Teflon, leather and Steele

West Hollywood, Calif., is 2,307 miles from Washington, D.C., but culturally you might as well be talking about the distance between Katmandu and the moon. The forms of entertainment available in that enclave of L.A., the sweeping cultural license that’s the norm out there, don’t always go over well when you're a captive of the social mores of those living hard by the Beltway. Especially when you’re spending someone else’s money on that entertainment.

What happens in West Hollywood doesn’t necessarily stay there. Michael Steele knows that now.

By now you know (unless you’ve been off planet for the last two or three days) that Steele, the embattled but unbowed chairman of the Republican National Committee — the primary fundraising arm of the Republican Party — is under fire again, facing criticism from those in the party and outside it for his role in a debacle that could cost him his job.

On Monday morning, the Daily Caller reported that on Jan. 31, Erik Brown, a Republican who spent $1,946 on “meals” at Voyeur West Hollywood, a bondage-themed nightclub on Santa Monica Boulevard, expensed the charges to the Republican National Committee. The charges were incurred during an after-party for the RNC’s Young Eagles, a group for rising Republican stars 45 years of age and under.

Brown was reimbursed by the committee for the charges, according to Federal Election Commission filings obtained by The Daily Caller, the political news Web site launched by former conservative journalist Tucker Carlson and former Cheney op Neil Patel.

Politico reported that Voyeur is modeled after sets from Stanley Kubrick’s racy 1999 Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman movie “Eyes Wide Shut.”

An RNC spokesman released a statement Monday: “The Chairman was never at the location in question, he had no knowledge of the expenditure, nor does he find the use of committee funds at such a location at all acceptable …”

But on Tuesday, wasting no time in effecting damage control, the RNC fired Allison Meyers, the Young Eagles director, who apparently OK’d the reimbursement.

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Steele has been criticized previously for various misdeeds, all of which pale by comparison with the Voyeur matter. He published a “blueprint” book of strategies for achieving Republican election victories without telling Republican leaders about it. Then he went on a book tour to promote that “blueprint.”

He made other speaking engagements outside the purview of party business and was compensated for them. He announced an embarrassingly half-baked strategy to do a hip-hop makeover of the GOP, meant to welcome those traditionally outside the Republicans’ sphere of influence.

And now this.

Some in the D.C. wing of the punditburo — notably David Wiegel, writing in the Washington Independent and Ana Marie Cox of GQ magazine, talking to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC — have said that, despite this towering screwup on Steele’s watch, the chairman would tough it out and remain at his post. I think Wiegel and Cox couldn’t be more wrong. It’s the distinctions between Steele’s previous missteps and this one that make it highly likely, maybe even inevitable, that the chairman may not be the chairman for long.

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When the Voyeur news broke Monday, there was a little more than seven months before the 2010 midterms. If a week is a year in politics, seven months is a millennium, but the Republican leadership is faced with the urgent need to resolve a dilemma, one brought on by Steele’s apparent financial mismanagement and his equally apparent love for high style and bling.

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It’s been estimated in various media reports that Steele started his tenure in the RNC high chair with about $22 million in operating capital; that’s since reportedly evaporated to about $10 million — a burn rate of ready cash that makes the spending of startups in pre-2000 Silicon Valley look modest by comparison.

Monday night on MSNBC, Cox told Maddow that nothing would change at the RNC, and that she looked for Steele to exit his job “in November, when there’s a natural break for him to go.”

Cox’s logic seemed to be that pulling Steele from the chairmanship now would be too disruptive to the Republicans. But is the GOP really prepared to keep watching the hemorrhage of money it needs to gird for battle between now and the fall, just for the sake of maintaining the façade of party unity? Are Republicans content to stand idly by while their prestige keeps sinking without doing something about it?

'24,' 9/11 and the certainty of uncertainty

The Fox series 24 debuted on Nov. 6, 2001, weeks after the worst foreign attack on American soil. In the eight years since then, its fictional forecast of endless terrorism in this country has been a lightning rod for controversy and a source of inspiration for those who championed the fight against the "axis of evil."

Fox's cancellation of 24, announced on Friday and effective with the series finale on May 24, ends a signal moment in the national teleculture when fiction and reality fused in the fall of 2001. ...

The Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning Fox show blazed fresh stylistic trails. Its real-time structure, with each episode documenting one hour in the life of national crisis, was joined with split-screen views, a noisy on-screen digital clock, and a relentless tension and foreboding. These signature touches (as well as characters with complexity and depth, people we actually care about) eventually made 24 the longest-running espionage-based series in television history.

The autumn of 2001 was thick with shows that anticipated the gathering storm of terrorism we live through today. Besides 24, other shows making their debut -- ABC's Alias, CBS's The Agency and NBC's UC: Undercover -- were the canaries in a cultural coalmine, transmitting the new national anxiety about our friends and enemies, foreign and domestic, and how each could trade places in a geopolitical eyeblink.

The Wen Ho Lee and Robert Hanssen espionage cases, the anthrax attacks, would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid and bureaucratic infighting at the FBI were all real-life examples of what 24 tapped into so effectively: the predictable unpredictability of life in an age of terrorism.

Since 2001, of course, other TV series have addressed our nervous Zeitgeist, from the lighthearted (NBC's Chuck) to the deadly serious (CBS's The Unit). But Fox's 24 remains the long-distance runner, the template for national-insecurity-as-prime-time-entertainment in the post-9/11 world. ...

Read the rest at TheGrio.com

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Image credits: '24' intertitle card: Fox. New York skyline, 9/11/01: National Park Service (public domain).

Seven days of the Democrats

“A week is a year in politics,” some political physicist once observed. By that highly compressed metric, the year between March 23 and today went as well — as perfectly, insanely great — as it ever has for the Democrats. To judge from the succession of Democratic initiatives advanced on Capitol Hill and from the White House, and the rhetorical and strategic energy that preceded them, there’s a fresh chutzpah, a swagger in the step of the Dems that’s at least momentarily got Republicans on the defensive.

It started Tuesday with President Obama signing into law what may be the landmark of his domestic agenda, a sweeping health-care bill intended to cover another 32 million Americans with health insurance — a gambit that brings the United States as close to universal health care as we’ve ever come.

On Friday the president and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a breakthrough deal on a replacement for the START agreement, a proposed landmark treaty that would update the Cold War-era pact, and cut U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles by 30 percent. Pending ratification by the Senate, Obama will sign the formal treaty on April 8 in Prague.

"I'm pleased to announce that after a year of intense negotiations, the United States and Russia have agreed to the most comprehensive arms control agreement in nearly two decades," Obama told reporters.

"With this agreement, the United States and Russia -— the two largest nuclear powers in the world — also send a clear signal that we intend to lead," the president said.

