March 2008 Archives

3. In the Senate you have one of the poorest attendance records, and you often simply vote present on thorny issues, why?

Because when Obama's had a long-held plan to coast to the White House on personality, emotion, and the "audacity of hope" alone, a paper trail of votes that shows his real positions on the issues would counter his wanton image as the great uniter, and give plenty o' ammunition to his opponents.

For crying out loud, whose idea was it for Barack to bowl? After Dukakis in the tank and Kerry in weird outfits or windsurfing, haven't candidates learned to avoid ridiculous photo-ops that backfire so easily? Barack looks silly, and he bowled a 37 to boot -- I've seen raccoons have greater success in an alley.

Time was when JFK refused to be seen eating, sensitive as he was to how dumb you can look while being photographed chewing.

Simple tip: Don't try to look like the common man. Try to look like someone the common would be proud to have as his leader.

I’m disappointed in Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s 10 questions for Obama. Some of them are misleading in their formulations and others in their implication. Here are my responses and they are not those of either Sen Obama or his campaign. Just me.

1. I suppose you could spin Obama’s statement that he was against the war without seeing the secret intelligence as a negative. However, I read it as “You guys saw the intel and you still got it wrong.”

2.This is a disingenuous criticism. His subcommittee is on European Affairs. Despite continental drift, Afghanistan remains outside of Europe.

3. The parts of this compound question mix his Illinois Senate service and his national service where there is no vote of Present.

4. I don’t know anything about this.

5. Do you really want to get into how dirty the money sources on all sides of both parties? Bill’s contributors to his library and his multi-million dollar retainer as a consultant are pretty putrid. There are no winners here. For the most part mega fortunes are not made with pristine cleanliness. They may however be cleaned up by being inherited. (See #6)

6. Penny Pritzker, one of Abraham Pritzker’s 12 grandchildren inherited her fortune and is a billionaire in her own right. She doesn’t need to skim from failed banks. The whole subprime thing ended in a fiasco but originally was supposed to help poor people, people who didn’t qualify to regular loans. It was a way of avoiding the redlining of poor people in poor neighborhoods. Yes it was predicated on a continually rising market and that market, as all markets eventually “correct.”

7. See #5

8. Does this question imply that Obama lied or just didn’t know what all his staff and surrogates were saying? Both are certainly sins, but one is worse than the other.

9. Has anyone asked?

10. Oh come on. Hillary stayed in along with Kucinich, Dodd and Gravel. Obama, Edwards and Biden did the honorable thing and tried to follow the request of the national party.

Here are ten troubling questions for Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama that he’d be wise to answer coming from me. If he’s the Democratic presidential nominee you can bank that John McCain and the GOP truth squad will ask him them. The questions were sent directly to him at his national campaign headquarters Friday, March 28. The questions are not campaign rhetoric, gossip, and partisan allegations. They are fully documented, and totally a matter of public record. If Obama won’t answer them, then the challenge is for his supporters to answer them point by point. This doesn’t mean hurling the usual cheap shot, brainless, personal invectives, name calling, personal insults, or character assassination. This is no substitute for factual answers.

1. You stated that you were not in the Senate in October 2002 when President Bush rammed through Congress the resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq. But you also stated that “perhaps the reason I thought it was such a bad idea was I didn’t have the benefit of U.S. intelligence.” This implies that you might have voted for the war if you had been in the Senate when the vote was taken. Why then do you condemn Hillary Clinton and other Senators who voted for the war authorization resolution when you admit the possibility that if you had been in the Senate you would have done the same?

2. As chairman of the Senate subcommittee on Foreign Relations you could have held oversight hearings, called witnesses and offered alternatives to Bush’s disastrous efforts against A Qeada in Afghanistan. Your subcommittee held none and provided no alternatives to Bush policy that you condemn, why?

3. In the Senate you have one of the poorest attendance records, and you often simply vote present on thorny issues, why?

4. Senate Legislation was proposed to require nuclear giant, Exelon to make public disclosure of its radiation leaks. You did not fully support that requirement. Exelon has been identified as your fourth biggest campaign contributor. Why did you oppose the tougher regulatory proposal for Exelon?

5. Chicago financier Tony Rezko has been accused of numerous financial illicit dealings. You have claimed that you did no political or personal favors for Rezko. Yet as an Illinois state legislator you wrote endorsement letters to government agencies on his behalf, as well as having conducted other documented financial transactions and dealings and with him. Why do you deny that you have no relationship with Rezko?

6. The head of your campaign finance chair is Penny Pritzker. Before taking over Obama’s campaign finances, she headed up the borderline shady and failed Superior Bank. It collapsed in 2002. The bank engaged in deceptive and faulty lending, questionable accounting practices, and charged hidden fees. It made thousands of dubious loans to mostly poor, strapped homeowners. A disproportionate number of them were minority. Why does she still have a principal financial role in your campaign?

7. You have taken money in past campaigns from straw donors. These are donors that have taken money from tainted and dubious sources and then contribute to your campaign under their names. You have talked much about financial openness in campaigns. Why did you take money from straw donors in the past? And do you take money from them now?

8. Following a speech by Hillary Clinton praising Lyndon Johnson for his role in helping pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, an Obama campaign advisor privately released a four page memo urging hammering Clinton for denigrating Dr. King. Yet, you told reporters that neither you nor anyone in your campaign had made the accusation that Clinton denigrated King. Why did you say that when clearly it was the memo from your campaign advisor that triggered the media and public assault on Clinton regarding King?

9. You have not produced a single public document that would provide the public with greater insight and knowledge about legislation, initiatives proposed, your votes on key bills, and your attendance record during your terms in the Illinois legislature. Why?

10. You have repeatedly charged that Clinton violated a pledge not to put her name on the Michigan Democratic primary ballot. However, neither Clinton nor any other Democratic contender pledged to the DNC not to have their name on the ballot. Three other candidates had their name on the ballot in addition to Clinton. Why do continue to make this claim that the other candidates, but especially Clinton, violated a pledge not to have their name on the Michigan ballot?

Obama’s campaign is based on the firm pillar that he represents a new, open, fresh, and transparent politics. He is the candidate that is the antithesis of the political duplicity, double dealing, evasions, lies and corruption that marred other candidates. Obama can prove it by answering these questions; questions that raise serious doubt about his contention that he represents a radical break from the political past. If he won’t answer them then will his supporters answer them for him? That’s again, before McCain asks them.

My column Sunday about my DWP bill in the context of the current debates over proposed DWP rate prompted readers' similar tales of woe over the ever increasing cost of living here in Los Angeles. One reader is a widow trying to live on $15,000 a year:

With the DWP rates and its long list of assorted charges always increasing, Internet service constantly going up, and of course the cost of gasoline, it is getting extremely difficult to keep my head above water. Like you, I am an environmentally conscious person doing all that I can think of to be energy efficient. I am very conscious about recycling and like you I am fully aware of the blue barrels being emptied by the scavengers long before the trucks come along to empty the empty barrels. ... How do we get the attention of those in charge when they can care less about us? It doesn't bother them, they are financially sound with their huge salaries and all the perks they receive. The DWP salaries are and have always been outrageously high. I say reduce those and all government salaries, make people in all levels of government employment far more accountable.

And an earlier post about my DWP bill prompted this comment:

My Woodland Hills home is a one family home. It has about 4000 square feet. After my children grew up and I was single again, I favored staying in the house. However, I simply did not personally need all that space for myself and it was too difficult for me to maintain alone.

I then had the truly bright idea of creating lovely guest suites -- virtually apartments -- within the space. There are connecting doors between each suite (because of understandable city and fire laws). But each space has its own entrance.

The DWP sees my house as an apartment building with four units. Therefore, the DWP has quadrupled my trash bill to $112 every two months. Here's the real issue at hand.....

I am effectively paying for 12 trash cans when, in fact, I only have three.
I called DWP about these charges. Once they realized the facts, they said I had to "use it (the 12 cans) or lose it." I then said my property cannot accomodate any more than three cans ... that the number of people who live in the house now has not changed from the original number that represented my family. They then had the gall to say to me that I should have no complaints ... that my rents likely more than cover this increased trash fee. This, of course, is not their business. Fairly billing people is. But, by this point, I just gave up while thinking I can't fight city hall.

If my trash fee goes from $112 to $152 I believe I'll actually save money if I simply hire a private trash service. I will simply dismiss ... discharge ... fire the city trash service. I look forward to that day.

Now, that's a lot of money for trash collection. Seems a trip to the dump would be cheaper.

Hillary denies privately complaining about big boys bullying her, but it just sounds so in keeping with the spirit of the last several weeks of the nomination process. When anyone comes within a 50-mile zone of classic racial or gender resentments, one of the candidates sounds an alarm (or uses surrogates to sound it).

It will be interesting to see how this dynamic changes come the general election, when Bubba of the Bible Belt will be less receptive to such posturing.

We already know that Bush and Gordon Brown have no cojones when it comes to standing up for China and boycotting the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. But German Chancellor Angela Merkel -- Forbes' most powerful woman in the world and highly worthy of the title -- has become the first leader to put her foot down and do the right thing:

"As pressure built for concerted western protests to China over the crackdown in Tibet, EU leaders prepared to discuss the crisis for the first time today, amid a rift over whether to boycott the Olympics.

The disclosure that Germany is to stay away from the games' opening ceremonies in August could encourage President Nicolas Sarkozy of France to join in a gesture of defiance and complicate Gordon Brown's determination to attend the Olympics.

Donald Tusk, Poland's prime minister, became the first EU head of government to announce a boycott on Thursday and he was promptly joined by President Václav Klaus of the Czech Republic, who had previously promised to travel to Beijing.

'The presence of politicians at the inauguration of the Olympics seems inappropriate,' Tusk said. 'I do not intend to take part.'

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany's foreign minister, confirmed that Merkel was staying away. He added that neither he nor Wolfgang Schäuble, the interior minister responsible for sport, would attend the opening ceremony.

Hans-Gert Pöttering, the politician from Merkel's Christian Democratic party who chairs the European parliament, encouraged talk of an Olympic boycott this week and invited the Dalai Lama to address the chamber in Strasbourg, while another senior German Christian Democrat, Ruprecht Polenz, said a boycott should remain on the table."

This is awesome news!! And I'm willing to bet that Sarko will take the boycott route.

My column last week on how we shouldn't play China's games anymore got a lot of interesting reaction, by the way, including a death threat from the mainland. No worries -- I'll just sic these creepy "fuwas" on him:

No, I haven't gotten that check, but I did get the direct deposit of my whopping $10 federal tax refund!! (I had to pay the state.) Why, thank you Uncle Sam for rewarding my hard work so... shall I buy a roll of laundry quarters, or a gyro plate at Firehouse?

This is the time of year I start lusting for Steve Forbes again: Flat tax!! FLAT TAX!!! And as far as the black hole where my tax money goes... cut those useless wasteful programs!! Reduce spending!! Chop, chop, chop...

Moammar Gadhafi, who apparently has taken pleather to new, exciting places, gets all street with the amazingly birdlike Syrian President Bashar Assad...

Very, very sad news about the passing yesterday of Dith Pran, the "Killing Fields" survivor who became a photographer for The New York Times -- and strove to ensure that Pol Pot's genocide would not be forgotten:

"I'm a one-person crusade. I must speak for those who did not survive and for those who still suffer. Since coming to America, I have visited Cambodia three times to evaluate the ongoing Cambodian crisis. The problems Cambodia faces are not only political but also economical and social. The Khmer Rouge have brought Cambodia back to year zero and that's why I'm trying to bring the Khmer Rouge leaders to the World Court. Like one of my heroes, Elie Wiesel, who alerts the world to the horrors of the Jewish holocaust, I try to awaken the world to the holocaust of Cambodia, for all tragedies have universal implications."

"Part of my life is saving life. I don't consider myself a politician or a hero. I'm a messenger. If Cambodia is to survive, she needs many voices."

A little Monday morning fluff, courtesy of GQ's "The Whipped List." Their No. 1 most emasculated man? Mr. Madonna, who used to be the man's man director of "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" and then got, er, "Swept Away." Plus, as they note, Guy Ritchie is now making a documentary to go with Madonna's Kabbalah fad.

Other funny bits on the list include Rupert Murdoch's arm candy Wendi Dang, who "once asked him in front of colleagues, 'Are you going deaf, old man?'" And on the political front, GQ picks John Edwards:

"After Ann Coulter referred to the former senator and failed presidential candidate as a 'fa---t,' Edwards did the stand-up thing: He let his wife, Elizabeth, call in to Hardball and tell the right-wing harpy off but good. John, meanwhile, looked like a man holding his wife’s purse."

Ah, but in the name of emasculated bipartisanship, Rudy Giuliani also comes in on the list:

"If the former New York mayor is serious about ever running for office again, he should think twice about paying his wife, Judy, a six-figure paycheck for 'writing' speeches she’ll later interrupt with her phone calls."

All of the people with piercings are probably freaking out over the story of the woman who was forced by TSA to remove her nipple piercings with pliers to board a plane. It's just evidence of what we all know: that so much of the so-called security post-9/11 is really for our benefit. I have a can of pepper spray at home that proves it. A friend came to visit me from DC in January and accidentally left the can of spray in a pocket of a jacket that she stuck in her carry-on luggage. No one batted an eye at that, though her lotion and shampoo were examined thoroughly. She wisely decided not to try to bring the can home.

So, while babies have to remove shoes and alternative people have to remove body art, pepper spray goes overlooked into the cabin of an airplane. Doesn't make me feel too safe.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and members of the City Council meet to discuss L.A.'s budget woes.

(Or offer your own captions in the combox ...)

Yikes. Just reading that quote makes me wince. It comes from lawyer-to-the-cameras Gloria Allred, who today will be -- you guessed it -- holding a press conference denouncing TSA for forcing a passenger at LAX to remove her nipple rings before boarding a flight. According to Allred, this is some sort of terrible violation of civil rights, although TSA defenders say that, depending on the nipple ring in question, this could just be consistent with the practice of barring passengers from bringing sharp objects, chains, etc. onto planes.

Either way, sounds painful to me. And yes, a little overboard. But seeing that TSA won't even let you bring a nail clipper aboard an airplane, we shouldn't be surprised. If national security can't handle mile-high nose-hair trimming, it probably can't handle Axl Rose nipple rings, either.

Then again, maybe TSA should make an exception here. Taking nipple rings off the banned list could inspire countless al-Qaida to take various sharp objects to their own nipples -- an excruciating fate they richly deserve.

As this article makes clear, we have to bring a mature and patient approach to the notion that the spread of democracy will make the U.S. strong and safe. Key excerpts:

Deputy secretary of state John Negroponte arrived for consultations even before the new government had a chance to form itself, fuelling paranoia in the country about being ruled from Washington... The rules have changed. Mr. Negroponte and assistant secretary of state Richard Boucher received a cold reception from politicians, highlighting the difference between dealing with an elected government and the military regime of President Pervez Musharraf.

But here's one decent solution, I'd say, courtesy of two of America's premier military men.

Plus room and airfare.

To travel with a SoCal lobbying entourage from April 15 though 18 on the L.A Chamber of Commerce's "Access Washington DC Tour," all you have to do is register here, pick your lobbying team (aviation, climate change, housing, transit, etc.) and provide your credit card information for the $850 fee. For that modest amount you can work the hall of Capitol Hill alongside Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Santa Monica's mayor, whathisface.

Join more than 200 of the region's top business leaders and elected officials for Southern California's largest advocacy trip to Washington, D.C. from April 15-18, 2008. This is an incredible opportunity to meet with members of Congress and Bush Administration officials on the issues important to our communities.

Access Washington, D.C. is a partnership of nearly two dozen business advocacy organizations, non-profits, educational institutions and local government leaders. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Santa Monica Mayor Herb Katz are co-leading the 2008 delegation.

Sounds like a real hoot! Surely worth $850 to lobby the mayor, I mean with the mayor in those hallowed halls.

Why is it that if gas prices dropped by 25 percent, we would be dancing in the streets ... but when housing prices drop 25 percent, we prepare for the next Great Depression?

And a corollary: Why is that when gas prices rise by 25, 50, even 100 percent, we denounce big oil for price gouging ... but when housing prices similarly soar, we gladly sell our homes at "market value"?

Fascinating George Will column today citing data that destroy two of the most common political assumptions: 1) Conservatives are rich; liberals are poor, and 2) Liberals are more compassionate than conservatives. There are a lot of good stats to discredit these assumptions, but to cite one factoid that stands out:

Although liberal families' incomes average 6 percent higher than those of conservative families, conservative-headed households give, on average, 30 percent more to charity than the average liberal-headed household ($1,600 per year vs. $1,227).

