May 2008 Archives

"The scornful set the city ablaze but the wise turn away wrath." Proverbs (29:8)
I live at the dangerous crossroads where religion and current events are always crashing. Usually there are victims. In teaching comparative religion, as well as writing a couple of columns on social and political issues, I see humanity's great aspirations and better angels in deadly conflict with our fierce, yet, natural instincts.

I look at our beautiful miraculous world, and at times I want to weep. I wonder what it is that makes us so quick to anger, violence and the negation, even annihilation, of our fellow human beings? How do people who lived relatively peacefully in Yugoslavia, turn feral and attack along ancient ethnic lines and kill their former neighbors? Why do Kenyans and Nigerians throw away their futures by withdrawing to old tribal identities--identities that while historic are not of intrinsic importance? How do South Africans, who suffered the terrible violent racism of the former white apartheid regime, purge cities and villages of fellow Africans who came seeking refuge from the massacres in their neighboring native lands? How do we lose sight of our common humanity that we so easily act out our common inhumanity? Bombs, burning tires put over human beings and called necklaces, rockets, machetes are turned on the "other," the different. What these differences are that seem so important are changeable. Old enmities can be resolved, or go dormant, then be reawakened by the clarion call of the bugles of war.

There is no national, ethnic, racial or religious exceptionalism. For us to look at Africa and see primitive tribes, is to miss the meaning of Yugoslavian tribalism. To see the slaughter in Darfur and believe it is a uniquely Muslim sin is to forget what Christians have done not only to non-Christians but also to each other. Nor are the, too much idealized in the 60s, Hindus immune to the madness. They set upon both Muslims and Sikhs in terrible holy frenzies. And, yes, there is no special exemption for Jews or Israel. People are people and nations are nations.

I don't understand how we do these things--or perhaps maybe I don't want to understand; I don't want to accept the feral nature lurking beneath the all too thin veneer of civilization.

I do understand that we humans are predators, the descendants of the winners in the Darwinian struggle to survive, to mate and to flourish. We did not get here to the top of the earthly food chain in a gentle way. There was art and madness. There were great Cathedrals and terrible Inquisitions. There is amazing science and technology that improve and save many lives. And much technology was developed from the military. Much of our technology can be used to harm or heal--depending on what we choose.

We can choose. We do choose. My heroes and heroines chose to step away from the madness, and fight their savage instincts. Florence Nightingale, born to wealth, heard a call to serve the poor and sick, to minister to society's outcasts. She fought poverty and disease and turned her outrage at the appalling social conditions of the poor into service. To the horror of war, she brought healing. She was not seduced by her righteous anger, but transformed it, with a kind of moral jujitsu, into moral virtue. It is not that Gandhi did not feel rage, but he fought it and conquered his impulse to violence and revenge. Do you think that Martin Luther King did not think about striking out at those who slurred him, slammed him, arrested him and persecuted and enslaved his people? His impulses were normal. His choices were moral.

Peace will not come passively or naturally. Peace is a choice, a hard discipline and daily commitment to back away from our instincts to hurt, get even, destroy. Like members of AA, we cannot promise a peaceful world or even peaceful selves. All we can do is work one day at a time to be conscious and aware of the inhumanity inside ourselves and the humanity inside others--others who seem so easily to devolve in our eyes from friend to adversary, to enemy to subhuman.

The rhetoric of dehumanization is well known. People become dogs or vermin, rats and pigs--animals to be slaughtered, insects to be exterminated. Killing, genocide, becomes cleansing--a most horrifying euphemism. Thus slaughter becomes a virtue.

In our own American history, our choices of insults are telling. When we fought in Asia we dehumanized our enemies with racial epithets. They weren't like us. They were "people whose eyes were oddly made and peoples whose skin is a different shade." They weren't really fully human. We, of course, used the racial and animal metaphors when trying to marginalize and control Blacks. And too many use vermin and rodent metaphors in talking about illegal immigration from south of the border--though not from north of the border. This is logically strange because a Canadian is far more likely to be competing for a job I want or my kids want than a Mexican or Guatemalan.

Yet when we fight against white people, we do not use the rat, dog, pig metaphors. We go after their religion, their ambition and, most of all, their sanity and sexuality. They are heretics, atheists, megalomaniacs and perverts.

The libel of labels is the early warning system to alert us to the madness. The aphorism is, "Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad." It is also true that when we do go mad, we destroy others, our own selves and souls along with our hope for a better, more civil international, national, local and familial society.

We have precious little control over others, but can assert some small measure of responsibility over our own actions. We can be aware of how easy it is to break and shatter families and friendships. It is not always the obvious "other" who becomes the target. It is the once upon a time loved that also attracts some of our fiercest enmities. Civil wars and divorces are two horrifying examples of disappointment leading too often to destructiveness and dehumanizing epithets.

There is a saying among judges that when they see criminal cases they see bad people at their best, but when they see family law cases they often see basically good people at their worst.

As long as we humans carry these once useful genes and hormones, the competitive and destructive drives, we will have daily choices to make. From deep in the DNA the madness may call, the bugle will blow, but we also evolved choice, consciousness and conscience. We have the power to turn away from wrath and not answer the call and instead choose life and peace over our natural madness.

What started as a trickle of puzzled queries on Oprah's message board when she touted Obama in October eventually turned into angry complaints from many white women when she barnstormed for him in January. They raged that America's long standing reigning queen of daytime talk TV had strayed way over the line. Oprah took note for a good reason. The loudest complaints came from middle-aged and middle class white women. They are the ones who have done as much as any other of Oprah's longtime regulars to make her fortune and keep her at the top of daytime talk show ratings. They are also the part of the voter segment that has done much to make Hillary Clinton's political fortunes and keep her competitive with Obama in the slog to the Democratic presidential nomination.

A legion of Oprah's handlers, show producers, magazine editors, TV moguls, syndicate heads, and media talking heads hotly deny that she's lost any of her luster because of Obama. Many of her women fans even jump to her defense and lambaste the women critics. Her ratings, cash spigot and superstar image still top that of most of her competitors in the TV business. It's also true that celebrities who get too political can tick off a lot of their fans. It's also an undeniable fact that Oprah has slipped in the ratings and the slip can be directly traced to her Obama support.

Within days after she touted Obama, a Gallup poll found that her favorable rating plunged by nearly ten percent and her unfavorable rating climbed by almost the same percent. As criticism mounted after her Obama foray to South Carolina, Oprah read the tea leaves. She hasn't made a public utterance about Obama since then.
But the issue is not really whether Clinton's staunch white female supporters are smacking down Oprah. The issue is Obama. He's opened wide the racial and gender sore between black and white women. In the days just before the South Carolina primary in January, nearly three times more black women said they'd back Clinton over him. The support for Clinton was greatest among lower income, working class black women. They admired Clinton as a woman, mother, and most importantly, many black women saw her as a strong advocate for health care and women's interests. White women, and that's middle class white women, backed her for pretty much the same reasons at the time.
Immediately after the Obama-Oprah roadshow, complete with shouting, and fawning fans, banks of TV cameras, and non-stop chatter and praise from the pundits, black women made a sharp volte face. Polls show that the overwhelming majority of black women now exuberantly back Obama. Many of the black women before Obama's surge to the top who praised Hillary for fighting for women's issues now complain bitterly that she is standing in the way of a black man getting to the White House.

It is more than just Oprah's halo that stirs the change. For them, it is a matter of pride, accomplishment, and the sense that he fulfills their date with racial history making. Race simply trumps gender. But for older, middle class white women this is not the case. The issue is still gender and women's interests. Clinton was, and is, still seen as the most informed, effective and passionate advocate for women's issues. Having the first woman in the top spot in the White House is a matter of pride, accomplishment and the sense that she fulfills their date with gender history making.

