so far to watch any part of the Democratic Party's quadrennial prom.
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This is what just might happen at a major political event if you venture outside of the "Freedom Cage."
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Cynthia McKinney
speaks in Denver.
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Far be it for me to offer Hollywood advice when they're doing so well for themselves, but what has become of the classic Paramount and MTM sitcoms on DVD. There hasn't been an announcement for a new season of "Newhart" in almost 12 months. The release drought on both "The Bob Newhart Show" and "WKRP in Cincinnati" is coming up on two years, and "Taxi" stalled out after Season 3 (of 5) all the way back in 2005. It's not like DVDs have become too expensive to produce. Perusing the Netflix site yesterday, I counted 189 new DVD releases just in the last week-- almost all garbage, as you'd expect. Free the true classics!
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One of the stars of Spike Lee's HBO doc "When the Levees Broke,"
Phyllis Montana-LeBlanc, talks with Salon.com. She has written a book... while living in a FEMA trailer.
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This one's for Aaron, who told me recently that he's adding Woody Allen to his list of the top-tier artists in his personal pantheon, completing a Mount Rushmore (if you will) that already includes Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and John Stamos. It's
New York Magazine's list (and set of video clips) of the director's
10 best sex scenes. (I'm paraphrasing.) Number 10 on the list should be number one. I saw that one just a week ago on Netflix, and peed myself silly.
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Bill Maher's show returns to HBO (and hopefully to YouTube as well) Friday night. Here's
a "Real Time" preview.
The informercials
"This convention is more of an infomercial than a news event," Ted Koppel pronounced in August of 1996 before the host of ABC's
Nightline left the Republican Convention in San Diego after only two days. "Nothing surprising has happened; nothing surprising is anticipated."
Twelve years later, little has changed. Much of the network television coverage has shifted to cable, but PBS, MSNBC, FOX News, CNN, and later NBC, CBS, and ABC will all be there to provide the two dominant political parties in America direct access to the American people; in some cases, more than 12 hours of programming will be devoted per convention to the flowery candidate platitudes and unedited video fluff pieces sanctioned and produced by the parties.
Already excluded from the horse race coverage of the nation's commentary class, presidential candidates Ralph Nader (Independent), Cynthia McKinney (Green), and Bob Barr (Libertarian) will go almost entirely MIA on your television this election cycle. They won't be given a chance to plead their case directly to the American people. None will have the chance to deliver "the speech of his/her life." You're likely to see more of Barack Obama's
sister on your tube this month than you will these other three individuals, despite the former being a well-known, even iconic, consumer and public advocate, and the latter two having each served more than twice the amount of time as legislators within the halls of Congress than the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Convention narratives for both the Democrats and Republicans will be framed around the candidates' and their advocates' perceived ability to effectively "convey their message to voters," but no commentator will once question the democratic wisdom of the process itself. No individual holding a microphone or speaking into one will bite the corporate hand that feeds the beast. The boat will not be rocked. Evolutionary rejects like Terry McAuliffe and Ralph Reed will be treated by working reporters with a jolting level of respect as guest commentators, met by them with both kid gloves and straight faces. In the end, a revolution in journalism will have amounted to the sum total of NBC having hired Tim Russert's kid.
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Ralph Nader and his supporters are rallying in Denver this week. Nader and vice presidential nominee Matt Gonzalez will be joined on stage by citizen activist Cindy Sheehan, and artists Sean Penn, Val Kilmer, and Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello. Free Speech TV will be streaming the event online Wednesday at 8pm central. So they've got that going for them.
Biden our time & other musings
If Barack Obama chooses Senator Joe Biden to be his running mate (and we now know he's picked somebody), how will he reconcile Biden's well-publicized plan to partition Iraq into three different countries with his own campaign promise to get us
out of Iraq? Anybody who thinks a Democratic president will stop this bloody war or put an end to our government's pathological need to engage in nation-building is fooling themselves.
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An Obama/Biden ticket would also mean of course that anyone voting for Obama because he had the wisdom to oppose the Iraq war would now be pulling the lever for another Democrat who voted to cough up the Senate's Constitutional power to declare war to the Bush Administration.