There are two phenomena at work here. The first is that, on average, conservatives tend to be more religious (or, to express it conversely, atheists are more likely to be liberal), and most religions require some form of tithing. (Tellingly, the least charitable group of Americans is secular conservatives -- i.e., Country Club Republicans.)

The second, related phenomenon is ideological: While both liberals and conservatives, by and large, recognize a need to help the disadvantaged, liberals tend to view government as the primary vehicle for doing so, whereas conservatives put their stock (and money) in private charity. To quote Will:

People who reject the idea that "government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality" give an average of four times more than people who accept that proposition....

While conservatives tend to regard giving as a personal rather than governmental responsibility, some liberals consider private charity a retrograde phenomenon -- a poor palliative for an inadequate welfare state and a distraction from achieving adequacy by force, by increasing taxes.

This explains not only why liberals are less likely to give to charity, but also why they're more willing to pay higher taxes. They see ponying up more money to the state as the price to pay for living in a more just and compassionate society. Conservatives, on the other hand, don't trust the government to do the job, and having already made generous charitable donations on their own, resent the implication that the government thinks they should be doing more.

These are two radically different world views, but one shouldn't assume -- as politicians and partisans often do -- that the other is intrinsically selfish.

Since societal compassion requires some level of both private and public efforts, perhaps we should see our differences here as a blessing -- a necessary system of checks and balances -- rather than as one more cause for political sanctimony and partisan outrage.

In the process of writing and editing an opinion piece for a major newspaper, a lot of things can end up snipped out by an enthusiastic editor. It is part of the process, and, in my experience, is not reflective of bias or political sensitivity. Unfortunately, some of those snips can snag substantive morsels of information.

This is one of those.

Shortly after the death of Suzie Pena, the LAPD SWAT team held a regular range practice at Angeles Range, in the Foothill Division. The team was stunned at having lost their first hostage in 35 years, disturbed at the possibility it might have been one of their own errant rounds tha killed her. Multiplying the tension, for the first time in their history, the potential of a serious inquiry into the actions and practices this world-class outfit loomed in the background.

That's when Assistant Chief Sharon Papa showed up. Papa, the highest ranking woman in the LAPD, is in large part an LAPD outsider. She was the chief of the old Metropolitan Transit Authority Police when it was absorbed by LAPD. She joined as a Commander -- a senior manager. For better or worse, she never pushed an "A Car" around an LAPD Division. Her experience with the kinds of calls and problems faced uniquely by LAPD officers is (and remains) limited.

So, having her around the premiere LAPD unit already caused the SWAT officers a bit of discomfort, especially given the motivation for her visit: She was going to discuss the Pena inquiry.

But it was the first words out of her mouth that none of the officers who were present will ever forget, numerous officers who were present have told me. Her words were not "thanks for having me." She didn't say "how are you guys holding up? I know its been a rough few days." She didn't even try to set a tone of cooperation.

Instead, this was her first comment:

"So, where are all the women? Oh, THAT's RIGHT, there are no women in SWAT."

Suzie Pena had barely been buried, and Sharon Papa was primarily focused on politcal correctness.

And thus the stage was set. Less than a month later, Papa was appointed to lead the Pena inquiry, and its conclusions were forgone. SWAT needs a woman. Dead hostages be damned.

Notably, two weeks ago, Papa, the senior officials of the LAPD's administration and personnel management activities, wrote an email to the wife of a SWAT officer, denying any knowledge of changes made to the SWAT selection test that would make it more accessible to women. Does anyone really believe, after a comment like this, that she really lost all interest in having a woman on SWAT?

Me either.

Thankfully someone stepped in and told Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to keep her mouth shut and butt out of the battle between Obama and Clinton over the superdelegates. That came from a group of top Clinton backers in a letter in which they demanded that Pelosi retract her hector of superdelegates to back Obama. The only thing wrong with their letter is that they took so long to write it. Pelosi popped off a week ago and sternly warned the superdelegates that they risked a palace revolt at the Democratic convention if they defied “the will of the people” and handpicked a nominee.

Pelosi’s silly saber rattle had to rank as one of the most asinine lapses of judgment, common sense, not to mention political ethics by a top Democrat in recent memory. The rationale, if it can be called such, is this. Obama leads Clinton in the number of pledged delegates he’s netted. Therefore, the superdelegates should slavishly fall in line and nominate him.

The checklist of things wrong with this would fill up a thick political primer. Here’s just a few of them. There are still a half dozen primaries left and that includes the big, crucial and must win Pennsylvania primary April 22. The vote there won’t even be close. Polls, surveys, and voter statements show that Obama will go down to a crushing defeat and if Clinton as expected picks up the bulk of the 128 delegate votes from her primary victory there she’ll be in a virtual statistical dead heat with Obama in the number of pledged delegates.

Even without the Pennsylvania win and despite the shrill drum beat calls from the rabid Hillary haters for her to stand down, their empty shout at her that it’s impossible for her to win, and their slander that she’s wrecking the party with her obstinate refusal to bow to Obama, she’s less than five percentage points behind Obama in the number of pledged delegates. That’s hardly a resounding mandate from the majority of delegates for Obama.

Here’s another. Many of the superdelegates had committed or pledged to back Clinton before Obama’s magical appearance on the national political scene. Pelosi almost certainly sans Obama would have been one of them.

Here’s another. The superdelegates have the responsibility not just too blindly cheer lead a candidate because of his fleeting momentary, and always ephemeral popularity but to make a hard headed political assessment of which Democrat has the best chance to beat the GOP guy. Clinton’s vote demographics among core Democrats are rock solid. She’s backed by older women, Latinos, blue collar workers, and party regulars. Recent polls even show that she even has the backing of nearly one fourth of African-American voters.

She has won both the big states and the crucial swing states of Ohio and Florida, and soon Pennsylvania. Without them, no Democrat has a prayer of winning the White House. Polls show that in a head-to head face off with McCain, Clinton is in a statistical dead heat with him while Obama slightly trails him.

Here’s yet another. The superdelegates are supposed to be the firewall to insure electability. Though Pelosi apparently confused that with Obama’s media celebrity and his popular aura, it’s anything but. The superdelegates, even if Pelosi can’t, are supposed to be able to tell the difference between the two.

Then there’s Pelosi herself. She is a superdelegate and she has not publicly committed to back either Obama or Clinton. That’s fine so far. She’s also the House majority leader and that means that she’s supposed to be a neutral and impartial political arbiter and broker for the Democratic Party’s interests in Congress. That also entails working with and unifying the discordant factions among the Democrats. In her naked Obama tilt badger of the super delegates she forgot all of that and became a partisan political hatchet woman for Obama.

The hard headed and strong willed Pelosi will probably do the wrong thing and ignore the demand that she recant her biased admonition to the superdelegates to get on board the Obama train. However, if she’s got any political sense, or sense period, she’ll at least zip it up, stop trying to massage things for Obama and let the superdelegates do their job and that’s to pick the candidate that has the best chance to beat McCain. Right now, neither Pelosi, nor any other top Democrat, can say with certainty which one that is.

What's worse than having to endure government flakery? Having to pay for it.

Like millions of Americans, I got a happy note in the mail from the IRS the other day. Who knew that could happen? it was the notice telling me that I was going to get a bribe, er rebate check in the mail shortly (though not in time enough to pay my tax bill next month). After the relief of not reading an audit notice, I started to get a little annoyed.Doesn't everyone whose head is not in the sand know there's a rebate? What exactly what was the point of this mailed note other than pure flakery? What's worse, this lRS letter campaign cost $42 million to mail.

The tax rebate was already a tremendously obvious PR stunt to momentarily make us forget that the Iraq war lumbers into its fifth year, gas prices are rising, the housing market is crumbling and so is the individual wealth of millions of working people, the nation's wealth is disproportionately going to the ultra rich, who are getting richer by laying off hardworking employees, and all our social safety nets have been rendered virtually worthless by decades of republicrats who have put the U.S. on the track toward third-world status. And the country has to finance this $169 billion economic package, of which these $600 bribes are part, making the final cost much, much larger. And this added, unnecessary cost of trying to spin the American people makes it offensive.

This is not to say I won't cash my check and spend it on some crap I don't need, and which was probably made in China or Mexico or Indonesia. I just wish that someone in DC would suddenly wake up and and say "hey, this is a bad idea. Let's stop the madness."

A couple of experts that I respect wrote this fine piece here (disclosure: I'm a researcher for one of them).

They make a fascinating point about how the American economy tripled expectations over the past 25 years, thanks to this nation's ability to innovate while others merely imitate. Coincidentally, BusinessWeek recently noted that Americans' debt-to-income ratio has doubled over these same past 25 years. Much more of our wealth is now in our homes, which we leveraged to the max and which now are declining in value.

That seems to make us more like the grasshopper and less like the ant of the ancient parable.

Working hard and spending wisely is not enough to keep you on top. No one worked harder or spent more frugally than the Depression generation. What gets you on top is the ability to innovate. What keeps you on top is the ability to work hard and spend wisely. We have the innovation down, but our instant-gratification culture doesn't have any concept of spending wisely. That's why I bemoan the current bipartisan attempts to save the economy, which place consumption on a pedestal high above production.

It would be nice to see a candidate show the courage to tell a debt-ridden citizenry (and an equally debt-ridden government) that the laws of economic physics do still apply. And it would be nice to see the citizenry not dismiss him or her as a crackpot.

It's been a while since I last posted here on Friendly Fire. I've been busy comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable in the San Gabriel Valley, and then when a little birdy dropped a package in my hands, the fit really hit the shan... as the saying goes.

However, if I read the tea leaves correctly, this could potentially be my last post. Ever. Anywhere.

The Los Angeles Chief of Police wants me silenced.

The package the birdy gave me contained the highly secret and remarkably inane report of the LAPD SWAT Board of Inquiry. Supposedly appointed to look into the Suzie Pena incident from 2005by Police Chief William J. Bratton, the board instead looked at everything but (it didn't even interview the Pena officers) and then made some dramatic allegations and recommendations that fly in the face of a remarkably successul organization. Actually, the board didn't really look at anything - SWAT cops tell me they rarely if ever saw the board, thus the board rarely saw SWAT, too. Many of its statements are demonstrably false and absent any factual basis.

Anyway, this package led to my authoring an OpEd for the other paper in town, an that led to a bunch of other stories, a mini-media tour of local talk radio stations and a grievance filed by the Police Protective League.

Apparrently, Chief Bratton is not amused.

In a stunning -- shocking -- statement, Bratton drew parallels to himself and the Corleone family from the movie "The Godfather." He vowed to silence his critics and noted: "And at the end of the movie, all debts are settled in a very bloody way."

Really? Is Bill Bratton going to silence me in a very bloody way?

Amazingly, the Los Angeles political and media establishment have been silent. There seems to be no discomfort whatsoever that the senior law enforcement official in this city has made reference to organized crime as his method for management.

However, extortion, threats and intimidation are clearly part of Bratton's LAPD calculus. Numerous SWAT officers have told me in recent days of mass punishment and statements to officers to the effect of "if you talk to the press, you're out of SWAT." At least one officer has been threatened with sanctions for things his wife said. So, Bratton disregards the First Ammendment, too.

Assistant Chief Sharon Papa pretty blatantly misled the wife of one SWAT officer. Some might say she lied. I won't - I don't wanna sleep with da fishes.

Despite all this, the local media is silent and our Mayor, who supposedly was all enthusiastic about the Bill of Rights when he ran the local chapter of the ACLU now seems more enthusiastic about the Bill who is his mafia don/Police Chief.

This is Los Angeles, 2008. Not the 1948 of LA Confidential. Not New York of the 1970s. Not Tiajuana. LOS ANGELES!!!!!

Yet our media seem uniformly unconcerned by mafia-style (literally) threats and intimidation. The "civil rights activists" are silent. Of course, they would be aghast if a beat cop was caught on tape comparing himself to a gang enforcer in trying to scare the bajeezus out of a thug in Jordan Downs. Imagine John Mack having nothing to say about that. Imagine the Times' consternation if Daryl Gates made an accurate, offhand remark about the immigration status of a cop killer (oh, wait, they did get upset, no need to imagine). Yet, when its from Bratton - nothing.

The silence in deafening.

If you don't hear from me for a while, just ask Bratton where he gave me my concrete shoes.

I discovered long ago that the mainstream media are, by and large, so illiterate on religious issues as to make most religion reporting untrustworthy. This is doubly so for the British press. So I suppose I shouldn't be shocked that the story I cited the other day about Mikhail Gorbachev's supposed conversion to Christianity is a phony. From the Chicago Tribune:

"Over the last few days some media have been disseminating fantasies—I can't use any other word—about my secret Catholicism, citing my visit to the Sacro Convento friary, where the remains of St. Francis of Assisi lie," Gorbachev told the Russian news agency Interfax. "To sum up and avoid any misunderstandings, let me say that I have been and remain an atheist."

Well, that makes matters pretty clear, doesn't it? Yet I don't see how Gorby's re-professed atheism squares with this quote from the original Telegraph story: "It was through St Francis that I arrived at the Church, so it was important that I came to visit his tomb." Either Gorbachev has quickly changed his tune, or, more likely, that quote and others similar to it are simply fraudulent. (Perhaps a deliberate mistranslation?)

Oh well. As Russian Orthodox patriarch Alexei II put i, "(Gorbachev) is still on his way to Christianity. If he arrives, we will welcome him." And I will never trust the British press on a religion story again.

Former Bush chief political strategist Karl Rove already answered the head-scratching question GOP strategists are pondering of whether Obama or Clinton is the easier mark for McCain. In an open memo which got almost no media play and zilch public attention last December, Rove spit out six things Obama should do to zap Clinton.

Obama has followed the script to the letter. He’s unleashed an all-out no holds barred attack on Clinton’s personality, record, and demeanor, and even tossed in some blatant racial digs at her and hubby Bill for supposedly demeaning Dr. King, Jesse Jackson, and of course himself. He’s made bold, brash, and loud pitches and promises to do everything from end the war to clean up the economy. This fulfills Rove’s admonition to him to stop sounding wishy-washy on the big ticket issues and create an aura and persona of confidence, expertise, and even invincibility about himself.

Rove and his anti-Clinton memo was sloughed off at the time as the blathering of a washed out GOP top gun operative who narrowly escaped an indictment. That’s a fatal mistake. Rove didn’t have an on the road to Damascus epiphany in lecturing Obama on how to beat Hillary. Obama is a moderate and centrist Democrat and that means he’s still very much a sworn GOP political enemy. More importantly, Rove got it right twice about how to beat the Democrats. And his sizing up of Obama as the easiest Democratic mark was based on a hard headed assessment of Obama’s weaknesses.

Rove viewed him as untested, inexperienced, way at the front on the learning curve on foreign policy matters, and with a checkered history. That included the hints, innuendos, and whispers about relations with his one time bankroller, the indicted Chicago financier Tony Rezko to his association with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

Almost certainly, the GOP hit squads had the out of context YouTube tape of Wright’s diatribes wound and ready to be looped endlessly in the fall. And just as certainly the squads are hard at work trying to figure out an angle to try and soil Obama with Rezko dirt. That card would also be played in the fall.

The Wright expose, however, was just too juicy, and media and public tongue wagging scandalous to be put off until the fall. Rezko may not be far behind.

Rove also figures on the X factor of race. Despite the raves Obama gets from many whites (remember his opponent is a woman, and one named Clinton), the X factor remains in how many white centrist and independents will cheer him in a head to head race with any white male GOP presidential candidate, in this case McCain. Rove banks not many.

Obama that is before the pre-Wright fiasco certainly seemed to make an idiot out of Rove’s calculated, and cynical ploy to pump him up as the man the GOP could easily zap. Though Obama has followed his beat Hillary script to the letter, he also has shown enough political skills, stump charisma, and the prodigious ability to pile up a king’s ransom campaign chest to be a bona fide competitive Democratic contender against McCain.

Wright may have changed that. Polls show Obama if not exactly in a free fall, he’s suffered marked slippage against Clinton and McCain. But that hardly tags him as a GOP straw man, yet.

The exact last thing that Rove wants to see is a Democrat in the White House. A bickering, squabbling, negative sniping Obama and Clinton means a potentially bickering, squabbling, negative sniping Democratic Party. That will further fuel dissension, stoke bitter divisions and deflect attacks from Bush’s Iraq war and a meltdown economy and McCain’s back door defense of those policies.

In the Rove scheme, the havoc created by telling one Democratic contender how to beat another Democratic contender would so sour the core supporters and enthusiasts for Clinton and Obama that if their candidate didn’t get the nomination, they’d drag their feet getting to the polls on Election Day. That is if they got there at all. That would be the biggest plus of all for the GOP.

