Republican Convention on The Huffington Post

Charles Madigan: Obama's Election: Destiny Called

2009-11-23T19:14:11Z

It sounds pretty arrogant--"I'm going to find a new way to write about politics" -- but that was my objective with Destiny Calling: How the People Elected Barack Obama. My sense was that the old hierarchy -- newsroom elites deciding what was important, reporters following orders and each day filing dozens of very similar stories from the campaign trail -- was melting away.

I was out of the game, one of a small army of veterans who either chose to leave the Chicago Tribune or were invited to leave to cut costs. But I wasn't done with politics yet, particularly in light of Obama's campaign, its epicenter in Illinois, and an awareness that a new kind of history was being written. Media may have been in collapse, but I wasn't. I needed to find a better (and frankly, cheaper) way to do it.

I concluded that what was most important was the condition of the nation after eight years of George W. Bush. What a disaster the man created! -- from Hurricane Katrina (the natural catastrophe he couldn't handle), to a pair of badly managed wars, to ethical behavior that recalled 19th Century politics, to a shattering economy with all its consequences still to play out. It seemed clear to me that the story of this campaign would not be told in an airplane flying over the nation. I wanted to find the people who reflected the problems I identified.

That took me to Mississippi to talk with a Katrina victim; to North Carolina to watch a campaign play out through the eyes of a political veteran; to Maryland, where a valiant retired army colonel told me about the price of war and why he would vote for the first person who promised to bring the troops home; and lots of other places to talk about the fissures of the economy.

There is nothing traditional about the book I wrote. It is defined by special people who reflect on the state of the nation. One of the most interesting pieces, to me, played out in Evanston, Illinois, where I spent some time with a woman I have known for years, Birch Burghardt. She did a big favor for me: she watched the Republican convention on television and set down her thoughts for me. Here is how I told her story in Destiny Calling.

Giving people are hard to find. Some people just send money. Some people send their concerns or their wishes for the best. Some people send their prayers. Birch Burghardt does all of that, but she also sends herself, which makes her unusual in the firmament of givers. Whether it's supporting after-school programs for disadvantaged children or tackling that biggest of all challenges, teaching in the Chicago Public Schools, somehow she has been there. There are people like this all over the North Shore of Chicago, folks who could sit comfortably back, send a check now and then, and feel just fine about it. But they don't. The place fairly buzzes with do-gooders, many of whom actually do good instead of just talking about it.

Burghardt lives in a couple of places, one of them Evanston and one of them an island off Seattle where she and her husband Galen have constructed a dream house for themselves and their children. A strong singer and lover of folk music, she is frequently seen in the company of her daughter, a tall blond like herself with blue eyes and the gift of a strong alto. It is a very musical family.

I asked her to watch the Republican convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul and tell me what she thought of the performances. I believed she would be particularly astute at this assignment because, first of all, she is fair-minded, and second, she is very smart, with a master's degree in economics from Georgetown and a doctorate in education from Northwestern.

She has an interesting background. Burghardt was born in New Haven, Connecticut. She went to public schools in Farmington then shifted to private schools. She spent her childhood in such a Republican family that she would be sent to school wearing a little gold elephant pin that said GOP on it, or "I Like Ike" buttons. All of that changed in the 1970s and 1980s, when her family abandoned the GOP and became activist Democrats in the wake of the Nixon administration and Watergate. They were inspired by Jimmy Carter.

Burghardt wants the next president to be careful about balance on the Supreme Court. She hopes he will not be so partisan when it comes to filling high court vacancies. She wants serious action on the environment -- not that she believes the nation can turn back the clock, but it has to make a commitment "to reduce our negative impact on the environment." Having taught school in Chicago, she knows "the immensity of the challenges faced by the schools," so federal funding efforts are important.

Then she pops up with an issue that sounds classically conservative to me: "balance the budget." But she adds that she would support tax increases to do that, which sounds Democratic again. She does not like the fact that the Chinese hold so much of America's debt.

Put it all together and you end up with a voter who looks a lot like many independent voters across the country -- concerned about social issues like education and improving living conditions around the world, a little conservative on budget questions, and an advocate for public schools. It's healthy that her positions are not predictable, because most people don't fit handily into the boxes created for them. There are gun-owning liberals, for example, and conservatives who deeply oppose the death penalty. There are libertarians who feel pot smoking is just fine, and Democrats who support strong enforcement action on all drugs.

Simple categories are just not broad enough for people like Burghardt. Because of her background as an economist, she has an inherent distrust of big government and what it can do. At the same time she liked the description "compassionate conservative" when it appeared in Republican circles in 2000 because it sent the message that you could be conservative and also care about the well-being of your fellow man. "It really made me think that people do care," she said. "They want there to be goodness. They want there to be kindness. They want there to be relationship and caring. They want to help people who need help, but they are still conservative." She hastened to point out that she believed President Bush was disingenuous and never voted for him.

By the time of the Republican convention, with its faux start because of Hurricane Gustav, she had been following both sides of the contest closely and was eager to see what the Republicans had to say. My sense was that even though I thought of her as liberal, she could be swayed by a good argument to do an about-face. Her comments on the convention indicated that was likely true, up to a point -- the point being the arrival of Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

"I thought that at the beginning, McCain and Fred Thompson were incredibly eloquent. And they said what was most important. The most compelling thing about McCain, I think, is that he has, in the past, been really open and really productive, often working across the aisle. He has that experience of being a prisoner of war and being very loyal to the United States. I think that's compelling. Whether it's important or not, I don't know. When I watched those speeches, I thought, 'Huh, maybe I'd vote for McCain. Too bad I don't agree with him on some points.'"

"When Sarah Palin gave her speech, I hated it. She was so sarcastic. I thought she was playing herself up as a great person, really spunky and neat, right? But not really a person of substance so much as a person of punch and power. And then this nastiness that came out, I was very sad ... Then [Rudy] Giulani's speech -- same thing. I thought he was unpleasant ... I mean, when he smiles it looks strange. So anyway, I thought, 'Okay, good. I don't have to vote for McCain.'"

As the convention progressed, Burghardt thought it was clear that the Republicans were still working on the party base, very late in the game. All the speeches seemed aimed at convincing the party faithful they had nominated the right candidate, even though his conservative credentials were hardly sterling. And the more she found out about Palin, the more concerned she became that the Alaska governor was unprincipled.

Palin's problem with the so-called "Bridge to Nowhere" got Burghardt's attention. The Alaska governor claimed she had canceled the project, a pet project of Alaska senator Ted Stevens, but that happened only after she first supported the construction project, then nixed it and used the money for other highway construction.

"There's that," she said. "I mean, the New York Times has biases, but they probably don't report falsehoods. Then there's the trooper story, which just makes me think, 'I want a slime ball like that as president?' Inexperienced and a slime ball. An emotional slime ball. Oh God!"

McCain put the deal breaker on the table for Burghardt when he chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. Burghardt is not a vulgar woman, so when a "bitch" slips out, she gets a little pink and apologizes. It's a fetching gesture, but not a good sign for the McCain-Palin ticket.

In making her decision, true to form Burghardt didn't just send money or offer lip service. She gave herself to the Obama campaign.

J. Bradley Jansen: For Liberty Examines the Kingmakers

2009-09-26T13:36:37Z

For Liberty, a documentary
of the Ron Paul grassroots movement, deserves attention. Ron Paul enthusiasts will recognize familiar names and faces and relive
unforgettable moments, and students of elections, campaign managers and
political activists of all persuasions should see it. Everyone
concerned with the direction of the country and the breakdown of
political discourse would find something moving. The seeds of this
grassroots movement are still growing.

One Amazon customer review
lauds, "this movie simply and eloquently captured the passions of an
unlikely coalition of people from all across the political spectrum who
quickly came together in response to a uniquely American message, and
who unexpectedly, enthusiastically and sometimes haphazardly ended up
immersing themselves entirely in a political campaign." Why then did
the campaign do so poorly? "The grassroots felt [the official campaign
staff] were at best incompetent" protested
Adam de Angeli of the Campaign for Liberty, the remnant of the official
presidential campaign on which he worked. He then doth protested too
much defending the failures of the official campaign in a documentary
about the grassroots. Incoherently, de Angeli criticizes the
documentary for avoiding examining mistakes while still harboring
delusions that the official Ron Paul presidential campaign brought
"hundreds" of Republican National Convention delegates in its fight for
the nomination (Green Papers shows Ron Paul winning only 20 of 2,380 delegates with 15 final votes).

This
movie puts faces on the people demanding a radical change towards a
more moderate government. Ross Perot mined this good government vein
in his two presidential bids with a call to put our own house in order
before promising new grandiosities and foreign interventionism. About
two-thirds of Americans are angry at government solutions and do not
think either party has the answers according to a recent Rasmussen poll. Recently Joe Scarborough
revisited a 2003 economic prediction from his guest Ron Paul that
warned that if we were to continue to inflate this bubble we would have
our housing crisis with damage world-wide; Arianna Huffington went out
of her way to agree with Dr. Paul.

People now protesting against the bailouts, out of control
government
spending and out of touch politicians in both parties
show the movement has grown beyond the Ron Paul "r3volution." A few
hundred thousand people, by my best estimates, recently converged on
the Capitol for the Tea Party protests. David Brooks explains these Jeffersonian roots. In my unscientific poll of the
9/12 Tea Party protesters, few recognized Ron Paul's name and nearly
all of those who did were dismissive or expressed a highly negative
reaction.

Two years ago, my friend Nicholas Sanchez prophetically remarked,
"This political train-wreck Republicans face can largely be traced to
Bush’s philosophical metamorphosis from a traditional,
non-interventionist conservative to the neoconservatives’ exemplar of a
'War President', and his positioning of the Republicans as the 'War
Party'." In fact, polls and other indicators increasingly show both a
resurgence of conservatism as well as disillusionment with the
Republican Party. After Dr. Paul warned the party has lost its way,
the Republicans suffered a crushing defeat. Support for foreign wars has since plummeted to an all-time low says CNN.

For Liberty: How the Ron Paul Revolution Watered the Withered Tree of Liberty
introduces us to the people who decide elections and the future of the
country--not just the activists but the swing voters. A 2006 study
by David Boaz and David Kirby found that about a fifth of voters hold
generally libertarian views. Grover Norquist labels it the "leave us alone" coalition. The pieces of a political realignment
waiting to happen are wonderfully edited on screen. As Ron Paul
demurred, "it was the message not the man": liberty is popular and the
constitution brings us together.

With a third of the country behind one of the two major parties, For Liberty examines
the people standing in the middle who decide elections. Those who want
to win over increasingly discriminating voters in 2010 and 2012 should
study this movie. As one woman in the film explains, the more they talk with their
neighbors the more they find they agree. The Rovian approach of divide
and conquer loses in the end. For Liberty beautifully shows us what Markos Mousitlas called the only true people-powered campaign in 2008.

Elin Suleymanov: Making History in Person: A view from Azerbaijan

2009-09-11T14:51:25Z

A year has passed since both major parties in United States politics held their nominating conventions. Looking back on the rancorous, contentious presidential election last year with the benefit of hindsight being 20-20, among the factors that made it truly special and the most important in recent memory, is the diversity of both tickets. And while the nation is now wrapped up in debates over health care reform, how to stimulate the sluggish economy and what the best course of action is in Afghanistan, we should take a moment to reflect on the truly historic nature of last year's election.

Regardless of political views and opinions, the fact that an African-American stood as the Democratic presidential nominee and now sits as the President, while a woman was the vice presidential choice for the Republican Party, embodies important symbolism for the entire world. Such symbolism should not be underestimated or overlooked. After all, if specific policies change or if they are forgotten years from now, the changing dynamic of who can become the leader of this powerful nation will be nothing less than historic.

Even today it is clear that the most outstanding characteristic of politics in 2008 and 2009 is the prominent role of women's leadership. Beginning with Senator Hillary Clinton's run for the White House and later appointment as the senior most diplomat in the U.S., women have energized and enriched America's political process. Women have finally become full partners in the American political process. This resonates far beyond America's borders because the world is watching the U.S. political process very carefully. Some are watching because the United States is a global power, which has an impact on many nations; others watch because the diversity makes the election so much more interesting.

