Ray Suarez – the MPR/NPR talking head responsible for making Talk Of The Nation such an unctuous bore – says asking questions about The One is…well, racist, of course, silly:

The “pseudo controversies” about Obama’s background are symbols for a “racial calculus” hard at work in U.S. politics.

“Racial calculus” is one of those terms, like “political kabuki”, that people use to make a 25 cent theory sound like a dollar’s worth of thought.

Opinions about Obama’s inexperience, his childhood in Indonesia, and the persistent but untrue rumors of him being Muslim are stand-ins for something his detractors cannot admit, Suarez said.

Ray.  Bubbie.  Get a grip.

I’m hosed if I can think of a single credible conservative commentator – one that 99% of us would claim – who’s said word one about The One’s childhood or the “M” word. 

And if talking about his palpable inexperience is “racist”, well, what’s the point of talking about Presidential candidates at all?  I mean, the man makes John Edwards look like a solid professional. 

Particularly, “religion has become a proxy for race,” he said.

And “has become a proxy for race” has become one of the many proxies for McCarthyism.

“Do you now, or have you ever found anything about Barack Obama that led you not to support him?”

Postlude:  Remember all the Ashkkkroft Libertarians – the people who joked about Libertarians before January of 2001, the ones who thought Civil Liberties were the province of Rand-sodden bearded wackoes who lived in compounds in the Rockies, but suddenly became solem civil liberties junkies the moment John Ashcroft was sworn in as Attorney General, and spent the next eight years protecting this nation’s most vital liberties (flag burning, making statues of the Virgin Mary out of poop, and getting calls for people whom there is reasonable probable cause to believe are terrorists)?

Betcha they say not one thing about the liberties that an Obama administration will try to bulldoze; the First, Second and Tenth are all at immediate risk. 

…’til the official beginning of the “home stretch” is coming up on Wednesday – the final Presidential Debate!

Join the Northern Alliance and AM1280 for the debate-watching party of the season!

AM1280 The Patriot is hosting a debate viewing party at Trocadero in Minneapolis (it’s right by the Monte Carlo, on Third Avenue at First Street North) for the final debate, a week from tonight!  Join the NARN – I’m one of ’em – for an evening of fun and politics!

We’ll have free appetizers and a cash bar (and let me tell you – nobody does appetizers like Trocadero!). The debate goes from 8pm CST to 9:30pm CST and doors will open at 7:30pm-ish.

Admission is free – but please RSVP at the handy AM1280 RSVP Page so we can plan accordingly.

Sign on up and join us the coming Wednesday, the 15th.

And stay tuned for details about the Patriot’s election-night coverage!

We’ll see you there!

If I have one strength in life, it’s that I’ve done my best to keep myself mobile as far as career options go.  I’m on my third career (fourth if you count my time as a nightclub DJ, and I certainly don’t), and I’ve done my best, so far, to try to make and keep myself as marketable as possible, and to try to rely on me, rather than a job or union or company, to ensure my viability.

In hard times, there are no guarantees; even being adaptible and light on your feet aren’t going to pay the mortgage if things come to a crashing halt.  But every little bit helps, as they say. 

Of course, the news media – especially traditional “journalism” – have been depressing rapidly for quite some time, now.   

Jeff Jarvis, himself a J-School faculty member, judges the journalism biz, finds them wanting, and they’ve brought it on themselves.

The fall of journalism is, indeed, journalists’ fault.

It is our fault that we did not see the change coming soon enough and ready our craft for the transition. It is our fault that we did not see and exploit — hell, we resisted — all the opportunities new media and new relationships with the public presented. It is our fault that we did not give adequate stewardship to journalism and left the business to the business people. It is our fault that we lost readers and squandered trust. It is our fault that we sat back and expected to be supported in the manner to which we had become accustomed by some unknown princely patron. Responsibility and blame are indeed ours.

[The WaPo’s Paul] Farhi’s rationalization on behalf of his fellow journalists makes many bad assumptions and blind turns and Greenslade only follows him down those alleys, piping in with (my emphases follow) an “unhesitating answer” of no to accusations of journalistic guilt. “There cannot be any doubt that journalists themselves … cannot be held responsible for either the financial woes of the industry nor for the public turning its back on the ‘products’ that contain their work.” He piles on: “They are blameless.” They have “no reason to feel guilty…. It isn’t our fault…. The truth is that we are being assailed by revolutionary technological forces completely outside of our control…. We journalists are not [his emphasis] paying the price for our own (alleged) failures…. you are not the cause of the current calamity.”

The hack doth protest too much.

The old model – journalists as high priests of knowledge, passing information down the hierarchy to the unwashed masses – has been dying for a decade.  Drudge put the bullet in the gun; Powerline pulled the trigger four years ago. 

And yet the people in the newsrooms still cling to that old model:

The internet does not just present a few glittery toys. It presents the circumstances to change our relationship with the public, to work collaboratively in networks, to find new efficiencies thanks to the link, to rethink how we cover and present news. No, the essence of the problem is that we thought the internet represented just a new gadget and not a fundamental change in society, the economy, and thus journalism.