Rove gave Obama seemingly some priceless advice on beating Clinton. But the advice was not given to put Obama in the White House, but to make sure that he or Clinton doesn’t get there. The debate then among some GOP strategists over which is the weaker Democrat is looking more facile even irrelevant by the minute. Neither Obama nor Clinton will get the needed 2,025 delegates to lock up the nomination. The decision will be tossed to the superdelegates. That means more rancor and division. It also probably means not one but two mortally weakened Democratic nominees. That’s Rove and the GOP’s fondest dream.

All ... I ... can ... say ... is ... WOW.

Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow!!!

And may I add -- WOW!

But you need to go see it for yourself.

Then when you're all done, go read this. (H/T Rod Dreher.)

If the Internet has made us all anti-social, it has also turned everyone into an opinionista thanks to blogs and comment functions on websites and community virtual gathering sites. Not everyone's thrilled with the trend, especially not cops who are now the subject of a popularity contest via the L.A.-based RateMyCop.com.

The nationwide cop rating web site does for police what it previously did for academics, in the widely used and perused RateMyProfessors.com. It lists about 140,000 officers across the nation, and 9409 names of the sworn officers of the Los Angeles Police Department, including Chief William Bratton, and allows users to comment on them.

As you might expect, cops hate the attention, the public assessment of their performance and the ability for any yahoo to take a verbal smack at them. Who can blame them?

As someone subject to ratings and critiques by readers all the time, I have little sympathy for cops complaints that they are "exposed" by this site. It's ridiculous to imagine that the pain of getting critiqued by someone who's had contact with an officer (and many, many of them are good ratings, BTW) could put them in harm's way. Believe me, I know. I've been denounced by truly dangerous people and haven't been knocked off yet. And I don't have the protection of a badge. Besides, secrecy is the handmaiden of abuse of power. People should have an outlet to complain or praise the people who have so much power over them. And since we recently found the LAPD's inspector general's office can't be trusted with it, why not an independent web site?

I was so delighted to receive the Pulitzer Prize for my groundbreaking anthology of columns that the nomination for the Noble came as such a surprise that I was beyond shock when I actually won the Noble for my novel Fruitflies in Argentina, written in verse using magical realism.

I was very grateful that I had the funds from the MacArthur Genius Grant to underwrite my writing time. And I assure you all that I value this recognition more than even the two OSCARS ™ and EMMY for the movie version of the novel.

Of course nothing equals the Congressional Medal of Honor, which frankly I didn’t think I deserved. Shooting down 12 enemy planes with a pistol while flying cover for the troops in my Piper Cub while talking the medic on the ground through a brain surgery procedure, well, anyone, I’m sure, would have done the same.

I will now devout all my time to making the table-top cold fusion power system I invented available to all. I must, of course, in good conscience, therefore turn down the generous offers to become Pope, Sultan of Brunei and Secretary General of the UN. But thank you for thinking of me.

What? What? Oh sorry, Honey. Yes, I’ll take out the trash. No, I can’t pay the DWP bill in full. I spent everything on gasoline. What about the MacArthur and Noble money? Oh, well, er, sorry, I uh misspoke, I mean miss-typed.

She has been able to do what, for nearly two weeks, Barack Obama has not -- change the subject away from Rev. Wright. Bosnia-gate has trumped pastor-gate as the scandal du news cycle. It must be maddening for the Clintons, who have lied so effortlessly and compulsively for so long, to now see their penchant for prevarication suddenly turn against them.

Meanwhile, as the Democrats obliterate one another, John McCain gets to sit pretty and watch his favorability ratings soar. Nobody's taken a swipe at him since the name "Mitt Romney" still meant something.

The difference? While Republicans mostly opted for winner-take-all primaries, Democrats, by and large, chose a proportional-winner system. The GOP race thus wrapped up quickly, with even close popular-vote victories amounting to massive delegate gains. On the Democratic side, though, even defeats yielded delegates, preventing either candidate from ever falling too far behind.

And while, as a matter of principle, there's something commendable about a party that calls itself "Democrat" opting for the more democratic means of selection, as a matter of politics, it's been utterly self-destructive. The ongoing Democratic civil war now makes conceivable, or even likely, the possibility that seemed unthinkable just a few months ago -- that the Republican candidate might actually win in November.

Ah, the sacred law of unintended consequences. Since the Reverend Mr. Wright damned America and pretty effectively kneecapped Sen. Obama, the clergy of each candidate has come under scrutiny.

I guess it was inevitable. This whole miserable campaign season started on a low note by examining Mitt Romney’s Mormonism—instead of his words, his record and his policies. Pundits and other Republican candidates wondered: What did the Mormon Church teach about polygamy? What kind of guy was Joseph Smith? When did they stop teaching that people of African origin were not only inferior but that a white marrying one should entail both being put to death?

Some of us hoped that religious questions had been put to bed by the election of John F. Kennedy. We hoped in vain.

The campaign and the subsequent election to congress of Keith Ellison, a Muslim, raised all hell. His loyalty as an American was questioned. His choice to be sworn in on a Quran was attacked—even by relatively mainstream people. Elected officials made dire warnings of what was in store for America now that we had an openly Muslim member of congress.

This led, quite naturally and unhelpfully, to the charge that Barack Obama was a Muslim. Sometimes the charge was that he was a secret Muslim and sometimes that he was an open Muslim. People acted on the presumption that his Muslim names implied his religion. I’m sure there must be moments when Barack may yearn to be just a generic Barry once again.

This Inquisition will end neither soon nor well. Now we are investigating the sermons of John McCain’s pastors. There is the Reverend Hagee who seems less than enthusiastic about the legitimacy of the Roman Catholic Church. There is the Reverend Parsley who not very sagely advocated prison for adultery. But since they are only endorsers and not the clergy of the congregation where McCain normally worships, it is an unfair comparison.

Fairer would be to look at the Reverend Dan Yeary. He is a traditional conservative Christian, strongly opposed to homosexuality, abortion and electing Democrats. Pastor Yeary has expressed some sympathy for the Reverend Wright and spoken of getting carried away in exuberance while in the pulpit. I’m sure his sermons will now be looked at more closely than he may have wished.

Is this to be the new standard? Candidates are responsible not only for what they do and what they say but what they hear? It is an interesting idea based, in my view, on a faulty premise.

The biblical Book of Ecclesiastes begins, in the normal if highly imperfect translation, with, “Vanity of vanities saith the Preacher.” And what greater vanity would there be than believing that anyone is influenced by the words of a preacher?

What is the influence of clergy from the pulpit? I mean if people actually listened and obeyed, if they were at all influenced by sermons, wouldn’t sermons stop and clergy no longer be needed? If we got the message and acted as our clergy of all our various faiths demanded, (you have to admit, an unlikely event), wouldn’t our ministers, priests, rabbis and imams have to find other work?

As Ecclesiastes further points out, “There is nothing new under the sun,” and we never get the simple message. With all of the sermons throughout our human history, there are really very few topics when you think about it. The main three are Sin, Forgiveness and Peace. The clergy mostly preach against sin. How does this seem to be working out? Have we rid the world of sin yet? They’re for Forgiveness. Apparently this is harder to do than it sounds. Peace? Of course, we are all for peace, and we’ll kill any who don’t understand peace as we do.

When I consider Sen. Obama and the Reverend Mr. Wright, I cannot conclude that Obama was saved or ruined any more than any other creature in a pew. To believe that having heard 20 years worth of sermons, some of which were angry in tone, have left Obama embittered, I would have to believe that 3,000 years of history has taught my people always to “do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with G-d.” I would have to believe that Christians got the pretty clear memo from Jesus that we cannot love G-d whom we have not seen, if we don’t love our brothers whom we have seen. I’d have to believe that the most repeated words in the Quran, and in daily Muslim prayers, “In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate,” has inscribed mercy and compassion on every Muslim heart.

People go to their religious houses of worship for many reasons. Sometimes it is neighborhood and convenience. Sometimes it is social. Often it is for the esthetic of worship style—the preaching or the music. Sometimes it is tradition. People even go, or so I’m told, for purposes of business and status. There is little that we can predict about a person’s politics, outlook or moral character by their choice of congregations.

Despite this, we can now anticipate that all candidates will henceforth and forevermore be pastorized—blessed and cursed by the preaching they sit through. We seem to be in the absurd position that when clergy exhort us to good they are highly ineffectual, but when they promote bad ideas using terrible rhetoric they sway us like a mighty wind.

... but according to Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson, Hillary merely "misspoke" when she delivered her fanciful account of her harrowing trip to Bosnia.

... then what is likening Bill Richardson to Judas? Here's Clinton campaign adviser James Carville's reaction to New Mexico Gov. Richardson's endorsement of Obama:

“An act of betrayal,” said James Carville, an adviser to Mrs. Clinton and a friend of Mr. Clinton.

“Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic,” Mr. Carville said, referring to Holy Week.

Earls' post below reminds me of this cartoon:

Of course McCain won't say an unkind word about his pastor, nor should he. Nor will his pastor's words (if they're no more inflammatory than the ho-hum examples Earl has cited) become a big story, like Wright-gate. When a candidate's pastor preaches plain biblical teaching, it is not news. When he preaches racial intolerance and ant-American hatred, it is. Trying to equate the two represents a rather feeble attempt at moral equivalence.

“I believe abortion should be outlawed” and “The Bible is pretty clear about homosexuality, it specifically calls it a sin.” Thus sayeth Pastor Dan Yeary. Normally the preachments of a Southern Baptist oriented minister in North Phoenix, Arizona wouldn’t stir much of a fuss. That kind of hard nosed saber rattle against gays and abortion is SOP within and among Southern Baptist preachers.

But Yeary’s comments deserve special attention for a couple of reasons. He’s the pastor of North Phoenix Baptist Church. And one among the faithful who can often be seen occupying a pew at Yeary’s Sunday services is John McCain. For more than a decade Yeary has been his pastor and spiritual mentor. His rock solid anti-gay and abortion preachments have not been looped on YouTube, endlessly repeated on every major network, peddled on legions of websites, emailed, and text messaged to millions, and gabbed about ad nauseum from the suites to street corners as Obama’s much embattled pastor Jeremiah Wright’s racial diatribes still are.

There are no calls for Yeary to explain, justify, or defend his views. There is no known press effort to dig deeper and find out what else Yeary might have said that could cast him as a wild eye extremist and by extension taint his star parishioner with guilt by association. Yeary is depicted as a benign, thoughtful, soft-spoken man of deep spiritual conscience and belief that downplays politics. His only mission is to save souls even those of damned to hell-fire homosexuals. Yeary, however, caught the drift of the Wright-Obama furor and figured out that some might start pecking around to find out if there were damaging rants that he made on gays and abortion that could be used to hammer McCain. He smartly headed that line of media and public march off at the pass and chuckled to a reporter that he didn’t talk with McCain about politics and that he thought that if McCain were asked whether he agrees with some of his views he would emphatically say that he disagrees as Obama did with Wright.

That’s fair and reasonable enough. Yet Yeary’s denials his hard-line views on abortion and gay rights are politically edged, and they’re shared by millions of voters. These are the millions that McCain banks on to help put him in the White House. But it was touch and go between him and them for a while. An embittered Focus on Family President James Dobson in 2007 loudly proclaimed that he wouldn’t vote for McCain. That spelled potential trouble.

Even before Dobson lambasted McCain, then would be GOP presidential candidate McCain scrambled fast to head off a religious palace revolt. He did a sort of repentance to the evangelicals and came in from the cold when he delivered the commencement address at Falwell’s Liberty University in April 2006. Falwell promptly returned the favor and told the press that he was satisfied that McCain marched in lock step with many of his principles and beliefs. Falwell’s imprimatur of approval on McCain was absolutely crucial to send the right signal to the Christian fundamentalist flock that he was an alright guy.

The Falwell-McCain détente was important for another reason. It was open acknowledgement that the Christian evangelicals could and should have a big say in politics. Despite Yeary’s disavowal of politics, a political agenda is always on the table for Christian evangelical leaders and ministers. Many don’t try to hide it. In a survey by the Detroit News in 2005 following Bush’s reelection the question was asked whether the church should have more influence in politics. Nearly sixty percent agreed.

But Yeary, as many ministers, also know that to much talk about politics will leave them wide open to the charge that they are GOP stalking horses. Falwell was fond of shouting to supporters "I am not a Republican! I am not a Democrat! I am a noisy Baptist!" He was, of course, much more than that. And so is Yeary and the other ministers that deliver the conservative morals message to their Sunday flock.

The sixty to eighty million Christian evangelicals that Yeary speaks for are big, important, and politically positioned. In fact, in 2007 seven out of 10 Americans said they were Christian. They are strategically placed in many key swing states and their numbers haven’t dropped. They have been the back bone of the GOP for a quarter century. Those that self-identify as evangelicals or born again Christians in 2004 made up nearly one out of four voters. They provided the vote muscle for Bush in 2000 and even more muscle for him in 2004. Yeary and McCain will move earth and especially heaven to make sure that they flex those muscles again in 2008 for the GOP.

Wright may have been a liability for Obama, but Yeary is certainly not one for McCain. Don’t expect an unkind word here from McCain about his pastor.

Be sure to read today's L.A Times account of the release of Willie Earl Green from San Quentin -- 24 years after a wrongful murder conviction. There are a few stunning things about this piece. The first is Green's fascination with all the trappings of modern life he's missed out on:

It was a day of firsts for Green. He drank his first cup of Starbucks coffee. He took it with cream and sugar -- two treats forbidden in state prison. His wife told Green that she would teach him to use her newfangled coffee maker and washing machine when they got home....

He asked a reporter to let him hold a cellphone, a contraption he had never touched before. He fingered the keypad a bit and carefully relinquished the phone. "Take it back before I drop it," he said....

An investigator for Green's legal team demonstrated a remote device to unlock the car. Green watched with delight as the investigator showed him how to open the doors and pop the trunk.

"That is something," Green said. "Teach me that someday."

More remarkable still is Green's under lack of bitterness, despite having so much of his life taken away:

"The system that put me in here was the same system that got me out," he said. "It's not perfect, but it's the best system in the world."

And finally, there's this chilling thought: What if Green had been executed? Wrongful imprisonment is terrible enough, but at least it can be corrected. The death penalty is irrevocable. Once applied, mistakes can never be undone.

Something to ponder on this, the commemoration of the day when Christ Himself was wrongly executed ...

Democratic Presidential contender Hillary Clinton will win the Pennsylvania primary April 22. That’s not a prediction made to denigrate or minimize the big effort Clinton rival Barack Obama has made in the state. The voter demographics perfectly match those in Ohio which she won. A huge percentage of Pennsylvania voters are blue collar, anti-big government, socially conservative, pro defense, and intently patriotic, and there’s a tormenting history of a racial polarization in the state. Pundit James Carville has even described Pennsylvania as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, with Alabama in between. Carville’s characterization is hyperbolic, but devastatingly accurate. Take the state’s two big, racially diverse cities out of the vote equation and Pennsylvania would be rock solid red state Republican. Polls show that Clinton’s decisive lead over Obama hasn’t dropped a point in the state. In fact, it continues to widen.

Obama tacitly acknowledged the likelihood of defeat when his strategists dropped hints that they bank heavily on bagging Indiana and North Carolina in their May 6 primaries. The aim is to recoup any momentum lost from his looming Pennsylvania loss. Wins in these two states could nudge him further ahead of Clinton in his delegate total.

Unfortunately, an Obama win in Indiana and North Carolina will continue to feed the false hope that if he’s the eventual Democratic nominee, he can beat Republican presidential contender John McCain in the red states; and Indiana and North Carolina are two of reddest states. The last Democrat to win Indiana was Lyndon Johnson in 1964. The last Democrat to win North Carolina was Jimmy Carter in 1976. The vote demographics in Indiana and North Carolina are not much different than the demographics in the other top heavy GOP states that Obama beat Clinton in. A cursory glance shows that.

Obama swept to primary or caucus wins in Idaho, North Dakota, Kansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Virginia and Nebraska. Bush won these states handily in 2000 and 2004. But that’s only the start of the problem for the Democrats. Republicans outnumber Democrats in Idaho and Utah by a three to one count and in the other states by margins double or one and half times greater than the Democrats. If Obama wins the Kentucky primary May 22, his backers will tout this as a big red state victory. It won’t be. Republicans outnumber Democrats by a crushing 400,000 vote margin in the state.

The states that Obama won in the Democratic primary have been the guaranteed pathway for Republican presidents Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. to win and stay in the White House. Their 170 to 200 electoral votes are in GOP coffers before the first vote is cast on Election Day. The states are so bankable and reliable for the GOP that it’s the rarest of rare sights to see a GOP presidential candidate traipse through the states in the stretch run of the campaign.