For the people of the Republic of Azerbaijan, the prominent role of women in the American election followed by the appointment of so many women to President Obama's cabinet, 7 in all, has an added significance. The reason is that the Azerbaijanis recently celebrated the 91st anniversary of establishing the first democratic parliamentary republic in the Muslim world. It was also more than 90 years ago that the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, which soon afterward was annexed and abolished by the Bolsheviks, granted equal voting rights for men and women alike. In so doing, Azerbaijan had pioneered a fundamental principle of equality for the region and beyond. Building on this tradition, Azerbaijan's First Lady Mehriban Aliyeva initiated an international forum on expanding the role of women in cross-cultural dialogue in 2008. The event organized jointly with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) in Azerbaijan's capital of Baku brought together leaders of diverse backgrounds, including many women who serve in Azerbaijan's parliament and government to brainstorm how to promote global understanding through making women leaders more vocal.

It is hard to say whether the Forum participants would agree with Sarah Palin's political views or those of Hillary Clinton or Janet Napolitano or Kathleen Sebelius, and others, but they, most likely, can relate to the challenge of being a working mother and would appreciate their strong leadership skills. That alone lays the foundation for a different tone of a global conversation. Today, I am not sure what the specific political positions of the first voters in Azerbaijan in 1918 were, nor who they voted for. One thing is certain: more than 90 years ago, they made history by personally pioneering change. Almost a century later, that still matters a lot.

Elin Suleymanov is Azerbaijan's first Consul General to Los Angeles and 13 Western States, including the State of Alaska. For more information on the Consulate General of Azerbaijan in Los Angeles, please visit www.azconsulatela.org.

Diane Tucker: Hey, Sarah Palin, Quit Stealing My HuffPost Blogs

2009-07-26T22:59:18Z

(To get Ms. Palin's attention, I'm afraid I used an unforgivable number of ice hockey terms in this post.)

Dear Sarah Palin,

During your resignation speech on Sunday, you complained the media is constantly roughing you up. So I hate to pile on with another attack. Especially since you've been stuck in your own end for months.

But heads up, Ms. Palin, because a Web site with your name on it is stealing my blog content. It says you recently posted Iranians Worldwide Roll Out Green Scroll Against Ahmadinejad. I wrote that piece, but I don't see any links to my original story. In the blogosphere, that's called stealing content.

For the record, this isn't the first time you've taken a cheap shot at me. Earlier this month, you posted Iranian Women: We Feel Cheated, Frustrated, and Betrayed -- again without linking to my original story.

So it's gloves off, "Maverick."

Why? Because it appears the SarahPal.in Web site is for sale, which means somebody is loading it up with stolen content from me, the New York Times, and others -- in order to make a few bucks. And while we're on the subject of money, I see the SarahPAC (your political action committee) has already raised more than $1 million according to your spokesperson Meghan Stapleton. Do you have any idea what I get paid to write these Huffington Post blogs? (Hint: it's not a million dollars.)

For all I know, Ms. Palin, you may not even be aware there's a SarahPal.in Web site. But it has your name on it, so go for a little skate and turn the Webmaster's lights out.

* * *

Michael Russnow: David Letterman Apology Redux: Shame on Dave for Buckling Under to Palin's Lies

2009-06-16T06:21:17Z

I feel sad for David Letterman, because in spite of the reasons he put forth in his latest mea culpa Monday night on The Late Show, he caved in, I believe, out of misplaced fear that he might be banished from his late night throne.

He won't admit it, but I believe it's true. In my article last week I felt he went too far when he went on and on about how he would never, ever tell a sexual joke about a fourteen-year-old. He looked straight at the camera and then said something to the effect of, "Hey, I'm sorry we made a mistake as to who was at the game, but you have to believe I was talking about Sarah Palin's adult daughter Bristol." All this, though there was little question that the vast majority of people who had watched knew Letterman's joke was about the Palin daughter who'd gained national fame as an expectant teenage mother.

It wasn't a great joke, but it was typical Letterman humor. This is a man who routinely makes fun of people in the news, often with fantasy references, so the Alex Rodriguez sex tryst fell right in with his normal fare. The sexual escapade was obviously phony and concerned a young woman who'd been much talked about in the national media regarding her youthful promiscuity -- a young lady whose fruits were paraded at the Republican convention and during the campaign by her ambitious mother.

Why couldn't Letterman joke about Bristol? You mean it's okay to make constant fun -- even today eleven years later -- of Monica Lewinsky, still the butt of his monologue barbs, not to mention unkind comments about her weight? And as to his probable left-leaning politics, it didn't stop Letterman from ad nausea comic slurs about Bill Clinton and Hillary's conjugal relationship.

I repeat, no one of any reasonable intelligence thought he was talking about the fourteen-year-old Willow Palin. It was her mother who framed it as such, due to some bad research on the Letterman staff's part, as there was only a passing mention to an unnamed Palin daughter at the Yankee game. It was Sarah Palin, a two bit governor of one of our nation's smallest states and the bottom half of a failed presidential campaign, who, in her zeal to stay in the spotlight, jumped at the chance to get back at one of the many comic commentators who've previously enjoyed many jokes at her expense. And she kept repeating it and repeating it even well after Letterman -- in a smart move to quickly defuse the controversy -- clarified rather emotionally last week on his show that it was Bristol who was the gag's target.

Did Palin change her tune and say, "Oh, but even though you were talking about Bristol it's still not right," which might have been questionable due to her daughter's adult age, not to mention her appearances on TV talk shows about abstinence. But she didn't and chose to ignore the truth, and at that point Palin was no longer a protective mother but an out and out liar.

However, she is not alone to blame, because the media wouldn't let up and gave Sarah Palin far too much leash, rarely questioning her motives or forcing her to deal with Letterman's clarification that the remarks were about Bristol. Indeed, many of the scathing TV attacks featuring Palin let her put forth blistering remarks, characterizing Letterman as a lecher and possibly a pedophile. There were TV reports that actually ended the story there, with no follow-up information that Letterman repeatedly had denied the joke was about the younger daughter, no doubt leaving some watching the news to believe Palin had all her facts in order.

The media coverage was so absurd that, according to Letterman, he felt obliged to apologize again. In particular, because of a remark condemning him by Mark Shields on the PBS Jim Lehrer Report. For Mark Shields to continue spreading Palin's lies about Letterman's joke, saying it was "indefensible," and that Letterman must have been aware he was talking about a 14-year-old was insupportable. It apparently hit Letterman hard, though, leading to his second apology last night.

Look, Letterman is in show biz and is probably a bit egocentric and neurotic. He kept going on about how his intent didn't matter, that it was the perception that counted. But how could there be such a perception, except for the media driving it with unrelenting zeal?

So Letterman buckled under the pressure, and that's too bad, because what he has done in this unusual act of cowardice -- he was one of my heroes -- is open the door for other groups to complain and/or to make him think far too much about satirizing anyone in the future. Satire full of silliness, setting famous people in places and situations clearly untrue in order to pay off the punch line. And his barbs spare almost no one or group.

For goodness sake, he has continually made fun of short people with his constant references to New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg as such. He has mocked old folks, including his mother, about whom he has told nonsensical jokes about her drinking. He has contrasted our president's schedule with John McCain's, giving images of the Arizona U.S. Senator that make him look like someone with borderline Alzheimer's disease, engaged in run of the mill tasks to fill his time. He has offended gay folks with jokes like, "Did you watch the Tonys last night? [after applause]: You must all be gay." And he routinely mocks the ethnicity and competence of New York City taxi drivers.

So I worry, I really do, where all this will lead. It may make CBS happier and it may reassure Letterman's future on his late night forum, but will the show be as good if he has to worry about what he's going to say? Ironically, his monologue prior to his apology had zingers and political humor, and he made fun of the controversy, but all at his own expense. Apart from self-deprecatory remarks, will he now start to censor himself beforehand with his writers and, worse, when he interacts with his guests on the panel? All it has to take is another person to seriously complain and mislead the media and public as Sarah Palin has shamelessly done.

Letterman may insist this is the end of it and he will go back to essentially the way things were. I hope he does, but I won't believe it's true until he gets back on the proverbial horse which recently threw him and summarily launches another zinger at Palin when she deserves it.

Michael Russnow's website is www.ramproductionsinternational.com

Carol M. Swain: A Plan for Moving Beyond Republican Chaos and Self-Destruction

2009-05-21T15:39:00Z

Nashville, TN (Wednesday, May 20, 2009) - Momentarily distracted from the cannibalism that has characterized its internal politics over the past few weeks, the RNC will end its special session on Wednesday where it is expected to approve three resolutions designed to draw major distinctions between them and the Democrats on spending, earmarks, and philosophies of governance. The most important of the proposed resolutions is aimed at rebranding the Democrats as the "Democratic Socialist Party." Unfortunately, this is a risky proposition for a party in enormous disarray.

Under the best of conditions, this strategy is likely to fail. Not everyone believes that socialism is better than capitalism. An April 9, Rasmussen Poll (which did not define the concepts of capitalism and socialism) found a non-trivial percentage of the American people surprisingly open to the idea of socialism. Given a choice between the two systems of governance, only 53 percent favored capitalism over socialism. Twenty percent preferred socialism, and among the under 30 crowd, 33 percent approved. Thirty-seven percent favored capitalism, and 30 percent of the under 30 groups were undecided. Given the near collapse of the economy, in a campaign, socialism could well win out over capitalism.

Republicans are attacking the wrong targets and pursuing the wrong goals. Until a few days ago, they were attacking each other and even thinking of ousting its first black chairman. Only the distraction of House Speaker Pelosi's quagmire over enhanced interrogation methods allowed them to rally the troops enough to slow the in fighting. Trying to brand the Democrats is a colossal waste of time. A new Gallup Poll released May 18, shows that the Party has lost support in just about every demographic group except church goers, conservatives, and senior citizens who probably stay because of its traditional values on right to life, heterosexual marriages, and First and Second Amendment rights. These declining levels of party affiliation show that it is the Republican Party brand that no longer excites people.

Chairman Steele has taken an official position that there is no reason for further retrospection. I could not disagree with him more. If Republicans are to regain national power, they must understand the multitude of failures and broken promises that go beyond their fiscal imprudence and abandonment of core conservative principles. What Republicans need is a new vision for 21st century America that recognizes where we are today and how far we have come as a nation.

This new vision does not mean that the Republican Party has to forsake its allegiance to traditional values and the protection of human life. But it does mean that the Republicans can no longer be the Party of racial intolerance, religious hypocrisy, and smugness. Rather than brand the Democrats, the Republicans must thrash out their internal differences as they shape and rebrand themselves for the 21st Century. Otherwise, they risk the fate of the Whigs.

Carol M. Swain is a Professor of Political Science and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University. A frequent CNN Lou Dobbs Tonight commentator on race relations, immigration, black leadership, and evangelical politics, Professor Swain is also an accomplished author of several popular books including: "Black Face, Black Interests: The Representation of African American in Congress" (Harvard University Press, 1993), "The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration" (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and her most recent book "Debating Immigration" (Cambridge University Press, 2007). You can follow Carol M. Swain on Twitter @CMSwain

Michael Moore: Why I'm Not Now and Have Never Been the Democrats' "Rush Limbaugh"

2009-03-06T04:46:34Z

I have watched with mild amusement this week the self-immolation of the Republican Party as it bows before the altar of Rush Limbaugh, begging for mercy, pleading for forgiveness, breathlessly seeking guidance and wisdom from The Oracle.

President Obama and the Democratic Party have wasted no time in pointing out to the American people this marriage from hell, tying Rush like a rock around the collective Republican neck and hoping for its quick descent to the netherworld of irrelevance.

