CULCHAVOX

Migration in progress: Short Sharp Shock

2010-04-24T19:55:00.000-07:00

After almost five and a half years, it's time for a change. Culchavox is now Short Sharp Shock (with all apologies to Gilbert & Sullivan, whom Pink Floyd owe an apology as well). Everything put together here in that time — from politics to pop culture, commentary on global affairs to analysis of America's wrestle with race and ethnicity — is in a new place.

The reason? Partly visceral -- I got tired of explaining what it meant and how to say it -- and partly strategic. I'm developing a new site, CULCHA, meant to be the seed of what could be something different for the Internets: crowd-powered entertainment news and reviews, social media and a few other wrinkles still in the works. It's in beta, but feel free to have a look anyway.

So ... it's not goodbye. We're just moving across the street. Come peek in the window if you're so inclined. Thanks for all you do.

— MER

Three takes on 4/20

2010-04-20T21:52:00.000-07:00

What the hell is it about the twentieth of April anyway. For generations now the 110th day of the year has been a source of fascination bordering on … well, not bordering on anything so much as tipped over into obsession. For numerologists, the number 420 has meant deception, fraud and subterfuge. Fans of nursery rhymes point to the line in “Sing a Song of Sixpence” (four and twenty black birds baked in a pie”). Fans of rock point to Stephen Stills plaintive “4+20,” what you get when you multiply the numbers in the title of Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35.”

For the rest of us, the date April 20 usually, or at least often, comes to three things:

There’s Adolf’s birthday. Yes, even demons have birthdays. The enduring symbol of how the cult of personality can be twisted into monumental evil was born this day in 1889, in what was then Austria-Hungary. The rest is history more ably recounted elsewhere, and lived, to one degree or another, everywhere. It’s a comforting idea, the idea that by common consent any associations between Adolf Hitler and April 20 could be expunged from the record of our collective memory, the better to reinforce his expulsion from the garden of humanity.

But thanks to white supremacists a lot like those who descended on Los Angeles over the weekend for a thwarted demonstration at City Hall, or those who offer the Fuhrer hosannas on his natal day via Stormfront and other deep-extremist Web sites, the link between Hitler and April 20 is pretty much indelible and immovable, ready to inspire people to madness where you least expect it.

Like at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., 11 years ago today, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, two seniors in black trenchcoated disguise, walked into the school cafeteria and shot and killed 13 people — 12 students and a teacher — with a stockpile of shotguns and pipe bombs, before turning the weapons on themselves.

It’s not clear if the Columbine killers had any specific affinity for Adolf Hitler. They clearly admired his work, and the fashion sense of the SS. And they had a grimly powerful read of how one brutal action can ring into the future for years, whether it’s one decade ago or 60 years in the past.

◊ ◊ ◊

Happily, we can thank stoner culture for another reason to remember 4/20. In 1971, a group of high school students in San Rafael, Calif., decided to gather one day after school at 4: 20 in the afternoon to smoke marijuana while searching for … a missing crop of marijuana thought to be growing near Point Reyes. Ryan Grim recounts their exploits in today’s Huffington Post.

Since then, herbal aficionados have gathered on 420 to celebrate cannabis culture and the increasingly confident movement toward decriminalization of marijuana. (My alma mater, the University of Colorado at Boulder, celebrates the day in high style; more than 10,000 students showed up at last year’s celebration. This year’s turnout? Depends on who you talk to.

From the Colorado Daily:

The university estimates that 8,000 people showed up for Tuesday's unofficial smoke-out, about the same number as last year, said Bronson Hilliard, spokesman for the Boulder campus. Police officers took the rough crowd measurement while standing on a top floor in Norlin Library so they could get a bird's-eye view of the quad, he said.
But Alex Douglas, executive director of the CU chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, estimates there were at least 15,000 people assembled on [Norlin Quad].

Whatever their actual number, we can thank this group of necessary yahoos for rescuing April 20 from being the downer that history says it should be.

“April is the cruelest month,” T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Waste Land.”

But not necessarily.

Image credits: Hitler: Deutsches Bundesarchiv. Klebold and Harris at Columbine: In-school closed circuit image from 1999. Marijuana: Chemistry World blog. Boulder 4/20 celebration smoker: Daily Camera/Mark Leffingwell.

Alicia Keys, Monster Super Woman

2010-04-14T22:40:00.000-07:00

Until the deadline closes for the position, the unemployed online have a new friend in our corner, and one of us maybe even has a job waiting. Thank Alicia Keys for that.

Recently, subscribers to the monster.com job search service got a pleasant wake-up call in the early morning monster posting: an ad by an employer seeking an employee. What an ad. What an employer:

Some things work better than coffee for putting steam in the morning stride. This has been one of them.

Ms. Keys seeks a “head blogger” for her new IAAS.com Web site, which will focus on news and empowerment advice for women. If you’ve got mad soash skills, Ms. Keys would like to hear from you and maybe put you to work helping her in reinventing her persona for the Web, and in expanding access to news pertinent to women online.

The vetting window closes on May 3.

Besides knowing Web culture and having an active blog or social site to prove that with, here’s some of what’s required:

• A background in Public Relations, Marketing / Web Marketing, Media Relations, Communications, Journalism, Writing, Digital Media, Internet Canvassing, and/or Social Media.
• Experience using web development tools and software such as Microsoft Office, Microsoft on Demand, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, WordPress, LiveJournal, and Digital Media Platforms.

Here’s what else is required:

• 2-3 years of related work experience.
• A Bachelors Degree or equivalent experience.
• Must be authorized to work in the United States. Unable to sponsor or transfer H1 visas at this time.
• Must be available for frequent domestic and international travel. Must have valid passport, and must complete any additional paperwork necessary for government travel clearances.
• Final candidates will be interviewed in New York City as part of a news segment on a national TV network morning show on or about May 17-20, 2010, and in London, UK at the Black Ball on or about May 27, 2010. Candidates must be able to travel to and participate in the interviews.
• Submit to a thorough background and reference check.
• Must be willing and able to report to work in New York City, NY.

And you pick up the tab for relocation. To New York City. Take it from one who knows: that can be a full-time job in itself.

But still, for the right person, this could be (as Ms. Keys advertises it) “an Opportunity of a Lifetime!”

For the rest of us in the hunt … it’s at least the best-looking jobs ad we’ve seen all year.

Black journalists’ good bad days

2010-04-13T21:27:00.000-07:00

On Monday we discovered just how much of two minds, of at least two distinct American realities the American media can be on matters of who advances in the nation’s newsrooms and who doesn’t, and the curious calculus by which that’s decided.

Richard Prince’s excellent Journal-Isms column (a longtime fixture of the Maynard Institute Web site and most recently syndicated in The Root) broke it down in one place for readers on Monday — Pulitzer Day.

Among the winners of the most prestigious and recognized prize in American journalism were The Denver Post, which won for feature photography; and for the Philadelphia Daily News, which won for investigative reporting.

Greg Moore is the editor of The Denver Post; Michael Days is executive editor of the Daily News.

For the first time, mainstream American dailies helmed by not one but two African American editors won two of the more coveted Pulitzer Prizes, the recognition for the two elements of modern print journalism — powerful photography and the compelling shoe-leather public-interest news story — that still resonate with the American public (or the percentage of the public that still read newspapers).

It was a good day right after a bad one.

◊ ◊ ◊

See, on Sunday, we got the results of the 2010 newsroom census from the American Society of Newspaper Editors, its findings a perfect distilling reason why black Americans, and especially black journalists, often characterize progress as one step forward, one step back (or is it two steps back? We forget sometimes).

The ASNE newsroom report found that, overall, the percentage of minorities in newsrooms was 13.26 percent, a drop of .15 of a percentage point from a year ago.

But black journalists got hit the hardest of everyone. The ASNE survey found there were 929 fewer African American journalists than were recorded in 2001, a falloff of 31.5 percent. The ranks of Native American journalists fell by 52, or 20.9 percent in the same time. Hispanic representation declined by 145, or 7 percent. The number of white journalists fell by 10,400, or 20.9 percent.

Newsroom jobs held by black journalists were cut by 19.2 percent in 2009, nearly six percentage points higher than the previous year.

◊ ◊ ◊

In a statement released Tuesday, Kathy Y. Times, the president of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), called it “a travesty that minority journalists would be targeted disproportionately in staff cuts. Despite the economy we must keep our newsrooms and voices at least on parity with the communities we serve.”

Communities are not of one color and neither should newsroom decision makers,” she said.

“It’s about accuracy,” NABJ Diversity Director Bobbi Bowman said of the census objective, in the same NABJ statement. “Can you accurately cover your community if you have a newsroom that doesn’t look like your community?”

“Readers are very smart and readers know whether or not their newspaper is covering news that is important and relevant to them,” she said Tuesday.

And we might have known this would follow. The NABJ said on Tuesday that its board "is scheduled to meet in the Washington, D.C.-area this weekend to discuss the recent ASNE findings and develop an action plan for improving newsroom hiring and retention of black journalists."

This latest broadside on the media’s institutional lethargy could well be the moment of the gauntlet throwdown. As media orgs rebound from the economy and begin rehiring, as many of the bigger players start to conceptualize how to cover the 2010 race (and begin to decide who gets to do it); as the country grapples again with race as the volatile, powderkeg subtext for everything political in the country ... watch for fireworks, or maybe just some overdue surprises.

The elephant’s nervous breakdown

2010-04-12T20:48:00.000-07:00

It was another bright, warm day in April, the clocks were again sounding thirteen, and the workers dragged the chairs out of cubicles and grouped them in the middle of the hall in the Riverside Hilton in New Orleans, in preparation for the start of the Republican Southern Leadership Conference, the Three Days Hate.

◊ ◊ ◊

Like a similar event attended by Winston Smith, the protagonist of Orwell’s “1984” (shamelessly mangled in the previous graph), the Republicans convened a kind of Hate Week over the weekend as their kickoff to the 2012 election season. There was a refreshingly high-minded purpose to some of the proceedings.

“Over and over, Republican speakers said their party had gone astray when it held in power; it was time, they argued, to get the party back on track with a focus on fiscal restraint and a break with the party's recent past,” reported Brian Montopoli today at CBS News. But elsewhere there was evidence of the bashing and condemnation that’s been a ritual enacted by party leadership in Congress, and (with a lot less eloquence) by party partisans in the streets.

Liz Cheney, surrogate for the former vice president, set the table for the event on Thursday. “The Obama administration is putting us on the path to decline,” she said, explaining the three-pronged Obama doctrine: "apologize for America, abandon our allies and appease our enemies."

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called the Obama White House “a secular socialist machine” on Thursday. “This is the most radical administration in American history. … If you think about the group that meets together in the White House, their experience is the machine politics of Chicago, the corruption of Springfield and the radicalism of [Saul] Alinsky.” Gingrich then proposed that “when” the Republicans retake the Congress in January, the Obama administration should be handcuffed by a congressional refusal to fund any of its policies and agencies — a threat to shut down the United States government.

Nominal former Alaska governor and political personality Sarah Palin took aim on Friday at “the makings of the Obama doctrine, which is coddling enemies and alienating allies … Don’t retreat, reload — and that is not a call for violence. … Yes we can kowtow to enemies, criticize allies, vacillate, bow, dither ... but somebody needs to tell the president just because we can doesn’t mean that we should.”

And not to be outdone by those in New Orleans, the head of the Republican Governors Association, Haley Barbour of Mississippi, set a spell with CNN’s Candy Crowley on Sunday and continued the repeal of rational thinking announced (and amended) last week by Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, who’d previously decided that slavery in Virginia was no B.F. Deal, before he decided that it was after all.

Barbour (who’s actually been considered a possible presidential contender, bless his heart), told Crowley on “State of the Union” that McDonnell was right about slavery.

CROWLEY: The [Virginia] Governor didn’t even mention slavery in his proclamation. Was that a mistake?

BARBOUR: Well, I don’t think so ... I don’t know what you would say about slavery, but anyone who thinks that you have to explain to people that slavery is a bad thing — I think it goes without saying. ...

CROWLEY: You know what I’m trying to get at. There’s a sort of feeling that it’s insensitive, that you clearly don’t agree ...

BARBOUR: To me it’s a sort of feeling that it’s just a nit. That it is not significant. It’s trying to make a big deal out of something that doesn’t matter for diddly.

All props to Barbour, staying the course of his constituents, all praise for fidelity to the past on the part of the governor of the state of Mississippi, a holdout on ratification of the 13th Amendment of the Constitution (the one prohibiting slavery) until 1995.

◊ ◊ ◊

The desperation with which the elements of the moderate-to-extremist right have hurled themselves against any hint of deliberative compromise with the Obama White House has been sadly astonishing — like that of a sleeper thrashing in his slumber against an unseen enemy, fighting with all his might against a phantom of the mind.

It’s a case of mental illness as political metaphor. There’s mounting evidence that the conservative movement and the Republican Party are jointly and rapidly approaching the low point of an identity crisis, that some kind of psychic snap is coming shortly. The GOP is having a nervous breakdown.

A predisposition toward instability was first suspected during the 2008 presidential campaign, in which the party standard-bearer, Sen. John McCain, displayed the ethical duality and tendency to ruthlessness common to the political diagnosis.

Some would say the condition first fully presented in the Joint Session of Congress in January 2009, when South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson cemented himself in the history books for at least one memorable achievement during his time in the House (“You lie!”). In the fourteen months since then, and especially as the health-care debate wound its way torturously through Congress into law, the Republicans and their more emotional proxies in the Tea Party movement, engaged in cheap shots and a breathtaking range of character assassinations.

This disorder may be contagious. The conservative ranks might actually be spreading this condition around the country. It’s already got people confused. Americans don’t know who to vote for if they want an alternative to the Democrats. With conservatives staking out their territory separate from the Republicans staking out their territory as a thing apart from the Tea Party crew … right now the American people are faced with three flavors of conservative identity: Traditional, Deep-Fried Partisan and Extra Hysterical.

How do you choose between the three in November? Do you even bother to try? How can you be expected to make up your mind when the big-C and small-c conservatives can’t seem to make up their own minds about who and what they are?

◊ ◊ ◊

Last week Bob McDonnell forgot to mention slavery in a state proclamation honoring the Confederacy. Then the Republican Southern Leadership Conference convened in New Orleans and forgot to mention the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

That amnesia of convenience, the philosophical schizophrenia, the strategies of opposition ranging from Palin’s passive-aggressive snark to the Tea Party crowd’s more graphically corrosive racism … it’s all proof of the Republican Party experiencing an episode of unprecedented high anxiety.

As President Obama gets ready to nominate his second Supreme Court Justice, watch for the condition to get that much worse. Watch for Hate Week to be convened somewhere else in America.

Image credits: Palin: Gerald Herbert/AP. Wilson: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP. Republican tea: CBS.

Revisionist history in Virginia

2010-04-08T23:26:00.000-07:00

Six hundred twenty thousand Americans dead. Another 412,000 wounded. Cities and towns destroyed, an economic infrastructure agonizingly transformed. A president assassinated. That’s the grim snapshot hallmark of the Civil War, never so much the War Between the States as it was the War Between the Confederacy and the United States. Among that conflict’s legacies is its lingering presence in this nation; among the most painful ironies we recognize about the Civil War is the one we’d most like to forget: it’s a war that’s still being waged today.

Bob McDonnell, the newly-minted Republican governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia, reminded us of that.

Reviving a tradition discontinued in two previous (Democratic) administrations, McDonnell issued a proclamation on Friday declaring April to be Confederate History Month in Virginia, doing so at the request of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, an organization of descendants of rebel soldiers with members from Trent Lott to MSNBC’s Pat Buchanan, from Charlie Daniels to Clint Eastwood.

McDonnell was the first Virginia governor to so recognize the Confederacy since Republican Jim Gilmore did it in 2001. But McDonnell made his Friday proclamation with no mention of slavery, the peculiar institution that gave the Confederacy its very oxygen. Slavery in the state of Virginia, erased by decree.

That’s when everything went, well, deep south. Condemnation exploded in various corners, including high-ranking political figures, and progressive lawmakers and organizations.

Tim Kaine, who preceded McDonnell as governor and is now the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said McDonnell’s tribute to the Confederacy "without condemning, or even acknowledging, the pernicious stain of slavery or its role in the war disregards history, is insensitive to the extraordinary efforts of Americans to eliminate slavery and bind the nation's wounds."

The outrage from the cable TV department of the punditburo, and an equal amount of discontent from the online commentariat was just as loud. It all prompted McDonnell (or someone on his staff with a better grasp of historical cause and effect than the governor) to amend the proclamation.

On Wednesday the governor finally came more or less correct — not politically correct but humanistically correct — with an edited version of the proclamation, and a mea culpa:

“The failure to include any reference to slavery was a mistake, and for that I apologize to any fellow Virginian who has been offended or disappointed.”

“It is important for all Virginians to understand that the institution of slavery led to this war, and was an evil and inhuman practice that deprived people of their God-given inalienable rights.”

McDonnell’s backing and filling was punctuated by a news conference on Wednesday that reportedly showed the governor well off his game, fumbling and stumbling to explain what he was thinking. He performed damage control the best he could, but less than three months into the job, McDonnell has shown he’s tone-deaf on stagecraft, and apparently even clueless about the breadth of his constituency, which includes not just the people who voted for him but everyone in the state of Virginia. Even 1.54 million people who don’t look a thing like him. People who know what slavery had to do with the state they live in.

◊ ◊ ◊

McDonnell’s epic fail was wrong on so many levels. It reflected a shallow reading of history as a collection of figures in a diorama, the stuff of a reenactment, tweakable and cherry-picked at will. This was the dumbest, most politically expedient kind of revisionist history. It was revisionist history that celebrated a tradition while overlooking the antecedents that made that tradition possible. Without slavery, there’d have been no anti-slavery position for Abraham Lincoln to run on and win an election with; without Lincoln’s election, the rationale for secession and the Confederacy vanishes.

In his freshman governor’s bid to shore up bona fides with his political base, McDonnell made a reflexive rush to the Stars & Bars without thinking things through. Just months into his brilliant career, he may have just had his macaca moment.

Even before he won the governorship last year, McDonnell was being quietly bruited as the next telegenic, tousle-haired Bright Young Thing in Republican politics. Now? Maybe not so much. We will see. Whatever his political future holds, he’s just demonstrated one trait the GOP leadership will find familiar, if not exactly comforting: Clearly, Bob McDonnell can already gaffe with the best of them. And the worst.

In search of the old new Tiger Woods

2010-04-07T23:47:00.000-07:00

Tiger Woods officially begins his quest for a fifth green Masters jacket on Thursday afternoon, when he tees off, with K.J. Choi and Matt Kuchar, in his first round of golf of the year. The gallery — the one at Augusta National and the other, bigger one watching the proceedings on television — will be packed.

And as of today, three more people figure in the sexual farrago of the former life of the world’s greatest golfer and richest athlete, the public consequences of that not-quite-private life, and the potential for redemption, a way out of the deep rough.

◊ ◊ ◊

As the saga of infidelities has unfolded since November, it looked for awhile that those within the friendly confines of Augusta National had largely looked the other way, forgiving Tiger for his ethical meltdown, welcoming him back into the fold no questions asked. Then, today, Billy Payne busted a cap.

As part of his annual state of the Masters news conference, Payne, the chairman of the Augusta National Golf Club said what’s been said elsewhere during the last four months, but formally putting the Masters organization on the record.

"As he now says himself, he forgot in the process to remember that with fame and fortune comes responsibility, not invisibility," Payne said. "It is not simply the degree of his conduct that is so egregious here. It is the fact that he disappointed all of us, and more importantly, our kids and our grandkids."

"Our hero did not live up to the expectations of the role model we saw for our children," Payne said. "I hope he now realizes that every kid he passes on the course wants his swing, but would settle for his smile."

"We at Augusta hope and pray that our great champion will begin his new life here tomorrow in a positive, hopeful and constructive manner, but this time, with a significant difference from the past. This year, it will not be just for him, but for all of us who believe in second chances.

"Is there a way forward? I hope yes. I think yes. But certainly his future will never again be measured only by his performance against par, but measured by the sincerity of his efforts to change."

◊ ◊ ◊

You could be of two minds in reacting to Payne’s news conference drive-by. Payne did end a relative silence from the Masters leadership, coming with a sermon from golf's mount that we might have expected, sooner or later. Tiger Woods is returning to competitive golf for the first time since the sturdy gated, exclusive insulation around the hot copper wire of his personal life cracked open in a driveway in Florida. And he’s returning at the Masters. As the head of a golfing franchise as much a national institution as it is a sporting organization — what other golf event has a “state-of-the” news conference before it begins? — Payne was obligated to make some kind of Official Statement consistent with the 74-year-old history of the event. It's only right.

But still. Tiger Woods has become a part of modern Masters lore, and by extension helped grace Augusta National and the Masters with millions in revenue and burnishing the Masters’ already solid reputation with the added luster of being the site of some of the greatest contests in the game. Payne’s statement — something from a perspective part preacher, part moralist, part disappointed dad — could have been made about any random phenom coming to the Masters for the first time after a potentially crippling scandal. You wonder if Payne might have told this to Tiger privately, if for no other reason than to spare Tiger the embarrassment, and to spare himself any appearance of punitively piling on ("As he now says himself”). Where was the love?

◊ ◊ ◊

If Payne might have been in a privately forgiving mood, Tiger wasn’t helped with today’s news that Raychel Coudriet, Tiger Woods' neighbor, claimed through a friend that she slept with him last year, according to the National Enquirer.