The domestic triumph of health-care reform, followed in dizzyingly short order by a sweeping proposal to reduce the world’s biggest nuclear arsenals … Is there Red Bull in the water supply at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

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Magic is generally defined as the art of misdirection; on Saturday, the president proved himself to be something of a master of the art. First came the news that, one day into the spring congressional recess (lawmakers lulled into thinking a quiet March Madness weekend was in store), the White House announced it had made 15 recess appointments, vital additions to agencies and boards that Obama made without the Senate’s approval.

It’s hardly unprecedented; recess appointments are a presidential perk that’s been used routinely (President Reagan did it hundreds of times). It’s one the Obama administration has been reluctant to use, a nod to its bipartisan inclination. That was then, this is now; no doubt invigorated by the big health-care win, Team Obama’s clutch of recess appointments was the week’s last slap upside the Republicans’ heads.

It was thought that Obama issued the appointments while safely ensconced at Camp David on Saturday. The news broke a while later that, no, the commander-in-chief was on the ground in frickin’ Afghanistan! President Obama arrived that day, making a surprise visit to U.S. troops at Bagram Air Base, and calling on Afghan President Hamid Karzai for a face-to-face. After six hours or so on the ground, the multitasker-in-chief hotfooted it home, back to the White House. Next mission: a Passover Seder with family, friends and close staff members, on Monday.

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This sense of the wind at the back of the Democrats is contagious. We’ve seen it on the Hill in recent weeks and months, as Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida and Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York spoke truth to power on the House floor during the vituperative health-care debate, with rhetorical flourishes that had more to do with the street than with Roberts’ Rules of Order.

Sen. Al Franken got the badass bug over the weekend. Frankel (who I saw occasionally back in the day at the New York Sports Club on 80th and Broadway in Manhattan, not far enough from Zabar’s, the gourmet-food emporium) was the subject of a media ambush orchestrated by Jason Mattera, a conservative mediaite and wannabe hit-man reporter in the mold of the producers from Fox News.

Nico Pitney of The Huffington Post writes:

“A conservative media activist named Jason Mattera confronted Sen. Al Franken last weekend and has posted video of the incident on YouTube.

“In the video, Mattera introduces himself warmly to Franken and then asks him, "Which portions of the health care bill lower costs? Is it the provision giving $7 billion to fund jungle gyms or the provision mandating that employers provide time off for breastfeeding?"

“Franken asks him to show him the portion of the legislation that gives "$7 billion to fund jungle gyms." Mattera points to a section of the bill he was carrying with him, but when Franken begins to respond, Mattera interjects: "Why is that the job of the federal government...to create an army of monkey bars? Go ahead, answer it."

“At this point, Franken seems to have had enough. "You have to shut up right now and listen to me instead of interrupting me." Mattera says, "I'm sorry, go ahead." The two continue their back-and-forth as Franken heads up a flight of stairs. …

Franken, of course, has been no freshman shrinking violet on Capitol Hill. From the beginning the prickly Minnesota senator has left no ideologue unchallenged, in recent months happily bitch-slapping Sens. Joe Lieberman and John Thune, and getting in the face of Comcast CEO Brian Roberts. Ambush-boy Mattera would be no exception.



Franken isn’t just an odd case. What’s striking is the way in which the Democrats, collectively buoyed by one success, have used its momentum to bolster their own self-confidence. And there’s no success quite like a Historic one.

William Galston, a former Clinton White House aide and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the Associated Press on Sunday that the Obama White House "had a political near-death experience over health care the past few months. It turned out OK in the end, but it was a close call. So I think they have to ask themselves: Do they think Democratic elected officials and the electorate have the stomach for a lot more controversy?"

That misses the point of the White House’s recent assertiveness. It’s never really been about deliberately courting controversy; it’s been a matter of getting things done. Of intending to lead. And over the last seven days, that’s exactly what’s happened: a series of achievements, crowded with ceremony and substance.

All in all, it seems, a helluva good time to be a Democrat in Washington. For as long as it lasts.

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Image credits: Obama top: Pool. Red Bull: Red Bull GmBH. Obama in Afghanistan: Pete Souza/The White House.

Presidential fists of fury

The epic battle for health-care reform has been recorded in millions upon millions of words, but leave it to the medium of the comics to boil everything down perfectly. Over the weekend The Root published this priceless comic-style distillation of the debate, its players and its outcome written, created and drawn by Lawrence Ross and Joshua Kemble.

Besides the big health-care win, there was news late yesterday that President Obama used the just-started congressional recess to exercise his presidential prerogative, making 15 recess appointments to fill vacancies in his administration and various agencies — bypassing the need for Senate confirmation. Republicans are not happy. Obama's fists of fury strike again.

Nick Veasey's art under the skin

In a world rife with identity-based divisions, it’s the rare and valuable artist who can express the commonalities of the human experience in a way that can’t be debated or challenged or politicized. Kudos, then, to Nick Veasey.

The award-winning British artist and photographer recently published “X-ray: See Through the World Around You” (Viking/Penguin), a survey of 13 years of his experimentation with X-ray imagery, a book of startlingly original images using X-ray technology and some Photoshop manipulation to get under the skin of our everyday lives in stark and novel ways. The New York Daily News ran a slideshow of his work recently.

Some of the most arresting forms of expression and creativity in the culture have less to do with sui generis conjuring — creating something new out of whole cloth — and more to do with juxtaposing or repositioning life’s ordinaries in refreshing new ways.

That’s Veasey’s approach. By using the common medical tool of X-rays and placing its resultant images in an everyday context, Veasey has created darkly whimsical work that speaks to human universality, even as it shows how those tools have already permeated every part of the human condition.

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In Veasey’s hands, the intrinsically diagnostic function of the X-ray takes on a voyeuristic aspect that is one with our relentless thirst for information. That comes home in one image in particular: an X-ray image of a piece of luggage, its contents revealed — an image of a carry-on bag all too common today for security screeners at an airport near you. An expression of 21st-century global security on the gallery wall.

“The Gunman,” an eerily beautiful image of an armed man, is another commentary on life in the post-9/11 world. The X-rays are powerful enough to see through the external contours of the man's foreboding silhouette, and through the gun he’s hiding in a holster, right down to the bullets in the magazine.

There’s no way to tell if this is a hijacker or a U.S. marshal sworn to stop a hijacker. The almost clinical anonymity of the figure, the lack of context for the weapon he’s carrying and why he carries it, gives this image the power of the dangerous ubiquity its subject represents.

Luckily, no human beings were harmed for these images. Since X-rays require several minutes to achieve the stunningly sharp resolution we see (a level of exposure that would be dangerous to living tissue), several of the images were created with either skeletons in rubber suits or cadavers donated by medical science.

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Which doesn’t diminish their emotional impact. You can’t look at these images without embracing the mortality behind them, however wittily expressed. Veasey’s “The Human Race” — a sly postmodern update of some of Eadweard Muybridge’s celebrated motion studies and the various ascent-of-man graphics we’ve all seen forever — puts the totality of human endeavor in a wryly cynical perspective.