But some commentators (Richard Wolffe of Newsweek, Chuck Todd of NBC News, etc.) have likened this to "what Republicans tried to do to the Democrats with Michael Moore." Perhaps. But there is one central difference: What I have believed in, and what I have stood for in these past eight years -- an end to the war, establishing universal health care, closing Guantanamo and banning torture, making the rich pay more taxes and aggressively going after the corporate chiefs on Wall Street -- these are all things which the majority of Americans believe in too. That's why in November the majority voted for the guy I voted for. The majority of Americans rejected the ideology of Rush and embraced the same issues I have raised consistently in my movies and books.

How did this happen? Considering how, for the past eight years, the Republican machine thought they could somehow smear and damage the Democrats if they said it was "the party of Michael Moore," it appears that the American public heard them loud and clear and decided that, 'hey, if you say Michael Moore is connected to the Democrats, then the Democrats must be OK!'

During this past election, a Democrat in Michigan, Mark Schauer, was running against the incumbent Republican congressman, Rep. Tim Walberg. Schauer asked me to endorse him and campaign for him, and I did. The Republicans were thrilled. They acted like they had been handed manna from heaven. They filled the airwaves with attack ads showing pictures of me and asking voters, 'is this the guy you want influencing your congressman?' The voters of western Michigan said "YES!" and threw the Republican out of office. The newly elected congressman told me his poll numbers had gone up once the Republicans started running ads likening him to me.

There have been over a half-dozen attack documentaries on me (Michael Moore Hates America, Fahrenhype 9/11, etc.), plus a feature film starring Kelsey Grammer and James Woods that had me being slapped silly for 83 minutes. Several books have been written by the Right in a concerted attempt to denounce me. One book, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America, had me listed at #1. The author was so sure people would know why, he didn't even bother to write a chapter on me like he did for the other 99. You just get to the end of the book and all it says is "#1" with nothing but a big picture of me that takes up a full page.

What made the Republicans so sure that Americans would recoil upon the mere mention of my name, or by simply showing a photo of my face?

The result of this was one colossal backfire. The more they attacked me, the more the public decided to check out who this "devil" was and what he was saying. And -- oops! -- more than a few people liked what they saw. Overnight I went from having a small, loyal following to having millions go to movie theaters to watch... documentaries? Wow.

Yes, the more the Right went after me, the more people got to hear what I was saying -- and eventually the majority, for some strange reason, ended up agreeing with me -- not Rush Limbaugh -- and elected Barack Obama as president of the United States, a man who promised to end the war, bring about universal health care, close Guantanamo, stop torture, tax the rich, and rein in the abusive masters of Wall Street.

Think about this road I've traveled. At the beginning of the Bush years, I was pretty much an outsider, referred to as being on the "far left." I usually found myself holding viewpoints that differed from the majority of the people in this country. When I spoke out against the war -- before it even started -- I was marginalized by the mainstream media and then booed off the Oscar stage in "liberal Hollywood" for commenting about a "fictitious" president. Seventy percent of the public back then supported the war and approved of the job George W. Bush was doing.

But I stuck to what I believed in, kept churning out my movies, and never looked back. The Right and the White House spokespeople came after me time after time. President Bush 41 called me an "a**" on TV, and I became a favorite punching bag at both the 2004 and the 2008 Republican National Conventions in speeches by John McCain and Joe Lieberman. On the front page of this morning's Washington Post, Mark McKinnon, a top adviser to George W. Bush, revealed -- for the first time -- the Bush White House strategy of singling me out in the hopes of turning the country against me and the Democratic Party. Here's what the Post said:

Mark McKinnon, a top adviser in President George W. Bush's campaigns, acknowledged the value of picking a divisive opponent. "We used a similar strategy by making Michael Moore the face of the Democratic Party," he said of the documentary filmmaker.

In the end it all proved to be a big strategic mistake on their part. Thanks to the Republican attacks on me, average Joes and Janes started to listen to what I had to say. Contrary to Richard Wolffe's assessment that "there were no Democrats as far as I can remember who were saying they stood with Michael Moore," Democrats, in fact, have stood side by side with me during all of this. Here's the Congressional Black Caucus supporting me on Capitol Hill in 2004. Here's Terry McAuliffe, the head of the Democratic National Committee, enthusiastically attending the premiere of "Fahrenheit 9/11" with two dozen senators and members of Congress. Here's a group of Democratic congresspeople endorsing my film Sicko in the chambers of the House Judiciary Committee in 2007. And here's President Jimmy Carter inviting me to sit with him in his box at the Democratic National Convention. Far from making me into a pariah, the Republicans helped the Democratic leadership realize that to identify themselves publicly with me meant reaching the millions who followed and supported my work.

Though John Kerry lost in 2004, my focus that year had been to get young voters registered and out to vote (I visited over 60 campuses). And so, just a few short months after the release of Fahrenheit 9/11, America's young voters became the only age group that John Kerry won. They set a new record for the largest 18 to 24-year-old turnout since 1972, when 18-year-olds were given the right to vote, thus sending a signal about what would happen four years later with the youth revolution that ignited Obama's campaign.

After Fahrenheit, I kept speaking out, the Republican machine kept attacking me, and two years later, in 2006, the American public sided with me -- not Rush Limbaugh -- and voted in the Democrats to take over both houses of Congress.

And then, finally, two years after that, we won the White House.

That's the difference -- The American people agree with me, not Rush.

The American public believes that health care is a right and not a commodity.

They want tougher environmental laws and believe that global warming is real, not a myth.

They believe that the rich should be taxed more.

They want to go after the crooks on Wall Street who got us into this mess and the politicians who enabled them.

They want more money invested in education, science, technology and infrastructure -- not in more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

They believe that, whether Democrats or Republicans have been in power, wealthy corporations have been calling the shots for the past few decades and the American people's voices have not been heard as their country has slowly been driven into the ground. Our politicians and our media have been bought and paid for by the highest bidders and we don't trust them anymore.

Finally -- they want us to get the hell out of Iraq and to investigate the criminals who sent us there for fictitious reasons.

Obama and the Democrats going after Rush is a good thing and will not do for him what the Republican attack plan did for me -- namely, the majority of Americans will never be sympathetic to him because they simply don't agree with him.

The days of using my name as a pejorative are now over. The right wing turned me into an accidental spokesperson for the liberal, majority agenda. Thank you, Republican Party. You helped us elect one of the most liberal senators to the presidency of the United States. We couldn't have done it without you.

Hoyt Hilsman: Do We Need the Republican Party?

2008-12-16T18:11:35Z

As a lifelong Democrat (my father worked for JFK) and a recent Democratic Congressional candidate, I have spent my life working to beat the pants off Republicans. And as a citizen who has suffered through the abuses of the Bush administration and the Republican rubber-stamp Congress, I would like nothing more than to see the architects of the last eight disastrous years banished to the far reaches of outer darkness.

However, if the Republican party were truly to disappear as a national political force (a fate they themselves wished on the Democrats), the nation would actually be worse off for it. By the way, this seems to be exactly what the current leadership of the Republican party has in mind. For the past eight years, the conservative wing of the GOP -- who are currently at the helm of the party - have steered a course straight for the rocks, alienating nearly every segment of the country except for the most reactionary elements of conservative America. From Latinos to big business, from Reagan Democrats to suburban moms, GOP leaders have waged war against the mainstream of our country, and they are now getting the full blowback of that ill-conceived and unjustified war.

So why not let the Republican party, now in the hands of a disgraced and disreputable conservative minority, head straight for the dustbin of history, where much of America now believes it belongs? Shouldn't there be some consequences for their recklessness and irresponsibility? From a moral standpoint, absolutely. But from a practical standpoint, we still need a responsible - and I emphasize the word "responsible" - opposition party.

The past few months of the financial crisis demonstrate the dangers of a renegade and irresponsible opposition. While the Republican leadership might have been expected to navigate a compromise in Congress with the help of the White House, the Democrats in Congress and President-elect Obama, instead they resorted to their old stonewalling tactics, determined to sabotage any constructive, bipartisan action. In the name of a rigid and outmoded ideology, they went back to the barricades when the rest of the country was trying to muddle through this mess together. The result--the GOP further alienated mainstream America.

Not that there are not a few voices within the party who have tried to be responsible. Even Bob Corker, who ultimately came down on the side of the know-nothings, tried to make a responsible argument against the auto bailout before he was drowned out by the voices of the Republican stonewallers. And there are other examples of moderate Republicans who could make important contributions to a national debate aimed at practical solutions, if they weren't swamped by the forces of extremism in their own party.

Ironically, the Republicans will have a real opportunity during the early days of the Obama administration to stake out reasonable opposing positions that might offer to restore a least of modicum of their vanished credibility with the American public. And responsible voices of opposition would likely be welcomed by the Obama White House, as they always are in times of crisis. After all, Barack Obama has promised not only change, but also a new approach to leadership that bridges historic partisan divides. When will the Republicans - both moderates and reasonable conservatives - push back against the extremist elements in their own party? It would not only be good for the GOP - possibly rescuing it from oblivion - but it might even (gasp!) be good for the country.

Monroe Price: Sarah Palin: the All-in-One Reality TV Show

2008-12-07T19:26:06Z

It's hard to have yet another Sarah Palin epiphany, but that's what happened as I was drifting happily through a conference called "Reality Worlds," organized at the Annenberg School for Communication by Marwan Kraidy and Katherine Sender.

Scholars devoted to the genre were generating all sorts of theories about these relatively inexpensive and ubiquitous program efforts. But what occurred to me (and undoubtedly has occurred to others) is how Palin's trajectory through the political campaign approximates the rhythm of makeover and other reality TV shows.

Palin is one-person reiteration of everything from "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" (early round dismissal?) up through and including "Survivor."

And then now, there's the story of Palin and her hair stylists, including Amy Strozzi, who received over $40,000 and was awarded an Emmy for her work on the show "So You Think You Can Dance." Shades of "Making the Cut," "Million Dollar $alon,"and "Top Hair."

Palin wasn't even mentioned in the Annenberg talks, but her arc during the campaign could have been a subtext for all the scholarly presentations.

Laura Grindstaff, for example, a professor at the University of California, hit a kind of proverbial Palin nail on the head when she spoke about how these shows seek out a center of American life, and engage in what she called the "production of ordinariness" through reality television.

Grindstaff was talking particularly about an MTV series called "Sorority Life" which chronicles the life of pledges as they move towards acceptance and initiation. I didn't ask, but it seemed to me that one could call Palin, whatever else she was, a kind of initiate, a rushee who among other things had to go through a process of hazing (did she make it? You be the judge.).

At the Philadelphia event, I talked with a very helpful Penn graduate student, Rebecca Pardo, who, like a lot of modern young scholars, has a slight and admirable obsession with "reality" filtered through this art form. She loves the work of Nicholas Couldry (a professor at Goldsmiths in London) and sees Palin as the embodiment of what Couldry has called the Myth of the Mediated Center.

Pardo also put me on to Justin Wolfe, who blogs about "The Hills," a reality show about life in 90210, hedonistic and pragmatic California. Wolfe has written , without, blogwise, using capital letters, about Palin and the process of candidate selection in reality shows:

"it's funny because the way sarah palin was chosen is, in many ways, just like the way heidi montag was chosen for the hills. if you strip all the fame away from heidi montag, if we pretend that she's just a normal girl what's special about her, what sets her apart? nothing, really, she's just normal. kind of pretty, sort of ambitious, but mostly normal. and, without the magic ticket she was given into the world of celebrity, into the show, that's how she would've probably stayed, a normal girl from a small town in colorado. If course, that's the Sarah Palin narrative, too: plucked from the relative obscurity of the alaskan wilderness into the national spotlight, with the barest of real experience or qualifications but with scads of those particular qualities that resonate with the american public: personality, relatability, normality.

"

As on some reality shows (take "Project Runway" for example), Palin was subjected to ingenious and daunting tests that would raise public anticipation about the outcome--triumph or failure. Would she make it to the next round? When Sarah met Katie Couric, it could have been one of these "tests" revealed to the contestant ("for your next challenge, you must go one on one with a noted anchor-person who will ask you questions you may have no way of answering"). Palin's life was a series of created melodramas with accompanying anxieties and the imminent apprehension of failure.