From the Enquirer:

”Raychel Coudriet, now a 22-year-old grad student at a state university in the south, had a torrid one-night stand with the cheating champion that left her ‘shaken and humiliated,’ says one of her close friends.  

“Shockingly, Tiger's sexual advances started in his car, only yards from where the golfer's devoted wife Elin was home, ending with a two-hour sex session on the couch in Tiger's private office.

The perverse timing of this, frankly, seems inescapable: an obvious attempt, almost psychologically malicious, to interfere with Tiger’s mental faculties — to get inside his head the way Tiger gets inside the heads of his competition on the course.

◊ ◊ ◊

But nothing gets in your head and stays there like what your parents tell you. Whether you take their advice or not, the lessons of the family are the first we ever learn, in voices we hear long after they’re gone. Nike understands this.

In the latest of its series of sometimes baffling, often intriguing television ads — spots that sell mindset as much as merchandise, striving to make connections between sports and life with either the starkness of a documentary or the splash of a musical — Tiger is summoned by the ghost of Earl Woods, his father, who passed in 2006.

Tiger, in living black & white, stands stock-still before the camera as his father speaks:

“Tiger, I am more prone to be inquisitive, to promote discussion. I want to find out what your thinking was. I want to find out what your feelings are. And did you learn anything.”

Cut to the swoosh. And the chase: In its own enigmatic, visually striking way, Nike formally announces that, while a parade of other sponsors bailed out since November, Nike still has Tiger’s back. And in an undeniably personal way, Tiger's father reaches out from beyond the grave and speaks as only a father can to a son. The words were spoken in reference to one of Tiger's early tournaments, but in the context of the current crisis, they're another way of saying, I've got your back too.

◊ ◊ ◊

It’s a good sign. While Payne was of a mind to weigh in and Coudriet may be of a mind to cash in, Nike’s willingness to stand in the fire with Tiger Woods may be some indicator of all this turning a corner. Finally. On Thursday a little before 2 o’clock Eastern time, it gets back to where it matters, on the golf course.

That’s where we’ll be looking for the old new Tiger Woods: the one who now not only inspires children and adults in the abstract but pays attention to them in the gallery … one and the same with the Tiger Woods who, with his father watching, through talent and relentless application and the sheer force of an indomitable will, awed and dazzled the world as the greatest golfer it has ever seen.

Michael Steele’s ‘honest answer’ and its consequences

2010-04-06T23:41:00.000-07:00

It was the smartest, most astute, least ideologically-driven thing that Michael Steele’s said in a long time, and he caught hell for it almost immediately.

The “it” was his response to a question from a commentator on one of the morning TV gabfests — a response that laid his heart vis-à-vis the matter of racial equality in the United States, tolerance, patience and whether it’s possible for the storied playing field to ever be level.

Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, has been under fire from many analysts and observers (including this one) for his role in contributing to the fiscally licentious management culture that led to the RNC’s West Hollywood spending scandal, and the resulting fallout. He was interviewed Monday by George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

STEPHANOPOULOS: We've got a lot of questions on my blog for you this morning.

STEELE: Sure.

STEPHANOPOULOS: One came in from Myron. And he asked, "Do you feel that, as an African-American, you have a slimmer margin for error than another chairman would?"

STEELE: The honest answer is yes.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Why is that?

STEELE: It just is. Barack Obama has a slimmer margin. We — A lot of folks do. It's a different role for, you know, for me to play and others to play. And that's just the reality of it.

The pushback was immediate, aggressive and (a departure for modern Washington) totally bipartisan. Ken Blackwell, the former Ohio secretary of state and the vice RNC chairman, jumped on Steele with all fours. “To interject race here is nonsense. There is a pattern of missteps, miscues and misstatements. And as a consequence, we now can’t fall back on the issue of race.”

And White House press secretary and Quipmaster General Robert Gibbs displayed an enviable rhetorical economy on the matter, dismissing Steele’s comments in a single sentence. “Michael Steele’s problem isn’t the race card. It’s the credit card.”

◊ ◊ ◊

Blackwell’s response probably obscured some of the deeper issues on race that the Republicans have. What no doubt truly raised the ire of the Republicans over Steele’s comments had much to do with equating himself with Obama on this issue. That’s what got the GOP in an uproar.

“Barack Obama has a slimmer margin. … A lot of folks do.” With two brief sentences, Steele brought down part of the GOP’s carefully constructed barrier of political distinctions. By existentially aligning himself with Obama, Steele undercut his party’s effort to maintain the philosophical firewall, the us vs. them, that’s central to contemporary Republican identity. Finding common cause with “the enemy” on the nation’s enduring third-rail issue blurs the battle lines, creates the rationale for carving out a commonality the Republicans want nothing to do with. That’s one of the reasons why Blackwell hit back so hard.

And for the Obama White House, and for Democrats generally, Steele’s reply to 'Myron' was problematic because it reawakened debate over a crucial aspect of the racial divide, reanimated an intrinsically corrosive but utterly necessary narrative that the Democrats have invested much time and political capital in trying to put to rest (witness the quixotic "postracial" meme that no one who's serious about this country takes seriously).

◊ ◊ ◊

Steele’s honest answer, of course, is the right one. There’s always been a different threshold, a different mathematics of performance that black Americans have been subject to. The saying about “working twice as hard to get about as much” has long standing in black and minority America. It distills many of the interracial and inter-ethnic disparities in the national life, from educational achievement scores to advancement in the workplace, from unemployment statistics to life expectancies.

In a perfect world, or a less partisan one, the fact that Steele understands this would be cause for celebration. As it is, it’s another indicator of the current reflexive ruthlessness of our politics. Steele’s comments reflect a grasp of that division; ironically, the reactions to what he said don’t conceal that division so much as they reveal it for what it is.

The fact that Steele drew fire from both sides of the aisle for his honest answer to an important question indicates the common ground the Democrats and Republicans already share:

Whether it occurs within a Republican Party allergic to broadening its appeal to black and minority voters, or from inside a Democratic administration determined to take the high road on race matters by avoiding the road altogether whenever possible ... denial is an equal opportunity experience.

Image credit: Steele top: Good Morning America/ABC News. President Obama: Still from White House video, August 2009.

Nominating America: Obama's 10 Supreme prospects

2010-04-06T22:33:00.000-07:00

The anglers’ saying for making a decision — “fish or cut bait” — has rarely attracted so much attention as it has since Sunday, when Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens used the phrase to set the terms for deciding on a time for retiring from the court. “There are still pros and cons to be considered,’ Justice John Paul Stevens told The New York Times. “[But] I do have to fish or cut bait, just for my own personal peace of mind and also in fairness to the process. The president and the Senate need plenty of time to fill a vacancy.”

Stevens’ judicial early warning means that President Obama will nominate the 112th Justice of the Supreme Court — a choice he’ll make amid a political atmosphere more charged and partisan now than it was last year, when Sonia Sotomayor was appointed after reactions from the Senate, the public and right-wing radio that went from the mildly controversial to the downright derogatory (remember Rush Limbaugh’s allusions to Sotomayor as a cleaning woman?). ...

It’s a fact that whoever President Obama nominates to the court will be required to pass a test as fraught with politics as with a command of the law. Olive branches from ranking Senate Republicans notwithstanding, GOP senators can be expected, as a matter of reflex, to oppose whoever he chooses.

And Obama’s progressive-left base isn’t a slam-dunk for support, either; liberals and progressives will call on Obama to make a selection that reflects attention to that constituency — important now, vital in 2012. The one and possibly two appointments Obama may make before long is his chance to make his philosophical imprint on the court whose laws impact Americans like no other.

Ten names that come to mind — most of them previously floated on any number of hypothetical short lists — would offer the president an embarrassment of riches: a range of intellectual and judicial heavyweights reflecting a range of personal perspectives very much like America itself. ...

Read the 10 ready for Supreme consideration at TheGrio.

Image credit: President Obama: Pool image, March 21.

Note to BlackWeb 2.0 re iPad: First isn’t always best

2010-04-04T11:13:00.000-07:00

The iPad revolution is held to have officially begun on Saturday at 9 a.m., when Apple began sales of the multimedia tablets nationwide. According to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster's estimates for iPad's first day of sales, somewhere between 600,000 and 700,000 iPads were sold on that frabjous opening day.

While the jury is very much out about who those 600K to 700K customers were, Ken Gibbs Jr. of BlackWeb 2.0 weighed in on March 30 with a lament (also published Saturday, in TheGrio) over who’s apparently opted out of the first wave of media organizations and publications to embrace redesigned Web presences built around the device.

“[W]hat about the African-American market?” Gibbs asks. “Has anyone seen or heard of an iPad demo of Ebony or Jet? Or how about Black Enterprise, Essence, Uptown or Vibe? African-American brands are the ones who could benefit most from the new revenue streams offered by the iPad.”

BW2.0 has a valid point. We’ve known the generalities of what Apple was planning for some time; The New York Times published a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office drawing of an Apple prototype months ago. We’ve known the specifics of what was coming since January, when Apple chieftain Steve Jobs showed it to the world in a dog-and-gigabyte show in San Francisco.

So it is curious that Johnson Publishing Company, publishers of Ebony and Jet, apparently didn’t come up with an early promotable working prototype of their Web sites in the iPad environment, in light of Johnson’s recent (and stunningly attractive) makeovers of both print magazines — and their Web counterparts.

Same would seem to be true for Essence — and for Black Enterprise! Given BE’s high-profile place in minority business journalism, some from-the-jump tie-in with a device likely to be a new and powerful form of personal technology would seem to be a no-brainer.

◊ ◊ ◊

It’s entirely possible, though, that all those print pubs BlackWeb mentioned may have such iPad-configured prototypes in the works right now. It’s not necessarily an advantage to be the first one out of the chute on tweaking a major technological advancement.

With the way technology changes in general, and the way Apple technology can be relied on to change in particular, there’s a lot to be said for laying in the cut for a minute and surveying the terrain before you jump in. Maybe they’re all taking a page or two from Sun Tzu.

We can assume (and sure as hell hope) that when the dust settles, the Webmasters at those black pubs will have iPad-ready versions of their sites, and soon. Like all the early adopters who waited in lines outside Apple Stores for days, the top-shelf, deep-pocketed publishers got in first, which means they’re hostage to any glitches or malfunctions that might arise in the first-generation devices themselves. First-to-market isn’t always the one that people remember.

As it was with the vote, major league baseball and the presidency of the United States, African Americans may not get to something early in the game, but the impact made when we finally arrive is inescapable.

Stay tuned. Better still, stay wired.

Image credit: Steve Jobs, January 2010: Apple tablet patent illustration: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, via The New York Times. Apple Inc. Brother iPad: Via The Huffington Post.

Bob Huggins, soul man

2010-04-04T09:27:00.000-07:00

West Virginia's valiant, quixotic run for the NCAA men's basketball title ended on Saturday night in heartbreaking fashion. The team, at the hands of a relentless attack by the Duke Blue Devils, lost their semifinal bid by 20 points. But the pluck and heart of the Mountaineers was pretty well distilled at one point during the game — not by one of the players, but by coach Bob Huggins.

In the fourth quarter, West Virginia's DaSean Butler took a bad cut driving to the basket; after colliding with Duke center Brian Zoubek, his left knee buckles and Butler falls to the floor, writhing in agony. Trainers and players did their best to console Butler, even as the team's medical people prepared to carry him off the court (later to find out Butler had a torn anterior cruciate ligament, one of the more serious injuries).

But before that happened, Huggins went on to the court at Lucas Oil Stadium to minister personally to his fallen player. In so doing, the irascible, colorful Mountaineers head coach created one of the most quietly electrifying, human moments in sports history.

Crouching over Butler, Huggins held him, caressed him, his face inches from Butler's own, cradled the stricken man in his arms and talked him through the world of his pain. We may never know exactly what soothing, anodyne words passed from coach to player. Huggins will paraphrase it for us forever — and maybe it's best that we don't know. Somehow, the transcript is beside the point

What the world will long remember ten years or a hundred years from now is the image, and the moment that made the image possible, of two human beings in communion. A player fallen in battle; a coach with a deep and inestimable reservoir of soul.

This was beyond authority or age or race. This was even beyond sports. This was a celebration, purchased with pain, of our base metal, the best of what human beings can be.

'SNL' rewrites the rules

2010-04-02T21:17:00.000-07:00

With its two recent hot choices for upcoming hosting duties, NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” is proving you don’t have to be a spring chicken — or be built like one — to get a gig on the show that may be the best reason to stay in on Saturday night.

On Thursday the Marquee Blog at CNN.com confirmed, through a NBC spokeshuman, that Gabourey Sidibe, the Oscar-nominated sensation of Lee Daniels’ highly and justly acclaimed “Precious,” is set to host the comedy sketch show on April 24. It will be Gabby’s first-time hosting gig on SNL, now in its 35th year. (Look at its longevity another way: the show was eight years along when Sidibe was born.)

Howard Stern, where is thy sting?

That news drops a few weeks after it was announced that Betty White, the octagenarian hottie star of TV, movies (“The Proposal”) and Snickers Super Bowl ads, will host ‘SNL’ on May 8 (that’s the day before Mother’s Day. Don’t forget.).

“SNL” jefe Lorne Michaels told USA Today the Mom’s Day appearance by White, 88 years young, was just the right thing to do. "She's the mother of us all in comedy," he said. The massive outpouring of popular support — more than 135,000 people approved of the idea in a recent Facebook poll — might have had a little bit to do with it too.

The casting picks show “SNL” continuing to break new ground. When Gabby stars on the show, she’ll be one of the few African American celebrities to host a program that’s come in for criticism of its often all-white cast, and its monochromatic hosting history. But hold up: TNT basketball analyst Charles Barkley did the hosting honors on Jan. 9 and former cast member Tracy Morgan (a mainstay of NBC’s “30 Rock”) did it on March 14. We got a trend thing working here.

And White will take the stage at Studio 8H as the oldest “Saturday Night Live” host ever — a refreshing departure from pop culture’s tendency to focus on the Bright Young Thing of the Moment.

All props, then, to “Saturday Night Live” for continuing to step outside the box —like it did in the past.

Next up: Mickey Rourke?

Image credits: Gabby: Via The Huffington Post. Betty: Lifeline Program/Mike Ruiz Photography, via The New York Times.

Flash! iPad about to change everything

2010-04-01T05:36:00.000-07:00

With Pampers worn in their proper place, the early adopters are already in line at an Apple Store near you, caffeine IV drips positioned next to the lawn chairs that will be their homes for the next forty-three hours or so. Saturday begins the season of the itch to be scratched by techies and fanboys/girls, artifact-collecting dilettantes with disposable income, and by the loyalists who’ve over 30 years made Apple Inc. as much a religion as a corporation.

The iPad arrives at 9 a.m. on Saturday and, to go by the early reactions of those who’ve played with it and tested it, the latest tablet-shaped device thrown down from Mount Cupertino by Steven the Lawgiver will then start the process of revolutionizing online access, publishing, music retrieval and things we haven’t thought of yet.

Walt Mossberg, dean of the tech journalists who also navigate the mainstream media, weighed in yesterday in The Wall Street Journal: “After spending hours and hours with it, I believe this beautiful new touch-screen device from Apple has the potential to change portable computing profoundly, and to challenge the primacy of the laptop. It could even help, eventually, to propel the finger-driven, multitouch user interface ahead of the mouse-driven interface that has prevailed for decades.”

At the Chicago Sun-Times, Andy Ihnatko also made with the hosannas: “[A]fter a
week with the iPad, I’m suddenly wondering if any other company is as committed to invention as Apple. Has any other company ever demonstrated a restlessness to stray from the safe and proven, and actually invent things?”

The New York Times’ David Pogue: “The iPad is so fast and light, the multitouch screen so bright and responsive, the software so easy to navigate, that it really does qualify as a new category of gadget.”

USA Today’s Jefferson Graham gave his endorsement — ringing but with a little less tintinnabulation than the others — in a video:

The choruses of early praise come amid a galaxy of new applications already designed for the iPad, with more following every day. And the ebook market is has been set for a major liftoff for awhile. The International Digital Publishing Forum reported on March 26 that U.S. wholesale ebook sales for the month of January increased more than 260 percent from the same period a year ago.

January, of course, was the month that Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO and Zen visionary in chief, formally debuted the iPad to the world from the stage of the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Just a coincidence, for sure.

◊ ◊ ◊

If history is any judge, what’s coming on Saturday will certainly be the first act of the iPad’s existence. All computer technology goes through upgrades and improvements, but it’s Apple’s peculiar genius to have reinforced the organic aspect of that evolution. More than with any other computing devices alive, Apple devices have mastered the mirroring of the plasticity of our lives. The semiotics of Apple technology fully dovetail with our idea of what computers, phones and music players should look like. Feel like. They’re becoming more and more extensions of ourselves.

The iPad will be subject to the same evolutionary process that took us from being quadrapeds to creatures that get around on two legs. And in the future like the past, that evolution will test our adaptability as much as that of the device itself. Starting with its features and its price.

We already know the iPad doesn't support Adobe's Flash technology, one of the thing’s biggest drawbacks. The Flash embargo locks iPad users out of some of the best visually-driven features of major Web sites like Disney, Hulu and ESPN. No onboard camera.

And, as the ‘Vox noted in January:

[I]ronically (very ironically for Apple), the iPad doesn’t allow for running multiple applications at once — a truly concerning omission given the insanely great multitasking capability of the other, most successful Apple products available today. In real-world terms, the iPad’s portability is almost neutralized by its lack of multitasking power. In marketing terms, it’s a challenging, counter-intuitive reach to expect consumers to step back from expectations based on what Apple’s already proven it’s capable of doing.

There’s issues with accurate translation of Microsoft formats to the iPad environment; Mossberg discovered this the hard way: “In one case, [an] exported Word file had misaligned text. When I then tried exporting the document as a PDF file, it was unreadable.”

Some other matters, minor on their own, take on greater importance in the aggregate. GPS won’t be available on all versions. The iPad’s lack of widescreen capability means getting a letterbox effect without the corresponding increase in image size (like you get when you watching a movie in letterbox format on TV). And, Mossberg also notes, familiar iPhone apps including Clocks, Stocks and Weather aren’t included.

◊ ◊ ◊

But no worries: Some of the features not in the inaugural iPads purchased by the truest believers — the people mainlining French roast outside the Apple stores right now — will show up in iPad 2.0. The long-term early adopters know this little drill, know it well. The X dollars you paid for an iMac with a 17-inch display in January will get you a 20-inch display and other goodies — in September of the same year.

It’s the price you pay for being in the church: accepting the fact that the pews will be bigger, the hymnals will be thicker, and the stained glass will reveal another 2 million colors the next time you come to worship. Count this writer (working at this moment on a second-generation iMac) as one of the longtime parishioners.

This just in: The iPad is about to change everything.

Including, eventually, itself.

Image credits: iPad images: Apple Inc.

April 1: Kansas relocates to Google home page

2010-04-01T03:12:00.000-07:00

On March 1, Bill Bunten, mayor of Topeka, Kansas, signed a proclamation Monday calling for Topeka to be identified for the entire month as "Google, Kansas — the capital city of fiber optics." It was Bunten's bid to persuade the Big G to make Topeka a test site for the company's Internet connection.

A month later, Google returns the favor, in the company's inimitable style:

Teflon, leather and Steele

2010-03-31T06:44:00.000-07:00

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.

◊ ◊ ◊

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.

◊ ◊ ◊

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.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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?

Cox and Wiegel’s insistence that Steele would stay the course begs the question of what’s to be gained by keeping him on when the damage he’s done — politically, financially and optically — is known already, and likely to get worse between now and November.

It brings to mind what Nazi Major Strasser told Captain Renault in “Casablanca” when discussing any possible departure from the Moroccan city by the freedom fighter Victor Laszlo: “I have been thinking. It is too dangerous if we let him go. It may be too dangerous if we let him stay.”

◊ ◊ ◊

It’d be one thing if the calls for Steele’s removal or resignation were coming solely from the progressive left. Then you could understand the Republicans rallying round Steele as a reflex action, holding on to him out of sheer political obstinance.

That ain’t the case right now. The loudest drumbeat for Steele’s ouster is coming from Republicans themselves — those in the party hierarchy, if not exactly the party leadership, conservatives with deep pockets who aren’t likely to be ignored forever.

"For those donors who truly believe in conservative values, this latest news about Steele has to be very disturbing," Douglas MacKinnon, former press secretary to Majority Leader Robert Dole, told Sam Stein of The Huffington Post.

MacKinnon continued: "No matter which side of the aisle you find yourself, if you are giving a political party your hard-earned money, you should have no doubts that it is going to be spent as advertised and not to provide a spoiled, egocentric, out-of-touch chairman with frivolous luxuries which are out of reach of the vast majority of the American people. Michael Steele needs to resign ...”

◊ ◊ ◊

It’s all different this time. Party finances are one thing. The party’s image is another. The Republicans face the coming election still smarting from the Larry Craig bathroom debacle, the David Vitter and John Ensign scandals, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s adventures in Argentina. It’s hard to imagine that donors to the Republican Party (some of whom had already switched their wallets’ allegiances to the Tea Party movement) will ignore the Steele affair in the context of those seamier events that preceded it.

Steele’s own earlier miscues were bad enough, but nothing fatal. The “blueprint” book, the tour to promote it, the chairman’s shameless freelancing on speaking engagements, the silly hip-hop pivot — all are more or less forgivable.