The mini-Oprah backlash also tossed an ugly glare on another side of race. While Oprah has never given the faintest hint that her tout and early bankroll of Obama has anything to do with race, and is careful to make it clear that she backs him solely because of his competence and qualifications and that makes him the right presidential stuff. Yet the lurking suspicion is that there is more to it than that and that she is just as thrilled as many other blacks at the thought that an African-American can actually bag the presidency. This is not exactly a play of the race card. But for many skeptical voters, and obviously from the complaints of many of Oprah's one time devoted white female loyalists, it comes uncomfortably close to a veiled racial motive.

Oprah acknowledged the risk that she ran in cheerleading Obama. In a statement sent to ABCnews.com shortly after the mini-furor broke last year, she walked the thin tightrope between explanation and mollification. She admitted that she might offend some by "stepping out of my pew." She got it almost right. It's not that she stepped out of her pew that offends the women that tune her out. It's stepping into Obama's.

I was not a Hillary hater when this Bataan Death March of a primary season began. I had always admired her, respected her and believed that she had done a truly amazing job of moving from First Lady to becoming a first rate senator. She went from being a victim of both her husband and the right wing to becoming an impressively collaborative leader.

Yes, I had hesitations, but they were over substance--her vote on the Iraq War. But my questions grew, and a matter of style became substance. Her inability to admit that her vote on Iraq was a mistake, gave me pause. We already have a president who cannot admit err and who finds opposition to somehow confirm his own moral rectitude. When she began to wrap herself in the flag and support anti-flag burning legislation, pandering seemed to be a problem.

Still, I admired her ability to know both facts and policy, to articulate a positive program of change in health care and to shift her view of the war. But then the deepest problem for me began to emerge. I wanted to love her but she presented me with a moving target for my affection. I did not know from day-to-day which Hillary I was supposed to love.

She had caught the Al Gore disease of morphing into whatever someone told her to be. Like Gore moving from blue suits to earth-toned sweaters, Hillary became a chameleon. I should have known about her shape-shifting when she first ran in New York and conveniently found a beloved Jewish step-grandfather. She was Hillary the inevitable, acting very presidential at the start. She didn't attack; she tolerated her opponents with a certain regalness.

After her loss in Iowa, she got a little weepy--and that was fine. It seemed an unusually authentic, unrehearsed moment for any politician. She found her voice, she said. Then she changed it again. At African-American gatherings, she got into very Baptist rhythms. In the South, her mid-west accent got pretty southern. Yes politicians try to be all things to all people, but they usually use the same voice. They can get away with an emphasis on different policies for different groups, but to change one's voice is to shatter the illusion that we know them.

She has moved from tolerant to angry, from tough to victim. She has been the champion of peace who then promises to "obliterate Iran" and move some Arab governments under our nuclear umbrella. Her persona has gone from competent to bellicose and recently to desperate. I don't know if she is Mother Teresa or Dr. Strangelove.

This week, however, she entered a new land and a new low. Her referencing of Bobby Kennedy's assassination was despicable, and her non-apology apology another indication of an inability to speak straight or admit to any error on her part. It is everyone else who got it wrong, who did not understand her.

We all know that she cannot win by playing by the rules. Her only hope is based on what we euphemistically call the "meteorite strategy." That is the long shot that Obama would get hit by a meteor--in the form of some scandal. Yes, at the back of our minds was the unspoken fear that violence too could come between the vote and the result. A black man in position to be the nominee and the actual president is a target. So, if we were all thinking it, what made it wrong, desperate and despicable for her to incarnate our thoughts and fears in the word: Assassination?

Had their positions been reversed and Obama were staying in, after losing the elected delegate count according to the rules that had been agreed upon by all, and had he indicated that anything could happen and she could be assassinated, the press would have gone wild. Pundits would be talking about how irresponsible, cruel and dangerous this was. They would write about how an unstable Obama supporter might hear it as a call to arms. This is, of course, both a racist and sexist assumption. It is racist and sexist in that we believe that a black man taking up arms and violence is more likely than a woman doing the same.

No, of course I don't think she was calling for violence. This was not a coded plea for a deranged supporter to in the words of Henry II "Rid me of this meddlesome priest." It was a glimpse into a desperate soul whose only hope is placed on the misfortune of her adversary.

Sure she can remain in the campaign. There is no harm if she runs against McCain, but continuing to try to damage Obama is selfish, destructive and without purpose. If she does no harm and Obama falls for whatever reason, her delegates will not have disappeared. Whom does she think would be chosen by an open convention?

However, her inability to admit error, her lack of caring about what her contentious continuation of a slash and burn campaign is doing to the party, her thinly veiled hope that something happens to Sen. Obama is narcissistic enough behavior to raise questions of both character and fitness.

How do our State Senators and Assembly folk want to fill the hole in our budget? Plug it with porn! Yes, what we cannot raise through general taxes, we can get up by levying a tax on the production and consumption of pornography. Talk about a sin tax!

Pornography is a thriving cottage, and often mansion, industry in California and in our own San Fernando Valley in particular. Virtually anytime I drive past a large home in the Encino hills with all the windows darkened, I assume they are either growing pot or producing porn.

The porn industry creates jobs, trains the next generation of gaffers, directors, cinematographers--and of course "talent." It is the bubbling spa cum cesspool from which infomercials are born, that in turn beget music videos and may lead even to TV and legitimate movies. Though to be fair to porn, it is increasingly hard to distinguish legit from porn.

And therein may lay the back rub. How shall we determine which productions are doing porn and which are either art or commerce? How shall we define porn? Yes, yes, I know we may not be able to define it but we know it when we see it. But most importantly, who gets to see it? Who has to watch the dailies (or should they be called "nightlies?")? What panel passes on porn?

How many porn shoots take out permits, and will imposing the 25% suggested tax drive them further undercover--or even out of the state? In the immortal words of H. Ross Perot, "That giant sucking sound you hear will be jobs going to Mexico."

Our elected geniuses in Sacramento also want to stick it to the hardworking porn consumers and lay on another stiff tax by adding another 25% on the other end--the consumers' end.

So if pornography turns out like the lottery and we become dependant on what was once a sin (Gambling in the case of the lottery), will the State then begin to promote porn? Will they give tax breaks in an attempt to attract an expanding industry? Will it become a new civic virtue to support local porn? I can see the marketing slogan: Fantasize Global but Buy Local. Of course, they would never directly tell us to support porn with taxpayer funds, only ask us to give it not a handout but a hand.

The Governor is trying to bet on the lottery. He has about the same chance of his lottery paying off as any of us--which is none to speak of.

I am a liberal Brie-eating condescending elitist snob. I am also a believer, along with Ronald Reagan, that taxes should hurt, that they should be visible and not be hidden in fees or other ruses. I object to the garbage fees being raised, the parking meters extracting more and the fines increased for every kind of infraction. These are all badly disguised taxes and are essentially dishonest. I also object to our police, who have important work to do in protecting and serving us, being conscripted into revenue agents.

But I save a special kind of irk and ire for the lottery and the Governor's plot to sell futures in lottery proceeds. Even if the earnings from the lottery were to increase as he fantasizes, (and no one with actual or actuarial knowledge believes his numbers) we would be running California by taxing the false hopes of the poor, the desperate and the uneducated.

