Straight Up |: September 2008 Archives

... and the award for best exploitative photojournalism goes to ...

... this photo. It appeared yesterday on the front page of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The caption reads: "Panorama Towers is shown in Las Vegas on Sunday as a commercial airliner flies in the distance." The excuse for running the photo was an FAA warning that the city's building boom could complicate Southern Nevada flight traffic decades from now. Uh-huh ...

... and speaking of appearances ...

The term Banana Republic has appeared many times on this blog. It refers of course to the U.S. of A. The first time was five years ago -- on Nov. 17, 2003 -- in an item about the unfinished business of the 9/11 commission, like so:

"Track the progression from last week's headlines: 9/11 Panel May Reject Offer of Limited Access to Briefings (Nov. 7), Panel Reaches Deal on Access to 9/11 Papers (Nov. 11), Deal on 9/11 Briefings Lets White House Edit Papers (Nov. 13). ... Why shouldn't the maximum leader of a developing banana republic be entitled to sanitize the records?"

The next time was two months later -- on Feb. 8, 2004 -- in an item describing Tim Russert's truly lousy interview of the Bullshitter-in-Chief as "one more confirmation that the United States is being turned into a Banana Republic."

Many such references have followed, as I say. But why bring them up now? Because yesterday Paul Krugman posted a blog item headlined "OK, we are a banana republic" -- and, no joke, I trust his judgment. His friend's remark was the lovely kicker: "We've become a banana republic with nukes." It could have gone with the photo.

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

Paul Newman, who died at 83, once told me in an interview, "There's a part of me that has always wanted to win an Oscar when I'm 83, so I could say, 'So there!'" The interview took place in Boston, at the Meridien Hotel. Newman was 57 then and in top form, promoting "The Verdict." He starred as an alcoholic Boston-Irish lawyer, and there was the usual Oscar talk. The script, written by David Mamet, called for him to play the role as a piece of bruised human wreckage who has sunk so low he's become a deadbeat ambulance chaser. Bleary-eyed, he searches the obituaries for notices of accidental deaths. Then he lines up with the mourners at the funeral service and drops his card in the widow's lap.

Newman didn't win the Oscar that time. (He won four years later, for "The Color of Money.") Anyway, his death on Friday reminded me of the interview. Rolling a toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other, he sat with a half-eaten hamburger and a side of potato chips in front of him on the coffee table. The hallway outside his suite was lined with reporters hoping to get a few minutes with him. "It's like double parking in front of a cathouse," he remarked, genuinely amused.

In contrast to his role in "The Verdict," Newman didn't have a blemish on him. He was lean, tan, and svelte in his tight brown slacks, knitted maroon tie and button-down shirt. He looked so handsome that the tinted glasses on the bridge of his nose, although meant to shield him from stares, merely served to heighten his glamour. I asked him how he had managed to look like such a dissipated wreck in the movie. Even his voice sounded wrecked. He answered with a quip: "You eat gravel for breakfast." But Newman was not a wit, and he knew it. He compensated by being alternately blunt and playful. And always a bit defensive.

Earlier that morning he had faced waves of group interviews with as much dignity as could be expected. One reporter had asked him, "Do you ever wish you were born with brown eyes?" It was the sort of question likely to turn him surly. But he cracked wise in a tone earnest enough to convey sympathy rather than contempt for his questioner. "There is nothing designed to make somebody feel more like a piece of meat," he said, "than some chick coming up and saying, 'Take off your dark glasses because we want to take a look at your baby blues.' People wonder why I get offended by that. What if I said to her, 'Gee, you've really got a great set of tits, honey. Do you mind taking off your glasses?' I mean, what do they expect your reaction to be? Are you supposed to look soulfully at them? Do I give them just a peek? Or a flash? It's such a ridiculous position to be put in. As I said to one lady, 'Sure, I'll take them off, if you let me inspect your gums."

The vulgarity of his anecdote, suggesting a horse trade, a dental appointment, and a pornographic invitation, made it Newman's best crack of the day, though it was almost matched when another reporter asked how he dealt with autograph seekers. "I generally try to puke on their shoes to get their attention," he said. "It gives them a gentle hint that I'm uncomfortable."

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

The Rick Davis story continues to percolate with this New York Times headline, "McCain Aide's Firm Was Paid by Freddie Mac Through August."