The Clinton strategy is the opposite of Obama’s. She recognized that these states are not in play for the Democrats; so why squander time, energy and limited resources in a pointless pursuit of votes there. Better to spend the time and resources on Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, and even Texas with its surging numbers of solidly pro Clinton Latino voters. These states are in play for the Democrats. Their electoral votes can make the decisive difference when the race is on the line. Florida and Ohio proved that. They cinched Bush’s two election victories.

Democrats were also ecstatic at the near record turnout by Democrats in some of the red states that Obama won compared to the relatively lower turnout by Republicans in the primaries in those states. This means little. Far fewer Republicans turned out in the Republican primaries in the election battles of Bush Sr. in 1988, Reagan in 1980, and Bush Jr. in 2000. All three were still elected.

Obama’s wins in the rock solid red states are commendable. These were states that he had to win to rev up his backers, sway some fence sitting super delegates to jump aboard his bandwagon (it worked with Georgia Congressman John Lewis) and most importantly wildly inflate expectations that he can do what Democratic presidential contenders Al Gore and John Kerry couldn’t do in 200 and 2004 and that’s win in the red states.

The hard numbers and the strong GOP tradition in these states, of course, tell otherwise. Already, the latest Gallup poll (March 14-18) shows that the gap in a head-to-head showdown between McCain and Obama is widening. Meanwhile, McCain and Clinton are statistically in a dead heat. A win by Clinton in the big states that are solidly Democratic and the must win swing states that she won in the Democratic primaries will yield the needed electoral votes to insure that the race with McCain is competitive for the Democrats. If history and voter demographics are any gauge, those votes won’t be in the states that Obama won in the Democratic primaries.

... and she should be.

One of the more artful, but deceitful, ploys in Obama's Wednesday speech was conflating Ferraro's utterly innocuous comments about race with the hateful rantings of Obama's own "spiritual adviser." Here's one of the quotes from that speech:

"On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike."

So there you have it, stating the bleeding obvious -- that many voters favor Obama because he is black -- is conflated with saying the CIA created HIV to wipe out African-Americans. (This is the same CIA, mind you, that was convinced there WMDs in Iraq.)

I love, too, how Obama pretends that Ferraro and Wright are at opposite "ends" of the political spectrum. Um, sorry, Barack -- these are two lefties here. The Democrats' (suddenly cannibalistic) appetite for identity politics is wholly a Democratic problem.

Anyway, back to Ferraro. "To equate what I said with what this racist bigot has said from the pulpit is unbelievable," she says, and she's right. It's far worse than some overheated Obama aide calling Hillary Clinton a monster (which, for what it's worth, is really no worse than Hillary's calling Dick Cheney "Darth Vader").

And if that weren't enough, Ferraro has also called out Obama, again rightly, for throwing his grandma under the bus. "I could not believe that," she said. "That's my mother's generation."

Really, couldn't Obama have said, "There are even dear people in my own family who have used racist stereotypes" -- and left it at that? Did he really have to brand Grandma as a racist before the whole country?

This flap is going to hurt Obama's chances greatly. Not just because it casts doubt on the sincerity of his "post-racial" appeal, but because it cuts into the very question of his decency. One of the greatest advantages Obama once had is that, unlike Clinton, he didn't seem like the sort of politician who would say or do anything, or sell anyone out, to get elected. That no longer appears to be the case.

A few months ago, I would have told you Obama would rout McCain in a general election. Now, if he wins, I suspect it will be in a squeaker -- and that's assuming he even gets to the general election.

All of which proves, once again, that long-range political predictions are for idiots.

The man who never rests is taking a day off -- without pay!

And it's easy to see why. When Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa proposed that Los Angeles city workers take voluntary furloughs (unpaid days off) to help save their jobs, he envisioned the city reaping $20 million worth of savings. But in the end, the plan only brought in a measly $95,000 -- probably because city workers, like the rest of us, like getting a paycheck.

Meanwhile, despite his lofty exhortations, Villaraigosa was notably not among the few self-sacrificial workers to forgo a few days' wages. So now the mayor has decided to lead by example by making today his day off. But being Antonio, he can't really just take a breather:

Regardless of the furlough, the mayor plans to attend five public events today.

In the morning, he will join Los Angeles City Councilman Ed Reyes, county Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky and members of Congress for a helicopter tour of the Los Angeles River.

Then, the mayor will attend the 41st annual Firefighter of the Year Luncheon to honor LAFD Capt. Stephen Norris. Following that event, the mayor will deliver the keynote address at the Southern California Association of Governments' Regional Transit Summit.

In the afternoon, Villaraigosa will head to Wilmington to discuss a landmark vote by the Los Angeles Harbor Commission. To end his day, Villaraigosa will attend the Korean American Chamber of Commerce's 31st annual Gala.

What a guy, he's working for nothing!

But rather than short-change himself, Villaraigosa ought to embrace more straightforward accounting: He should go ahead and charge the city for today's work -- but pay back his wages from all the weeks he spent traveling around the country stumping for Hillary Clinton.

... comes a newly revealed devotion to Jesus Christ.

God bless Mikhail Gorbachev, shown here paying a visit to the tomb of St. Francis of Assisi:

"It was through St Francis that I arrived at the Church, so it was important that I came to visit his tomb," said Mr Gorbachev.

"I feel very emotional to be here at such an important place not only for the Catholic faith, but for all humanity."

I'd say that Lenin must be rolling in his grave, but I suspect that the USSR's first leader has come to know the reality of God even more profoundly than has its last ...

I've posted the toon above because it neatly encapsulates an argument I've heard from various Obama apologists, namely that Barack's association with Pastor Wright is no more odious than John McCain's receiving the endorsement from Rev. John Hagee. It's a nice try at moral equivalence, but it's just not true.

To put it simply: There is a big difference between receiving someone's endorsement and giving someone your own. And it was Hagee who endorsed McCain -- not the other way around.

If Obama had simply received the endorsement of Rev. Wright, this would be a non-issue -- you can't control who likes you, and no cause is so noble that it won't attract bad people. This is why few people much care that Louis Farrakhan has endorsed Obama, even though Farrakhan's views make Wright's look positively mild.

But because Obama has held Wright out as a spiritual and political mentor, Wright's intemperate views are relevant. They suggest that even though Obama might not share these views, he is all too accommodating and comfortable with them. As I noted earlier, this is not just a friendship, but a religious/ideological connection. Certainly it tells us something about what Obama thinks, even if the meaning of that something is in dispute.

Meanwhile, that some crazy likes McCain tells us very little about McCain -- and it's hardly something for which the Arizona senator need apologize.

“There were early warning signals of the ugliness that could come….the message was that Obama was not exempt from a racial dig. That was also evident in the knock at Obama's Southside Chicago church, or to be more exact the minister at the church, Jeremiah Wright. He is an outspoken afro-centric activist on racial and social issues. The inference was that Obama's guilt by membership and friendship with him made him a closet radical and a race baiter.”

This writer wrote these words in a column January 6. It was a no-brainer prediction that the Wright card would eventually be played hard by the media and milked for all it’s worth. The inflammatory, provocative rants of Wright were well-known. Thousands within and without his church have heard them for years. His afro-centric tinged writings have been widely cited by black commentators. It was only a matter of time.

The only surprise was the timing. This writer expected that the Wright card would be kept tightly in the political deck and dumped on the political table by the GOP “truth squads” in the fall if Obama is the eventual Democratic presidential nominee. But then again why not dump it on the table now. The Wright rants are just too juicy, racially salacious, and media sensational to keep under wraps any longer. And since Hillary Clinton has been so trashed and demonized by much of the media, while Obama got a free pass, all the better to toss out Wright now. If Obama can be hammered with and tainted by the guilt by association tag with Wright that further poisons the Democratic Party well and makes the throngs of independents that are enthralled by Obama waver, maybe even rethink just who and what they’re getting into by backing him.

But this writer didn’t just make the prediction that the Wright card would sooner or later be used against Obama. He also flatly predicted the instant Obama stood on the steps of the Old Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois back in February 2007 and announced that he was on a history making quest to be president that two things would happen. The first is that the racial innuendos, rumors, gossip, hints, digs, and finger-pointing would be a subtle and tormenting subtext to his campaign.

The second thing was that he couldn’t duck and dodge racial matters by simply pounding away that he and his campaign was about hope, change and unity. That was good campaign stump stuff but it is not the reality of race and politics in America.

Now we come to his so-called race speech. Obama did the obligatory sprint backwards from Wright’s preachments and philosophy. The idea was not just to distance himself from Wright’s views, but to get ahead of the curve and reassure the waverers and doubters about him that his hope, change and unity theme was still alive and well. The problem with this is that it won’t quell the doubts.

He made the speech only under extreme duress, namely the beating that he took for his association with Wright, and his fear that it could wreck or at the very least be a horrible distraction to his campaign. As he correctly noted, the Wright speech(s) will continue to resurface and will continue to be a prick in his campaign’s side. It won’t open up any new dialogue on race that some commentators naively think will or should happen. Obama in fact told us why. He mentioned the O.J. Simpson case, and how the great racial discourse that the case supposedly ignited was grotesquely twisted, mangled, and ultimately botched. But that doesn’t mean race will magically disappear from the presidential campaign trail, or more specifically from Obama’s campaign trail. These questions will still be whispered or shouted out whenever Obama’s name is mentioned: Is America ready for a black president? Will whites vote for him in a showdown with two white males? Does he really have the experience (read intelligence and competence)? Is he patriotic enough? Is he black enough? Is he too black? Will he tilt toward blacks and other minorities in the White House? Will he be a yes man for (white) corporate interests? Will his election make race a dead issue in America?

This doesn’t make for serious dialogue on racial problems, let alone point America in the direction of real solutions to them. This is mere momentary racial titillation. Obama’s speech contained the seed for the racial discourse dodge when he spoke of the disparities in the criminal justice system, failing inner city schools, HIV/AIDS, and chronic and nagging Great Depression high rate of black male unemployment, the need for greater family supports only in the broadest of broad generalities. There was not the barest hint of any specific initiatives to tackle these problems.

The Wright issue and by extension race was forced on Obama. One eloquent and flowery speech won’t make either go away.

Plenty of countries claim up and down that they don’t hold political prisoners, and those eager to do business with that country are usually too eager to buy their story. But a recently leaked copy of a secret politburo document should leave everyone with little doubt that not only does Vietnam persecute political prisoners; they’re worried about learning to persecute more efficiently so they’ll catch less flack from the international community.

I got a hold of that memo, which was so tightly controlled that copies were numbered, sent out to the Communist Party hierarchy, then recalled and the numbers ticked off to make sure all were returned. Read all about it in my column today:

“When pressed last year on human rights during his historic visit to D.C., Vietnamese President Nguyen Minh Triet passed off violations as a ‘different understanding’ that needed to be taken in context of ‘historical backgrounds and conditions.’Pro-democracy Vietnamese, however, understand well the conditions in place to systematically keep their voices silent. Now an apparent memo from the top tells the story.

The top-secret, just-leaked Vietnamese government document urges Communist Party officials to become more conscientious in their quest to ‘limit the spread of false ideas in the population about democracy, human rights, religious freedom, which impacts negatively on the Party and the State foreign policy,’ and work ‘to institute effort to neutralize these organizations and individuals who conspire to maneuver against the country and socialism.’

The document titled ‘NOTICE: Conclusion of the Political Party, concerning raising the bar of quality and effectiveness in the execution of the political trials in the face of new development’ and dated Sept. 12, 2007, was distributed to provincial authorities, party officials and leading technocrats, as noted in the memo.

Signed off and stamped by Standing Secretariat Member Truong Tan Sang, the Politburo sent out numbered copies on a recall basis. Yet a copy of the document was leaked by a Communist Party member to the People’s Democratic Party of Vietnam, which advocates a multi-party system and is thus banned by the Vietnamese regime.Reading the document - the English translation provided by the PDP - is a window into a regime that systematically conspires to silence dissidents and fears international scrutiny could derail its attempts at global acceptance.

‘The quality and effectiveness of the execution of the political cases have not met the requirements to enable the struggle to prevent and deal with these crimes,’ the memo reads, complaining that ‘the charges and rulings in a number of cases have not been appropriate’ and trials have been ‘allowing the accused excessive responses.’

‘…To fight and defeat the attack plot of the enemy forces is our first line of defense, urgent and immediate.’…”

Over at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a reader says this in response to the column running there:

"If we had followed thru in Vietnam 30 years ago this would not be happening..."

Looking forward to seeing how those readers respond to that...

(The photo, btw, is Father Nguyen Van Ly, who said "Down with communism!" at his sham trial, and in response the politburo puppets clapped a hand over his mouth.)

Just got this e-mail from a very dear friend, with whom I differ on a great many issues:

I was thinking -- just think of the Arabs that I am friends with and the views they hold -- some of them I'm so close with I'm going to Tunisia with them next year to visit their familiies, and I would never disown them, even if I were running for president -- is that comparable to Obama's situation?

She writes of some Arab neighbors who have become her good friends, and who are dear in every way -- except that they hold some truly frightening, ignorant viewpoints about Jews. (My friend strongly rejects these views, and vehemently disagrees with them whenever they are expressed, but still values these neighbors' friendship.) Here's my response:

I don't think the analogy you set forth is appropriate. It's one thing to have friends and loved ones who hold beliefs you find offensive -- I've got them in spades. (Starting with you!) It's another thing, though, to set these people up as your "mentor" or "spiritual adviser."

A friend is someone whose company you enjoy regardless of ideology, politics, or worldview. A political and/or spiritual mentor is just the opposite -- it's someone whose advice you take seriously precisely because of beliefs (regadless of whether you like the person on a personal level or not).

If this were Obama's brother-in-law or golfing buddy, it wouldn't be much of an issue. But it's a man he considers a source of wisdom and inspiration -- and that's what makes it problematic.

In addressing the Wright controversy and the race issue, Barack Obama hit the ball out of the park. He did a beautiful job of showing how America can get past its racial obsession, not by burying real grievances, but by keeping them in their proper context:

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

The only question is: Will it work? Obama may have said all the right things, but it no longer matters what he says -- it matters what people think he believes. His strongest asset, his authenticity, has been damaged. First the NAFTA flap, then the Gerldine Ferraro nonsense, and now the Wright brouhaha have all served to call Obama's sincerity as a race-transcending straight-shooter into question. And this is a hard problem to overcome.

No matter how fine the speech, it will do little good if people don't buy it.

I find fascinating the polarizing and unpredictable division of opinions in the Obama-Wright kerfuffle. Just look at what we have here at FF and in the Daily News. First there's Jasmyne Cannick, who in today's paper lines up strongly behind Jeremiah Wright and his heated rhetoric, and denounces whites who would criticize it:

It seems that it's not enough that we've adopted their religion and most blacks are worshipping to their white, blue-eyed Jesus, but now they want to dictate the message that we receive as well. And in the process, they've backed Obama against a wall, forcing him to publicly distance himself from his pastor in order to prove that he's not an angry black man in disguise.

Then in a post yesterday that became an op-ed in today's paper, Jonathan offers what is, I think, the perfect counterpoint:

This is not about an endorsement from a person with distasteful ideas. This is about belonging to a community that presents an angry and aggrieved face to the world. That anger may be justified is not the point. The public face of his church is far different from the face that Obama presents to the nation.

Exactly. Jasmyne may be right that Pastor Wright represents an authentic voice for part of black America, but he stands in stark contrast to the hopeful, unifying, race-transcending themes that have been the centerpiece of Obama's campaign. If Obama had run as "an angry black man" (as Jasmyne puts it), he would never have made it to frontrunner status. Indeed, angry candidates of any race seldom do well in a country that craves optimism from its leaders.

Meanwhile, I find myself agreeing with Rob, to an extent, that Wright's anti-American statements are not entirely bad. There is something noble, even patriotic, about not looking past the evils of one's own people. And while I disagree with Wright about what some of those evils are (the idea that the CIA created AIDS to wipe out blacks is vile, noxious hookum), I do find myself uncomfortable with certain Republican-types who react furiously to any suggestion that America might be anything less than immaculate.

Christopher Hayes makes the point nicely in this article in The Nation:

Imagine for a moment that you are pro-life. You believe that each abortion represents the murder of an innocent child. ... If you were religious, you might think that God judged America harshly for this crime, for the nation's continuing indifference, and you might even think that God damns America for its tolerance of a holocaust.