Does anyone remember old films that showed the corruption of "The Numbers Racket?" These involved the Mob (usually considered to be the bad guys) taking bets on random numbers that would be revealed by the saddle numbers of the winners of the first four races at Hialeah. Well, the government seems to have decided that taking illicit gambling away from private enterprise and co-opting it for themselves moved it from being immoral to not only moral but now a civic duty. "Buy a lottery ticket for the kids," they plead.

Who plays the numbers in our state run numbers racket? The poor and desperate. This is a tax on the poor. A tax on ignorance. When the lottery started in California, locally Gelson's and other high-end markets offered tickets. But the socio-economic segment of society that could afford 5 bucks didn't buy in sufficient numbers to keep the machines in such venues. This is not because the wealthy don't want more money or have no dreams of greater and unearned wealth. They just understand the odds better and decided to spend only a tiny percentage of their income on tickets, compared with the poor.

When the lottery began, I objected to it because it is a sneaky and cruel way of extracting money, and I believed it would, be unfair to the poor and uneducated. I was called a snob and an elitist. I was accused of believing that I knew better how to spend my resources than poor and uneducated people. I was a class snob. Okay. But was I, am I, wrong?

Some say that a voluntary self-tax, in the form of wagering, is better than the involuntary taxes imposed on us by government. They compare the gains from they lottery to sin taxes on alcohol and tobacco. This is a fair argument--except that funding some portion of healthcare from activities that promote ill health has a karmic kind of justice. Funding education through a tax on a bad judgment seems an injustice.

Our schools deserve direct and chosen support. The lottery has already broken the essential deal that brought it into existence and that was that the proceeds would not be used to off-set the educational budget but to augment it. They lied then about what the lottery would do. So, the question is: Are they lying now? You can make book on it.

This story from City News Service ...

Travelers at LAX had more to deal with than long lines Monday morning: The air conditioning went out in "most of the terminals," said airport spokesman Marshall Lowe.

The air-conditioning problem stemmed from a "10-secound outage caused by a squirrel on one of our commercial lines that feeds the airport," said Joe Ramallo of the Dpeartment of Water and Power.

... reminds me of this:

The obsessive talk still is that race might wreck close-to-presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama's slog to the White House. Race is a hazard to Obama. But the even greater hazard is the knock that Obama simply is to green, too untested, and too soft to be a firm, and resolute commander in chief. Months before Bush hinted at it, and McCain attacked him on this point, the Republican National Committee shoved the inexperience rap to the front of the its keep the White House playbook. At its midwinter parlay in February, the RNC made inexperience point number five on the Obama hit list. Race was nowhere on the list of attack points.

Obama backers parry the attack by turning the table and proclaiming that his lack of national and especially international experience is a positive. That he'll bring fresh ideas and approaches to statecraft that replace the old, tired, and failed polices of recent times. The more exuberant turn the table again and say that his tenure on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Veterans Affairs Committee, and Homeland Security, make him even more experienced than Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton, George Bush, Jr. when they took office.

There's faint truth to that, but only if the issue is foreign policy experience. With the exception of Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush were all successful two term governors with much executive and administrative experience. Obama doesn't have that. Yet, as presidents they still made disastrous and costly foreign policy blunders. But even if they hadn't stumbled over a crisis or two, this still wouldn't cancel out the perception among legions of voters that Obama is too inexperienced for the job.

A Pew Research Poll Center Poll in early May found that "inspiring," " fresh," "change," and "visionary" was not the one word that voters said best described Obama. The one word was "inexperienced".

This can't be cavalierly shrugged off as a desperate campaign slur by the GOP, or as a code word that closet bigoted whites latch onto as an excuse not to vote for him. And it's definitely not a meaningless and overblown measure of a candidate's competence and effectiveness in the White House. The inexperience rap has hurt Democrats once in the White House. It hurt JFK with his Bay of Pigs bungle and his initial waffle on the Cuban Missile crisis. It hurt Carter with his hopelessly botched Iran hostage rescue attempt. It hurt Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart in 1984 against Democrat Walter Mondale. Hart, like Obama, was seen as the change guy who could move the country in a new direction.

That is until Mondale pounded him in a televised debate and on the campaign trail that his ideas and plans were just too fuzzy for Democrats to take a chance on in tossing the nomination to him. That helped sink Hart's nomination fight.
The inexperience tag is a politically perilous one for a good reason.

Many voters really believe that the American presidency is and should not be an OJT position. They aren't willing to make a leap of faith that an untested candidate can smoothly and effortlessly handle crisis situations that inevitably arise. The reality is that inexperienced presidents often make poor crisis managers. They have gotten the country into costly and unpopular wars and brush fire conflicts. They alienate foreign friends and allies. They bungle the economy. And their administrations more times than not are riddled with corruption and cronyism. The disastrous proof is the administration of the man that Obama seeks to replace.

Even without fingering Bush's foreign and domestic policy bumbles and ineptitude, the presidents that have been most successful in recent decades have been FDR, Clinton and Dwight Eisenhower. They had two things in common. They had extensive executive and administrative experience either as governors, or in the case of Eisenhower, in the armed forces before they became president.

Even before McCain snatched at the inexperience buzz word against Obama, Hillary Clinton grabbed at it to imprint the notion in voter's mind that she is the best Democratic presidential candidate to handle the inevitable crises that saddle all administrations. Her play of the inexperience card against Obama may not have gotten her any more votes, but it served to remind that Obama will be a question mark in the White House.

The lack of administrative and crisis management experience shouldn't disqualify a prospective presidential candidate, or mean that he will implode under fire. This holds true for Obama just as it did with other presidents who took office with a paper thin resume on foreign policy experience. Yet, it's an issue that will dog Obama every step of the way on the campaign trail. McCain and the GOP will see to it.

The burning question is who close-to-presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama will pick as his running mate. The question is better asked of his GOP foe John McCain. His vice presidential pick is far more crucial than who Obama picks. Obama is pretty much a solo act on the campaign circuit. He's firmed up his rock solid core of black voters, students, and college educated businesspersons and professionals, with his rock star allure, fresh face, soaring rhetoric, inspiring and catchy message of hope and change.

If he can convince a reasonable number of blue collar white Democrats that are racially doubtful about him that he can do more to soothe their economic woes, this could trump the racial doubts of many about him. That and the Bush albatross of the war and the economic meltdown around him is a tough one for McCain to get around, especially since he has none of the charisma, the message of Obama, a wobbly base among Christian fundamentalists and social conservatives, and the persistent whispers and doubts about his age and health. He'll need a vice president who can help right the tottering GOP ship. He has no choice but to implore Mitt Romney to sign on to the ticket.

The reasons for Romney go beyond McCain's image problem and party doubts. Romney was the first GOP presidential candidate to publicly warn back in January that Obama would be the likely GOP opponent, and then say that he could beat him. This was not mere political braggadocio. He like Obama sold himself as the change guy who can go to Washington cut the cronyism, bureaucratic and congressional inertia, and restore public confidence. McCain is the walking embodiment of the much loathed Washington insider establishment.

Obama is a cash cow and will have a king's ransom campaign war chest. In fact, he's the first Democratic presidential candidate in a while who can go toe to toe with Republicans in the presidential money rink. This presidential race will be the costliest in American history, with some estimates putting the price of winning the White House at one billion plus dollars. Romney is every bit the corporate cash cow as Obama. He pumped tens of millions into and virtually self-bankrolled his campaign. He can do what McCain has struggled to do and that's open the GOP's corporate money spigot.

