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Keep the Faith

A Sunday New York Times editorial titled Come Back, Little Deaniacs applauds Howard Dean for attracting so many young people into politics and sympathizes with his more "innocent followers" who "have been grappling with the shock of discovering that it is possible to be pure of heart, fired with dedication, and still lose overwhelmingly." It's sunny message is don't give up even if Dean does not win the nomination.

Fair enough. What the editorial does not do is give Dean credit for saving the Democratic Party from the callow, morally bankrupt, feel-your-pain, triangulating, gutless leadership of the DNC and DLC. His courage to say what was right, even before it was focused-grouped, forced the other candidates--except for poor clueless Joe Lieberman--to adopt his agenda. We all--including the ultimate nominee--owe an enormous debt to Howard Dean for forcing the Democratic candidate to grow a spine.

posted by Jerry Bowles 11:11 PM

Mi Bill Richardson problema es su Bill Richardson problema

Bill Richardson is a product of the Hewson Ryan diplomat mill at Tufts. His disingenuous politics have more to do with being a shtarke for Oxy Pete and other big oil interests than the Latino populism he attempts to project. Memo to Howard Dean: Al Gore is up to his ears in this one too...

Just as John Kerry knows you don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s rye bread, Bill Richardson knows you don’t have to be Latino to love New Mexican red chile that is grown in Mexico by underpaid farm workers and shipped across the border via the Pete Domenici port-of-entry.

If what Jerry says about a Kerry-Richardson ticket has a modicum of truth it speaks volumes about John Kerry and his inner circle. One would expect that John Kerry would not consider running with a governor from one of the nation’s most openly corrupt states, with the nation’s lowest per-capita income and the highest poverty rate. New Mexico has one of the nation‘s most notoriously regressive tax schemes (yeah, we know you say you are trying to fix it, Bill) that is driving doctors out of the state. Thanks to lobbying by pharmaceutical companies psychologists in Governor Richardson’s state can now write prescriptions for psychotropic drugs like Valium, Zoloft, Prozac and Haldol, among others.

Oppo research freaks will have a field day with Richardson. The Sinophobic Wen Ho Lee trial came down while he was running the DOE for Slick Willie. On Richardson’s watch, John Kelly, a US Attorney and New Mexico Democratic party retainer botched the trial of the Los Alamos scientist accused of passing nuclear secrets to Beijing.

Juggling his credentials as Clinton's multi-culti poster boy, Richardson parachuted into Colombia to help Oxy Pete jack a Maryland-size oil patch away from local Amerindians. And he claims to be a friend of the Native Americans in the US.

Bill Richardson has more experience dressing up like Dan Rather in his Mujaheddin suit than he does with US domestic policy issues. Santa Fe, the center of the First Congressional District of New Mexico, which served as his political stairway to the stars, is a haven for trendy bi-coastal who have bought small casitas at inflated prices. It costs more to attend the Santa Fe Opera than it does the Metropolitan Opera. Ordinary New Mexicans who still work in Santa Fe to serve the idle rich transplants from Great Neck and trust fund brats from Lincolnwood are forced to commute 50 miles from substandard housing and trailer parks. Espanola, New Mexico, just five miles down the hill from Los Alamos, has one of the highest death rates from heroin in the US.

Bill Richardson is a classic Washington insider wrapped in a white flour tortilla. Un politico gordo que tiene equipaje… cuidado…ojo!

posted by Groom 4:42 PM

Si, she said. Yes.

Kerry-Richardson. You heard it here first.

posted by Jerry Bowles 10:21 AM

The Dean Come-back Plan

Looks like a long shot, but could it work?It is no secret that the Dean campaign is refusing to die, and that its new CEO has a serious argument to make. To see it, all you need to do is take a look at the campaign blog, where you can find the following letter:

This campaign has always defied conventional wisdom. Our extraordinary rise last year defied conventional wisdom—so did our fall in Iowa, and so did our comeback in New Hampshire after most pundits predicted Howard Dean was finished.

Conventional wisdom has been consistently wrong about this race.

So when conventional wisdom says a candidate must win somewhere on February 3, or that John Kerry will have wrapped up the nomination after fewer than 10% of the delegates have been chosen, we disagree.

Our goal for the next two and a half weeks is simple—become the last-standing alternative to John Kerry after the Wisconsin primary on February 17.

Why Wisconsin? First, it is a stand-alone primary where we believe we can run very strong. Second, it kicks off a two-week campaign for over 1,100 delegates on March 2, and the shift of the campaign that month to nearly every big state: California, New York, and Ohio on March 2, Texas and Florida on March 9, Illinois on March 16, and Pennsylvania on April 27.

In the meantime, Howard Dean is traveling to many of the February 3 states, sending surrogates—including Al Gore—to most, and conducting radio interviews in all. We believe that one or more of our major opponents will be eliminated that day, and that the others will fall by the wayside as our strength grows in the following days. As a result we have elected to not buy television advertisements in February 3 states, but instead direct our resources toward the February 7 and 8 contests in Michigan, Washington and Maine. We may not win any February 3 state, but even third place finishes will allow us to move forward, continue to amass delegates in Virginia and Tennessee on February 10, and then strongly challenge Kerry in Wisconsin.

