Enough With The McCain Election Fallacy!

I was riding in the car last night with S. when she turned on the radio. My heart sank - it was NPR, her favorite radio station, and the announcers were in the middle of their evening news report. Don't get me wrong - I think National Public Radio does a commendable service of bringing parts of our culture to light that might not otherwise get a voice.

What kills me is the Dramamine-sounding voices, in a timbre and cadence that begins at cloying and escalates to mind numbing, as if the news readers are telling after lunch stories to a bunch of preschoolers who they are trying to lull to sleep.

Last night, the announcer and his cohost recapped the presidential campaigns in an effort to analyze what went wrong for John McCain and what went right for Barack Obama - a subject that gets my blood pressure up when on-air personalities use poor analysis to build specious arguments or make unfounded assertions.

The announcer ascribed McCain's loss to several factors - not defining who he was to the public properly, not hammering the alleged precondition faux pas Obama made at a debate during the primaries, and not appealing to enough "UFP"'s, a designation I never did fully understand, although I took it to mean "undecided for president".

I looked at S., my eyes glaring at the radio speaker in the dash. "This is just bad information. I can't STAND when somebody who should know better uses bad information to reach a conclusion."

I get home, and what do I see - channel after channel full of people saying, "if only the McCain campaign had done this", or "if the election had been held in September, McCain would have won - he was ahead then."

Then I pop on the internet, there is more of the same old story, the same old "woulda coulda shoulda."

Are these people for real? Does someone actually pay them to spin this nonsense out of whole cloth - because there are very few empirical facts to back up what they are saying.

A guy walking down the street can have the internet in the palm of his hand. There are nine hundred and seventy eight channels on my TV, including one that seems dedicated to showing "Dog The Bounty Hunter" reruns in perpetuity. And I'm sure that between Google, Alexa, Yahoo, and MSN, ten thousand new pages of information have been indexed in the time it took to write this sentence.

In a world where the traditional has been turned inside out and upside down, in a world where marketing campaigns have to calibrate their efforts to adjust for the amount of savvy the average man on the street has about being sold to, it is more than amazing that we continue to rely on a structure like this for information, a structure that seems to willfully ignore what is going on around it.

The Obama campaign took a full court approach to a game that is normally played as if it is a half court one. Instead of bulking up with wide bodied players who could throw elbows in the paint all day long, they went with a squad that could run the fast break for forty eight minutes.

Instead of a twelve man squad, they had the Verizon network on their bench, giving them an inexhaustible supply of reserves.

Salary cap? Didn't apply to them. They could pick up anybody they wanted.

They had the Pat Riley of politics, disguised in his "Colombo" costume, who was going for the black candidate "three peat" - Chicago's City Hall, Illinois Senate seat, and now the presidency of the United States.

If they had called these campaigns on ESPN, the announcers would have stopped caring about the Clinton campaign in May, and stopped laughing about the McCain campaign in January.

There was no horse race this fall, not even close. The debates are practically irrelevant, the ads superfluous, and the nightly pandering to whatever locale a candidate is in by drinking a beer, eating cheesesteaks, or wearing a cowboy hat at a rodeo has gotten to be as ridiculous as the footage on America's Home Videos.

I can't take this pablum anymore!

We have trillion dollar problems that will take several, as in more than one, trillions to solve. We've got an economy that has one foot stuck in the fifties and one foot stuck in the door of the new millennium. We've got a population that needs to see beyond the end of their own experiences, but is mighty, mighty comfortable with the labels we allow ourselves to be stuck with.

I challenge my fellow political scribes to think big. If you want to compare Barack Obama to someone, chose someone like Steve Jobs of Apple.

Because the difference between Apple and Microsoft is what the challenge of an Obama presidency is going to look like if you believe he will really attempt to change the way we see government in America.

The Maverick Takes Texas

Even as John McCain is projected to win Texas, Wolf Blitzer says that things for John McCain looks grim.

When NC and VA come in, THAT will be grim.

SC Projected for McCain

I was there last week - the voting was intense by the people in my hometown. My buddy called me today from a voting line.

1% of vote in - exit polls is what they are telling us (although Toobin on CNN doesn't sound very convincing)

Damn shame.

I'll have to call my mother in a little while.

Things I Have Learned This Election Season

I feel like I've gotten a PhD in political doublespeak this year.

When John McCain's campaign was BEHIND almost ten points in the polls, what did he announce? "We've got them right where we want them".

At this point in the race, with four days left, I wouldn't be surprised at anything. Some of the other things I've learned this year:

• Huffington Post has headlines that are more misleading than the ones on the Drudge Report.

• John McCain wears $400 Ferragamo shoes - but HE can afford them.

• Sarah Palin has upgraded to a Neiman-Marcus wardrobe - but she has to give the clothes back at midnight on November 4th.

• Barack Obama owned a Chrysler 300 before he ran for president - now he has a Ford Escape hybrid - I don't know HOW he and Michelle fold those long-ass legs in THAT tiny pretend SUV.

• A "capitalist" is someone who takes money from the government when his business goes bad.

• A "supporter of free markets" is someone who takes government campaign funds instead of raising money from private citizens.

• A "socialist" is someone who pays for their own health insurance so their employer can pay out dividends to its stockholders.

• A "supporter of socialism" is someone who raises campaign funds from private citizens and manages to stay with their budget.

• Alaska is an "energy rich" state.

• Lump sum taxpayer financed bailouts are "rescue packages".

• Individual tax rebates to tax payers are 'welfare".

• "Mavericks" are allowed to stab each other in the back and still say they are on the same page.

• Cable news anchormen you see on your TV screen are smaller than they appear.

• One half-digested fact from the campaign trail can hold the interest of the entire cable and network news universe for 24 hours.

• The amount of a candidate's zeal for explaining his tax plan is inversely proportional to the likelihood that it will be implemented if the same candidate gets elected president.

• Casting your vote early only heightens your anxiety until Election Night.

• Black people can suspend "C. P. time" when they feel like it.

H.N.I.C. Rebukes G.O.P.

For years, Colin Powell has been the Republican Party's favorite black man, their beloved "Head Negro In Charge" who didn't threaten any of the Party's leading presidential contenders because he was not going to run for president. He was their light skinned Morgan Freeman - wise, solemn, with a dignity and a bearing that made him the conservative movement's bulwark against the Jessie Jackson's and the Al Sharpton's, an accomplished, polished, no nonsense kind of black guy whose dynamic personality appealed to the GOP's free enterprise capitalism ideologists.