Romney is a social conservative, but he's also one that social conservatives like, have confidence in, and have gotten behind with passion. McCain isn't. Though he's done reasonably well in some primaries getting Christian fundamentalist and ultra conservative votes, there's little passion and enthusiasm among them for him. If they stay home in droves on Election Day, McCain's candidacy is DOA.

In nearly all polls, affordable health care worries ranks close behind the economy as a major concern of millions. Obama will tell what he will do if elected to provide affordable care for millions. Romney can tell what he actually did to provide it. Though since leaving office he sounded a warning about the costs, he can still wave the much admired, and successful health care plan that he helped craft and implement as Massachusetts governor as a model for the states and the nation.
McCain will have to spend time and money building name identification for any VP pick other than Romney. Romney has that name identification, and more importantly, name identification that is not saddled with a trunk load of negatives.

Romney is a decade younger than McCain. Age, as race with Obama is a great X Factor, for McCain. He will be the oldest president ever on inauguration day. This, and health questions, is a big concern of many voters.

The most successful presidents have been governors (with one very current exception). They bring the administrative and management skills crucial to the office. Romney would put the minds of many voters at ease that if McCain succumbed to health problems, he could immediately step in and ably run the affairs of state.

He's a team player. When he shut down his campaign in February he immediately met with and smoothed over the ruffled feathers with McCain, and urged his delegates to support him. He then went to a couple of states to pitch him. One of them was Michigan which is very much in play for the GOP given the large number of social conservatives there and his strong roots there during his father, George Romney's, years as governor.

McCain bets the political bank that his strengths on national security, the war against terrorism, and strangely, even winning the war in Iraq on his terms, will resonate with millions of voters. He'll need more than that to offset voter and party doubts, divisions, and the X Factor of age and health. Romney gives him added insurance to help offset these potentially deal breaking liabilities for him. Romney poses a bigger threat to Obama than McCain.

Well, another year has flown by. They do get faster all the time. This being a political year, there has been a great deal to blog about. Surely there will be no let up through the first week in November (and possibly a few more weeks for counting, recounting, Mugabeing the results and then litigating).

In this year we have posted 1,765 blogs (not counting this!) That's better than 147 per month and more than 5 per day. So much wisdom in so little time. And we're only one-year old.

Way to go!

For people of my generation and older, where we stand today was virtually unthinkable--even by liberal activists. The Democratic Party, in the absence of a meteor or violent madness, will nominate a Black man to run for the presidency. Whatever you may believe Barak Obama's merits or weaknesses are, however you are going to vote, this rite of passage is a very big deal. This is not symbolic. This is not a throwaway vice presidential nomination in a losing year. This was fought for and earned by both works and grace. Whether he turns out to be an Al Smith, the first Roman Catholic nominated or a JFK, the first Catholic elected, we Americans of all races, ethnicities and political beliefs are a part of something new and different, and we are riding together a rapidly moving tectonic plate.

For all our problems, our faults, fears, excesses and yes prejudices, this is a pretty amazing time. No, we do not yet talk straight about race. We do not necessarily even think straight. We are often afraid to talk, to question, or to acknowledge our fears. I read Black pundits who keep warning how racist America is and how we should not count on Americans voting for or against Obama based on his character. They assert that many, too many, will NEVER vote for him because of his color. They warn that we code our racism sometimes with other phobias. Obama is an elitist--another Dukakis, another Adlai Stevenson. He's an egghead, an intellectual, a Brie eating, Prius driving elitist. This is a wonderful charge to make against a Black man, the son of a single mother who was on food stamps. Yeah, he's out of touch with the "hard-working white Americans." Hello irony! Only in America.

I think that some African American pundits do not have the "audacity of hope," and they dare not imagine that Obama can win. They may be afraid that his defeat will cast a pall on them, and that his failure as a candidate will hurt too much. They may fear that should he win, and be found wanting, it would cast a shadow on them. I do understand this attitude psychologically.

When Joe Lieberman (outfitted at the time uncomfortably in liberal democratic drag) was nominated to run for the Vice Presidential position, outwardly the Jewish community was proud. Many of us qvelled (Yiddish for to bubble with joy). It felt like an accomplishment, a barrier broken, a great moment in American Jewish history. But there were those who quietly--at least as quietly as anything ever happens in the usually fractious Jewish world--began to express reservations, not so much on policy but on collateral issues. Lieberman, as it turns out, was not much of a threat to politically conservative Jews and seemed like an okay choice for liberal Jews. But there was some fear that if Gore were to lose, it would be blamed on the Jewish community. Some in the Jewish community did worry that were he to advocate for Israel, it would not be seen as even-handed but he would be viewed more as a Jew than a "real American."

I suspect, but do not know, that this is going on in the African American community too. Obama's success would be wonderful and a source of pride; his failure might feel like a failure of a people more than an individual.
This is the natural role and burden of people who break barriers. Jackie Robinson was selected as much for his temperament as his athletic skill. He knew he was not a single person being evaluated alone. He was a symbol and would be, in those old and largely unintentionally insulting and demeaning words, "a credit to his race."

We do know that there are racists in our society who will not vote for a Black man. There are sexists who hate Hillary for her gender more than her politics or personality. There are probably some young people who will not vote for a geezer out of touch with their generation. All of this is true. We remain imperfect. This is unquestionable.

We are also much improved in both our dreams and our reality. The very ground we stand on, the assumptions--both romantic and apocalyptic--of our youth shift and we strive to do more than hang on, more than just go along for the ride. We strive to shape change and make the chaos reflect, if only for the few moments of our time on this wild ride, our best hopes, our deepest dreams and our most personally authentic values.

Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama has moved heaven and earth to keep race out of his campaign. He had no choice. He knew that if he gave even the faintest hint of a tilt toward black voters his campaign would be DOA. While early polls consistently showed that a crushing majority of whites said that competence, ability and experience, not race, are the only things they consider in voting for a candidate, he also knew that race still might be the great X Factor for him in the presidential contest.

Privately, many in the Obama camp worried that many of the whites who loudly professed to be color-blind might develop collective amnesia on Election Day and punch the ticket for McCain. What they didn't consider was that many white Democrats would punch the ticket for Clinton instead, and then make it clear that if she didn't win they'd stay home or punch the ticket for McCain.

The overwhelming rejection of Obama by blue collar, rural, and non-college educated (and many college educated whites too) in West Virginia, all Democrats, is no longer cause for private worry for Obama but grave public fear. It follows close on the rejection of Obama by blue collar whites in Indiana, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Ohio. The pile of racist incidents that plague the Obama campaign, and the continued narrowing of his base to blacks, students, and upper-crust college educated whites are further strong cautionary warning signals for him and the Democrats.

Team Obama counters that he can snatch blue collar white Democrats and thus is electable with these three arguments. Obama won five of 12 primaries that included Wyoming and Idaho with a majority of white votes. He has gotten out front on the racial issue by mildly acknowledging that some whites won't vote for a black man yet that hasn't slowed his campaign. And, that the economy is in such lousy shape, and voters are so disgusted with their economic hurt and blame Bush for it, that this will trump the residual racial fears and distrust among Hillary Democratic blue collar whites toward him.

The three arguments are shaky at best.

In exit polls in the key states he lost and even the one that he won, North Carolina, whites by double digit figures that ranged as high as twenty five percent in Ohio and Pennsylvania, flatly said that color does matter, and that means they are unlikely to vote for Obama. And, these are all Democratic voters.

The five states he won, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Kansas, and Nebraska are not in play for the Democrats. Republicans outnumber Democrats in these states by lopsided margins. The states that he lost and even possibly the one he won, North Carolina, are far different. They are in play for the Democrats. If he loses them his chance of bagging the White House is nil.