It's hard to imagine, though, that if a Republican presidential candidate were running for president and had a preacher with the views spelled out above, that it would cause much of a stir, or even register a blip in the brain-dead oscillations of the twenty-four-hour, scandal-cycle EKG. And yet here we are, five or six news cycles into an ongoing firestorm over a few seconds of two different sermons delivered by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, pastor of Barack Obama's (and Oprah Winfrey's) Chicago church, and a man who Obama says "brought me to Jesus."

Although I would argue with some of Hayes' language and conclusions, he has a point. I, for one, do believe that America's abortion regime is an abomination. And a pastor who says as much, even if he uses overheated and harsh language, is speaking the truth.

Where Hayes comes up short, though, is in his suggestion that a Republican whose pastor said God was damning America for abortion would not suffer for it politically. It's one thing to say abortion is evil. It's another, from a political standpoint, to say America is evil, whatever the reason. As Jonathan aptly asks at the end of his article:

Senator Obama, is there any conceivable way that you could place on your ticket as Vice President a person who attended The Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Church for twenty years?

The answer is no, and not just for Obama, but for anyone running for president. Falwell's suggestion that America brought 9-11 upon itself went over the line for how much national self-condemnation the public will tolerate -- from the left or the right, black or white.

Here we return to Rob's discussions of national self-criticism and patriotism. As far as I'm concerned, the most toxic words Rev. Wright has uttered are not the anti-American ones we've heard on TV the last few days, but the racialist and arguably anti-Semitic ones I wrote about two months ago. Yet clearly those never generated the same level of fury.

Go figure.

I concede readily that the Pastor Wright controversy is a punch in the head to the Obama campaign. But on the bright side, it does offer evidence that Obama may not really be a Wahabi jihadist.

Beyond the politics, I'm pondering what the reaction to Wright says about our citizenry.

Wright got a lot of cheers in those notorious YouTube videos. That confirms that his angry denunciations were reassuring, cathartic and vindicating to many in his flock. But what seems to be righteous indignation to one person always seems like lunacy to the object of that indignation -- and that's why so many conservative whites are shocked, shocked by it all.

And while what Wright said was inflammatory, he and his crowd would surely liken it to Jesus turning over the tables of the money-changers at the Temple. Truthfully, his comments about America's judgment before God are certainly in line with a New Testament view of human depravity and the need for redemption and reconciliation.

That's what makes me think about how so much of religion in America is just a diluted, nationalized form of civil religion that can make Wright -- or any bold person who makes us uncomfortable -- look like the devil.

Yet, whether a person is a theologian or a patriot, think about what Clarence Darrow said: "True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else." Maybe, just maybe, the pastor who has famously said, "God [bleep] America" is in that sense a true patriot.

The Olympic torch run is set to pass through San Francisco -- its only U.S. stop -- on April 9. Now, Mayor Gavin Newsom refused to even listen to human-rights advocates who said that welcoming this tainted torch in the city stands against SF's liberal traditions. And now, he's trying to corral protesters into designated "free-speech areas" -- out of sight of the torch path so as not to offend the delicate Chinese government. Which, as I've been told, thousands of protesters may not take kindly.

The weekend's tragic, bloody crackdown on freedom-seeking Tibetans in Lhasa should make everyone angry -- and should stress the need to hold China's feet to the fire. Mark your calendar for a pre-torch rally at UN Plaza in San Fran on April 8, followed by march to the Chinese consulate and candlelight vigil that evening; then on April 9 the torch run is expected to go through the financial district, where tens of thousands of protesters are expected to gather. I'll be there, and I hope many Angelenos can make it!!

From a friend (and former DN employee!):

"If you ask me, the Spitzer case isn't even about sex, it's about POWER. Eliot Spitzer liked having the power to buy a $1,000 an hour prostitute. After all, he got his Harvard educated lawyer wife to quit her job and take care of their kids - I have a feeling this is a guy who won't let anyone else in his life outshine him and has to bully others. Hence the hookers. Ick."

Good point. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, baby...

I'd like to take a moment to clear up something: Contrary to popular Hallmark-card sentiment, everybody is not Irish on St. Patrick's Day. Everybody can wish they're Irish, drink like they're Irish, and then go to confession afterward like they're Irish. But did your ancestors lose all their potatoes, watch a million die, then decide, "Damn, I'm hungry! Think it's time to go to America!"?

One parting thought for today: Eist le fuaim na habhann agus gheobhaidh tú breac.

This now is the tipping point for Barack Obama’s presidential hopes. There is no need, for the moment, to worry about Michigan, Florida or super-delegates. He will survive or he will go under. In a week we will know if he survives Pastor-Gate or if he is dragged under by the overblown, offensive and disturbing rhetoric of his pastor and friend, The Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

As a fervent supporter of Sen. Barack Obama, I have had to explain, and sometimes rationalize, parts of his resume that were disquieting to many. The ugly slurs about him being a secret Muslim agent, a kind of Muslim Manchurian Candidate were easy enough to deal with. Since they were factually untrue, they moved few people. Supporters were not deterred and opponents were not further alienated.

As to his foreign policy advisors who were characterized as anti-Israel, well, this is in the category of half-truths. Yes, Zbigniew Brzezinski was on the panel, along with some other Jimmy Carter people. But this was a large panel and has many people who are strongly pro-Israel, including Clinton’s go-to guy, Dennis Ross.

Obama has a broad spectrum of views on all of his advisory panels, and he is willing to listen. This to me was, and is, a selling point, making him different from the incumbent who will brook no dissent and hear no views other than his or Cheney’s.

The silly stuff that Sen. Clinton threw at him about plagiarizing a couple of sentences did not stick. It is really difficult for a candidate who reads prepared speeches from her hired speechwriters to charge an opponent with using someone else’s words.

However, going to a church and listening to sermons that were angry in tone and hateful at times is a far more difficult problem to explain away or rationalize in a satisfactory manner. This is not about an endorsement from a person with distasteful ideas. This is about belonging to a community that presents an angry and aggrieved face to the world. That anger may be justified is not the point. The public face of his church is far different from the face that Sen. Obama presents to the nation.

The question of the week, the political life and death question before us, is if he gets a break that a white candidate would not get. Were I to run for office, I don’t think I could belong to a civic or religious group that demonized another race or religion. So can Obama survive attending his church for 20 years, contributing significantly to it and including, up till Saturday, The Reverent Wright as an official part of his campaign?

No, I am not to be judged by what my rabbi says. When he goes out on a limb, I do not have to crawl on out there with him, though mostly I’m happy to. But when I disagree with my rabbi or officials at my university must I either denounce them or assume that people will believe they speak for me? Of course not. I belong to organizations that are proudly as Philo-Semitic as Obama’s church is proudly Afro-Centric. These cultural, religious and ethnic associations are not, in themselves, problematic. What is problematic is the heat of the rhetoric.

What is the threshold for walking out on hateful rhetoric? How long am I allowed to listen to even a learned rabbi castigating Arabs or Muslims in a racist and unacceptable manner? If I stay ten minutes is it too much? What if, believing the talk to be an aberrant anomaly, I come back for another try? Now, what if I keep coming back for twenty years? At some point, I legitimately become identified with the institution, its missions, message and style. This cannot be avoided. I do not find Obama credible that he never heard any of this nasty rhetoric and all this comes as news to him.

The defense that The Rev. Wright was essentially about social justice is off point. At some point, style becomes substance, and our choices, our habitual choices, “come home to roost.” The message of The Rev. Wright is distasteful.

I watch Fox News sometimes. But if it were my main source of news, you would be right in making certain suppositions about how I think and feel. If I bought an X-rated movie now and then (which I don’t), it would probably mean nothing. But if I bought them regularly over a long period of time, it might influence how you thought of me. Would watching only Fox guarantee me as a conservative? No. Would the regular buying of porn prove I am sexually bent? No. But inferences could be drawn by consistent behavior over time.

Senator Obama’s relationship with The Rev. Wright does not prove him to be a bigot, anti-America or anti-Israel. I do not believe he is any of these. This is, however, a test, an important test, of credibility and judgment. The one question that Sen. Obama needs to find a way to answer, and I don’t know the right answer, is this: Senator Obama, is there any conceivable way that you could place on your ticket as Vice President a person who attended The Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Church for twenty years?

So any reader of mine knows that I enjoy crashing protests and reporting from within. But yesterday, I just couldn't do it. I couldn't bear to see the signs stating that deposing Saddam wasn't worth it, that the U.S. was the evil aggressor -- particularly considering that this weekend is the 20th anniversary of Halabja.

I write about the grim anniversary this weekend at Pajamas Media:

"...Being no stranger to crashing war protests, I can bet that if you held a poster bearing one of the infamous images of a man who fell and died at the base of a home’s steps clutching an infant whose mouth was frozen in a vain gasp for air, or the pile of bodies in traditional colorful clothing strewn across an otherwise verdant hill, most demonstrators would assume the grisly images are products of the American war machine. They wouldn’t like to hear that these murders were committed by the dictator we deposed.

On March 16, 1988, Iraqi warplanes bombed the Kurdish town of Halabja with chemical weapons including sarin and mustard gas, targeting civilians as part of the Anfal campaign to rid Iraq of its Kurds. Five thousand — three-quarters of them women and children — died from the chemical cocktail. Children trying to rush home fell in the street, while the insidious gasses claimed those who cowered in basements from what they thought was a traditional bombardment. Thousands were left with chemical burns, blindness, cancers, birth defects, etc.

The Halabja attack was, in Josef Mengele fashion, an experiment to determine which of the various chemical agents worked best on the population, where were the best strategic places to drop the poisonous canisters, where victims would fall and how many. 'These were field tests, an experiment on a town,' Iraqi defector Khidhir Hamza, the former director of Saddam’s nuclear-weapons program, told then-New Yorker reporter Jeffrey Goldberg in 2002. 'The doctors were given sheets with grids on them, and they had to answer questions such as "How far are the dead from the canisters?"'”

Read the whole thing!

Acknowledging Halabja, though, means acknowledging that ousting Saddam served a purpose -- and that the international community turned a blind eye (again) to genocide.

My favorite contestant is the old guy in this audition tape from Mazar-e-Sharif:

It's like "American Idol," but scours for contestants in Kabul, Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif, Kandahar, etc. There's even an Afghan Ryan Seacrest (who's actually a medical student) and a woman on the judging panel a la Paula Abdul. It's in its third season, and this year a woman from Kandahar placed third, the highest ever for a woman, drawing lots of fans and pissing off conservative clerics. And I can't help but notice that, sans beards, there are some hot guys in Afghanistan...

There appear to be a few common denominators in the current news coverage of the mortgage mess.
* Everyone speaks in jargon -- analysts, pols and journalists alike.
* Few people frame any of the issues in terms of common sense, although a few people speak of "fundamentals" as a sort of quasi-common sense.
* Fewer people speak in terms of character -- as in the need for American investors and consumers to show character in their commitments, or the need for the American investor to show a commitment to his craft that isn't based entirely on the government's ability to puff up his mood, or the need for the American consumer to tighten his belt and pledge to come back tomorrow as a stronger and wiser person.

If you read the current narratives of Wall Street and Main Street, you would have no idea that America has been built on individual initiative, self-reliance, a pioneering spirit, and a commitment to do well for oneself while also doing well for others. Rather, you would suspect that we are consumer addicts with a sense of entitlement to the things we seek to buy. Does anyone really think government can help us here with minor tinkering or major posturing?

Neither the fall of Oedipus nor Eliot is about sex. Their downfalls and humiliations are earned by their character (or lack there-of) and most importantly by their moral blindness.

When comparing these two disgraceful and disgraced figures, I remind you that the tragic hero is not necessarily heroic in our modern sense. They are great men only in the sense of the greatness of their power, not their virtue.

This certainly describes Spitzer—a man famous for ferocity, lack of compassion and a zealotry that seems based on exceptional, what the Greeks called, Hubris and we refer to as chutzpah.

Oedipus’ great sin was not so much that he married his mother and thus gave Freud a career and influence beyond the bounds of even death. It was his impetuosity, his single-mindedness. Raised in a royal house, he felt entitled. When upset by not getting the right of way for his chariot, he slew the man who had refused to yield. In this first recorded incident of road rage, he slew his biological father and then married the widow, his mother.

When he learned that his kingdom was being punished by the gods for some great sin, he set out with fierce passion to find the culprit, not knowing that he was looking for himself. With eyes wide open, yet blind to his moral culpability, he sought to find the scoundrel responsible for the city’s suffering. Only the physically blind seer Tiresius could see deeply enough to know that Oedipus was headed for disaster. Throughout the play light and dark are constantly contrasted. Secrets are brought to light after being hidden in darkness. As Oedipus closed in on himself and began to see where he was headed, he cried out in an attempt to mitigate his guilt and responsibility that he was “caught in the web of the gods.” Tiresius said, “No, Oedipus, you weave your own doom.”

At the moment that Oedipus truly sees what he has done, when his moral blindness is cured, he plucks out his physical eyes thus trading one blindness for another.

Spitzer, also born to a high station in life, was relentless in the pursuit of evil. We, and probably he, thought to punish it, but it turns out to perpetrate it. He wanted to punish the bad guys and was willing to do anything to find criminals, and punish them. He bragged about living in a Manichean world of black and white, good and bad, virtue and evil. As zealots do, he pursued evildoers without pity or remorse. He hated lies. He hated cheats. He hated prostitution. That his swift fall followed from the world finding out that he was everything he seemed to hate may seem at first blush to be hypocrisy. I suspect that this is too easy an analysis. I suspect that what he hated derived from what he feared that he was. He chased the bad guys, the cheats, the hookers, the Johns to slay his own demons.

We know the sad narrative by now—the double cliché of the fallen icon weeping in contrition for his sin—the anti-gay crusader caught in a men’s room, the preacher found in a motel, the justice department anti-crime crusader charged with perjury. We know too the second cliché of bringing the wife, teary and humiliated, in front of the cameras. For what? To show solidarity? To indicate that someone still stands with him? Why is she being punished for his sins?

I understand the perp walk—parading some fallen executive from home to car in cuffs. This is meant to embarrass and humiliate. It is a cautionary gesture warning other malefactors to be aware of the costs of being caught. But for the most part the FBI doesn’t cuff the innocent spouse. Oedipus’ wife/mother, when all was revealed got to die off-stage. A good example of compassion.

Oedipus and Eliot have their public falls from grace, power and privilege. What was dark and hidden is brought to light by zealous and ironic acts of self-immolation. Two men with great power and potential destroy themselves with pitiousless moral blindness—and in the end, those who were physically sighted prove to be blind and two physically blind men remain: Tiresius the Seer and David Paterson the new governor of New York.

It's high enough.

For years, my bi-monthly DWP bill was usually somewhere between $150 - $175 for water, sewer, trash and electricity for my small two-bedroom house with many water- and electricity-saving devices. A couple months ago the combined whammy of increased trash fees ($11 a month to $26 a month) and higher water rates pushed it up to as much as $250 per billing period. Now, the city is thinking about raising the trash fee again?

Yes -- if you can believe it. According to a Times story today ( they occasionally get a City Hall story in the paper before us, but believe me we will cover much heavier than the Times over the course of thing), city officials are talking about raising the trash fee again, to $38 a month. Combined with the 6 percent hike in water rates again and 9 percent in power in the near future, I can see my bi-monthly bill easily surpassing $300 -- a 100 percent increase from just last summer -- despite the fact that I'm one person in a small house and I don't have a lot of electronics and don't take frequent long showers. I even have low-flow toilets, front-loading washer, no lawn a very low water landscaping and compact florescent bulbs in all my fixtures.

If my bill goes up to $300, what must other people be experiencing?

The natives are getting restless in Los Angeles City Hall, what with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa uttering the l-word -- layoffs. And folks aren't happy. Some internal e-mails that city workers are passing among themselves have been forwarded our way, and they reflect a great deal of frustration with both the political and the bureaucratic leadership.

First there's this:

Let us all contact the Daily News newspaper and express our opinion.....didn't he take his entire staff to China last year....and didn't he approve a raise for DWP who already makes more us and also to the Fire and Police depts. If he is going to lay off people, he should start at the top because those people make the most money and usually do less work....I know many management analysts who just pass their work down to the clerical; I'm sure you all know what I mean!!

And then this:

Augh!!!! Don't get me started on lazy MAs "delegating." I've known some (but not all) that have proven to be the laziest bunch of employees in the City! But, I'd start the layoffs much higher up the chain of command. Layoff a dozen of those six-figure salaried employees, and the deficit will be resolved!

A justly defiant Geraldine Ferraro just keeps getting it right. She told NBC that if anyone should apologize for playing the race card it’s Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama. She flatly and rightly blasted Obama for virtually calling her a racist for merely saying what Ray Charles (may he rest in peace) could see and that’s that the media has employed a blatant, no grotesque, double standard when it comes to tip toeing around any criticism no matter how slight and muffled of the hyper thin skinned Obama.