Regardless of who takes first place in these states, we think that after Wisconsin we’ll get Kerry in the open field. Remember one crucial thing about the 2004 calendar—in previous years a front-runner or presumptive nominee would typically emerge after most of the states had voted and most of the delegates had been chosen. The final competitor to that candidate, even if he won late states, as many have done, has not been able to win a majority of delegates under any scenario.

This year is very different. The media and the party insiders will attempt to declare Kerry the winner on February 3 after fewer than 10% of the state delegates have been chosen. At that point Kerry himself will probably have claimed fewer than one third of the delegates he needs to win. They would like the campaign to be over before the voters of California, New York, Texas and nearly every other big state have spoken.

Democrats in Florida, who witnessed a perversion of democracy in November 2000, will not have a choice concerning the nominee if the media and the party insiders have their way.

We intend to make this campaign a choice. We alone of the remaining challengers to John Kerry are geared to the long haul—we’ve raised nearly $2 million in the week after Iowa, over $600,000 in the 48 hours since New Hampshire. No candidate—not even Kerry, who mortgaged his house and tapped his personal fortune to funnel $7 million into his campaign —will have sufficient funds to advertise in all, or even most, of the big states that fall on March 2 and beyond. At that point paid advertising becomes much less of a factor.

And we alone of the remaining challengers offer a clear choice to Kerry. Howard Dean is no Johnny Come Lately to the message of change—he has actually delivered change in Vermont. Howard Dean has the courage and conviction to stand up for what’s right, even when it’s not politically popular, as opposed to the cautiousness, compromise and convenience that has characterized John Kerry’s 19 years in the Senate.

We believe that when the voters of the post-Wisconsin states—which constitute 75% of the delegates that will be chosen in the states—compare Howard Dean and John Kerry, they will conclude that Dean, not Kerry, has the best chance to beat George Bush, because only Dean offers a clear vision of change and a record of results that contrasts against the rhetoric emanating from Washington. We believe they will increasingly reject the rubber stamp presented to them by the media.

Has such a strategy ever worked before?

No. It's never been tried.

But prior to this year, no candidate had ever raised $46 million dollars, mostly from ordinary Americans giving $100 each. Prior to this year no candidate for President had ever inspired the kind of grass-roots activity that has been this campaign’s hallmark. Prior to this year no candidate for President had so clearly revitalized his party, allowed it to reclaim its voice, and shifted the agenda so clearly to a call for change.

Let the conventional wisdom and the media declare this race over. We’re going to let the people decide.

Roy Neel
CEO, Dean for America

posted by John 6:50 AM

Enemy of the people… old media not old politics

“sure enough, we are being conditioned this week to understand that everything that happens in the Super Bowl is more important than almost anything at stake in a presidential campaign. It’s a dismal moment in American media, and just the right time to be developing a real conversation on the Web. The revolution will not be televised, but maybe it will be blogged.”
Christopher Lydon

In 72 hours the corporate media will anoint John Kerry as the winner in the Democratic presidential derby even though less than 12 percent of all the delegates will have been chosen. Christopher Lydon tells us why internet democracy scared the shit out of the bought-and-paid-for media and why they have attempted to destroy Howard Dean. It ain’t gonna happen.

posted by Groom 5:11 AM

Friday, January 30, 2004

What Dean has done

It is easy to sneer when a campaign stumbles. Easier still for writers with the political morals of weathervanes to leap on the latest bandwagon. But when people ask why Howard Dean isn't giving up and won't just go away quietly, he's got a point: He owes it to the folks who have gone on this wild wonderful ride with him and brought new life and energy to a Party that seemed, after 2002, to be very nearly useless. Here's an inside glimpse from the trenches, a letter from the Mayor of Minneapolis sent to Lauren Shannon, one of the founders of Tokyo4Dean.

Having been through quite a few political campaigns, I know that
sometimes it's easy to get cynical about this whole strange process.
Next time I get that feeling I'm going to try to remember the DFL
Central Committee meeting last week because the Dean people there
put on one of the least cynical, most uplifting displays of political
inspiration I've been in a long time.

Here we were at another boring political meeting and yet the
room was filled with energetic Dean people, a good share of them new
to politics. You stayed, you cheered and you illustrated the point
Laura Herridge made so well that the Dean campaign has energized a whole
new group of people and, in the process, the Democratic Party. As Laura
spoke surrounded by a crowed stage of activists, I could see the
delegates in the audience beginning to nod in agreement. They were
seeing that the Dean campaign is doing what Humphrey did when he
brought in farmers and workers; what the anti war movement did in the 60s,
what Wellstone did in his campaigns....you are opening doors to a new
group of activists who will power the party for years to come.