You couldn't have ordered a black actor from central casting, if Morgan Freeman was busy, who could better play the role of the Republican Party H.N.I.C. than Colin Powell. Which is why Sunday's announcement of him coming out in support of Barack Obama was all the more heartbreaking for John McCain and his allies.

In an excerpt from a piece of short fiction I wrote a couple of years ago, titled The Black Folks Guide To Survival, I expounded on the Colin Powell and Condolezza Rice's images within the power structure, and how they were relevant to any young black professional who had his eyes on the executive suite:

There are ex-Crackers out there, especially the ones you work with, who wonder why we all can’t be like Condoleeza Rice or Colin Powell – smart but not uppity, aggressive but not angry, ambitious but not power hungry.

As unpopular as some of the decisions are that Rice and Powell have made in our community, they are still two black folks in blue suits using complex language on television to articulate their thoughts.

DO NOT FALL FOR THE OKIE DOKE! Condi and Colin don’t want to get to the top spot in their organization. You do. If your goal is to be “The Man” in your organization, you are going to have to take the gloves off and duke it out sometimes.

As I watched Powell calmly and methodically lay out his reasons for supporting Barack Obama, his mannerisms seemed reminiscent of those of a high school principal who has gotten tired of his students who are perpetual troublemakers. His blunt assessment of his own party's failings was probably the most candid seven minutes of presidential election commentary that has been shown this year.

The talk radio court jesters didn't miss a beat, mercilessly pounding on the validity of Powell's actions since then, but what they don't seem to realize is they are not talking about O.J. Simpson.

Colin Powell has stood in foxholes.

Colin Powell has commanded battalions.

Colin Powell has four stars to go along with the rank of general.

Colin Powell has been the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Colin Powell has served as the Secretary of State of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Beside Powell's thoughtful, measured comments, these radio shills sound like all the other pretend Republicans and fake conservatives who feel the need to cling to a rigid ideology instead of allowing their thinking to be guided by core principles. The "Straight Talk Express" can't haul much more of this hypocrisy - the wheels were already starting to fall off of the McCain campaign.

Rush Limbaugh and his cohorts are trying to turn the clock back to 1945, when black soldiers who fought to keep America free were supposed to get back in their "place" when their ships hit our shores. When the black man's opinion, whatever his station in life, only mattered when the rest of the country wanted it to matter.

The drumbeat on the airwaves, the kind of revealing dialogue being shown between these scared white men and their audiences about what THEY'RE feeling - by last night, when the evening news shows came on, I had become more than a little ticked off, partly at myself for lumping this rhetoric into the same old "this is the kind of shit black people have to put up with" and partly at the way the media pundits had taken out their toolkits to subtly reshape the boundaries of discussion, imperceptibly pointing their commentator colleagues into directions they were more familiar with.

If our faith-based friends would only exhibit a little more "faith" in the process, instead of worrying about what they see in front of them, I think they will be able to get through this.


Because Colin Powell and Barack Obama are going to be black for a long time.

Doing The Colin Powell Bounce

In the last twelve hours, I've heard Chris Rock advise white people on when it is appropriate to use the word "nigger" in public, come across a very recent photo of Colin Powell doing the "Colin Powell Bounce" on stage in London, watched the Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin replace her own alter-ego in a cameo appearance on a comedy show AND sing along to a rap song that makes fun of her own candidacy, all capped off by the announcement that Barack Obama's campaign raised $150 million dollars in September.

Whew!

Then "The Last Boy Scout", Colin Powell, decides to finally announce his presidential election endorsement, after shaking up his image this week with an impromptu performance on stage with a hip-hop group.


Powell commented at the Africa Rising Festival on Tuesday in London, ""I stand before you tonight as an African-American. Many people have said to me you became secretary of state of the USA, is it still necessary to say that you are an African-American or that you are black, and I say, yes, so that we can remind our children.

"It took a lot of people struggling to bring me to this point in history. I didn't just drop out of the sky, people came from my continent in chains."

Colin Powell was back to his stone-faced self this morning, though, as he praised Barack Obama, criticized John McCain, and then looked into the Meet The Press camera and said "I'm voting for Barack Obama." His announcement got the cable news pundits atwitter, with some of them, especially the ones on CNN, reading so much into the phrases he used that you thought they were fortune tellers instead of journalists.

Watching Newt Gingrich on the George Stephanopoulos show, I had to force myself to remember that he had been a college professor before entering politics, because the stuff coming out of his mouth this morning was more ridiculous than usual as he recited a laundry list of "leftist" and "liberal" policies that were about to be unleashed by Obama and Congress on the American public.

To hear Gingrich say that Democrats wanted to "redistribute" the hard earned money of ordinary Americans almost made me fall out of my chair. We just gave the biggest wealth transfer in the history of the country to the smallest, most personally financially secure sliver of citizens EVER, a "redistribution" that will dwarf anything coming down the pike for years, and people who can add "2 + 2" are supposed to react to smug faced sound bite?

The thing all the Democratic pundits missed was an opportunity to hammer home Powell's endorsement. The reality of Powell's decision is that he threw his support behind the most conservative candidate in the race. If you can see beyond the rhetoric of the hot button issues, what you've got is what you always get when a black guy rises to a high level in America - someone who does their homework and is prone to act out of an abundance of caution.

I need to go practice my dance steps - looks like Powell might have a few moves on me.

Cut That Zero, Get With This Hero

Is Barack "The Professor" Obama starting to get jiggy with it?

Could he possibly have Doug E. Fresh's Greatest Hits on his IPod?

In the picture above, Obama could be signaling a lot of things. But if you have a multi-track mind like I do, one that can go off in ten directions at the drop of an absentee ballot, you might get the idea he's trying to show us:

• The number of percentage points McCain and Palin increased in the polls today.

• The number of grandchildren Obama expects to have before his daughters finish college.

• The amount Joe The Plumber's taxes will go up on the income he ACTUALLY earns.

• The size of John McCain's eyeballs when Obama told his opponent how much money HIS campaign raised in September.

• The sum total of all the game changing ideas the McCain campaign has left.

• The total quantity of mooseburgers Obama will ever eat in his life.

• The number of text messages Obama has sent Rev. Jeremiah Wright this year.
  

• The amount of times Obama has considered "suspending" his campaign.