The Voyeur deal is something else again. Whatever Steele’s involvement really is, whether he was actually at the club drooling into his shoes or not, almost doesn’t matter. The steward of the Republican Party purse had a role, however peripheral, in an embarrassment for the party, one that makes a mockery of the GOP’s corner on the family values market.

For Republicans, this is the big one, the unforgivable sin. Republicans don’t weather sex-related controversies that well. The fact that Voyeur’s entertainment apparently featured topless women in simulated lesbian bondage encounters doesn’t exactly dovetail with the GOP’s fidelity to monogamy, nuclear families and full-throated disdain for the GLBT experience.

◊ ◊ ◊

This optic embarrassment, combined with Steele’s earlier arrogance and bluster, and his overseeing the dissolution of party money — cash from everyday donors, during the worst economy in generations — right when the party needs it most make you wonder why Cox and Wiegel would predict Steele will ride this one out.

Anyone who’s ever owned a nonstick skillet will tell you: Teflon wears out when the heat's up high enough. Michael Steele’s previous great escapes may not be a guarantee of future results. The Republicans are a hard-headed bunch, but they’re not above adopting a practical solution to a nagging problem: When you’ve got a stone in your shoe, sooner or later (if you’ve got any sense) you stop walking, take that shoe off and shake that stone out.

It’s difficult to see the Republicans running a race from now to November if they don’t.

'Vox update: The heat's on: Steele is coming under increasing attacks from various Republican and conservative thought leaders, from Tony Perkins, director of the Family Research Council to former GOP senator Rick Santorum, from Arizona Republican Rep. John Shadegg to former Bush 43 strategist and Prince of Darkness Karl Rove. Check their reactions here. Then, call your local sports book ... get your bets down now.

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

2010-03-30T11:38:00.000-07:00

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

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

Seven days of the Democrats

2010-03-29T23:50:00.000-07:00

“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?

◊ ◊ ◊

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.

◊ ◊ ◊

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.

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

Presidential fists of fury

2010-03-28T02:10:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-27T01:34:00.001-07:00

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.

Phases of a crisis

2010-03-26T15:14:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2010-03-25T05:55:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-24T23:38:00.000-07:00

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.”

“At the same time,” the report reads, “nativist extremist groups have increasingly adopted ideas from the Patriot movement — demonstrating a cross-pollination between different segments of the radical right not seen in years.”

The threads, the links between the Tea Party, the Republican Party and the extremist right are a command of the lexicon of intolerance and a gauzy, generalized opposition to the federal government. But for the Republican Party — nominally the only grownup in the room, the one marginally respectable political group out of the three — these commonalities are dangerous.

With Tea Partiers spitting and shouting obscenities at people doing the people’s business; with Republicans vilifying the Democrats, with zealots like Palin and Tea Party darling Tom Tancredo dictating the terms of discourse, with Patriot groups metastasizing around the country … it’s now gut-check time for the Republicans. This is their opportunity to finally, formally decide what the GOP will be, what it will stand for, in the future. Nothing less than the party’s future hangs in the balance.

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It’s not enough to wag a finger in front of their faces saying, “bad, bad Tea Party,” which is what RNC Chairman Michael Steele attempted on NBC's "Meet the Press” on Sunday. “It's certainly not a reflection of the movement or the Republican Party when you have idiots out there saying stupid things,” he said.

Tea Party leadership tried much the same trick. "I absolutely think it's isolated," Amy Kremer, a Tea Party coordinator, told Fox News on Sunday. "It's disgraceful and the people in this movement won't tolerate it, because that's not what we're about."

But frankly, that’s boilerplate revulsion, day-late dollar-short statements more or less expected. It does nothing to change the evolving symbiotic philosophical relationship between the Republican Party, the Tea Party and the network of ad hoc malcontents the SPLC report warns us about.

Many of their talking points — smaller government, lower taxes, curbs on immigration, unfettered application of Second Amendment rights, an end to federal “intrusion” — are identical. Their demographics (almost uniformly white, largely rural, chronologically older) are, too.

When push comes to shove, there’s not much more than an inch of daylight between them. A Quinnipiac poll released on Wednesday seems to bear that out. The survey of self-described Tea Party members found that 74 percent of them vote or are leaning to vote for Republican candidates.

You’re not just known by the company you keep, you’re also known by the company that keeps you. In the wake of the recent incidents, the web of anti-government sympathies that bind mainstream and extremist is a huge problem for the Republicans in November. And one for the rest of the country right now.

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“We have seen a party of incoherent rage fused with its right-wing subculture, alien to logic and fact,” said The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel today on MSNBC, referencing the Republicans.

We’ve also seen what could be, if not for cooler heads prevailing somewhere, the twilight of the ideologues of the legislative right, and the rise of the extremist fringe to a frightening level of persuasion.

And we’ve seen what may be the start of a sociopolitical variation on a cynical cold-war strategy attributed to an American officer attending the destruction of the provincial capital of Ben Tre in February 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War. Associated Press correspondent Peter Arnett quoted the officer: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

The extremist-right movement in America, and their passive-aggressive enablers and proxies in the right-wing media and on Capitol Hill, are similarly engaged in a pursuit of a dangerous strategy that would destroy this nation in order to save it, for themselves.

That’s a bargain this nation should want no part of. Hopefully, we’ll see that in November.

Image credits: Tea Party protest signs: Via The Huffington Post. House Democrats target map: SarahPAC.com via Talking Points Memo. Carl Paladino: New York Daily News. Sarah Palin: Fox News. Twitter page: via The Huffington Post.

This is when change begins

2010-03-23T23:29:00.000-07:00

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.”

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’

2010-03-22T23:26:00.000-07:00

“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.

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“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.”

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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?

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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.

That was always non-negotiable. What made the difference for Stupak? What finally put the ball over the goal line? Putting the president’s principle in writing. That’s what this all came down to. It’s like what can happen in a multibillion-dollar business deal with lives and livelihoods on the line by the thousands, a negotiation that goes back and forth forever ... finally settled when one side picks up the tab for the chump change of lawyers’ fees.

The fact of President Obama putting in writing what he’d already stated and supported costs him nothing politically; despite the reflex reaction of pro-choice progressives, the executive order betrays no reversal in his previously stated positions. Compromise is a wonderful thing. Especially when you don’t have to make one.

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Someone on Twitter, hours after the vote: “Dems doing stuff is actually kind of sexy.”

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In her address from the House floor, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi picked up on a point about the health-care bill’s passage that’s gone mostly under the radar. It’s nothing you can quantify, and that’s one reason nobody’s paid attention to it. But leave it to a Californian to grasp the ways that legislation, when law, will reawaken a vital aspect of the country's identity.

Free to search for better job opportunities, unburdened by the need to keep a job solely because of the inability to get comparable affordable health insurance somewhere else, the American people will eventually be empowered by an Obama health-care law that revives a basic of the American dynamic: the Freedom to Move, to indulge our passion for change and the new in pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It’s not something the Congressional Budget Office can score, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.

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MSNBC political analyst and tireless conservative apologist Pat Buchanan made only a brief appearance on the air for the vote analysis. His customary on-air bluster was absent. What was more startling: Buchanan, on the air, wearing a bright Democratic sky-blue tie.

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In some perverse way, the timing of all this couldn’t have been better. Coming to a climax as it has seven months, give or take, before the November election, the now settled health-care legislation now has the chance to work its way into the ordinary experience of American life, to become — like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid before it — an everyday companion article, one of the unspoken ubiquitous existential factors of a modern nation.

Quiet as it’s kept, it’s that fact, the everydayness of health-care reform in America, that the Republicans fear the most. Liberated from the jargon and procedure of lawmakers, health care reform and its benefits become accomplished facts of life, not the precursor to Armageddon, not nearly so exotically socialist as the GOP has painted reform for the last fourteen months. That’s hugely problematic for the Republicans.

The conservatives are already vowing a concerted movement to repeal the bill. Reps. Steve King of Iowa and Michelle Bachmann of Michigan are leading the early charge. But besides the fact that a repeal of the legislation just passed by Congress would require (1) the loss of 100+ Democratic seats in the House this November, and (2) the cooperation of the same president who spearheaded the law’s passage in the first place, there’s a more basic reason there’ll be no groundswell of support to repeal this: It’s hard to get people’s heads around the idea of repealing something that hasn’t fully taken effect.

The problem for the Republicans with the idea (already being advanced) of campaigning against health-care reform is huge on so many levels. It’s lousy politics to campaign against things people actually want, like no children being excluded from health insurance for pre-existing conditions, $250 Medicare rebates for seniors, small-business tax credits — things that go into effect the minute Obama signs the bill into law. And most of the rest of the law doesn’t go into effect until 2014. How the hell do you effectively campaign against a theoretical, against something that hasn’t happened yet?

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This kind of American progress is not reversible, and the Republicans know it. Like all the tectonic shifts that move this country forward, from the Emancipation Proclamation to the 13th and 19th Amendments to the Constitution, from Brown v. Board of Education to the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, the health-care reform legislation is more the advance of an idea than the advance of a law.

Why? Because for all the claims of its intrusiveness, paradoxically, it’s a law that reaches for where the law doesn’t reach: to the bedside of a dying loved one whose end-of-life care is draining a family’s life savings by the day; to the kitchen table of a laid-off worker, a family breadwinner looking down the barrel of COBRA health insurance payments he can’t possibly afford to pay; to a child’s bedroom, where a couple watch their child sleep and engage, agonized, in the brutally practical calculus of wondering how her rare childhood cancer will be paid for as much as how it will be treated.

“I feel a sense that we're on the side of the angels," said Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a former Freedom Rider and Civil Rights leader. "When historians pick up their pen and write about this period, they will have to say that the majority party forgot about the politics and did the right thing.”

Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur got it right too. “The health bill that will move forward today is actually a bill about life — life for all of America’s families, including women and children.”

Then Kaptur put it all together, deep emotion registered with a pause you could drive a Mack truck through. A pause and a statement that said everything:

“It is just so ........ profound to be a part of a moment when we truly move America into the twenty-first century.”

This is a defining moment in our history. This is what change looks like.

Image credits: House vote: Still from C-SPAN. Obama and Biden: Pete Souza, The White House. Bart Stupak: Reuters. Nancy Pelosi: Public domain. Obama bottom: Pool image. Rally in St. Charles, Mo.: Pete Souza, The White House.

Tiger opens his own cage

2010-03-19T12:57:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2010-03-18T13:08:00.000-07:00

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.

Image credit: Beanjamish, deviantART.com

Health-care reform: Navigating the tunnel's end

2010-03-17T02:40:00.000-07:00

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.

Researching the issue, though, Ryan Grim of HuffPost found that the practice goes back a hell of a lot farther than that:

The first time that the chamber used what's known as a “deeming resolution” -- the mechanism Democrats are leaning toward using to pass the Senate health care bill through the House -- was March 16, 1933.

Then, as now, it involved a bill that had little support in the chamber among individual Democrats, but all of them knew they had to pass it. Very few Democrats want to vote for the Senate version of health care reform, but most are okay with it as long as it's amended through reconciliation.

Less than two weeks into FDR's first 100 days, Congress needed to raise its debt ceiling, a ritual vote that hasn't gotten any easier for the majority party in the intervening 77 years -- and is still political fodder for partisan opponents.

Instead of voting on the underlying Senate bill to raise the debt ceiling in 1933, the House voted on Resolution 63, which stated that "immediately upon the adoption of this resolution the bill H.R. 2820, with Senate amendments thereto, be, and the same hereby is, taken from the Speaker's table to the end that all Senate amendments be, and the same are hereby, agreed to.

In other words, it was deemed passed and sent to the president for his signature. ...

“Republicans … have often made use of the deeming resolution themselves -- 36 times in 2005 and 2006, when they controlled the lower chamber. Democrats used deeming resolutions 49 times in 2007 and 2008.

◊ ◊ ◊

The bottom line: We may be approaching the light at the end of the long nightmare tunnel of the health-care debate, and this time there may be no oncoming train to deal with. The Republicans, themselves the beneficiaries of such legislative (and perfectly legal) slight-of-hand in the past (just like the Democrats), may be hoist on the same petard they’ve eagerly used before.

The stage is set for a vote this week. Some Democratic holdouts remain. Kucinich of Ohio, one of the staunchest Democratic opponents of the Obama plan, and a generally rock-solid progressive, was the object of pressure from the White House (as well as Natoma Canfield, who petitioned Kucinich to vote for the Democratic health-care plan with four poignant words: “Everything needs a start").

Citing sources, MSNBC’s Howard Fineman reported late Tuesday that Kucinich was likely to vote for the bill.

◊ ◊ ◊

The final count is expected to be close but Pelosi, DNC Chairman Tim Kaine, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, senior White House adviser David Axelrod and the president himself have all forecasted a win. For health care. This time.

Some in the media think the vote happens on Friday or Saturday, a day or two before President Obama is set to leave for Asia.

The process of health-care reform can’t begin to change fast enough for middle-class Americans. A new report prepared for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation by researchers at the University of Minnesota found that the U.S. middle class is losing health insurance more rapidly than any other income group.

The number of middle-income workers covered by employer health insurance declined by about 3 million between 2000 and 2008. The number of uninsured middle-income wage earners increased in that time from 10.5 million to 12.9 million -- more than that experienced by any other income group.

This week, finally, President Obama drives to the basket on health-care reform. No shots from three-point land this time. In what may be the most pivotal vote of his presidency, and sure as hell the one with the deepest resonance for the people he governs, the president is doubling down for the need for change.

And change can’t get here fast enough for middle-class Americans. People like Natoma Canfield. People like Michael Brooks. People like anybody looking at you in the mirror.

Everything needs a start.

Image credits: Obama: Still from whitehouse.gov. Ad detail: National Republican Congressional Committee. Natoma Canfield: The Associated Press.

Review: The Word according to George  (PopMatters)

2010-03-16T23:15:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-16T21:19:00.000-07:00

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?

Image credits: Michael Jackson: Associated Press.

The ‘black agenda’ and its discontents

2010-03-14T22:08:00.000-07:00

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.

In November 2006, in a spasm of genetic nationalism, Stanley Crouch published an essay in the New York Daily News noting the absence of links between Barack Obama and the touchstone of slavery common to African Americans.

“After all, Obama’s mother is of white U.S. stock. His father is a black Kenyan. Other than color, Obama did not — does not — share a heritage with the majority of black Americans, who are descendants of plantation slaves.

“So when black Americans refer to Obama as ‘one of us,’ I do not know what they are talking about.

The careful reader will note Crouch’s exception, a caveat the size of Mount Everest: Other than color. It’s a bit like saying, “you know, if it weren’t for gravity, we could all fly.” Crouch ignored the way most black Americans navigate bias and racially-tinged conflict every day in their lives: first on the basis of skin color, then on the basis of shared language and culture, and then on the basis of originating nationality. Instead, Crouch went straight for the plantation logbooks. It’s only the slightest variation on the “paper bag” rule common in black culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

That’s the first generational misconception that persists among blacks who matured in the civil rights era (and one that dogged Obama periodically during the campaign): the idea that some black leaders were entitled to their leadership on the basis of how well they advanced the talking points of the classic civil-rights agenda, right down to who their mama was and where she was from.

◊ ◊ ◊

This myopia runs parallel with an inability to see the ways in which campaigning and governing are two distinctly different political experiences. Like any candidate on the campaign trail, Obama was both liberated and imprisoned by the candidate’s necessarily idealizing function in American politics: This is what I want to do, intend to do, if I get elected.

As president of the United States, Obama is constitutionally obligated to combine those idealistic intentions — the ones he advanced during the campaign for every interest group you can think of — with the praxis of running a combative bicameral government, working for a nation of more than 300 million people.

The idea, advanced by Tavis Smiley and members of the Congressional Black Caucus, is that the degree of unquestionable misery that black Americans now experience requires special, singular, identity-based attention by the president; this thrusts the identity of the campaigner onto the shoulders of the president, and it’s not a good fit. It seeks to hold the president hostage to working for constituencies within this nation, rather than on behalf of the nation as a whole.

President Obama understands this. “I can’t pass laws that say I’m just helping black folks,” he said recently. “I’m the president of the United States. What I can do is make sure that I am passing laws that help all people, particularly those who are most vulnerable and most in need. That in turn is going to help lift up the African-American community.”

If Dyson wants a teachable moment, that right there was a sound expression of the realpolitik required to formally govern a nation, as opposed to emotionally governing a people. The professor isn’t just the professor anymore; he’s the chancellor of the university system now. A vastly different thing, requiring a vastly different threshold of responsibility.

◊ ◊ ◊

Ironically, one of the things that hamstrings us as a people is an inconsistency about our own self-identity. We rightly insist on inclusion, but we find ways to reinforce a sense of apartness that contradicts that drive for inclusion. The name of the most celebrated black American advocacy organization continues to use in its name a phrase that is the antithesis of modern black American self-description.

We insist on the primacy of Black History Month as Ours, the singular time in the calendar for honoring black history (lest America forget it), when, in fact, other dates on the calendar — from Martin Luther King’s birthday in January to Black Music Month in June, from regional Juneteenth observances that same month to Kwanzaa in December — indicate how much black history has been for decades a year-round, unavoidable, national experience.

Now, with the first African American president in the nation’s history, a man sworn to uphold the national interest, there are calls for that president to engage in corrective measures that would segregate black people from everyone else — a course of action politically unpalatable and, maybe, constitutionally actionable.

Nothing tells the future like the tide of American history. In a masterful August 2008 essay in The New York Times Magazine, Matt Bai grasped what Obama truly represented, at that time as a candidate, and what many in the black American community still don’t get at this time, with Obama as a president:

“For a lot of younger African Americans, the resistance of the civil rights generation to Obama’s candidacy signified the failure of their parents to come to terms, at the dusk of their lives, with the success of their own struggle — to embrace the idea that black politics might now be disappearing into American politics in the same way that the Irish and Italian machines joined the political mainstream.”

◊ ◊ ◊

Leave it to Dr. Dorothy Height to make sense of things. The social activist, educator, counselor to presidents going back to FDR and, for 40 years, the president of the National Council of Negro Women spoke truth to power again in a recent interview.

“We have never sat down and said to the 43 other presidents: ‘How does it feel to be a Caucasian? How do you feel as a white president? Tell me what that means to you,’ ” Dr. Height told The New York Times.

“I am not one to think that he should do more for his people than for other people. I want him to be free to be himself.”

Image credits: Obama top: Pete Souza/The White House. Congressional Black Caucus: Via Brown Man Thinking Hard. March on Washington 1963: National Archives via Wikimedia Commons. Barack Obama and family: Time.com via Wikipedia. Fair use rationale: Necessary to depict 'Obama's mother' in pertinent historical context for elements of this essay. Obama bottom: Reuters/Jim Young.

Redhead rising: Conan O'Brien on tour

2010-03-12T09:19:00.000-08:00

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.

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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.

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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.

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

Walmart’s not-quite-3/5th compromise

2010-03-12T03:03:00.000-08:00

The buyers at Walmart are well-known for their marketing skills and their ability to leverage high volume into deeply-discounted prices and astronomical sales. Their sensitivity to the sensibilities of their customers is apparently another matter.

That much was obvious recently, when the Web site Guanabee.com published a photo said to have been taken at a Louisiana Walmart — a shot in the toy aisle, showing ebony and ivory Barbie dolls hanging on the racks together in perfect harmony. Everything in harmony but the prices.

The black Ballerina Teresa Barbies were priced at $3. The white Ballerina Barbies were sold for $5.93.

The photo and story moved from Guanabee and the humor site Funny Junk.com to the mainstream press; ABC News reported it on Tuesday, complete with damage-control statements from headquarters.

“To prepare for spring inventory, a number of items are marked for clearance,” Wal-Mart spokeswoman Melissa O'Brien told ABC News in an e-mail. “... Both are great dolls. The red price sticker indicates that this particular doll was on clearance when the photo was taken, and though both dolls were priced the same to start, one was marked down due to its lower sales to hopefully increase purchase from customers.”

“Pricing like items differently is a part of inventory management in retailing,” O'Brien said.

Not that the profit picture of a global economic raptor like Walmart exactly depends on how fast Barbie dolls are moving in the first place. From ABC News: “Whatever Ballerina Teresa's lagging sales may say about society, retail analyst Lori Wachs said Walmart may ultimately regret their pricing choice. The discount giant, which reported a quarterly profit of $4.7 billion last month, could have absorbed whatever loss it might have suffered had it kept Ballerina Teresa's price the same as that of Ballerina Barbie.”

Ah, but we’ve been here before. A reader, commenting on the story at Guanabee, cut to the chase with a refreshingly clear sense of the historical:

“3/5 of $5.93 is not $3.00.”

Image credit: Funny Junk via Guanabee.com.

Juanita Goggins (1935-2010)

2010-03-11T20:58:00.000-08:00

The state of South Carolina has been badly served lately by certain people in the public square and on the public dime. Rep. Joe (“You lie!”) Wilson and Argentine bush pilot Gov. Mark Sanford haven’t exactly been role models for the Palmetto State.

Sometime in the days of blizzard and low temperatures between Feb. 20 and March 3, South Carolina lost a real role model, one in the mold of the citizen-politician, someone for whom the phrase “serve the people” was a mission statement, not a slogan meant for a YouTube video or a Facebook page. That phrase was something Juanita Goggins lived, out loud and for real.