Yet let rival Hillary Clinton (or God forbid hubby Bill) even breathe the R word about Obama and the screeches from the clinically obsessive Hate Hillary Clubbers are swift and loud.
Ferraro bore the full brunt of their noisy howls and the double standard when she dared intimate that the media and much of the public has turned like Lot’s wife into a stone mute on race with Obama while unleashing a 24/7 barrage of sometimes thinly veiled and other times outrageous sexist innuendos, wisecracks, taunts and ridicule of Clinton. As Ferraro correctly noted if you scratched out gender from the cracks at Hillary and penciled in race and made the same veiled and not so veiled racial digs at Obama the howls of protest would be heard on the Moon.

A textbook case was the Martin Luther King, Jr. versus Lyndon Baines Johnson flap a couple of months ago. Clinton in an innocent and in fact praiseworthy and totally factual statement said that Johnson played the major role in getting the 1964 Civil Rights Act through Congress. Oh Boy! Clinton was: take your pick: A. a maligner of Dr. King B. a slanderer of the civil rights movement C. a closet bigot. When Clinton fought back the by now all too predictable pattern from the Obama camp kicked in. First self-righteous indignation, followed by deliberate distortion of her actual statement, followed by personal attack and slander, and then the capper, plausible deniability that Obama never made an issue of it in the first place.

But here’s the bigger problem with all this. The great strength of the Obama campaign has rested squarely on his pitch that he’s the post-civil rights guy, with a broad based, issue driven, non-racial appeal. That’s the front door, image enhancing spin. The back door, under the table pitch is to subtly play race at every turn. Whether it’s getting Oprah to nakedly and blatantly rev up blacks on the campaign trail, or hint to black audiences about his poverty and civil rights work, or to cast a different cadence of speech when he’s talking to black groups, or most importantly to snatch at every chance to turn even the slightest reference to race by Clinton or anyone in her camp, such as Ferraro, into a federal case.

This tired act is wearing thin and thankfully a few that have not totally abandoned all sense of reason are seeing through this melodrama. In an editorial, “Obama and the Race Card,” the Wall Street Journal got it right. It blistered Obama for the wrong headed, and self-serving dictum that if anybody white dares bring up race they automatically will be branded as the second coming of David Duke (my characterization). Yet, it’s totally permissible ala the Lyndon Johnson blast at Clinton for the Obama campaign to bring up race when and wherever it’s deemed in their interest.

The even bigger problem with all of this is that this shows beginning warning signs of backfiring. That was plainly evident in the Mississippi primary. Obama would have gone down to a crushing defeat if it wasn’t for the black vote. His on the surface hope and change message fell flat on its face with white voters. He won exclusively with the black vote (90 percent). Clinton got the overwhelming bulk of the white vote. The racial polarization was in the Democratic primary! If Obama is the eventual Democratic nominee it isn’t political rocket science stuff too figure out how he’d fare in the general election in the state if he had to depend on the black vote alone.

Now back to Ferraro. She didn’t just ask for an apology from Obama for virtually calling her a racist, she also warned that if the Obama camp persists in this shell game on race, that he risks alienating many Democrats that could and would raise money and votes for him if he is the eventual nominee. She included herself in that category. It may already be too late on that score. Race is just too good and too juicy a plum to abandon when it serves a campaign purpose. In other words, Geraldine, while you certainly deserve an apology from Obama, don’t hold your breath waiting for it.

"I guarantee there is some meat on the chicken."

That was Arnold Schwarzenegger's characteristically colorful response to a question from the Daily News editorial board today about whether the state can dredge up more revenues by closing "loopholes" in the tax code. By "meat on the chicken," Schwarzenegger means cash -- he's sure there's more of it, somewhere, for Sacramento to scoop up.

But doesn't Arnold oppose tax hikes? Hasn't that been his signature position, the one resolute stance that makes him palatable to the state's increasingly irritated Republicans?

Well, it was ...

"I would never begin negotiations by saying this (or that) is is off the table," Schwarzenegger now says, implying that in budget talks with legislative Democrats, new taxes will certainly be considered. Indeed, "There will be so many things on the table it will be like we're in the candy store."

Still, Arnold knows better than to actually say he supports tax hikes. When asked the question directly, Schwarzenegger interrupted and remarked only that he's willing to close those aforementioned "loopholes."

But the meatiest of all the "loopholes," at least according to State Legislative Analyst Elizabeth Hill, is the home-mortgage deduction -- which is anything but a giveaway as far as middle-class homeowners are concerned. Eliminating it would be nothing but a tax hike for millions of Californians. And when pressed, Schwarzenegger specifically declined to say the home-mortgage deduction was off-limits.

Which is to say, tax hikes for everyone will soon be on the table at the Sacramento Candy Shoppe. And Arnold's days as an anti-tax warrior are numbered ...

** UPDATE ** -- 3:55 PM -- Just got off the phone with gubernatorial aide Matt Davidson, who wanted to clarify Schwarzenegger's position: "The governor does not believe the home-mortgage deduction is a loophole, but is open to debating all ideas at the table with leaders to solve the '08-09 budget deficit."

In a meeting with the Daily News editorial board this morning, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made his previously ambiguous position on granting driver's licenses to illegal immigrants clear: It's not going to happen. Not under his watch.

Upon taking office nearly five years ago, Schwarzenegger promptly overturned a similar law that Gray Davis had signed into effect. Then -- and when the measure has come up in subsequent years -- Schwarzenegger said he was open to giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, but cited technical reasons for why he couldn't do so just yet. Throughout most of that time, he said California couldn't act until the federal government offered some clarifications on the Real ID Act.

Well, that objection vanished back in October, when New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer -- yes, that Gov. Spitzer -- struck a deal with the feds to offer Real ID-compliant licenses to illegal immigrants in the Empire State (not to be confused with the Emperors Club).

We all know how that turned out. New Yorkers revolted, Spitzer got hammered, and he ended up pulling the plug on the proposal. The fiasco devastated his approval ratings, which no doubt was a big part of why he lacked the political capital to withstand his hooker scandal.

No wonder, then, that Arnold -- who has long tried to dodge the issue anyway -- will have nothing to do with it now. When asked whether he would support licenses for illegal immigrants since Real ID is no longer an obstacle, he said, "It doesn't look good."

And why?

"Because the people of California hate it, and I represent the people."

There you have it.

Schwarzenegger also observed that this issue -- along with the budget and the car tax -- led to the undoing of Davis, and he wasn't going to repeat that mistake.

So, like other local politicians who know better than to touch this political hot potato, he called on Washington to clean up its immigration mess, and praised not only John McCain, but also George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama for their commitment to comprehensive immigration reform.

Generally I'm not one to sneer at the pages of sex ads in alternative publications like the L.A. Weekly, possibly because they seem somewhat sad. Those ladies, and some men, are just trying to make a buck in a city that sells sex in any way people will buy it. Besides, it seems marginally safer to ply your trade through the want ads than working the mean streets of Sunset or Sepulveda.

But the ads of the Emperor Club VIP that are floating around on the Internet chill me in a way that my libertarian sympathies can't dismiss. It's not such much the Playboy centerfold type spreads of women's bodies with their measurements that bothers me. It's not the seven-diamonds ratings system, though it seems better suited to a movie or hotel. It's the marketing language that advertisers use for any other product for sale on the free market.

The online intro to the club (recently taken down, not surprisingly) boasts top-notch product:

"Our meticulous standards of beauty, intelligence and charm ensure that you always encounter the quality you've come to expect in a woman."

Ugh. The crass commodification of the "escorts" doesn't even try to dress up the prostitution. We got your quality piece of ass right here.

Obama supporters screaming "racist!" every time someone says something less than flattering about their candidate, or Clinton supporters screaming "sexist!" every time someone dares to question Hillary's integrity.

To his credit, I haven't heard John McCain say "You just hate old people!" -- yet. But given the country's obsession with victimology, it seems all but inevitable.

Al Qaeda has gotten to Lahore and Islamabad faster than it's been able to get to L.A. or Iowa City. The Model Town section of Lahore is a small area where my mother grew up, a place I'd often visited during my youth.

Pakistanis appear exhausted by how they've been pulled into the war on terror. They blame Musharraf for bowing to Washington's demand for a heavy-handed response in the anarchic northwest frontier that borders Afghanistan. Many say that Pakistan should negotiate with the militants, even though neoconservative dogma maintains that talking with terrorists is folly. Many Pakistanis just want everyone to go away -- the U.S., the Taliban, the countless Afghan refugees who trampled their land in the wake of "Charlie Wilson's War."

We as Americans will need to understand, in coming years, that we have to take seriously the voices of those people who are far closer to the carnage than we, those people who face a far greater threat each day of being victimized than we do. We need to appreciate those allied citizenries whose lives are on the line, just as much as or more than our own American troops' lives are on the line.

I'm with Earl that Geraldine Ferraro should get a merit badge, though I think she should get it into not being cowed to back down from her comments from an interview with DN-sister paper the Daily Breeze yesterday.

I'm hip to the Obama thing, but I'm tired of his campaign crying "racism" every time someone makes a statement pointing out the obvious. I'm sure that if he's the nominee, there will be amble opportunity to protest real racism from the not-too-colorful GOP. Besides, of course Obama's ethnicity has something to his success -- that's an honest observation, not a slur. And many think it's a factor in a good way. This nation is becoming increasingly non-white and there's a sense that it's time for a less-than-white leader who can understand and lead a new America of people from all over the world, not the old one which was run by wealthy middle-aged white men.

Here's what she said:

"If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color), he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept."

She thought it, she said it, and now, she's not going to be cowed into taking apologizing.

Far from backing off from her initial remark, Ferraro defended it and elaborated on it.

"Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says let's address reality and the problems we're facing in this world, you're accused of being racist, so you have to shut up," Ferraro said. "Racism works in two different directions. I really think they're attacking me because I'm white. How's that?"

Wow! Imagine if she had only become VP way back when. Instead of maligning her, the Obama campaign should recruit this strong woman.

And let's not even talk about the much more prevalent sexism at work in this race. And credit to Hillary Clinton for not harping on it, though it's evident to any woman closely observing the race.

I know the whole world is dumping on New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer lately, but I think his resignation speech today was pure class. He's owned up to his faults, assumed responsibility, accepted the consequences -- and now tries to pick up the pieces.

Some notable lines:

• "From those to whom much is given, much is expected. I have been given much - the love of my family, the faith and trust of the people of New York, and the chance to lead this state. I am deeply sorry I did not live up to what was expected of me."


• "Over the course of my public life I have insisted, I believe correctly, that people, regardless of their position or power, take responsibility for their conduct. I can and will ask no less of myself."


• "I go forward with the belief, as others have said, that as human beings our greatest glory consists not in never falling but in rising every time we fall."

Amen to that. One hates to see our leaders ever embroiled in this kind of scandal, but much to his credit, Spitzer has shown exactly how to respond to one's failings with grace. Godspeed to him and his family.

... a look into our not-so-distant future:

Might he say a word or two about the pleased comments about his potential presidency that were found on a laptop of the Colombian terror group FARC? You know, the nuggets buried at the bottom of the AP's story on the contents of the seized laptop:

"Writing two days before his death, (FARC commander Raul) Reyes tells his comrades that 'the gringos,' working through Ecuador's government, are interested 'in talking to us on various issues.'

'They say the new president of their country will be (Barack) Obama,' he writes, saying Obama rejects both the Bush administration's free trade agreement with Colombia and the current military aid program."

Surely a notorious killer, kidnapper, and drug trafficker isn't an ideal endorsement. Two days after Reyes' death, before the laptop discovery was released, Obama released a short, general statement against the threats of war in South America, saying diplomacy through "international actors" (Danny Glover?? Sean Penn??) should be used to defuse the situation. Obama's previously signaled his opposition to free trade with Colombia, but what about the U.S. aid agreement by which President Alvaro Uribe has been able to battle the traffickers and the FARC (which still holds three American hostages), thus making the cities there livable again? I'd love to hear Obama's opinions in light of the Reyes mail...

So I've heard the argument all day on TV: If politicians had to resign for being unable to control their sexual urges, we'd have no politicians left. Yeah, no great debate there. But Eliot Spitzer paid for sex, thus breaking local law, and paid to transport his call girl from N.Y. to D.C., thus breaking federal law. Break the law, step down. It's not a "personal" matter.

Plus, the affair should call into question his money-managing skills as governor, too. Five grand for an hour or two? Potentially $80,000 spent over his career as a high-class john? That averages out to about 16 moments of, er, sexual satisfaction for the price of the first house my parents bought. Undoubtedly, he thought the money was buying his anonymity (though he used a friend/donor's name without the guy's knowledge -- nice!) and buying his secrecy (yeah, that worked really well).

So Spitzer should wipe the Gumby look off his face and call it a day.

Incidentally, I was at the Mayflower hotel a little over a year ago, but all I got was an omelet from a book publisher who wanted to yap about ways to stick it to the left. She should have left the cafe, gotten in the elevator, went about eight floors up, and gotten the story, evidently...

Fire former Democratic VP candidate and Hillary Clinton advisor Geraldine Ferraro? She ought to get a merit badge pinned on her for having the guts to tell the truth. Ferraro got it right on both counts when she sad that race has made a difference with Barack Obama. He has gotten a virtual free ride from much of the media. His paper thin voting record, lack of experience, zig zag stances on foreign policy issues, Republican lite positions on health care and the sub prime housing crisis, repeated subtle going negative against Hillary Clinton while giving himself a plausible deniability out and insuring that Clinton gets dumped on when she hits back has been blatantly obvious. The media and much of the public have kept hands off him in part out of sheer terror of being branded racist and in part out of hatred for Clinton. And that’s the other thing that Ferraro got right. She flatly called the media sexist and said that many Americans, she really said America, has a huge problem with a woman running for president.

The Obama camp screamed bloody murder at Ferraro’s brave and very accurate remarks. They went through tortured gyrations in demanding that Clinton fire Ferraro by comparing her to the justly released Obama aide Samantha Power. There is no comparison. Power should have gotten a swift boot for her personal, slanderous and mud sling name call of Clinton as a “monster.” Ferraro did not engage in personal name calling against Obama but rather made a blunt political comparison between the double standard treatment Clinton’s campaign has gotten versus Obama’s.

That double standard should rankle anyone who believes in at least some fair play in what’s arguably the dirtiest business around, namely American politics. But that’s been a moot point when it comes to dealing with Clinton. From the instant she tossed her hat in the presidential ring back in January 2007 she’s had to deal with a relentless barrage of gender tinged wisecracks and outright insults on the campaign trail. At one rally, hecklers yelled to her to iron their shirts. Other gender taunts and slurs were even less flattering. Radio host Rush Limbaugh told listeners in one of his nationally syndicated shows, "Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?" Clinton has been taunted in some online websites with fake ads for toilet brushes labeled, "First Cleaning Lady" and a Clinton nutcracker was also for sale. It cracked nuts between her legs. Hillary Clinton's hairdos, ankles and even her cleavage did not stir any sustained protests or outrage from either men or women.

A female in the White House would shatter the frozen in time mindset that the first lady isn't the president but the emotional helpmate to the president. That notion, though, is still a foreign concept to many men. In February, the Associated Press and Yahoo News found that 40 percent of Republicans said they would be reluctant to vote for a woman. A much smaller percentage said they would be reluctant to vote for a black.

More than three decades before Clinton made her run for the White House, then New York Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm the only other woman to make a spirited run for the presidency as a Democrat quipped that “Of my two "handicaps" being female put more obstacles in my path than being black. I've always met more discrimination being a woman than being black.” Chisholm got a frosty reception from the male members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Thirty six years and nine presidential elections later some things haven’t changed as Ferraro noted for a woman that seeks the highest office in the land.

The politically correct view is that Clinton’s entrance into and drive for the presidency will permanently alter the hostile mindset of many men that a woman is not equipped to hold the highest office. That’s been the biggest myth of all. In Democratic primaries in January and February Obama held his own or surpassed Hillary’s vote total with white men. He did it in some of the most traditional bastions of white male voter resistance to backing a black candidate in elections past.

The votes he got from the men didn’t necessarily mean that these men were enthusiastic backers of Obama. It likely meant that when it was a head to head contest between a man and a woman, they backed the man. Many liked Obama’s message of change, but there were undoubtedly other men that simply didn’t like Clinton, or rather the thought of a woman in the highest office. As Ferraro accurately put it lots of men fit that bill.

Clinton will be under intense pressure to dump Ferraro. She should mightily resist it. After all, no one should lose their job for telling the truth.