The disclosure undercuts a remark by Mr. McCain on Sunday night that [his] campaign manager, Rick Davis, had had no involvement with the company for the last several years.

How long will it be before the untethered Gasbag announces that, Gee, I didn't know the details of the payments Davis received? Just as he didn't know the details of the $42-million golden parachute his corporate mouthpiece Carly Fiorina received after being fired as CEO of Hewlett-Packard.

("I don't know the details of her compensation package. But she's one of many advisers that I have." Watch the video.)

Davis was paid $2 million in salary -- $30,000 to $35,000 a month for five years, from 2000 to 2005 -- to head an "advocacy coalition" that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac created to defend them from government regulation. When that salary ended, Davis asked for, and received, a consultant fee from Freddie Mac that payed him $15,000 a month.

The Times reports this morning,

Freddie Mac's payments of roughly $500,000 [to a firm that Davis owns], the people familiar with the arrangement said, began in late 2005, immediately after Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae disbanded an advocacy coalition that they had set up and hired Mr. Davis to run.

According to half a dozen sources, "Freddie Mac's post-2005 contract with Mr.Davis" was "widely known among people involved in Freddie Mac's efforts to influence policy makers." So the Gasbag was either lying or ignorant on Sunday in an interview with CNBC and The Times, when he

responded to a question about that tie between Mr. Davis and the two mortgage companies by saying that [Davis] "has had nothing to do with it since [2005], and I'll be glad to have his record examined by anybody who wants to look at it."

I'd say the Gasbag was ignorant, because a lie so readily checked would have been too brazen even for him. Although claiming not to know about Carly's golden parachute has to make you wonder. He couldn't be that uninformed.

As to his campaign's attack on The Times, accusing it of being "150 percent in the tank" for Obama because of its reporting on Davis, what a load of manure from Steve Schmidt -- aka Sergeant Schmidt, The Bullet -- a Karl Rove protégé who's running the Gasbag's day-to-day operation.

Question: "Do we really want an out-of-it president surrounded by corporate lobbying sleazeballs?"

Answer: "D'oh!"

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

Postscript: Sept. 28 -- Read all about it: the crooked Gasbag.

Before it's too late, three cheers for the lead editorial in The Wall Street Journal on Friday, "McCain's Scapegoat," which began this way: "John McCain has made it clear this week he doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street" -- oh, wait a minute -- "any better than Barack Obama does."

Hmmm ... make that half a cheer.

The editorial calls McCain "untethered," as well as misinformed and dishonest. It says that in seeking a "scapegoat for [the] financial panic" his "populist riffing" is "both false and deeply unfair. It's also un-Presidential." While it does not go as far as calling him "liar, liar, Gasbag on fire," doubtless out of misguided politeness, it says his finger-pointing is not only "unsupported by any evidence" but also misleading and contradictory.

If you wonder why the scapegoating Gasbag is so untethered, misinformed and dishonest, it's because he has become "a candidate searching for a political foil rather than a genuine solution."

They got that right.

What does the editorial say about Obama? Nada. After equating him with the Gasbag, there is no mention, not one, of how or why he misundertands the Wall Street crisis, let alone misunderstands it as badly as the Gasbag.

The Obama part of their lede? Totally unsupported.

In fact, for the rest of the editorial -- nine paragraphs, 710 words -- there is no mention of Obama at all, until the very last sentence, which says the Gasbag will "never beat Mr. Obama by running as an angry populist" -- oh, and get this -- "like Mr. Gore, circa 2000."

So much for truth in editorializing.

To be fair, I should mention I have no love lost for the Gasbag's chief scapegoat, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Christopher Cox, who was appointed by the Bullshitter-in-Chief. Cox was a rightwing BananaRepublican jerk when he represented the Orange County, California, BananaRepublican 48th Congressional district, and he's still a rightwing BananaRepublican jerk. Just like the Gasbag.

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

John Schulian wanted to know if I had heard the news. I hadn't. His e-mail message filled me in: "James Crumley, the best crime writer of our generation, died, at 68, in a bed surrounded by his friends and family in Missoula. I never pictured him checking out so benignly, and I doubt that he did, either."

Schulian is a crime writer himself -- read his story One Gift -- Hold The Wrap, published online by thuglit -- and not someone easily impressed. He's a veteran sportswriter, one of the best, who many years ago fled the clutches of Rupert Murdoch for a career in Hollywood, where he became a successful television writer and executive producer.