Let Seanna Adcox of The Associated Press tell the story:

COLUMBIA, S.C. — When Juanita Goggins became the first black woman elected to the South Carolina Legislature in 1974, she was hailed as a trailblazer and twice visited the president at the White House.

Three decades later, she froze to death at age 75, a solitary figure living in a rented house four miles from the gleaming Statehouse dome.

Goggins, whose achievements included key legislation on school funding, kindergarten and class size, had become increasingly reclusive. She spent her final years turning down help from neighbors who knew little of her history-making past. Her body was not discovered for more than a week.

Those neighbors, as well as former colleagues and relatives, are now left wondering whether they could have done more to help.

"I'm very saddened. People like her you want to see live forever. She had quite a gift for helping others," said state Sen. John Land, a fellow Democrat who was first elected to the House the same year as Goggins.

Goggins, the youngest of 10 children, grew up the daughter of a sharecropper in rural Anderson County, about 130 miles northwest of the capital. She was the only sibling to earn a four-year college degree. Her bachelor's in home economics from then-all-black South Carolina State College was followed by a master's degree.

She taught in the state's segregated schools, married a dentist and got into politics. In 1972, she became the first black woman to represent South Carolina as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. Two years later, she became the first black woman appointed to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

"I am going to Columbia to be a legislator, not just a black spot in the House chambers," she told The Associated Press in 1974 following her victory over an incumbent white man from a district just south of Charlotte, N.C.

Voters "were weary of poor representation. They were ready to accept a person who was sincere and concerned about things. Those feelings go beyond color," Goggins said.

She sat on the powerful House budget-writing committee and was responsible for funding sickle-cell anemia testing in county health departments.

The former teacher also helped pass the 1977 law that is still the basis for education funding in the state. Her proposals to expand kindergarten and to reduce student-teacher ratios in the primary grades were adopted after she left politics in 1980, citing health issues.

"She was not bashful or anything. She liked to talk. I used to say she could sell an Eskimo ice," recalled Ilese Dixon, 88, of Pendleton, Goggins' last surviving sibling. "She was just lively and smart. She thought she could fix the world."

Her colleagues say they never learned the specifics of her illness and, since she didn't talk about it, they didn't press.

Several years after leaving the Legislature, Goggins divorced and then moved to Columbia in the early 1990s, renting the brick ranch house in a quiet neighborhood off North Main Street where she lived for 16 years. ...

Neighbors said she was always a private person. One neighbor said she would return her waves, but refused to let visitors in the door.

Last year, about the same time the Legislature voted to name part of a state highway after her, Goggins was mugged near her home. She changed the locks on her door and stopped taking walks, according her neighbors and landlord.

Police found Goggins' body March 3 – two weeks after she was last seen. Her landlord contacted police after a next-door neighbor realized he had not seen her lights on in some time.

Coroner Gary Watts said she died of hypothermia, probably about Feb. 20, and said he found indications of dementia. When she died, during a cold snap, Goggins was wearing several layers of clothing, yet her heat was working at the time.

She had money to pay her bills, but the utility company said it shut off the electricity for nonpayment Feb. 23. Watts said it appeared Goggins was using Sterno to cook, but her stove was still functioning when police climbed through a window and found her. ...

State Sen. John Scott, whose realty company owns Goggins' home, said he and his sister tried to take care of Goggins as best as they could without prying.

"We lost a great trailblazer," said Scott, a Democrat from Columbia. "Our family's very saddened this happened to a person who's given so much."

His sister who manages the property, Linda Marshall, said Goggins declined help from the county.

"She needed someone to assist her, but anyone who tried to get close, she'd block them off," she said. "She was very fragile. This was something I always dreaded."

Why she withdrew remains a mystery even to her son. He attributes it to her illness, which was never fully diagnosed.

"That's something I've been trying to get my head around for the last 15 years," said Horace Goggins Jr., 42, of Powder Springs, Ga. ...

He wants to focus on her accomplishments and the good times at his mother's funeral Friday in Rock Hill.

"I would like for her to be remembered as a woman who cared about her community," he said. "I want her to be remembered as a positive role model, not only for African-American girls, but also any young girl who has a want and a desire to make a change and do something positive."

Image credits: Juanita Goggins: Spartanburg Herald. Goggins story excerpt: The Associated Press, as published in the Spartanburg Herald, Dec. 30, 1974.

Poll: Every midterm goodbye ain’t gone

2010-03-09T23:17:00.000-08:00

Voters generally don’t turn out in big numbers for the midterm races, especially black and minority voters. For the conservatives and for many political analysts and professional pol-watchers, that’s been not so much a talking point of the 2010 campaign debate as holy writ. The Republicans and their proxies with blogs and microphones in the wider world, have been relying on that historically proven assumption, counting on it as they ramp up their strategies for retaking the Congress in November.

They may want to retool their efforts: A newly released poll suggests — convincingly — that among those black and minority voters, past performance in the midterm part of the election cycle need not be a guarantee of future results.

According to the poll conducted by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, about two-thirds of black adults in four states with Senate races in the fall say they’re watching the political scene, and monitoring analysis about the fall elections, and between 74 percent and 80 percent said they’re very likely to go to the polls in November.

The nonpartisan D.C.-based organization, which monitors minority participation in matters of public policy, surveyed 500 black people in Missouri, Indiana, Arkansas and South Carolina. Despite the relatively small sample, its methodology makes sense, given recent events and established political history.

“In many competitive congressional districts, blacks make up a quarter of the electorate, and they vote overwhelmingly for Democrats,” the Associated Press reported Tuesday. “Their surge during President Obama's 2008 victory is widely credited with helping sweep many Democrats into office who might have otherwise lost.”

Dr. David Bositis, a Center researcher and the director of the poll, told The AP that, while the turnout would certainly be lower than poll estimates, the results reflect a continued support for President Obama.

“I think the Obama election and the fact that there is an African-American president is something of a game-changer,” he told AP. “African-Americans feel like they have a real investment in President Obama ... I think it's a major motivating factor.”

“A real investment”? Big time. From the poll: “Nearly all respondents feel favorably toward President Obama. In each of the states surveyed, between 94 and 95 percent of black adults said their feelings toward him were favorable. There has been no public figure in the past 20 years who has elicited such favorable feelings from African Americans. “

Sensibly, black Americans are focused on the economy and health-care reform; the poll found those were the top-tier concerns on the minds of black voters.

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Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University who specializes in African-American politics, had doubts about the poll’s turnout forecast. “One of the things you have to realize with polls is that if you ask people if they're going to vote, people can misrepresent themselves,” she told AP. “Nobody wants to look like a civic deadbeat.”

That’s true enough — and no more or less true today than it was in November 2008, when African Americans turned out in record numbers to elect Barack Obama president. And with health-care reform and jobs hanging in the balance, there’s at least as much at stake this election as the last one. Black Americans got that when the survey was conducted last year, between Nov. 11 and Dec. 1. They certainly understand it better today.

And black and minority voters are more plugged in today than they were in 2008, not less. A late-February survey from the Center found that black Americans and Latinos with college degrees and earning more than $50,000 a year are adopting broadband faster than any other cohorts of the population. About 94 percent of this African American group and 98 percent of the Hispanic group have broadband.

Those voters are more plugged in, they’re more attuned to life and culture, they’re more sophisticated, and more likely to avail themselves of the levers of our democracy. Simply put: they’re better citizens now than they were before, and with as much on the table as is on the table now, there’s no reason on earth to think they’ll walk away from the closest thing to full political empowerment they’ve enjoyed.

◊ ◊ ◊

The takeaway? Among other things, the Joint Center poll means that the GOP needs to resist the temptation to go native & go negative, two of the defining characteristics of contemporary Republican strategy.

They need to get focused on enhancing their own message, refining what the GOP has to offer the American people – instead of using the history of midterm voting patterns as the compass heading for its political direction. Past ain’t always prologue.

The Joint Center poll findings also mean that, contrary to some of the more downbeat assessments of Obama’s prospects coming from the punditburo, the president still enjoys the inaugural benefits from black American voters.

It’s not just a honeymoon anymore; almost fourteen months in, there’s a real marriage going on now, with highs and lows. And contrary to what the pundits think and what the conservatives wish, black Americans aren’t really having second thoughts.

Image credits: Logo and chart: Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. President Obama: Still from NBC News.

‘Precious’ night, precious changes

2010-03-08T16:03:00.000-08:00

Sunday was a big night for upsets at the 82nd Academy Awards. Most of the attention’s gone to “The Hurt Locker” and its surprising win as Best Picture, beating out the prohibitive favorite, “Avatar.” The Best Picture win for Kathryn Bigelow’s “Locker” is a triumph for cost-effective motion picture production. The film was made for about $11 million, and has recouped almost twice that amount. True, “Avatar,” made for about $237 million, has put $2.56 billion worth of butts in theater seats around the world. But the win for “Hurt Locker” (and director Bigelow’s Oscar for best director, the first for a female director) feels like a triumph of the underdog.

And for fans of the African American filmgoing experience, the underdog was top dog tonight. With two awards, black talent in Hollywood took a huge leap forward.

Geoffrey Fletcher, the screenwriter of “Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire” made movie history when he became the first black screenwriter to win an Oscar in the 82-year history of the Academy Awards. John Singleton was the most recent to come close; he was the previous black screenwriter to be nominated, for “Boyz n’ the Hood,” back in 1991. Fast forward, now ... 19 long years.

“I don’t know what to say,” an emotional Fletcher said. “"This is for everybody who works on a dream everyday -- precious boys and girls everywhere."

But Fletcher’s triumph is bigger than something just for him. The solitary process of sitting in front of a keyboard, a typewriter or a blank sheet of paper and writing, willing a world into existence from the stuff of your own imagination, is one of the more mysterious practices — maybe the most mysterious practice — of the movie business, and a definite exception (at least at first) to the groupthink mindset that’s a necessary part of making a major motion picture.

Black people have been doing that for generations. What’s different now for black and minority wordsmiths is doing it, for the first time, with the weight of Oscar’s gravitas in their corner. On Sunday a black screenwriter joined the pantheon of movie greats who have tapped into that special reservoir of the imagination that yields Oscar gold. From now on, that fact will fire the spirits of every other such screenwriting hopeful who dares to sit down with pen in hand (or keyboard at hand) and invent what comes after FADE IN.

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Just minutes after Fletcher’s victory, the Best Supporting Actress award went to Mo’Nique, the former Radio One talk show host, BET standup comedian and television actress whose incendiary portrayal of Mary Jones in “Precious” has provoked tears in audiences since the film hit the theaters.

With her win Sunday, Mo’Nique added the Oscar to a long list of awards for her “Precious” portrayal, including a Golden Globe award, and awards for best supporting actress from the New York Film Critics Circle, the Screen Actors Guild, the Boston Society of Film Critics, and the San Francisco Film Critics Circle.

"First I would like to thank the Academy for showing that it can be about the performance and not the politics." I want to thank Ms. Hattie McDaniel for enduring all that she had to, so that I would not have to. ... to my amazing husband Sidney, thank you for showing me that sometimes you have to forgo doing what’s popular in order to do what’s right.”

Not a dry eye nowhere.

From the beginning of Hollywood, and certainly from the beginning of black people trying to get over in Hollywood, success in motion pictures has been a matter of measuring progress by alien and unfamiliar yardsticks. More and more, that progress is measured by our own.

That’s a precious fact — precious without the quote marks.

Image credits: Fletcher, Oscar statuette: Yada/Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Best Picture: A tale of two sensibilities

2010-03-07T17:25:00.000-08:00

According to the smart money, tonight’s battle for Best Picture at the 82nd annual Oscars ceremony comes down to a choice between “Avatar,” James Cameron’s sci-fi animation morality tale/space Western/geopolitical fable, and “The Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow’s story of American soldiers fighting the insidious IED-borne dangers of the Iraq war. Both have been nominated for nine Oscars.

Several critics have made the assumption that “Avatar” has amassed so much momentum, both culturally and financially, that it’s the prohibitive favorite. That may be true, the critics may well be right, but for some of the wrong reasons.

If “Avatar” wins — and the Academy throws off the prevailing assumptions and elevates a dark horse like “Precious” or “A Serious Man” to the top spot — it may have as much to do with the Academy as anything else.

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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is an old-line outfit. Founded in May 1927, it was and remains not only the primary arbiter of a movie’s esthetic qualities but also the standard-setter for the films that hold to the Academy’s sense of what dovetails with its world view, its idea of the kind of pictures that should be celebrated.

Demographically, longtime Academy voters skew older, whiter and more culturally conservative. These are filmgoers whose sense of cinematic spectacle has its roots in films like “Gone With the Wind” and “Cleopatra,” “Ben-Hur” and “Lawrence of Arabia” — a sense of spectacle that’s more recently found expressions in votes for “The Last Emperor,” “Crash” and “Slumdog Millionaire.”

An unproven but firmly-held conviction: Academy members are less enamored of the movies as sounding board for ripped-from-the-headlines expressions of reality; if given a choice between a Best Picture vote for a movie that’s captive to the here & now of modern life and one that’s principally captive to the imagination, they’ll go the imagination route much of the time.

Academy voters were faced with just such a choice back in 2001. That year, the two leading contenders for Best Picture were “Traffic,” Steven Soderbergh’s brilliant multilayered study of America’s drug problem and how it got to be what it’s become; and “Gladiator,” Ridley Scott’s sword-and-sandals epic of one man’s revenge against an emperor.

“Traffic” was held in high regard as a powerful social statement, a film that masterfully examined the different dimensions of America’s chemical infatuation. Stellar cast, top-notch script, characters you cared about — all of it suggested “Traffic” would be crowned Best Picture.

“Gladiator, directed by consummate craftsman Scott, brought a lot to the table. The film starred Russell Crowe, Djimon Hounsou, Joaquin Phoenix and Oliver Reed in a story that borrowed from the grand style of the “Ben-Hur” tradition. Stellar cast, top-notch script, characters you cared about ... For its supporters, “Gladiator” was a lock.

What the Academy was looking for then may well be a clue to which film the Academy voters picks tonight.

◊ ◊ ◊

In the Best Picture derby, the Academy often anoints the tale well told, the big-canvas film that advances the art of the storyteller, the fabulist who invents a world of his or her own invention, the story that owes little or nothing to the world we inhabit, a world at the mercy of the body counts and disasters delivered on the evening news.

When Academy voters made their Best Picture choice in 2001, it came down to picking between the sensibilities of two distinctly different motion pictures:

“Gladiator” was a movie whose subject matter was what you go to the movies for.

“Traffic” was a movie whose subject matter was what you went to the movies to get away from.

It was that embrace of the escapist possibilities of the motion picture that gave “Gladiator” the edge that year. It’s the same embrace of escapism adored by those older, probably more conservative members of the Academy that’s likely to give “Avatar” the advantage tonight.

Anything can happen, of course, and nobody knows for sure but the folks at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and they ain’t talking. But barring a complete upset, “Avatar” director James Cameron should hoist another Best Picture Oscar tonight. If he’s “king of the world” again, it’s because he’s king of a world: the fully conceived, animated, realized and dramatized world of “Avatar,” a world the Academy couldn’t live without.

'Vox update 9 P.M.: So much for trying to figure out the mood of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: The Best Picture Oscar just went to "The Hurt Locker." Despite an 11th-hour campaign against the film launched by Iraq war veterans who angrily condemned it as highly inaccurate and a slap in the face to the U.S. military, "Locker" also won awards for best film editing, sound editing, sound mixing, original screenplay and best director — Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman to win a best director Oscar in the history of the Academy. And good on her.

Exhuming McCarthy 2.0

2010-03-05T20:19:00.000-08:00

The Republican Party has been in an ethical wilderness for so long now, has so aggressively assisted in its own spiritual demise, it’s hard to remember when this deathwatch really began. Bereft of any vision for the nation, emotionally attuned to the punitive instinct, ready to oppose President Obama on any initiative out of reflex rather than principle, the GOP has been on intellectual and credibility life support for a long time.

Liz Cheney, Jim Bunning and the Republican National Committee just pulled the plug.

With three events that happened in such lockstep it makes you think it was intentional, the conservatives in Congress and outside have been badly served by some of their number who showed, by accident and on purpose, just how desperate and mean-spirited they’re willing to be in order to advance their agenda.

◊ ◊ ◊

The Republicans’ lock on their old strong suit, national security, isn’t what it used to be; two wars and responsibility for the worst attack on American soil won’t enhance its bona fides on that front over the long haul. And so, the former vice president Dick Cheney has, in speeches and op-ed pieces and a forthcoming book, been working furiously to rewrite history as it relates to the panoramically criminal actions of the Bush administration.

Daughter Liz has happily entered the family business. On March 1, Liz Cheney’s right-wing advocacy group, Keep America Safe, released a breathtakingly ridiculous Web video that suggests that lawyers at the Justice Department responsible for defending the military prisoners collectively misidentified as “detainees” share the ideological viewpoints of the al-Qaida network.

It was a revisitation of the same innuendo and character assassination perfected by Republican Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy and unleashed on the country for three harrowing years during the McCarthy hearings in the 1950's. And like her apparent ideological mentor, Liz Cheney had her Joseph Welch moment. In fact, she had more than one.

Cheney’s DoJ broadside got a lot of pushback from a broad range of conservatives, some from previous Republican administrations, who indicated that the video was off base in its ad hominem attacks of Justice attorneys. The Conservative Power Line blog called the video “vicious” and “unfounded.”

Reginald Brown, former Bush associate White House counsel said “the video is truly offensive … It’s beyond a cheap shot to suggest that a lawyer is an al-Qaida sympathizer because he advocates a detainee’s position in the Supreme Court ...”

◊ ◊ ◊

Cheney’s YouTube mal mot surfaced two days before a story in Politico, a piece highlighting GOP fundraising documents apparently lost or forgotten at a Republican National Committee leadership retreat for top donors and fundraisers, held Feb. 18 at the Gasparilla Inn & Club in Boca Grande, Fla.

The presentation was delivered by RNC Finance Director Rob Bickhart, Politico reported on March 3. The 72-page document was provided to Politico by a Democrat who was apparently at the hotel.

The docs, assembled as a PowerPoint presentation, shows one graphic that highlights desired motivational triggers for getting donations from conservative supporters. At the top of the column for “Visceral Giving” (read: spot donors) is the word “Fear.” In another column headed “Calculated Giving” (code for deep-pocketed donors), motivations the document said are ripe for exploitation include giving that’s “Ego-Driven” or powered by a desire for “Access” or “Personal” reasons.

Another slide in the deck reads: “What can you sell when you do not have the White House, the House or the Senate? Save the country from trending toward Socialism!”

From the Politico story: “In neat PowerPoint pages, it lifts the curtain on the often-cynical terms of political marketing, displaying an air of disdain for the party’s donors that is usually confined to the barroom conversations of political operatives.”

It was all too clear for former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. “The Republicans simply don’t respect American voters,” he told MSNBC on Thursday. “What this shows is that they don’t even respect their own donors among their own voters.”

◊ ◊ ◊

As you’d expect, the damage-control machine went off loudly at RNC headquarters.

“This was an internal matter,” RNC Chairman and apologist-in-chief Michael Steele told Fox News. “Clearly it’s not something I would tolerate … We’re dealing with it administratively within the RNC.”

“They don’t get it,” Judson Phillips, an attorney and organizer of the recent National Tea Party Convention, told the Daily Beast. “They freaking don’t get it.” Phillips said he disagreed with the characterization of small donors as “reactionary” and motivated by “fear.” “Our motives are patriotic,” he said. “Can they be any more insulting?”

Adam Brandon, a spokesman for FreedomWorks, the activist group that played a role in organizing the first Tea Party protests, called the presentation “inept and silly.”

“I’m just kind of shocked,” he said. “I don't get what they were trying to accomplish. ... ”

Brandon said the use of the word “fear” was ill-advised. “When people start using the term ‘fear,’ you start getting the black helicopter mythology going,” he told the Beast.

◊ ◊ ◊

But the table was set for all this on Feb. 26, when Jim Bunning, GOP senator from Kentucky, took insensitivity to new heights. Pissed off at having missed a NCAA game featuring the Kentucky Wildcats, his personal fave, Bunning voted repeatedly to block H.R. 4691, a 30-day extension of provisions and benefits -- unemployment insurance, flood insurance, highway funding, SBA business loans and small business provisions of the American Recovery Act — for an estimated 400,000 Americans around the country. His refusal to cast the vote that would have meant the necessary unanimous consent also blocked COBRA benefits for people who’d lost their jobs. The benefits expired on Feb. 28.

“I have missed the Kentucky-South Carolina game that started at 9:00,” he said,  ”and it's the only redeeming chance we had to beat South Carolina since they're the only team that has beat Kentucky this year.”

The TiVo-deprived senator from Kentucky tried to stand on principle — that we shouldn’t spent another $10 billion we really don’t have, in the face of a multitrillion-dollar deficit. “The only difference I have [with] some of my good friends from the other side of the aisle, is that I believe we should pay for it,” he said.

But Bunning’s act was weak. His attempt to teach Congress the basics of financial rectitude with the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans hanging in the balance looks sour and cynical.

And Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, wasn’t buying: “This idea of somehow we are going to hold back on unemployment benefits and balance the budget on the backs of unemployed people in Illinois and Kentucky, you could not pick a worse strategy or a worse time to do it.”