By maintaining the newspaper and its newsroom as essentially static entities, Farhi also makes the common and dangerous assumption that their budgets are also fixed: They are what they are because they always have been and so that’s what they need to be. So it’s not their fault that they need to be supported at that level. But newsrooms are terribly inefficient and too many of their expenses were fueled by ego. We bear business responsibility. That is why I am teaching business in a journalism school, so we can be better stewards.

Like most of what Jarvis writes, it’s worth a read.

To:  Dennis Lien, St. Paul Pioneer Press

From:  Mitch Berg

Re:  Fact Checking in your 10/9 piece

Mr. Lien,

Mitch Berg here.  Not sure if you’re new in the market because, like an awful lot of people to the right of Amy Klobuchar, I don’t actually read the daily newspapers in this town.  I know I’ve seen your name in the paper, but I don’t recall if you’re an old PiPress hand or not.

I’d like to hope so, since your piece on Thursday incorporated a lot of rookie, or rookie-esque, flubs. 

Your piece covers the “Dump Bachmann” blog, run by Eva Young.  The reason I wonder if you’re a newbie is, of course, “The Dump” got near-saturation coverage before the 2006 election, back when lots of reporters – whether well-meaning or gullible – treated “The Dump” as a legitimate news source. 

It’d seem you and the PiPress have fallen into the same trap – whether through wishful thinking or merely digging for anything to throw at the conservative rep and lightning rod in the Sixth. 

The reasons matter not – the same First Amendment that applies to me (until the Obamessiah repeals it) covers you. 

But there’s some fact-checking to be done, here:

There’s a lengthy discourse on whether Bachmann will attend a debate. 

“Discourse” requires two sides, Mr. Lien.  The word you’re looking for is “echo chamber”.   

 From its debut in 2004, the site, dumpbachmann.blogspot.com, has been home to a hyperactive collection of people who find Bachmann oddly compelling.

Whatever your piece’s other faults, Mr. Lien, I’ll give you style points; “hyperactive collection of people who find somone oddly compelling” is the most artful way to describe “bunch of obsessed stalkers” I’ve ever read.  Kudos!

But please see to this bit here…:

 Young said she spends an hour or two every evening updating the blog. Minneapolis cartoonist Ken Avidor handles the video items.

Let’s cut the crap, Mr. Lien.  It’s Ken Weiner.  “Avidor” is a pseudonym he adopts to try to dignify his dork-fingered oeuvre.  But don’t worry about names, since whenever he wants a different identity, he just takes one.  Without bothering to tell anyone.  You can call him Avidor, you can call him Weiner, you can call him Al Goldstein’s kicktoy, you can call him the only “cartoonist” in the Twin Cities less accomplished than Swiftee…

…but those of us who know him best just call him “the Lord of the Sock Puppets”. 

“What I bring to the blog is not only documentation and video, but a little bit of humor,” Avidor said.

Yep!  Funny stuff, like the picture of Michele Bachmann in a Nazi outfit!

(Although to be fair, perhaps that was what you were referring to when you wrote about The Dump’s “provocative, in-your-face bits of rhetoric”

And quoting Karl Bremer – a man whom Yellow Hacks have disowned for giving them a bad name – is kinda a self-limiting move, Dennis.

At any rate, please see to this, OK?

That is all.

(PS to Eva:  “Acknowleding and responding” to something is not the same as “having a cow”.  Or to put it another way; I’m laughing at you).

(And, of course, Lien).

Camille Paglia, responding as it were to a letter from St. Louis Park, discounts McCain’s ability to hold executive office in favor of Obama’s substantially higher level of relevant experience.

What is her assessment based on?

Like a broken record…he’s run an inspiring campaign. He’s shrewd. He looks good; smells good. The egg justifies the chicken.

Yes, McCain is profoundly patriotic, as were his military forebears. Patriotism, rather than race, may indeed prove to be the determining factor in this election. But I simply don’t see that McCain has the basic managerial ability to run the complex Washington bureaucracy. Obama lacks executive experience too, but he has shown a shrewd ability to captain a national campaign. And Obama’s sober, deliberative temperament seems to me genuinely presidential. In contrast, McCain’s bizarre grandstanding during the Wall Street crisis (such as his embarrassingly unprofessional call for cancellation of the first debate) suggested that he lacks the steadiness of behavior and expression that we have a right to expect in a president.

Then she labels McCain’s decision to suspend his campaign and call to postpone the first debate, in a time of financial crisis and investor panic, as grandstanding; a ridiculous charge given the events as they occurred. The fact that we didn’t have a greater meltdown is not cause for criticism for what was clearly an executive decision to err on the side of precaution.

I know this is editorial bullsh*t but its bullsh*t nonetheless and Obama’s brain dead followers are eating it up like cattle being fed on the way to the rendering plant.

The markets appear poised to take a breather today as the hysteria subsides (update: ok, maybe not) if only for a moment. The bailout has passed but has not been implemented; it’s effect limited to the psychological benefit to those who value short-term fixes for long-term issues.

In her post-debate analysis of the Presidential debate, Nina Easton of Fortune magazine dramatically called the end of the conservative movement.

“We’re witnessing tonight something quite profound and that was the sinking ship of free-market Republicans keel over, groan, and fall to the bottom of the sea. John McCain, without much notice, proposed a $300 billion dollar plan to nationalize home mortgages…”

Her dramatic punditry was triggered by John McCain’s proposed plan to spend $300 Billion of the bailout kitty on buying down under-water mortgages. I’m not sure if McCain planned this or if it came to him during the debate, but let’s be clear on a couple things today.