It's the same feeling I got seeing all the Dean folks
driving to Iowa to campaign, or going to small Meet Ups, or inventing a new way to fund campaigns through small donations.
We are going into a period of time that every successful
campaign faces: where we are tested, where the "establishment"
writes us off, where sometimes even people you counted on seem to waiver.
When you see that happening, remember how far we've come, and
how the Dean campaign is about something much greater than the report
you see on the news that night. You are reinventing the way we elect
leaders, and how we talk about politics, and some people won't even
see that happening until it's already happened.

I want to thank all of you for giving me fresh faith in a
system that needs new energy, and say how excited I am to keep up the
battle as we come into these crucial next few weeks.

RT Rybak
Mayor of Minneapolis

posted by John 8:42 PM

Economic growth down 100%- analysts blame average Americans for "not consuming"

One reason our AADD leader is talking WMD... the analysts predicted badly. They pimped the economy and it took a swan dive. After 8.3 percent annual growth in the 3rd quarter last year, driven by Shrubby's war and temporary jobs, the 4th quarter annualized growth stumbled to 4 percent. That, effectively, is a one percent growth rate over the quarter. The expert forcasters blamed consumers, of course. It's all our fault. We don't buy enough. Maybe our health care and prescription drugs bills are so high that us average American's can't afford to. To take the heat off of his angry economics, the prez says he "wants to hear the truth on WMD" but like Leon the Madison Ave. football star, he don't wanna go there.

posted by Groom 4:45 PM

Is There Another Way For Dean’s Mission To Be Accomplished?

George Wallace, the former Governor of Alabama and four-time candidate for president said if first, back in 1968: “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference” between the Democratic and Republican Party. Spoiler Ralph Nader echoed the same message in 2000 when he took in enough votes from the Democrats to prove Wallace and himself wrong. In between, Nixon, Reagan, and Papa Bush moved the Republican Party to the right while the Democrats rested on FDR’s and LBJ’s laurels.

Then along came Bill Clinton who won reelection by moving the Democrats to the elusive center as the Republicans continued to move further right. Now Bush Junior has taken the Republican Party so far right that there is no center. I think we all agree that Joe Lieberman represents the dying embers of this Clinton legacy, though there is some question about Kerry’s focus and intentions. Dean, of course, has erased any ambiguity about where the Democratic Party needs to go, but he is the wrong messenger with the right message. Democratic voters are not rejecting the message, but there are looking for a different mission and a different messenger.

In a brilliant op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times, one of the heavyweight political and public policy thinkers of our time, Robert Reich, summarized the state of the Democratic Party affairs in three words: The Dead Center. Reich lays out a good strategy for the Democrats to be Democrats again.

The only question remaining is how best to do this? Who can best lead this effort? If not Dean, then who? To what extent should re-making the party be a focus of electing a president? (So far most voters don’t care about remaking the party; they don’t want a revolution; they just want to beat Bush with anyone who can.) If Dean continues to lose the primary contests (despite picking up delegates for second and third place finishes) is there another role for him aside from coming to Boston with his surgery team? With all the other candidates now adopting Dean’s lines, could Dean, with everyone’s blessing, begin a concurrent effort of party reform that could be embraced in Boston, rather than Dean trying to shove the message down delegates’ throats? What form could that take? Would it work? Does anyone really care about party reform? I’m not so sure.

posted by Josh 10:13 AM

The End

Zogby has Kerry with a 34-point lead in Missouri, a 21-point lead in Arizona, and trailing John Edwards by only 1 point in South Carolina and Wesley Clark by 8 points in Oklahoma in a three-day tracking poll of the four states.

Dr. Dean is in third place in Arizona, Missouri and South Carolina and fourth place in Oklahoma. Arizona was the only state where Dean registered double-digit support, at 12 percent. With no money, how can Dean go on past next Tuesday?

posted by Jerry Bowles 8:45 AM

Twelve angry men…

Bush, Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Snow, Wolfowitz, Bremer, Frist, DeLie, Feith, Abrams. Talk about the “axis of anger”…

Here we are heading into a bread and circuses Super Bowl weekend and we learn that this ingrate administration not only underestimated the cost of its “prescription drug benefit,” but that they plan to jack Medicare payments on cancer drugs.

The braintrust now admits that their original $400 billion program will coast, at minimum, $134 billion more. That's about a year and a half's worth of Shrubby's Iraq war.

John Kerry, you’ve been dealing with prostate cancer. Maybe its time to speak out. Howard Dean, you’re a doc. Edwards, you know how cash strapped average Americans are when it comes to health insurance and expensive prescription drugs. As a nine year colon cancer survivor I know that cancer doesn’t differentiate between Washington insiders and outsiders.

There’s a key message that Democratic contenders, and pretenders are missing, namely that Bush Republican economics are the economics of anger and class warfare.

If you want to jack America’s social net, you lie and fabricate excuses for a war that will force minority Democrats in Congress to put the Social Security trust fund on the cutting board and agree to other concessions that will provide the Baby Boomer generation a retirement benefit that mirrors what’s available in Bucharest, Romania.