The argument that Bush has so mangled the economy that scores of Hillary Democrats will ultimately back him makes some sense. Polls consistently show that Americans, no matter what color, are anxious, fearful, and angry about the economic meltdown. And many do finger point Bush policies for it. But in nine of eleven opinion polls in the 2004 presidential election, voters also said that the most important concern for them was the economy. In some cities and counties in the crucial battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, the economy had virtually collapsed. Plant closings, high oil prices, and high consumer debt caused deep economic misery for thousands of workers even then. Job gains that year throughout the country were far lower during the summer of 2004 than Bush had repeatedly claimed, and economists expected.

The economy, though, didn't crash. The Federal Reserve micromanaged interest rates, and there was a relatively low inflation rate, and the expansion of the retail and service industries bolstered Bush's boast that his administration had created thousands of new jobs, and his tax policies had kept overall unemployment low. This was the powerful spur that Bush used to spin news, even bad economic news, as a gain. McCain is and will continue to do the same. Also, the economic pain in 2008 as in 2004 is not even. In other words not everyone is hurting. In polls a near majority of voters in the Southwest and the West rate the economy as good. Those are the GOP stronghold states and voters are even less likely to break rank and vote for Obama even if their economic worries trumped their racial qualms about him.

West Virginia was more than a symbolic, meaningless win for Clinton and loss for Obama. No Democrat has won the White House in the past near century without winning West Virginia. The chilling Obama loss in the state and the continued rejection of his candidacy by rural and blue collar whites make the Democrat's Obama gamble riskier than ever.

If there were ever words that Hillary Clinton should take back it's her retort that hard working whites backed her in the primaries. The implication was that whites are the only ones who work hard. She obviously didn't mean that. Her awkwardly put point was simply that Obama has not cracked the resistance to him of blue collar, rural, and non-college educated, lower income whites.

Obama will try to overcome that resistance by fingering McCain for Bush's economic bumbles. This is the one issue that should resonate with blue collar whites who are hurting more than anyone else from a near decade of bad Republican economic policies. But economic misery hasn't been enough for any Democratic presidential contender or even president to dent that resistance in the past three decades. And Hillary's lousy word play notwithstanding their resistance can't be shrugged off solely as racial bigotry, guns and religion fetishes, and cultural gaps between blue collar whites and blacks and the so-called elite.

Bill Clinton said and did all the right things about the economy and snatched the White House from Bush Sr. in 1992. But he didn't do it by getting a majority of blue collar white votes. Bush Sr. narrowly beat him with them. Four years later, the economy boomed, jobs were plentiful, and Clinton got the credit for this. Yet he still lost to GOP challenger Robert Dole by an even greater margin among blue collar whites than he did to Bush Sr. four years earlier. If women had not turned out in large numbers and voted heavily for him, Dole may well have beat him out, and he would have done it with the massive backing of blue collar whites.

There are two big reasons for the locked in resistance of blue collar white males to Democratic presidential contenders that have been totally missed in all the usual talk about cultural differences and sneaky racism. That is that many of them perceive the messages that GOP male candidates convey and the code words and terms they use to convey them much different than women, blacks and upper income, college educated whites.

GOP presidential candidates and presidents in past decades have at various times skewered social programs and nakedly played the race card in presidential campaigns beginning with Goldwater in 1964. Since then other Republicans at times artfully stoked male rage with racially charged slogans like "law and order," "crime in the streets," "welfare cheats," and "absentee fathers." Bush's John Wayne frontier brashness, and get tough, bring em' on rhetoric in talking about the Iraq and the war against terrorism was calculatingly geared to appeal to supposed male toughness.

The other reason is that Republicans have just as artfully played hard on the anger, frustration, and visceral dislike of many white workers harbor toward government. The angry white male was more than a cleverly coined buzz word in the 1990s to describe the fear, frustration, and the sense that males, particularly white males, were losing ground to minorities and women in the workplace, schools, and in society. The trend toward white male poverty and alienation actually first became evident in the early 1980s when more than 9 million Americans were added to the poverty rolls and more than half were from white, male-headed families. Two decades later, the number of white men in poverty or among lower income wage earners continued to expand. The estimate was that more one in five white males who voted in 2004 made less than $45,000 in household income.

The main culprit was always a big, bloated federal government that tilted unfairly in spending priorities toward social programs at the expense of head of household male wage earners and taxpayers, at least that's how the GOP politicians were able to craft the reason for the anger and alienation that many white males felt toward government and that translated out to even more fear anger and distrust of liberal Democrats.

McCain will again snatch this well-worn page from the GOP playbook, and do what every GOP presidential candidate has done going back to Reagan and that's tag Obama as a far out left liberal who's wildly out of touch with and even threatens blue collar white males. He'll endlessly cite Obama's moderately liberal voting record and statements on abortion, taxes, and judicial appointments. Republican strategists are rubbing their hands in giddy anticipation that the freshly minted "Hillary Democrats" (blue collar whites that traditionally vote Democratic) are very much in play for McCain.

The idea is to bag the blue collar white male vote, especially in the South, by reinforcing the deep suspicion of many conservative males that the Democratic Party is a hopeless captive of special interests, i.e. minorities, gays, and women, and that white men especially are still persona non grata in the party.

Hillary said it wrong but got it right about the hard working, white Americans that back her and not Obama. The supreme test for Obama is to prove that Hillary said it wrong and got it wrong. The West Virginia primary is yet another litmus test to see if he can.

Anybody who believes Rush Limbaugh's idiotic gas bag boast that he tilted elections in Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania and now Indiana to Hillary Clinton deserves the word that Al Franken used a few years ago in the title to his best selling book to describe Limbaugh.
Limbaugh's Operation Chaos is the latest in the endless stream of dime store promotional gimmicks Limbaugh has used to hype his up and down show ratings, maintain his spot as king of the yak radio circuit, and puff up his Grand Canyon size ego.

The facts in the Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania primaries, of course, refute Limbaugh's hogwash claim. The polls consistently showed that Clinton would likely score a single to double digit win over Obama in these three states. Her core base of supporters, Latinos, rural and blue collar whites, and Reagan Democrats were solidly behind her. In Ohio she got an eleventh hour boost from an alleged memo that painted Obama as waffling on his opposition to NAFTA. That's a red flag issue to economically strapped Ohio workers.

In Pennsylvania nearly 2 million registered Democrats voted. Exit polls showed that out of that number roughly 100,000 voters or 5 percent of the overall number claimed that they changed their registration from Republican to Democrat. An equally small percentage of the Democratic voters said they were new voters or had no party affiliation before the primary. In any case, exit polls showed that the new voters, suspect Democrats or not, backed Obama, not Clinton, by a wide margin, and those that were openly admitted Republicans and that voted as Democrats split evenly down the middle between Obama and Clinton.

The number of new, and unaffiliated voters, and those that claimed to be ex-Republicans at least for the primary was simply too small to seriously say that they made a difference in Clinton's win, escpecially given the gaping margin that she beat Obama by in the state.

Now there's Indiana. Few paid much attention to Limbaugh's absurd blather about Operation Chaos before Obama lost the state by a narrow 14,000 votes. And even then Limbaugh's stunt might have been laughed off as another of the gas bag's ratings grab, that is until Obama backer, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, and some Team Obama staffers bought into his taunt and cried foul. And since Indiana is an open primary state, Limbaugh's boast seemed plausible.

But as always, facts have an irritating way of spoiling a good yarn, or in this case, a hokey claim. Even if we take the word of the roughly ten percent of the Democratic voters in Indiana who claimed they were Republicans, the percentage that went for Clinton was less than ten percent.

