The problem with politicians

Being part the First of an informal (x)-part blog suggesting movies to watch if you are sick to death of the current race for President of the United States. Derived from conversation on a very good blog.

I watched a fascinating movie last night. It gave me, I think, an new insight into the whole problem with politics in America (I believe this is a problem inherent in any two-party political system).

Essentially, it fosters uninteresting candidates and forces them--if they want any chance of winning--to sell out their ideals and pander to people who are opposed to them ideologically.

People make a big deal of Kerry's waffles--the entire world has. Bush has waffled more than a few times himself (of course these sites are partisan, but at least they cite their sources). Waffling is a matter of course in American politics.

But is this a weakness in candidates, or a weakness in system? It’s probably a little of the former, but I think the idea that this is a systemic problem is far more to the point, and much more worrisome.

The fantastic movie I watched last night was called The Candidate. It features Robert Redford looking hotter than ever, with mutton chops you just want to smother in applesauce and eat right off his face. It was made in the seventies, but it speaks clearly to what is happening this election cycle. It touches so perfectly on the questions I’ve been asking about these presidential candidates that watching it felt fateful--I'd totally forgotten it was in my Netflix queue.

It's about an idealistic young lawyer, Bill McKay, who gets roped into fighting an absurdly popular incumbent for senator of California. McKay has name recognition thanks to a father he’s ideologically opposed to, and that’s about it. He wins the primary going away because all the Democrats with clout are afraid to face their Republican opponent. As a candidate, McKay is a train wreck, unclear on certain issues, completely lacking views on others. However, there is strength in him. He possesses a fierce idealism and is under the assumption that this campaign is his to lose. Think of Al Sharpton’'s quadrennial primary failures. —McKay sees himself as that kind of candidate: There to force dialogue on uncomfortable issues.

Long story short, after the primaries he's a forty-point underdog to Crocker Jarmon (best. . . antagonist name . . . ever), but begins making up ground fast, not because his social-democrat platform is reaching disenfranchised people, but because his campaign handlers are fantastic at splicing his views into digestible sound bytes that are palatable to moderates and even Republicans. The less clear his stances on issues, the more he resonates with people.

McKay doesn’t like this at first, but as the gap between he and Jarmon closes, he tolerates it and eventually gets caught up. There’s a wonderful moment where he’s given the support of a union leader who is guilty of caving to business and breaking a small strike of farmers. McKay's hate for this man is palpable

Union guy: “I think you’ll find we have more in common—“
McKay: “I don’t think we have shit in common.”

Here, Redford looks like a feral dog. The room, full of various advisors to McKay, is silent for about 15 seconds. Then the men erupt in laughter, even the union boss. Finally McKay smiles too, because he doesn’t seem to know what else to do.

The next scene shows the boss introducing McKay as “the next Senator from the great state of California.”

The campaign is no longer McKay’s, it's no longer anyone's really.

The movie was strangely anticlimactic and more powerful for it. Redford'’s last lines lingered with me for hours. With the campaign over, the once confident and self-assured candidate turns to his manager and says, “"Marvin? Marvin, what do we do now?”"

The statement is simple, but profound.

When there are only two choices, the inevitable winner is not the person who electrifies the most people to his/her cause; it’'s not the candidate who convinces people he/she will push for change. The winner is the person who convinces the most people he/she’s just like them. You do that by saying as little as possible.

I found the movie fantastic at chronicling the swift movement toward center that all candidates (those that want to really win anyway) have to make in order to succeed in a two party system.

I'm sure someone is going to disagree with me on this. Bring it.

Mad plays the bass like the race card.

Read the full thing here.

Clarifications and Retractions

I think I was too hard on Sedaris'’ new book. I think I was too hard on Leconte'’s new film. I most certainly was not hard enough on Doom III.

I'm not going to completely exonerate Sedaris or his editor, about half a dozen stories should have been culled without mercy. Last night, though, I re-read two stories from Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and found them roughly a jillion times more entertaining for it. Then I read a review of Intimate Strangers in Time and it glowed. "“That Richard Schickel is on to something,"” I thought. Of course he ignores all the major flaws, but they seemed mitigated in my own mind by his lavish praise anyway. I was also in a much better mood.