Memo to John Kerry: you’ve been in combat… when you say “bring it on” you assume something is coming at you. When you “take it to them” you lead. It is the only way to beat an incumbent.

posted by Groom 5:41 AM

Thursday, January 29, 2004

Can you hear me now?

The corporate media and some bloggers don’t think its time to “Let it Be” when it comes to Howard Dean’s selection of Al Gore retainer Roy Neel to run his campaign. Lobbyist. Insider. Beltway Bandit. Maybe all of the above. Maybe some of the above. Maybe no different than Kerry’s crew, or Karl Rove’s black bag buddies. Like that FBI surveillance transcript making its way around the net says… you gotta do what you gotta do.

In the metaphor of New England football lore… I see John Kerry as a classic drop-back passer in the Steve Grogan mold. I see Howard Dean as a scrambler in the tradition of Doug Flutie. Can Neel running interference keep Dean from being sacked?

What Neel brings to the party is the ability to is bridge the people power of the Dean Machine with the corporate populism that the oft-criticized United States Telecommunications Association is using with success to connect with consumers. This crew has fronted most of the bucks to finance and build the information superhighway (of course there are government incentives and loopholes- they are a lobbying organization, after all and we can‘t give them a ticket to Treblinka). One accomplishment Neel helped facilitate is the ability of ordinary Americans to keep their cell phone number. This is a task that requires bringing a diverse identity of interests together, not all of whom play by the rules.

USTA is running a highly successful ad campaign that they say goes “direct to the people.” They have their own agenda, clearly, but they realize that there are too many people in government wearing clod-hoppers who are crapping up the information highway. This change in the Dean front office is about the need for centralization. When you’ve got a muddled message, it’s time to juice up the fiber, increase the bandwidth.

posted by Groom 4:13 PM

We'll Be Back

Here's Dan Gillmor's take on Joe Trippi and his contribution to Internet political campaigning:

Neel isn't just a Gore associate. He was head of the United States Telecom Association, probably the single most retrograde Washington lobbying organization around -- the mouthpiece for the local phone monopolies that have worked so hard to thwart serious competition in telecommunications. In other words, Neel is as inside-the-beltway as you can get. Now he's running an "outsider's" campaign. Sure thing.

Trippi was far from perfect as an operative. But under his guidance, Dean emerged in the first place as a credible candidate. And Trippi, via Dean's candidacy, was a catalyst who helped change the rules of national campaigning in ways that will reverberate through politics until they've been absorbed by everyone in the political game. The Net helped make Dean, and it was Trippi who grasped what was happening early on and convinced Dean to take advantage of it. Of course, the true revolutionaries here have been the Dean supporters who understood the power they could bring from the edges and apply to the center. They will not go away, however much the political establishment may want them to.

posted by Jerry Bowles 2:46 PM

Let It Be

There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear. Josh mentioned it to me first but the notion had been bouncing around in the back of my mind, too--a sense that John Kerry's emergence as the candidate considered most likely to save the world from George Bush is less a matter of Howard Dean's having stumbled--although he has—then a subconscious sense on the part of people of the Woodstock generation that he may be the right man to finally heal an old wound.

To those of us in the 55 to 65 crowd, Viet Nam is unfinished business. It was our 9/11. The last time the country was as deeply divided as it is today was in the late 60s and early 70s. There were police riots at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Lots of bloodied heads and bloodied dreams but it was a public relations victory for the anti-war protestors. Public opinion shifted heavily against the war. It was going that way anyway.

By the time the last troops came home from Viet Nam in 1974, everybody was sick of hearing about it. Bitter at the government for having “lost” the war and undervalued by those who opposed it, veterans re-adjusted to civilian life as best they could. There were no parades. No welcome home parties. The protestors returned to their books and became doctors and lawyers and merchant chiefs, the idealism of their glorious street revolution days, supplanted by babies and stock options and BMWs and American Express cards.

For years, nobody talked about Viet Nam. A lot of American kids had died and we lost anyway. Both sides simply got on with their business, but neither ever forgot or truly forgave. If Jane Fonda showed up unaccompanied at the Viet Nam Memorial today, someone, probably a still emotionally-wrecked veteran wearing a tattered flak jacket, would do her harm.

That’s where John Kerry comes in. He is one of only a handful of Americans who both served, with distinction, in his case; and led a coalition of veterans against the war when he returned home. He has walked both sides of the Viet Nam divide. Better than most he understands that nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong. That’s a centrist message that reasonates with a lot of people today.

posted by Jerry Bowles 10:40 AM

Clark, Kerry and the Jewish question

If the Holocaust were held today Wes Clark and John Kerry have enough Jewish bloodlines to get their tickets punched for Dachau.

Clark, a Roman Catholic who grew up in a lower middle income environment, made acknowledgement of his Jewish heritage part of his campaign. Kerry, a Roman Catholic whose father married Boston Brahmin money, seems to prefer sidestepping the issue of his Jewish heritage.