No reality show is complete without the backroom drama, as "Dancing With the Stars," illustrates through the elaborate process of trying to turn someone quite ordinary (in some respects) into the surprisingly gifted (the Pygmalion moment, the alchemy of transformation). Can you really make this person rhumba? Can he or she be trained to be a cook or a business executive (or an expert on foreign affairs)? We were all on pins and needles to see if this process would work with Sarah.

My mind drifted to one of my favorite shows I never watched in entirety: "Ladette to Lady," the story of a group of relatively inexperienced young women,who are given an old-fashioned five-week course in learning how to behave like a real lady. They are sent to Eggleston Hall, an English finishing school.

There was a lot of Ladette to Lady in the Palin tale, though Palin was not a Ladette, by any stretch. And the Republican National Committee wasn't Eggleston.

You could say that this wasn't a real reality show because it didn't have the panel of judges requisite in some versions. But I think of that curious crew of indifferent panelists Wolf Blitzer oddly and unrealistically named "the best political team on television." They could just as well have had cards and numbers; and Sarah (holding Todd's hand tightly) might have been seen on camera -- like frightened ice-skaters -- waiting for the results in an isolated room.

Zala Volcic, a Slovenian now living in Brisbane spoke, at the Annenberg conference (part of Professor Barbie Zelizer's Annenberg Scholars Program in Culture and Communications Program) about That's Me, a Big Brother style Balkan reality TV show which mixed roommates from all over the former Yugoslavia. The show was designed to "negotiate the struggles among religious, ethnic and national groups that still plague the region." That's Me was supposed to smooth conflict, and did not necessarily succeed. This was reality show as social engineering. Think Palin: The Message, energizing the base.

There was much talk at the Annenberg workshop about "parenting" as a persistent theme in reality shows. Mark Anthony Neal, the Duke scholar of hip-hop, gave an exuberant talk on Snoop Dog and his program called "Fatherhood." There and on so many other shows, the fragile nature of parenting--and the possibility of failing and the complexities of succeeding--were tracked.

Of course, the Sarah candidacy--right out of the box--was about mothering in American society--mothering and having a career, mothering and the extraordinary decisions about a child with Downs Syndrome, parenting and an unmarried daughter who discovers pregnancy--it goes on and on.

Much of reality television scholarship is about voting habits of the committed viewers. Stephen Coleman (Leeds), the guru of Big Brother voting, has concluded that there's not a gulf between those who vote in "real" elections and those who vote in "reality" elections. Aswin Punathambekar of the University of Michigan probably had a slightly different view. He spoke, movingly, about the temporarily intense political activity and rampant mobile phone voting in North-East India for the Indian Idol candidacy of Amit Paul.

And then, of course, there were the clothes. Palin and her relationship to clothing is Reality TV writ large. It's the epitome of the "makeover" story. One can think of the RNC operatives as channeling "What Not to Wear", the British show with Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine, even including those choice bits of surveillance where Trinny and Susannah view videos of the poor subject.

It's a small and maybe obvious epiphany--The Palin campaign as all reality shows rolled into one. The Annenberg conference luxuriated in phrases that resonated with the campaign like "cult of the commonplace." But mostly, it was interesting to see, through the Reality TV Show lens, what the Republicans -- McCain and Palin's handlers or the audiences reacting to her so enthusiastically -- were actually doing, thinking and reflecting this summer and fall.

Bob Cesca: An Open Letter To Joe Lieberman

2008-11-19T17:49:44Z

Dear Senator Lieberman,

Congratulations! You got away with it! So despite having supported and endorsed the Republican candidate for president -- and going so far as to question the patriotism of the Democratic nominee -- you've managed to keep your chairmanship. By rights, you should've been summarily ejector-seated from your committees, bonked on the head with your gavels -- cartoon-style -- and hauled from the Democratic caucus naked and on a rail whilst being pelted with wadded-up copies of your RNC address.

The aforementioned reasons for this still-lenient serving of justice fails to include the syllabus of other trespasses against you, including, first and foremost, your unwavering support for the Bush administration's unforgivable foreign policy -- a policy which has all but bankrupted our treasury and besmirched America's reputation abroad. Heckuva job, Senator!

One might be inclined to consider your conduct to date as somehow principled -- even mavericky, had it not been so transparently self-serving. Your behavior has been that of a man guided by nothing more than petty vengeance and retribution -- attention-starved opportunism not unlike grade-school instigators and gossip-mongers whose only path to relevance is to play two friends against each other. Worming your way from side to side depending on which kid or clique likes you more.

Now, I completely understand the political reasons for why President-elect Obama and the caucus ultimately chose to keep you around. Unfortunately, the Democrats need your stinky vote -- such as it is -- in order to theoretically break any future Republican filibusters. And there will be many of those to be sure. However, the closer we get to 60 votes in the caucus the better our chances of reversing the craptastical policies and legislation of your favorite Bush administration and the formerly Republican Congress.

Sure, there's no guarantee that you'll vote with the caucus, but you made it clear that you would have pitched a spasmodic, petulant fit and changed your affiliation to the Republican Party from the "Lieberman Loves Lieberman" party or whatever the hell it's called, had you been stripped of your chairmanship. Consequently, the Democratic caucus would've definitely lost your vote. It's an unenviable "possibly" versus "definitely" proposition. And with the caucus being this close to 60 against what will surely be an obstructionist Republican caucus, we have no other choice but to roll the dice with "possibly."

That is until 2010 when the Democrats will hopefully attain enough members, and thus votes, that they won't need your support anymore. Then you can storm off and mind-screw the Republicans for a couple of years until -- and it's probably not good strategy to tip our hand like this, but you know it's coming -- until you lose in 2012.

Nevertheless, you got what you wanted yesterday. Circumstances allowed you to keep your chairmanship irrespective of your weasely and contemptible maneuvering. And more than a few of us on the left actually agree with you for once: you managed to abscond off without adequate punishment.

You got away with it, despite those meddling kids, right?

Not so fast.

I submit to you, Senator Lieberman, that you were punished yesterday more than you realize. Stick with me on this. I'll explain.

I've been a supporter of the president-elect for the better part of a year now, and while I've always recognized a deep intellectualism and multilayered thoughtfulness in the man, it never fully occurred to me how he would use these strengths in a position of leadership. Until this week.

In sharp contrast to your behavior, President-elect Obama hasn't shown any predilection for pettiness or disloyalty, nor has he undermined his allies for the sake of political expedience. He's proved himself to be a man of great character. Of values. I don't need to remind anyone how he stood by Jeremiah Wright, for example, and at his own political peril when most would've tossed him overboard like political chum.

You, on the other hand, have shown an unapologetic contempt for the party that once nominated you for the vice presidency -- the party that welcomed you back to the fold even though you slipped through the system and defeated the fairly elected Democratic nominee, Ned Lamont, in 2006. You've betrayed your fellow liberals to settle a political score, Senator -- in order to exact some kind of ignoble payback against your former party, against your caucus and against the netroots for merely calling you out on your literal and figurative smooching of the president.

This is behavior President-elect Obama doesn't appear to be capable of. Because he's clearly better than you. In fact, it's not difficult to hypothesize that had you possessed a fraction of his political instincts or any small measure of his morality, you would absolutely not be in this position, Senator.

See, by allowing you to keep your precious chairmanship -- by letting you off the hook -- President-elect Obama, through his political bigness, punished you without punishing you. He beat you yesterday, Senator. He beat you because he let you be you, and underscored it with his demonstrably better angels and strength of character.

In the final analysis, the hard reality is that by not choosing retribution, he made you look...

...small.

And that, Senator, is good enough for me.

Cheers!
Bob Cesca
The Huffington Post
BobCesca.com

Order my new book: One Nation Under Fear, with a foreword by Arianna Huffington. Also available in stores.

Coleen Rowley: Criminalizing of Dissent: What Would Thomas Jefferson Do?

2008-11-14T23:00:48Z

When I got this letter enclosing 20 some business cards from a St. Paul bail bond company about three weeks before the Republican National Convention, to give to members of my peace group, I couldn't believe it.

As a retired FBI agent and former FBI legal counsel who also knew the non-violent composition of the protest and peace groups that were organizing the various marches, rallies, concerts, picnics and "unconventional" artistic events during the RNC, I wasn't very worried about police brutality or jail. I was more worried about the increasing intimidation that was deterring more and more people from participating. So we held an impromptu press conference that last week to try and alleviate the fears and get more people to participate. I also wrote a letter spotlighted in the St. Paul newspaper entitled "Patriots can't stay home".

Unfortunately it turned out the bail bond company had the correct scoop. Although my husband and I luckily managed to escape, hundreds of others would find themselves arrested for things like "unlawful assembly" over the course of the RNC week in St. Paul and hundreds more would be subjected to chemical sprays and police brutality.

No patriot should have to face what we did merely to exercise his or her first amendment rights. St. Paul authorities were apparently duped into letting their city be used and abused, probably because of the lure of the (Republican) money. But even the promise of making money did not turn out to be true for most St. Paul businesses. There's little appetite now, with the elections over, to dredge up and rehash the nightmare, but without better exposure and more critical examination of what happened, the kind of "war on dissent" that occurred the first week of September in St. Paul risks repeating itself at all future "national security events".

If you haven't seen the just released film "Terrorizing Dissent", please take two minutes to at least watch the trailer. The juxtaposition of McCain's phoney speech-making inside the Republican National Convention with the violent reality that was unfolding outside is quite eye-opening, isn't it? (The fact that TV and other main stream media only carried what went on inside the RNC and not outside contributed to creating the public approval "bump" for the Republican ticket -- certainly not unexpected following such televised extravagant displays but which was critical in 2008 for McCain-Palin to have any chance after Bush's eight disastrous years.)

Certainly, many folks who did not participate in the various activities held at the time of the 2008 Republican National Convention (Aug 31- Sept 4) and who did not witness it first hand, will have a hard time believing what an awful combat zone St. Paul was turned into much of the time that week; how pre-emptive raids effectively criminalized dissent; how community police were turned into militarized, dehumanized (and non-identifiable) robo-cops, equipped with tasers, pepper spray and tear gas; and then (unsurprisingly) pushed to over-react and use their chemical weapons and arrest over 800 non-violent citizens, including 40 some journalists. (In addition to the Glass Bead Collective and Twin Cities IndyMedia's raw footage film, there's a great insider viewpoint by William Cox: RoboCops: Professional Policing of Political Protest - An Insider's Viewpoint; the Sept. 1st Democracy Now interview of National Lawyers Guild Attorney Bruce Nestor and myself; and "Storm Troopers at the RNC" by Ray McGovern.)

All kinds of irregularities and bad departures from St. Paul's community policing model occurred. And the more we learn about the heavy-handed involvement of the Twin Cities' two (Republican) Sheriffs: Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher (whose deputies were convicted of corruption the week right before the RNC as a result of an FBI sting investigation) and Hennepin County Sheriff Richard Stanek (a McCain Campaign Co-Chairman), as well as diffusion of responsibility amongst a number of federal agencies, the more likely it appears these repressive police actions could have been politically motivated -- deliberately intended to intimidate citizens from exercising their first amendment rights in order to convey a false impression to the larger American public of little widespread opposition to the disastrous policies of the last seven years and those that Republican politicians continued to promote.

Unfortunately the intimidation did work, scaring thousands away from protesting and other activities in St. Paul that week. Watching the surreal scenes that unfolded outside the RNC, it's amazing any of us citizens had the courage to try, isn't it? In fact our little Peace Island Picnic group was only a block away from Mickey's Diner on Tuesday night, Sept 2nd (having just left the St. Paul "Free Speech Stage" outside the RNC) when police over reacted and shot their chemical weapons into the people on the street.