But there’s also something darkly hopeful about these shots. There are exactly 206 bones in the human body; when you see those bones in the various skeletal forms of Veasey’s work, arrayed in various human endeavors, what comes clear is what we all have in common regardless of race, color or creed.



In Veasey’s artistic world, utopia is darkly lit. There is no racism, gender bias, religious bent or political persuasion. We are all very much the same.

Mortality is an equal opportunity employer.

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Image credits: All images © 2010 Nick Veasey.

Phases of a crisis

The suicide machine known as the Republican Party should be facing a massive recall right about now, the better to find a way to stop the episodes of unintended acceleration that make the GOP vulnerable to going over a cliff between now and November.

There doesn’t seem to be an emergency brake or kill switch anywhere in the machinery. In their inexorable drive toward unswerving ideological purity, conservatives are imposing what amount to loyalty oaths on their followers, and woe unto those apostates who wander too far off the grounds.

David Frum can testify to that. Frum, author, former Bush 41 speechwriter and a true believer in conservative principles, was “terminated” yesterday from his staff position at the American Enterprise Institute, after Frum made on-air comments on MSNBC, and wrote an opinion piece for CNN.com finding fault with the failed Republican strategy for derailing the health-care legislation that is now the law of the land. In the CNN column, Frum said the health care issue had proven to been a sad turnabout of last year’s conservative confidence:

“The ‘Waterloo’ threatened by [South Carolina Senator] Jim DeMint last year regarding Obama and health care has finally arrived all right: Only it turns out to be our own.”



Frum may also have been cashiered for putting talk-radio Rottweiler and former recreational pharmaceutical enthusiast Rush Limbaugh in his place. Also from the CNN piece:

“When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say -- but what is equally true -- is that he also wants Republicans to fail.

“If Republicans succeed -- if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office -- Rush's listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less and hear fewer ads for Sleep Number beds.”

Then, in another rare burst of conservative candor, Frum said on ABC’s “Nightline” that the right-wing ideological bent of Fox news, and the Republican Party’s dance with that network was damaging to the credibility of the party.

"We're discovering we work for Fox," he told ABC.

Frum has insisted the excommunication was his idea, after AEI leadership offered him the chance to stay and work for free. It’s hard out there for everyone, even conservative columnists. No doubt disenchanted with making pro bono work a part of his résumé, Frum announced his departure. “Premises will be vacated no later than April 9,” he wrote in a letter to AEI president Arthur Brooks.

Ja Car commented at The Huffington Post: "Somebody forgot to tell Frum AEI is a 'we tell you what to think tank.'"

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It’s more evidence (like you need any more) that the Republican Party is experiencing the kind of existential crisis that occurs in large corporations and other unwieldy human enterprises, and for at least some of the same reasons. There’s insight from the corporate world that’s easily analogized to the travails of the GOP.

The American Press Institute held a conference of CEOs from various media concerns in November 2008. The conference had, among things, the mission of discussing survival options and timetables for the newspaper industry in a time of unprecedented challenge, and crisis, for print journalism.

In a summary, one that made use of the graph you see here, the Institute entertained the advice of a business turnaround specialist and professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, who determined that companies under such stress “should start [course correction] by plotting their place on a ‘Phases of a Crisis’ chart. The earliest stage is indicated by a company essentially blind to eroding conditions undermining its business. This is followed by acknowledgement but inaction, followed by faulty action in hopes of a quick fix, followed by full-blown crisis and finally dissolution of the enterprise.”

According to the specialist, “[F]ailure to take action at any point on the curve means the enterprise inexorably moves to the next point. As an organization moves down the crisis curve, it will find executing a recovery plan more difficult, and will have less time to do it.”

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Where the Republican Party is on this hypothetically relentless downhill trajectory is open to debate. Trying to get a sense of “rock bottom” is hard to do when the rocks that are presumably at the bottom keep moving under your feet. Some observers will say the GOP is at the top of this poison wave — somewhere in the vicinity of the P1 value: “Blinded,” unable to look past ideology in order to see the ruinous course it’s on. Others will say the grim slide is well underway, and that the GOP is leaving the P3 zone (“faulty action”) and headed straight for P4 — full-on “crisis.”

Recent behavior by Republicans suggests that they’re on the outskirts of crisis this minute. The leadership would do well to look into this. Despite the fact that the graph was prepared to address problems in a completely different organizational structure, the Phases of Crisis graph looks to be as applicable for a rudderless political party as it is for a newspaper business, another concern that hasn't kept pace with a changing world.

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Image credits: David Frum: NBC News. Limbaugh, October 2009: NBC News. Phases of a Crisis graph: American Press Institute/Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.

YouBoob: John Boehner goes ballistic, then viral

One of the more sadly astonishing but thoroughly entertaining moments of Sunday’s health-care vote in the House of Representatives came from an unlikely source.

If you were watching the proceedings, you must have seen Ohio Republican congressman John Boehner speaking passionately against the legislation. Actually, “passionately” doesn’t quite describe it. Boehner was clearly off his meds that day, cranking up his address to a fever pitch so quickly, he looked to be having a kind of non compos mentis grand mal seizure.



The genuine article looks bad enough. The unbridled, free-floating rage of the conservatives and their supporters is distilled in Boehner’s call-and-response outburst. But the congressman’s antics will be preserved on more than videotape and in the pages of the Congressional Record.

Someone (God love you whoever you are) reedited Will.i.am’s moving Obama “Yes We Can” campaign video from 2008, adding a loop of Boehner’s rant in counterpoint to the original music track. The remix’s been posted to YouTube, like everything else in creation.

It is hard to imagine any contrast of visuals, any clash of soundbites that more perfectly illustrates the mindsets, the differing philosophies between Republican lawmakers and everyday people. This is the contrast, as stark and plain as black and white, day and night, no and yes.

This is what we’re up against.

The GOP and its malcontents

Sometime on Tuesday night, some idiot cut the propane line on the gas grill at the Virginia home of the brother of Rep. Thomas Perriello, a Democratic congressman who voted for the health care bill that was just signed into law. An organizer for the Lynchburg, Va., Tea Party, posted on his blog what he believed to be the congressman’s address, in case “any of his friends and neighbors want to drop by and express their thanks regarding his vote for health care.”

It goes without saying that a lit match anywhere near that line could have meant a disaster for Bo Perriello, his wife or their four, small, children. Happily, that didn’t happen. But that little incident reflects how the Republican Party in particular and the nation in general are dealing with something even more combustible.

With the passage of the health-care reform bill into law, the Republicans have started the ritual blame game, deciding who in the conservative ranks was at fault for the most stunning legislative rebuke the GOP has sustained in years.

They can start with their philosophical brethren, the good folks in the Tea Party movement.