Kerry has said that he’s acknowledged his Jewish background and that he doesn’t need to do any more. When you are one of the wealthiest members of the nation’s most exclusive club (the US Senate) you can leave the scut work to renowned historian-for-hire Douglas Brinkley, author of Kerry‘s PT-109-like biography “Tour of Duty.” Here’s what Brinkley says about Kerry’s Jewish grandfather….

“Fredrick A. Kerry was actually a Czech Jew named Fritz Kohn who had fled the aggressive Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1905, brutalized by anti-Semitism. Three years before his arrival in America he married Ida Lowe, a beautiful Jewish musician from Budapest. According to the Boston Globe, the young couple simply studied a map of Europe, found County Kerry in Ireland, and chose it as their last name. Baptized as Catholics, they moved to Chicago with their young son Eric, where Fredrick (or Fred as he was called) earned a living as a business manager. Eventually they moved to Brookline, known as the “town of millionaires” in the early 1900s, had two additional children, Richard and Mildred, and earned a reputation as good neighbors. . . He seldom missed attending Catholic church services on Sunday. He kept it secret that he was of Jewish descent…”

In his February 2, 2003 Boston Globe piece “Search for Kerry’s Roots Finds Surprising History” staff writer Michael Kranish wrote…

“Kerry said he learned about 15 years ago that his grandmother was Jewish. That led to years of unsuccessful effort to learn more about his grandfather’s roots and his own…”

Kranish reported that when the Boston Globe provided Kerry with the results of its ancestral research into Kerry‘s family, the Senator said “this is amazing; this is fascinating to me… this is incredible stuff. I think it is more than interesting; it is a revelation.”

Kerry’s statement is puzzling in light of the fact that his brother converted back to Judaism in 1982.

Kranish went on to write that “Kerry acknowledged that some voters in Massachusetts, the nation’s most Irish-American state, may have had the impression that he had Irish roots.” Numerous publications, including the Globe, have stated that Kerry is Irish-American. Kerry’s spokesperson, Kelley Benander says that Kerry “has never indicated to anyone that he was Irish and corrected people over the years who assumed he was.”

In the Kranish article Kerry says he’s been “as clear as a bell” on the Jewish heritage issue… “it has a big emotional impact, because it obviously raises [questions]: I want to know what happened, why did they (his grandparents) do this, what were they thinking, what was the thought process, and why, once they got over here, why they never talked about it.”

Now, as the big delegate states of California and New York, with their large Jewish populations, loom on the horizon, John Kerry needs to step up to the plate and hit a home run by doing exactly what Wes Clark did. Get it out in the open, be up front and be proud. But where Clark has taken the plain folks approach by opening up on his Jewish background, Kerry continues to come from on high and pontificate. If he lets Douglas Brinkley do all the talking he’s opening the door to a character issue that all the Brahmin Bucks in Boston won’t be able to shut down.

posted by Groom 6:18 AM

Wednesday, January 28, 2004

Hark, Is That a Fat Lady I Hear?

Joe Trippi is out. Gore loser Roy Neel is in. So much for the Internet/political revolution. This time.

posted by Jerry Bowles 6:06 PM

Blame game continues on Britain’s jacked WMD intel

The long awaited results of Lord Hutton’s inquiry… Tony Blair cleared in the death of Ministry of Defence WMD “adviser” David Kelly. Kelly died of “natural causes.” BBC boss resigns over flap.

Buried in the report, however, is the Law Lord’s finding that Blair (like Bush) desired to have a dossier on Saddam‘s WMD arsenal “as strong as possible”. Lord Hutton also acknowledged that Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee may have been “subconsciously influenced” by Blair’s desire to have a dossier “as strong as possible” but that the contents of the dossier was consistent with the “available intelligence.”

Available intelligence presumes there may have been unavailable intelligence. If so, why wasn’t it available. Hutton had more to do with preserving the integrity of the institution of Prime Minister than it did with saving’s Blair’s lying butt or laying out the Anglo-American intellectual authorship of the big lie(s).

Available intelligence is a question that needs to be raised with a higher decibel level on this side of the pond. It’s sort of like the National Football League suspending players who associate with “known gamblers”… what about all the unknown gamblers.

Not so clear channel

Just to add on to Jerry's post on Clear Channel getting love tap justice from our non-alcoholic beer drinking leader and his inner circle... Clear Channel was the radio network that banned over 200 tunes from its stations in the wake of the Saudi attacks on 9-11. One of those tunes was "Great Balls of Fire" by Jerry Lee Lewis. Does anybody know if Ray Stevens "Ahab the Arab" was one of the others?

posted by Groom 5:37 PM

Shrub and Bubba the Love Sponge

In an effort to make nice with Congress, Michael Powell and his merry band of miscreants at the FCC are proposing a record $755,000 fine against Clear Channel, the nation's largest radio chain for airing a sexually explicit radio show. Seems that four Clear Channel stations -- all in Florida -- aired various episodes of "Bubba the Love Sponge" a total of 26 times.