But it didn’t look that way to the folks on Bunning's side of the aisle. Compounding the horrible optics of such a singular moment on the Senate floor was the fact that, astonishingly, other Republicans had Bunning’s back.

Firedoglake reported on Tuesday:

“Right-wing conservatives compounded the problem by cheering Bunning on and making inartful comments. Jon Kyl, number 3 in the Senate leadership, argued against jobless benefits altogether, calling them a “disincentive for work.” Kentucky Senate candidates to replace Bunning, Trey Grayson and Rand Paul, applauded the effort in an attempt to capture the far-right base. And right-wing media praised Bunning as well. This is starting to look a lot like Newt Gingrich’s 1995 government shutdown, which forced a reconsideration of cruel Republican policies among the public.”

The bill’s passed the Senate on Tuesday and the president signed it; the benefits are flowing to where they should have gone all along — no thanks to the gentleman from Kentucky.

◊ ◊ ◊

Before the latest misfortunes and since, RNC Chairman Steele has been working the airwaves, stoking the confidence engine, doing his best to brandish a political sang-froid he hasn’t earned yet.

“Absolutely, absolutely, at the rate we’re going now, with the ground game we’re putting in place, we absolutely can take the Congress back this year.”

That may have been true when he said it, on Jan. 10 on NBC’s “Meet The Press.”

But in the light of this latest, three-step process of exhuming the worst of Republican identity, the question for independent voters who might be inclined to consider Republican candidates this fall is: Why reward the GOP for this kind of insensitivity to the small donors who could help keep their election hopes alive? Why gift the Republicans for this kind of indifference to their own constituents — and to the truth itself?

With Cheney’s hardly-subtle terror baiting, the RNC’s fear-mongering by Power Point and Jim Bunning’s antagonism toward the less fortunate, the Republicans, and conservatives more generally, clearly have identity issues. They’re the kind of problems that voters look for, as an indicator of how the party with the problem is likely to govern. They’re the kind of issues Americans don’t necessarily feel obliged to reward with election.

The GOP is facing the next stage in a crisis of cynicism, and the American people have had quite enough of that little commodity lately, thanks. Why on earth would they sign on for any more in November?

That’s not a question about the Republicans that liberals are necessarily coming to, or Tea Party activists or independents or any other political group. It’s an apolitical question — like the one that follows, borne of straight-up common sense: How you gonna govern a nation, or the Congress, when you can’t even govern yourself?

The non-starter-over in chief

2010-03-03T23:14:00.000-08:00

If you had any doubt that President Obama means to, uh, stay the course in his pursuit of health care reform this year, you can rest a little easier. Today in an address from the East Room of the White House, flanked by doctors, nurses and other health-care professionals, the president threw the gauntlet upside the heads of the gradualists on Capitol Hill, the tabula rasa crowd who insist on starting the health-care reform process all over again on the proverbial Clean Sheet of Paper.

Obama’s message couldn’t be simpler: No do-overs. Two weeks, give or take. “Let’s get it done.”

“The insurance companies aren’t starting over. They’re continuing to raise premiums and deny coverage as we speak.

“For us to start over now could simply lead to delay that could last for another decade, or even more,. The American people and the U.S. economy just can’t wait that long.”

“I believe the United States Congress owes the American people a final vote on health care reform. We have debated this issue thoroughly, not just for a year, but for decades. Reform has already passed the House with a majority. It has already passed the Senate with a supermajority of sixty votes. And now it deserves the same kind of up-or-down vote that was cast on welfare reform, the Children’s Health Insurance Program [S-CHIP], COBRA health coverage for the unemployed, and both Bush tax cuts – all of which had to pass Congress with nothing more than a simple majority.”

In a speech that exhibited a pitch-perfect balance of rhetorical loft and rhetorical heft, the president indicated he’s had enough of the congressional kabuki do-si-do bullshit that has characterized this debate in the halls of Congress for the past 13 months (to say nothing of the prolonged debate among street activists, netroots organizers, and the blogosphere in general).

And just as important, Obama gave the speech the necessary sense of mission, of purpose. It might be fair to say health-care reform could be to Obama what the Interstate highway system was to Eisenhower, what the moon shot was to JFK: an opportunity to apply national principles to the pressing and immediate task at hand.

“In the end, that’s what this debate is about: It’s about what kind of country we want to be. It’s about the millions of lives that would be touched — and in some cases, saved—by making private health insurance more secure and more affordable.”

“What’s at stake right now is not just our ability to solve this problem, but our ability to solve any problem.”

“The American people want to know if it’s still possible for Washington to look out for their interests and their future,” Mr. Obama said. “They are waiting for us to act. They are waiting for us to lead. And as long as I hold this office, I intend to provide that leadership. I don’t know how this plays politically, but I know it’s right.”

“And so I ask Congress to finish its work, and I look forward to signing this reform into law. Thank you. Let’s get it done.”

The Republican response was swift and utterly predictable. House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio said “well, it’s pretty clear that the Obama administration and my colleagues in Congress are going to continue on their march to shove this government-run health care plan down the throats of the American people,” Boehner said, using the word “shove,” one of the GOP’s hot verbs of the moment (others invoked recently by the Republican leadership include “ram” and “jam”).

Rep. Marsha Blackburn, of Tennessee, condemning Democratic attempts to “push through” health care, said, “This is a bill that is too expensive to afford. It is something that will restrict access to health care, and it will cause us to continue to lose jobs in this country.”

◊ ◊ ◊

So much of the health care debate has centered on its estimated out-of-pocket cost; the president’s plan has been estimated at $900 billion over 10 years. Hardly chump change by any estimation.

But look at it another way:

According to a Harvard Medical School analysis released on Sept. 17, almost 45,000 Americans die every year as a result of having inadequate medical care and/or no health insurance. Extrapolating from that estimate, then: if those 45,000 Americans’ lives could be saved, what would be the cumulative annual effect on the economy?

It’s fair to assume that not all of those 45,000 Americans are of or past retirement age, or facing end-of-life issues like terminal diseases that would prevent them from making an extended contribution to the work force. Many, maybe even most of them, could be expected to return to some productive work once their health issues were resolved.

For the sake of a workable scenario, let’s assume that 70 percent of those 45,000 Americans — 31,500 of them — had been ordinary working people.

According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States 2010, wage earners of all races and both genders earn an average of $27,059 a year. Multiplied across the 31,500 people saved from early death in our hypothetical, that puts $852.3 million into their pockets, which, ultimately, means putting most of that money into the national economy.

Add to that the vast financial benefit that arises because hundreds of thousands of other Americans aren't forced into bankruptcy by ruinous medical bills — Americans who are able to route that money into various sectors of the wider economy, such as construction, small businesses and consumer products. The benefit would be billions more.

And there’s the other unknown unknown: just how big a financial impact their incomes would have on other businesses whose income depends on their income ... and on and on, the ripple effect of American capitalism at work.

Admittedly, such gains would be a drop in the bucket compared to the conservatively estimated $90 billion a year the Obama plan is expected to cost, to insure another 31 million Americans. But surely, there’s an obvious financial benefit to bringin’ em’ back alive. Any money is good money when the alternative is no money. A live contributor to the American workforce beats a dead statistic any day.

◊ ◊ ◊

We don’t know if anything like that entered the president’s consideration, and since it’s just a back-of-the napkin conjecture, maybe it doesn’t matter.

What does matter is the fact that in May 2002, the Institute of Medicine estimated that 18,314 Americans died every year because they lacked health insurance coverage.

In less than eight years, that number’s more than doubled.

"The report documents the immense consequence of having 40 million uninsured people out there," said Ray Werntz, a consumer health expert with the Employee Benefit Research Institute, to USA Today in 2002. "We need to elevate the problem in the national conscience."

The president’s throwdown to Congress does just that. Finally.

It’s still to be seen if Congress can meet his admittedly ambitious two-week deadline. Congress is as unwieldy an institution as there ever was, and the Republicans on Capitol Hill and their cheerleaders in talk radio and the punditburo will do everything they can to slow down a process that’s already taken too long.

But more and more, there’s a sense that we’re near the endgame, maybe closer to this goal line than ever before. And when you’re on the 10-yard line, or even the 20, you damn well don’t start the game over.

Image credits: Obama: Pete Souza/The White House. Operating room: Detail of photo by Piotr Bodzek, MD, republished under GNU Free Documentation License version 1.2 or later.

Banality Fair

2010-03-01T21:39:00.000-08:00

You’re to be forgiven if you glanced at the latest cover of Vanity Fair and thought Hollywood culture was having a flashback, to about 1957.

That’s the inescapable takeaway from the Annie Leibovitz cover portrait, one of those huge fold-out gatefold affairs that VF runs every so often (probably after firing X number of interns to make room in the budget). The cover lines splayed across a recumbent Kristen Stewart tell the story: “A New Decade, A New Hollywood!”

Sitting for the portrait are what we’re told is the new doe-eyed, tousled-haired ensemble of power players in a Hollywood undergoing one of its periodic generational morphings. There’s Stewart, Carey Mulligan, Evan Rachel Wood, Amanda Seyfried, Rebecca Hall, Mia Wasikowska, Anna Kendrick, Emma Stone and Abbie Cornish, the nine actresses that VF has apparently defines as the new It Girls.

◊ ◊ ◊

It’s a bit of a stretch for at least two reasons. This isn’t the first time in the last three years that VF has coronated children of a lesser candlepower this way. Seyfried and Stewart made the cover back in long-ago August 2008, in a similarly-themed cover tease (“Hollywood’s New Wave”). Coming so soon after that investiture, it’s a little hard to see this as much more than canny marketing, and a shameless cheesecake pitch for newsstand sales in a sour economy.

And then there’s the other factor. It’s suspect enough leaving out the young men who are making a difference in Hollywood. Nothing like a little reverse gender bias to get people talking. The March VF cover is just as conspicuous for who else it leaves out. Gabourey Sidibe, Zoe Kravitz, Zoe Saldana, Jurnee Smollett, Jessica Alba, Lauren London. Women of color, all. Among others.

Dodai, writing at Jezebel, picked up on it: “VF's ‘Young Hollywood’ is much like the golden age of Hollywood: There was a fetishization of the lithe, gorgeous, virginal ingenue, whose virtues and ambitions were pure, and therefore desirable. You either wanted to be her or sleep with her. … her "All-American" good looks meant that she was a WASP or a fresh-faced farmgirl. Certainly not black, definitely not fat, and never both. Looking at the March 2010 issue, has anything changed? Even Evgenia Peretz's descriptions of the actresses — 'Ivory-soap-girl features,' 'patrician looks,' 'dewy, wide-eyed loveliness' — reinforce the idea that a successful actress is a pretty, aristocratic-looking (read: white) actress.”

Morninggloria, in Jezebel: “Caption for the cover shot: ‘You can’t join our sorority.’”

◊ ◊ ◊

You want to cut VF a break. After all, you only have to look back to their Hollywood issue of 2008 to see how VF can think outside the box: America Ferrara and Zoe Saldana graced that cover (inside the first fold, and not immediately visible on the newsstand, of course).

But as they say, that was so last century. Ironically, though, the real-life prospects for on-screen diversity have changed somewhat since 2008. It's curious that VF couldn’t find room for Sidibe, who’s up for an Oscar next week for her work in "Precious"; the Breck girls on the current VF cover will no doubt walk the red carpet on Oscar night ... probably right to their seats in the audience, and nowhere else.

Saldana, a solid actress with staying power, is one of the standouts in “Avatar,” the groundbreaking James Cameron film that's performed the challenging trick of both Changing the Way Movies Are Made and putting a$$e$ in theater seats. No room for her to repeat on the cover, apparently.

It’s just so inconsistent, so predictable, and predictably retrograde. DearConnie, writing in the Seattle Examiner, understands: “As someone of multirace who reads Vanity Fair, gotta say I was pretty taken aback by the fact they didn't even try or realize what message they were sending: Hollywood for the next decade looks like Hollywood since its inception.”

“A dream is a wish your heart makes,” goes the lyric from Disney’s “Cinderella.”

Maybe a monochromatic magazine cover is a wish a magazine makes.

The Douglass-Lincoln debates (Excerpted from PopMatters)

2010-02-28T01:42:00.000-08:00

Their lives were defined by what they opposed as much as by what they supported; they were connected in only the most general terms, shaped by slavery and imprisoned in the amber of our common assumptions.

Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln have been for generations two of the accessible saints of the American iconography. For black Americans, Douglass has been held high as the defining pre-civil rights era example of speaking truth to power. For Americans generally, Lincoln remains the president most responsible for holding a fractious nation together.

In recent years, Lincoln biographies from Doris Kearns Goodwin, James M. McPherson, and Ronald C. White, among others, have taken the wraps off old depictions of Lincoln, their nuanced investigations revealing fresh layers to the complex, driven, conflicted man who would become the 16th President of the United States. Readers of historical nonfiction haven’t been so lucky with biographies of Douglass, the runaway slave who transformed himself into a publisher, activist, and one of the most commanding orators of the American 19th century.

Douglass biographies have been fewer and farther between, and inevitably marginalized, to some degree, on the lower and distant shelves of the bookstore of the national narrative (with the other black studies books) in a kind of de libris historical segregation. The two figures are connected by slavery, the ‘‘peculiar institution’’ that would define them both. It makes sense that that institution should unite them literarily.

John Stauffer’s Giants brilliantly addresses this absence with an eloquent, muscular, compassionate, thoroughly readable conflation of two singular American lives, a biography of two intersecting lives whose grappling with the evil of slavery created a bond uncommon in American history, and almost as rare in American literature. ...

Read the rest at PopMatters

Tiger, Tiger, burning

2010-02-27T16:56:00.000-08:00

Just when you think the last shoe’s dropped in the Tiger Woods debacle, there’s another major sponsor heard from. Today, one week after Tiger Woods went before the cameras in his first appearance since his toweringly compartmentalized life exploded last Thanksgiving, Gatorade officially dropped Woods as a spokesman for its line of electrolyte replacement beverages.

“We no longer see a role for Tiger in our marketing efforts and have ended our relationship," a Gatorade spokeswoman said, according to The Associated Press. "We wish him all the best."

John_spray tweeted later in the day: “It woulda been weird to hear him say their slogan, "Is It In You?"

The Gatorade defection and its fallout were what the world’s greatest golfer must surely hope is the endgame to a sordid period and, sure as hell, the sand trap of his biography. But some have said that with last Friday’s mea culpa, he may have made things worse. Which raises the question of what more he’s expected to do relative to other misbehavers in the public square.

Breaking sports news video. MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL highlights and more.

Tiger’s phenomenal success in the world of golf, and his unprecedented reach into the sport’s folklore as an African American, has always made him a target and the object of ridicule in some corners. For black Americans, his willingness to equate his black heritage with the other ancestries that form his DNA has always been a sore spot, for whatever emotional reason. And for others, for Americans in general, the behind-the-hand attitude toward Tiger was just the boilerplate schadenfreude that the small-minded regularly impose on those more talented than they are.

So people had the long knives out when he stepped to the podium and apologized, again.

“I want to say to each of you, simply and directly, I am deeply sorry for my irresponsible and selfish behavior I engaged in.

I know people want to find out how I could be so selfish and so foolish. People want to know how I could have done these things to my wife, Elin, and to my children. And while I have always tried to be a private person, there are some things I want to say.

Elin and I have started the process of discussing the damage caused by my behavior. As Elin pointed out to me, my real apology to her will not come in the form of words; it will come from my behavior over time. We have a lot to discuss; however, what we say to each other will remain between the two of us.

I am also aware of the pain my behavior has caused to those of you in this room. I have let you down, and I have let down my fans. For many of you, especially my friends, my behavior has been a personal disappointment. To those of you who work for me, I have let you down personally and professionally. ...

“I was unfaithful. I had affairs. I cheated. What I did is not acceptable, and I am the only person to blame.

“I stopped living by the core values that I was taught to believe in. I knew my actions were wrong, but I convinced myself that normal rules didn't apply. I never thought about who I was hurting. Instead, I thought only about myself. I ran straight through the boundaries that a married couple should live by. I thought I could get away with whatever I wanted to. I felt that I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me. I felt I was entitled. Thanks to money and fame, I didn't have to go far to find them.

“I was wrong. I was foolish. I don't get to play by different rules. The same boundaries that apply to everyone apply to me.”

He was nervous, he was clipped, he was wooden; in a way, regardless of what he said, you can see why Gatorade cut him loose; it was the way he said it, furtive and edgy, eyes not focused, inner turmoil still obvious. It’s been reported that Tiger spoke with President Obama before his statement. If the president offered Tiger any talking points about talking, the golfer didn’t take his advice.

Some of the fallout has been pretty much predictable.

“I’ll be holding a press conference later today to express my regret at not having sex with many, many beautiful women,” tweeted Michael Ian Black.

“Today is the birthday of Copernicus. The first man to prove the world does not revolve round Tiger Woods. Happy Birthday Copey,” tweeted twitwit Craig Ferguson.

Jimmy Kimmel was merciless on ABC late-night, doing a takeoff on Tiger’s situation with a white tiger apologizing for eating Roy (of Siegfried & Roy).

Joslyn James, one of Tiger’s mistresses, sat crying shortly after watching Tiger speak, demanding that Tiger should personally apologize to her. Gloria Allred’s handkerchief slowly enters frame.

What’s more than a little disturbing at this point is the imprecision of the metrics by which we measure the sincerity of Tiger’s contrition, and therefore the metrics we’ll use to accept that contrition. That yardstick of tolerance is too elastic; seems there’s no standard, there’s no goal line. You get the feeling Tiger Woods could step to the podium once a month for a year, and there’d still always be something else demanded from him.

And the focus on Tiger, which both the facts and the culture demand, sidesteps the other players in this mess.

Tiger didn’t grab these women by the hair and throw them into the Escalade. They went willingly, they went with opportunistic forethought, visions of high life and dollar signs dancing in their hennaed heads. To broadly characterize these women as susceptible, gullible pawns thrusts a victimhood onto women collectively, and trades the factors of choice and personal responsibility for a default assumption of gullibility that, I'd say with confidence, most women in this country would reject out of hand.

◊ ◊ ◊

The building notion that Tiger should continue apologizing is problematic at a lot of levels. It suggests that we as a society don’t take him seriously, and it strongly suggests that we don’t take the very idea of apology seriously. Calls for more and more pounds of Tiger’s flesh short-circuit the relationship between apology and corrective action; they lock the accused into a holding pattern of endless apologies, none of which is ever considered enough.

Is it racial? That’s part of it, naturally. African Americans, and minorities generally have been subject to a kind of reductive physics in American life, expending more energy to achieve the same result. But the knives arrayed against Tiger have to do with the adoration of celebrity and those subject to its consequences at this time in the national life, regardless of race, color or creed. In an economy that’s never been this bad no matter how old you are reading this, there’s more malicious delight than usual right now in seeing the lifestyles of the rich and famous run aground in the driveway. For everyday people these days, rich people are a target of opportunity.

The damage done to Tiger Woods’ reputation and his status as a role model will be, in many ways, a permanent thing. Tiger knows he’ll be subject, one way or another, to the sideways stinkeye for the rest of his life. Those whispers, those snickers will always be there. But you watch: those corporate sponsors who sprinted away will wander back into the fold when the heat’s off and he’s got another Masters under his belt.

When those sponsors start drifting back in his direction, they’ll be ready to “move on.” And because they won’t drift back until there’s improvement in the national economy and the marketing-weather forecast for Tiger Woods ... when that happens, for everyone ... we’ll be ready to move on too. Watch and see.

We’re a judgmental nation. Fortunately, we’re also usually a forgetful one.

Image credits: Tiger Woods: pool image from speech. Joslyn James and Gloria Allred: Reuters.

The Blair House Project

2010-02-26T09:33:00.000-08:00

“I hope that this isn’t political theater,” President Obama said near the beginning of an event as eagerly awaited in Washington as a new James Levine production of “La Traviata” would be in Rome. For more than six hours on Thursday at the Blair House, across the street from the White House, the president met with Republican and Democratic senators and congressmen, for an unprecedented health-care summit meeting, televised for your convenience.

Despite Obama’s appeal, the Republicans (some initially reluctant to show up at all) appeared with talking points, soundbites and props, the stuff of theater at the ready. But by the end of the day, two things were obvious:

(1) The glum faces of Oklahoma Rep. Tom Coburn and Arizona Sen. John McCain strongly indicated that the Republicans had spent their last ammunition and are coming around to the high probability that the process of reconciliation — a straight Democratic party-line majority vote in the Senate — is the next formidable card to be played by the White House to advance the health-care agenda.

(2) The closing statements by President Obama, effectively holding the promise (or the threat) of reconciliation as a distinct possibility may be the best chance for the Obama White House to salvage a beleaguered health-care bill, and maybe the best chance to rescue an increasingly damaged reputation with the Democratic base.

◊ ◊ ◊

The Obama sang-froid was much in evidence, the president’s trademark cool displayed for much of the session. He hinted at where he was going at different times, telegraphing punches he knew the Republicans couldn’t dodge. And President Obama exercised his talent for rhetorical logjam removal: “I think the American people aren’t always that interested in the procedures inside the Senate on how we move this forward,” he said at one point.

The Republican pushback was predictable and hurt by generalities and imprecision. McCain, Obama’s old antagonist on the campaign trail, went at the president in some hazy, ad hominem attack for Obama’s alleged retreat on a campaign promise to put health care negotiations on C-Span. "We're not campaigning anymore," Obama said. "The election is over."