First of all, if this action is required to rescue our financial system and preserve what’s left of our economy, let’s not confuse the medicine with the disease. We face unprecedented (at least in modern times) financial challenges that require the consideration of “all of the above”.

If some of these bailout dollars are to be used to acquire appreciating assets, taxpayers can cross their fingers and at least retain some hope of being paid back to some extent, and God willing, realize a profit.

But don’t hold your breath.

To that end, Treasury Secretary Paulson announced this morning that some of the dollars earmarked for the economic rescue plan may be invested in some of the more troubled banking institutions.

Paulson told reporters in Washington yesterday that legislation Congress passed last week to rescue financial institutions gave him broad authority that he intends to use, beyond just buying mortgage-related assets on banks’ balance sheets. He indicated that an option available may be boosting companies’ capital with cash infusions.

“It is the policy of the federal government to use all resources at its disposal to make our financial system stronger,” Paulson said. “We will use all of the tools we’ve been given to maximum effectiveness, including strengthening the capitalization of financial institutions of every size.”

This “strengthening” may include purchasing troubled assets these institutions in exchange for equity in the institution. As such, I wouldn’t characterize this as a pure play socialistic intervention as some pundits have of late.

On the other hand, lets not lose sight of the fact that American taxpayers have unwillingly found themselves party to a violation of epic proportions.

Back to the medicine and the disease: let us not at the same time forget who caused this crisis.

Once upon a time, Liberals in Washington decided that their constituents held a the right (not the opportunity) to home ownership, without regard to their economic relevance to the economy. This pressure was manifested in directives and incentives for their buddies at Frannie Make to acquire mortgages that would otherwise not be considered good long-term investments. All this while the liberals nudged and winked “Don’t worry, we’ll bail you out if this all goes awry.”

(A self fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one)

This created a vacuum that was willfully and eagerly filled by the likes of WAMU and Countrywide who flooded the market with cheap mortgages, sold them to anyone that could fog a mirror, knowing that Frannie Make would take them off of their hands.

Meanwhile, these mortgages were packaged as safe investments and sold to companies like AIG.

In turn, artificial demand for homes elevated their value and created an enormous drive to buy land and build homes to satisfy the voracious appetite for them. These homes, once occupied, continued to artificially appreciate, creating a refinancing craze and providing capital via increasing debt for the purchase of consumer goods including but not limited to the items to fill these homes.

(The Bubble)

Once the inevitable failure of many homeowners to continue servicing this ill-gotten debt ensued, the domino effect followed close behind. So much of our economy hinged on the ability of homeowners to borrow against their homes – or even the psychological effect of the knowledge that they could – that when it vanished, consumerism went with it.

Institutions found themselves in receipt of illiquid assets as the market for them was flooded.

(Pop! )

Clearly it was not free-market “Republican” principles that caused this crisis, and unfortunately, due to the magnitude, it won’t be solved by free-market principles alone. The American people have little appetite for long-term solutions that require short-term pain. Furthermore, I bristle at the fact that domain of free-market and free-enterprise principles have been relegated solely to the Republicans – I’ve always thought of them as fundamental American values.

Liberals have brainwashed Americans for years into thinking that they need government to solve their problems, to take the sting out of life, to shave the peaks to fill in the valleys in the interest of fairness.

Barack Obama is the most liberal Senator in America. He personifies all that is wrong with American fiscal policy. His rhetoric belies his record, his history, his choice of advisers and associates and his claimed intent to lower taxes. His actions speak so loud, his words we should be smart enough to discount. His brainwashed minions follow him and don’t even know why, nor do they realize the damage he and his liberal brethren could do to our economy.

It was the very government meddling that Obama espouses, some years ago, perpetuated by unchecked greed and political power, and despite warnings of John McCain and others, that created a crisis of such proportion that only government intervention could solve it. We can only hope that this truth is not lost on the American people as they consider solutions for our country’s most pressing issues.

The bad news?  They’re doing a remake of Red Dawn.  The movie – one of the guiltiest pleasures in all of guilty pleasuredom – was both a terrible movie and the original “America!  F**k Yeah!” for a generation of people who, frankly, needed it. 

The good news?  They’re doing a remake of Red Dawn.  Which will make the leftymedia a richer target than a convoy of Nicaraguan trucks spread out in the draw below the Wolverines’ machine guns.

The perfectly-named David Plotz sniffs, phumphers, and finally waterboards the context of the story and its times to the point where even John Milius would gag.  The conclusion?

It’s really a metaphor for Iraq!

The insurgents are at first merely scared, angry kids, but they’re hardened by the viciousness of the Soviets. Seeing nothing to lose, they become suicidal terrorists who assassinate, bomb civilian targets, gleefully murder wounded and captive Russians, and eventually martyr themselves in theatrical, insane ways. Howell faces down a helicopter gunship with nothing but a rifle, screaming, “Wolverines,” as its machine gun cuts him to confetti; Swayze and Sheen make their inexplicable suicide assault on a base with hundreds of soldiers and heavy weapons; Jennifer Grey, mortally wounded and afraid of being tortured by the occupiers, booby-traps her own body so when a Soviet soldier touches her, it sets off a grenade that kills both of them. Ultimately, the insurgency and the anxiety of occupying a hostile land take their toll on the invaders. By the end, the Cuban commander is submitting his resignation, demoralized by his job of brutalizing the Americans.