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The behavior of Tea Party activists in the weeks and days and even hours before Sunday’s pivotal House vote — when TP protesters stained the parliamentary process with hateful posters and old-fashioned racist invective — probably made it easy for Democratic fence-sitters to throw their weight behind the Obama legislation that passed.

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But the inflammatory rhetoric of the Tea Party crowd isn’t isolated to the Tea Party. After the vote came down on Sunday, GOP Rep. Steve King of Iowa spoke to a crowd of TP activists.

“You are the awesome American people,” King said. “If I could start a country with a bunch of people, they’d be the folks who were standing with us the last few days. Let’s hope we don’t have to do that! Let’s beat that other side to a pulp! Let’s chase them down. There’s going to be a reckoning!”

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On Saturday, Missouri congressman Emanuel Cleaver was spat upon by a protestor. Rep. John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat and icon of the civil rights movement, was called a “nigger.” And Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank was labeled a “faggot” by protestors who shouted at him as he made his way to work.



South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, the House Majority Whip and like Lewis a veteran of the civil rights era, told The Huffington Post that he “heard people saying things [over the weekend] that I have not heard since March 15, 1960, when I was marching to try and get off the back of the bus.”

And then there was that little outburst on Sunday by Rep. Randy Neugebauer of Texas, the conservative who shouted “baby killer” at Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan on the floor of the House of Representatives, while Stupak was defending his support of the bill.

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Want some more? On the day Obama signed health-care bill into law, Carl Paladino, a Buffalo millionaire and Republican candidate for governor, equated the impact of the new federal health care law to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“The day that bill was passed will be remembered just as 9/11 was remembered in history,” Paladino told Curtis Sliwa during a morning drive-time interview on AM-970. “It was an attempt by these people in Washington to defy the Constitution.”

In the days since the signing, there have been at least 10 attacks or threats against Stupak and other Democratic lawmakers in upstate New York, Kansas, Ohio and Arizona.

And, oh yeah, that severed gas line at Bo Perriello’s home.

You can’t say President Obama’s inauguration 14 months ago didn’t put people to work. It effectively created a full employment act for Tea Party activist sign painters, graphic artists and Web designers all over the country. In their angry Photoshop-capable hands, the 44th president of the United States has been transformed into a witch doctor, a lab-coated mad scientist, Batman’s nemesis the Joker, a surrogate for Osama bin Laden, a Russian general and a darker, leaner version of Adolf Hitler.

The Internet is of course a great conduit for artistic outrage. Recently, for example, the SarahPAC Web site, run by former Alaska governor and political personality Sarah Palin, displayed a map of the United States featuring 20 crosshair designs scattered over various states — 20 crosshairs meant to symbolize the 20 House Democrats thought to be politically vulnerable in November.

And if that ballistic metaphor isn’t enough, check her Twitter page. That’s where, in the wake of conservative defeat last weekend, Palin wrote: “Commonsense Conservatives & Lovers of America: Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!”

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But there’s another element to all this. Clyburn’s sense of the pervasiveness of this attitude — “This stuff is not all that isolated,” he told MSNBC. “It's pretty widespread. I hope it's not too deep" — anticipates the reality documented in a March 2 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC report, the cover story of its quarterly Intelligence Report publication, documents “an astonishing 244 percent increase in the number of antigovernment Patriot groups in 2009.”

This is when change begins

It’s no panacea. The process of redirecting the oceanliner of our bureaucracy vis-à-vis health care will take time; the sausage-making process common to American legislation has not been repealed; the full effects won’t trickle down to everyday bedrock for another four years. But today at the White House, President Obama did what at least eight presidents in the modern era before him could not:

With his signing of the 2,409-page Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the biggest shift in health insurance coverage for American citizens since Medicare in 1966, about 32 million uninsured Americans are poised to reap the benefits of the closest thing to universal health insurance in the nation’s history.

A change in the social contract between government and governed has been laid upon the table, signed, sealed and delivered.

“Today, health insurance becomes law in the United States of America,” Obama said in the East Room of the White House.

“The bill I’m signing will set in motion reforms that generations of Americans have fought for and marched for and hungered to see,” said the president. “Today we are affirming that essential truth, a truth every generation is called to rediscover for itself, that we are not a nation that scales back its aspirations.”

Up to now, much of the talking on the issue has been about politics and policy. With health-care reform now health-care law, you make the pivot to perception — of the president and his party. Obama’s too polite to throw it out there, but he’s entitled to ask: How ya like me now?

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People forget it was in his special joint session address to Congress, on Sept. 9, 2009, when he made his daring gauntlet throw-down on health care: “I am not the first president to take up this cause but I am determined to be the last.”

Six months and change later, it’s reality. That’s a potent message to put before the voters between now and November, an actualization of his campaign slogan: not Yes He Can but Yes He Did. It’s the kind of big win Obama needed to buttress the Democratic base of supporters tired of congressional gridlock, hungry for the kind of transformational event that Obama’s election showed them was possible in the first place.

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Certainly, some of the disillusioned independent voters who drifted away from the Democrats in the past year will come back into the fold, galvanized by a refreshingly new Democratic focus on getting things done, and the Dems’ apparent willingness to leave the circular-firing-squad behavior to the Republicans.

And that perception of Democrats as winners will resonate further on the president’s behalf. With passage of a health-care law he pledged the American people, Barack Obama already steps into the ranks of the most socially transformational presidents of the last 100 years.

And we’re not even halfway through his first term.

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This is when change begins. But let's give credit where it’s overdue. If we want a shorter, less cumbersome name for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, we might try calling it what it really is: the Dingle-Kennedy Act.

Their legislative contributions form the DNA of the new health-care law. No two members of Congress worked harder for what Obama signed into law than Democratic Rep. John Dingle, the congressional champion of health-care reform going back more than 50 years, and Edward Moore Kennedy, the late Democratic senator from Massachusetts who for 40 years made health-care reform not just his job in the Senate but his mission, his calling, to the day he died last year.

Dingle and Kennedy’s work for the healthcare reform that President Obama signed into law was, among other things, an attempt to level the playing field between haves and have-nots.

The New York Times’ David Leonhard gets that. Writing in the Times today about the economic impact of the Obama health care law, he notes how the law begins to change, or at least challenge, the economic disparities of American life — disparities that had their origins in the Reagan administration.

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“The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago,” Leonhard wrote.

“Over most of that period, government policy and market forces have been moving in the same direction, both increasing inequality. The pretax incomes of the wealthy have soared since the late 1970s, while their tax rates have fallen more than rates for the middle class and poor.

"Nearly every major aspect of the health bill pushes in the other direction. … Beyond the health reform’s effect on the medical system, it is the centerpiece of his deliberate effort to end what historians have called the age of Reagan.”