McCain grinned that grin laced with malice, and said that he was “reminded of that every day.” Who do you blame for that, pal?

And while McCain referred to the Senate bill’s 2,400 pages, House Minority Leader John Boehner said “this 2,700-page bill will bankrupt our country.” Historians and molecular physicists would be advised to check, but this may be the first time in the history of America — and the history of physical matter — that a legislative document actually changed in its actual size while lawmakers were in the act of debating its future.

◊ ◊ ◊

And leave it to the Republicans to play real small ball. “Mr. President,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) said at one point, “can I just interject one quick point here? Just in terms of trying to keep everything fair, which I know you want to do, to this point, the Republicans have had 24 minutes, the Democrats, 52 minutes. Let's try to have as much balance as we can.”

But that penny-ante, high-school-debate crap was, to invoke lawyerspeak, hardly dispositive. The disparity of speaking minutes may have as much to do with the fact that in the room at Blair House were Republicans who’d made up their minds before they got there that the whole thing was a waste of time, some of whom were no doubt prepared to act accordingly.

Mike Pence, the Indiana Republican Congressman and lately an ardent critic of the Obama health care agenda, proved as much when he went on the air before the summit was even finished. “What I think the American people have seen is almost a professor with a petulant group of students,” he said on MSNBC.

Boehner proved as much when he spoke to AOL News before the summit even started and made the case for scrapping the current bill.

And when the Republicans did speak, it was in the soundbites-and-talking-points style that’s characterized GOP identity for years, with one word or phrase used repeatedly to show just how on-message they were. The Democrats were prone to such rhetorical repetitions, too. But reading the transcript it’s clear the Democratic repeats were elaborations and nuance on strategy, more deeply layered and detailed than the Republicans’ strategic 3x5-card monte.

◊ ◊ ◊

The phrase “start over,” or its variants, was used at least half a dozen times by the GOP on Thursday. The Republican embrace of health-care incrementalism surfaced with frequent use of the phrase “step by step.”

There were Republican calls for a “clean sheet of paper,” another Republican favorite (although Illinois Rep. Peter Roskam, apparently having a childhood moment, proposed that the White House “take the Etch-a-Sketch” and begin again [“let’s do incremental things where there's common ground”] — maybe the first time health-care legislation has been so trivialized).

“It was synchronized stalling,” Chris Matthews said on MSNBC’s “Hardball.” “What a flaming embarrassment!”

The Republican tendency to embrace talking points extended to rote, nationalist praise. “This bill is a dangerous experiment with the best healthcare system in the world,” Boehner said.

Rep. John Barrasso of Wyoming said it, too: “I do believe we have the best health care system in the world.”

But the definition of something, anything, as The World’s Best necessarily establishes a universe wider than the few. You can’t have the World’s Best anything if the world — or in this case, the American people — has no real opportunity to experience what you’re talking about.

The world isn’t the primary pool of customers for that health-care system, the American people are. And if the World’s Best health-care system bankrupts the people who need it most, if the World’s Best health-care system is financially accessible to a subset of a subset of a subset of that nation’s population ... how good can it possibly be?

◊ ◊ ◊

Old habits are hard to break. As he’s done in the past, Obama made some feints toward bipartisan consensus. Essentially agreeing with the Republicans on incentivizing states to address medical malpractice issues, caps for malpractice lawsuits, and price transparency for medical services.

But by the end, the president’s line in the sand was clear. “Baby steps don’t get you to the place where people need to go. They need help right now. ...

“When I talk to the parents of children who don’t have health care because they’ve got diabetes or they’ve got some chronic heart disease, when I talk to small businesspeople who are laying people off because they just got their insurance premium ... they don’t want us to wait. They can’t afford another five decades.

“The truth of the matter is, politically speaking, there may not be any reason for Republicans to want to do anything. We can debate what our various constituencies think. ...

“If we saw significant movements, not just gestures … you wouldn’t need to start over because essentially everybody here knows what the issues are. And procedurally, it could get done fairly quickly. We cannot have another yearlong debate about this.

“The question I ask all of you is ... Is there enough serious effort that in a month’s time or a few weeks time or six weeks time, we could actually resolve something? And if we can’t, then I think we’ve got to go ahead and make some decisions — and that’s what elections are for. We have honest disagreements about the vision for the country and we’ll go ahead and test those out over the next several months until November.”

With that summary statement, President Obama deftly made the pivot from professor to street fighter. With those words, the Republicans were put on notice: With you or without you, we’re going ahead. Reconciliation, the last tool in the toolbox, may be the best tool in the toolbox.

The Republicans, a long time comfortable doubling down on assumptions that Obama would insist on Bipartisanship No Matter What, got a wake-up call Thursday. The Obama they thought they knew ain’t necessarily so anymore. The hangdog Republican expressions in the room said as much at the end of the day.

◊ ◊ ◊

“This is about a fundamental vision of government,” Democratic strategist Donna Brazile said afterwards on CNN. “The Democrats should not fear the future, they should not fear the November elections. They should lead, they should govern.”

And that may be the Democrats’ most effective weapon — a weapon that the Republicans at Blair House seemed to understand:

By losing their concerns over election defeats in November, the Democrats can move almost fearlessly. By indicating a willingness to go “all in” this hand, the Obama White House throws out the powerful suggestion that, vis-à-vis health care, the Democrats may have become that most dangerous political entity: one willing to stand on its principles as a party with nothing to lose but an election, and everything to gain in national credibility before an election.

◊ ◊ ◊

The Republicans manned the spin room from almost the minute it was over. But regardless of their efforts, it was obvious the Obama White House had a very good day on Thursday.

Harold Pollack, writing in the New Republic, understood how Obama addressed the political concerns of two national constituencies at once:

“A racially tinged conservative meme is circulating that President Obama delivers a great speech, but that he is all sizzle and no steak, a teleprompter slave. Nobody watching yesterday could believe that meme. The contrast in health policy expertise — and, at times, sheer intellect — between the President and his Republican interlocutors was almost embarrassing.

A less-toxic but also misleading meme is circulating among progressives that the President doesn't understand or sympathize with the plight of ordinary working people. That meme was debunked, too.”

Michigan Rep. John Dingell, lion of the House, put the bill and its prospects in perspective: “The last perfect legislation that was presented to mankind was delivered to the Israelis at the base of Mt. Sinai,” said Dingell, the second-longest serving member of Congress and present at the creation of the Democrats legislative drive for health-care in 1955.

“It was on stone tablets, written in fingers of God. Nothing like that has been presented to mankind since.

“What we are going to do is not perfect. But it sure will be better and it's going to ease a huge amount of pain and suffering at a cost, which we can afford ... ”

Dingell’s closing statement is as eloquent a call for progress, after almost a year of partisan wrangling, as you could ask for. Dingell knows what’s at stake. He clearly understands that phrase about the good not being held hostage to the perfect. What’s unknown now is whether House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and others in the Democratic leadership will bring every weapon to bear on advancing this legislation — and not let the good be held hostage to a hoped-for bipartisanship that will never, never materialize.

Obama’s closing statement made it clear: Once you get past the fear of losing an election, you might actually be able to govern. That thought has to be as liberating to the Democrats right now as it is abhorrent to the GOP. Now, with this ball very much in the Democrats’ court, we’ll see if they’ve got the balls to play to win.

Image credits: Obama top: Via Huffington Post. Obama, Kathleen Sebelius and McConnell: The White House. Etch A Sketch: Republished under GNY Free Documentation License v1.2. Dingell: Public domain.

'Wall Street 2': The Gekko also rises

2010-02-20T09:04:00.000-08:00

Cheer up: A diversion from fretting over the sad ephemera of your 401(k) statement will soon be available to you. Get ready to carve out a movie night sometime this spring or summer ... he’s baaaack, and he’s still the one you’ll love to hate, more now than you did 20 years ago. And with good reason.

Gordon Gekko, the suavely cynical investment buccaneer of Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street,” returns later this year in “Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps,” the long-awaited sequel to the 1987 film that typified the freewheeling Reagan era of the financial bazaar — the precursor to the financial temblor we’re climbing out from under today.

Michael Douglas, Oscar-winning producer (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) and current VOG for the NBC Nightly News, won the Oscar for best actor for his portrayal of Gekko, a ruthless Wall Street trader. The original ended with Gekko on his way to the slammer for an undetermined number of years.

Fast forward to what’s next. In Stone’s sequel, Gekko’s getting out of jail and doing so in high style.

One way or another, this is gonna be a lot of fun. And much of it will center around one player. Taking nothing away from Shia LeBeouf, Carey Mulligan ("An Education"), Frank Langella or Josh Brolin (George Bush in Stone’s “W”), the big draw here, the one who’ll put asses in the theater seats, is Michael Douglas.

He was always nothing less than entertaining in the original, his warped moral principles embodied in a coiffed, gregarious dynamo with a relentlessly cocksure charm. It should be great to see how Gekko the lion has mellowed after X years in the pen. Or if he’s mellowed: some images from the trailer suggest he’s up to his old moneyed tricks. And count on Stone to make a point or twelve about the very real connections between the Reagan-era economy and its hallmark of deregulation, and the fallout we’re enduring right now as a direct consequence of that deregulation.

Taking nothing away from Jason Reitman, George Clooney and “Up in the Air” — the Oscar-nominated film about a man sent around the country to fire people, a movie hailed as the perfect cinematic distillation of our current economic woes — but Oliver Stone may have the last word on his one. With Oliver’s usual twists to be expected, “WS2” is apparently set to scope out the big picture, to tell some story of the wider economy with a focus on the titans and knaves of Wall Street who make those firings necessary in the first place.

Joe the Engineer: An angry man in Texas

2010-02-19T08:34:00.000-08:00

For one brief white-hot moment, Joseph Andrew Stack — he’s already acquired the American nomenclature for evil, identified with all three of his names, like Lee Harvey Oswald or John Wilkes Booth — became the archetypal American: a doer, an achiever, someone willing to act on an idea and exert the energy to bring it to reality. The fact of that reality, of how he made his simmering passions explode to life, is more of a problem for the rest of us. Those of us who share some of his frustrations. Whether we admit it or not.

A little before 10 a.m. on Thursday, Stack, a 53-year-old software engineer nursing years-long outrage with the Internal Revenue Service, flew a single-engine plane from an airport in Georgetown, Texas, to Austin, about 30 miles away, and then angled the plane into the Echelon Building, a seven-story glass-faced structure where almost 200 IRS employees worked.

Stack died in the crash and/or the subsequent fireball and explosion, as well as at least one person in the building. And Stack didn’t detonate in half measures; he went all the way off, apparently setting fire to his home near the crash site before he flew out of the Georgetown airport.

Not long after the incident, which instantly roused memories of and connections of 9/11, federal officials took note of what appear to be Joe Stack’s last words: a long, rambling but fully articulated (if not reasoned) combination manifesto and suicide note that Stack apparently posted on a Web site earlier in the day.

Stack begins: “If you're reading this, you're no doubt asking yourself, ‘Why did this have to happen?’ The simple truth is that it is complicated and has been coming for a long time. The writing process, started many months ago, was intended to be therapy in the face of the looming realization that there isn't enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken.”

What follows is a tale of “the storm raging inside my head,” a bildungsroman animated by life as an independent contractor; frustration with the government; outrage with the recent bailouts on behalf of the “thugs and plunderers” in business and the government; personal false starts and thwarted hopes; retirement savings prematurely exhausted; divorce and bitterness; months of peanut butter and Ritz crackers as a staple diet; and the individual powerlessness driving his belief that “desperate times call for desperate measures.”

Some, uh, highlights:

“We are all taught as children that without laws there would be no society, only anarchy. Sadly, starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all. We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principals represented by its founding fathers. Remember? One of these was “no taxation without representation.” I have spent the total years of my adulthood unlearning that crap from only a few years of my childhood.” ...

“I remember reading about the stock market crash before the “great” depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn’t it ironic how far we’ve come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn’t have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it’s “business-as-usual”. Now when the wealthy fuck up, the poor get to die for the mistakes… isn’t that a clever, tidy solution.” ...

“I know I’m hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand. It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country, and it isn’t limited to the blacks, and poor immigrants. I know there have been countless before me and there are sure to be as many after. But I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change. I choose to not keep looking over my shoulder at “big brother” while he strips my carcass, I choose not to ignore what is going on all around me, I choose not to pretend that business as usual won’t continue; I have just had enough.”

 
◊ ◊ ◊

Cybesq, commenting at The Huffington Post, makes an irrefutable point: “You have to love the thought process of lunatics. He rails against the rich, claims they control the government, and then flies his plane into a building of modestly paid government workers.”

But Jason, commenting on Stack’s manifesto at Business Insider, saw something else: “How can anyone call this man insane? It looks to me that his hostility has been building up for several years. Insane implies you are not in control, this man, it seems, was very deliberate in his actions. Thankfully he didn’t kill a bunch of people. Sounds like he tried to "fudge" his taxes, at least one year, you cannot f#ck with IRS, WARS ARE EXPENSIVE! and ‘somebody’ has to pay for them. Watch out people, it's only going to get worse. ...”

James weighed in, also at Business Insider: “He was extremely eloquent and a long way from a crackpot … perhaps he sees the matrix as it really is, perhaps you need to look at what is really going on. Today Wachovia announced that they have only foreclosed on 1% of the people in default.... the country is hurting because of the big banks and Wall Street, and nobody is protecting the average citizen. In fact, the Supreme Court just ruled that corporations can put as much money as they like behind any candidate that they feel.”

◊ ◊ ◊

That’s what so scary about Stack’s mad cri de coeur. Driven to rage by government’s protective instincts for bailing out the airlines and bailing out the banks, but at least appearing to put the needs of people on the backburner, Stack had a personal fuse that was clearly burning white-hot. But the primer cord of his personal and professional lives’ capacity to adapt to change is not so different from our own.

Stack is hardly the first American faced with scorching the earth of his own 401(k) today, years ahead of schedule, to make ends meet. He’s not the first one to be at the mercy of a job market whose bleakness for everyday people seems to grow exponentially month by month (regardless of what the Official Numbers say). He’s not the first to condemn the coziness of American government and American business.

What separates Joe the Frustrated Engineer from the rest of us is either the absence of that one incendiary spark — the big That Does It moment in which a dangerous idea metastasizes overnight, or faster, into a dangerous action — or the absence of willingness to actualize that rage, to nourish that spark with gasoline. For most of us, putting one foot in front of the other, going through the daily grind and looking for something, anything resembling a lifeline, is work enough.

Sometimes, hanging on in quiet desperation is the American way. Sometimes, for the Joe Stacks of America, it’s not.

◊ ◊ ◊

It’s anyone’s guess how Joe Stack’s death will be manipulated for political gain. The fire was still burning at that building in Austin and the blogosphere was already speculating on how the Tea Party and its anti-government champions may adopt Joe the Engineer as its patron saint of rebellion, probably to be mentioned in the same reverential language as that reserved for the John Birch Society and the Posse Comitatus.

At HuffPost, kanaka5000notvote4bloomberg, observed: “I heard the teabaggers and the morons at the CPAC convention had a moment of silence for their hero stack.

The New York Daily News reported Friday on some early reactions:

"Finally an American man took a stand against our tyrannical government that no longer follows the Constitution," wrote Emily Walters of Louisville, Ky. …

“Joe Stack, you are a true American Hero and we need more of you to make a stand,” tweeted Greg Lenihan, an engineer in San Diego.

Joe the Plumber, pick up your last check at the cashier’s window. Your services are no longer required.

◊ ◊ ◊

There’s no minimizing the towering criminality of his actions on Thursday morning. What separated Joe Stack from the rest of us is the willingness to abide by the social contract, and to accept the value and importance of human life. When you cross that line and venture into the land of the beasts, you get what you deserve. Like having your name invoked with the middle name attached.

Stack’s action on Thursday has been characterized in the media with the word “insane” more than once. Without a mental evaluation, without Stack receiving the “therapy” he spoke of, we’ll never know.

But dubious clinical interpretations aside, insanity isn’t what’s communicated in this 3,000-word manifesto. More disturbingly, what’s communicated is despair, the deep, paralyzing existential despair that in point of fact none of us is that far away from — the same despair millions of Americans wrestle with every day.

Victoria Casseday, commenting in HuffPost, sees this: “The most dangerous species on earth are human beings who feel there is nothing left to lose and all hope is lost. Unfortunately, there are a lot more of them out there just lying in wait of that trigger, that straw that breaks the back of the camel.”

Image credits: Joseph Stack: Via CBS News. Joe Stack Twitter reaction: Via exiledonline.com.

Drinking the Kool-Aid Tea

2010-02-17T20:44:00.000-08:00

In what may be the most egregious kowtow of a major political party to a political nonentity in at least recent American history, Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, met on Tuesday with members of Tea Party WDC, maybe the most formally established manifestation of the series of ad hoc conservative protesters and extremist malcontents that have rallied under the Tea Party banner for nearly a year.

Steele reportedly huddled with about 50 Tea Party leaders for more than four hours, discussing their angles of attack on the Obama White House, what Republicans and Tea Partiers have in common, and what they don’t have in common, in the runup to the 2010 midterms.

“The chairman believes it is extremely important to listen to this significant grassroots movement and work to find common ground in order to elect officials that will protect these principles,” RNC spokesperson Katie Wright said Tuesday to The Washington Post, offering an olive branch the size of a tree to the cohort of American conservatives that could, maybe, be a force in November.

We may be months away from a political scenario once thought improbable but more and more likely all the time, a variation on the storyline of “King of Hearts,” the 1966 Philipe de Broca film that posits what happens when the inmates run the asylum, and the town it’s located in.

◊ ◊ ◊

The devil and the details are inseparable. Even as the Tea Party makes its mainstream move (a unifying flag-bedecked logo, spokesmen with titles), it’s forced to come to grips with issues that have complicated its existence from the jump.

Credibility has been a problem for the Tea Party set. To this point, the TP’s followers have been characterized by a noisy intolerance that traffics in the symbols of don’t-tread-on-me populism married to silly exercises of self-identification (Tea Party members walked around last April wearing tea bags) and virulent intolerance (others carried signs that equated President Obama with Hitler).

To now, it’s been an orange-pekoe protest whose buffoonery contained just enough extremist rhetoric to make it something to take at least semi-seriously. But it’s hardly enough to suggest it could be a political game-changer for the broad cross-section of Americans who vote.

Another problem for the Tea Party (really, stemming from the first one) has to do with the fraud of its genesis. When the first large-scale Tea Party protests began last April 15, in demonstrations from Oak Harbor, Wash., to Sag Harbor, N.Y., they were heralded as the bellwether of a new grassroots, bottom-up movement in America.

The facts were something else again: A parade of K Street lobbyists and government insiders like former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich were instrumental in sparking and bankrolling the protests; and Fox News, the conservatives’ media arm, broadcast the Tea Bag Day rallies from various places around the country.

It’s impossible to believe that the fingerprints of such conservative powers could have disappeared from the movement in less than a year. The populist thrust of this movement was blunted from the start, and still is, by the involvement of the same government and corporate insiders the movement was meant to protest against in the first place.

◊ ◊ ◊

What’s the Tea Party’s reason for being? From the start, most people couldn’t see much difference between the bullet-point credo of the Tea Partiers and that of the Republicans. Even today, Americans still can’t find daylight between their mutual positions. The GOP and the Tea Partiers are in lock step on major issues like tax cuts, smaller government and the disturbingly imprecise notion of “returning to American values."

With no substantive differences in their basic philosophy, then, the TP movement is faced with a question: What can it hope to do in Washington that the GOP can’t do with more resources, more lobbyists, more like-minded partisans already on Capitol Hill? Carving out a distinction when there’s not much distinction is a huge challenge if you define yourself as an independent grassroots political insurgency — like the Tea Partiers do.

That’s what the Tea Partiers have tried to do: articulate distinctions between themselves and the Republicans; they’re doing what they can to make their claim of independence stick. “We're not a function of the Republican party,” one D.C. Tea Party member said last April, and said for a damn good reason. Implicit in that statement is an inescapable fact: If the Tea Party finds common cause with the Republicans, the Tea Party has absolutely no reason to exist.

◊ ◊ ◊

An equally foundational problem for the TP movement has been and is its willingness to accept, or certainly tolerate, the very people that most Americans don’t identify with. For almost a year now, the Tea Party has aligned itself with birthers, death-panel believers, ardent nativists and Palinistas that have swelled the TP ranks, and whose approach to politics hasn’t been much more than ad hominem attacks and character assassination.

Now, in a new bid for legitimacy, the Tea Party movement has to figure out what to do with the yahoos that formed its early base, even as it tries to tack toward wider mainstream acceptance — the only thing that could possibly make them a potent political force.

The GOP’s in much the same box. Having tried to leverage the anger of the TP movement to its own advantage, Republicans now face a group whose bid for political independence means throwing the Republicans under the same bus as the Democrats, as a matter of principle. The fact that many in the Tea Party’s ranks are really disaffected Republicans or right-leaning independent voters is hugely problematic for the GOP; they don’t cut into the Democrats’ voting bloc nearly as much as they do the Republicans’.

In positioning itself as a band apart, a bloc of conservative voters the GOP can’t take for granted, the Tea Party movement highlights just how potentially dangerous it is — to the GOP.

Which brings us to the four-hour courtship that took place on Tuesday.

◊ ◊ ◊

Presumably what makes the Tea Party distinctive is its mission statement, a snapshot of which is on their Web site: the party announces that it’s “for and by Americans that want to preserve, protect and promote freedom.”