I knew Schulian at the Chicago Sun-Times back in the '80s and later commissioned him to write a column about pop culture when I was an editor at msnbc.com, the news Web site. It was one of the smartest editorial decisions I made there. His column, which appeared once a week for a year, riffed on everything from country music (a favorite of his) to books (another fave) to celebrities (only when I asked), and made the site's arts coverage worth reading.

Here is one of those columns -- an appreciation, disguised as a review, that ran when Crumley was still very much alive. It was posted on Dec. 3, 2001.

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

By John Schulian

Crumley has never shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, but he knows how blood looks when it's spilled against a backdrop of whiskey dawns, cocaine pick-me-ups, and wall-shaking sex. His is a wisdom acquired by bellying up to the bar in roadhouses where bikers, ranch hands and oil-field workers beat each other senseless for playing the wrong Merle Haggard song on the jukebox. It's no life for the delicate, but the delicate don't have a taste for Crumley's novels anyway, so the hell with them.

... in the wake of yesterday's Wall Street meltdown ...

As an old friend says, "It seems this election is about the intelligent and dopey versus the stoopid and cunning. Quelle choix!"

Herewith a short roundup about that appalling "stoopid and cunning" mush team, McPalin & McMaverick (aka the Dashboard Jesus and the Hood Ornament) ...

Alaskans Speak (In A Frightened Whisper): Palin Is "Racist, Sexist, Vindictive, And Mean"

Besides insulting Obama with a Step-N'-Fetch-It, "darkie musical" swipe, people who know her say she refers regularly to Alaska's aboriginal people as "Artic Arabs" -- how efficient, lumping two apparently undesirable groups into one ugly description -- as well as the more colourful "mukluks" along with the totally unimaginative "fucking Eskimo's," according to a number of Alaskans and Wasillians interviewed for this article.

Palin's Churches and the Third Wave

The Third Wave is a revival of the theology of the Latter Rain tent revivals of the 1950s and 1960s led by William Branham and others. It is based on the idea that in the end times there will be an outpouring of supernatural powers on a group of Christians that will take authority over the existing church and the world. The believing Christians of the world will be reorganized under the Fivefold Ministry and the church restructured under the authority of Prophets and Apostles and others anointed by God. The young generation will form "Joel's Army" to rise up and battle evil and retake the earth for God.

And the video that goes with it: Sarah Palin's Demon-Haunted Churches

Also, here's the deal on Sarah Palin's Faux Populism.

"Populist" is not an empty political buzzword that can be attached to someone like Palin, whose campaigns (lieutenant governor, governor and now Veep) are financed and even run by the lobbyists and executives of Big Oil, Wall Street bankers, drug companies, telecom giants and other entrenched economic interests.

Populists don't support opening our national parks and coastlines to allow the ExxonMobils to take publicly owned oil and sell it to China. Palin does. Populists favor a windfall profits tax on oil companies that are robbing consumers at the pump while milking taxpayers for billions of dollars in subsidies. Palin doesn't. Populists don't hire corporate lobbyists to deliver a boatload of earmarked federal funds, then turn around and claim to be a heroic opponent of earmarks. Palin did. Populists favor shifting more of America's tax burden from the middle class to the superwealthy, while opposing another huge tax giveaway for corporations. Palin doesn't and doesn't.

Another thing populists don't do is sneer at community organizers, as Palin did in her nationally televised coming-out party.

But just in case you didn't know Why Rednecks May Rule the World.

[R]ednecks have never had so many friends or so much attention as in 2008. Contrary to the stereotype, we are not all tobacco chawing, guffawing Southerners, but are scattered from coast to coast. Over 50% of us live in the "cultural south", which is to say places with white Southern Scots-Irish values -- redneck values.

They include western Pennsylvania, central Missouri and southern Illinois, upstate Michigan and Minnesota, eastern Connecticut, northern New Hampshire ...

So when you look at what pundits call the red state heartland, you are looking at the Republic of Redneckia.

Now for the petty stuff: The McCain-Follieri Love Boat

John McCain has been hammering rival Barack Obama for being little more than a vapid "celebrity" and "elitist." But The Nation has obtained a photo revealing just how star-struck a straight-talking maverick can become when offered the chance to celebrate his birthday aboard a yacht filled with celebrities--even if one of those celebrity types turns out to be an A-list con man.