And Leonhard, recounting a story told to him by White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers, reported Tuesday on how Summers, helping his daughter prepare for a college exam, “realized that the federal government had not passed major social legislation in decades. There was the frenzy of the New Deal, followed by the G.I. Bill, the Interstate Highway System, civil rights and Medicare — and then nothing worth its own section in the history books.

“Now there is.”

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Image credits: Health-care bill signing: Pete Souza/The White House. Signature: President Obama. Ted Kennedy: via The Huffington Post.

‘This is what change looks like’

“I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.”

President Obama

Yesterday’s date rendered strictly in numerical form — 3.21.10 — looks a lot like what the day turned out to be: a countdown clock on ruinous past practices, the arrival of time’s-up on a national legacy that’s been a national embarrassment before the world. It might have been just another official first full day of spring if not for the fact that lawmakers on Capitol Hill were busy changing the arc of the national future.

With the initiative and energy of President Obama and the negotiating skill of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership, a courageous Democratic Congress voted last night to enact the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the most panoramic change in health insurance coverage for American citizens since Medicare in 1966.



In two dramatic votes last night the Democratic led House passed the Senate bill 219-212, passed the reconciliation bill 220-211. The Senate bill, passed last Christmas Eve, now goes to President Obama to be signed into law in a ceremony on Tuesday morning. The reconciliation bill makes corrections to the Senate bill; it goes to the Senate for a final vote. A motion to recommit was also defeated by the Democrats.

The vote last night and the president’s expected signature in the morning usher in the most sweeping realignment of the terms of the social contract between the federal government and the American people in generations, and the closest thing to universal health care this nation has ever seen.

MSNBC’s Ed Schultz got the gravity of the occasion: “This is a defining moment in our history when it comes to what our priorities are. We have chosen people over profit.”

Talk-radio velociraptor and former recreational pharmaceutical enthusiast Rush Limbaugh might want to have his Costa Rican real estate agent on speed-dial right about now.

◊ ◊ ◊

“Tonight, after nearly 100 years of talk and frustration, after decades of trying, and a year of sustained effort and debate, the United States Congress finally declared that America’s workers and America's families and America's small businesses deserve the security of knowing that here, in this country, neither illness nor accident should endanger the dreams they’ve worked a lifetime to achieve,” Obama said in the East Room of the White House last night, after the deal went down.

“Tonight, at a time when the pundits said it was no longer possible, we rose above the weight of our politics. We pushed back on the undue influence of special interests. We didn't give in to mistrust or to cynicism or to fear. Instead, we proved that we are still a people capable of doing big things and tackling our biggest challenges. We proved that this government -- a government of the people and by the people -- still works for the people. ...

“This isn’t radical reform. But it is major reform. This legislation will not fix everything that ails our health care system. But it moves us decisively in the right direction. This is what change looks like.”

◊ ◊ ◊

For days now, the Democrats on the Hill have quietly betrayed a growing sense of optimism about passage of the bill, even as they engaged in a variation of Lyndon Johnson-style arm-twisting. And deal-making wioth one noted holdout: Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan, a conservative Democrat who'd opposed the bill since November because of what he said were loopholes through which elective abortion could be paid for with public funds.

Stupak insisted on and yesterday received a way to make clear his objection to public funds used for abortion: A pending executive order announced by President Obama, meant to shore up his already-stated commitment to maintaining the Hyde Amendment's policy and language restricting federal funds for abortion in the current health-care legislation. Executive Order 13535 was signed after an agreement with Stupak, who’d threatened a no vote against the bill unless such an agreement were obtained.

“We’ve all stood on principle,” Stupak said at a news conference announcing the deal. “We expect the current Hyde language to apply throughout this health-care bill. “[The president] said there will be no federal dollars for abortion. The president has put his commitment in writing. This is a very extensive order, he does not plan on rescinding it.” ...

“We've always said ... that we were for health-care reform, but there was a principle that meant more to us than anything, and that was the sanctity of life.”

There’s some illogic in Stupak’s argument, though: How do you uphold the sanctity of life as an absolute and oppose health-care reform when opposing it likely means dismissing the sanctity of the lives of millions of Americans here already?

◊ ◊ ◊

The great thing about the Stupak-brokered agreement — besides the fact that its very existence validates the best deliberative possibilities of American government — is something that burnishes the president’s negotiating bona fides: the agreement that led to Obama’s executive order reflects no compromise of Obama’s own principles on the matter of elective abortion. He’s been on the record as saying that under his health plan, no federal funds would be used or siphoned off, directly or indirectly, to fund non-medically necessary abortions.

Tiger opens his own cage

We’ve been waiting for Tiger Woods’ other show to drop for a while now, the one that would more fully define his trajectory back into public life after an infidelity scandal whose spread was almost viral. The first one, of course, was that shaky performance on Feb. 19, almost exactly a month ago in front of family, friends and a broadcast seen around the world.

On Tuesday, we got the rest of that strategy. On his Web site, Tiger Woods announced his return to the world of competitive golf begins on April 8, when he plays, as more or less expected and certainly prayed for, for qualification for the hallowed Masters, at the Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia.

“The Masters is where I won my first major, and I view this tournament with great respect. After a long and necessary time away from the game, I feel like I'm ready to start my season at Augusta.

“The major championships have always been a special focus in my career and, as a professional, I think Augusta is where I need to be, even though it's been awhile since I last played. ...”

Executives at the PGA and CBS Sports, longtime home of the Masters are salivating at the prospect of what’s already being projected to be the biggest TV audience for a preo golf event in years, and maybe ever. About 19 weeks after the swiftest image meltdown in merchandising history, advertisers are lining up again. And bet on it: the stock market will be very happy the Monday after Tiger makes the cut. You read it here first.

◊ ◊ ◊

This is a case of a Tiger opening his own cage. He’s setting the terms of his return to public life and, to some extent, the tone in which at least the first days of that return will be conducted. Implicit in this announcement is the idea that, whether you like it or not, whether you like him or not, Tiger Woods is done with mea culpas, he’s through making apologies, and he’s getting more comfortable with the idea of transmuting apology into gold on the golf course, where it counts. Where it matters.

The Augusta crowd in general, and the traditionalists of the Masters in particular, are likely to rally round Woods, protective of him as one of the green jacket family.

But Tiger’s return next month has as much to do with the calendar itself as any grand event-specific strategy he might be mounting. The Masters was the scene of four of his previous triumphs, four of the most electrifying moments in the game. It makes sense to lead with your strength, especially when the event where you've previously brandished that strength is right around the corner.

The British Open and the U.S. Open are still months away. And of course there’s the little problem of perception. Since his endorsement deals with AT&T and Accenture went away, it’d be a bit of a public-relations challenge to show up and compete at the Accenture Match Play Championship or the AT&T National. All of which makes the Masters the logical first move.