Those of you with decent memories will recall that Clear Channel is the sleazeball McRadio chain run by Bush Pioneer and family bag man Tom Hicks who made Shrub independently wealthy (of dad) by buying his share of the Texas Rangers at an inflated price not long after then Governor Bush appointed him University of Texas Regent, making it possible for him to "manage" the university's $13 billion endowment fund. Clear Channel Chairman L. Lowry Mays had his fingers in that pie, too.

Clear Channel stations around the country organized most of those "spontaneous" boycotts and patriotic rallies against the Dixie Chicks after Natalie Maines had the nerve to suggest that Bush was not her favorite president and that maybe invading an unarmed third world country was not a great idea.

Well, a $755,000 fine will sure show Clear Channel that the FCC doesn't care how they use their 1,200 stations to stifle dissent and kill local broadcasting but beware of airing anything that is dirty and funny. I can see multi-zillionaires Hicks and Mays playing a hand of liar's poker right now to see who picks up the $755k.

posted by Jerry Bowles 5:28 PM

The Fat Lady Is Reaching for Her Song Book

Will it be a song with sour notes or an aria filled with harmony? Right now everyone is spinning his own tune, but the jig is almost up. Integrity Joe wants us to believe that he tied for third? Dean claims a “comeback” although NH is his back yard and tailored for the new constituency that hasn’t delivered for him: only the "very liberal" and "very young" cohorts give Dean an edge over Kerry. New voters--Dean's claim to fame--did not support Dean disproportionately, with Kerry attracting 39 percent of them. And Dean spend more time, 82 days, and more money by a factor of 2:1 over his rivals and only has a distant second place finish to show for it. Second place with a five percent improvement over Iowa is not a comeback.

The data is piling up. The voters in two states were not looking at the issues but at electability, a trend that I think will continue for the next two or three rounds. According to the exit polls, Dean holds his own with issue-oriented voters, but almost half (46%) of electability-oriented voters are going for Kerry. Now Dean may pull a Steve Forbes and win Arizona, maybe Delaware, but there is no way Gephardt backs him in Missouri. The first possible sour note of the Democratic harmonics.

It takes three data points to establish a trend line, so we are a week away from maybe, maybe, a two-man contest, or at best a three man contest, as some are hoping for. My guy Clark is not ready for primetime and while I have stated that he needed a third place finish in NH to stay in the race, he has not shown a the knowledge of the issues and the media savvy required for the national stage. Clark never thought he would be up against Kerry, and it shows. Edwards is running for VP, especially if he wins South Carolina and Oklahoma, but two junior senators on the same ticket spells disaster--even if one of the juniors is 60 years old.

It's quarter to noon and the fat lady looks like she's in hurry to get to lunch.

posted by Josh 9:08 AM

Glengarry, Glen Ross… John Kerry, John Kohn

It’s getting easier to understand the angst and the tortured body language. John Kerry, who acknowledges that some voters in Massachusetts think he is Irish, says he only learned that his grandmother and grandfather were Jewish about fifteen years ago.

You'd think that someone who is Yale, Skull & Bones and with connections deep in the intelligence community would have dealt with an issue like this long ago. Get ready for Obersturmbannfuehrer Rove's whispering campaigns about "a Jew in the woodpile" and "does America need a second Jewish president after Roosevelt." Kerry didn't need Scientology to tell us that he has perfectly clear on the matter...he just thinks he has.

The Boston Globe, one of several publications that bought into the myth that Kerry is Irish-American, has done exhaustive research into his family background. Beyond Kerry’s maternal roots in the Forbes and Winthrop families, there are his Jewish grandparents. the Kohns.

Friedrich "Fritz" Kohn changed his name to Frederick Kerry in 1902 before emigrating to the US from a region of Silesia (part of the Czech Republic and Poland today) that was part of the Austrian Empire under Emperor Franz Josef.

The Kerry family says that Fritz converted to the Roman Catholic Church though the Globe claims that there is no documentation to support this. Senator Kerry’s brother, Cameron, converted back to Judaism in 1983. John Kerry is a Roman Catholic.

John Kerry could go all the way to the White House. But the last thing he needs is for his run for the presidency to have a sublplot that scans like William Dean Howells “The Rise of Silas Lapham.” Like Tim Leary used to say "you can be anyone you want this time around."

posted by Groom 6:06 AM

Will they do the right thing?

Following the Iowa caucus, Josh Hammond asked if Joe Lieberman and Howard Dean would do the right thing and retire from the race. I repeat the question with a different cast of characters. Will Joe Lieberman, John Edwards, and Wesley Clark do the right thing? Given that John Kerry has yet to win more than a scant plurality of votes, isn't it time that we got this race down to a two-man face-off and got the business done.

posted by John 4:03 AM

We're All Kerry Friendly Now

I know, I know. The winner in New Hampshire doesn't always go on to win the nomination. But, I suspect this isn't going to be one of those times. Dean's distant second and almost certain loss to Edwards (and maybe Al Sharpton) in South Carolina next week are likely to prove too much to overcome. We should have known that Al Gore's endorsement would be the kiss of death. Edwards will do well in his home state and may surprise in Oklahoma but will quickly fade after that. Lieberman is already ancient history.