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He
may indeed know how many houses he owns, but Biden is still no friend to working men and women. The Senate's top recipient in campaign cash from the finance/credit card industry led the effort to pass the legislation that made it harder for people to declare bankruptcy. This was a bill that Bill Clinton vetoed twice during the 1990s, but that sailed through under Bush in March of 2005. The finance industry made an expensive show at the time of castigating people who overspend and get in over their heads, but statistics show that far and away the number one cause of bankruptcy filings is health and medical expenses. Either Biden didn't buy the numbers or he just wanted more of the dough.
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Can't we just agree that Obama and McCain are
both elitists? Let's put that false campaign dispute to bed.
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Garrison Keillor seems to have enjoyed his visit to the Iowa State Fair. He went all "Garrison Keillor" in
this summary.
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The Nation's Andrew Rice
reviews two baseball books released this summer-- Nicholas Dawidoff's "The Crowd Sounds Happy" (which I've read), and Will Leitch's "God Save the Fan" (which I haven't)-- thoughtful critiques for a person like me who, in Rice's words, "devote(s) large portions of his conscious attention to the fortunes of a bunch of men in colorful hats who wave sticks at a white speck and run around in circles."
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Anonymous web comment of the week not from this site: St. Louis Post-Dispatch reader "coedhacker", on the topic of a career-threatening elbow injury to Cardinals' reliever Jason Isringhausen--
"Yeah sure, Izzy can pitch again, for the Olympic team perhaps, or maybe my company tee-ball game. Yes, I said he could pitch in my company tee-ball game."---
Baseball is about to disappear as an Olympic sport, but
the U.S. and Cuba had a nice sustained rivalry while it lasted-- right up there with Dodgers/Giants, Michigan/Ohio State, Celtics/Lakers, and Cheney/U.S. Constitution. Fortunately, it will live on with the tri-annual World Baseball Classic, coming again in March. Will it have been
three years already?
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I'll be spending Sunday night with Bruce Springsteen in Kansas City. If you're nice to Aaron, maybe he'll give you a blog review when we get back.
Gettin' the permits
It's fun sometimes to try to read behind the headlines of a story. In
this Des Moines Register story from Tuesday, a Granger, Iowa farmer is defending his initiative to build two large-scale hog confinement facilities in rural Dallas County after the state Environmental Protection Commission rejected his building permits first approved by the D-N-R.
What are we to make of some of the buried details in this story? A local, "fifth-generation" farmer (as the paper's anonymous reporter kindly fellates) is bidding to get the neighbors' clearance on the construction of the confinement units, but the multi-national food conglomerate Cargill, headquartered out of state, owns all the hogs that would be in residence. Is this how the industry operates today? Cargill enlists an area man to do their bidding, and all they have to do in return is provide enough manure to serve as fertilizer for the farmer's 7,000 acres. In any case, I can't think of a better metaphor for modern farming-- the corporation gets the hogs, and the local man- along with his neighbors- gets the hogshit.
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It's all well and good for one to
question the editorial decision by the "non-profit" (yet somehow corporate-sponsored) Commission on Presidential Debates to have three old white guys moderate the televised presidential debates between Barack Obama and John McCain, but we have only Democratic and Republican party bosses to blame since they comprise the makeup of the commission in its entirety. As Harry Truman once said, "If you're getting beaten on the head, it's probably a good idea to look up and see who's beating you." Does it really matter who's lobbin' the softballs anyway? They should just bring in the guy who was throwing to Josh Hamilton during the Home Run Derby at Yankee Stadium. The real obscenity thumbed towards "the potent richness of the electorate" is that only two candidates were invited to answer the moderators' questions.
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The New Yorker's David Remnick
on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vladimir Putin.
Chris Moeller for Statehouse
I've decided that it's time to put my money where my mouth is in regards to progressive action. Over the past month, I've been collecting signatures in an effort to land a spot on the general election ballot of November 4th. I met the filing deadline a week ago by submitting the required 50+ signatures and an affidavit of candidacy to the Secretary of State's office in Des Moines. I will be
a Green Party candidate for Iowa State Representative in House District 66.
I'm running because I'm dissatisfied with the quality of progressive leadership in the state of Iowa. The Democratic Party controls the governor's office, and both chambers of the legislature, yet
-- our health care coverage is becoming less accessible and less affordable
-- inner-city schools in Des Moines are being shuttered
-- the cost of tuition at our universities is going through the roof while state aid withers
-- the governor continues to weakly surrender the brave men and women of our increasingly-vital National Guard to fight in a war for oil profits half a world away
-- Iowa leads the nation in the percentage of African-Americans behind bars, more than 8,900 of the 70,000 blacks who live in the state(!), 13 times the incarceration rate of whites
-- labor's right to organize continues to be severely restricted
-- Iowa's rivers are now among the most polluted in the country as our legislature sees fit to protect polluters with legal immunity from nuisance lawsuits
-- state leaders throw millions of our tax dollars at out-of-state corporations under the fraudulent advertisement of "economic growth," in fact jeopardizing the quality of life that comes only with sustainable urban development and agriculture.