This reinforces thoughts I’ve been having lately about the fluidity of opinion. Specifically, the fluidity of my opinion and the curious blindness people have to the fluidity of their own. There is a general assumption, I think, that critics strive for objectivity when passing judgment on things. Certainly, the critics themselves and the structure of reviews in general encourages this feeling.

With the exception of a handful of reviewers on Pitchfork and Roger Ebert’'s occasional rheumy strolls down Nostalgia Street, Memoryton, Longtimeagoland, detachment and clinical precision are vaunted; personal and anecdotal statements regarded as suspicious and un-American. “"Let the people decide for themselves,”" critics say, "“We are but torches of objectivity, illuminating truth and distilling fact.”" Fair enough. If people like it and it’s your shtick, then by all means.

It is ultimately, though, self-deceptive window dressing. Objectivity and opinion are mutually exclusive by definition. But it is what it is, and the journalistic culture in America places an undue emphasis on impartiality, so it makes sense that critics would portray themselves as pseudo-journalists in the American thread: impartial and unbiased.

An aside: America is the only nation I can think of where journalists are expected to be objective. This is silly and ultimately dangerous. It’s pretty obvious to me that most networks skew left politically, not necessarily a lot, but enough. I don’t know if other people realize this, I think a lot don’t. When someone quotes FOX News like it’s a bastion of objectivity, I always double-take . When I suggest the network might be pretty damned conservative, I invariably get, "“but don’t they say they’re fair and balanced?"” Like I said, dangerous. Impartiality and journalism are so often placed in tandem that they'’ve become synonymous with each other. “"The narrator'’s style is so passive it’s almost journalistic"”--meaning unbiased, without commentary. The truth. This is patently untrue in most cases.

Hence, in the spirit of truth, journalism and objectivity should be cleaved. It should be okay to affiliate yourself politically. That way you'’re up front with your reasons about story choice, headlines, and other emphases. All over Europe it'’s seen as the craziest thing in the world that American journalists present themselves as unbiased. It’'s a very unjournalistic self-appraisal.

Back to the original point: It’s now obvious in my own life that critical objectivity is impossible. I can'’t review something solely on its merits, there are millions of arbitrary, personal-preference type filtering media that any piece of literature or film or art have to pass through before lodging somewhere in my love/hate cortex. This explains many things that had long been mysteries to me.

Why Roger Ebert liked Benji: Off the Leash, for example.

I spent a day weeding through his past reviews trying to identify a pattern, that one thread in the personal preference matrix of Roger Ebert would make him likely to enjoy that movie. Where was the precedent? I concluded that his opinion, like my own, is highly contextual and often very arbitrary. Every other possibility I could think of required that I write him off as a senile dotard, and I’'m not ready to do that. I don’t think his recent body of criticism warrants it. Nonetheless, there it is, staring you in the face. Roger Ebert liked Benji: Off the Leash.

“it sends a valuable message: Mongrels are just as lovable as pure breeds.”

If you want objectivity, I suggest the following shift in paradigm. Critics are told to spout free-form rants about the subject at hand, in real time, as it happens. Editing is not allowed, save for a single addendum: after the film is over, the book is finished, whatever, the critic takes a survey of activities, administered by a third party. Better yet, his movements are recorded daily by said third party, then added without his/her input.

It would look something like this:

Benji: Off the Leash
A film by Joe Camp, Running time 100 min.

I love dog movies. Oh my God I love dogs, I wish my own dog hadn't died. OMG now he’s running from the dog catcher. Why are dog catchers so mean? These jokes are funny. God I loved Call of the Wild.

.
.
.

That wasn'’t a very satisfying ending, but whaddryagonnado? Benji is happy, so I am too.
--Roger Ebert

Sleep Cycle: 7 hours | Food intake: Corn Flakes, Ham Sandwich | Sexual intercourse: Yes | Medications: Claritin, Paxil, Rolaids

This way, people get to read the review devoid of editing fluff, literary conceit and other sullying factors, and see that, in addition to his (curious) love of all dog movies ever, this review was skewed by the sex, the Paxil, and maybe the ham sandwich.