Clark is finished, too. The re-emergence of Kerry as a more-than-viable alternative to Shrub on foreign affairs and the military--combined with a lack of guile and stump smarts on the part of the General--has made his candidacy unnecessary. Thanks a lot, Wes. Leave your resume and we'll get back to you.

But, aren't you glad that we have a guy as strong as Kerry still standing? Let's get the next couple of weeks behind us and get on with the serious business of saving America, and maybe the planet, from four more years of Shrubsterism.

posted by Jerry Bowles 12:03 AM

Tuesday, January 27, 2004

I Kid You Not

Jack Paar, the archetype and best of a line of "sensitive" television schmoozers that runs down Hugh Downs Boulevard past the Dick Cavett tunnel and on to the Aaron Brown off-ramp, died at 85.

For my money, he was the best of the late night talk hosts. Steve Allen and Johnny Carson were funnier but they weren't as real; they had what Robert Klein once told me was the true mark of a professional comedian--the ability to make a roomful of strangers laugh at a time and place not of their own choosing. But, you never got the feeling that you were seeing the "real" Allen or Carson. You never got the feeling you were seeing the fake Paar.

Paar was avidly neurotic, moody, often petty and vindictive, and he made little effort to disguise his moods. His speech patterns were riveting--he stuttered just enough to draw you in, to make you work with him. He was above all unpredictable. As a TV critic once observed--you watched the Paar show to see who was going to have a nervous breakdown.

Paar had an uncanny ability to coax brilliant stories out of genuinely interesting people like Clement Freud, Alexander King and Peter Ustinov. He probably could have gotten an interesting story out of Britney Spears. He was basically self-educated--much like Aaron Brown--but mercifully devoid of the need to have everybody like him and think he was smart. What Jack Paar was was an American original. We don't get too many of those anymore.

posted by Jerry Bowles 5:47 PM

Diane Sawyer needs a fecal bath

Mrs. Mike Nichols introduced America to the phrase “fecal bath” during an "expose" she did a few years back on the chicken processing industry that brought her great accolades. After reading Alexander Stille’s piece in the Los Angeles times (registration required, toggle down to "commentary" due to unstable URL) dissecting her interview with Howard and Judy Dean one walks away with the feeling that she needs to be run through one herself.

Of the 96 questions Sawyer asked during the interview, 90 were about personality and only 6 about issues. She asked 20 questions about Judy Dean’s absence from the campaign, 21 questions about family life, all of which had a sexist subtext.

Most troubling is that Sawyer asked all these questions assuming that the negative stereotypes were truths, not debatable opinions, Stille points out.

Maybe its’ time to start asking Diane what all she did while she worked for the Nixon White House during the Watergate era. Maybe ex-Republican Hillary Clinton has a few details. America's bought-and-paid-for corporate media... "we inform... we decide."

posted by Groom 11:22 AM

The American Rasputin

Remember Dick Cheney? Cobby little fellow with a sideways grin? Used to be our vice president until he appeared on Meet the Press the Sunday after 9/11 and made Shrub look bad so Karl sent him back to his ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming from where he has controlled, meddled, and generally fucked up everything the Bush administation has touched for the past three years, emerging only occasionally to assure Republican fat cats that despite what the nominal president or his chief weapons inspector say, Saddam really was working closely with al Qaeda and had nukes trained squarely on Washington. Never in American history has one individual had so much power with so little accountability. Our own Rasputin.

Someone in Cheney's office had the bright idea that this being an election year and all, it might be a good idea to re-introduce the vice president to the American public. But, since good old Dick is a bit rusty in the social skills department, they decided to launch the Cheney makeover in old Europe, which doesn't matter anymore anyway. So there he is laying wreaths and trying his damndest to turn that nasty little snarl into a smile. Meanwhile, polls show that his "negatives" have doubled over the past two years. Do you think Karl would fire the real president to save Shrub?

posted by Jerry Bowles 9:11 AM

The underground economy

The unspoken issue in a primary state like New Hampshire, where Massachusetts folk go to buy booze, cigarettes and move to avoid paying taxes…

As New Hampshire Democrats and Independents vote in their primary we learn that the Bush administration is racking up a record budget deficit that will make future generations push the stone up the mountain. And with the Twin Towers looming and the jobless recovery booming the supply of dollars the US government is able to tax successfully is decreasing.

Where are the dollars going? The Bush tax cuts supported by some of the presidential candidates are one part of the problem; rich folks know how to shelter the money Shrubby helps them steal. Then there all the legal loopholes, licenses to steal wrangled by lobbists and their bought-and-paid-for legislators, not to mention the Phi Scamma Jamma rules administered by the FASB, otherwise known as the Financial Accounting Standards Board... sounds government because it's supposed to have that "regulatory feel" to it. But it's the same private accounting "oversight" outfit that rode all the rest of the scandal plagued races with blinkers on.

