Virginia Creeper Season

We may be sugar maple-deprived out here, but we don't lack for fall color. Our eye-catching performers, some native some not, include (besides subj) vine maple, sweetgum, sumac, sourwood, witch hazel, euonymous, and larch, just for starters. Red, red, red, rainbow, red, and yellow, respectively.

Josh at Talking Points has a fun post on the increasing self-destruction of the McSame campaign. I especially enjoyed the paternal biology aspect:

My dear, departed father, a biologist to the core, loved the phrase 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny', which is a perfectly deft but utterly inscrutable way of saying that the stages of growth of a fetus in the womb mimics the evolutionary history of the species itself *. (If that's still not completely clear, see this.) But we also know, if not from science than from Science Fiction or at least Star Trek, that as organisms die they often cycle back through their own individual histories, tracking off their defining moments as they wind down into oblivion.

And yesterday I had an political epiphany. As the McCain campaign staggers toward its conclusion, with electoral columns and pediments standing since 1966 buckling under their weight, the party seems to be cycling back through its history of character assassination, McCarthyism and wedge politics flimflam, only now with an desperate and parodic impotence taking the place of punishing rhetorical violence.

Southern strategy race-baiting, check! Hyper 9/11ist 'the Dems are terrorists' character assassination, check! Rep. Michelle Bachmann's neo-McCarthyite manifesto and call for a new HUAC, check! 'The Democrats want to bring socialism to America', check! Who lost Georgia? Aspirational neo-Cold Warism, check! Mix these in with a general stew of 70s-90s soft-on-crime, Dems are pedophile weirdo-freak-loser wedge politics and we've basically got the full ground covered.

-clip-

It being Boy's Night In last night, Eric and I again indulged in Jambalaya, featuring andouille sausage, tasso ham, and prawns. And of course the holy veg trinity. Lip-smacking good.

Tonight we went a different way. While appetizing ourselves with Garroxta, nettle-infused Gruyere, Epoisses, and Parmesan, E grilled some gorgeous little tenderloins to perfection while helping me assemble a Gruyere-inflected potato galette. We rounded it off with baby bok choi doused with garlic-and-red pepper flake-infused oil and soy sauce. Oh my!

And then Marg weighed in with her apple-and-pear galette dessert! To swoon for!

We are so very fortunate to be in a position to savor food in this way. We need a good deal more "socialism," the term being slung around by McPalin as if it were a curse, to assure that these opportunities are not limited to the few.

This post at FDL led me to the following two links. I will excerpt each of them, but strongly encourage your further pursuit, presumably including instructive repartee in comments on posts:

I don't think anyone here has written yet about Robert Draper’s attempted dissection in the New York Times magazine of the schizophrenic McCain presidential campaign. Digby captures the gist of it well ("Republicans have become so enraptured by their hype about 'marketing' and 'branding' that they've forgotten that you need to have something in the package you're selling besides air"), but the full article is an amazingly rich source of anecdotes — some insightful, some dubious, and some just plain weird. This story told by pseudo-strategist Steve Schmidt to Draper may fit in all three categories:

The smartest bit of political wisdom he ever heard was dispensed by George W. Bush one spring day at the White House residence in 2004, at a time when his re-election effort was not going especially well. The strategists at the meeting — including Schmidt, who was directing the Bush campaign’s rapid-response unit — fretted over their candidate’s sagging approval ratings and the grim headlines about the war in Iraq. Only Bush appeared thoroughly unworried. He explained to them why, polls notwithstanding, voters would ultimately prefer him over his opponent, John Kerry.

There’s an accidental genius to the way Americans pick a president, Schmidt remembers Bush saying that day. By the end of it all, a candidate’s true character is revealed to the American people.

Leaving aside that this obviously wasn’t true for Dubya (although it may be proving that way for McCain), I'm with John Cole: What are we supposed to make of a so-called strategist who says he got the best political advice of his life from George Bush? Isn’t that like taking performance advice from Howdy Doody or Charlie McCarthy?

Then again, I suppose that’s what Sarah Palin did.

-clip-

And here is brief from NYT, to repeat, deserving of a full read for any who might be wary of being pigeon-holed with a certain "incurious" executive:

On the morning of Wednesday, Sept. 24, John McCain convened a meeting in his suite at the Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Among the handful of campaign officials in attendance were McCain’s chief campaign strategist, Steve Schmidt, and his other two top advisers: Rick Davis, the campaign manager; and Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime speechwriter. The senator’s ears were already throbbing with bad news from economic advisers and from House Republican leaders who had told him that only a small handful in their ranks were willing to support the $700 billion bailout of the banking industry proposed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. The meeting was to focus on how McCain should respond to the crisis — but also, as one participant later told me, “to try to see this as a big-picture, leadership thing.”