That hardly represents a Republican stampede to Clinton. If there was any rush to a Democrat by Republicans anywhere it was to Obama. He got the greater percentage of alleged cross over Republicans in seven of eight states he won according to exit polls. And he got them before Limbaugh allegedly sat out to make mischief by propping up Clinton.

Clinton eked out her win over Obama in the state not with cross over Republican voters but by beating him with the Democrats that she beat him with in Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, and even North Carolina and that's blue collar white voters who are Democrats and vote Democratic. In Indiana Obama's anchor voter demographic, blacks and college educated younger voters, made up a smaller percentage of the vote than in North Carolina.

By dignifying anything that comes out of the mouth of talk radio's champion huckster, Kerry and Team Obama do a disservice to the success that Obama's retooled stump tactics had in making the Indiana race closer than it could have been. He barnstormed the state through small towns and rural areas and touted a quasi populist working fellow's pitch and softened his image as a regular guy in photo-op stops. This helped take the spotlight off of the Wright fiasco, and bury for the moment his verbal gaffes about guns and religion that Clinton and the GOP giddily waved in the face of Pennsylvania voters.

Limbaugh declared and says that he's shutting down Operation Chaos. Why not? He worked this latest con job to masterful perfection. He got a legion of talking heads actually giving serious credence to his screwy boast. He got a ratings bump up. He got some Democrats who should know better to pay perverse homage to his supposed political prowess. And he further bolstered his stock as the GOP's main man of the airwaves.

Not bad for the guy that Franken branded a big fat idiot. Kind of makes you wonder just who the idiot really was in all of this.

Perhaps I exaggerate when I describe the Billary campaign in such a way. But having defended these two for so long, I truly expected more out of the only living two-term Democratic presidential couple. Instead we get this sort of desperate divisiveness.

Yesterday I finally scored an interview -- via phone, direct from the Ukraine -- with former WBC heavyweight champion Vitali Klitschko, who's running for mayor of Kiev. The vote is coming up on May 25, and Klitschko is attempting to knock out (well, theoretically -- but he does have a higher knockout percentage than any other heavyweight champ!) incumbent Leonid Chernovetsky.

So stay tuned for my column on this matchup, where Klitschko -- who holds a Ph.D., incidentally -- confesses that politics is much more difficult than boxing. He also uses his upbringing in a Soviet state to craft his vision of how the Ukraine really needs to embrace true democracy and knock out corruption.

(Klitschko, btw, lived in L.A. for a while -- all of his three kids were born at Cedars-Sinai.)

Oh, wait, Putin is still, for all intents and purposes, ruler supreme of Russia... Never mind!

As Israel nears her 60th birthday, this is major food for thought: Hamas airs a "documentary" showing that Jews supposedly plotted the Holocaust to weed out the weak and gain international sympathy. They release it just a couple of weeks before the day when the world remembered the victims of the Holocaust. The media largely ignores this outrage, because Hamas represents the "persecuted" Palestinians. I write about the lessons we need to learn from this -- with the insight of my pal Valerie Harper, who took her amazing Golda Meir character to the big screen recently -- in my column this week:

"Sadly, as we marked this year's Holocaust Remembrance Day, 'never again' seems further from reach than ever. Jews continue to be targeted, be it in the 1994 bombing of the Jewish center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, or the repeated desecration of Jewish graves in Berlin. Holocaust denial has became accepted as legitimate thought in some circles and has become a foreign-policy talking point in the regimes of others.And when I, a gentile columnist, have written about the outrage of Holocaust denial, I've received far too many letters defending the deniers.

'Jews don't care about anybody but the Jews,' wrote one Canadian reader. '...Only a fool would trust a Jew to play fair with gentiles. ... They're laughing at you for falling for their lies. Don't be such a sap.'

Hamas is doing its best to stoke that disbelief in the true nature of the Holocaust, while fanning the flames of hatred for the Jewish people.

On April 18, Al-Aqsa TV - which brought Palestinian kiddies Farfour the martyr mouse and Assoud, the Bugs Bunny rip-off who vowed to 'eat' the Jews - aired an 'educational' program that accused Jews of perpetuating the Holocaust to weed out the weak among their ranks and simultaneously gain international sympathy.

This, of course, walks a fine line with Hamas' contention that the Holocaust never happened..."

Read the whole thing!

And if you want to be even more depressed, read the reader comments, which include this gem from a woman in Redondo Beach:

"Holocaust 'denial' is a misnomer. Nobody denies the Holocaust. Some people have noticed irregularities with some aspects of the official holocaust story and have raised questions. For example, why haven't the mass graves at the death camps been opened up to estimate the number of victims and see what we can find out about who they are or how they died? Why hasn't anybody demanded information about a relative they believe was murdered in one of the death camps? How exactly did the gas chambers work and how did they dispose of all the bodies?

All reasonable questions but instead of answers, you get called a bigot and anti-semite for asking them. For that reason, people will continue questioning the holocaust. It's not bigotry that leads people to holocaust revision, it's simply curiosity."

To which one reader from New York responded:

"Christina, I could not agree with you more. It's not bigotry to find the truth. The real bigots here are the stiff-neck mutated counterfeit jews that reasons with their own vile vehement that spews forth without intelligences, along with their brain dead following.."

Feeling truly ill yet? There was a positive comment over at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to lift one's spirits (the last line cracked me up, anyway):

"I'm surprised the PI let Bridget Johnson's opinion on here.

The popular opinion on the far left is that the Jewish people and Israel are the root cause of all violence, poverty and hate in the Arab world. Without Jews, none of it would exist.

I'm sure they would have felt sorry for them as they were being cooked early in the late 30s, had they been around to see it, but now that they have recovered, prospered and are white and wealthy, they are a target.

Hamas could fry babies, and they do in a sense, and they would be the noble ones to the far left, because they aren't wealthy.

Keep the faith Bridget and if your letters smell of lattes and incense, save yourself some grief and throw them away."

Also known as what I did at the beginning of Chris' vacation while helping fill in for him and the news desk computer system was crashing down around our ears: Read about my Monday night (we're talking till midnight) at the Academy screening here at Pajamas Media. The tidbits offered by Tarantino and company afterward were, as I write, juicier than a Big Kahuna Burger!!

Could one love L.A. any more???

As I've written before, as much as I admire Earl, he can get downright silly when it comes to this campaign. In his latest post, Earl writes:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain feigned fury at Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama for voting against the confirmation of Supreme Court justice John Roberts. This was not simply a cheap political shot at Obama, since Hillary Clinton, and 20 other Democrats also opposed Robert's confirmation. He didn't knock any of them. McCain had two reasons for slamming Obama. One, it's part of the openly boasted GOP attack strategy to tar Obama as a far out liberal pro abortion, gay rights, and tax and spend Democrat who's out of step with mainstream voters. The other reason is less transparent but much more crucial to McCain's seeming compelling need to reassure conservatives, especially Christian evangelicals, that they have nothing to worry about from a McCain White House.

How about a third option: McCain didn't hit Clinton or any of the other 20 Senate Democrats because he doesn't think any of them will be his opponent in November. Politicians don't usually waste their time chasing phantoms, and criticizing an opponent's views is hardly a cheap shot.

Then Earl makes two remarkably contradictory claims:

1. "(McCain) has been anything but the maverick, thumb his nose at GOP conservatives sometimes depicted when it comes to the prime evangelical litmus test of abortion."

and ...