That’s objectivity.

My sister is living in a Dorothea Lange photograph, and the homosexual in me wants to get down on my knees and scrub until my fingers bleed.

Read the full thing here.

The problem with words

This is probably going to be long. You've been warned. I'll also say that I don't think any of this will be groundbreaking by any means.

I started writing this about a month ago. I got like 3 sentences in, hit "Save as Draft" and brooded over it like a mother hen. But no matter how I scratched at the thing and clucked, I couldn't organize my thoughts properly.

Then last night something happened. I think I realized some things. They are, in no particular order:

Language is a primitive and ramshackle way for certain intelligent, intensely solipsistic mammals to convey ideas to one another. Languages are highly--though arbitrarily--structured series of symbols meant to point at things in the world. I think, as minds evolved, it also become a way to attempt to find common ground for the turmoil within ourselves. Where in more intelligent animal species it is a tool for coordinating movement in the world, among humans it has become a way to approximate and communicate the function of cognition and the structure of memory. It does that last thing poorly, but does it about as well as I think anything possibly could.

The problem that arises is one of interface. Any CS major knows it's hard to get two computers to talk to each other--the crazy handshake protocols and whatnot. For all that difficulty though, computers have essentially the same architecture. When they also have the same operating system, the job is simplified further. They might have different stuff on them, but they're essentially built the same way. There are standards in place to ensure these sorts of things.

There are no such standards for the human mind, which is not just fantastically complex, but is left, more or less, to create itself as it goes. Hence each mind is unique, and without some commonality, is completely foreign to other minds.

Into the cracks of these fractured and never-duplicated architectures, language takes hold and fights to maintain an interface. It does a decent job. I certainly couldn't do any better.

It's best at managing exterior commands and descriptions. Language can adequately describe and interpret the world and disseminate useful predictions and conclusions about it. These are tautological kinds of things. You point and say to your friend, "That is a cat." He slaps you because A) you are wrong and that's not a cat or B) you didn't need to tell him that because he already knows it.

This is useful for navigating one's way through life. Language is like the evolutionary buddy system. Walk this way. Kill that. Avoid the sharp things in that thing's mouth. It's a system of distributed survival skills for a class of particularly slow, fleshy omnivores.

But even here the cracks in language start to show. A cat is not merely a cat. Calling a cat a cat is a really crappy description. It says practically nothing. There are dozens if not hundreds of modifiers in the English language to abet this shortcoming. These modifiers, including but not limited to adjectives, are almost always a judgement call. Big, small, tall, short are the most simplistic of a group of words that are all highly relativistic terms that require interpretation on the part of the speaker and listener alike. This creates problems.

Even at it's most objective and straightforward, language causes profound complications in understanding. Which cat? That cat. Which one? Third from the right. My right or your right? And on and on.

What happens then, when the context shifts from describing exterior phenomena to the world of thoughts and emotions? Chaos. I think.

How do you define an emotion? Describe it. Crystalize what you're feeling right now with just the words you have around you. If somehow you possessed language but were without other agents to share yourself with, how would you describe an emotion? This situation is, by definition, impossible, given the dialogic nature of language evolution--but consider it.

Not only is such an attempt fruitless, it's also maddeningly hard. I'd say it's impossible. Language is a dialogue. How do you have a dialogic interaction with people who have no access to what you're talking about?

What is sadness? Not the emotion you feel. How do you recognize sadness in others? Tears? Pessimistic attitudes? Lashing out? Have you ever been wrong in your diagnosis?

If we understand that there is no one to one correllation of words to phenomenal objects outside of us, how can we hope to find any kind of correllation at all between the workings of two completely unique and experientially distant minds? How can you develop a series of dialogic symbols for unique feelings--feelings no one else has?

We can't. If we could, the human world would be a much better place. As humans, understanding other people's emotions involves several cues, only the least important of which resides with the other person him/herself.