But since that’s certainly the boilerplate objective of Democrats, Republicans and any political party, you wonder how much traction the Tea Party Nation can generate by November with a glittering centerpiece of a generality like that.

That generality hurts the Tea Party movement. For many Americans, its lack of policy specifics — symbolized by TP darling Sarah Palin, who addressed the first Tea Party convention last week with her political credo scribbled on her left hand, like a grocery list — suggests there’s not much there there, that the TP movement’s sole reason for being is protest for its own sake.

Leave it to the Republicans to ride to the rescue. The GOP, still emerging from the long time in the wilderness that began with Barack Obama’s inauguration, offered specifics with symbolism on Wednesday when about 80 conservative leaders convened on the former estate of George Washington in Mount Vernon, Va., to announce a manifesto restating principles rooted in “constitutional conservatism.”

The so-called Mount Vernon Statement, coming on the eve of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference, will have company. An early version of the Tea Party Patriots’ Contract From America, a prepositional tweak on Gingrich’s 1994 Contract With America, will be released when the three-day CPAC convention starts, Thursday at D.C.’s Washington Marriott Wardsman Park Hotel.

◊ ◊ ◊

There are already plans for the second Tea Party convention, now set for Las Vegas in mid July. We can guess that’s when the TP movement will start to concretize its beliefs with real policy proposals, not just boilerplate bromides.

Back in 2004, in the runup to that year’s presidential election, the GOP frantically marketed itself as a “big tent” organization, one that would accommodate Americans across the political spectrum. That thinking’s been echoed since by Steele and others in the Republican leadership — even as other Republicans have embraced the idea of thinning the herd, separating the true believers from the fifth columnists (otherwise known as “moderates” and "RINOs").

We’ll watch closely as conservatives grapple with their latest existential dilemma: Do the Republicans grant the Tea Party movement admission to their big tent, or do they sit by and watch as the TP crowd puts up a tent of their own?

And if the Tea Party decides to build that tent, will anyone show up to see what’s inside?

Image credits: Tax Day 2009 protester: Via MSNBC. Gingrich: KyleCassidy, republished under GNU Free Documentation License. Obama protest sign: Unknown. Palin: Via C-SPAN.

Palm Palin: A hand job and its consequences

2010-02-10T23:40:00.000-08:00

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin may be either the most daringly self-inventive political figure on the American scene or just the one most desperately in need of a clue. From making the mavericky decision to quit her state post (vacating a power position of some leverage if she really wanted to be president) to writing a roguey book that nonetheless made her a millionaire in as close to overnight as this economy allows, Palin is carving out a reputation as a Rashomon presence in our political culture: adored or reviled, depending on your perspective.

Two recent events bear that out all over again. On Feb. 6 at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville, Palin addressed the first Tea Party Convention, a gathering of conservative iconoclasts, ideologues and malcontents for whom the Republican Party is, for now, apparently not conservative enough. Palin, a darling of the Tea Party set, vaulted into another variation of her set speech:

“Very good to be here in Tennessee, the Volunteer State. It’s the home of good country music and good southern barbeque, and…great to be at the Tea Party Convention. I guess down here, that’s some southern sweet tea. And you know, up in Alaska, we have a smaller version of Tea Party up there, and we call it ice tea.

“And I am a big supporter of this movement. I believe in this movement. Got lots of friends and family in the lower forty-eight who attend these events, and across this country, just knowing that this is the movement and that America is ready for another revolution, and you are a part of this. ...

“This is about the people ... and it's a lot bigger than any charismatic guy with a TelePrompter,” Palin said at one point, making a reference to Obama's use of TelePrompters.

But something shows up on the replays of her Nashville speech. At one point, when her left hand is momentarily open, it’s visible: there are talking points clearly written on her left hand in ink:

Energy
Budget cuts [“budget” crossed out, replaced by]
Tax cuts
Lift America’s spirits

Independent journalist Stefan Sirucek, writing in The Huffington Post, offers a clarification:

“The notes most likely weren't for her speech, for which she used prepared remarks, but for the Q&A session that followed, during which she glanced at the hand in question.

“But in my opinion that's even worse.

“There were no specifics on there, just general concepts and things she supports.

“The takeaway is that this presidential contender apparently can't remember her supposed core principles and needs a cheat-sheet when simply asked about her beliefs.

To quote Charlie Brown: Good grief.”

◊ ◊ ◊

Jotting crib notes on one’s hand is nothing new for public speakers. It’s usually done to spur a speaker’s recall of salient points to be elaborated on at length and in depth. What’s so problematic for Palin is how this plays into the long-building narrative that she doesn’t think on her feet that well.

And what was written — a clutch of bullet-point words and phrases — only superficially dovetailed with anything approaching a policy statement or an original political philosophy. The handwritten notes and the address they stemmed from had only the scarcest detail and insight. They point to how Palin thinks in bromides and slogans, skimming the surface of the nation’s most important issues.

The Tea Party crowd assembled in Nashville wouldn’t have cared that night; they greeted her with rapturous applause, and the kind of automatic hosannas professing an appeal that continues not in spite of the mainstream’s denigration of Palin, but because of it.

◊ ◊ ◊

A new poll released near the same time as Palin’s hand job indicates that the country as a whole is a lot less charitable. A Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted between Feb. 4 and Feb. 8 found that 52 percent of Republicans say she’s not fit to be president.

Among the general American population, 71 percent of people say she is unqualified for the gig — an 11 percent increase in unfavorables just since November.

A Feb 1-3 Gallup Poll puts it another way. Naming their preferences for the 2012 derby, 14 percent of Republicans or Republican-leaning voters — independents in all but name — support former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for the presidency. Fourteen percent is hardly a ringing endorsement, but at this early stage and no firm field of contenders, it’s pretty much expected.

But it’s striking that, after her furious media exposure since the 2008 camapign (a best-selling book, a job as a Fox News analyst, numerous magazine covers and mentions) only 11 percent of those voters in the Gallup survey back a Palin campaign in ’12.

That response could be based as much on disbelief in her political acumen; in some ways it could be their way of saying that right now, Palin’s overexposed, a light burning twice as bright for half as long.

◊ ◊ ◊

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Palin’s problem, now and in the ’08 GOP debacle, has been having the ability to build a consensus of like-minded partisans, few of whom have a like mind to begin with. Her initial post-2008 support from regular Republicans smitten with the promise of a new and attractive face has fragmented into backing from the Tea Partiers, whose birther-fueled hate is hardly a platform for a springboard to a national campaign, let alone a shot at a national victory.

And Palin herself speaks in such passive-aggressive, flag-bedecked generalities, she’s created a following built around the flimsiest outlines of a political philosophy. She’s the Great & Powerful Oz from the Yukon.

And since for the most part her talking points dovetail with those of the Republicans — tax cuts, rein in government spending, fidelity to GOP social tripwire issues — the question for the rock-ribbed GOP crowd and independents alike is simple: Why fool around with a Republican Lite when they can have the real thing?

The fact that at this point Romney leads any hypothetical pack of Republican contenders is important. If he’d had a sharper message and been a more inspiring messenger, Romney might well have been the Republican nominee for president in 2008. As it is now, from the standpoint of personal achievement, government service and political credibility, Romney’s electables dwarf Palin’s by orders of magnitude. There’s not enough room on both of her hands to write the reasons why.

Image credits: Palin: Reuters/Josh Anderson. Palin left hand: Unknown. 2012 poll snapshot: Gallup Poll.

No. Hell naw. Absolutely not. Not a chance. Never in hell.

2010-02-09T05:13:00.000-08:00

Fat Sunday

2010-02-08T13:38:00.000-08:00

We interrupt the regularly scheduled joyous hysteria visiting New Orleans on Fat Tuesday with an early bulletin: The New Orleans Saints — a team and a collective metaphor for the city it represents — won Super Bowl XLIV tonight.

That’s not a dispatch from the bizzarro world, as anyone who’s watched this spirited, inspired, talented team win and win and win all season already knows. It was the realest of real deals: 44 days after Christmas, 44 years after the Saints organization was first awarded an NFL franchise, the former whipping boy of the NFL won Super Bowl No. 44, defeating the Indianapolis Colts 31-17.

Fat Tuesday, Feb. 16, was already on the city’s calendar. You can call tonight Fat Sunday. Laissez les bon temps roulez, tout de suite.

◊ ◊ ◊

In a game that had analysts quietly licking their chops at the prospect of coronating Colts quarterback Peyton Manning as Perhaps the Greatest QB of All Time, the Saints spoiled the Colts party with one of their own.

Saints QB Drew Brees mixed it up the hard way, battling back despite an early 10-0 deficit, grinding it out play after play. The Saints combined dogged but spirited offense with opportunistic defense and Garrett Hartley, a field-goal kicker whose points after seemed almost laser-guided.

Saints head coach Sean Payton, who combined undeniable coaching skills with the guts of a burglar and the soul of a riverboat gambler, took risks in different ways throughout the game. Using everything from a smart (and successful) coach’s challenge to a timely reverse to the very act of gambling on Brees (who underwent shoulder surgery after the 2005 season) in the first place, Payton proved he wouldn’t play by the books.

It was most obvious tonight when the Saints, scoring a Hartley field goal in the second quarter to trail 10-6, started the second half with an onside kick.

A pre-fourth quarter onside kick, in the Super Bowl. Find that in the damn playbook. Who pulls shit like that? Payton’s crew does, and the Indianapolis Colts (anticipating the deep kick for a runback) were every bit as surprised as the TV analysts and the crowd at Florida’s SunLife Stadium. The Saints recovered the ball and started the second half of the game with a quick touchdown, and a serious shot to the psyche of the Colts. ESPN said it was the first successfully completed onside kick before the fourth quarter in Super Bowl history.

◊ ◊ ◊

Manning was off his feed much of the night; at times on the sidelines he seemed sullen, rattled and maybe even angry. And the Colts as a team were less than the sum of their well-oiled machine parts. The feared Colts defensive end Dwight Freeney spent much of the fourth quarter sidelined, nursing a still-healing torn ligament in his right ankle, offering himself as a testing aid to the trainers who practiced their taping skills on that ankle the rest of the game.

Little by little the tide turned and stayed turned. Hartley makes another field goal from deep space. Brees hits Jeremy Shockey for a TD that gives them the lead. Payton, bold again, successfully challenges the ruling that Lance Moore had not scored on the 2-point conversion. Saints 24-17.

Meanwhile, Colts kicker Matt Stover misses one from 51 yards out. Colts receiver Pierre Garcon drops a pass; later Garcon was called for offensive pass interference. In the aggregate, the Colts played a decent game, despite some key mistakes that on the whole weren’t more than any other team might post on any given Sunday.

But this was The Super Bowl. The Indianapolis Colts, who had posted stellar numbers all season en route to the best win-loss record in the NFL, had been playing like supermen. They picked the wrong game to turn into mere mortals.

It was all distilled in the last three minutes of the game. Down 24-17, Manning and the Colts mounted a feverish last-minute drive. Manning makes a short pass across the middle, a throw intended for Reggie Wayne. Not today. Looking for the main chance, Saints defensive back Tracy Porter intercepts the pass, and returns it 75 yards for a touchdown.

Game, set, match, title, party.

◊ ◊ ◊

It was hard not to be torn by deep, emotional — and, yeah, racial — affinities either way you placed your bets. You wanted to side with Indianapolis Colts head coach Jim Caldwell, one of only five rookie head coaches to reach the Super Bowl, and one of only three African American coaches (Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith are the others) to get to the big show.

But this year the stakes were bigger than victory for a team, more so than in any other Super Bowl in recent memory. What was at stake for New Orleans was its sense of itself, its idea of the possible four and a half years after the ravages of Hurricane Katrina.

In the days and weeks that followed the worst domestic meteorological event of our time, many people had written off New Orleans, came to the conclusion that the city couldn’t be saved, that its days as a major port and arterial for commerce, source of a proud gumbo of varied cultures and maverick traditions, and the birthplace of jazz were numbered.

Indianapolis wanted this victory. New Orleans needed it like a body needs a soul, and the Saints knew it. “We didn’t just win for ourselves,” the Saints’ Jonathan Vilma told ESPN, echoing what others on the team had said. “We won for the whole city of New Orleans.”

And not to belabor the racial angle, but the Saints win was a definite, undeniable jolt to the psyche of African Americans throughout the country. The ways that a proud, capable, resilient, once-and-future predominantly black American city could be seemingly on the brink of extinction and battle back not just to survive but to dominate is nothing less than a distillation of the story of black Americans.

In a time of black unemployment rates almost twice the national average, in a period in which black families face foreclosure more often and more quickly than others, the Saints achievement is an emotionally anodyne event.

◊ ◊ ◊

Maybe the Saints just got tired of the whisper campaigns. There was a sense that some people, maybe even a lot of people, had dismissed the Saints chances to win this thing before the game even started. It wasn’t the fact that Manning’s parents and younger brother Eli were in one of the boxes watching the game, ready to celebrate Peyton’s investiture. That was a family thing, and the Manning family roots extend deep into New Orleans’ history (patriarch Archie Manning used to be the Saints QB).

It was … other things. The betting line was against the Saints. Before the game, the oddsmakers at online super-sportsbook SBGglobal.com had the Colts as four-point favorites; that was pretty much the spread from almost the moment the Saints beat the Vikings two weeks earlier. The Sporting News had anointed the Colts before the fact.

Hell, even the apes got into the act: On Friday, Kutai, an orangutan at the Oregon Zoo in Portland, picked the Colts to win at the zoo’s yearly football forecast event, on the basis of T-shirt selection. The zoo said the Kutai Sports Book was 4 for 5 in earlier Super Bowl picks.

And then there’s Fuel, the new multigrain cereal spinoff of the Wheaties brand, with an initial packaging run that includes the pictures of athletes on the box, including Kevin Garnett, Albert Pujols and … Peyton Manning. It’s the fruition of an ad campaign that started months ago, an ad campaign that apparently never considered the idea that Drew Brees might be one of the faces of the new breakfast of champions.

The good folks at General Mills might want to add a Saint to that whole-grain pantheon right about now.

◊ ◊ ◊

But all that’s, well, water under the bridge. New Orleans was a city that needed a psychic shot in the arm as much as anything else. It got that voodoo vaccination tonight, winning a contest — our national contest — whose outcome really wasn’t as close as the score suggests. “New Orleans is back,” Saints owner Tom Benson said, and who’d disagree?

Speaking of which: As a team in a city deeply animated by music, maybe the Saints got a high-sign from the band that played the halftime show. The Who, that enduring British band of the 60’s, played one of its classics, “Who Are You,” whose title is just another way of invoking the Saints’ rallying cry: “Who dat?”

In the annals of professional football, like in every other part of our vast cultural weave, we know good and damn well Who Dat is now.

Image credits: Saints 2009 schedule: Via Stats LLC. Saints logo: New Orleans Saints/National Football League. Jim Caldwell: Donald Miralle/Getty Images. Wheaties Fuel box: via mrbreakfast.com.

The new Candy Crowley

2010-02-05T16:55:00.000-08:00

CNN’s ultra-reliable Washington political reporter Candy Crowley has had a little work done in recent months, and the network she works for is making some changes too. The relationship between the two may or may not say a lot about the, uh, shape and complexion of the TV news business.

For anyone who’s watched Crowley over the years, the change between Crowley, say, during the 2008 presidential campaign and this year’s model is striking. Physically striking. Simply put, Crowley has lost a significant amount of weight.

“It's stunning to me that something I consider so separate and apart from what I do for a living has taken up so much space in some people's thoughts. I am a hard-news journalist. That is what I do,” she told the Los Angeles Times in November.

How was it done? The Times James Rainey reports the details on Crowley’s downsizing: “There has been no Lap-Band. No gastric bypass. No surgery at all. Rather, Crowley said, she has been dieting, swimming and working out, sometimes with a trainer, since last December.”

“And, in a change she thinks has made the biggest difference, she has taken up Transcendental Meditation. A couple of times a day, Crowley escapes her break-neck schedule to settle into what the TM website describes as a ‘natural state of restful alertness.’

“ ‘I feel great physically. I feel really good,’ the newswoman [said]. "I'm lighter now in a lot of ways.’”

◊ ◊ ◊

Fast forward to 2010, and change comes fast: Crowley, a 22-year veteran of the network, was named the new anchor of CNN’S “State of the Union” Sunday morning program, succeeding John King, who moves to a new 7 PM newscast on the network, replacing "Lou Dobbs Tonight," which blessedly went off the air, along with its nativist windbag host, in November. Crowley takes over officially on Feb. 7.

“Candy's rare combination of shrewd insight and healthy irreverence for the games politicians play has made her one of the most honored political journalists and a cult figure among CNN viewers," CNN/US President Jon Klein said in an announcement. "Every Sunday she'll translate Washington-speak into plain English that every American can understand, as she has been doing better than any reporter on the beat for decades.”

All of which is true enough, but given television’s predilections for cosmetic consistency and younger women in the studio, some have wondered — perhaps unfairly — if Crowley would have landed such a plum gig without making some concessions to TV’s bimbette obsession.

“Would I have gotten the job without having lost the weight? I don't know. That's an X factor," she said Friday to Gail Shister at TVNewser. "Does the refrigerator light stay on when you close the door? We'll never know."

◊ ◊ ◊

Despite the unfortunate refrigerator metaphor — and no, Candy, the light goes off when you close the fridge door; if yours doesn’t it’s time to step up to a better fridge — Crowley was on point in telling Shister that the “young, blonde thin” woman anchor as default cable-news personality may no longer be the preoccupation it's been in the past.

“I readily admit I'm not the most obvious pick, from a purely cosmetic point of view,” she told Shister. “I'm not going to argue that when you turn on the TV, you basically get young, blonde, thin women. This is changing.”

Well, yeah, some. But not very fast. Now that the glass ceiling has been at least pierced for the YBT (young, blonde & thin) demographic, it’s time to see more advances with other groups.

Tamron Hall, a stunning, competent, stunningly competent MSNBC midday anchor, is one of the few cable-news reporters both female and African American — a combination that seems to be a challenge for the suits in high places to get their heads around. Hall had some company until last year, when her black male counterpart, Carlos Watson, was suddenly absented from MSNBC. Now Hall’s the one shining exception to a rule in cable TV that’s gotten almost too familiar.

For Crowley, her ascension to Sunday-morning gasbag referee was justly deserved. “I think I have the credentials to do this job,” Crowley told Shister. “This company has talked about my credentials first, last and always. I got the job because I'm the best person for the job.” No argument there.

Crowley, who told Shister she lost five dress sizes, inherits a show that’s lost some serious weight of its own, being trimmed from a four-hour Sunday parade float to a manageable hourlong program. It all suggests that CNN is in makeover mode. Here’s hoping that CNN’s initiative is contagious, and other professional journalists whose personal optics are outside TV’s discomfort zone get the same opportunity.

Image credits: Crowley, CNN logo: CNN. Hall: MSNBC.

Sistuhs’ trifecta

2010-02-01T21:23:00.000-08:00

Say what you will, this weekend was a great one to be an African American woman. And just in time for Black History Month. Three big events of the weekend just ended have rocked our world, whether we know it or not, in ways we haven’t fully absorbed yet. It was the kind of 1! 2! 3! cascade of cultural advancements that strongly suggest what more and more of us are thinking all the time: this is a sistuh’s world. We of the testosterone persuasion may just be living in it.

On Saturday Serena Williams won her second consecutive Australian Open, and her fifth overall, defeating Justine Henin 6-4, 3-6, 6-2 (in her comeback bid), tying Billie Jean King for Aussie Open victories, and vaulting her ahead of such champions as Evonne Goolagong Cawley and Chris Evert.

On Sunday Serena and sister Venus Williams won their second consecutive Australian Open doubles match, their 11th Grand Slam doubles championship.

The sisters Williams thus cemented an already solid hold on the annals of modern sports history, and Serena pretty much fully redeemed herself for that ‘lil street eruption on the court at the U.S. Open last year. Hey, passion happens; playing down under, Serena channeled it into a convincing win for the record books.

On Saturday in Las Vegas, Caressa Cameron, a broadcast journalism student from Fredericksburg, Va., was crowned Miss America 2010, becoming the eighth black Miss America in the pageant's 89-year history. Cameron, all of 22, bested her opponents in the swimsuit, evening gown, talent and interview categories. She pockets a $50,000 scholarship and will soon inherit the travel schedule of a truly frequent flyer.

And oh yeah, on Sunday night, Beyonce Knowles made musical history at the Grammy Awards when she won six Grammy awards, the most for any female recording artist in the history of the awards.

Mrs. Hova swept the major categories, including Song of the Year, Best R&B Song, and Best Female R&B Vocal Performance for “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)”; Best Female Pop Vocal Performance (“Halo”), Best Traditional R&B Vocal Performance (“At Last,” Beyonce's shimmering version of the Etta James classic); and Best Contemporary R&B Album “I AM...SASHA FIERCE.”

Serena! Caressa! Beyonce! All in all, a sweet cultural trifecta, and given the state of the overall economy (and the black American economy), one of the few bright spots in a winter whose discontent never seems to end.

Bearding the elephants

2010-01-31T23:08:00.000-08:00

The chameleon we call American politics moulted on Friday afternoon, changed for the better, right along with at least the short-term fortunes of the Obama administration. Reeling from both the perception that it was off track in pursuit of its domestic agenda and the reality of numerous opinion polls pointing deep south, the Obama White House, and the Democrats generally, have been in a kind of torpor, a seeming numb helplessness to the Republican forces arrayed against them. Despite being the majority party.