As this participant recalled: “We presented McCain with three options. Continue offering principles from afar. A middle ground of engaging while still campaigning. Then the third option, of going all in. The consensus was that we could stay out or go in — but that if we’re going in, we should go in all the way. So the thinking was, do you man up and try to affect the outcome, or do you hold it at arm’s length? And no, it was not an easy call.”

Discussion carried on into the afternoon at the Morgan Library and Museum as McCain prepared for the first presidential debate. Schmidt pushed for going all in: suspending the campaign, recommending that the first debate be postponed, parachuting into Washington and forging a legislative solution to the financial crisis for which McCain could then claim credit. Exactly how McCain could convincingly play a sober bipartisan problem-solver after spending the previous few weeks garbed as a populist truth teller was anything but clear. But Schmidt and others convinced McCain that it was worth the gamble.

-clip-

Despite their leeriness of being quoted, McCain’s senior advisers remained palpably confident of victory — at least until very recently. By October, the succession of backfiring narratives would compel some to reappraise not only McCain’s chances but also the decisions made by Schmidt, who only a short time ago was hailed as the savior who brought discipline and unrepentant toughness to a listing campaign. “For better or for worse, our campaign has been fought from tactic to tactic,” one senior adviser glumly acknowledged to me in early October, just after Schmidt received authorization from McCain to unleash a new wave of ads attacking Obama’s character. “So this is the new tactic.”

-clip-

And then we have Digby Herself. This is how it ought to be done:

The NY Times magazine has a fascinating feature about the McCain campaign in this week-end's edition. The inside look at the Palin choice is really interesting. Republicans have become so enraptured by their hype about "marketing" and "branding" that they've forgotten that you need to have something in the package you're selling besides air:

On Sunday, Aug. 24, Schmidt and a few other senior advisers again convened for a general strategy meeting at the Phoenix Ritz-Carlton. McInturff, the pollster, brought somewhat-reassuring new numbers. The Celebrity motif had taken its toll on Obama. It was no longer third and nine, the pollster said — meaning, among other things, that McCain might well be advised to go with a safe pick as his running mate.

Then for a half-hour or so, the group reviewed names that had been bandied about in the past: Gov. Tim Pawlenty (of Minnesota) and Gov. Charlie Christ (of Florida); the former governors Tom Ridge (Pennsylvania) and Mitt Romney (Massachusetts); Senator Joe Lieberman (Connecticut); and Mayor Michael Bloomberg (New York). From a branding standpoint, they wondered, what message would each of these candidates send about John McCain? McInturff’s polling data suggested that none of these candidates brought significantly more to the ticket than any other.

“What about Sarah Palin?” Schmidt asked.

[...]

After that first brief meeting, Davis remained in discreet but frequent contact with Palin and her staff — gathering tapes of speeches and interviews, as he was doing with all potential vice-presidential candidates. One tape in particular struck Davis as arresting: an interview with Palin and Gov. Janet Napolitano, the Arizona Democrat, on “The Charlie Rose Show” that was shown in October 2007. Reviewing the tape, it didn’t concern Davis that Palin seemed out of her depth on health-care issues or that, when asked to name her favorite candidate among the Republican field, she said, “I’m undecided.” What he liked was how she stuck to her pet issues — energy independence and ethics reform — and thereby refused to let Rose manage the interview. This was the case throughout all of the Palin footage. Consistency. Confidence. And . . . well, look at her. A friend had said to Davis: “The way you pick a vice president is, you get a frame of Time magazine, and you put the pictures of the people in that frame. You look at who fits that frame best — that’s your V. P.”

[...]

After McCain’s speech brought the convention to a close, one of the campaign’s senior advisers stayed up late at the Hilton bar savoring the triumphant narrative arc. I asked him a rather basic question: “Leaving aside her actual experience, do you know how informed Governor Palin is about the issues of the day?”

The senior adviser thought for a moment. Then he looked up from his beer. “No,” he said quietly. “I don’t know.

”This is where Karl Rove's politics hit the wall. Indeed, it's where the conservative movement hits the wall.

-clip-

Ruby and the Romantics' Greatest Hit?

No cheating now, Net or books. I suggest you mull it over and then let it go, for me often the key to an elusive item I know I know but cannot grab on command. (Answer at end.) If you have it, I believe your innate processes (possibly the same %*&@#$% gremlins that waken us at 4AM?) will ferret out the answer.