• The size of Jessie Jackson's ego after he was recorded saying he wanted to "cut Obama's nuts off".
  

• The number of times Obama wished he'd chosen Hillary Clinton as his running mate.

• The total quantity of bombs Obama helped William Ayers build and detonate.

• The number of terrorist cells Obama heads up.

• The amount of times Obama has had sex with Larry Sinclair
  

• The number of aides Obama needs to help him navigate the internet.

• The amount of chittlins Obama intends to keep stocked in the White House kitchen.
  

Now I'm sure his gesture was in response to something more serious, like the amount he plans to raise taxes on the middle class, or the number of times he voted for the war in Iraq, but with all this repetition of these talking points about the ISSUES, my mind has become the devil's workshop.


November 5th can't get here soon enough.

No Intellectual Peacocks In This Debate

Luckily, I dozed off during the closing statements of the debate, so I avoided what must have been a painful night for the political pundits who were waiting with baited breath to dissect this last presidential debate. Because there was really nothing John McCain could do, short of beating Barack Obama in the head with a baseball bat, that would change the course of this election.

Actually, the main thing that was running through my mind just before I went to sleep was a burning question - who the hell runs CNN? And what do they have all those god dammed dials and charts and lines on the screen for?

That stuff was beyond distracting – do they think the kind of people who watch debates are video game junkies? If I was one of those live bloggers who posted comments to the web about the debate every two or three minutes, I would have sent fifty nasty emails to the network last night.

The thing that the pundits probably spent a lot of time telling you about is what those seismograph looking lines meant as the debate went on, as if every reaction you have as a human being is directly related to a substantive input. I will watch Sunday Night Football even if Detroit is playing the next worst team in the league because my old buddies John Madden and Al Micheals are calling the game.

Why? Because its the sound of their voices that I want to hear, a pleasing and familiar combination that lulls me to sleep on the very same couch I fell asleep on last night.

When I woke up, the actual debate was being played again. As I lay on the couch, gathering myself so I could sleep in an actual bed, I thought about the voices of Barack Obama and John McCain that were piercing my semi-consciousness, and something my best buddy had said after the last debate.

"Bill Clinton is probably the best debater ever-"

"Bill Clinton," I said to him that day, "has been arguing his whole life. It was a survival mechanism."

While I listened to the voices of Obama and McCain with my eyes shut, repeating words and phrases I'd originally heard a couple of hours before, I recreated their personalities in my mind's eye to match the images their inflections and intonations suggested. And then I compared them to Clinton, looking for a way to delineate the differences between the three of them in terms of their personal styles.

Obama sounded like some of the guys I grew up with, the kind of guy who had always drawn attention because of his "otherness" instead of any preternatural ability to speak to people. McCain reminded me of all the short guys I'd ever known, who had always had to do unnatural things to stand out in a crowd.

Clinton's draw has not been his looks, or his height, or his charm, but his intelligence. Maybe I know this because I am a small town native myself, but in the kind of place Clinton was from, where he didn't grow up in the biggest house, or have a black father, or six fingers, he was known as the kid who knows everything.

Obama, as we have seen time and time again, reluctantly displays his smarts. McCain doesn't seem to care whether you think he is a smart guy or not. But for a guy like Bill Clinton, it was being an intellectual peacock that made him stand out in a crowd, that got him in front of opportunities his mother never could have shown him, that garnered the awards, the fanfare, the presidency, and the women, starting with his wife.

As Obama's stammer and McCain's bluster invaded my thoughts, repeating many of the same talking points we've come to memorize over the last couple of months, hectoring each other over "Joe the Plumber", I wondered if there had really been anything of value in this last debate, other than the fact that John McCain had obviously practiced looking Obama directly in the eye.

"If I'm starting to think about Bill Clinton," I said to myself as I clicked the TV off, "probably not."

This Is Not A Horse Race - Again

One of the fallacies that has been propped up by our main stream media journalists for the last three weeks is that this election is still a horse race. What almost all of them conveniently ignore is the tremendous amount of energy, time, money, and an improbable shift in the actual demographics of the remaining battleground states that would be needed for the Clinton McCain campaign to garner more than a 50% total of the outstanding pledged delegates votes in each of these states she is projected to get based on current state by state estimates.

I wrote the original paragraph above back in May, when Hillary Clinton’s campaign was flailing against Barack Obama’s organization. The title came back to me as I thought about the political pundits on TV last night. There was no real tension in their voices as they speculated about tonight’s final presidential debate and the things each candidate needed to accomplish, because they know what you know – John McCain and Sarah Palin have very little chance of winning this election.

The thing that is maddening to me this time around is that every journalist in the country who is on the political beat or is a political columnist, people whose job is to understand the actual mechanics behind getting out the vote, don’t do a better job of focusing on why the feeling of an inevitable loss by McCain/Palin is so similar to the feeling you got back in May when Hillary Clinton’s team was on the ropes.

Barack Obama and his top strategists have taken the business of politics as seriously as the Mafia took the business of crime. Their decision to make the internet and the small donor the backbone of their fundraising efforts was as revolutionary to American politics as Henry Ford’s assembly line was to the manufacture of automobiles. The methods they used to mobilize and deploy their campaign resources - money, manpower and volunteers – are as pioneering to political organizational planning as John D. Rockefeller was to the distribution of oil.

Do you think you will hear any of this tonight after the debate from your favorite political pundits?

This level of execution has changed the dynamics of our electoral process so much that our traditional political bellwethers have become anachronistic. Tonight’s debate is almost a formality. Too many people are planning to vote this year, people who don’t seem to understand that they are supposed to have landlines, like good Americans, and that they are supposed to wait by their phone to be polled. Too many dollars have been raised from individuals who don’t seem to understand how much quid pro quo is supposed to be gotten in exchange. And waaay, waaay too many people are on the internet, talking to each other when the latest "information" being disseminated doesn’t seem to add up.

But the people who get paid the big bucks to analyze this election will be telling you the same old stuff they said last week. The campaign commercials will recycle things you already know, but with a more insistent tone in the narrator's voice. The campaign surrogates on both sides will continue to parrot their talking points, with the Republican ones trying their best to look particularly earnest.

And John King, the guy on CNN who plays with the snazzy electoral vote map, will be working overtime tonight to explain to you just how John McCain and Sarah Palin might still be able to pull this out.

You Know You Flipped That Switch, John McCain

When YOU flipped the switch to start the negative campaigning in earnest, John McCain - YOU know what switch I'm talking about - YOU signaled to your troops how low YOU were willing to go.