Help Defend the RNC 8! Sign the Petition to Dismiss Charges

If you're like me, you've probably signed hundreds of petitions in the last few years but I believe this one can really impact the situation because it's focused on one individual (Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner) who possesses the legal wisdom to recognize the wrongfulness in proceeding with a criminal prosecution of this sort that would set dangerous precedent -- dangerous to constitutional rights because it would broaden terrorism to include mere property damage instead of acts dangerous to human life. Interestingly enough, this new crime was created in the wake of 9-11 by passage of the Minnesota Anti-Terrorism Act -HF 2622, commonly referred to as Minnesota's Patriot Act. The expansive definition of terrorism was written and pushed into law in 2002 by the very same Richard Stanek when he was the Republican leader of the Minnesota Senate (before he became Hennepin County Sheriff and McCain Campaign Co-Chair). This provision of the Minnesota Patriot Act has never been charged before and the argument is that it blurs real terrorism with what was, at most, acts of intended civil disobedience.

Most noteworthy is the fact that, once the plan of blurring these lines and smearing protesters as terrorists succeeded at the RNC, Republicans carried their McCarthy like tactics a step further, and tried to do the same with Obama himself, alleging that he had "palled with terrorists." That's when their bluff was called. But it was too late for the eight young people (the "RNC 8") who were already charged with felony "conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism", charges that carry a maximum penalty of five years imprisonment and a $10,000 fine.

As an aside, I did not know any of the RNC 8 personally before this unprecedented attempt to use the expansive Minnesota Patriot Act to essentially "terrorize dissent" but you can hear them tell their own stories of what happened on this video along with comments of Naomi Wolf. If you're like me, you can sign their petition on the basis of principle alone: upholding the First Amendment and need for authorities to not blur what was, at most, planned acts of "civil disobedience" as opposed to acts of real terrorism.

What would Thomas Jefferson do?

He wouldn't hesitate to sign this petition. The turning of the "War on Terror" into a "War on Dissent" on our own citizens and the subsequent damage to First Amendment principles that we witnessed in St. Paul is reason enough to support this cause. Planning is NOT conspiracy. Protesting is NOT rioting. Dissent is NOT terrorism.

"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere." --Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, 1787.

(Earlier versions posted at The Vigil and DownWithTyranny)

Ron Levitt: GOP Governors Try to Unite Amid Palin's Media Frenzy

2008-11-14T11:40:16Z

MIAMI -- Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin had an hour-long Q and A with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, spent another 30-some minutes with Larry King, hit a few more of the cable and network news outlets, chatted with local South Florida area broadcast and print media, took charge (much to the chagrin of her fellow GOP executives) of a party press conference and, in general created what appeared to be a 48 hour "media frenzy" at the Republican Governors Association annual two-day convention.

The confab at the downtown Intercontinental Hotel overlooking Biscayne Bay was supposed to be a "show of unity" for the GOP governors, as a follow-up to the devastating Presidential electoral thrashing the party took on Nov. 4. But, the Palin media soiree caught almost everyone off balance. Here was a governor -- one who no one really knew until three months ago when Republican nominee Sen. John McCain put her into national politics with a second spot on the ticket -- taking center stage.

Palin alluded to questions from several media sources that she had been "handled" during the campaign, thus keeping her away from many media interviews (after a disastrous Katie Couric encounter ) but she more than made up for her lack of press contact during the campaign during her two day stint in Miami. As one journalist noted, "she was everywhere." "It's Sarah Palin's Show at GOP Miami Meeting" headlined the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, over an article by political writer Anthony Man. Man called her a "hot commodity."

But, staffers connected to other governors on hand were less than enthusiastic, noting "she is not the de facto leader of the party."

Others -- many who spoke only on condition of anonymity -- called her multi-press interviews and broadcast appearances as "sucking up all the media oxygen." One governor, Mississippi's Haley Barber, however, came to her defense, shrugging off that description.

In fairness, the media seemed to be seeking her out for a comment at every opportunity.

However, the press conference on Thursday apparently caused the most concern, comment and replays on national television well into the evening Thursday and Friday morning. Backed by 13 other GOP governors as a show of party unity -- after a lengthy introduction by Texas' Rick Perry, Palin took over the microphone and attempted to answer all the questions (with her fellow governors looking awkwardly on) before the press staff shut the media conference down after ll minutes and four questions.

Palin also was criticized for adding to the tension because of her speech at the Miami meeting. It was supposed to be a call for unity and for the future of the aching Republican party. But instead Palin spent much of her talk about her experiences as the first woman on a national GOP ticket and a call to keep President-elect Barack Obama"in check." There were little details, but she reportedly was continuing to rebrand her image which she says was unfairly tarnished during the presidential campaign,

In her TV appearances, Palin also made comments about her party-paid-for wardrobe, purchases (she called them merely theatrical props), her pregnant daughter (who she said could be a leader in teaching teens how to avoid such situations), repeated some of her anti-Obama campaign criticism ("he palled around" with the wrong people), and continued to praise Sen. McCain as a national hero.

She also continuously denied blame for the GOP'S defeat. "If I cost John McCain one vote, I am sorry."

"I think the economic collapse had a heckova lot more to do with the campaign's collapse than me personally," she told NBC.

Several newspapers reported that host Florida Gov, Charlie Crist, had lost much of his luster when McCain turned to Palin for the number two spot on the ticket, despite his campaigning full steam for him in the primary. He welcomed the governor's group to South Florida with a call for unity.

Others on hand (and mentioned as potential candidates in 2012) included Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana (notably missing when Palin held her press conference flanked by 13 other leaders) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minneota. And, some pundits have written about the success of several two-term winners in the party -- John Hoeven of North Dakota, Jon Huntsman of Utah, Jim Douglas of Vermont and Mitch Daniels of Indiana

Gov, Palin left the possibility of a 2012 presidential run or a Senate seat campaign as something she might consider, but said she would be devoting herself to her job as Alaska's chief executive.

Citing the Almighty as the ultimate decision maker, she noted that she would not appoint herself to a Senate seat if convicted Sen. Ted Stevens is ousted from the Upper Chamber, but said that if God should open the door to a special election, she might walk "through the door."

You betcha!

The GOP's Bizarre Purchases: Chocolate Elephants, Art Restoration, Rove's Lunches

2008-10-27T15:34:09Z

In early October, as the presidential campaign was hitting its emotional peak, the Republican National Committee mailed off a check for $6,000 to an art restoration company in Kensington, Maryland. What political purpose such an expenditure played is difficult to ascertain. An employee at Wimsatt & Associates declined to discuss the services it provided for its client, only confirming that the company deals in repairing damaged artwork, not in selling pieces. The RNC, meanwhile, did not return requests for comment. But it is hard to imagine, in the context of the current election, that $6,000 for art restoration helped the Republican Party's electoral standing.

The revelation that the RNC spent tens of thousands on clothing for Gov. Sarah Palin has roiled the race in recent days. A more comprehensive review of expenditures by the RNC and the McCain campaign finds various other instances, such as the above, of questionable spending. In the past two months, for example, the GOP ticket has opened up its wallet for elephant-shaped shrubbery, baseball tickets, a yacht rental, and lunches for Karl Rove.

Like Palin's clothing, these expenditures pale in comparison to the vast sums spent on standard campaign essentials. But with Republicans facing down a historic Obama-led fundraising juggernaut, they seem likely to raise new questions about the GOP's spending priorities, with no apparent practical purpose in advancing John McCain's candidacy.

For instance, the McCain Victory 2008 committee spent nearly $9,000 on "event site rental" from a yacht company in San Diego, while the John McCain 2008 committee bought $336 worth of "event tickets" for an Arizona Diamondbacks baseball game.

Hoping to lavish big time donors with gifts of appreciation during the GOP convention in Minnesota, McCain Victory 2008 purchased 250 wine glasses adorned with elephant designs, at a cost of nearly $7,000, from a shop in Georgia. It was considered a deal.

"I gave them a 20 percent discount," said an employee of Kevin's of Thomasville. "We are all Republicans here."

That same committee also purchased $3,589 worth of elephant shaped chocolates from a sweet shop in Dallas, Texas. "They bought about 1,000 pieces," said the storeowner. "About eleven ounces a piece in all three types of chocolate: milk, dark and light."

In addition to these items, the McCain campaign spent nearly $9,000 at a jewelry and political paraphernalia shop in Washington D.C., and $4,249.07 at the outdoor/clothing store, Lands End. The RNC, meanwhile, paid the Minnesota-based Tropical Plants Unlimited nearly $500 for an elephant-shaped topiary shrub.

These may seem like minor expenditures. And certainly, the Obama campaign and the DNC have also made their share of questionable purchases. But, all told the McCain campaign put down nearly $20,000 simply on items classified as "event-donor gifts."

The campaign also bought items that cut against the Republican candidate's own political message. These included checks totaling more than $9,400 for an event at the Beverly Hills Hilton, roughly at the same time that McCain was criticizing Obama for going to Hollywood while the economic crisis stirred. John McCain 2008 also paid $107.20 in subscription fees to the New York Times, the same paper that aides to McCain have called a non-journalistic institution and have trashed on a semi-regular basis.

The Republican National Committee had its share of curious purchases as well. The party paid $1,000 for a gift certificate to South Coast Growers Inc., "a plant grower, broker, & distributor dedicated to both the buying and selling of quality plant material and specimens for the wholesale market." It covered more than $600 combined in Starbucks purchases made by its workers; and $77.41 in meal tabs reported by former Bush strategist Karl Rove. And from September through last week, the committee spent $955 on golf carts and $38 on two separate car washes.

In the end, these budget items add up to a small amount of the many millions of dollars that the RNC and the McCain campaign have plowed through during the course of the campaign. But with an election that seems close to slipping away, and with multiple states considered battleground turf, every penny surely would help. And six-thousand-dollars on art restoration won't, it appears, win any votes.

Mario Almonte: For Republicans, the Agony and the Ecstasy that is Sarah Palin

2008-10-15T12:31:57Z

The Ecstasy - She's the Republican Party's most effective and dynamic public speaker whose inspirational words can motivate supporters to a point of great passion and fanatic loyalty.

The Agony - She's an effective and dynamic public speaker whose inflammatory accusations about her opponents incite crowds to acts of violence and hate, turning off potential supporters and generating misgiving of Republican leadership.

The Ecstasy - Her acceptance speech as McCain's VP running mate immediately bumped up McCain's standings in the polls and established her as the Republican Party's rising star.

The Agony - Her subsequent, limited interviews with the media revealed a person who is completely clueless about the American political process and world events, causing Republican leaders to wring their hands in anguish, and to fight back that sinking feeling that her selection had sealed their political doom.

The Ecstasy - She's the most exciting and successful fundraiser for the Republican Party, getting supporters to donate millions of dollars to the McCain presidential campaign to ensure that she gets elected into office.

The Agony - She's the most effective fundraiser for the Democratic Party, driving terrified voters to donate millions of dollars to the Obama presidential campaign to ensure that she doesn't get elected into office.

The Ecstasy - She fires up conservatives and religious advocates, who see a champion for their cause to establish a society based on sound religious principles and solid moral values.

The Agony - She frightens away the independent and liberal bases, which see a hypocritical and small-minded person, whose own life reflects a complete contradiction to all that she claims to stand for and believe in.

The Ecstasy - She looks good in librarian glasses, pricey designer suits, and high heels, possessing a telegenic presence that wins over audiences.

The Agony - She evokes Dana Carvey's Church Lady with her calculated, folksy demeanor that hides a fanatical intolerance of any lifestyle that does not meet her strict criteria.

The Ecstasy - She has convinced supporters that "Joe Six Pack" and hockey moms are fully qualified to run the country, solve the energy and economic crisis, engage in international diplomacy, and command the most powerful army in the world; that any ordinary Joe and PTA mom with minimal education and professional experience can sit in upon high-level discussions with economists, scientists, military leaders, and scholars to explore the nuances and ramifications of actions by the U.S. upon the international community, offer astute insights and make intelligent decisions that impact that lives of hundreds of millions of people.

The Agony - She produces nightmares in people of fair intelligence who can only imagine a drunk, beer-bellied redneck and his hillbilly wife in curlers with their fingers on the "new-cue-ler" button.