2. "Despite McCain's occasional soft peddle of the high court's Roe v. Wade ruling, he once said that he'd let it stand, that never diminished his standing with a wide swatch of evangelical voters."

Earl's trying to have it both ways here, but it won't work. Either McCain is a party-line pro-lifer, or he's OK with letting Roe v. Wade stand. But it's simply impossible for someone to be both, when overturning Roe v. Wade has been the preeminent goal of the pro-life movement for the last 35 years.

Earl is right when he notes that McCain has work to do in persuading conservative Christians that they can trust him. But this is precisely because of McCain's record, not in spite of it.

This is pretty funny. At the very time McCain is trying to make up with conservative Christians for his differences with them, Earl and various Democrats are trying to convince liberal secularists these differences don't exist.

My column from a few weeks' back about Ben Stein's "Expelled" -- which posited that the movie should be taken as satire -- has been affirmed by none other than its screenwriter, Kevin Miller, who calls my review "brilliant."

This is, I think, a remarkable endorsement, considering that I called the movie's tactics "nasty" and "unfair," and described some of its main arguments "a stretch" and "a cheap shot."

That Miller doesn't take offense to these descriptions suggest that I was right in my understanding of the movie:

Stein's film is part parody of, part rebuttal to, the crusading atheists who have risen to prominence in recent years - such as Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. And it employs the same nasty tactics they have perfected.

By the way, some have asked where they can find the video I wrote about in my column's lead. Here ya go:

Today I heard from a highly placed LAUSD official -- who will remain anoymous -- who called today's Daily News editorial about Superintendent David Brewer "amazing," and added, "you nailed it."

This is the editorial, mind you, in which we all but called for the firing of said official's boss.

Someone alert the admiral -- a mutiny appears to be under way.

After a long FF hiatus, I'm back. Allow me to begin with a profound apology. First the layoffs shrunk the DN's editorial-pages office by one-third, severely cutting into my blogging time. And then I went on vacation and a voluntary media blackout. (To the right is a pic of the Weinkopf fam enjoying the reprieve.)

So only now that I'm back in town, do I have a chance to return to the blogosphere.

Anyway, my apologies for my absence, and my thanks to all the great bloggers here who have kept things interesting!

Republican presidential candidate John McCain feigned fury at Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama for voting against the confirmation of Supreme Court justice John Roberts. This was not simply a cheap political shot at Obama, since Hillary Clinton, and 20 other Democrats also opposed Robert's confirmation. He didn't knock any of them. McCain had two reasons for slamming Obama. One, it's part of the openly boasted GOP attack strategy to tar Obama as a far out liberal pro abortion, gay rights, and tax and spend Democrat who's out of step with mainstream voters. The other reason is less transparent but much more crucial to McCain's seeming compelling need to reassure conservatives, especially Christian evangelicals, that they have nothing to worry about from a McCain White House.

The constant buzz during much of 2007 and into 2008 was that a larger segment of evangelical voters than ever would be receptive to the Democrats. And with the supposed residual bad feeling many evangelicals had toward McCain, evangelicals would be less than thrilled to storm the polls for him. Even if they didn't vote Democratic, which was still unlikely for many evangelicals, a lackluster vote would be the same as a vote for a Democrat.
There are several glaring problems with that. One is McCain's actual voting record. He has been anything but the maverick, thumb his nose at GOP conservatives sometimes depicted when it comes to the prime evangelical litmus test of abortion. He opposed any federal funding for abortion, backed parental consent for abortion, and supported the ban on women in the military getting an abortion at an overseas hospital even if they paid for it. He enthusiastically backed Roberts and every conservative Supreme Court as well as the federal court judge Bush nominated. In almost all cases, the judicial nominees toed the GOP line in opposing abortion.

Despite McCain's occasional soft peddle of the high court's Roe v. Wade ruling, he once said that he'd let it stand, that never diminished his standing with a wide swatch of evangelical voters. McCain did almost as well with evangelicals in some primary states as short term GOP presidential contender Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee who was regarded as being more in tune with their traditional views and beliefs. The reason for this is that the big majority of evangelicals are traditional Republicans, and are concerned about a wide range of public policy issues such as terrorism, national security, taxes, and smaller government. McCain reflects those views and their philosophy on these issues.

Some Democrats have talked wistfully about going after some evangelical voters. A couple of polls and surveys have shown that the younger ones are more concerned about poverty and global warming than abortion and gay rights and might be ripe for the Democratic pickings. The problem with that is the powerful and cohesive organizational structure of the flagship evangelical churches with their top down leadership. The Democrats would have to convince these leaders that they can work in sync with evangelicals, young and old, on such issues as poverty and war opposition, while not totally betraying their long standing support of religious tolerance, gay rights and abortion. That's a tough, if not impossible, political contortion for moderate and liberal Democrats to make.

McCain can also bank on political tradition. Conservative evangelicals have voted solidly for conservative Republicans for nearly three decades. A sharp reversal to back Democrats in the relatively short span of four years would require a total volte face, an almost superhuman political fete. It's not impossible but with the deep seated loathe of many evangelicals of Hillary as a walking religious sacrilege, and the knock of Obama as an out of touch lefty, only the most wishful thinking Democrats could believe that such a dramatic political transformation could happen.

The hard reality is that no matter how much saber rattling some Christian evangelical leaders do against McCain, they are still Republicans, and even the worst Republican by their standard is still heads and shoulders above a moderate to liberal Democrat, no matter how much some Democrats talk about their Christian beliefs as both Obama and Clinton occasionally do.

Though an embittered Focus on Family President James Dobson in 2007 loudly proclaimed that he wouldn't vote for McCain, it wasn't clear whether Dobson spoke for anyone other than Dobson. In the showdown between McCain and Obama or Clinton, Dobson and other disgruntled Christian evangelical leaders will move quickly to bury the hatchet with him. McCain will get a stamp of approval from Huckabee, Kansas Senator Sam Brownback whom Christian evangelicals like and respect despite his conversion to Catholicism, and all other political evangelicals. They have little choice. The prospect of losing the White House and the power and political dominance it represents is just too frightening a prospect for them.

McCain really didn't need to rap Obama for voting against Roberts to send the message that he's still the evangelical's go to guy. They already knew that.

I'll bet $100 that the copy editor of this catastrophe was from the virtually illiterate Gen Y.

I know that some question my patriotism because I'm a slightly left-leaning liberal. I guess that's understandable. I complain about our government, and I have protested some. It's true that I was distrustful of our government when they got rid of habeas corpus, held people without trial and wanted to conduct secret trials. I do accuse our elected officials and bureaucrats of incompetence, mendacity and corruption. I share with my friends on the right all of these complaints, as well as a hearty distrust of government's motives, efficacy and honesty. Strangely, few seem to question the patriotism of critics who fire their potshots from the right.

Oh, and I don't wear a flag pin anymore. I did following 9-11, but this regime has trained me not to wear my love of country on either my sleeve or my lapel. Still, I am an American, love my country and therefore this week I took the president's words to heart and reluctantly followed orders, acceded to his request and did my duty.

Yes, despite the fact that there is nothing to watch on TV--except news, I took my wife's and my rebate check and bought a large flat screen Hi-Def digital TV. Mister President, I hope you're happy.

Instead of paying down long-term debt, I chose to do the right thing, my civic duty and give our shared economy the shot in its sagging butt that the president asked me to. I cannot live selfishly and must take into consideration not just my economic situation or desires but those of my fellow Americans. I understand that this economy depends on people spending money to buy things we don't need in order to keep people employed so they too can buy more things they don't need. After 9-11 the president said that the best thing for the American people to do to defeat the terrorists was to go shopping. Ok. If I'm now a Jonathan come lately to the cause, my wife, the Fair Helenkela, is a super patriot. She got the message, and was ready on day one. She has been spending us to prosperity.