I’m here to tell you that you wasted your breath dismissing the comments by Congressman John Lewis that compared recent actions surrounding your campaign to those promulgated by arch segregationist George Wallace. This is EXACTLY how you motivate people to believe your message, John McCain, when logic and common sense have to be abandoned. It's the same way you do it in wartime when you have to learn how to hate an enemy you don't know.

The Gordian Knot of race didn't tie itself. And in all those years since the first guy - who I am certain was not one of us pesky minorities, who have caused all the rest of the nation's ills, including the latest financial crisis - since that same first non-minority guy thought up the concept of discrimination based on skin tone and ethnicity, there were a whole lot of non-minority people through the ages who went along with the idea.

Why? Because it gave them an advantage.

But now that the shoe is on the other foot, having an advantage because of the color of your skin seems to be bad all of a sudden.

It isn't a coincidence that the party who has adopted Christianity as one of its main sponsors is paying the price for this. Over zealous religious believers have been some of our nations most dedicated and fervent oppressors, with centuries of practice under their belts, and even now, they have retained the unique ability to spit intolerance out of the same lips that they use to ask God for personal salvation.

Barack Obama is as much of a politician as the next guy, which is why I will applaud his use of any means necessary to corner, cower, antagonize, browbeat, and generally keep his opponent off balance.

You know who Obama is, John McCain. He's the one wearing the white trunks, not the right trunks. He's the one who you've said is "all show and no go", although he asserts that he is the second coming of "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee".

He's the one that's taller than you. He's the one you've been chasing around the country these last few weeks, trying to keep up with Obama campaign rally rope-a-dope. Now you're about to find out what Joe Frazier knows - the "sting like a bee" part can hurt you real bad.

But its not the "race card" that's doing all this, John McCain, its the collective strength of all those community organizers - remember them? - who are really taking a toll on you, who are showing in these final days that having a longer reach is as invaluable in politics as it is in boxing.

If I were you, John McCain, I would immediately demand an apology from George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, Joe McCarthy, Jessie Helms, Lee Atwater, Bull Connor, Lester Maddox, and all the rest of those whose vile and despicable acts of the past have forced you to have to try to be a decent and honorable candidate, especially when the cameras are rolling.

Because it's too late to flip that switch back - it's stuck in the "ON" position.

Making The News

My mother went to Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina back in the late fifties, when black Americans were protesting segregation and joining together in protest marches all across the country. So when the documentaries begin to air in January and February, she often shares a favorite story.

"We used to get dressed up and do our hair, then go to downtown to one of the places that had a lunch counter. We'd stroll right up to the counter and take a seat. We'd sit there until the word got out and the newspaper reporters and the TV cameras showed up. Then we would race back to the dorm to see if we could see ourselves on TV." She would laugh as she recalled the scene. "Man, if you went at the right time, you could make the news everyday."

A lot of the things I saw on TV last night were about people who were "making the news". About people who were mugging for the cameras like my mother and her college buddies used to do.

Fidel Castro's recent pronouncements about race and America, Mitt Romney's criticism of the McCain campaign strategies, and of course, Mr. James Harris, the black guy calling himself a conservative whose infamous performance at a recent John McCain rally has become a youtube.com classic, all had something in common - a desire to make the news.

So who did I see on CNN last night but THE James Harris,who turned out to be - guess what? A radio talk show host - with a big cheesy grin on his face as he fielded questions from commentators. The thing that made it even more surreal to see Harris basking in his 15 minutes of fame was the fact that I had just watched the movie Head Of State with Chris Rock. Some of the things Rock had played for laughs were actually taking place in the real live presidential campaign of John McCain and Sarah Palin.

With the final presidential debate coming up in two days, even as voters have been casting their ballots in many states for over a week, in some ways this election is beginning to feel like the Georgia Dome during the fourth quarter of an Atlanta Falcons football game - vendors cleaning up, people streaming out of their seats, security directing traffic, all while the game is still in progress.

The professional commentators on the cable news channels look like they are getting tired. The liberal squawkers seem triumphant but fearful. The conservative talkmeisters appear to be combative and embarrassed.

In the next 48 hours, the Obama campaign will announce its September fundraising totals. With the planned ad buys that have already been announced, the expectations are that the total will surpass 100 million dollars.

I am glad to be back. Unlike a lot of my Atlanta Falcon fans, when I go to the Georgia Dome, I stay in my seat until the clock expires, even if one team is running up the score.

Obama's Kryptonite Crippling McCain Campaign

I heard from three friends of mine in the same hour this afternoon.

"What's going on with this ACORN?"

"Do you think Obama's got it in the bag now?"

"Do you think it looks like Obama's going to win?"

After the third call, it started sounding like the "30 Dirty Tricks In 30 Days" segment of the McCain campaign's fall strategy had gotten up to a full head of steam. Throw enough mud long enough, and even the most faithful will begin to waver a little. So I decided to see if I could find anything to ease their minds as the negative campaigning season begins in earnest.

After looking around, I could see why my friends were calling - it looks like Old Spice and Scary Spice were at it full speed ahead today, manufacturing new slurs by the hour to try to combat the rising tide of bad news that threatens to drown their struggling campaign. But there's no need to dwell on that stuff - there will plenty more of it for the next few weeks from Old Spice and Scary Spice as desperation sets in.

Just remember, stories like the ones I am listing below are like kryptonite to the McCain campaign. The more of them there are, the weaker they get, no matter how negative their attacks are.

From the Anchorage Daily News
Thursday, October 9, 2008 1:06 pm:
Alaska Supreme Court Refuses To Block Troopergate Inquiry

The Alaska Supreme Court today rejected an attempt by a group of six Republican legislators to shut down the Legislature's investigation of Gov. Sarah Palin.

The ruling means that Steve Branchflower, the investigator hired by the Legislative Council, will release his report as scheduled on Friday.

Branchflower is looking into Palin's dismissal of her public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, and whether she improperly pressured him to fire a state trooper divorced from her sister.

Anchorage Superior Court Judge Michalski ruled last week that the conduct of the investigation did not violate the right to fairness. He found the Legislature has the right to investigate and issues like whether it happens through a council or committee are not for the courts to decide and is "business to be left to the legislative branch."

The Alaska Supreme Court today upheld Michalski's ruling in a two-page decision. The court clerk, Marilyn May, wrote that a full opinion explaining why would be coming.