Erik Lundegaard: The More Things Change: Norman Mailer and the 1964 Republican Convention

2008-10-13T13:04:45Z

The letters of Norman Mailer, excerpted in the Oct. 6 New Yorker, reminded me all over again why I loved that left-conservative bastard. He's grandiose but self-effacing. He's far-sighted and non-doctrinaire. He admired both Fidel Castro and William F. Buckley, and even contributed money to The National Review, but, at the same time, or later (in '76), he could write to a friend, "But as for Ford, Reagan, Dole and the rest of that pirate ship -- Mary, they're puke." His letter to Don DeLillo, praising him for Libra, is a good reminder that Norman's ego, which so many people can't get around, was at least matched, if not outmatched, by the largeness of his spirit.

The letters also led me back, for whatever reason, to his piece, "In the Red Light: A History of the Republican Convention in 1964," from Cannibals and Christians, which I first read over a decade ago. I remember I didn't particularly like it back then. Norman went off on too many tangents, he reduced too many groups -- "Goldwater girls ran to two varieties," etc. -- and while sometimes this stuff felt close to truth, other times it just felt hollow and mean.

Parts of it still feel hollow and mean but the rest feels shockingly contemporary. It makes the 1964 election feel like the first half of a bookend whose second half we may be fashioning.

An Arizona senator is running for president by appealing to the worst elements of the Republican party. The Midwestern and western elements of that party viciously attack the eastern establishment, the media, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. There's a down-home folksiness in the candidate's voice: "I think we're going to give the Democrats a heck of a surprise," he says. There's a callback to Christianity: "The thing to remember is that America is a spiritual country, we're founded on belief in God, we may wander a little as a country but we never get too far away," he says.

At the convention, at the Cow Palace in San Francisco of all places, a senator from Colorado, Peter Dominick, gives a speech favoring extremism by quoting a New York Times editorial from 1765 which rebuked Patrick Henry for his extremism. Norman writes:

Delegates and gallery whooped it up. Next day Dominick confessed. He was only "spoofing." He had known: there was no New York Times in 1765. Nor was there any editorial. An old debater's trick. If there are no good facts, make them up. Be quick to write your own statistics. There was some umbilical tie between the Right Wing and the psychopathic liar.

Yet for a time Norman considers voting for Goldwater. There are elements of LBJ and the Democratic party he can't abide -- its modern, clinical quality -- and he thinks it may be worse to die a slow, suffocating death than to go out with Goldwater in a blaze of glory. But finally:

One could not vote for a man who made a career by crying Communist--that was too easy: half the pigs, bullies and cowards of the twentieth century had made their fortune on that fear.

Cuba comes up, and Norman writes of the U.S.:

One could live with a country which was mad, one could even come to love her (for there was agony beneath the madness), but you could not share your life with a nation which was powerful, a coward, and righteously pleased because a foe one-hundredth our size had been destroyed.

Again and again, from a distance of 44 years, Norman describes what we are today.

Goldwater lost that election, of course, he lost big, but in later years even the much-hated media would see that convention, and that loss, as the birth of the modern Republican party. They'd bend to Goldwater and see him through orange-colored glasses. Re-read Norman, though, and you have no doubt what elements he was stirring up.

They're still stirred up. A friend of mine once said that you could either be successful or you could be right, and in the early 1960's the Democratic party decided to be right, finally, reluctantly right, on the issue of civil rights, and since then the Republican party has been successful largely on the back of that decision. But maybe things are finally changing. It's probably too much to ask to bookend this period, in which I've lived my entire life, so neatly with these two Arizona senators: one railing against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the other railing against the culmination of that Act. But it would be nice if, in another 44 years, no one had to read Norman's article and think about how shockingly contemporary it still was.

Robert D. Stolorow: Trauma and Change in America

2008-10-10T17:36:02Z

In this radio interview I discuss my ideas about emotional trauma (RD Stolorow, Trauma and Human Existence, Routledge, 2007) and extend them to the collective trauma of 9/11 and the "portkeys" (a term borrowed from Harry Potter) that transport us back into that devastated state. Bush and now McCain and Palin have exploited these portkeys -- the specter of weapons of mass destruction, the "tribute" to 9/11 at the RNC, the smear of "palling around with domestic terrorists," the economic collapse -- for their own political aims.

http://www.wsradio.com/internet-talk-radio.cfm/shows/The-Dr.-Howard-Gluss-Show.html

Josh Ruxin: Can the Democrats Lead in Africa?

2008-10-10T14:22:39Z

Last month, I wrote about my invitation to attend the Republican National Convention, where I took part in a panel discussion on American leadership in Global Health. I mused before attending that as a lifelong democrat, I would likely feel like a fish out of water in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

While I did experience the odd feeling of dislocation at times, I came away from the experience greatly heartened, and - at the same time - very concerned. In conversations with my fellow panelists and leading Republicans, I was strongly impressed by the party's leadership's commitment to a forward-thinking policy in Africa. Several delegates I spoke with noted that the only aspect of Bush's foreign policy that they viewed positively was rooted in Africa. Not only do Republicans talk about their commitment to current investments such as Millennium Challenge Accounts and PEPFAR, they agree that significantly more needs to be accomplished - in infrastructure, communications, and economic development. Highlighting the appeal of service and investment in Africa, the ONE campaign service event managed to attract Bill Frist, Cindy McCain, Laura Bush, and a crowd of hundreds of the Republican elite. Although I didn't make it to Denver, I heard the parallel event there was not nearly as well attended.

Thus, my concern grows that the Democrats have not shown the same level of commitment to Africa as the Republicans have. Though, it's true that the bipartisan organization ONE Vote '08 recognized the need to support Africans through Bush Administration programs, and during their visit here, they were genuinely surprised and pleased by my Rwandan neighbors' energy. The Rwandans' grassroots enthusiasm and desire for more trade and business opportunities was a significant revelation to them.

However, as Election Day nears, I can sense that my neighbors' concern is deepening somewhat. What Rwandans - who are certainly bigger fans of President Bush than Americans are at this point - want to know is this: will the next President of the United States honor the commitments of his predecessor? Will he also open doors to them that allow increased trade and business opportunities - opportunities that make it possible for rural farmers, merchants, and skilled laborers to create their own businesses?

I often talk about prosperity creation in these pages. Yet, my conversations with some attending the convention and others reveal that prosperity creation through business or entrepreneurial activity seems counter to what Rwandans and other Africans need. Some believe that aid is all that is required to keep Africa moving in the right direction, but the fact is, aid programs are not about movement, or even stasis. Too often, aid is about playing catch-up.

We can certainly do better and we must. To get African nations mobilized as Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda are beginning to be, we need to look beyond simple aid. We need to help Africans develop business agreements, new companies, co-operatives and other wealth generation activities. When I describe this type of investment, my audience occasionally nods and repeats the old saying, "If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day: if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime." While this feels right, it may undermine the enormous potential of wealth-building programs.

The fact is, you don't just feed that person for a lifetime. You make it possible for that person to teach others, to build relationships, to create more profitable systems that improve the lives of everyone involved, in education, in health, and in a country's future. People in Rwanda value U.S. programs that build prosperity more than any other programs we currently fund because they see the immense potential to build health and wealth in their lives and their communities. Is this better for all of us? You bet it is. A fellow panelist at the RNC, Nancy Birdsall of the Center for Global Development, recently noted in her superb collection of essays, "The White House and the World", that 45% of US exports go to developing countries and 10% of our labor force depend on those exports. Helping developing countries to generate wealth helps us.

Before Election Day, I don't think the Democrats are likely to make as vocal a commitment as the Republicans did last month to US programs that build African prosperity. But, if Barack Obama is elected, I would hope that he embraces the best part of the Bush legacy - as the Republicans have.

Marissa Moss: An Interview with Ted Leo: Providing Post-RNC Rx

2008-09-30T10:47:04Z

Things that have dropped off the radar since the RNC:

1. "Barack Obama is Just a Community Organizer" (due to counter-point: "So was Jesus")
2. Possibly John McCain (see: Obama debates... Obama?)
3. Any coverage of the police brutality against journalists and protesters who were raided, some arrested and prevented from protesting the RNC

These items haven't gone unheard, however, with Ted Leo, singer and songwriter currently known for his work with band the Pharmacists. Especially not #3.

When word of the RNC violence and arrests traveled east, Leo and the band decided to record two new songs, Paranoia: Never Enough and Mourning In America, plus two cover tunes I Got Your Number (originally by Cock Sparrer) and Nobody's Driving (Amebix). These four tracks comprise Rapid Response, an EP created to bring awareness and financial aid to the people affected by the police brutality in Minnesota -- with all proceeds going directly to Food Not Bombs Minneapolis, Democracy Now and Cold Snap Legal. I chatted with Leo about life as a politically-motivated songwriter, his feelings about the RNC violence and, of course, pigs in lipstick.

Rapid Response is available now for an exclusive window via Touch and Go Records for $4.00, and will soon be available on Itunes.

Have you always been politically active as a band?

Yeah absolutely. It's something that I sometimes have to struggle to get away from, at least topically when it comes to songwriting. It's kind of like, I hate to make it sound so cliché: but I literally grew up being formed by punk rock and topical songwriting. It's at the core of what I do. It's hard for me to not write that way.

Do you sometimes feel like you have to reign yourself in and not write politically-motivated lyrics?

No, it's just that sometimes it can be stifling as an artist, especially when you want to be able to say something and you find yourself confined to the same issues. For example, just thinking about the last five, six years, there's barely anything new to discuss politically. There's this latest thing we did with what went on the RNC, but in a broad sense, time and time again it's the same series of issues because we have had the same administration for eight years. You find yourself struggling to see how you can address this again.

Do you think it's the musician's place, especially one in the public eye, to speak about and engage youth culture and activism via their work?

Absolutely. Is there a place? There certainly is. It blows my mind when people suggest that there isn't. It's not as if art in general doesn't have a millennial history of exactly this sort of thing- the idea that anyone, a musician, should stick to pure entertainment is ridiculous. It's absolutely fine if that's what a particular artist wants to do, gods knows there is also certainly a place for the songs. But there's plenty of immediate social commentary in Dante, and that's going way back...there are a lot of people who just say "shut up and sing." But the idea that art should somehow be separated from commentary is completely ridiculous....

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists

What was it about the events of the RNC that put you in such haste to release this EP?

There are a number of things, but at the most basic level it was a moment of being fed up, with all this violence against our own citizens by our police force, coupled with the context of a violent republican convention. It just really made me angry, and this is what I can do. I can't change the world, but I can write a song and hopefully raise money for people who need it. So that's what we can do and we chose to do it. More specifically there were two things that really sent me over the edge, one was a video that I saw of this girl getting pepper-sprayed repeatedly by a police officer and all she was doing was matching pace with their march and holding out a flower. It's actually making me physically agitated as I talk to you right now. That paired with Sarah Palin's speech where she essentially made fun of Barack Obama with her "reading them their rights" statement. Of course they should be read their rights - that's in the constitution! And then you go to the arrests...this is not supposed to happen in our country. But these people have behaved for years and years with no accountability, they can get away with everything they want. If they don't think that that filters down to the cop who is pepper-spraying that girl, I really think it does. It created a cultural zeitgeist where lying and bullying is rewarded.

It's true in that we tend to award that type of Republican strategy as good politics, when people come out and cleverly position lies--we applaud good game playing, sneaky rhetoric. That's the discussion, not that the facts are incorrect.

Yes. And another after-effect is how that plays out in the general population. I really think that you are seeing a rise in thuggish, jock-ish bullying. It makes me fearful of having a child -- that's how upset it makes me.

Let's talk a bit about the songs you wrote as a reaction to what went on at the RNC. What was the process of putting them together?

As that was happening and we were getting news of it [the band] just all agreed that we wished there was something we could do. The first thing that you think of in a situation like that is, let's put on a show to raise a little bit of awareness and some money. But it was tough schedule-wise and it occurred to me that it only appeals to however many people are there and then it's over. Whereas if we created as document of our lasting feelings, it will exist forever and be perpetually available for people to be able to contribute to the causes we wanted to support. So I just woke up one day and wrote a song really quick. Went to practice, set up our situation to record it, and it's as simple as that.