There's a simple explanation as to why all of the above is true, and that's because the Democrats at the Capitol are in hock up to their eyebrows to the lobbyists and special interests that put them in office. This includes my incumbent opponent, who accepts PAC money from all over the country despite the advantage of representing an overwhelmingly-single-party-controlled district.
The Democratic Party has become a graveyard for progressive ideas. When an upstart, true progressive candidacy, such as the recent Fallon for Congress, rises up
from within, the monied interests in the state, and from beyond our borders, act swiftly to swat it down; and as the state's principle opposition party, the Republicans' strategy on governance has been little more than to simply grab as much as they can for themselves as fast as they can. That's why I'm running
from without. That's why I'm running as a Green
.
There is no Republican candidate on the ballot in the District so "the Fighting 66th" has a unique opportunity to put a truly independent progressive in the legislature to advocate for their quality of life and for that of the entire state. Living in Sherman Hill, I've been a proud resident of the 66th District for more than 10 years. It's the only place that I've lived during my adult life, first as an apartment renter, now as a homeowner. I feel as though I understand your trials and concerns.
There are many things the Iowa General Assembly can accomplish if it has true progressives there to lead it...
If the federal government won't provide health care as a human right to all of its citizens, we can make sure that all Iowans in need are covered through an expansion of the Hawk-I insurance program that currently covers only children. Living without health insurance in the insurance capital of the world should be a laughable concept.
We need progressive tax formulas that pay for lower university tuition, not higher, and ultimately, we need tuition-free post-secondary public education for Iowa residents.
I vow to fight also for a full $10/hour minimum wage that makes the minimum wage a more "livable wage," and no more tax incentives and payoffs to out-of-state corporations that flood over our borders, endangering so many of our small businesses, and operate without regard to the health of our local communities.
We need legislation that challenges "the legalization of theft" in Iowa under the disingenuous heading of eminent domain. The unchecked government power to transfer property from one private owner to another, devastating already impoverished communities, is just another issue in which Democratic leaders have shamefully failed us by giving themselves over, heart-and-soul, to their corporate paymasters.
I promise to fight for not simply civil unions, but for
full marriage rights in Iowa for gays, lesbians, transgender, and intersex individuals. Again, this is an area where the state of Iowa has the capacity to act to fill the insulting void created by the federal government.
I'm committed to ending Iowa's designation, once and for all, as a so-called "right to work" state. There should be no more union organizing restrictions, no more crooked backroom dealing at the statehouse, and no more free ride for non-union laborers riding the train of progress engineered by collective bargaining. In the statehouse, we can make sure that an Iowa company's workers have the first right to buy a business put up for sale, going bankrupt, or being outsourced. A union man or woman spilled his or her blood for every right you enjoy at your workplace, and it's our patriotic duty to constantly recall their collective and individual sacrifices.
We need creative public transportation, a bicycle and pedestrian-friendly infrastructure in the state, and restoration of abandoned lands. District 66 residents are particularly benefited by what's called urban in-fill development, which allows a community to grow without the unsustainable sprawl of modern development. Individual decisions in cities and neighborhoods should be locally-controlled, but state government can provide our communities with many of the resources they need for healthy, long-term growth.
Finally, I vow I will never, ever take money from lobbyists or PACs. This widespread practice of buying off our political representatives is the overriding obstacle to all other progressive action and reform across this nation. The decision to accept these pointed bribes is also the biggest difference between my opponent and me.
I'm privileged to run "down-ticket" from the Green Party's Presidential and Vice Presidential nominees, Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente, two extraordinary national leaders and vibrant Women of Color. I'm greatly in
your debt for any feedback and any support that can be provided for this grassroots, citizen-centered campaign.