FULL RULING BELOW for my legal eagles and procedural junkies:

Appellants are six legislators who claim that the Alaska Legislative Council's investigation into the dismissal of Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan is unlawful and should be enjoined. The superior court denied the appellants' Motion for Temporary Restraining Order and granted the Motion to Dismiss submitted by the Alaska Legislative Council and the other defendants.

At the request of the appellants for a decision no later than today, October 9, 2008, we heard the appeal on an expledited basis. On consideration of the October 6, 2008 appellants' brief, the October 6, 2008 amicus curiae brief, the October 7, 2008 appellees' brief, and the oral argument held on October 8, 2008,

IT IS ORDERED: The order of the superior court issued on October 2, 2008 granting the Motion to Dismiss is AFFIRMED. An opinion will follow.

Entered at the direction of the full court.

Obama Buys Half-hour Of Network Primetime

Barack Obama has purchased a half-hour of primetime television on CBS and NBC, sources confirm.

The Obama campaign is producing a nationwide pitch to voters that will air on at least two broadcast networks. The ad will run Wednesday, Oct. 29, at 8 p.m. -- less than a week before the general election.

The direct purchase of such a large block of national airtime right before an election used to be more commonplace before campaigns began to focus their end game strategies exclusively on battleground states. Such a move is not without precedent in modern presidential politics, however -- Ross Perot did a similar purchase in 1992.

OBAMA POLLING +8 IN WEST VIRGINIA

American Research Group, Inc.

Presidential Election Poll - West Virginia

Interview dates: October 4-8, 2008

Sample size: 600 likely voters

Margin of error: ± 4 percentage points, 95% of the time

Question wording and responses:

If the general election were being held today between John McCain for president and Sarah Palin for vice president, the Republicans, and Barack Obama for president and Joe Biden for vice president, the Democrats, for whom would you vote - McCain and Palin, Obama and Biden (names rotated), or someone else?

Likely Voters:

McCain 42%

Obama 50%

Other 3%

Undecided 5%

Hopefully, for those of you who have begun to get a little nervous like my friends, these items will give you a little more confidence, or assuage any doubts that may have popped up this week.

Old Spice and Scary Spice can yell "terrorist" and "William Ayers" and "he's not one of us" as loud as they want - it is being drowned out by the roar of the Dow Jones Industrial Average crashing down through the 9000 point mark. Losing another six hundred points will put the Dow Jones under 8000, very real possibilty in the next few days.

The only gamechanger this year will be the economy.

Although I'm sure there are some people in a small, airless room somewhere near McCain campaign headquarters who are trying to figure out a way to pin this on Barack Obama.

I'm still waiting for them to connect Obama with O.J.

At the rate these two are going, you know its just a matter of time.

McCain Succumbs To Obama Mojo During Debate

For all the policies and programs and progressiveness Obama might address in his debate appearances, it is the images, more than the rhetoric, that will ultimately decide his fate. Last night, in a debate setting that looked more like the studio of PeeWee's Playhouse than an actual townhall meeting, Obama was able to use his physicality in a way that we haven't really seen before, subliminally reinforcing the theme of youthful vigor with the relaxed and confident ease he displayed while waiting for his turn to answer a question from the audience. Obama's rhetoric is decades old - the logic, centuries old. But it was his image on the screen that stirred the blood of the debate watch group I was with last night.

I watched the last two debates at home. Mindful of the tendency for crowds to be noisy and distracting, that was the best place for me, because I am not above telling someone to be quiet if I can't hear what's being said. But somewhere between looking at Bloomberg's chart of the 500 point drop in the Dow and checking my half dozen email accounts, I came across a reminder yesterday for a watch party that was being held right down the street from us here in John's Creek, Georgia, at a local sports bar called Barnacles. The stars aligned themselves perfectly - an absent teenager and a need to eat dinner - and we found ourselves walking into the sports bar right about 7:30 pm.

I didn't really think about us being in Republican central until we walked into the place. The most interesting thing was the family we passed on the way to the banquet room in the back. The oldest child, a blonde-haired, animated girl who looked like she was in the third or fourth grade was standing by her mother's shoulder, talking into her ear as she pointed at the t-shirts the line of people dribbling into the room were wearing, explaining to her mother that the symbol on them matched the symbol on the posters tacked to the wall. Her mother was nodding her head, listening and eating at the same time. The most interesting thing about the whole scene was the fact that they were the only family sitting in this area - this restaurant was normally pretty busy, especially around family dinner time, every day of the week.

We originally sat in a booth, but ended up switching to a table closer to the middle of the room. There were two huge projection screens at either end of the room, showing four fifteen foot tall shots of Lou Dobbs' head as he railed against something while Republican ex-contender Romney smiled. Sixty TV's lined the connecting walls, 30 on each side, all of them perched on a narrow ledge just above the booths, all of them showing Lou Dobbs. For some reason, Max Headroom came to mind.

Many of the people there were regulars, folks who had come to know each other from the previous parties that had been held at the same location. Even though we were in a bar, there was a forthright earnestness in many of the people that reminded me of church. Sitting at a table for six out in the open seemed to function as a unofficial signal that we were open for company. We met a lot of people, including a couple that we already knew, between eight and nine. A lot of them seemed to repeat the same story - the turnout was lighter than usual, probably because there had just been a debate a few days ago.

A young guy told us about his next Youtube video he was planning. A woman joined us - her husband, she said, had just been here last week, and was playing tennis tonight. Several women came over to say hello to her, relating the same tale - "my husband said he was just here last week". But between the looking for work woes, the high school exit exam horror stories, and the recent gas shortage tales, political trivia and rumor weaved in and out of the ever-changing conversation at every turn.

I looked at S. and our new friends. "This place is like an opium den for political junkies." As I said that, I pictured the internet in my mind as a ghost town, the pathways to The Drudge Report, Huffington Post, Jack and Jill Politics, Daily Kos, Salon, Slate and Black Planet all gone slack with excess capacity as we all trained our eyes on the candidates walking across the stage.

The room went silent as Brokaw spoke. I was impressed. The only real difference between watching the debate there instead of at home, at least at first, was the audience applause whenever Obama made an especially crisp point, and their sighs whenever McCain said "I can fix it". A Syrian couple I'd run into earlier on the way to the bathroom sat down at our table about fifteen minutes after it started. These two were too wound up. The husband could not be quiet, fidgeting, gesticulating, distorting his handsome face in disgust - it was like watching an interpreter for the hearing-impaired.