On your Web site, you link to an article related to domestic spying when a viewer clicks on one of the songs.

It's just another example of a reason why we can never be too paranoid.

And the songs will be available on Itunes?

Yes, but the money will continue to go to the beneficiaries.

It's amazing to see how the internet has really changed how people interact with politics, and certainly where the music/political intersection is concerned.

I think it's pretty much 100% a positive development, in every way. It allows disinformation to spread -- but it also allows real information to spread. Over the past few years we've seen what a useful tool it is. Immediate community building, not just chatting on a message board, but organizing.

So is it safe to say you endorse Obama?

I absolutely do, and I'll tell you this. I am only a registered Democrat so I can vote in their primaries -- I see enough of a difference in the sides to know which way I want to vote, but I am usually dissatisfied with anyone who occupies public office. Having said that, there is a lot about the centrist lead of whoever is running for national office on the Democratic ticket to make me perpetually frustrated with him or her. But I do endorse Obama with some enthusiasm. That was a pretty lame endorsement, but I am actually pretty excited about him.

In these next days, what are you going to be doing to get out the vote?

We are going to be on tour-playing in Bloomington, Indiana on election day. It's a matter of speaking to who we can from night to night, trying to get different groups out and connecting politically with the people who will be at our shows.

One last question. What's the different between a hockey mom and a pit bull?

Don't say lipstick (laughs.) But can I tell you a joke of my own? If anyone asked me how I feel about lipstick on a pig in context to how they felt about Sarah Palin, my answer would be "pigs are very intelligent animals. I wouldn't denigrate them by comparing them to her."

Ted Leo and The Pharmacists are on tour now.

Nielsen: Uncommitted Voters More Engaged By RNC Telecasts

2008-09-22T12:46:23Z

Voters not yet committed to either candidate were 12% more engaged by TV coverage of the GOP convention than the Democratic convention, according to an analysis released Monday by Nielsen IAG.

"Engagement" refers to the amount of attention paid to a television program by the average viewer. Nielsen measures TV engagement by questioning a representative panel of viewers about their recall of specific telecasts' content.

Hawkish GOP Delegate Drugged, Robbed Of $120,000 After One-Night-Stand At Convention (VIDEO)

2008-09-16T17:15:00Z

The Pioneer Press reports on the self-described "poor judgement" of Gabriel Nathan Schwartz, 29, of Denver. Schwartz was in Minneapolis last month for the Republican National Convention when an innocent one-night-stand ended rather badly for the young delegate.

He met her in the bar of the swank hotel and invited her to his room. Once there, the woman fixed the drinks and told him to get undressed.

And that, the delegate to the Republican National Convention told police, was the last thing he remembered.

When he awoke, the woman was gone, as was more than $120,000 in money, jewelry and other belongings.

The thief's take stunned cops.

"It's very, very, very rare," Minneapolis Police Sgt. William Palmer said. "I can think of a couple of burglaries where we had that much stolen, but it's the first time I've heard of this kind of deal."

Click here to read the complete story

The Pioneer Press also posts footage of Schwartz taken from the convention in which he lays out his hawkish plans for the Middle East. He says that the US should "bomb the hell out of" Iran. When asked how the US should pay for such a strike, he suggests, "We should plant a flag, take the oil, take the money. We deserve reimbursement."

Watch:

Tina Dupuy: Denouncing Extremists While Touting 'Mavericks'

2008-09-15T13:44:15Z

When I endure a really, really bad movie, I like to watch the director's commentary on the DVD. I do. It's my way of looking for an explanation of why total crap is made, marketed and landing in my DVD player. Call it morbid curiosity. In extreme cases, I look for an apology. "I'm sorry I made this movie and I'm even sorrier that you watched it. Forgive me."

This is how I watched the Republican National Convention. I sat there night after night looking for someone to say, "Wow. Did we ever leave some children behind or what?" Or, "Sorry about all the looting. Our bad." Or "When we said 'God' was in the White House...yeah we really regret that." Or "We did misunderestimate George Bush, sorry America." Or even, "Look, it's not our fault that Kerry was a dud. Okay? There are some things that are on us - that is not one of them." Just a little contrition. Something.

Instead, I saw a bunch of white people dressed like bedazzled community cork boards chanting "Drill Baby Drill" reacting enthusiastically to speeches about 'change'. No, "America is awesome. Everything is great. We've been in charge. Yippee" speeches. Change?! Barack Obama was talking about change. He is, after all in the opposing party. So, the Republicans decided that if speaking out against the last 8 years was getting some traction for the Democrats - Republicans should do that too.

The trick is -- talk about change but assume absolutely no responsibility for spurring it. That takes some maneuvering. Cue word play:

"Change is coming." McCain said to the sea of cheering supporters during his acceptance speech. The same sea that happily voted for George Bush twice. The same sea that happily had the most powerful executive branch in history. The same sea that's endured few compromises these past years...which could account for why they are so happy.

Change is coming? Okay, they ruined the word change. Change is change. Changing the change. Not climate change (of course), but change. Sparring change. Sparing change. Change. They've muddied the meaning. They've run 'change' into the ground where it has now lost all significance. Like the surge of patriotism and unity after 9/11; Republicans have warped change. One person's reformer is another person's progressive -- but still, this is ridiculous. McCain used Obama's exact buzzword?

Does no one at the McCain camp own a thesaurus?!

They have also forever tarnished the word 'maverick'. Maverick used to be a term for a rebel. For someone that didn't fit in. Someone that bucked the system. A motherless calf. Madonna started a record label, Maverick records. Madonna is a maverick. Ron Paul is a maverick. Lyndon Larouche is a maverick. My cousin that can't keep a job because he thinks 'rules' are 'lame, dude', is a freaking maverick...Man. McCain is a military man and career politician. His version of 'maverick' is everyone else's version of total conformity and doing everything that you're told.

But the Republicans love to say McCain and his veep choice Sarah Palin are mavericks. They're mavericks because they said something against their own party. Ooh edgy. They're critical of politicians. Oh stop you nonconformists. Next they'll say the system that they're offering to fix is broken. What won't you rebel against?!

Besides, the Grand Old Party, the party of traditional marriage, traditional values and traditional skin tones embracing their nominated candidate as a maverick, is bizarre anyway. You can't denounce 'extremists' and tout 'mavericks'. That's akin to denouncing hoagies while endorsing po-boys. It makes you look nuts.

"We're going to nominate this guy that we say doesn't do what we say because we know he shares our values." Blink.

The Republicans don't want change. They want to remain in power. Which makes them say anything, including the word 'change'.

Mary Lyon: Lipschtick and Pigs

2008-09-11T21:27:23Z

Amazing what a difference a week makes.

Something has changed since Sarah Palin burst into the Republican Convention and started living it up by the stiletto. It still stings to look back over her mean-spirited, scornful, barb-laden speech. Whoever once said sticks and stones might hurt but names would not, has obviously never met the new Republican Annie Oakley wannabe. But it's not just the nastiness anymore. Now it's the wall-to-wall lies. Evidently she hasn't yet bothered to visit the now-fabled "Straight Talk Express."

I've noticed an interesting new yeast beginning to leaven the Sarah Palin story. Her acid tongue has pierced through a wall that seemed unassailable for years. The near-adoration of her by a ridiculously fawning media a few days ago now has some strings attached. For a nauseatingly long time, Republicans in general and the Bush administration in particular have enjoyed a singular freedom from vetting by the media. The most we've ever had when one of these people bore false witness was a lipstick-on-pig vocabulary of delicate wordings and phrasings such as "misleading," "misstating," "misspeaking," "misrepresenting," "stretching the truth," "exaggerating," "prevaricating," and other verbal tidy-wipes.

Sarah Palin's statements have apparently pushed this tolerance threshold just a bit too far. Seems someone has finally noticed - and doesn't mind saying so - that the lady has trouble telling the truth. For the first time, I've actually heard some mainstream media people using that other "L-word" - lie - in all its derivations, when discussing her. That attests to the power of the blogosphere that decided not to wait for the mainstreamers to fact-check her claims. I guess their due diligence dug up so much pay dirt so quickly that the conventional media couldn't afford to remain so willfully blind or deferentially on their knees any longer. Previously, there never would have been heard a discouraging word - after all, we are talking about a Republican here.

I think it might be a case of "it's the magnitude, stupid." It would be one thing if the issue were a single boo-boo, or one teeny tiny tall tale that gets a nice laugh and then fades. But with Palin, it keeps coming and coming and coming, over and over and over again. Not just one inadvertent omission or exaggeration. Multiple statements she made in her speech, and repeated on campaign stops, have not passed the smell test. At such a high level of regularity, it shouldn't be surprising that somebody somewhere started to notice. That heightened awareness has bloomed from such blogs as Talking Points Memo, DailyKos, and ThinkProgress to Newsweek, the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, ABC News, MSNBC, NBC's Nightly News, CBS, the Washington Post, even Chris Wallace on Fox Noise, and CNN's Wolf Blitzer wondering aloud "is she telling the whole truth?" We're finally seeing the media at least attempting to be completely impartial and start questioning again, rather than dutifully funneling whatever any GOP celebrity said, directly from tongue to TV screen and news print without regard to whether that tongue might be forked.

Now there's a growing awareness of the need to correct both Palin's and John McCain's statements repeatedly, because these two have provided so much material to work with. In her case, it's about the Bridge to Nowhere, earmarks, pork-barrel spending, the executive jet that may or may not have been sold on EBAY (maybe for a profit and maybe not), how innocent and occasional was her questioning of the employment of her ex-brother-in-law, and what she personally pocketed in travel expenses while living at home. For McCain, there's the whole side show regarding who said "lipstick on a pig" about what or whom, complete with multiple video clips of his own (pardon the pun) liberal use of that phrase.

Is it time, yet, to declare that the McCain/Palin bloom fading from the rose? Has the blanket free pass finally been revoked? Richard Wolffe went so far on MSNBC's "Countdown" to say that the McCain/Palin campaign may well have "jumped the pig." I've watched over several days as the coverage of the campaign has changed ever so slightly in timbre. It looks as though they're not just swallowing Republican talking points whole, or mindlessly anymore. As much time seems to be spent, now, dissecting the content of a stump speech or a campaign commercial to examine what's misleading or flat-out false, misquoted, or taken out of context. Nobody ever seemed that interested in such meticulous autopsies before. Perhaps the news media has decided, at least partially, that lapdog time is old news, and watchdog time is back on the clock.

Which brings us to the lip service about "lipstick." Is "lipstick" the exclusive property of the GOP? Both Sarah Palin and John McCain would have you believe it is. Why else would McCain relish using the "lipstick on a pig" phrase about Hillary Clinton's health care plan during the primaries, and peppering his public comments with it on any number of occasions, only to take great umbrage when Barack Obama uses the same phrase to describe McCain's policies?

Palin attempted to assert claims of exclusive ownership of the word "lipstick" in her convention speech. Sarah, dear, let me help you here at the cosmetics counter. You do not own that word. You never did. No one woman unilaterally does. Nor do Rudy Giuliani, Kiss, or RuPaul. Tammy Faye Bakker certainly didn't - and she might actually have had a reasonable claim. Connie Francis didn't, even while singing "Lipstick on your collar told a tale on you" in 1959. Nor did Margaux Hemingway in the film "Lipstick" ten years later, or more recently Alesha Dixon in her "Lipstick" video, or Brooke Shields on TV's "Lipstick Jungle." Max Factor doesn't even own that word. No one ever issued Palin a trademark for it.

What's next? Might we soon see Palin suing for copyright violation if Obama or another Democrat uses the word "lipstick" in a sentence from here until Election Day? And if so, shouldn't it be John McCain who might take such legal action? After all, the video clip of Obama using the words "lipstick" and "pig" in the same sentence featured him mentioning only one name: McCain's. Not Palin's. Maybe we're getting a little touchy?