After which Jennifer Gray and C. Thomas Howell baked the Cuban’s children in an oven as the mother watched in mute horror before being fed into a plastic shredder?

Maybe?

No?

Sorry.

Red Dawn is not an exact parallel to our situation, of course. The Iraq we invaded was no functioning democracy; our Army does not execute civilians; many Iraqis favor the American occupation. But Red Dawn certainly didn’t stir the mad, patriotic fervor I felt when I heard Howell shout, “Wolverines” 24 years ago. MGM is so far tight-lipped about the plot of its Red Dawn remake, but I wonder: Will the new Wolverines be us—or fighting us?

Read the whole thing and count the “conservatives are nuts because of this 24 year old B movie” references.

And ponder the question – if David Plotz sproings wood over Quentin Tarantino movies, is it a symptom of “liberal nutterdom?”

Please vote for me (every day)

ACORN is allegedly actively abetting voter fraud:

Two Ohio voters, including Domino’s pizza worker Christopher Barkley , claimed yesterday that they were hounded by the community-activist group ACORN to register to vote several times, even though they made it clear they’d already signed up.

Barkley estimated he’d registered to vote “10 to 15” times after canvassers for ACORN, whose political wing has endorsed Barack Obama, relentlessly pursued him and others.

Fearless prediction: watch the media focus relentlessly on everything but ACORN.  I’m guessing electronic voting machines will make a comeback in the next few news cycles…but I digress.  Watch pre-emptive Tic claims of election fraud to get breathless coverage.

No, really.

The wages of the past eight years – of the Dems trying on the one hand to sabotage confidence in the electoral system on behalf of Algore, and on the other to fraudulently gin up votes for their people up and down the ticket – are a much weaker democracy.

As my son and I traversed the new 35W Bridge a couple weeks ago, we noticed wavy concrete sculptures marking the boundaries of the span.

I’m not an art critic but I know it when I see it and this aint it. The objects sit awkwardly on the center divider. While their fabrication in concrete lends to the aura of fortitude that is reassuring while crossing the mighty Miss on a bridge where one once ceased, the lack of contrast is uninspiring. The objects look to have been tacked on as an afterthought.

As it turns out, their purpose may be less about pleasing the eye and more about saving us from less than optimally oxidized particles.

the new sculptures are made from a type of concrete that is photocatalytic, meaning they will be able to convert gases like carbon monoxide, nitrous oxides and sulfur dioxide to higher oxidized states, making them less damaging to the environment. Another benefit of the new concrete mixture is that it never looks old as it maintains a white oxidized color on its outer skin.

This is the same process used by a catalytic converter in automobiles.

The monuments were designed using the international cartographic symbol for water.

Many thanks for the definition of photocatalytic. I might otherwise have thought it described an object, once viewed, that induces discomfort in the right brain. I sit corrected.

I’m 45, these days.  Big thrills come fewer and farther between than they used to. 

Which in many ways is a good thing.  When you’re a teenager or an overdramatic twentysomething, hormones and that lack of jading that most of us start out life with make way too much stuff seem like life and death.  The dumbest stuff matters like life and death when you’re a kid – and having two teenagers in the house, I do see that all the dang time.

One of the things that’s have some of its searing immediacy shaved off over the years is rock and roll. 

I used to wear my heart on my sleeve when it came to music; thrills and chills in the form of a thousand little moments were all over the place.  They came in places you’d expect – Darkness on the Edge of Town and London Calling and Who’s Next and The Pretenders and The Crossing and Tim and The Unforgettable Fire and Have A Good Time (But Get Out Alive), sure – all of them are albums that are packed full of big moments that seemed to sum up big chunks of my life. 

And beyond that, there are a zillion other little moments – not even necessarily on songs I like, even, but moments where I can tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing when I first heard them, and describe the jolt it gave me.  “We Live For Love” by Pat Benatar takes me back to the first night at my first radio job; “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey, hanging around the dorm my freshman year of college; “Forever” by Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul is always tied to sitting at the dam and looking up at the stars in the summer of ’82; “GirlUWant” by Devo is inseparable from high school speech team trips to Fargo and Grand Forks; “Nights In White Satin” by the Moody Blues is all about sitting in a car at 2AM, lovelorn and anxious to get the hell out of North Dakota…

…and I could go on.  Indeed, over the past six years on this blog, I have gone on.  But most of those are interesting to me as historical artifacts – sort of an audio museum of my life. 

These moments – little snippets of musical genius or just emotional accidents in the right place at the right time – happen less and less often these days.  And when they do happen, lately, it seems like they’re mostly songs from way back when that make me wonder “how did I miss this one, or forget it, all these years?”

I can count the number of artists that’ve made me sit up and go “Yeaaaaah!” and feel that jitter up my spine that comes from having a big epiphany, that’d make me think “I’ll remember where I was when I heard this the first time”, on probably a couple of fingers.

Eminem’s Eight Mile soundtrack had a bunch of ’em.