Finally, John McCain's ads are LIES. Here's the video proof.

... with thanks to George Mattingly, Hammond Guthrie, Richard Kostelanetz, Alan Edelson and the rest of Straight Up's staff of thousands for pointing out these and other tips, and hats off to Josh Brown.

Postscript: Sept. 13 -- The Times gets it right this morning with McPalin's McWorldview. Garrison Keillor slayed the Dashboard Jesus earlier this week .

[A] former mayor of Wasilla, a town of about 8,500, who hired a lobbyist to get $26 million in federal earmarks is now running against the old-boy network in Washington who gave her that money to build the teen rec center and other good things so she could keep taxes low in Wasilla.

Stunning.

And if you question her qualifications to be the leader of the free world, you are an elitist. This is a beautiful maneuver. I wish I had thought of it back in school when I was forced to subject myself to a final exam in higher algebra. I could have told Miss Mortenson, "I am a Christian and when you gave me a D, you only showed your contempt for the Lord and for the godly hard-working people from whom I have sprung, you elitist battle-ax you."

Keillor slayed the Hood Ornament last month.

[I]t's an amazing country where an Arizona multimillionaire can attack a Chicago South Sider as an elitist and hope to make it stick. The Chicagoan was brought up by a single mom who had big ambitions for him, and he got scholarshipped into Harvard Law and was made president of the law review, all of it on his own hook, whereas the Arizonan is the son of an admiral and was ushered into Annapolis though an indifferent student, much like the Current Occupant, both of them men who are very lucky that their fathers were born before they were.

The Chicagoan, who grew up without a father, wrote a book on his own, using a computer. The Arizonan hired people to write his for him. But because the Chicagoan can say what he thinks and make sense and the Arizonan cannot do that for more than 30 seconds at a time, the old guy is hoping to portray the skinny guy as arrogant.

Good luck with that, sir.

Meanwhile, the casual revelation last month that McCain has never figured out how to use a computer and has never sent e-mail or Googled is rather startling. It's like admitting that you've never clipped your own toenails because your valet always did that for you. It's like being amazed at the sight of a supermarket scanner. What world doesMcCain live in? Where does he keep his sense of curiosity? My 94-year-old mother has sent e-mail.

A marketing friend of mine keeps repeating: "Obama's gonna win. Obama's gonna win." When I asked him if he truly believed that, he said, "Of course. But you have to say it -- everyone has to say it -- to make it happen. Believe me, repetition works."

It was up tonight -- briefly. The techs must have been rehearsing.

Postscript: "The twin towers of light, made up of 44 searchlights near Ground Zero, are meant to represent the fallen twin towers of the World Trade Center. Depending on weather conditions, the columns of light can be seen for at least 20 miles around the trade center complex." -- Official Website of the U.S. Navy

Here's a good friend, Carl Weissner, playing Chopin. He hasn't played for, oh, about 50 years. "This is the schmaltzy version -- Viennese," he says. On top of that he's combining two different pieces. "But," he adds, "what the hell."

(Recorded on my new little gizmo, a Flip Video Mino. The image is sharper when you play the video, and much sharper here when you click "watch in high quality.")

And here's a taste of the Caribbean on a summer day in Tompkins Square Park, NYC.

(The image is sharper when you play the video, and much sharper here when you click "watch in high quality.")

Seems the Flip Video Mino will turn anyone into a videographer, especially me. It's a democratization of sorts, and I don't doubt that it lowers the tone of the industry.

I went to the John Cage birthday celebration at St. Mark's Church yesterday. Big crowd. Awful sound. A couple dozen people mumbled into a bad p.a. system. It was impossible to understand what they were saying, with a few exceptions. This guy came prepared, though, with his own music and his own setup. His name is Kevin Hufnagel.

There's a good story about Cage showing up at a concert hall for a performance of one of his works. He hadn't called ahead, or reserved a seat, and was almost too late. He sat down in the very back. An usher recognized him and said, "Oh, Mr. Cage, you must sit up front where the sound is better." Cage tilted his head quizzically and said, "Better sound. What an interesting concept."

Great story. Probably apocryphal.

(I recorded Hufnagel with my new little gizmo, a Flip Video Mino. The image is much sharper here when you click "watch in high quality.")