"I also ask you to work with me on another environmental first. I propose that California be the first in the world to develop a low carbon fuel standard that leads us away from fossil fuels."

That is, of course, the same governor who takes a private jet, almost daily, to and from Sacramento, burning more fossil fuels that a slew of normal commuters over the course of their lifetimes. So how does Arnold justify imposing tougher green burdens on the rest of us when he does so little to reduce his own massive carbon footprint? This is how he answered that question yesterday:

To me it's very important that I serve the people of California, but also at the same time that I serve my family. And so in order to do both I fly two or three times a week up here to Sacramento and fly back again so I can be at night with my family, can do the homework with the kids, can spend time with my wife and everything, which is extremely important. I promised that to them and I promised to the people of California I would take care of the job. And that's what I do. That's why I fly up to Sacramento and all over the state.

In other words, I've got my own good, personal reasons for releasing enough greenhouse gases to choke Al Gore.

Which, no doubt, is true. But here's the thing -- we all have our reasons.

I have good reasons for driving a big family car (a minivan) -- namely three kids (and a fourth on the way) whose state-mandated car seats wouldn't fit in a Prius. I've also got good reasons for a 90-mile round-trip commute -- namely, it's what I need to do to be able to afford a home where we can feel comfortable raising our children.

That's the point. Other than, oh, the occasional millionaire with a garage full of Hummers (not to single out anyone in particular, mind you), we all have good reasons for doing what we need to do to get around this crazy state. And Arnold's plan for higher fuel-efficiency standards on cars will impose a real hardship on middle-class families struggling to get by and get around. (Private jets, of course, are exempt from the higher fuel-efficiency standards.)

While I'm willing to make some sacrifices if the health of our planet depends on it, there's something infuriating about a governor calling on ordinary people who live on tight budgets to make such sacrifices when he's unwilling to make any himself. Like telecommuting, or saving some of that jet-fuel dough and buying his family a house in Sac'to. (And please don't tell me this "carbon offset" nonsense counts.)

Surely if Arnold thinks that saving the earth requires us to make some tough choices, he can lead by example.

Reports today show that our tap water contains some additives that would normally be quite upsetting, even disgusting. While our water officials assure us that the “bad parts” of our bodily wastes are filtered out and we are in no danger of catching anything microbial, one must wonder at the not so bad, in their view, parts of our bodily waste remaining. Toxicology reports indicate that traces of drugs, many drugs, do show up in our drinking water. Therefore, they are likely to show up in us.

Our water, across the nation, reveals traces of diazepam and other tranquilizers, as well as anti-biotics, vitamins and uh performance enhancing drugs such as Viagra and Cialis and estrogen. This only effects an estimated 41 million people—so far. Southern California, not surprisingly has relatively high anti-anxiety drugs, while San Francisco—and I’m not making this up—leads the way in sex hormones. New York City has high amounts of caffeine but strangely not as high as suburban New York. Maybe they suffer from anxiety envy in the burbs.

I remember the good old days when it took a right wing nut to worry about the government medicating us for our own good. At that time, the drug scare was about fluoride. Officials argued that it would prevent tooth decay. People who feared the precedent responded that we could buy fluoride if we wanted to and the government had no business making our drug choices for us, however benign their motive or whatever the efficacy of the drugs. Where, they wondered, would it stop? Would they give us vitamins too? Maybe some statins to lower our rates of heart disease would be a good idea. As long as the government could establish a public interest, why not add anti drug abuse drugs that would make us sick if we ate, drank, smoked or swallowed substances that were either illegal or bad for us.

Some years ago, there was a fairly major story about lithium occurring naturally in the aquifers that fed the city water of El Paso, Texas. Some scientists and statisticians claimed that this lithium, which, in tablet form, is used for treating manic-depressive disorders, must be responsible for El Paso’s low rate of mental health hospitalizations—specifically compared to Dallas. The water department of El Paso somehow failed to grab a hold of this and market their natural lithium as part of a healthy and sane life-style. Instead they declared that you would have to drink 600 glasses of their water to get a therapeutic dose. The different rates of mental health complaints might, however, make one wonder at what we actually know about what really constitutes a therapeutic dose. We might wonder further at how much the calming words of assurance we hear today are actually worth.

We know that many of these drugs are still—hard to resist writing “potent” when talking about Viagra or Cialis—potent enough to effect the life that lives in our rivers and reservoirs. There is apparently enough estrogen to feminize some fish. There are reports today about confused fish that start out male but after taking a bath in estrogen and Viagra don’t know which way to go. Some are actually self-reassigning their gender and becoming anatomically female.

I long for simpler times when we worried about fluoride and DDT. Now I cannot even know what it means to drink responsibly. Will I pass or fail drug tests at work? Will I be disqualified from sports because of steroids? And how should I compete—I mean as male or female?

These testing results, on the face of it, are not very assuring. The “toilet to tap” people promised us pure water—and this seems to mean only bacterially pure. They are, they claim, successful at killing the bugs by filtration and ultraviolet light. They put this treated water back into the ground to filter it for a couple of years before it re-emerges into our water supply theoretically: Great, clear, sparkling and safe. Except maybe it’s not. They could get rid of the drugs with reverse osmosis, but that is prohibitively expensive.

Still, I’m not as upset as I think the facts warrant. I wonder why? Oh, maybe it’s the tranquilizers. And you know, my wife’s black silk blouse might look good on me. I think I could carry it off. Wonder if it comes in extra-large?

As the sad news of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's adultery and involvement with prostitution breaks, expect to hear some talk of "hypocrisy." After all, he was an anti-corruption crusader who prosecuted a couple prostitution rings in his days as New York's attorney general. But expect nothing of the sort of hypocrisy-hyperbole you might hear if Spitzer were a Republican, a conservative, or, worse yet, an opponent of "gay marriage."

Whenever anyone who has said a word in support of traditional families gets caught in one of these sex scandals, all hell breaks loose. Think of Newt Gingrich. Or Larry Craig. Or Robert Livingston -- to cite just a few names from a very long list. Among the chattering classes, these conservatives' marital sins are considered to be somehow worse than progressives' like Gavin Newsom's because right-wingers have the nerve to prattle on about "family values" from the campaign stump.

But as a candidate and as a governor, Spitzer has also been know to prattle on about family values -- he just does so in support of "gay marriage." Consider some of the phrases he has used to describe marriage, words which could have come straight from James Dobson or Pope Benedict XVI.

• Spitzer has called the bonds of matrimony a "solemn commitment."
• He has said that "the institution of marriage produces incalculable benefits for society, by fostering stable familial relationships."
• He's called marriage a "crucial social institution."
• He's even said, "Strong, stable families are the cornerstones of our society. The responsibilities inherent in the institution of marriage benefit those individuals and society as a whole."

Both opponents and proponents of "gay marriage" claim that matrimony is important -- the former argue it's so important it cannot be altered; the latter argue it's so important that it must. Either way, both pay lip service to the institution and its role in society.

So how is a married supporter of "gay marriage" any less of a "hypocrite" when caught soliciting $5,000 call girls from the Emperors Club VIP? He, too, has violated the very moral code he claims to uphold, the one he's cited to advance a political agenda as well as a political career. He, too, has fallen far short of his own rhetoric and his own publicly held ideals.

Here we get to the rub: "Hypocrisy" is an overrated vice. The only ones among us who aren't hypocrites are the shameless, those who don't fall short of their own ethical standards because they have none in the first place. (No one will ever call Larry Flynt a hypocrite, but is this really a statement in his favor?) The rest of, struggling to live morally in a fallen world, are all hypocrites and will be until the day we die. We no doubt try to do better, to live better, to be better -- but in the meantime, we'll fall short.

Which is why the great cudgel of "hypocrisy" that progressives like to wield against fallen conservatives is nothing more than that.

Eliot Spitzer may be a hypocrite, but that hardly discredits any of the positions he's taken in the past, on marriage or anything else. Indeed, the fact that he's willing to acknowledge his failings -- rather than to deny they are failings at all -- shows that he's just one more soul struggling for the grace to live up to his ideals.

May he find it. May we all.

Perhaps it's just me, but I find a curious, though clearly quite coincidental, connection in NY Gov. Eliot Spitzer's prostitution scandal (watch the video of his press conference here a few minutes ago which he apologizes for something, but never says what). Spitzer reportedly met with his high-priced prostitute (no crack 'hos, for Eliot!) at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington according to a federal probe. (He had her flown there. She must have been one special hooker! The kind you can't find in Washington.) And Spitzer worked for the former NYC district attorney's office, which in 1984 busted the Mayflower Madam -- Sydney Biddle Barrows.
Ok, it's a thin connection. But fun!

It's true. Authorities finally cracked down on the word factory in Los Angeles in which journalists are forced to work in adverse conditions, long hours for low pay and levied fines against the owners. Ok, it was one of those other Daily Newses out there, the Chinese Daily News in Monterey Park, and a federal judge fined the company $5.2 million. Here's an excerpt from the Editor and Publisher story:

Reporters testified in the case that they were forced to work six days a week at 12-hour shifts that could extend to 17 hours at times with no breaks for meals. Supervisors altered time cards to make it appear that no overtime was worked. Reporters were also given quotas of stories to come up with, according to the lawsuit.

More than 200 reporters, ad salespeople, delivery drivers, secretaries, and production workers ultimately joined the class-action lawsuit that was first filed in 2004.

And I thought long hours was jut part of the 24/7 news cycle!

The newspaper fired workers who dared to complain about the workload or overtime situation, the lawsuit contended. Lynne Wang, a former reporter who told the New York Times she was fired in 2005, said workers felt unable to complain because of the non-stop work, a culture of intimidation, and their ignorance of U.S. labor law. ...

"Reporters were required to produce five stories a day, Ms. Wang said, which meant they had to race between news conferences and interviews for hours without a break. Production workers and packers did the same indoors, spending hours before presses and stackers. Quotas for advertising salespeople were unreasonably high, she said, and drivers were forced to navigate rush-hour traffic with long lists of delivery addresses strewn across the sprawling city."

Curiously this story says it was first reported by me, Mariel Garza, in the Los Angeles Times, which I found amusing because a) I don't work for the Los Angeles Times and b) I never even wrote about this for the Los Angeles Daily News.

If your enemy drops a bomb on you or shoots your child, you will be understandably aggrieved, angry and want revenge. This is only human.

When Israel suffers a shooting, as yesterday, with 9 rabbinic students slaughtered, I understand the rage and calls for action. When Palestinian families lose their children and their homes, I understand that they too cry out for what seems like justice to them.

Here’s what I do not understand. Truly, I do not understand dancing and celebrating the deaths of civilian members of the group you oppose. Not being a pacifist, I accept that war and violence are sometimes necessities. This is always tragic and never holy. There are no holy wars. That is an oxymoron. There should be no joy in the destruction even of an enemy.

The Talmud teaches that when the Red Sea closed up on the Egyptians who were pursuing the escaping Hebrews, the angels began to rejoice. G-d rebuked the angels saying that they dare not take pleasure in the deaths of the Egyptians, by saying that “they too are my children.”

Yes, when death and destruction rain down on you, your family or people you won’t much care about mood or motive. You will have pain, loss and rage. But there is something fundamentally different between fighting and killing with enthusiasm and fighting with heart aching and eyes filled with tears.

The Palestinians danced today; they danced at 9-11, they danced while dead Israeli soldiers were dragged through the streets and displayed like animals. I have never seen Israelis dance at Palestinian suffering and death. Why?

Why are these Palestinians, including children, celebrating? Because a terrorist group newly named after fallen Hezbollah kingpin Imad Mughniyeh sent a gunman into a rabbinical seminary last night and opened fire, killing eight and wounding nine as they studied the word of God and prepared for Purim. Thousands of Palestinians celebrated the massacre in the streets.

More from the AP, including the quote of the day:

"Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev harshly condemned the shooting and said the Palestinian government must take steps against the extremists — not just denounce their attacks.

'Tonight's massacre in Jerusalem is a defining moment,' he told The Associated Press. 'It is clear that those people celebrating this bloodshed have shown themselves to be not only the enemies of Israel but of all of humanity.'

...Israeli defense officials said the attacker came from east Jerusalem, the predominantly Palestinian section of the city. Jerusalem's Palestinians have Israeli ID cards that give them freedom of movement inside Israel, unlike Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the attacker walked through the seminary's main gate and entered the library, where witnesses said some 80 people were gathered. He carried an assault rifle and pistol, and used both weapons in the attack. Rosenfeld said police were also searching for an explosives belt.

...Yehuda Meshi Zahav, head of the Zaka rescue service, entered the library after the attack. 'The whole building looked like a slaughterhouse. The floor was covered in blood. The students were in class at the time of the attack,' he said. 'The floors are littered with holy books covered in blood.'"

Now that it looks as though we can't avoid a brokered Democratic convention, I'll admit some annoyance at how the Clintons just won't go away. I know that Earl feels there's too much Clinton-bashing going on.

But I've long defended the Clintons and I even do believe that a vast right-wing conspiracy unfairly chewed on their legs (as the fine book, Hunting of the President, depicted). But this campaign of theirs reminds me of their worst tendencies, like how Bill clung (clang? clinged?) to power during Monicagate, when it was obvious that stepping aside in favor of Gore would have helped his party (and the nation) over the long haul. It all feels too much about "them."

The only good piece in all this is that Obama needs to learn to deal with the kind of back-alley scuffle that the Clintons enjoy, or he'll be a hapless Dukakis II in the fall anyway. So the Clintons are doing him a favor.

And if Obama fails to get the nomination, it'll at least make for a helluva fight between the Limbaugh dittoheads and the very vengeful Clintons.

Bridget is wise, in her advice to John McCain, that he just be himself in the months leading up to November. In this age of focus-group testing and overnight polling, authenticity is the single trait voters seem to crave the most. It's a lack of authenticity that doomed Mitt Romney, even though he had all the money in the world, and it's an abundance of authenticity that made a contender out of Mike Huckabee, even though he was penniless. Likewise, Hillary Clinton 's lack of authenticity has been a major problem for her "inevitable" candidacy. And it was authenticity that propelled Obama into contention -- and a lack of authenticity vis-a-vis the NAFTA flap that has derailed him.

But as Bridget notes, there's more at work here than just whether a candidate is for real. It also matters whether a candidate can break the current cycle of partisan hatreds. She calls this "seizing the middle" -- whether a candidate can demonstrate a real ability to work outside party lines.

Assuming Obama still carries the Democratic nomination, this campaign could end up featuring two candidates who stake their claim on "uniting" the country. But there is a difference: Whereas Obama bases his ability to reach across party lines on little more than his soaring oratory, McCain has a long history of bipartisan cooperation to his credit. He also has the battle scars to prove it, all from fellow Republicans who couldn't stand his deviations from the party line.

The contrasting records couldn't be more striking. McCain has an impressive record of working with Democrats on bipartisan solutions to intractable problems. Obama, on the other hand, has never worked with Republicans on a single matter of substance during his three years in the Senate. McCain bucks the party line, and thinks for himself, on countless issues. Obama is a cookie-cutter Democrat who's yet to give voice to a single independent thought.

Thus, by "being himself," McCain would not only bolster his authenticity and his centrist bona-fides, he would also quietly expose Obama's biggest weakness -- the perception that he is a rigidly partisan ideologue.

This is an argument Hillary has been unable to make against him, as primary voters tend to like partisan ideologues. But it's the issue that could well puncture the Obama bubble come the general campaign.

I'll be on The Martha Zoller Show at 8:20 a.m. Pacific time/11:20 a.m. Eastern this morning to talk about the presidential campaign here on out, specifically my hombre McCain. Listen live here!

Here's a little advice for McCain which won't appeal to some conservatives, but is necessary to win in November: Don't change. Be Mr. Maverick. No pandering to groups or people with whom you've never aligned before just to make CPAC happy.

Because the November win and the White House remaining in GOP control hinges on the middle. That big mass of moderates that seems to grow with every election, that group that stays in the polls' "undecided" column right up until Election Day. Buoyed by her wins, Hillary will now go after Obama at the kneecaps and their respective agendas won't long be shrouded in identity politics or feel-good, happy happy rallies. The left will be struggling to find its core, the left will be exposed, and the middle will be for the taking.

McCain will pick a more dyed-in-the-wool conservative VP. The angry Anybody But McCainers have already used up their 15 minutes of fame and their calls to boycott the polls or vote for the Dem to teach the GOP a lesson will be regarded as more than silly by the voters in just a few months. Mac is back, and the more important thing he can do right now is not change. Heck, he should emphasize his compromise record. Stress that the real change is reaching across the aisle once in a while to get things done in D.C.