◊ ◊ ◊

The Masters brings him back at a venue that’s equal to his place in the game. But Tiger’s storied penchant for control can’t be maintained in the friendly confines of Augusta National forever. Sooner or later, somebody’s gonna lob a verbal grenade he can’t get away from.

Somebody will yell out of a car window and call him back to reality, reminding him that even in a nation besotted by celebrity, a lot of people in America object to him making the beast with two backs with a number of women around the country, none of whom were his wife.

This is when people need to see a new Tiger Woods, not just in his private life, but in his public life too. For all the exposure and endless manicuring of his image, anyone who’s watched Tiger Woods in action on the golf course over the last decade knows they’re looking at a man possessed.

Look at the videos, watch him in the majors: After making a shot, good or bad, Tiger often walks the course with a certain driven aspect, a man barely acknowledging the gallery of sincere well-wishers, a look on his face somewhere between absolute focus and visceral discomfort. He might as well be the Terminator in search of Sarah Conner, with mission prime-directives flashing before his cyborg eyes.

◊ ◊ ◊

That crap’s got to change, at least a little. He seems to know this. Implied but not stated in Woods’s recent vow of self-improvement is Tiger being better to everyday people, and not the everyday people he slept with. The golfer has been accused of affecting a haughty, impersonal manner; don’t be surprised if the new Tiger Woods actually works the gallery at the Masters … leaning into the frame of somebody’s digital-camera shot … lingering with one citizen questioner or another … slowing a little bit in his marches down the fairway … starting to reconnect with the public in general by connecting with the people at Augusta in particular.

We’ll see. Rehab of any kind is a process, not an event. Rehabbing from sex is, must be, coming down off a drug like no other.

The other rehabilitation is the one to rescue the public perception of Tiger Woods, and salvage the good will of many people in this country who feel let down, deceived. Especially the kids.

But America being America, few things will help restore Tiger to the public’s good graces like winning. Victory muffles the sound of a multitude of sins. The American redemption song has a lot of verses. Just ask Robert Downey Jr. Ask Paul Reubens (aka Pee-wee Herman). Hell, ask Mickey Rourke. They’ll tell you: Fitzgerald was wrong about second acts.

If they can pull it off, so can Tiger Woods.

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Image credits: Tiger Woods top: AP/Charlie Riedel. Tiger Woods logo: © 2010 TigerWoods.com. Tiger Woods and Nick Faldo, 1997 Masters: Stephen Munday/Getty Images. Terminator image from one of the "Terminator" film franchise; Terminator character © 2010 Pacificor. 

Wabbit Season 2059

FADE IN

EXT. SHATTERED CITY SKYLINE, IN RAIN – NIGHT

Its towers chipped and decaying, its grand thoroughfares now reservoirs for trash, a once-proud and glittering metropolis is a hollow, broken husk of its former self. Its self before GreatWar 2.0.

As we ZOOM IN to one particularly abandoned district, we see sporadic signs of life: fires burning in trash cans, bands of marauders roving potholed streets in search of victims: anyone on foot. Almost anyone.

MEDIUM LONG SHOT

Down a dimly-lit ALLEY off one of the serpentine streets, a figure some distance away blocks the rain-dappled light behind him. The figure, a menace of armor, moves forward. Its hulking shape announces: this is nobody’s victim. SLOWLY ZOOMING toward the figure, its details become apparent: A man, grizzled and grimy, wearing body armor head to foot, one panel bearing an identity label: “FUDD, HUNTER, CLASS 1.” He brandishes a weapon, an over-under 12-load Taser shotgun that glistens in the sparse overhead light. His eyes are fixed in a relentless focus. His mouth doesn’t move but it doesn't have to. We hear his thoughts, an incantation to himself, a mantra willing him to self-control.

FUDD (VOICE OVER)

Be vewwy … vewwy … quiet. I … am hunting wabbits.

From a working draft of “Fudd v Bugs 2059,” a post-apocalyptic live-action/animated reworking of the classic Looney Tunes cartoon tandem, now in development at Warner Brothers. In the sci-fi update, Elmer Fudd, a seasoned and ruthless casual hunter, has been biomechanically re-engineered by the government and tasked with capturing the last remaining mammal in the family Leporidae of the order Lagomorpha — a rabbit — for breeding in an environmentally depleted world.

His prey: Bugs Bunny, the wily, elusive creature who makes use of the city’s subterranean spaces, and his own survival instincts, instincts technologically sharpened by his time as a test subject in an experimental U.S. military animal-testing program. It’s cat and mouse, hunter and hunted in the nightmare world of 2059.

Tobey Maguire is reportedly on the short list for the role of the gifted hare, as is Jim Carrey. Gerard Butler is being considered for the role of Elmer Fudd; Will Smith has also been approached.

Kathryn Bigelow will direct.

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Image credit: Beanjamish, deviantART.com

Health-care reform: Navigating the tunnel's end

The health-care debate that’s on the verge of becoming American history has hundreds of thousands of personal stories that distill the nation’s perilous situation on health care for its citizens into something accessible. The lofty, procedural, partisan rhetoric of the issue comes down to everyday scenarios. Like the one for Natoma Canfield, a small-businesswoman recently diagnosed with leukemia, a woman whose story typifies the bureaucratic farrago facing those millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions.

Or Michael Brooks’ story. The 12-year-old Omaha boy, faced with a myofibroblastic tumor, a rare form of cancer that was unresponsive to chemotherapy, found that his family’s insurance wouldn’t cover an experimental procedure, according to KETV of Omaha. He faced a grim future until his community — from neighbors, friends and classmates to strangers wandering in off the street — rallied to gather the money for the experimental procedure. Health care by crowdsourcing: a sad sign of the times if there ever was.

It’s that kind of heart-wrenching financial improvisation that may be near an end in the United States. Sometime this week, maybe next at the very latest, President Obama expects to sign into law the most sweeping health-care legislation since Medicare, more than two generations ago, and the realization of an objective that has eluded this nation since Theodore Roosevelt first proposed it in 1912.

The caged death match Republicans have now with House Democrats hinges on so-called deeming resolutions, a procedure under which the yearlong saga of the health-care reform may finally be just about over. The resolution, shorthanded as “deem and pass,” was suggested by Rep. Louise Slaughter, chair of the House Rules Committee, and has been adopted and championed as a strategy by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.



It's the latest skirmish in the health-care warfare between the House and the Senate, the bruising and confusing legislative choreography that all these months has looked like gridlock to the American people.

The intricacies of this entirely parliamentary procedure will provoke a headache you don’t need, but Jason Linkins of The Huffington Post, breaks it down nicely:

The House is stuck having to basically pass the Senate health care bill, because the bill cannot be reconciled in conference committee. Why? Because it will be filibustered. However, House members are averse to doing anything that looks like they approve of the various side-deals that were made in the Senate -- like the so-called "Cornhusker Kickback." The House intends to remove those unpopular features in budget reconciliation, but if they pursue budget reconciliation on a standard legislative timeline -- where they pass the Senate bill outright first and then go back to pass a reconciliation package of fixes -- they'd still appear to be endorsing the sketchy side deals, and then the GOP would jump up and down on their heads.