• You notice something is wrong with X based on a survey of his/her complexion and demeanor. He/she appears to be Y
  
• You ask X if something is wrong (error checking).
• X says he/she is Y (we'll say he/she is "sad")
• You remember sad. You remember how other people have looked when they were sad. You remember why they say they were sad. You remember the context, nothing about their actual emotions.
• You cross-reference this against the times you have fit into that context.
• You attempt to remember how you felt then.
• You assume they feel the same way now as you did then.
• You ask them, "Why, what happened?"
  

That one in italics is the tricky one--it's a big assumption. And, after making that assumption, there's no way to figure out if it was the correct assumption to make. So regardless of veracity, you continue to make that assumption.

His sadness must be like my sadness. Is it? Often, I think, it's not at all like your sadness.

Why do some people have unexpected and strange reactions to anti-depressants and other psychotropic drugs? Is it because certain chemicals have different functions in different people? Perhaps because a drug designed to boost A also has an unexpected and undocumented affect on B? These are the prevailing thoughts I think, and they're probably correct very often.

Doesn't it also seem likely though, that the misstep might be happening in the process of diagnosis, when a doctor has to decide on whether medication is a good idea? The doctor looks at what the patent has told him: I'm depressed, I'm paranoid, I can't sleep. Once again comes the big assumption of correllating depressed, paranoid insomniac with previous--successfully treated--depressed, paranoid insomniacs.

Of course that's what all the training is for, to make those distinctions and judgements. But no amount of training can really get you access to the raw emotions that drive people.

At the level of human thought though, there can really be very little separation between emotions and the words you use to describe them. I express emotions to myself all the time in terms of words. It's a highly abstract association kind of thing. It's the kind of thing I've learned not to share with others, because the words I use to describe something new and peculiar to me (something lacking a culture-wide symbol like sadness) are not the words other people would use. I know these people wouldn't have used those words because they look like the culturally understood confused and worried.

How many times have you heard someone--or thought to yourself--I'd love to get this off my chest, but I don't want to worry X? Why do we say that? I think there are two possibilities, and each is rooted in what we call fear.

1. We worry that our feelings have never been experienced by the other person, and that we'll seem broken somehow, like non-functional humans.
2. We have, at a fundamental level, the knowledge that language just isn't good for certain things. We fear our own inability to articulate.
   

The first instance seems vaguely Freudian, but I'm not sure. I haven't exposed myself to much Freud because psychoanalysis hasn't been hip since . . . well, whenever Woody Allen stopped making good movies. I'm almost positive, however that almost all instances of case 1 can be subsumed into case 2.

What then of empathy? I think this is a special case. It can't be learned the way someone can be trained in psychiatry. For those that are considered to have it, it just is. They have a natural gift for understanding, without words, a person's feelings. It seems like empathy would have to be pre-cognitive, existing somewhere outside the region of the brain infected with language because everything touched by language becomes almost indivisible from it. Emotions exist on some kind of hinterland.

It's amazing and beautiful and I'm positive that I don't have it. I have, however, had profound connections with certain people that seem to transcend the barriers of language. My relationships with these people feel empathetic. I feel like I know what they're experiencing, sometimes when they don't. I've used this for good and evil. But it's not like a latent connection. It's an understanding born of proximity, study, sanguinity, infuriation, and above all, I think, luck. I connect with these people, I think, because the words I'd use to describe my emotions are somehow very close to the words they'd use. Like somehow, in the course of these lives, we've selected similar word sets to describe similar emotions.

I don't think this happens very often, but when it does, your connection with the other person approaches empathy because, inexplicably, the interface of mind to language evolved the same way for you as it did for him/her.

It's amazing sometimes.

Anyway, this was never supposed to be organized, but I feel like I'm rambling, so I'm going to stop.

I figured I had paid my debt to society, by paying my overdue fines at the Multnomah County library.

Read the full thing here.

Wow

I just noticed something.

Despite conventional wisdom, it doesn't rain very much in Seattle. It rains often, but not for very long. Further, it packs a lot of rain into a small temporal window of complete and total raininess.