More information coming soon at
http://www.polkcogreens.org/Chris Moeller
700 15th St #6
Des Moines, IA 50314
515-249-3457 (cell)
Spinning wheel
The
king of cowboy style is dead at the age of 107. Jack Weil's Western shirts graced the big screen on the backs of both Clark Gable and Heath Ledger. So goes one of the last American CEOs who believed in the Made in the USA label. "I never wanted to be the richest man in the cemetery," he said. I like that.
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Madonna turns 50 tomorrow. She's almost reached an age in which "underwear-as-outerwear" has always been socially acceptable.
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They crowned
Iowa's elderly king and queen at the state fair Wednesday. The selected queen, Margaret Hurley of Johnston, was the oldest registered participant at 101 years old. Madonna came in second.
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It would be a nice gesture on Barack Obama's part to allow Hillary Clinton to join him when he takes the oath of office on Inauguration Day.
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America is in the midst of the rebirth of
the streetcar line. Hear, hear. Affordable, efficient, and green. As our forefathers said on so many occasions-- look to Cincinnati.
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Bob Saget is
the roast-ee of this year's Comedy Central celebrity roast. The event airs on the cable channel Sunday night at 9 central.
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In the
Sherman Hill neighborhood here in Des Moines, the annual Walking Tour will be September 20 & 21, 27 & 28. Tickets are $10/day. Stop by if you're in the area. The Moeller Penthouse on 15th Street, however, will be off-limits to the prying public.
Fast on the heels of the Walking Tour then might be the first-ever
Sherman Hill Halloween celebration in October. (The event is in the planning stages, says today's
Register.) My condo is haunted only by the ghost of my radio career. Neighbors claim that sometimes late in the evening they can hear a disembodied old voice from KXNO reading a list of partial ballgame scores.
This Olympic moment
I'm sorry in advance for what may wind up being sparse blogging this week. I've been experiencing difficulties getting online at home. Fortunately, you have the Olympics to keep you busy. Do you have
"Lolo Fever" like I do? The sprinter from Des Moines is almost too good to be true-- committed, down-to-earth, and very cute.
I haven't been watching the Olympics coverage on NBC. Tell me, has the television network come through with lots of heartwarming stories about athletes overcoming long odds, like the Des Moines Register story linked above? Gosh, I hope so. I love Lolo, but being a great athlete while being poor is not that unusual. There are many more world-class athletes among each country's poorest 10 percent than among its wealthiest 10 percent. Case in point-- Ivanka and Paris are both sitting out this particular Olympiad.
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A psychology professor writing for
The Atlantic argues that stop signs and speed limits actually cause
more traffic accidents. Discuss amongst yourselves.
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Madonna turns 50 on Saturday. Can you believe it?
In related news, her British accent turns 9 on Tuesday.
The new frontline
Two thoughts spring immediately to mind regarding
Russia's invasion of the Republic of Georgia--
1) It's a shame that the American president and the other war criminals of his administration so quickly and so long ago surrendered all capacity to project diplomatic or moral authority across the globe. How in the world are we in a position to lecture or sway Russia over
their act of military aggression?
and 2) The world's need to end its dependence on oil is not just an environmental concern, but a national security one as well. Georgia represents the West's "energy corridor" to the Caspian Sea, and Vladimir Putin knows it. Once again, our oil card is showing.
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Reporter Mark Ames slices through Candidate McCain's bluster regarding the conflict. No surprise, the senator's simply an agent for Wall Street.
There are no heroes in the pissing match between Russian Prime Minister Putin, long spoiling for a fight in the region, and the criminally careless Georgian dictator, Mikheil Saakashvili. As usual, civilians are left to bear the brunt of military violence-- at least 2,000 dead already.
Friday roundup 8/8/08
Former state representative Ed Fallon's new progressive organization is called "I'm For Iowa," designed to recruit progressive candidates for public office, and to promote clean elections and grass-roots community action. Their website features a handy
"Shop Local" section that lists local businesses county-by-county. Polk and Johnson Counties, as examples, have long menus listed already, but other, particularly rural, counties are far from complete.
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Hillary Clinton says she hopes the upcoming Democratic convention will be
"cathartic" for her. This will provide an interesting element to watch for among dispassionate viewers like myself who just can't get enough detailed examination of the Clintons' fragile psyches. But please, no wagering.
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One of the true lions of the left, Jerry Brown, is mulling another bid for governor of California. George Will's
take.