There's more... corporate and mutual fund scamming. Companies decapitalizing and moving their headquarters offshore still another… one reason Ross Perot isn’t bothering to look under the hood anymore. And then there’s the other black hole… the underground economy.

Thanks to the underground economy, the federal government loses an average of $195 billion each year in tax revenue. In addition, individuals and families fail to report on the average of $630 billion each year.

What is the underground economy? You won't hear about it on those Mr. Rogers reruns. Economics textbooks take a cue from Leon and don't go there. People working for cash. Kids mowing lawns. College athletes getting under the table payments from "backers." Barter deals between faith-based groups. Sex and drugs and rock n’ roll. The Soprano family in real life...the Roto-Rooter guy who does a few snake jobs off the books. You betcha. That svelte server at the veggie eatery in Santa Monica who’s been waiting for a callback from a sitcom. All the folks in Cleveland County, North Carolina and within a 50-mile radius of Ukiah, California who know that the pot isn’t where every chicken goes. And then there are the legal and illegal aliens and new citizens who come from cultures in the “developing world” where corruption and tax avoidance are the preferred techniques for accumulating wealth and passed from generation to generation. With the emergence of America the third world nation, average white folks are taking on the same values.

The equation is sad and simple. As the underground economy grows our social net shrinks because the supply of tax dollars needed to support it decreases. New Hampshire, which offers but a handful of delegate votes, has grown and prospered thanks to people fleeing regressive taxation in Massachusetts and some of the bonehead tax bills that Senator Kerry and his pal Senator Kennedy supported in Congress. Oops... just got a call from Leon. We can't go there. The folks who are conducting the entrance and exit polls find the theme politically incorrect to the point that it might it might skew the results of their scientific polling.

posted by Groom 5:07 AM

Monday, January 26, 2004

Knockin’ on Hatch’s door

If you watched Hungarian international Miklos Feher collapse and drop dead on TV over the weekend Michael Specter’s piece on “dietary supplements” in the February 2 New Yorker takes on even more relevance. The attorney general in Portugal, where the 24-year old star played, announced that results of the autopsy on Feher were "inconclusive"and that an inquest will follow. I saw it on Telemundo. US corporate media don't usually offer graphic images of dead people, murders, bullfights. TV networks in the mundo Hispanohablante don't let a narrow view of First Amendment rights get in the way of that retentivo hang-up.

The Godfather of the 1994 law deregulating the “supplements” industry is none other than Sen. Orrin “Booby” Hatch (R-UT). The “free trade zone” at Salt Lake City, Utah just happens to be the port-of-entry for the largest quantity of these supplements and their precursors in the US.

We’ve got candidates going 24-7. Soldiers in Iraq, Colombia, Afghanistan and West Africa looking for an edge. Every little league parent who wants their kid to be a 6’4” 320 lb. tackle on the Parade Magazine high school all-America page. All the men and women who drive big rigs looking for that fatter paycheck to get mad cows and sick chickens to America‘s table. Or politically connected athlete-geeks like Carl Lewis taking human growth hormone and then ratting out Olympic opponents like Canada’s Ben Johnson for doing the same thing.

The National Football League (NFL) has banned the "dietary supplement" ephedra. But there are pro athletes out there who always find some way to get to the next level.

Like nuclear and “dual use” WMD technology, the “dietary supplements” genie is way out of the bottle. “Anti-doping” efforts by the International Olympic Committee and others are more effective at job creation than at the imperial regulation that was their intent. The bottom line in this world of dialectical materialism is... my supplements are less detectable than your supplements. As one gangster said in a recently released Federal transcript… “you gotta’ do what you gotta’ do.”

posted by Groom 5:35 PM

People 1, Ashcroft 0

A federal judge has declared unconstitutional a portion of the USA Patriot Act that bars giving expert advice or assistance to groups designated foreign terrorist organizations. The ruling marks the first court decision to declare a part of the post-Sept. 11 anti-terrorism statute unconstitutional, said David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor who argued the case on behalf of the Humanitarian Law Project. Associated Press, September 26, 2004

posted by Jerry Bowles 3:27 PM

Iraq Was Not a Humanitarian War

The invasion of Iraq ended the reign of a brutal government, but coalition leaders are wrong to characterize it as a humanitarian intervention, Human Rights Watch said in the keynote essay of its annual global survey released today. Said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch:

...removing Saddam Hussein from power brought about the end of one of the world’s most abusive governments. But intervening militarily on the territory of a sovereign state, without its permission, is inherently dangerous and must be undertaken for humanitarian purposes in only the most extreme cases. While Saddam Hussein had an atrocious human rights record, his worst atrocities were committed long before the intervention. At the time coalition forces invaded Iraq, there was no ongoing or imminent mass killing of the sort that would require the kind of preventive military action that should characterize true humanitarian interventions.

For a military action to be characterized as “humanitarian,” Roth argues that the motive for intervening should be primarily humanitarian; the danger of slaughter should be imminent and the scale of the killings massive; and all other options for preventing the slaughter should have been exhausted.

posted by Jerry Bowles 10:39 AM