The distinction to be made there is that, while it rains 300 days a year, it's not a rainy place. Seattle isn't defined by rain. It's one of the more gorgeous places I've ever seen and mother nature only ruins it long enough to keep the lush vegetation oozing moisture.

Example: I accidentally left an empty half-liter bottle outside work yesterday. Its mouth is about an inch wide. It rained for probably an hour last night. When I came to work today, the bottle was almost totally full.

That's a lot of rain, I thought.

Then I looked up and realized that the bottle was sitting under a tree with a really dense canopy of leaves.

That's a lot of rain, I thought.

These are the things I think about when I'm consciously trying to ignore other things.

Read the full thing here.

America's most treasured import

Turns out it's immigrant children.

"The study indicates there are significant gains to immigration," says Mr. [Stuart] Anderson.

Indeed, but not in the ways Americans have come to expect. Foreign kids are not just for stitching our sneakers together at pennies on the dollar or filling out celebrity clothing lines anymore--though getting some of those jobs back on U.S. soil would be nice.

We've found a much better use for other nations' children: Intelligence generation. It just so happens that immigrant kids are much smarter than their American counterparts.

Seven of the Top 10 award winners in this year's [Intel Science Talent Search] were immigrants or their children. Of the top 40 finalists, 60 percent were the children of immigrants. And a striking number had parents who had arrived on skilled employment, or H-1B, visas.

This bodes well for America, as immigration numbers have never been higher. The smarties just keep coming. There is every indication this trend will continue. I can think of no resource renewed with such fecundity and vigor as Human beings. New ones keep popping up everywhere.

Even so, immigration is a major (up to 60% yearly) contributor to population growth, which is troublesome. The population of America, like so many other countries in the world, is at its tipping point.

That said, it's pretty obvious what needs to be done. We need to start staging world-wide talent searches within all American-owned sweatshops and munitions factories worldwide. The dumb kids--there will be a few I'm sure--stay where they are. The smart ones get a shiny new life in America.

Conversely, extend No Child Left Behind's standardized testing system to include not just a series of rewards and sanctions for schools, but for the children themselves. The new system will more accurately place kids according to intelligence, and end many long-standing problems.

The smart kids stay and flourish in an American milieu of exploding cultural diversity, while the kids in the lower 60th percentile get to stop school and spend all day laughing with their idiot friends and playing in the mud . . . dy streets of Indonesia, for example, until such time as they can properly sew a Nike care instruction tag into a Dri-Fit pullover.

In the interest of naming veracity, call it: "Dumb Children Sent Away."

This will instantaneously curb the immigration problem, eliminate the need for Affirmative Action, promote understanding amongst cultures and end the worry about rogue states and WMDs, as most remaining citizens won't even be able to correctly pronounce nuclear. The Americans who remain will feel a profound, amost familial, unity, being as they are, the smart ones.

This is really only unfair to the stupid, but not even No Child Left Behind cares about them.

Read the full thing here.

Wha? . . . God, who let the English majors in?

I'll begin by saying I'm all for civil disobedience. I'm even more in favor of passive civil disobedience, because there's less of a chance that it will kill me. Further, civil disobedience aimed at the current war in Iraq is agreeable to me because A) I'm also ideologically disinclined to like that particular war and B) if the protest is successful, my chances of premature death fall even more.

Having said that, are . . . you . . . serious?

This is why I hate things and why I never participate.

What's that, you're protesting the war? What are your plans? Chaining yourself to something? Linking arms across a street?

"We are going to be out there dressed in white, to stand out and be dramatic," said Ed Hedemann, an organizer of the War Resisters League, which describes itself as a secular, pacifist organization. "Probably by the end of our incarceration we will be grubby."

Hmmm. Interesting. May I retort? No one cares if you get grubby. If people cared about that, my life between bi-monthy wash cycles would get more press than the Civil Rights Movement.

There is no room for symbolism in activism. Gandhi didn't refuse seasoning at restaurants, he starved himself. Why? Because starving actually means something, it means you die. It means you have conviction. Suffering means you're serious. If each of these "activists" will provide me with proof that they suffer from OCD, then maybe I'll give them some credit.