The crowd quickly tired of McCain's stump speech standards, hissing whenever he said "my friends", or asserted "I can fix it". The longer the debate went on the more I thought of the famous Nixon/Kennedy debate in 1960 that many felt was one of the keys to Kennedy's victory that year because the TV cameras seemed to work against Nixon. McCain didn't just sound recycled - he looked old.

In the last half an hour, before he seemed to gather himself for a final push, he sounded like a doddering old man, grasping at the tail end of sentences, looking a little unsure of himself as he pointed that finger again and again, still insisting, as if we hadn't been listening, that "I can fix it". His jokes were absolutely horrible, with a wooden delivery that seemed more like they were launched at pre-determined times rather than the spontaneous zingers we all have seen him spout. And when he pointed at Obama, referring to him as "that one", you had to wonder whether it was past McCain's bedtime.

Obama looked like he had had a very good night's sleep, and moved quickly, surely, and confidently around the stage. His biggest bugabear, the professorial stammer, was mostly kept in check, only rearing its head a lot near the end of the debate. After a tough two weeks and a Dow that closed down another 500 points yesterday, it was hard for him to get his inspirational mojo going, but you could feel it, right there under the surface, sitting right next to the sense of self satisfaction that his campaign plan was coming together. There is no doubt that McCain could feel it, could sense it, but couldn't combat it.

EVERYBODY in the room seemed to know the early voting statistics for Georgia, and one guy just flat out declared that Obama was "winning Georgia right now". As I watched the big screen antics being multiplied along the rows of TV's along the walls, I was simply amazed at how big a part electrons had played in this election, from the Obama website to radio to phone banking to internet donations. I was glad it was coming to an end - the background color had gone from jarring to irritating.

Back at home, we watched the recap by the CNN gang. Jeffrey Toobin could not let go of the idea that "that one" would be hung around McCain's neck for the rest of the campaign, much as the dead albatross hung around the neck of the Ancient Mariner. Nobody, from Castellanos on down, seemed to be particularly impressed with McCain, but none of them were blown away by Obama either.

Something tells me, though, that in the bizarro world that this campaign season has become, Sarah Palin will be snarling "that one" at her campaign rallies before the sun sets tonight, even as we watch the Dow Jones Industrial Average falter lower during today's trading, as if name calling will obscure the financial crisis America is facing.

New Voters "Money In The Bank" For Obama

I am slowly beginning to understand Andy Rooney, the curmudgeonly old guy who used to do a five minute segment at the end of the news show “60 Minutes” about things he didn’t like. In the last couple of weeks there are a few words and phrases I’ve gotten tired of hearing:

“gaffe”

“Joe Six Pack”

“energy independence”

"also"

“maverick”

The one that is probably the most bothersome is the one I am sure will be used to death over the next twenty four hours as the punditocracy chatter among themselves on their pre-debate and post debate panels – “gamechanger”.

I was reminded of this as I watched the Minnesota Vikings take on the New Orleans Saints in the Superdome last night. New Orleans amassed four times the yardage of Minnesota in the first half, but just couldn’t get the ball in the end zone enough. There had been too many errors in the execution of their gameplan, and too many fumbles by their star running back Reggie Bush. Minnesota was leading at one point by 10 points. And then, just like that, in the space of a few seconds, Reggie Bush electrified the crowd as he returned a punt from deep in his own territory for a touchdown. A few minutes later, he did it again, to put New Orleans in the lead. What was the first sentence out of Tony Kornheiser’s mouth? “This guy is a gamechanger.”

Finally, I said to myself, someone uses the phrase “gamechanger” phrase appropriately. And as I sat there, watching Reggie Bush’s teammates pat him on the back, I thought about what it was that got me so agitated whenever I heard a political pundit say “will this be a gamechanger” when they attempted to predict the impact each candidate's performance could have on the TV audience. As I sat back, watching the two football teams fight it out on the screen, I could see exactly what it was.

In a football game, you saw it all right there inside the stadium, the players on the field, the players on the bench, the coaches, the back ups, the special teams, the team owners in the skyboxes – everything that could affect the game except the training room was right there on display.

In this election, we are seeing only a fraction of the manpower of the opposing campaigns. The podiums and the cadre of aides each of the Democratic and Republican candidates are usually seen with in news clips tend to be equalizing images. The thing that is so maddening to me is that if you could visualize, as I do all the time, the difference between the manpower and the financial resources of the Obama and McCain camps, you would quickly realize that there is no way John McCain or Sarah Palin could have the kind of effect on this election that Reggie Bush had on the game last night.

There is no running room in virtually any state. No way a Hail Mary pass will make it to the Electoral College goal line. And even if McCain/Palin recover a fumble, Obama/Biden have too many players on the field for them to get very far. One of the bulwarks of Obama’s basic strategy – significantly expanding the electorate – was derided by the conventional wisdom as being a costly, time consuming endeavor. Now these newly registered voters are like money in the bank for Obama - although these days, "money in the bank" might be an oxymoron.

The “gamechanging” has been taking place for the last eighteen months, one door and one voter at a time. The army of Obama volunteers will finally get a break after mounting the biggest voter registration drive by a political party in modern times.


No 30 second TV ads will change this.


No debate zinger will matter.


Reggie Bush's heroics didn't change the football game enough either last night.


New Orleans lost by 3.

Barack Is Back

Barack is back.

The full-court press by Barack Obama is on. His surrogates started going to one-on-one microphone matchups yesterday, unfurling the history of the Keating Five Savings and Loan scandal as if it just happened last week. It is the timing, more than the coordinated effort itself, that seems inspired, coming after a two week effort by the McCain campaign to stop the bleeding on several fronts. With only 60 odd hours before Tuesday night’s debate, the domination of the news cycles by this new twist on the campaign trail narrative will certainly ruffle the feathers of an already irritated John McCain.

I would imagine the campaign has planned for the inevitable push by Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage to somehow connect last weeks O.J. verdict with Barack Obama. This is going to take a bit of imagination, but these guys can’t pass this up. Six Degrees of Separation will become Three Degrees of Taint by Association. Somehow, O.J.’s erratic, attention craving antics will be shoehorned into a box with all the misinformation about Obama, even though O.J.’s temperament and decision-making abilities are in the same league with McCain. If you thought you heard some convoluted logic during last week’s vice presidential debate, you better watch out, because the real bullshit is about to start flying.