There's one other point to make here. At the convention, Palin herself declared that she was ready for a good fight. She proved that she can throw a punch, and she seems eager to keep doing so. Anybody who struts around a stage boldly likening herself to a "pitbull in lipstick" is spoiling for some sort of dust-up, or at least talking like it. Those are fightin' words. If you adopt such a belligerent posture, you lose your right to object when and if some of the punches coming at you start landing a little too hard. For the McCain/Palin campaign to start whining and yelling "No Fair!" now, when they were the ones who started waving their lipstick at America is tantamount to smearing that lipstick directly into the Looking Glass. Besides, it's the P.O.W. griping on behalf of a running mate who's presently M.I.A., which makes him look small and rather pathetic. She's more than capable of defending herself. After all, this lady painted her own face with war paint, in the first place. Nobody forced her hand.

What's encouraging is that the mainstream media is now no longer pulling its own punches. It's MORE than fair to ask questions, and challenge phony and off-base claims, especially when you have a record AND the video tape to underscore the validity of that challenge. Let the full media vetting surge ahead. As voters we have the absolute right to know whether McCain and Palin, who would govern our land and our lives, are lying and fudging the facts when they make their case for our support. It's long past time when only Democrats should be subject to a political proctoscope while Republicans get a mere skin-deep overview. It's good, finally, to see that press people aren't willing to take much at face value from either party any longer - with or without lipstick.

Elissa Altman: A White Knight Talking Backwards: The Manchurian Candidate in the Kitchen

2008-09-11T20:26:02Z

Much has been made over the last week of the Alice-Gone-Down-The-Rabbit-Hole Republican Convention; we had Fred Thompson going on about how great things really, really are. We had Giuliani stealing a magnificent 13 minutes of airtime by going over--way, way over--in a speech that, even for him, was wildly maniacal. We had everyone and their brother yammering on about how little experience Barack Obama has, followed immediately by the nomination of Sinister Sarah, whose exhaustive public work in Alaska involves an attempt at book censoring (who knew that Mark Twain was so naughty!), breaking state law by offering her "personal" feelings surrounding the Clean Water Initiative (Alaska law prohibits public officers from voting on ballot initiatives such as this one), and, clad in a powder blue windbreaker, offering the keynote address to the opening of the secessionist Alaska Independence Party "Convention," presided over by a ZZ Top look-a-like. And then, we had the presidential nominee himself, speaking in kind and dulcet tones about reaching out to his friends across the aisle. Right after Sarah eviscerates them like she would a not-quite-dead moose.

Distressing? Sure. Disgusting? Definitely. Frightening? Without a doubt. So, after the hideous spectacle was over, I did what most food writers do when they're mildly hysterical: I fled for the safety of my kitchen. September notoriously marks a bumper crop of end-of-season vegetables, scores of like-minded folks wanting to cook at home after a summer packed with picnics and travels, and the arrival of a library's-worth of new cookbooks. This is the time of year when I become fixated, like a caribou in the proverbial cross-hairs, on absolutely all things culinary: I pull them around me like a safety blanket, hunker down, and cook constantly, because the process is so elemental and, at its best, so simple. The thing is, you can't really lie about food--what's good and what isn't, what's healthy and what isn't, what's real and what's fake--and so after the likes of Palin, McCain, Giuliani, Thompson, and the whole who's-really-preggers-and-who's-really-not debate, I desperately needed to be grounded by the very act of preparing food slowly and thoughtfully. And that's exactly what I did: pan-seared chicken with Meyer lemon, roasted on a bed of fresh herbs; Suvir Saran's Goan Shrimp Curry; Judy Rodgers'Porchetta. It all made me feel a little bit better, mostly.

During the week, when my meals tend to be a bit faster and less labor intensive, I often satisfy my culinary urges by watching food television: Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern delight me (although I could live without the idea of eating palmetto bugs). And late at night, if my partner has gone to bed ahead of me, I will click around until I get to the Food Network which, after 11:00, tends to get a bit more practical than it is during the day. I'm not a big Food Network fan anymore--not since Mario went away and it became impossible to find Jamie and Nigella -- but I do love Alton Brown. Alton is a scientist, and a thinker; a cross between Harold McGee and James Beard, all tied up in a nice, neat, slightly geeky, totally quirky, accessible bundle.

So there I was last night, watching Alton cook a steak the proper way; I was a little distracted, admittedly. I sipped a small glass of Salice Salentino, stared out the slider and worried about Haggis, my cat, who has been wanting to be outside in time for the onset of cooler weather. I thought about the fact that I don't eat much beef anymore for both health and ethical reasons; I pondered this weekend's dinners--David Tanis' Roast Duck with Figs, maybe some homemade sage pappardelle--and I made some notes, just as Alton was sitting down to his meal. And then, seconds before I was about to shut off the set and head to sleep, It happened, at precisely 11:25 pm.

It was bucolic; there was a lot of green--that co-opted, slightly puce, enviro-green hue that is showing up everywhere. It featured a lot of healthy-looking, fresh-faced folks lollygagging around at a party. One mom was pouring a clearly toxic substance into her kid's cup while another mom (definitely a liberal) was casting aspersions. There was some snarky "Did you know" talk, followed by "Get the facts." I sat back down with my little glass of wine, feeling kind of sick, and sort of knowing what was coming next.

It was an informational ad called Sweet Surprise, extolling the virtues of High Fructose Corn Syrup. Underwritten by the Corn Refiner's Association, Sweet Surprise asks the simple question: Are You Sweet Smart? According to the advertisement--and to the organization's website -- all sugars are metabolized the same way. And high fructose corn syrup is low in calories (which it is, but so is arsenic). Packed with young, healthy-looking, thin, vibrant folks, the Sweet Surprise advertising campaign flies in the face of virtually every scientific study done about this material which, in its raw state resembles a cross between salt water taffy and softened clay, and is the scourge of healthy diets everywhere. It's also the bane of existence for concerned parents, who are struggling to get this crap out of the food that kids eat at school; after all, you can control what your kids ingest in the privacy of your own home, but once they're out in the big, bad world, you have about as much control over them as Sarah Palin had over Sex on Skates.

I won't get into the long litany of scientific studies that have proven, repeatedly, that HFCS is contributing to all manner of diseases--everything from obesity to diabetes; I'm not a scientist, nor am I a physician. But I will echo my late father on the art of comedy: timing is everything. And the timing of the Sweet Surprise ad campaign was positively Rovian in its brilliance. Shortly after Alice fell down the rabbit hole and the last 8 years were forgotten; when the Republican nominee exhibited his first display of utter ineptitude by joining together with an inexperienced wingnut who doesn't believe in science but just happens to wear a skirt; when Fred Thompson wondered aloud why Democrats think we're in dire straits, even as the economy has come crashing down with a thud; when restoration of ethics is bandied about as a moral imperative, even as the Department of Interior has been rocked by a scandal revolving around sexual misconduct, drug use, and widespread financial misdealings involving oil and gas company executives; when we are now being told that everything that has been scientifically proven to be true about a sickening, entirely artificial substance manufactured specifically with the goal of cheapening food while lining the pockets of Big Corn is, in fact, false......and then it's advertised on the Food Network, why on earth should we be the least bit surprised?

We shouldn't.

Haven't you heard? Things are great! It's Morning in America again, and the good old days of Bush and Rummy and Rove and Condi may actually start to look good by comparison.

Larry Eason: What Republicans and Democrats Need To Hear Continued -- Youth At Convention Speak Out

2008-09-11T16:51:36Z

I've been blogging about last weekend's Equal Voice for America's Families Convention. Fifteen thousand people from low-income communities gathered in LA, Chicago and Birmingham and adopted a National Family Platform.

Thanks to the ethnic news organization New America Media the three-city Convention included Youth Media Lounges where young people interviewed young people (using the cheap, easy-to-use Flip camera) and blogged about their experiences at the Convention.

Here are three short videos from the Youth Media Lounges, one from each location. They feature clips from the interviews with young people speaking out about their lives, neighborhoods, concerns, and what they'd like to tell the candidates.

Los Angeles

Birmingham

Chicago

New America Media spent the past 9 months covering the Equal Voice Campaign. You can find all of that coverage in the Equal Voice section of their site.

Learn more about the Equal Voice Convention and Campaign at www.equalvoice2008.org.

Michelle Haimoff: The Divided States of America: One Nation Under Two Gods

2008-09-11T16:22:37Z

It's time for the two separate countries residing in the United States of America to part ways in peace. There exists an ideological schism so extreme that it no longer makes sense for us to stick together as a nation. Perhaps it's time to abandon the union that the Civil War maintained. The schism has become increasingly pronounced with each presidential election and it was unmistakable at the recent Democratic and Republican conventions.

The rift begins and ends with the political parties' conception of God. Although the Republican and Christian platforms have always been linked, the Democrats are just as "Christian" as the Republicans. The Democrats' brand of Christianity is about love, tolerance and charity, whereas the Republican brand of Christianity is about self-sacrifice, duty and retribution.

Republicans don't believe in addressing social problems with preventative measures like international diplomacy, healthcare or planned parenting. When something bad happens it is either because arbitrary evil has been revealed in the world and we need to destroy it (Iraq War), or because we have been evil ourselves and need to be punished (death penalty). Evil, whether external or internal, must be destroyed -- not conversed, empathized or negotiated with.

McCain resonates particularly well with a crowd that values self-sacrifice. As a POW he was beaten and tortured for a higher cause, not unlike Jesus himself. He said in his nomination acceptance speech that his beliefs include hard work, strong defense, faith, service, a culture of life and personal responsibility. These are severe, chin up, no nonsense values. As for retribution, McCain would have sounded like a born-again Christian at an evangelical church if he had said "God" instead of "Country" throughout his speech: "[God] saved me. [God] saved me, and I cannot forget it. And I will fight for [God] for as long as I draw breath, so help me God." Salvation is big with McCain.

The Democrats, conversely, believe in the well-being and happiness of their fellow Americans. Everyone should be entitled to health care, education and civil and human rights. The solution to a chronic problem can be found in the root cause of the issue, whether it is higher crime rates (gun control) or social inequity (anti-discrimination law). Their God is a compassionate one who wants to protect and provide for his children. He is not the tough-love god of Republicans, but rather the gentle, accessible protector of what Republicans might call "a nation of whiners."

In his nomination speech, Obama talked about a country that is more decent, generous and compassionate than it has been of late. One that provides for people who don't have bootstraps, let alone boots. He talked of moral obligation, quoting Kennedy's call for "intellectual and moral strength," and referenced his mother "who once turned to food stamps but was still able to send us to the best schools in the country with the help of student loans and scholarships." Obama is big on charity: both our moral obligation to others and our country's moral obligation to us.

These diametrically opposed, partisan visions of America can never be reconciled. They can never be reconciled because both parties feel that they are fundamentally saving the other party from itself.

A citizen who believes that life starts at conception isn't going to go for pro-choice legislation, not just because she doesn't believe in it personally, but also because it's her responsibility as a Christian to look out for her ignorant brothers and sisters. A citizen who equates abortion rights with women's rights is never going to be sold on pro-life legislation, not just because he doesn't believe in it, but because he's looking out for his brothers and sisters who don't know any better. He's trying to protect them from squandering the rights generations have worked so hard to achieve.

If we can't get agree on the major issues because we think we are saving each other (and what better intention is there than that?), then we will never be ideologically or theologically compatible as a country. We're trying to colonize each other when the only way to respectfully coexist is to compromise.

I never thought it was a good idea for important social legislation to be determined state-by-state until I watched the crowds at the conventions: The ruddy-faced fellas in cowboy hats and round blonde women wearing heavy eye makeup and American flag blouses in Minneapolis. The earnest college grads in message T's and pant-suited moms in Denver. Combined with the content of the speeches, these crowds made me realize that, instead of trying to bridge two very different Americas, maybe we should just let them be. The separate Americas are happy. The ideals that conservatives and liberals have, the types of god they want to worship - it's all working for them, even if neither side gets the other. Divided, we are mercifully at peace.

In election years we try to define what nation we are under God, but maybe we should examine what God the nation is under. Because we're talking about two very different Gods. Enough with the rhetoric of unity and nonpartisanship. We're never going to change each other's minds. We're never going to save each other. Maybe it's finally time to stand divided.