Franky Perez?  Poor Man’s Son had a bunch – enough to make me think he was a Cuban-American Springsteen when I first caught him, five years ago.  That he is not a superstar is an indictment of the American music industry.

But most of all, there’s Marah.

Marah is a band from Philadephia, Brooklyn, or points somewhere in between depending on who you google.  And calling them a “band” is a little misleading – it’s really the Bielanko brothers, Dave and Serge, along with (for the past couple of years) keyboardist Christine Smith.  They’ve been around for a long time – their discography goes back to 1997 – but their national breakout of sorts came in 2000, with Kids In Philly, an album recorded above an auto-repair shop in Philadelphia that evoked Springsteen’s The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle in enough ways to set an amateur music critic off on a Hornbyesque orgy of taxonomizing.  The lyrics were as rapid-fire and dense as anything Springsteen wrote pre-Jon Landau; the music was as gleefully, eclectically alt-country as Springsteen’s sophomore effort swerved between rock and R’nB.  And Kids in Philly was about Philadelphia – or at least the neighborhood the album came from, with its Italian diners and Vietnamese barbers and South Asian groceries – as E Street Shuffle was about the Jersey Shore via Bleecker Street.

The similarities didn’t escape the critics or, more importantly, me.  “Faraway You” is a banjo-driven (?) raveup that’s equal parts zydeco and rockabilly, with a little Irish snuck in there (you have to work for it).  “Point Breeze” evokes E Street Shuffle‘s title cut, while “Christian Street” takes the same spirit and sticks a rocket-booster horn section behind it and wraps it with a production style that tries to mimic the Spektor “Wall of Sound” on a tiny budget, with glorious results; they bring in legendary Philadelphia disk jockey Hy Lit to kick things off, tying together five decades into three minutes.  “The Catfisherman” is a slinky bit of funk blues with a nasty surprise.  And for all the joyous stomping and pre-Sorpranos underworld tourism, some of the lower-key moments stick out just as much; “My Heart Is The Bums On The Street” may be the best closing-time lament since the Replacements’ “Here Comes A Regular”. 

And if that’d been their only contribution to music history, I’d be sitting here, eight years later, raving about them still.  It was the kind of album a great garage band should do; yes, done in/above a garage, but brimming with a glee at being able to play rock and roll that crackled through the headphones and made you think, damn, it isn’t a sin to be glad you’re alive.

For a while, it seemed that’s what I’d do, eventually – write about a great old album.  I followed the band via their website for most of the last eight years; along about 2004, it seemed they were going to be consigned to the “acoustic duo show” ghetto, playing coffee shops and little clubs to the hard-core fans. 

And yet not only have they soldiered on, they’ve gotten better.  2005 brought If You Didn’t Laugh, You’d Cry, an even better album full of even better moments than Philly. 

And earlier this year came Angels of Destruction, maybe their best yet.  And, like any “best yet” from an unknown, almost-there band, it couldn’t happen without a problem; on the even of a tour in support of the album, their rhythm section quit; Marah, indeed, seems to go through backlines like Spinal Tap went through drummers.  The Bielankos and Smith forged on, and are on the road again, sort of. (Hint, guys – the Twin Cities.  C’mon). 

And yet the album absolutely shimmers; there are too many high points to name – the title cut, “Coughing Up Blood”, “Santos De Madera” and enough others that I’m going to start sounding like a shill before long. 

Which’d be a shame – because the point is, as I’ve gotten to be older, I’ve gotten to be a lot harder to impress.  Hell – it’s gotten a lot harder for me to notice music and remember it.  And yet Marah – bittersweet, joyful and rollicking and smoky and sweaty and eccentric and maddeningly-just-shy-of-famous and occasionally pit-of-the-soul poignant – never misses. 

And hey – nice to know there’s other fans out there – that’s a blog that posts lots of videos, including a few full performances, including this one at Weert, Holland.  Worth a look.

Anyway – your mission is clear.  If you only buy one album this year, buy Kids in Philly and If You Didn’t Laugh… and Angels, too.

The official beginning of the “home stretch” is coming up in a week – the final Presidential Debate!

Will Obama be carried in a sedan chair made out of glued-together foreign contributions?  Will Mac sic Sarah on him before event to shake him up?  (Hm.  Note to self…)

I dunno – but it’d be a lot more fun to watch with a bunch of your closest friends!

AM1280 The Patriot is hosting a debate viewing party at Trocadero in Minneapolis (it’s right by the Monte Carlo, on Third Avenue at First Street North) for the final debate, a week from tonight!  Join the NARN – I’m one of ’em – for an evening of fun and politics!

We’ll have free appetizers and a cash bar (and let me tell you – nobody does appetizers like Trocadero!). The debate goes from 8pm CST to 9:30pm CST and doors will open at 7:30pm-ish.

Admission is free – but please RSVP at the handy AM1280 RSVP Page so we can plan accordingly.

Sign on up and join us a week from tonight, the 15th.

And stay tuned for details about the Patriot’s election-night coverage!

We’ll see you there!

…almost as despondent as Roosh seemed to. 

Mac generally does well in a “Town Hall” format – and I personally don’t like “town hall”-style debates a whole lot.  And like Roosh, my first impression was that Mac was too polite; that he didn’t go inside and mix it up with Obama nearly enough.