But Barack is back, his troops manning up, a body on a body, refuting all Republican talking points almost as fast as they are conceived. Now they are playing a little offense, with a email blast/drumroll to announce in tantalizing fashion the unveiling of a 13-minute documentary called "Keating Economics: John McCain and the Making of a Financial Crisis", available at KeatingEconomics.com today at noon, along with background information that every voter should know.

Did the "mavericks" think they were shooting at a sitting duck?

Once again, Barack Obama has changed the game, bringing out the big stick on the back nine, just like Tiger Woods does when he knows its time to put some distance between him and the rest of the field. The size and strength of his organization, with almost 40 million dollars and three hundred and fifty paid staffers in Florida alone, have begun to trump the McCain organization at almost every turn out in the field, rendering even the voter suppression tactics the GOP is famous for all but moot in the face of the largest voter registration drive in America’s history.

George Will made a very cogent point on the George Stephanopoulos show yesterday. He said "Barack Obama will be the beneficiary of the biggest mailout in political history in the next couple of weeks – the 401(k) statements that will be hitting mailboxes all across America." Will feels that for many who are uncertain or undecided, seeing the dramatic drop in the account balances of their 401(k)'s will be the final push many people need to start believing that ii really is time for a change, putting one of the last nails in the coffin of the McCain campaign.

Barack is back.

Are You Suffering From Electile Dysfunction?

• Do you find yourself getting frustrated with your political opponent?

• Is it hard to maintain your concentration on current events ?

• Are you haunted by your choice of running mate?

• Is the leadership of your own party confused about your actions?

• Are you finding yourself unable to hang on to your core constituency?


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Its not too late.

Talk to your doctor about LogiCal^TM


**side effects may include hypersensitivity to bullshit, negative advertising, and bald faced lies. During campaign activity, if you become dizzy, nauseated, disoriented, or find yourself believing you have already won the election, call your doctor right away. Contact your doctor or seek emergency medical attention if you find yourself having an attack of conscience for more than four hours. Do not take LogiCal^TM if you are also using maximum strength Heronex^TM – this may cause a serious increase in erratic thinking.

"Negro, Do You Know Who I Am?"

As I watched the predictable news pundit responses tonight about McCain’s Mississippi Maneuver, I was snatched back to the first of the year, when something between Obama and an agitated press corp made me compare Barack Obama’s reactions when provoked to the classic performances by Sidney Poitier in Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner and In The Heat Of The Night. Poitier’s characters acted as the moral authority in these pictures, rebuking prejudice through the only stance a black man could take in a movie in those days – coolly restrained rage crossed with a furious sense of righteousness.

There is a heightened level of agitation I am seeing, not just in John McCain, but in a large section of the American population, a visible anxiety about Barack Obama’s ever growing support that is now threatening to ratchet itself up to the next level – an outright racially based fear that these particular white Americans who say they support John McCain and Sarah Palin can’t seem to escape.

At the press conference he held yesterday to announce he was suspending his campaign to help his fellow senators wrestle with the Wall Street bailout plan, McCain’s eyes and his facial expressions told me what you already know - that his defiant stance was being backed by millions of his supporters, who had long been waiting for McCain to "show that uppity Negro" who was really in charge here. The way he looked at the camera when he said “I informed Obama of what I planned to do,” I could see his brain ticking – "negro, don’t you know who I am?"

I don’t have to waste time conducting any damn polls to tell you what kind of nervous jubilation is erupting in this segment of America tonight. For these people, McCain is their Great White Hope, the last obstacle between that black man and the Oval Office. So long as he doesn’t pop up as a suspect in the Jon Benet Ramsey case, he can do no wrong.

For Barack Obama supporters like me, watching their white hero in action, I get the same sense of preposterousness I have when I watch an obviously aged Clint Eastwood punch out men decades younger than him in his movies. But this preposterousness is laced with disgust, because I know the same thing you all know – white America has mastered the art of believing its own bullshit.

There is a scene in the movie In the Heat Of The Night, set in Sparta Mississippi, where a young, vigorous Sidney Poitier, who plays a Philadelphia detective, confronts the old Southern aristocratic banker who is responsible for the death of a wealthy progressive industrialist. Poitier got slapped hard across the face by the banker when he asserted his authority as an officer of the law, something the banker had undoubtedly done many times before to rebuke impudent, uppity blacks who threatened his way of doing business. It was Poitier’s arm slinging back automatically, as if by natural reflex, his brown hand cracking the aristocrat square across the face, that brings me back to this picture year after year.

I have watched this scene many times from the relative comfort of the new millennium, but isn’t until now that I really understand what that slap meant, and why John McCain is really doing everything in his power to avoid facing the movement that is Barack Obama. Suddenly withdrawing from the presidential debate to be held Friday in Mississippi has virtually nothing to do with the Wall Street crisis.

It was the white community's sense of shame that the civil rights movement exploited, because it was the only weapon they had. This white shame that the movement's organizers marshaled into a palpable moral authority literally disciplined America. This metaphorical visit to the woodshed is something these particular white people remember all too well, and are not interested in going through again.

To have to see that brown skinned face standing behind a White House podium for at least four years means that they are wrong, that their belief systems are wrong, that the bedrock of the principles by which they live their lives, which most certainly does not include any notion of true equality by black or brown people, are just plain wrong.

These are the things nobody wants to talk about, because the kind of kindergarten equality we have today is only tangentially related to an actual universal equality. Universal equality means anybody could potentially wield the power to retaliate, the power to dictate the agenda, and the power to rearrange the fabric of the lives we have come to believe are authentically American.

What black Americans want to see from Barack Obama, the thing that will let us finally look upon him as a fully formed man, are crackling, spontaneous reactions to this kind of bullshit, a reaction whose aggressiveness exploits the power behind him. A reaction that says in no uncertain terms that he means business.

His campaign managers know better than this, though. They know intimately the levels of depravity to which a lot of white Americans, including some of those who have decided to support Obama, can sink to in a hurry. So we won’t get to see Obama metaphorically cock his arm back when he is confronted with the rest of the bullshit that you know is about to come.

But what we will see is an increased level of agitation in McCain and his supporters as the eight million volunteers and the $400 million plus dollars that under gird the Obama campaign conspire to do what our standard bearer cannot – retaliate against the odious stench of race baiting, fight to dictate the American agenda, and work to rearrange the very structure of the lives we actually live until we finally begin to really become the Americans we think we are in our minds.