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Former big-leaguer Doug Glanville has written
a guest column for
The New York Times.---
Alec Baldwin, on NBC's "30 Rock" winning a Peabody Award--
"The fact that we have a smart show with nothing that caustic or harsh is a miracle. To talk about what I want to do to Condoleezza Rice sexually without saying something really, really anatomical -- that takes a lot of doing."
Around the horn
A business journal in New York City estimates that the Yankees will quickly
double their annual revenue when they move into their new stadium next year. Field-level box seats are expected to run as high as $2500 per game, with individual luxury suites commanding upwards of $850,000 for each of the 81 annual home contests. Yet none of this has prevented the team from asking taxpayers for an additional $366 million in tax-exempt financing.
Ted Stevens would be envious of the proposed deal.
Mohegan Sun Casino, of Uncasville, CT, will lease space for a sports bar just beyond the fence in centerfield. Does this mean Major League Baseball will let bygones be bygones with Pete Rose?
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The logo for the 2009 MLB All-Star Game in St. Louis was
unveiled today. The Gateway Arch is prominent. Construction of the monument had just completed the last time St. Louis hosted the game in 1966.
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Entering Tuesday, the Brewers had lost seven of their last nine games, and Monday night saw
a shoving match in the dugout. The whole Brett Favre thing is proving to be a huge distraction.
King Corn
A movie recommendation for you is the 2007 documentary "King Corn," on DVD and available now for rental or online viewing with Netflix. Two young men from the east coast, with roots in Iowa, rent an acre of field from a farmer in Greene, Iowa (Butler County), and follow their corn (as best they're able) from planting through processing.
It was an eye-opening film even for a lifelong Iowa resident like me who grew up in an agricultural family, the son of a grain elevator manager ("grain storage brats," they called my brother and me). It describes the historic and mostly devastating evolution in corn-growing from an enterprise that predominantly involved small family farms to a modern day industry of behemoth factory farms, which controls prices and sets political agenda.
In one examination roughly mid-way through the movie, the filmmakers explore what will eventually be the utilization of their product. Upon harvesting, the 10,000 pounds of corn(!) produced by a single acre of farmland fans out across the country, shipped away for processing where roughly 32% will be converted into ethanol or simply exported, leaving the nation's food supply. 490 pounds of it, on average, will become sweeteners, such as the fructose corn syrup contained in so many processed products in your supermarket, from breakfast cereals to frozen pizzas to bottled soda and juices-- damn near everything. More than half of the production-- 5,500 pounds for every 10,000-- is fed to animals-- hogs and cattle-- for meat production.
Across the west, where cattle once grazed exclusively on grass, they now graze primarily on corn. Producers discovered that cattle could be fattened quicker by confining them in feed lots. They're fed continuously while their movement is severely limited, allowing them to reach market weight in a fraction of the time of a generation ago. The cows are subsequently pumped with antibiotics and steroids to help fight off the illnesses that pop up intrinsically with morbid obesity. Additionally, a processing facility with roughly 100 thousand head of cattle produces enough waste to equal the human waste of a city with 1.7 million people.
In Iowa, families that have farmed the same land for up to five and six generations are being priced out of the game, and industry profits are far more likely to wind up at corporate headquarters than back in local economies. Having already been forced to play under the new rules going back to the 1970s, there's now widescale abandonment not only of the multi-generational homesteads, but of the small town communities that have long been the lifeblood of the Heartland. The damage caused by corporate agribusiness has been economic, nutritional, environmental, and cultural.
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I've decided to back presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney and the Green Party in November, and further announcements are coming soon, but what progressive Ralph Nader is doing is also quite extraordinary. Despite a calculated and appalling effort by Democrats to suppress dissent and the rights of voters, not to mention an almost absolute campaign blackout by the traditional media, a
CNN poll released two days ago found that Nader had the support of wholly 6 percent of America's registered voters. Back in the day, when the League of Women Voters sponsored the televised presidential debates (as opposed to the current "debate commission" comprised of Democratic and Republican party bosses), the threshold for inclusion in the proceedings was 5 percent, which proved beneficial at the time for both John Anderson and Ross Perot.
Recent Nader media releases also advertise that the campaign expects to land on 45 state ballots this year, up from 34 in 2004. The traditional news media continues to perpetuate a bogus narrative about John McCain, and particularly Barack Obama, energizing young and/or disenfranchised American voters, but coupled with recent approval polls for both the White House and the Congress, all empirical evidence indicates record dissatisfaction with both Democrats and Republicans.