And then I thought slept on it, and didn’t feel nearly so bad.

Just as Mac doesn’t need to play to the media (indeed, just as he and Gov. Palin need to outflank them and go directly to the people), Mac doesn’t need to destroy Obama; he needs to convince millions and millions of people who are not political junkies – people not remotely like me, by the way – that he’s someone they can trust to lead this nation during the most difficult time in recent memory.  He needs to appear like a statesman and a leader, not a trench-fighter (that’s Palin’s job – one she’s finally gotten to take on in the past week). 

While last night’s performance was bound to leave doctrainaire conservatives and political junkies [Roosh and Berg raise their hands, glancing nervously about – Ed.] a little unsatisfied, Mac knows that they’re not the ones he needs to win; while that issue may have been in doubt six weeks ago, putting Palin on the ticket guarantees that no movement conservative who’s not in Lori Sturdevant’s rolodex is going to stray.  That means Mac can – and, last night, did – play to the vast horde in the middle who don’t care much for “R” and “D”, but who do balance their checkbooks and watch their 401Ks and whose kids are going to be of military age sooner than later. 

And I don’t think Mac lost a single vote in that crowd last night.

He needed to look like a leader, a statesman, a President.  And I think he did.

…that they can still solve mysteries like this one – the sinking during World War II of the USS Grunion.

The sons of the boat’s commander led the expedition themselves; they found the boat’s remains last year, and confirmed its identity last week.

Relatives of the Navy crew members who perished in the 1942 sinking of the USS Grunion, including the Newton family of its lieutenant commander, had already been planning to gather in Cleveland later this week to memorialize the men.

But an announcement from the Navy on Thursday that it had verified the discovery of the ship’s wreckage has heightened that gathering’s significance.

“It is very valuable to have them do that recognition,” said Bruce Abele, son of the vessel’s commander, Lieutenant Commander Mannert L. Abele of Quincy, who, along with his two brothers, hired the search team that pinpointed the wreckage site in 2006. “It’s everything, because what it says is there’s credibility to [our discovery], and that’s what’s important.”

The Navy’s Pacific Fleet credited the Abele family’s efforts in announcing that the wreckage discovered off the coast of the Aleutian Islands, a volcanic chain in the North Pacific about 1,200 miles southwest of Alaskan Peninsula, was indeed that of the World War II submarine, which was declared lost by the Navy on Aug. 16, 1964, 22 years after it disappeared for still unknown reasons.

“Closure” is a grossly-overused word in our society these days; in this case, it seems to fit.

John McCain has one more chance to assert himself and as it turns out he needs it.

Because it didn’t happen so much tonight.

John McCain favors the town hall format but the elements that differentiate that format didn’t manifest themselves tonight. Tom Brokaw didn’t allow it, much to the detriment of the process and the value of tonight’s debate.

As moderator, Tom Brokaw displayed a last gasp of vitality in denying Obama’s request at one point to rebut a rebuttal in which McCain took a shot at him. In the next session, Obama couldn’t resist and went there anyway. Thereafter, Brokaw seemed to lose his will to moderate at all.

Not so much so as to allow John McCain to pick up where Sarah Palin left off on the concerns of character and associations that many anticipated would be part of the fare tonight. The format left Obama unscathed here.

The result of all of the above was a restating of well worn talking points and serial question non-answering on the part of both candidates, and from my vantage point, more so on the part of Senator McCain.

John McCain may have taken off the gloves but he didn’t take enough swings and he didn’t land enough blows.

An opportunity missed for sure.

To his credit, McCain was effective at conveying to Americans the reality that the level of entitlements enjoyed currently can not continue.

At the same time, McCain missed the opportunity to truly drive home the idea that Obama’s ridiculous and implausible promise of net spending reductions, bipartisanship and reform fly in the face of his public record while McCain, using the same measure, can more credibly assert that he will actually be able to exhibit and foster fiscal discipline.

Ideology aside, McCain was nervous and a little goofy, settled in and gained confidence, then regressed. Obama seemed consistently confident and poised.

My barometer tonight was Mrs. Roosh, a devout conservative who is much more removed from the day to day blog fodder and media bombardment than I am. Her take on McCain’s performance? She was annoyed.

I think she, like many voters, just wanted some straight answers if not a clear change of momentum in McCain’s favor.

All in all making next Wednesday night’s debate an even more pivotal event.

…without the Minnesoros “Independent” sending ace reporter Molly “Is It White In Here” Priesmeyer – AKA “The Margaret Grebe of the 21st Century” – out to the nightclubs to show how the Sturm and Drang of the Zeitgeist was causing Angst among people who are…er, hanging around in bars on a weeknight:

The cover photo of this week’s Time magazine has been lurking in the psyche of America for the past two weeks: A bread line, circa 1931, buttressed by the headline “The New Hard Times.” Whether or not that’s overstating things by the liberal media elite remains to be seen, but I took my own pulse of America this week, stopping in at Minneapolis bars and music clubs (and one strip club), to imbibe in the healing qualities of good music and gathered people, and to gauge the post-crash mood.

Unlike the Republican candidate for vice president, it wasn’t pretty. In fact, the only comparable such club tour I’ve taken was in the week immediately following 9/11, when hushed roomfuls of people stuck their head in the live music sand and wondered what the bleep would happen next.