At least they're secular, so I can't openly dispise any one group in particular.

Symbolism is only forceful in certain, rare situations--situations like college. This protest will never be studied in a graduate level Literature or Film class, thus it will die a quiet death.

Read the full thing here.

You can't top that

Part of the reason I started a blog was to get better at writing. The point is to write with enough frequency that certain things became easy. Eventually, my thinking goes, if I can become decent at a few of the baser elements of writing, then writing itself will become easier. The words will at least sound more natural as I hamfistedly put them to print.

Figuring out how to compose a sentence that is more comprehensible than Beowulf read in the Old English was the first hurdle. I’ll let you be the judge of whether I’ve cleared it or not. There were other, tertiary goals, but that was the first big one.

Prior to blog-form, I’d been infrequently fiddling with a bunch of short ideas, which are never to be confused with short stories. That’s the tricky part: making stories out of ideas. It took me a while to realize that. My plan was to write around my subject until a plot and characterization and themes just kind of happened. My college only offered creative writing classes every eighth solstice for a month of alternating weekends. So, lacking access to any greater insight, my way seemed as good as any to begin.

The problem is that I always started with that one thing I liked—sometimes a character, an idea or some kind of conceit—and I’d write until I’d fully fleshed out this particular thing, then I’d continue writing until I was bored, out of things to say, or pissed that my stories weren’t going anywhere. It was most often that last thing.

It was a flawed paradigm that was really only good for two things: making me angry and producing sentences that got progressively worse as the exercise went on. That’s the kind of flat-spin you can’t recover from, just ask Nine Inch Nails, or Maverick and Goose for that matter.

Maybe the worst part is that I’m left with a dozen or so sentences I genuinely like—up to about the first three on any given story.

I could start over, the germ of each idea has held up to repeated scrutiny. There’s just so much baggage there. All that time wrapped up in all those bad sentences. You either try to forget you wrote them, you revise them, or you just keep going and hope that somehow the train wreck untangles itself.

We all know what God says about building a house on a foundation of sand.

He’s against it.

So I never got past that tricky part—making an idea into a story—even once. And I’m too lazy to give the old ideas another try. I also have new ideas I’m afraid to screw up. So my fiction writing amounts to a handful of sentences that might have been something but stand in eternal testiment to the fact that I'm a quitter.

Want to hear some? Too bad, here they are:

Jon was born to the kind of parents who would freely add or sacrifice letters, silent or otherwise if necessary, to create the illusion of free-thought and novelty in the drudgerous and sacred act of child name giving.

Stanley Mortimer O’Brien was a boy given to spurts of intense contemplation. Even as an infant, his mother would often walk into the living room and find him in his playpen, teething ring hanging from the fleshy vice of his mouth, staring at a blank section of wall. During such episodes, he was totally imperturbable; general household racket could do nothing to break his concentration.

Astor Green spent the last moments of his life—thirteen years worth—wishing he had more damn time.

At Maya’s graduation party, with her friends and relatives and parent’s friends and various others gathered around, her mother had delivered a tear-filled speech in iambic pentameter extolling the virtues of her daughter.

By the time Jamie Daniels was nine, he was almost used to getting the piss beaten out of him on a regular basis. There was no reason to think it would stop anytime soon.

I also make up words a lot. That’s one more hurdle to get over I guess.

Read the full thing here.

You're not listening

This is an amazing (by that I mean frightening and shameful) statistic pointed out by the good folk at ladida.org. The women of America feel ignored and underrepresented.

A little snippet:

Broken down by candidate, 51 percent of the women polled said that Bush understands them not well or not at all, and 39 percent said the same about Kerry, reports KRON4.com. Women represent 60 percent of all undecided voters, according to Center for Media Research.

Frankly, that sucks. Despite one group being from mars and the other from Venus, men and women have been actively engaged in a gender equality dialogue for a long time now. Maybe not long enough, but certainly longer than I've been alive.

