When I listen to candidates I hear mostly people trying to reach the 'base' of their party, as they perceive it. Common wisdom says that this is the way one wins primaries, which are dominated by party activists. This idea goes back to the time when the nomination process was a mystery to all but the most politically active, and when results were actually determined at the party conventions. Much of the process in those days may as well have been secret, as it was done behind closed doors in living rooms and convention centers. Nowadays the process is wide open as never before. Along with primaries, conventions, straw polls, you have an ongoing daily and weekly commentary, discussion and ferment that effectively never ceases. The next election begins as soon as the last one is over. With the early primaries and the world of blogs and web chatter there is the time and the forums to actually discuss issues and compare in some detail differing points of view, well before any voting is actually done. The insiders of the political parties have been challenged and all but supplanted by a new wave of grassroots activists who have no official function but possess the power to influence hundreds or thousands through the medium of the Internet.

BBC reporter Greg Palast spoke yesterday at the local Lensic Theater in Santa Fe yesterday and managed to sum up the real 'win/lose' situation in Iraq quite succinctly. He made the point that although many people speak of how we have 'lost' in Iraq, there are some who do not see the adventure as a loss at all.

One of the basic rules in the oil business is, "When the supply goes down the price goes up. What's the best way to reduce the supply of oil? Have a war. When George W. Bush came into office oil was $20 a barrel. Now oil is over $60 a barrel. Mission accomplished."

Hillary

Eight years in the White House
With the know-how we need
When you walk with a leader
You learn how to lead
And who kept her head high
When it could have been down
Who ran the show
When the scandal hit town
This country needs to be honest
Changes need to be large
Something like a big switch of gender
Let's put a woman in charge
Put a woman in charge of the army
Put a woman in charge of the wheel
The country owes it to Hillary
And Hillary owes it to Bill

• Merle Haggard

"That mean ol' levee
taught me to cry and moan."

                -Memphis Minnie

An argument in defense of the government regarding its belated hurricane response is that there was no racism involved. President Bush, according to his wife, "cares for all Americans." Another argument is that the federal government wasn't in charge and that the privations of New Orleans' citizens were the fault of local and state officials. The stories coming out of Louisiana bear witness to a level of incompetence that borders on the criminal. As the months role by, and more than a million displaced people either find a new place in a strained civil order or the opportunity to return and rebuild, we will see a side of America that we've too long wanted to ignore.  

 

 "The big story in this election is that [Bush political strategist] Karl Rove has decided to strategically use gay and lesbian Americans in a number of swing states. The same people who are feigning outrage about what happened in the debate should speak out against that type of political gamesmanship."  - Patrick Guerriero, head of the Log Cabin Republicans on CNN.

36+ hours. That's how long it took the story of Lynn Cheney's "outrage" at John Kerry's mention of her LESBIAN daughter in the debates, to appear, rise to the top of the Google News page, and then drop from view. It first appeared early Friday morning as an op-ed on the extreme right wing news site, Men's Daily, and was quickly snapped up by other right wing news sources like the Washington Times and Christian Paraplegic Veterans For Christ and such. The bottom feeders caught the buzz and swarmed the sites like flies on shit, driving the Googlerhythm until the story began to rise from the third section toward the top six stories. At that point, about 11 or 12 am and into the afternoon the mainstream press caught on to the brushfire and posted their own stories on the flap, lifting the story higher. When the head of the Log Cabin Republicans responded with an attack on the Bush team for 'hypocrisy' and "feigned outrage" in a story appearing on CNN and then picked up by The Advocate, things started to get more interesting. An op-ed in arizona predicted it would be a "Tempest In Tempe" and a story with a 12 hour life span. He was off by about 24 hours.

By Friday night it was a subject of the weekend's first Friday news talk shows. The McLaughlin Group tossed it back and forth and then pretty much discarded it, although Pat Buchanan and the other right wing guy ominously warned that it would become Kerry's "fatal error."  The Washington Post did a quicky poll that indicated that even Democrats and Liberals thought Kerry had made a poor choice in mentioning Mary Cheney in his example. Apparently, even though the Cheney's themselves have openly acknowledged their daughter's orientation, and Edwards brought the subject up a week earlier in his debate with Dick, and was THANKED for his kind words, there was some anxiety about outing her within the ranks. It turns out that this outrage had been expressed behind the scenes after the Edwards debate. So, Kerry's bringing it up was no accident. It was a calculated move intended to help drive a wedge between the Republican extremists of the religious right and the moderate elements of the party, who are on the verge of revolt (see the article link Below to Rus Suskind's piece). The response of the Log Cabin Republicans, who more than any other faction represent these moderate elements, confirms that it may actually have the desired effect. For the Republicans here was an golden opportunity to further their favorite political strategy of character assassination with the image of an upset 'mom' calling Kerry a "bad man."

Probably intentional, but a risky move on Kerry's part.  In these final days and hours it was apparently made with the calculation that the outrage, based as it is on an interpretation of what was, after all, a truthful statement phrased as a compliment, would fade quickly, while the overall impression of Kerry's domination of the debates would outlast it. Of course the Republican outrage driven by Lynn and Dick, undoubtedly with the consultation of Karl Rove, is intended to change the subject from those very debates. The idea is to keep this thing going at least throughout the weekend news cycle and hopefully much longer. If this is all they've got, it's pretty pathetic. Apparently the Dubya has been impressed enough by the response from the lobotomized legions that he's taken to bringing up the Gay Marriage Amendment at every one of his closed to the public rallies. The calculations of the Bush camp rely more and more on driving hordes of queer hating Christians to the polls in sufficient numbers to overcome all organized opposition on November 2nd.

So far, however, the story's been playing pretty exclusively on Google, which is driven by algorythms' that calculate the popularity of news stories by the numbers of hits, and is very effectively manipulated by extremist hordes of all stripes. I'm sure it's the main topic of conversation on Talk Radio For Morons. The story has yet to make it to the top headlines on Yahoo or the sources that are driven by actual human editorial intervention. Instead these sites are covering real stuff like the draft and the potential voter fraud issues. Still, these Republican Dittoheads are media savvy, and shouldn't be underestimated. They're pretty desperate to turn around the momentum from the debates and will dredge up as much sewage as they can to appeal to the bigots that form their base.

The big political news of the week as far as I can see is that two more states on the L.A. Times Electoral Map moved from the Bush column to the too-close-to-call swing states column. The states are Arkansas and Arizona. Although two polls by Zogby/Reuters and Newsweek have come up with slightly better overall vote numbers by Bush since the last debate, the same polls show Kerry leading in the majority of swing states, especially some of the most important ones, like Ohio and Pennsylvania. It looks like the race could come down to Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, although fraud and challenges in various states, particularly Florida and Colorado could cause the vote counting to go on even longer than last time.

Ahh...it's almost one oclock in the morning, mountian time, and the Mary Cheney story has finally been knocked off by three newspaper endorsements, two for Kerry (San Francisco and Cocoa Beach, Florida) and one for Bush (Bloomington, Illinois).