Debate Delay Dicey Decision

Here I was, planning on giving up going to the first night of my college class reunion, S. beginning to get ideas about a debate party of sorts, when my boy John McCain's picture popped up as I surfed through the New York Times website.

"McCain Seeks to Delay First Debate Amid Financial Crisis"

I had just finished listening to our resident teenager explain to her mother, with the slick smoothness of a TV defense attorney, why it was perfectly okay for her to go shopping in the middle of the afternoon ON A WEEKDAY when she is flagging her economics class (is this some irony or what?). Although, according to her, her grade is low only because there are some "slight discrepancies" between what she "knows" and the right answers to the latest test questions.

So when I saw that headline, I felt like I was reading about the teen-aged version of John McCain.

Being unpredictable has worked for McCain lately, keeping the Obama campaign off its stride. But once McCain goes over the limit with these kind of decisions, he'll turn from maverick to menace in a heartbeat.

Does it really matter if he and Obama go to Washington? They've been briefed personally by the two architects of the bailout plan on a daily basis. They've focused almost exclusively on national issues the last few months, as opposed to issues that are germane to their constituents in Arizona or Illinois.

McCain is in a tighter spot than Obama. Oppose the bailout to distance himself from Bush, and the public outcry will be deafening. Vote for the bailout, even a new version, and the shadow of the Bush presidency he's been avoiding all summer will come back to haunt him.

If you live with a teenager, you understand the power of pretext better than just about anybody. The pretext of postponing Friday's debate...

...opens the door to postponing the vice-presidential debate with Sarah Palin, who has never debated anything ever on a national stage.

You do the math.

Something tells me that yesterday's fracas over access to the network feeds touched a nerve in someone behind-the-scenes.

Whether I'm right or wrong about this surely won't matter for long, though, as McCain and Palin are apt to change their minds back at any moment - just like our resident teenage diva.

Sticking It To "The Man"

There was a Sprint commercial a while back that portrayed a CEO, grey haired, square jawed and in a pinstripe suit, sitting at his desk in his high rise office, playing with a new phone while one of his lackeys stood to the side.

"Is that a new Sprint phone?" the lackey asked his boss.

"Uh huh. With Sprint's new Fair and Flexible plan, no one can tell me what to do. I can talk when and How I want." The CEO turned to his lackey and sanguinely intoned, "it's my little way of sticking it to "The Man".

His lackey, looking bewildered, blurted out, "but you ARE "The Man".

The CEO stared straight ahead. "I know."

There was something in the absurdity of that exchange that has had me thinking of John McCain more and more these days.

The latest debacle in his logic-defying campaign has swirled around the refusal to allow any reporters to get within recording distance of Sarah Palin, his vice-presidential candidate, as she posed for photos with world leaders in New York today and tomorrow for a United Nations meeting.

CNN pulled the plug on its TV crew after its reporters were barred from attending, leaving the media and the McCain campaign to play a high-level game of cat-and-mouse that has ended with McCain capitulating, agreeing to give a fifteen minute press conference today at 4:00 pm, presumably with Sarah Palin in tow. This will be the first press conference McCain has given since August 13th.

In a lot of ways, McCain's actions over the last thirty days make me wonder when he will have to finally admit, like the CEO did in the commercial, that he is "The Man".

They Can't Kill All The Indians This Time

"We have, in fact, two kinds of morality side by side; one which we preach but do not practice, and another which we practice but seldom preach."

Bertrand Russell

I watched Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin come on stage Wednesday night like a couple of cowpokes from the Wild Wild West with their six shooters drawn. After listening to the two of them, it appears that the easiest way for us to "circle our wagons" to save America from the bad guys would be to evacuate the nation from top to bottom - then allow only right thinking, completely certifiable Anglo-Saxons back in.

When "us" versus "them" is your theme song - the righteous versus the damned, the right to lifers versus the baby killers, the evolutionists versus the creationists, "pure hearted" America against the "evil doers" - you should not surprised when your supporters boil these images down to their most simplistic form, the way you've taught them to do in every other situation.

I guess that makes the rest of us as relevant as the Indians used to be when the America decided to tame the West. We're just a bunch of peace pipe smokers who don't have any guns, taking up space on valuable land that should be developed, speaking a language that is incomprehensible to those whose native tongue is Gasolinia - "drill baby drill!"

Take Christianity, for instance. Who was that guy back in Galilee, way back when, who went from house to house, from corner to corner, ready to help those in need? Jesus Christ himself, it seems, was one of those lousy"community organizer" types.

A self designated American patriot who only sees the world in red, white and white while driving an Expedition, a Suburban, an Excursion, a Hummer, or any other big ass SUV slash school bus is as patriotic as the reverend who spends money from his parishioners at the strip club is religious.

Now if you're reading this, and your politics leans to the left, before you go getting on your high horse about the minuscule size of your carbon footprint, you need to remember that righteousness, that good old salve for the prickled consciences on both the left and the right, has never won an election, even when married to the best of intentions.

For those of you who have been thinking critically, you can see beyond the rhetoric that Palin has been pushing the last...well, the last thirty six hours...and think about where the locus of power really resides in political arenas. Is it the person who can write a check to a campaign for $4600? Is it the person who can write a check for $4600 to a campaign AND $28,500 to the party?

Or is it the person who is a center of influence in his community, whose judgment and advice is trusted because his or her community sees it in action everyday? Community organizers are one of the cornerstones of the Obama campaign, helping to keep costs down and enthusiasm up as they attempt to pull off the most massive voter registration drive in the history of this country.

There are not enough big donors out there to fund this kind of gargantuan registration effort if you had to do it with paid staff, which is why people who believe, the same armies of people in every single state in the union who are working for the Obama campaign for little or nothing, are so powerful.

With the help of their tireless efforts, the expanded electorate McCain/Palin will face in November pose an extremely tough challenge to the Republican ticket in states like Missouri, Florida, New Mexico and Colorado. It could even make it a horse race for our electoral votes here in good ole Georgia, as well as North Carolina and Virginia.

At some point this October, the campaign ads will reach a point of saturation. The colorful mailers will get thrown out before the mail hits the counter. And even though there is nothing so sweet as the sound of a robo call to bond a voter with his candidate, voters will inexplicably stop listening to them.

The “code of the west” was romantic, but John Wayne is dead, there is no more cavalry, and they can't kill all the Indians this time.