So much of the opposition to Obama initiatives had been deployed by the conservative press and well out of earshot of the president himself. They talk about him like a dog when he’s not around. Which is what made what happened on Friday so flat-out historic.

At the invitation of the Republicans, President Obama attended a Republican House lawmakers’ retreat in Baltimore with the intent of answering questions from the group on his policy proposals, and the legislative and procedural logjams the Republicans have erected from almost the start of his administration.

The Republicans, no doubt emotionally buoyed by the big Scott Brown win in Massachusetts, doubled down on chutzpah: They agreed to televise the event. “The Republicans agreed to let TV cameras inside, resulting in an extended, point-by-point interchange that was almost unprecedented in U.S. politics, except perhaps during presidential debates,” the Associated Press said.

“At times it seemed more like Britain's ‘question time’ -- when lawmakers in the House of Commons trade barbs with the prime minister -- than a meeting between a U.S. president and members of Congress,” AP reported.

But the feast of president under magnifying glass the Republicans were expecting turned out to be something else again. With a deft rhetorical approach by turns lawyerly and fraternal, tough and charitable, President Obama essentially called Bullshit on the Republican politics of obstructionism, and bearded the elephants in their lair.

◊ ◊ ◊

Obama had good reason to feel buoyed himself. He’d just come off his first State of the Union address, one that combined real solid doable proposals ($30 billion to small businesses, for one) with the high rhetorical flourishes we’ve come to expect from the most verbally gifted president we’ve had in a while.

But there was something else. At the State of the Union, Obama chided Republican lawmakers, gently but clearly castigating them for blocking or hobbling all of his most pressing domestic policy objectives. Obama was calling them out on Wednesday. He finished that process on Friday.

In his opening remarks, Obama criticized what he said was a Washington culture driven by opinion polls and nonstop political campaigns.

“I've said this before, but I'm a big believer not just in the value of a loyal opposition, but in its necessity. Having differences of opinion, having a real debate about matters of domestic policy and national security -- and that's not something that's only good for our country, it's absolutely essential.

“... The only thing I don't want -- and here I am listening to the American people, and I think they don't want either -- is for Washington to continue being so Washington-like. I know folks, when we're in town there, spend a lot of time reading the polls and looking at focus groups and interpreting which party has the upper hand in November and in 2012 and so on and so on and so on. That's their obsession.

“And I'm not a pundit. I'm just a President, so take it for what it's worth. But I don't believe that the American people want us to focus on our job security. They want us to focus on their job security.”

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Obama then backed the Republicans into a corner on one of their signature platforms — tax cuts — by essentially repeating what he’d said in the State of the Union.

Under his plan, “[e]mployers would get a tax credit of up to $5,000 for every employee they add in 2010. They'd get a tax break for increases in wages, as well. So, if you raise wages for employees making under $100,000, we'd refund part of your payroll tax for every dollar you increase those wages faster than inflation. It's a simple concept. It's easy to understand. It would cut taxes for more than 1 million small businesses.”

“So I hope you join me. Let's get this done.”

Then came the first confrontational haymaker. “[T]he idea of a bipartisan fiscal commission to confront the deficits in the long term died in the Senate the other day,” the president said. “So I'm going to establish such a commission by executive order …”

It wasn’t necessarily a big thing, but it sent a signal: this president wasn’t afraid of using the end-run around the loyal opposition, much the same way his predecessor did when it suited his agenda. Only legally.

And then a warning, the words bearing a touch of the olive branch, their meaning like a chain-mailed glove to the head:

“I'm ready and eager to work with anyone who is willing to proceed in a spirit of goodwill,” Obama said. “But understand, if we can't break free from partisan gridlock, if we can't move past a politics of ‘no,’ if resistance supplants constructive debate, I still have to meet my responsibilities as President. I've got to act for the greater good -- because that, too, is a commitment that I have made.”

◊ ◊ ◊

Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence of Indiana, one of Obama’s more strident opponents of late, left himself open to Obama’s jabs. “Stick and move” is good boxer’s advice, but going up against Pence, Obama didn’t really even have to move.

Pence: “[L]ast year about the time you met with us, unemployment was 7.5 percent in this country. Your administration, and your party in Congress, told us that we'd have to borrow more than $700 billion to pay for a so-called stimulus bill. It was a piecemeal list of projects and boutique tax cuts, .... Well, unemployment is 10 percent now, as you well know, Mr. President.

“Now, Republicans offered a stimulus bill at the same time. It cost half as much as the Democratic proposal in Congress, and using your economic analyst models, it would have created twice the jobs at half the cost. It essentially was across-the-board tax relief, Mr. President. ...

“The first question I would pose to you, very respectfully, Mr. President, is would you be willing to consider embracing … in the name of every struggling family in this country, the kind of across-the-board tax relief that Republicans have advocated, that President Kennedy advocated, that President Reagan advocated ...?”

Obama jumps off the turnbuckle: “You're absolutely right that when I was sworn in the hope was that unemployment would remain around 8 [percent], or in the 8 percent range. That was just based on the estimates made by both conservative and liberal economists, because at that point not all the data had trickled in.

“We had lost 650,000 jobs in December. I'm assuming you're not faulting my policies for that. We had lost, it turns out, 700,000 jobs in January, the month I was sworn in. I'm assuming it wasn't my administration's policies that accounted for that. We lost another 650,000 jobs the subsequent month, before any of my policies had gone into effect. So I'm assuming that wasn't as a consequence of our policies …

“I think we can score political points on the basis of the fact that we underestimated how severe the job losses were going to be. But those job losses took place before any stimulus, whether it was the ones that you guys have proposed or the ones that we proposed, could have ever taken into effect.”

Pence, p’wned.

◊ ◊ ◊

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Utah freshman congressman with more nerve than good sense, weighed into Obama about having broken one of his key campaign promises: “when you stood up before the American people multiple times and said you would broadcast the health care debates on C-SPAN, you didn't. And I was disappointed, and I think a lot of Americans were disappointed.”

Obama comes with the uppercut: “Look, the truth of the matter is that if you look at the health care process -- just over the course of the year -- overwhelmingly the majority of it actually was on C-SPAN, because it was taking place in congressional hearings in which you guys were participating. I mean, how many committees were there that helped to shape this bill? Countless hearings took place.”

Chaffetz, dismissed.

◊ ◊ ◊

It wasn’t always that easy. Obama had to contend with some lawmakers — Jeb Hensarling of Texas and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee — who offered brief questions deeply wrapped in wheezing disquisitions of GOP philosophy that went on for many minutes. “I know there's a question in there somewhere, because you're making a whole bunch of assertions, half of which I disagree with,” the president said at one point, to Hensarling.

But Obama won the match, largely because of the frankness of his message about message. “We've got to be careful about what we say about each other sometimes, because it boxes us in in ways that makes it difficult for us to work together because our constituents start believing us," he said. "So, just a tone of civility, instead of slash-and-burn, would be helpful."

The lawmakers knew they were outpointed by Obama’s cool but relentless jabs and parries. The blogosphere checked in, and the TV punditburo, to confirm what anyone watching already knew: It was on the whole a Kum Bah Yah drive-by; a smashmouth performance, one that Obama deftly made seem almost collegial; and an emotional shot in the arm for Democrats weary of Republican demonizing.

◊ ◊ ◊

Later we found out how effective Obama’s appearance really was: when it was all over, some Republicans expressed regret that they let it be televised. The obvious question is Why? Why would the GOP regret the transparency, open dialogue and frank exchanges that characterized the Q&A on Friday? What do they have to hide?

It’s that reflexive secretive, defensive GOP stance on every major issue that was obvious on Friday. The questions/position papers by Pence and Chaffetz, their towering and incorrect assumptions, point to a party hellbent on blocking or weakening Democratic legislative reforms by every means possible.

By the end, though, even the leadership made nice. “It was the kind of discussion that we frankly need to have more of,” said House Republican Whip Eric Kantor.

“I'm having fun, this is great,” Obama said when Pence asked if he could take more questions.

“So are we,” Pence said.

True as that may be, Obama had more big fun on Friday than the elephant gang did. The president used this unexpected but welcome opportunity to school Republicans on the need to cut back on partisanship and own up to the fact that, for the next three years, a Democrat is driving much of the national debate. Like it or not.

How far they’ll reach across the aisle, or whether they will at all, is anyone’s guess. But the GOP should be chastened by the principal revelation of Friday: The president is on to them. He knows what the Republicans are doing and how they’re doing it, and he knows how fighting a schoolyard antagonist is much the same as dealing with a willfully obstructionist political opposition: Often, the best way to confront a bully armed with anger and misinformation is to be a bully armed with common sense.

Image credits: Obama: Pete Souza, The White House.

Steven the lawgiver

2010-01-28T12:17:00.000-08:00

The Wall Street Journal got it exactly right recently: “The last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it.”

That distills the months-long tongue-wagging and online fervor over Apple’s plans to introduce an electronic tablet for access to the Internet, music and (especially) the quickly exploding e-book market. What would it look like? Would it work seamlessly with the other iProducts that we didn’t know we needed until they arrived? How deep would we have to dig in our slim wallets to buy it?

Steve Jobs, the sorcerer-in-chief at Apple, laid it all Wednesday at a news conference in San Francisco to announce ... the iPad, billed by Jobs as “our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.”

There’s a lot to recommend it. The iPad offers a mobile repository for photos, a moving link to e-mail and the Internet via WiFi, a portable studio for artwork, a panoramic platform for video games, a notepad for text entry (complete with touch-screen keyboard, an e-book reader whose 9.7-inch screen presents text and images from books and magazines in crisp color, and a device that will make use of the 140,000 applications available through the Apple App Store.

Visually, it extends the iPod/iPhone design paradigm: sleek, elegant, easily as seductive in look & feel as any of Apple’s products in recent years (someone at the Moscone Center wolf-whistled when Jobs showed off the iPad). And if Apple’s past practices are any guide, the iPad that drooling early adopters will swoop down on when it goes on sale in March will be tweaked and upgraded between then and Christmas.

◊ ◊ ◊

That would be a good thing. Technology analysts are already up in arms about certain features that should be in the iPad right now, but aren’t. Since the Safari browser is the only one available, iPad buyers will of course be locked into Apple's ecosystem right from the jump. But there's more:

The iPad doesn’t support Flash, which means any number of videocentric sites like Hulu and Disney, and hugely popular sites like ESPN, are pretty much off limits. "[The] iPad offers the best web browsing experience there is — way better than laptops," Jobs said on Wednesday, apparently unfazed by the fact that, during his presentation of the front page of the New York Times home page, those devilish blue boxes with white question marks showed up in places where Flash-driven ads should have been.

The iPad doesn’t have a native USB port, which will make filesharing and file transfers more of a challenge than you’d expect from Apple; you need an adapter (optional) for that.

It doesn’t have an onboard camera, a deficiency that’s philosophically at odds with the device’s portability. While still photos would be a problem, who wouldn’t want to have the option of video chat when they move around? All the attention Jobs paid in his hands-on presentation to the ability to manipulate archived photos would seem to make having a digital video camera a no-brainer. Not in this first generation.

"Video chat fits right in with the hardware profile," said Aaron Vronko, CEO of an iPod and iPhone repair shop and author of a guide to iPhone technology. "Not having that really limits the benefit of that device. The iPad is no more capable than the iPod Touch as a communicator."

Since Jobs didn’t highlight it on Wednesday, we're left to assume there’s no way to personally adjust the iPad for brightness or contrast, which could be a problem given its LED-backlit screen; screens using the emerging OLED (organic light-emitting diode) technology are said to be clearer for reading text.

And ironically (very ironically for Apple), the iPad doesn’t allow for running multiple applications at once — a truly concerning omission given the insanely great multitasking capability of the other, most successful Apple products available today. In real-world terms, the iPad’s portability is almost neutralized by its lack of multitasking power. In marketing terms, it’s a challenging, counter-intuitive reach to expect consumers to step back from expectations based on what Apple’s already proven it’s capable of doing.

JayMonster, commenting in Information Week, was decidedly underwhelmed: "I know there are going to be Apple apologists, but this is sad. The iPad as it stands now, will go down in history with the Newton, Pippen, and AppleTV."

◊ ◊ ◊

Another problem with the iPad right out of the box has less to do with the hardware and everything to do, potentially, with its links to the Internet. AT&T will be the service provider for WiFi access — a fact that elicited boos and shouts of displeasure from the crowd at the Moscone Center when Jobs said it on Wednesday. AT&T will connect iPad owners to the Internet for $30 a month for unlimited data service, with no contract, much less than the cost of data service for a laptop.

But AT&T has already encountered a serious headwind of customer complaints, issues related both to its general mobile services and, earlier, its dedicated service for Apple’s iPhone.

On Thursday, the company admitted as much, announcing plans to spend another $2 billion to address complaints of dropped calls and sluggish downloads. On a conference call with analysts, AT&T honchos defended the company and outlined plans for improvements amid wide customer discontent, even as it admitted that iPhone service in two of the biggest markets in the country, New York and San Francisco, was below expectations.

AT&T is presumably serious about making changes, but that still can’t inspire confidence that it can handle what’s already needed for improvements to its existing service, as well as a whole new stream of customers buying iPads in the millions.

Add it all up and, for many, the iPad spells disappointment. The critics are weighing in, some in anger, some with tongues firmly in cheek. Check out midnightblade's take on how Der Fuhrer reacts to the news:

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But with all that working against it, there’s one apparently immutable law — call it a commandment, if you like — on Steve Jobs’ side of the ledger:

Thou Shalt Not Bet Against Apple. Several times in the last twenty years, Apple’s products have been met with a skeptical enthusiasm, followed by a qualified acceptance, followed by something just short of adoration as techies specifically and the public in general came to embrace Appleware — especially after various tweaks and refinements of the original product concept evolved. The iPod begat the iPod touch, which begat the large-scale touch-screen technology Jobs unveiled on Wednesday.

The iPod is a good example of this stealth transformation of the culture. Since it was introduced in October 2001, it’s gone from being an affectation to a game-changer. With more than 240 million sold, it sets the standard for mobile music devices. The iPhone, launched in June 2007, took a similar trajectory into our wired culture to become what it is today: with more than 42 million units sold, the most popular mobile phone in the world.

For those reasons, the early complaints shouldn’t be given that much weight. Sure as night follows day, the first-generation iPad machines will similarly evolve into versatile, whimsical, necessary devices we can’t see right now, and won’t see, until we stand in the lines stretching around the block to buy them.

◊ ◊ ◊

In the marketplace of 2010, Jobs has thrown down the gauntlet to the Kindle, amazon’s popular e-book reader. Even in its first iteration, the iPad is more versatile than the Kindle, Sony’s Reader or Barnes & Noble Nook: it’s an e-book reader and more, and unlike the Kindle’s black-&-white-only display, the iPad hits the ground running in vibrant color that should only improve with time. This isn’t just a shot across the competition’s bow, it’s a bomb in the engine room. The iPad will step up everyone’s e-book R&D game just by being on the market in its current form.

Jobs saved the best part for last on Wednesday: When it hits stores in March, the iPad base model (16GB with WiFi) will sell for $499. Other models (32GB and 64GB) will also be available in March at various price points up to $699. Jobs said models with WiFi and 3G technology would be available in April, with prices topping out at $829 — close to what everyone was expecting to be the entry-level price.

Steven the lawgiver thus throws down another timely commandment to the competition: Thou Shalt Be Affordable. The $499 entry price sets a high bar for competitors working in the mobile-devices space.

And he puts us all on notice of how the future arrives a little at a time, until it’s the present — the everyday — we couldn’t see coming before it got here. Over time, the iPad may well become what it looks a lot like already: another everyday companion article for millions of writers, artists, gamers, e-mail addicts, music fans and photo enthusiasts. Over time, Jobs is likely to show us again what he’s shown us before: how what’s new and what’s next can be exactly the same thing.

Jeff & Erin: The Epic

2010-01-25T21:29:00.000-08:00

Some venue in Los Angeles is likely to be a very happening place on Oct. 10 of this year, the day when Jeff Wong and Erin Martin of Sydney, Australia, are to be married. Maybe you’ve heard about it. Maybe you’ve seen it. J&E sent out a save-the-date note ... to everyone on the planet.

By way of YouTube, Hyde Park video soapbox of our time, Wong and Martin released what’s already being called an “epic” wedding announcement, a movie trailer that condenses the stuff of several movie genres — from boy-meets-girl-cute to Tarantinoesque badass pyrotechnica — in a four-minute video whose production values and simple storyline have made it an Internet sensation (and we all know how long those things last).

Narrative pretty much undercuts what you have to see to make any sense of. The video is a spirited four-minute mashup that begins when Jeff, in some literal foreshadowing, walks up to Erin in a park. Instant pheromone hookup.

From there it’s off to the races, a rapid-fire production of recent movie styles and directors. There’s a smidge of Kurosawa, a touch of the "Mission: Impossible" high-tension style, a sepia-toned crib of the mapped travels of Indiana Jones, a snatch of the “Matrix” dayglo green vertical titling. And now we know where Michael Bay’s flashpots have been lately.

It all comes to a head in Los Angeles on Oct. 10 of this year, when the couple ties the knot in a ceremony almost certain to be memorialized in another J&E Production. After a honeymoon to we know not where, what’s next? Anything’s possible. There’ve been reports that Jeff and Erin are In Talks with Steven Spielberg about a development deal.

Nah, made that part up. But what if? What a way to start a marriage. That would be epic.

Image credits:

All the best to you crazy kids.

The Saints ain’t Aints no more

2010-01-24T20:42:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you’re sure life can’t get any worse. You’re ready to holler and throw up both your hands and give up what’s left of your personal ghost. And then somebody — Somebody in High Places — throws you a bone with just enough on it to keep you going, keep you believing in the possibilities of the underdog.

That’s what happened earlier today. In the New Orleans Superdome, the scene of tragedy not long enough ago, the New Orleans Saints defeated the Minnesota Vikings 31-28 in the NFC Championship, to advance to the Super Bowl on Feb. 7, in the Saints’ first appearance there in the 44-year history of the franchise.

Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras is pretty much as automatic a party as this country ever has, but the scene there tonight promises to be wilder, more raucous than Mardi Gras will be. The Saints — for most of two generations the doormat of the NFL — is going to the big show two weeks from now. And the city of New Orleans realizes a shot in the arm that transcends money, pro football bragging rights and other superficialities.

◊ ◊ ◊

It was a shooting match for most of the game, with Saints quarterback Drew Brees and Vikings quarterback Brett Favre trading long bombs and spirited sprints out of the pocket. But the Vikings were the victims of mistakes that began in the third quarter and cascaded into a pattern of play that was hard to believe was coming from a playoff-caliber NFL team.

By the end of the fourth quarter, the wheels fell off for the Vikes, followed by the transmission, the brakes and everything but the catalytic converter. Fumbles. Quarterback hurries. More turnovers than a pastry shop. Favre was on the canvas 16 times that day, and was briefly out of the game earlier, due to an injury that looked horrific in the replay.

Favre, gamer that he is, came back into the contest. But just before overtime, the score tied at 28, you could sense something was going wrong when, driving for a decisive score, the Vikings were hit with a 5-yard penalty … for having 12 men in the huddle. The penalty almost certainly took them out of field-goal range, so Favre went with a pass play.

On third-and-15 from the New Orleans 38, Favre, desperate to get close enough to give Ryan Longwell a chance to win the game in last-second fashion, rolled to his right. Then, instead of running for the yardage that might have put the Vikes in field goal range, Favre threw across the field to the left … where the Saints’ Tracy Porter intercepted, sending the game to overtime.

A field goal by the externally unflappable Garrett Hartley, and the Saints were set to go marching into their first Super Bowl.

◊ ◊ ◊

“Just wondering if I can hold up, especially after a day like today,” said Favre, battered and ghostly, a man whose tank was drier than empty after the game. “Physically and mentally. That was pretty draining. I am going to go home, a couple of days and just talk it over with the family.”

Was it miscommunication or nerves? Was it performance anxiety, or maybe what Hunter S. Thompson used to call “the fear”? Who knows?

What we do know is as uncomfortable for Vikings fans as it is undeniable for everyone else: While Brett Favre — a top-notch competitor and a man we’ve come to love — wanted that NFC Championship victory, for any number of team and personal reasons, New Orleans needed that victory, needed it deeply for reasons that are plain to anyone who remembers the brutal, chaotic events of five summers ago in the state of Louisiana.

The NFC Championship win is the latest good news for the region. In November, citing “monumental negligence,” U.S. District Judge Stanwood R. Duval Jr., opened the door to an expected torrent of lawsuits against agencies of the federal government, lawsuits representing the first real evidence of justice for human beings needlessly displaced by the ravages of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005.

The four individuals and one business in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish were awarded $720,000 by Duval, resolving a lawsuit brought against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. More suits can certainly be expected.

But all that’s on the long come. More immediately, dead ahead, is New Orleans’ second-line dance into the first rank of winning NFL franchises, and the chance to tweak its own salute to the team, to make it a salute to the city the water couldn’t wash away:

Who Dat say Nawlins is finished?

Image credits: Saints logo: New Orleans Saints/National Football League. Saints celebration: Michael C. Hebert/New Orleans Saints. Favre: AP Photo.

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