Profound.

UPDATE:  My bad; the piece was in the MNPost, and it’s by Jim Walsh, who is not a bad music critic.  Which is sort of like saying “Leukemia isn’t such a bad cancer”; I’ve gotten progressively less and less tolerant of “rock critics” over the years, in the same way “sports journalism” has come to strike me as an oxymoron among all but a few “sports journalists” tiny enough in number to fit into Frank DeFord’s jacket pockets.

UP-UPDATE: OK, I lied.  I knew it was Walsh all along – and I followed the “Priesmeyer Tangent” because “Rock Criticism” frequently – usually? – falls back on the same trite answers to life’s persistent questions that seem to dominate her oeuvre.  Perhaps it’s because most rock critics are lousy writers (and the craft’s dubious standards, in this era of freebie, “citizen” “journalism”, seems to be eroding year by year; I’m flummoxed to think of a rock in the AAA leagues who’s fit to carry Dave Considine or Jim DeRogatis’ Ipod case.  Perhaps the eternal adolescence of the rock club world – a place that’s a combination of Peter Pan and Logan’s Run, a place where everyone, whether musician or bartender or booker or waitress or the audience, either stays a pissed-off 21-year-old or eventually disappears, un-lamented and unremembered – makes the whole enterprise terminally self-limiting. 

And for those of us who disappear from those clubs – those of us who stomped around The Entry’s claustrophobic stage, fought with The Uptown’s cranky sound system and crankier booking agent, cadged drinks from girls at Lyle’s for a year or four, and then…disappeared, vanished into a world of babies and mortgages and day jobs and newer lives lived in daylight?

I’m not going to speak for all of us – but I’m not exactly hanging on Liz Phair’s reaction to the economic crisis.  Or anything.

But, as I said, Walsh is not one of the semi-literate slapnuts that glut “rock criticism” today.  He’s a sharp guy, a good writer and, often enough to notice, a sharp observer.

And amid the pop-culture dross, he scores a few good points:

After 9/11, the president famously told Americans to go shopping. At the moment, it might behoove him to remind “we the people” that going out — to clubs, bars, music venues — gets us out of ourselves and out of our own burrowed-in blues, and that it’s important to keep the blood pumping and the elbows rubbing, even when the world can make you feel, as one mourner put it to me at a funeral home recently, “I’m lost.”

You could ask – “did we grow up and stop having fun because life got difficult, or did life get difficult because we grew up and stopped having fun?”   The answer would be “probably not entirely”, of course, because life is rarely that black-and-white. 

So no – you won’t see me giving a rat’s ass about what some adolescent, or arrested-adolescent, in a bar on a Tuesday night thinks about politics or the economy.  But Walsh is right – isolation is as big a killer than the stress that isolates us.

I’m not enamored by the personal attacks that appear to represent the final chapter in the 2008 Presidential campaign. That is not to say I find them irrelevant.

Obama criticizes McCain for an attempt to distract the American people from the economic crisis that his his colleagues in Congress and his pals at Fannie and Freddie (one of which is now his advisor) caused, and that John McCain warned of, and then responds in kind with more of the same.

Also not a fan of tit for tat, but I am amused at the notion that Obama considers this:

The so-called Keating Five scandal involved McCain, who was in his first term in the Senate representing Arizona, and four Democratic senators, none of whom are still in office. They faced accusations of improperly intervening with federal regulators on behalf of Keating, an Arizona businessman and campaign contributor who was chairman of California-based Lincoln Savings and Loan Association.

On par with this:

Bill Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground, which carried out a series of bombings to protest the Vietnam War in the 1970s.

Once again; This:

Unchecked Greed

With This:

Attempting to Kill People and Destroy Public Property with Explosives

Again, this:

A Banking Scandal

With this:  

Domestic Terrorism

Then again…

The Senate Ethics Committee in 1991 ultimately cleared McCain of wrongdoing, though it said he had “exercised poor judgment.”

As for Ayers…he’s unrepentant.

Now I know why so many liberals make all those tittering neo-nazi references about conservatives.

They’re projecting.

And of course, we knew what happened the last time the last couple of dozen times a personality cult took over a major power, don’t we?

Er…don’t we?

Hello?

The wheels are coming off the credit system.  Times are uncertain.  The nation may be on the brink of electing an unqualified Democrat dillettante and demigogue who will likely be, on Inauguration Day, the worst president of my adult lifetime.  Things are just plain crazy out there.

And in situations like this, nothing takes the mind of ones’ troubles like seeing  what happens when money and end-stage spyrochaetal paresis mix.

Over and over we hear the refrain: “the world wants Obama”

The world, however, is mostly pretty stupid – or at least, that’s the tale of the poll:

Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, there is no consensus outside the United States that Islamist militants from al Qaeda were responsible, according to an international poll published Wednesday.

The survey of 16,063 people in 17 nations found majorities in only nine countries believe al Qaeda was behind the attacks on New York and Washington that killed about 3,000 people in 2001.

U.S. officials squarely blame al Qaeda, whose leader Osama bin Laden has boasted of organizing the suicide attacks by his followers using hijacked commercial airliners.