Enter deem and pass. Under this process, the House will simply skip to approving the reconciliation fixes, and "deem" the Senate bill to be passed. By doing it this way, the Democrats get the Senate bill passed while simultaneously coming out against the unpopular features of the same.

◊ ◊ ◊

The conservatives won’t roll over. In recent days, the National Republican Congressional Committee took out a new sky-is-falling ad, a countdown clock in ominous blacks, whites and red counting down the time before the expected vote.

And the conservative press is up in arms. The Wall Street Journal, mouthpiece of media buccaneer Rupert Murdoch, condemned “deem and pass” as an “amazing procedural ruse,” a “two-votes-in-one gambit” and “a brazen affront” to the Constitution. The Journal mentions in passing that the procedure has been used in the past, only going back to 1998 to put it in a shallow historical context.

Review: The Word according to George (PopMatters)

Writing the book that caps your 50 years in the entertainment business, a book you know will probably serve as your valedictory address, can be a very liberating experience. You get to settle old scores, to set the record straight. You get to define the universe, or at least your universe, on your own terms. ...

George Carlin, a stand-up comedian with a refreshingly singular view of words and the modern world, was a relentless diarist, writing notes constantly in his years on the road. Over the years, he recorded conversations with Tony Hendra, author (Father Joe), satirist and early voice of the National Lampoon. Last Words, the now-published product of that 15-year oral history/literary conspiracy, is Carlin’s “sortabiography”, a spirited mashup of recollections, self-analysis and rant, both a parting gift and a parting shot. ...

Carlin’s previous books — Brain Droppings, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? and Napalm and Silly Putty — are celebrations of Carlin’s embrace of the language and his kaleidoscopic views of various aspects of the human condition.

Part raucous credo, part comic pilgrim’s progress, Last Words is Carlin’s celebration of his own human condition: its madcap cast of characters, its personal and professional resilience. It’s maybe the best evidence of how he transcended the stand-up comedy he revolutionized, ultimately becoming not so much a comedian as a conscience. ...

Read the full review at PopMatters

Michael Jack$on lives

While it’s true that, according to the old adage, “you can’t take it with you,” there’s nothing that says you can’t leave more of it behind after you’re gone.

Michael Jackson — or more accurately his estate — will soon be the beneficiary of the ways in which death can be an astute career move, almost nine months after the singer pharmaceutically shuffled off this mortal coil. News reports surfaced today that the beleaguered Jackson estate is finalizing a deal with Sony Music that guarantees the estate $200 million for 10 Jackson projects, including an album of unreleased material, to be released over the next seven years.

The deal makes it the most lucrative contract in recording history. With various sweeteners, merchandising deals and incentives related to sales, the final amount could be as much as $250 million.

“During his life, Michael's contracts set the standard for the industry,” said John Branca, the co-executor of Michael's estate, in a statement. “By all objective criteria, this agreement with Sony Music demonstrates the lasting power of Michael's music by exceeding all previous industry benchmarks."

This goes a long way to retiring the Everest of obligations, unpaid bills and lawsuits that Jackson faced before he died in June 2009, debts that some have estimated at as high as $400 million.

◊ ◊ ◊

One of the reasons this could pave the way for ultimately retiring those bills entirely has to do with a simple fact: a much slower burn rate. Without MJ around to spend money as fast or faster than he made it, those obligations are now pretty much a stationary target.

But for the public, it’s not about the money anyway. What piques the interest of fans, and will until sometime around 2017, is the prospect of fresh music from the pre-eminent entertainer of our time. In life and death, Michael has cast a long shadow; it’s estimated that 31 million copies of his back catalog have been sold since his passing. Like Elvis, Kurt Cobain or Jimi Hendrix (whose latest album, “Valleys of Neptune,” was just released almost 40 years after his death), Michael enjoys a popularity that doesn’t respect the finality of the grave.

Writing in The Daily Mail Online (UK) a few days after Michael died, journalist Ian Halperin quoted a source “in Jackson’s camp” who had previously said the singer “has as many as 200 unpublished songs that he is planning to leave behind for his children when he dies.” If that’s true, there may be even more MJ projects than those under the scope of this new deal.

It’s a prospect that’s bittersweet: Michael Jackson may approach his previous sales and popularity when he’s no longer around to enjoy it. But for his legions of fans, and for those people who’ve never heard a note of his music, Michael Jackson may soon regain his status of long ago: the producer of a sound and vision as ubiquitous as the air we breathe.

“Everything old is new again, “ Peter Allen once observed. Yo, Death, where is thy goodbye?

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Image credits: Michael Jackson: Associated Press.

The ‘black agenda’ and its discontents

Rev. Jeremiah Wright resurfaced last week in the pages of The Washington Post. In an interview with the controversial minister published Thursday, Wright spoke of how his life had changed since the 2008 presidential campaign, when the fire of his homiletic past and his proximity to President Obama before he became president was an issue — a kind of “what did he preach and when did he preach it” style of character assassination by association that went on far too long.

“It is unrealistic to think that one person can change the mess that this country has gotten into, but to pick on him is like picking on one of my kids,” Wright told The Post. “I have been knowing him for 20 years. I have not stopped loving him because of what the press did, and to see him beat up on because of things he is not responsible for is painful.”

This statement from the 2010 model Jeremiah Wright, defending Obama, seeks to calm some of the troubled racial waters of the campaign — waters stirred up as much by intragenerational black American politics in general as by any specific utterance by Rev. Wright from the pulpit of the Trinity United Church of Christ.

Wright’s statement was his Kum Ba Yah coda on his part in the intraracial conflict between Obama, vanguard of a new style of black leadership at the levers of power, and those of Wright’s generation for whom the old identity-dependent tools and strategies for fighting America’s racial ills have been mostly working just fine.

◊ ◊ ◊

Others from that generation have been heard from again.

In recent weeks, members of the Congressional Black Caucus have stepped up challenges to President Obama’s domestic agenda, exasperated at what they see as a lack of attention paid to issues specifically related to African Americans navigating the shoals of a ruinous recession.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers of Michigan told Politico that the White House is “not listening” to black lawmakers.

“I don’t think we expected anything to change overnight because we had an African-American in the White House, but the fact still remains that we’ve got a constituency that is suffering,” Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, told The New York Times. “I think he could do more, and he will do more.”

And off Capitol Hill, Michael Eric Dyson, author, lecturer, Georgetown University sociologist and an Obama supporter, is feeling let down: “All these teachable moments, but the professor refuses to come to the class,” he told The New York Times on Feb. 8.