Be yourself, Mac, be yourself. No right-wing butt-kissing. Seize the middle!!

How is it that we are debating NAFTA and the shipping of jobs overseas while at the same time letting Airbus win a $41 billion contract for tanker planes for our Air Force? This contract is likely grow to over $100 billion Euros over the next decade. This represents money that could be spent here, and workers who could be employed here. The fig leaf of Northrop having offices in the states and some assembly taking place here is just that—a fig leaf.

Instead of worrying about tech support in India and people sewing shirts in South Asia for pennies and hour—jobs not really injuring our citizens—why are we not demanding the return of aerospace industry to our shores? This is not simply about jobs, though this is certainly an important part, but about our ability to engage the world.

We know that we have problems when the oil spigot dries up. What about when the world disapproves of some American foreign policy initiative? Could our military be held hostage to French foreign policy objectives or by a vote of the European Union? If we outsource our military equipment, the answer becomes Yes.

Should we need spare parts, we can imagine ourselves, like Cuba, isolated and starved of the ability to keep our planes in the air. Yes, this is economic but it is also a matter of national security.

As we enter a recession with growing deficits and unemployment, as the world becomes less and less influenced by our wants and needs, this contract is madness itself—economically, for jobs, for the deficit, the balance of trade and for our security and freedom of movement in the world.

Lilia Esther Garcia was appointed to the East Area Planning Commission today. The board is responsible for planning decisions in Silver Lake, Echo Park, Boyle Heights and northeast Los Angeles.

The appointment means nothing to many until you realize she's the the sister of Monica Garcia, the rather unremarkable president of the LAUSD board of education and one of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's special hand-picked board members. She was also the former aide to Councilman Jose Huizar when he was the president of the LAUSD school board, who was the anointed replacement when Villaraigosa left the 14th council district for the mayor job. It's just like a big happy family here in Los Angeles politics.

If you're on the e-mail list of any animal-loving person or organization, you've surely been forwarded a link to the YouTube video of a young Marine tossing a small black and white puppy off a cliff. I have seen stills and chosen not to watch the video (posted below for the few and the brave) as the puppy looks too much like a younger version of my own Beastie.

The outrage over the tossing and the creepiness of it being filmed and distributed (don't Marines have more important things to do on duty?) is understandable, even if it is a fake. (Hey, Hollywood makes unreal stuff look real all the time). If it is, the Marine should be dealt with severely by the military. Anyone who sees the killing of any of God's creatures as entertainment and funny ought not to be trusted with a gun or authority.

But what I find fascinating about animal-cruelty incidents ( like the road rage in San Jose a few years back in which a man grabbed the dog out of a car and tossed it into traffic) is the visceral, ferocious reactions it evokes in many, many people, turning some irrational nuts. The Seattle Times reported that a family of the same name as the Marine received death threats in the wake of the event (story doesn't not make clear if the family is related). How does that serve anything?

I admit too that animal cruelty hits my irrational bone in a way that human suffering just doesn't. I don't know why, only that it does. I can tell myself that killing a dog is no different than the pain, suffering an torture that went into my In-and-Out lunch, I can rationalize that its no worse than the mistreatment of so many children around the world who labor in terrible conditions to make the cheap clothes I enjoy. I don't even want to admit what I do to certain bugs that find their way into my home. And then there's the horror of war in which regular people, including kids, get essentially thrown off a cliff. Where's the outrage? The death threats to the White House?

But I'm not immune either. My gut, and my heart, are wrenched by the idea that the little furry guy in the pictures was real and died a scared, pointless death. Just like it was when I read about the chihuahua who was locked in a freezer during a burglary up in Palmdale last year. Would my heart still ache if it was the dog's owner was left for dead in the freezers by robbers? I don't think so. Would yours?

This was the worst night yet for the packs of obsessive charter members of the hate Hillary Clinton club. Their first bad night came back in January when despite the gleeful, hopeful but totally false and overblown anticipation of the wrong headed pollsters that predicted a smash Obama victory, Clinton bagged New Hampshire. Tuesday’s outcome was much worse for them. The same gleeful, hopeful, but just as wrongheaded pollsters and even more wrongheaded pundits deliriously wrote the epitaph for Clinton (“the end is in sight,” “her Waterloo,” “will Clinton stand down,” and on and on the blarney headlines screamed).

They didn’t matter. This writer flatly predicted a Clinton win in Ohio and Texas. It wasn’t hard to do. Despite the Clinton is finished doom and gloom predictions, what the Clinton haters missed, or rather deliberately omitted was that she was never out of the hunt for the nomination. Clinton ran no ads, had only a token campaign staff, and spent virtually no time in the string of primary election states that she lost. The reason was simple. She smartly concentrated on winning the two states that she had to win, Texas and Ohio. The losses in the smaller primary states meant little since she still had an ample number of delegates and super delegates in the bank. In fact despite the loss in these eleven primary states she was still about five percentage points behind her rival in the delegate count. Losses in the Democratic primary meant even less still in states such as Utah, Nebraska, Kansas, South Dakota, and Montana. They are safe Red States and the eventual Democratic nominee doesn’t have a prayer of winning them anyway in the general election.

The victories in Texas and Ohio, coupled with the wins in California, and New York prove one thing and that’s that Clinton can win the big states. This is the absolute minimum requirement for a Democratic nominee to have any shot at beating John McCain. Clinton’s wins in Texas and Ohio does even more. They demonstrated that she can be competitive with one powerful constituency and maintain a solid grip on the other that a Democratic nominee must either win the majority vote from or a sizeable percentage of their vote. The two constituencies are Latinos and blue collar whites. Bush got more than forty percent of the Latino vote in 2004. As other GOP presidents and candidates dating back to Ronald Reagan in 1980, Bush got the vote of the overwhelming majority of blue collar whites, especially white males. Ohio is the bluest of blue collar states and Clinton got a smash win there. That’s a hint that Ohio could be competitive for the Democrats, that is if she’s the nominee. The Democrat’s lock on the Latino vote is solid, again, only if she’s the nominee.

The charter hate Hillary club members also delight in constantly harping on the supposed mounds of Clinton negatives. The point supposedly is that this alone is enough to set the Democrats on a train wreck course with her as the nominee. But the polls also have consistently shown that voters like her for her strength and experience. When they assess her positions on health care, jobs and the economy, and in dealing with the sub prime crisis, without the filter of distortions and twisting, her positions are sound, reasonable and workable, and much better than anything offered by any of the other candidates.
The polls show something else and that’s that in a head to head race with McCain Clinton loses by a few percentage points or is statistically even with him. This too is supposedly proof that Clinton will sink the party. But these are the same polls that showed Clinton losing virtually every contest in every primary. These are the same polls that did not factor in that Clinton tactically and strategically picked the primaries that she chose to make a major effort to win and then proceeded to do just that.

There are more primaries ahead, but despite all the fervent hopes and delicious dreams of the hate Clinton club members; she will win more primaries, Pennsylvania, being the most likely. That will further strengthen the case that she can and should boldly make and that’s that she can win the big states and make the White House race a real contest. In other words, there are more bad nights in store for the hate Clinton club members.

There just always seems to be a Valley connection to every sordid crime and weird news.

The big news today, which is all over the radio and wires, is that the memoir of author "Margaret B. Jones" a county foster kids who reportedly ran drugs for the Bloods in South L.A. is actually an upper middle class woman from Sherman Oaks who went to the private school in NoHo. Here's an excerpt from the New York Times story about her fabrication.

In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods. he problem is that none of it is true.

Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed.

...

In a sometimes tearful, often contrite telephone interview from her home on Monday, Ms. Seltzer, 33, who is known as Peggy, admitted that the personal story she told in the book was entirely fabricated. She insisted, though, that many of the details in the book were based on the experiences of close friends she had met over the years while working to reduce gang violence in Los Angeles.

Remember all the fun surrounding false burglar alarms a few years ago? It seems that's in store for false fire alarm calls as well. We editorialized about it today in "Fire alarms redux."

The Los Angeles Fire Department wastes $9 million a year answering 30,000 bogus calls. Why not compel those responsible for this waste to pick up the cost?

The problem comes in the execution. Just ask the Los Angeles Police Department.

Four years ago, the city wrestled with the same problem as it pertains to false burglar alarms. Then, as now, authorities complained that too many false alarms were draining resources away from real emergencies. Then as now, they proposed steep fines to help mitigate the problem.

And then as now, the idea made sense - in theory.

After a long, bitter and drawn-out battle among city leaders, homeowners and private security firms, the city agreed to allow homeowners and businesses two false alarms - after which alarms from that address would not be answered without human confirmation that an actual break-in was taking place.

Uh oh. I now know that Hillary Clinton is doomed; Yusef Robb is working for her presidential campaign. Robb sent out a press release about a TV spot featuring actor Jack Nicholson endorsing Clinton. It's a great score to have this legendary tough guy on her side. Too bad she's also got a local kiss of death working for her.

No offense to Robb, who is actually one of the nicest and most decent press people ever to work in Los Angeles City Hall. He was press deputy to James Hahn and then worked on his failed re-election campaign against Antonio Villaraigosa. Robb might be a good press deputy but he has the misfortune to have worked for several losing campaigns from Gore 2000 to his current gig.

He's helped the "Yes on 87" campaign (oil tax to fund clean energy in California) lose in 2006. He worked with Controller Steve Westly's during his failed gubernatorial primary run against Phil Angelides earlier that year, who lost to Arnold, which makes it sort of a double whammy. He was speechwriter for recalled Gov. Gray Davis. I think he was also he also was an assistant coach for the patriots in this year's super bowl (Hah-that was Chris' joke; he may have pneumonia, but he's still cracking the one-liners)

Here he is outlining the benefits of Prop. 87

Not that the Daily News can throw stones about dooming campaigns. This editorial page too taken the side of more than a few loser candidates and initiatives -- including Prop. 87 and Steve Westly's gubernatorial campaign. We also came out on the side of plenty of other losers, such as John Kerry for president and Bob Hertzberg for mayor in 2005. We pushed for Valley secession, which failed, and against Measure S (the 2008 phone tax), which won, and too many other campaigns to list here.

The editorial board knew it was taking the side of the underdog in many of these case, but endorsed anyhow because we vote our collective principles, not odds. So perhaps Robb too picks his jobs not on who seems the best shot at winning, and thus helping out his career, but on his principles. In that case, it makes his career choices kind of honorable.

But too bad for Hillary. I think she's going down.

Guess who wins the civility challenge?

Here's a letter from astute reader Ian Freeman in Thousand Oaks:

Re “The Ralphster won’t be a factor in ‘08” (Viewpoint, March 2):
Bill O’Reilly’s column about Ralph Nader did not contain any hatred, distortions, falsifications, smears or racial slurs. It is sad that this warrants comment.
This was never, however, the case for the late conservative pundit William F. Buckley. His intelligence, decency and integrity were of the highest order.

With the state desperate to scare up new reveneus, various California officials, including the governor, talk about finding ways to milk more money out of the lottery. (Read: Separate foolish people from their wages.) The latest is State Sen. Dean Florez, D-Fresno, who wants to loosen the law so lotto officials can market their product more aggressively.

Nothing unusual there. What's funny, though, is who's risen up in opposition to this plan. No, it's not the anti-gambling puritans but ... California's gaming tribes.

You know, the same tribes who, oh, a month ago, were blasting racetrack owners for opposing an expansion of gambling that just so happened to benefit their interests. The same tribes that spent millions on TV ads telling us that 17,000 new slot machines would be California's fiscal salvation. The same tribes that have claimed gambling has saved their people from poverty.

Well, times have changed. Now Howard Dickstein, who represents several tribes with casinos across the state, says:

"I know there's a lot of desperation at the Capitol, but trying to rely on gambling is not the answer."

Oh, so now they tell us.

Tired of your typical, snorefest political endorsement? Try the king of "Cat Scratch Fever" on for size. He penned an op-ed for the Waco Tribune-Herald under the classic byline "Ted Nugent, Texas Wildman":

"...Even with a win in the Buckeye state, a loss in Texas should seal Clinton's fate. Good.

She strikes me as a power-hungry person who would sell her soul to become president. I wouldn't doubt it if she had her sights on the presidency 30 or more years ago. Anyone that drunk on presidential power is cause for concern.

Beneath her forced smiles, fake tears, smirks and impossible 'feel good' promises, Clinton comes across as a mean-spirited, narcissistic, vindictive person who is cut from the same cloth as Leona Helmsley, the notorious billionaire Queen of Mean — infamous for saying that only the little people pay taxes. The vibe I get from Clinton: Cross my path at your own peril.

...Do your duty on Tuesday and blow Clinton's presidential candle out before we get more smoke in our eyes and a nagging gag develops."

It seems like just yesterday that I accompanied a music-critic friend to a Ted Nugent show, raccoon tail pinned to his tush, shooting a drop-down cutout of Saddam with a bow and arrow and singing a song called "Kiss My Ass" written specifically for Boxer, Feinstein, etc. ...

Let me mince no words: There is no world leader thirsting for war with anyone as badly as Hugo Chavez.

Here's the deal: Leftist Ecuadoran leader Rafael Correa didn't seem as upset the day before yesterday about Colombia reaching inside Ecuadoran territory to strike at a camp of FARC leaders, making their most important kill yet in taking out commander and spokesman Raul Reyes, one of seven members of the guerrilla group's hierarchy.

But in the past several weeks, Chavez, a longtime supporter of FARC, has been doing the "hostage negotiation" dance with FARC in an effort to publicly usurp the power and influence of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe (who, it has to be said, has really cleaned up the country and is Satan to Hugo because he has a good relationship with the U.S.). The slaying of Reyes puts Uribe firmly back in control and probably wounds the FARC -- a longtime thorn in the side of Colombian stability -- to the point of no return.

Chavez's message now: He's has Russian arms and he wants to use 'em. He licks his lips at the thought of drawing the U.S. into a South American conflict, and is trying to stoke the fires by saying that the U.S. jointly killed Reyes. He's gotten lapdog Correa as riled up as he needs to be.

More from the AP:

"...Chavez on Sunday promised Venezuela would respond militarily if Colombia violates its border, where he ordered tanks as well as thousands of troops. He also ordered closed Venezuela's embassy in Bogota.

Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, called for the troop deployment while also withdrawing his government's ambassador from Bogota and expelling Colombia's top diplomat.

'Mr. Defense Minister, move 10 battalions to the border with Colombia for me, immediately — tank battalions. Deploy the air force,' Chavez said during his weekly TV and radio program. 'We don't want war, but we aren't going to permit the U.S. empire, which is the master (of Colombia) ... to come divide us.'

Correa said Colombia deliberately carried out the strike beyond its borders. He said the rebels were 'bombed and massacred as they slept, using precision technology.'"

Precision technology? What's wrong with that? It meant that innocents weren't killed. Oh, that's right... you refuse to believe that the FARC are terrorists...

"'This could be the start of a war in South America,' Chavez said. He warned Uribe: 'If it occurs to you to do this in Venezuela, President Uribe, I'll send some Sukhois' — Russian warplanes recently bought by Venezuela."

The thing about Chavez is that Colombia may not even have to step one inch inside Venezuela's border for him to find "cause" to start a war. And never mind that he took his helicopters inside Colombia for his FARC kaffeeklatsch hostage retrieval.

A suggestion for John McCain: J.C. Watts. Four-term former congressman from Oklahoma; once the fourth-highest-ranking member of the House as chairman of the House Republican Conference. Former quarterback, Southern Baptist youth minister, businessman, author of the book "What Color is a Conservative," pundit, great orator.

Free saxophone for Russian voters in Moscow today!

Perhaps Bill can do this for Hillary in Ohio on Tuesday?

It’s 3 in the morning and the phone rings in the White House. You get out of bed. Heart racing as you pick up the reciever, you wonder: Where is Bin Laden? Where is Ahmadinejad? Where is Bill?

John McCain was quick to distance himself from an obnoxious radio host making cracks about Barack Obama before a campaign rally. He should be even quicker to distance himself from the endorsement of anti-Catholic televangelist John Hagee:

McCain released the following statement Friday:

"Yesterday, Pastor John Hagee endorsed my candidacy for president in San Antonio, Texas. However, in no way did I intend for his endorsement to suggest that I in turn agree with all of Pastor Hagee's views, which I obviously do not.

"I am hopeful that Catholics, Protestants and all people of faith who share my vision for the future of America will respond to our message of defending innocent life, traditional marriage, and compassion for the most vulnerable in our society."

Please, senator, make clear which views about which you disagree. Because I'm hopeful that all politicians who have a vision for the future of America will see that campaigning shouldn't include standing up with bigoted televangelists -- er, fundraisers who preach.