On average, 46 percent of those surveyed said al Qaeda was responsible, 15 percent said the U.S. government, 7 percent said Israel and 7 percent said some other perpetrator. One in four people said they did not know who was behind the attacks.

A few years back, a poll showed a third of American Democrats thought as former “governor” Jesse Ventura does – that 9/11 was an inside job.  Perhaps the world shouldn’t feel so bad.

Not.

Respondents in the Middle East were especially likely to name a perpetrator other than al Qaeda, the poll found.

Israel was behind the attacks, said 43 percent of people in Egypt, 31 percent in Jordan and 19 percent in the Palestinian Territories. The U.S. government was blamed by 36 percent of Turks and 27 percent of Palestinians.

In Mexico, 30 percent cited the U.S. government and 33 percent named al Qaeda.

Oddly, it was in the least “developed” parts of the world that Al Quaeda was most-blamed.  Could it be because in places like Nigeria, Al Quaeda isn’t an abstraction?

Or is it because they aren’t exposed to the western news media? 

I’ll take “all of the above”. 

(Via Gary @ TVM)

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/09/09/2360240.htm?section=world

Joe Biden was on a Fantasy World Tour the other night and between he and the fetching Mrs. Palin, he is supposed to be the foreign affairs expert. Not so much apparently. Governor Palin let him get away with some whoppers, a missed opportunity for sure. But this morning she’s getting a little help from her friends.

Biden’s Fantasy World

…what are we to make of Mr. Biden’s fantastic debate voyage last week when he made factual claims that would have got Mrs. Palin mocked from New York to Los Angeles?

Mr. Biden asserted that “When we kicked — along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, ‘Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t know — if you don’t, Hezbollah will control it.’ Now what’s happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel.”

The U.S. never kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, and no one else has either. Perhaps Mr. Biden meant to say Syria, except that the U.S. also didn’t do that.

Then there’s the Senator’s astonishing claim that Mr. Obama “did not say he’d sit down with Ahmadinejad” without preconditions. Yet Mr. Biden himself criticized Mr. Obama on this point in 2007 at the National Press Club

Sarah Palin may not know as much about the world, but at least most of what she knows is true.

The conventional wisdom is that Senator Obama picked Joe Biden because he’s older, wiser, and serves to shore up Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience.

Turns out, Joes’s just older.

It was Friday, October 6, 1988.

The previous night, the sleazy DJ service slotted me into a new bar – a Chi-Chi’s on Brooklyn Boulevard at Regent, stuck amid a bunch of car dealerships and apartment buildings.

There were maybe a dozen people in the room – not horrible for a Thursday at a crappy bar, really.  Five of them sat at a table next to the booth – three rough-looking guys and a couple of very drunk twentysomething girls. They were in the mood to dance, anyway.

It was around 9:30, and the five of them were on the floor, lurching clumsily about.  One of the women – whose birthday party the evening was, as it turned out – was shrieking loudly, a little too happy.  It all seemed pretty harmless.  I turned away from the floor to pick my next record.

One of the guys came up to the booth.  “You need to play something you can’t dance to”, he said, sounding urgent, “or you’re going to have one very naked bitch on the floor”.

He seemed to think that was a bad thing.

“OK, well, you might wanna get her to slow down a bit”, I said, paying the guy as much attention as I now pay the kids when they bug me for something dumb.

“I warned you, man”.  He walked away.
“Thanks!”, I called after him, not knowing or caring if he heard me.

I was having a hard time finding my next record; my attention was focused on the bin for about a minute, until a commotion behind me, on the dance floor, caught my attention.

The birthday girl had managed to toss almost all of her clothes in that minute; she was on the floor in her panties, lurching about, trying to peel them off as her friends tried to reason with her – as opposed to, say, keeping her from getting undressed.

I called for a bouncer.

The evening got a lot quieter after that.

———-

Earlier in the week, I’d heard from a friend of a friend that a friend of a friend of his “has a big project starting up”, and that I’d be “perfect for it”.

I called him.

“I’m starting an all-weekend, all-talk radio network”, he said, explaining his business plan.  It’s in New York”.  He needed a producer and off-hours host.  And, if I was going to be in New York, we could certainly talk.

As luck’d have it, I pointed out, I would indeed be in New York – in about ten days, in fact.

We set up an interview.

That was three.

Certainly – certainly – something would pan out.

It had to.

To:  The Broadcast Media

From:  Mitch Berg

Re:  News

All,

When carrying broadcast packages involving Governor Palin on the campaign trail, it is not necessary to use Saturday Night Live’s parody of Governor Palin as a coda to every single piece on the subject. 

The parody may have been news a month or so ago (along with the “news” that SNL finally has perhaps its third passably-funny bit since Norm MacDonald left the cast).  A month later, it is a weekly bit on an (I’ll be charitable) entertainment show.  It happens as regularly as Linday Lohan passing out in a puddle of vomit.  This isn’t even “dog bites man”, it’s “dog piddles on tree”.

Giving Tina Fey a half-week-old last word on every one of Governor Palin’s statements is sort of like appending Zach Braff’s or Hugh Laurie’s impression of a doctor onto every story about healthcare.  To the best of my knowledge, no network news department (except perhaps  MSNBC) does this.

See to this.  Thanks.

That is all.