It all came to a head, in a way, on the Feb. 23 edition of Rev. Al Sharpton’s radio call-in show, where Sharpton and guest co-host Charles Ogletree, author and Jesse Climenko Professor at Harvard Law School, spoke with a caller: Tavis Smiley, author, lecturer and presumptive general of the new-media-literate black empowerment movement. Their contentious exchange hinged to a large degree of how much responsibility Obama has for advancing what they characterized as a “black agenda.” Smiley, a longtime critic of Obama as a candidate and as president, wants that attention paid.



On a recent broadcast of the Tom Joyner Morning Show, seeking to justify such special treatment for black people, Smiley threw out one of those questions that was meant to stifle all debate coming afterwards: “Isn’t the African American agenda the human agenda?”

Kris Broughton, writing at Politic365, wasn’t having any:

“Tavis Smiley’s rhetorical question during his monologue last week on [Tom Joyner] is a sentence that reads the same backwards and forwards. Smiley would do well to heed his own advice, and learn to recognize that the White House efforts to back initiatives aimed at African Americans won’t always come with peel-and-stick “black agenda” labels.”

◊ ◊ ◊

The debate over the president’s fidelity to the black cause is the latest proof of a split in black American politics, a politics of two minds and approaches right now: One side calls for allegiance to the textbook civil-rights agenda, and to the strategy of identity-focused solutions to national problems. The other side seeks to incorporate the so-called black agenda into the wider necessaries of the nation’s business.

The old guard’s thinking necessarily provokes the question of what challenges now confronting black and minority Americans don’t confront everyone in the country. Among the most oppressing of them — jobs, home foreclosures, health-care reform — it’s not a matter of these issues hitting blacks separate from everyone else; it’s a matter of degree.

But the idea that a black agenda exists and should exist feeds into a hierarchical consideration, the idea of who should best define and articulate that agenda. That’s led to a kind of loyalty-oath reasoning that’s gone on for generations in black America, an us-versus-them attitude that’s troubling.

Redhead rising: Conan O'Brien on tour

While Jay Leno takes up his old perch on NBC's “Tonight” show, Conan O’Brien, the show's former host, is picking up his act and taking it on the road. Literally. The result — a multicity comedy tour that’s likely to sell out before it even begins — is a new visibility for a late-night TV talk show host who’s about to slip the surly bonds of his time-slot, his medium and the restrictions of his noncompete contract in ways that should be unsettling to Team Leno.

"The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour," billed on the Team Coco Web site as “a night of music, comedy, hugging and the occasional awkward silence,” opens April 12 in Eugene, Ore., and meanders all over on its 30 dates, stopping in Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Chicago, Boston and New York City, as well as other cities (and a stop at the Bonnaroo Music Festival in Manchester, Tenn., on June 11). The tour ends in Atlanta in June, but new dates may be added. American Express is offering its cachet as a tour sponsor.

It’s not a matter of straight numbers of people, of course; in any apples-to-apples comparison, the audiences attending Coco’s shows will be dwarfed by the millions who watch Leno on television. But that’s the small-ball math. Sure as night follows day, the O’Brien shows performed live from April until June will contain the kernel of what shows up when he’s no longer legally prohibited from being funny on television, on O’Brien’s next late-night venture — almost certain to be on Fox, sometime this fall.

(And don’t forget the secondary revenue stream that’s probably right around the corner: the opportunity to buy the Conan tour performances on DVD, or the audio tracks from those dates as iTunes downloads — just in time for the holidays.)

O’Brien is field-testing new comedic material not in a nightclub setting but at the wider, panoramic scale of the stadium. Conan occupies a curious piece of the cultural real estate: part folk hero, part rock star, part walking cartoon, part savvy advertiser of himself. This concert-tour runup to a fresh late-night presence on TV on a new network raises the bar on everyone’s late-night act, especially Leno’s.

The old new “Tonight” show host has been game for the game: new set (heavy on the wood), new theme, new titles. But if the show’s physical look is updated, more or less, the semiotics of “Tonight” under Leno practically scream yesterday. He needs to counter that, somehow. Count on it: Sprinkled among the concertgoers at any of Conan’s 30 dates (including Universal City, Calif.) will be Leno scouts, reporting back to the boss with all the intel they can get.

◊ ◊ ◊

The prices for regular seats on the Conan tour aren’t cheap, about what you’d expect for a better rock concert. For the April 18 show at McCaw Hall in Seattle, prices range from $37.50 (second-tier box) to $77.50 (orchestra). For the June 1 at Radio City Music Hall in New York, tickets sell for from $44 to $84 apiece.

But that’s for “regular seats.” Some folks at digg and elsewhere in the vast, interwoven and multivaried blogosphere are a bit upset at the tiered pricing for some of the other perks available. For $250, you get the “Hot Seat” package. The “amenities” for this deal include one premium seat in the first 12 rows, exclusive tchotchkes and a “collectible laminate.”

For $500 a head you get the “Hot Sound” package: all of the above plus access to the sound check and a premium center orchestra seat in the first five rows.


And for $695 a pop, “you get it all!” : All of the above plus a front-row center orchestra seat and a meet & greet with Coco himself (photo op included).

And TMZ.com reports that O’Brien won’t earn a dime from the tour. TMZ says O’Brien “is doing the whole thing so he can employ his former ‘Tonight Show’ staff.

“We're told roughly 40 people have been hired to work on the production -- many of whom are ‘Tonight Show’ alums,” the Web site reported.

◊ ◊ ◊

On the one hand it’s easy to applaud Conan for doing the right thing by his staff, doing his best to keep them employed in the middle of a very sour economy.

But looking at it another way, it’s hard to square such efforts for his production staff when the prices for regular seats and the perk-laden special packages seek to pull so much money out of consumers working like hell to stay afloat in the middle of a very sour economy.

And nobody on Coco’s production staff drove off the NBC lot for the last time as a pauper, anyway; Conan’s full crew of about 200 people were reportedly paid $12 million in severance by NBC — averaging, a tidy $60,000 each. Some of that crew are no doubt about to work for him on the tour as well.

But for Conan loyalists, it’s no big deal. They’re already out in force ready to help O’Brien further his hold on the popular imagination. They sense what may be coming:

Someone commented at TMZ: “He's smart enough to capitalize on the goodwill that came from being a folk hero. If he had been given half the chances Leno was given when he started, he'd have done fine. I've got my tickets, and I've little doubt it will be a fun, spontaneous show that captures a great moment. Haters can stay home and watch Leno recycle material for free.”

More than Letterman would, more then Leno could, Conan O’Brien is effectively repackaging the late-night comedian as a prime-time concert attraction. In one swift move, he may be about to break more of the rules he started violating when he started out years ago.

A late-night television talk-show host building his audience, and his reputation, without actually being on late-night television. Imagine that.

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Image credits: Conan poster, Coco T-shirt: sirmikeofmitchell.com. O'Brien: NBC.