It's not like Feminism is over--the dialogue isn't waning. I often find myself engaged in it. My girlfriend reminds me about the feminist march of progress when I fail to clean up after myself. I remind her about it when she refuses to pick up the bar tab. If not perfectly equal, whatever inequality exists in the relationship is based more on who complains the loudest, not who has the penis. It's about as healthy as two humans living in close quarters can get, I think.

Why then, have the issues and concerns of over 50% of Americans been swept under the rug? Not even abortion is a hot button topic this election year. The ban on partial-birth abortion has been dying a slow, judiciary death for a while now and no one seems to care.

Women's primary issues and concerns, in no particular order, are:

The survey found that women are eager to hear more discussion from the candidates on issues such as violence against women, healthcare, pay equity between the sexes, and access to child care. Reproductive rights and freedom of choice were found to be particularly important issues for younger women aged 18-24.

Erm, I count at least three of those that shouldn't just be feminist talking points, but of concern to everyone. Violence against women? Healthcare reform? Pay equity? Access to child care? I'm sure there are almost as many babydaddies looking for affordable day care as there are babymommas.

So that puts the number well above 50%. Why are these issues getting no play? Maybe they are, but not really on a national level. Reasons for this? I don't know, I'll wager some guesses.

This is wartime. Like all other wartimes, war discourse rules the debate. Iraq is a valid topic, I grant. Less valid is the question of service in Vietnam and Texas, respectively, 30+ years ago.

Blame John Kerry; blame moveon.org; blame those insufferable and poorly spoken swiftboat vets for truth; blame their Republican handlers. This is bi-partisan stupidity. It's undercutting the spotlight issues, and completely obliterating the ones talked about in that survey-- each of which should be spotlight issues.

There's also the economy to worry about. People tend to forgo worrying about perks like day care and equal pay when they're unemployed. The essential and valid point that day care and equal pay should be rights, not perks, takes a back seat when no one's getting their paper. There's nothing less equal than unemployment.

I can't see this lasting though. It's going to be a squeaky tight election by all estimates (except Chris Matthews', and it's increasingly hard to take him seriously). If 60% of undecided voters are women, then I would think touching on these topics would be a great way to bolster the bottom line. It would work especially well for a populist like John Edwards.

Hopefully they figure it out. Then, hopefully, whomever figures it out stands by their promises and pushes these agendas. They probably won't, but that's a different problem altogether.

Anecdotally, I find it strange that this poll was conducted by Lifetime Television, yet had nothing to say about whether Valerie Bertinelli's snubbing for a cabinet level position is a factor in the political alienation women feel.

Incidentally, KRON4 are the same hard-hitting journalists who brought you whistle-tips, and the irascible Bubb-rubb and Li'l Sis. Once again I thank them for their vigilance. Woo-woo

Read the full thing here.

Maybe if we say please . . .

Officials Ask Hamm to Give Up Gold Medal

Stupid Koreans, stupid International Gymnastics whathaveyou, sportsmanship and fair play is the mantra of people who aren't winners.

Proof: "We tried as hard as we could," U.S. Dream Team member Allen Iverson said after loss. "They were a better team than us tonight."

The Answer needs a hug.

We call such people losers. We don't truck with losers around these parts.

Voluntarily give back the gold? You're not listening: Paul Hamm is a winner. Regardless of how mediocre he was in the individual and team competitions, in the individual all-around he came to play. He faltered, came back, finished well--relatively, and was nudged to that highest podium by three simultaneous and grotesque officiating breakdowns.

Winner.

I watched more gymnastics than anything else this time around, and with each mind-numbing hour of programming, it became more and more clear that world gymnastics is an embarrassment.

It sucks for Hamm; it sucks for the Korean kids who were probably better than him; it sucks for me especially, having no gleaming metal disk or crown of olive branches to show for the time I spent watching the debacle.

Instead of typed pleas to the winner, FIG or whatever should be spending this time hand writing individualized apologies to the TV-watching world in an act of ascetic penance. Lick those envelopes manually.

This one I wrote in cold blood with a toothpick.

Read the full thing here.