I know that the Fed has been complaining that they bailed out a lot of financial institutions but too much of that money has gone to their reserves and not back into the economy. I know that the Feds are afraid that the people will also be stingy with the largess of our government, and we will save our money. Well, I'm here to tell you that I have joined a mighty throng in trying to set a good example and shaming those miserly banks, brokers and investment houses. No savings for me!

Now it's true that I don't understand how our system works. I'll just have to take it on faith that if we are broke as a nation, running huge deficits and borrowing money from China, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States (and by Gulf States, I do not mean Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Alabama), the best thing for all of us to do is spend money like drunken sailors. (Sorry about that, you sailors--drunk or sober. Make that "drunken congressmen"). I further can't quite grasp how buying things will really help my fellow Americans, few of whom actually make any of the things we are likely to buy.

Knowing little about economics, I can't figure out how buying TVs made in China, electronics from Korea, and cars from Japan, fueled by oil from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States (still not Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Alabama) help with either our national or our personal debt.

But I'm tired of being a cynic, tired of being misunderstood as anti-American, so I'm joining in and doing my part. I'll spend till we are all economically in the pink. I'm now an optimist and filled with the audacity of hope.

The added benefit of my new-found patriotism is that I can now see on my 52 inch flat panel TV how bad BillO's complexion is, KeithO's heavy makeup and exactly how fake the CGI effects are when seen too closely. I know that true patriotism is not manifest in only one purchase. It is, like dieting, a way of life. Having climbed on the bandwagon, I'm in this for keeps. A big Hi-Def digital TV is worth little without theatre quality sound and a Blue-Ray DVD player. I'm on a path way beyond the amount of my refund and my rebate. But hey, this is the American way. Count on me to do my part. We all owe a great debt to this nation--just as this great nation owes a debt to China, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. What we owe to our Gulf States of Louisiana. Mississippi, Texas and Alabama we have not begun to pay.

Many people say they love small government -- but their tune is quite different when it comes to carrying out war as diplomacy by funner means. Suddenly, they have great faith in government's right and ability and even duty to carry out war, with no regard for whether it is being carried out efficiently. Suddenly, government is never wasteful, and never overeager, and should never be questioned. It's odd.

I often puzzle over the difference between bona fide libertarians and conservatives who pay lip service to small government. True libertarians seem intellectually consistent -- they don't believe that government is an effective mechanism for most things, so they seek to allow the free market and private enterprise to handle many matters; and they have reduced expectations for what they can accomplish overseas.

A distrust of government can be founded on a view that human folly, fueled by taxes, is a recipe for disaster. But such thinking often evaporates in the mind of the small-government conservative when our government begins to plan $50 billion wars that become $500 billion wars that are on their way to becoming $3 trillion wars.

We may need one qualification, though: If Bill Clinton says that we must send out troops, he's just a naive, big-spending nation-builder; if a Republican says that we must send out troops, he's a new Churchill, and all nay-sayers are latter-day Chamberlains.

So maybe it begins with us vs. them politics domestically, then becomes an us vs. them issue globally. And it could be summed up as, "it's not big, wasteful government when I'm doing the wasting."

On Sept. 4, 21-year-old Joshua Pomier will have served nearly four years in a detention center near San Bernardino, Calif. Pomier is charged with multiple counts of car theft and robbery. There are two deeply troubling problems with the amount of time he has spent behind bars. One, he has not been convicted of any of the crimes he's charged with. He had barely turned 18 years old when he and another juvenile were arrested for the crimes in September 2004. Pomier and family members vehemently protest his innocence. The even more tormenting problem is not Pomier's guilt or innocence, but the absurdly long length of time that he has been jailed awaiting disposition, any disposition, of the charges leveled against him.

His bail was set at nearly a half million dollars, and there have been several delayed court dates. During that time, he has been relentlessly pressured to accept a plea bargain that will require him to serve a lengthy prison sentence. Pomier has refused, and continues to protest his innocence.

Pomier is African American, and his dragged out incarceration without being convicted of anything is not unusual. In fact, he's a near textbook example of how thousands of mostly black and Latino young adults and juveniles languish for months, even years, in America's jails with high or no bail, receive shoddy or non-existent legal counsel, and are browbeaten and even threatened by harried, overworked, and often indifferent public defenders and prosecutors to accept deals.

The Coalition for Juvenile Justice estimates that on any given day, nearly 30,000 youth between the ages of 14 and 18 years old are locked down in juvenile detention centers nationally for interminably long periods awaiting disposition of their cases. Even with the plunge in juvenile and adult crime, the numbers of youth and young adults incarcerated for lengthy pre-detention jail time nearly doubled in the 1990s. During the same time, the rates of excessive pre-trial detention time dropped for white youth.

The young adult defendants are nearly always faced with excessively high bail, and for juveniles, no bail. In the juvenile system, most states do not permit bail. Juveniles are considered wards of the court, and pretrial release is solely at the discretion of the judge. High bail, or lack of bail, clogged court calendars, and overcrowded jails virtually ensure that defendants such as Pomier get lost in the system without any disposition of their case. In one study, the Sentencing Project found that blacks on average were held for a year or more without any action on their case.

The effect of outrageously long pretrial imprisonment has been catastrophic. It has severely strained jail and detention center inmate capacity, overtaxed city and county budgets, and strapped public defenders to keep up with the backlog of cases that have not had any legal resolution. The Juvenile Justice group's study pegged the cost of one detention bed at more than $1 million over 20 years, and that's a juvenile detention bed. The jail costs for lengthy adult pretrial imprisonment is higher.

Then there's the human cost. Excessive pretrial detention has resulted in a rise in inmate violence in overcrowded, poorly served jails, increased suicides, stress-related illnesses, and psychiatric ailments, as well as the personal anguish of the family members of the defendant awaiting trial or sentencing not knowing how, or especially when, their fate will be decided. The outrage of men and women languishing indefinitely behind bars costs society in still other ways. A San Francisco study of 1,500 high risk youth found that the youths that were placed in alternative to detention programs had a far lower recidivism rate than youth who remained incarcerated while awaiting sentencing.

An international criminal justice reform group, Justice Initiative, has established pretrial detention reform study projects in 10 countries. In Mexico, the project has worked with prosecutors in several areas to provide a more efficient and effective bail supervision program, bail assistance and counseling programs to ensure that defendants have access to fair and reasonable bail. This has reduced the number of defendants who skip bail, and has lowered recidivism rates.

The United Nations Human Rights Committee, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other international legal and human rights groups have fiercely condemned excessive pretrial imprisonment in the United States and other countries. They have labeled it a gross violation of civil liberties. It also mocks the U.S. Constitution's precept of a defendant's right to a speedy trial.

The outrage and condemnation of international legal and human rights bodies and the efforts by some states at reforms in the way defendants awaiting disposition of their cases are handled is welcome. However, it won't do much to ease the anxiety of Pomier's family. They have waited for nearly four years to find out the ultimate legal fate of Pomier. Unfortunately, there's no sign that their wait will end any time soon.

You may have noticed issues with your Daily News this morning -- lateness, absenteeism, or pages that looked a tad different. Suffice to say we had major technological issues last night and had to re-do basically every page into the wee hours of the morning. (I'm attempting to ease the pain with a 44-oz. shot of caffeine-laden Diet Coke.) So rest assured that we're doing our best to keep the readers happy!