The TPM "Election Central Morning Roundup" is not a bad place to start your day, this being one specific example:

Polls: Obama Ahead In Florida, Ohio And Pennsylvania
A new round of Quinnipiac polls gives Barack Obama the lead in the three largest swing states. Obama is ahead 49%-44% in Florida, 52%-38% in Ohio, and 53%-40% in Pennsylvania. The Ohio result seems like an outlier compared to other recent polls showing a tight race, but the others are not unreasonable.

Obama In Indiana, Then Off To Hawaii; Biden In North Carolina
Barack Obama is holding a rally at 11 a.m. ET this morning in Indianapolis, before leaving the campaign trail to visit his ailing grandmother in Hawaii. Joe Biden is campaigning in North Carolina, with a 10:30 a.m. ET rally in Charlotte, a 2:15 p.m. ET rally in Winston-Salem, and a 7 p.m. ET rally in Raleigh.

McCain In Florida; Palin In Ohio And Pennsylvania
John McCain is kicking off his officially-themed "Joe The Plumber" rallies, with a 9 a.m. ET rally in Osmond Beach, Florida, and a 6 p.m. ET rally in Sarasota, Florida. Sarah Palin is holding a 1 p.m. ET rally in Troy, Ohio, and a 7:15 p.m. ET rally in Beaver, Pennsylvania.

Mellencamp In New Radio Ad: Obama Is The One For Small -Town Voters
The Obama campaign has a radio ad in Indiana featuring the state's favorite son John Mellencamp, whose famous "I was born in a small town" lyrics puts him in a good position to subtly rebut any objections to Obama's own "small town" gaffe from April:

"But now I'm seeing small towns across America dying," Mellencamp says. "Folks losing their jobs and their homes. Eight years of George Bush have really hurt. And John McCain is just more of the same."

Another Poll Shows Narrow Obama Lead In North Carolina: A new poll from North Carolina-based Marshall Marketing gives Barack Obama a 48%-46% in this newly-minted swing state, within the ±4.5% margin of error. In their previous poll from two weeks ago, McCain had a 48%-46% edge.

Obama At Rally: "This Looks Like The Real Virginia To Me": At a rally yesterday in Leesburg, Virginia, Barack Obama rebutted the "Real Virginia" comments of McCain surrogate Nancy Pfotenhauer. "I know some folks may not think so, but this looks like the real Virginia to me," Obama said. "This looks like authentic Virginia and y'all look like a bunch of Virginians."

Schwarzenegger: Palin Will Be Ready By Inauguration Day: In an interview aired yesterday evening on CNN, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger did his best to defend Sarah Palin's qualifications. When asked whether Palin is ready and qualified, the Terminator answered: "By the time that she is sworn in I think she will be ready.

Award-winning sandwich-board I savored on lower First Avenue the other day

• Irish Breakfast
• Irish Coffee
• Irish Whiskey
• Irish I Had the Day Off

I want me a Jane Hamsher T-shirt! When this battle is won, as I am confident it will be, she deserves mucho credit:

In his debate yesterday with Larry Kissell, Robin Hayes now has a new explanation for why he said "liberals hate real Americans." First he didn't say it, then the audio clip surfaced, and now -- it was all because of liberal bloggers! (see video clip above).

I'm personally quite thrilled that we've become such great all-purpose bogeyman. I feel like I need a foot rub and a cigarette.

Peter Daou has a thoughtful piece looking back on the growth of the netroots at the Huffington Post, entitled "On November Fourth, the Netroots Should Be More Than an Afterthought":

We should acknowledge that the netroots kept hope alive when our system of checks and balances was in mortal danger, kept hope alive when civil liberties were fast becoming disposable niceties. We should realize that back when Billmon and Bob Somerby and a gentle soul with a sharp pen named Steve Gilliard were required reading, when Digby was a mystery man and Firedoglake was a new blog with an intriguing name, when citizens across the country began logging on and conversing from the heart, there was no glory in political blogging. There still isn't. No one knew if blogs would become quaint artifacts. Many hoped they would. Blogging was about speaking up for America's guiding principles, liberty, justice, equality, opportunity, democracy.

If there's one thing I learned, it's that you never get credit for being right too early. Just ask Howard Dean. But it's been fun to be a part of all this nonetheless.

Meanwhile, House GOP officials have leaked a "death list" of most vulnerable seats, and it includes Hayes. It may be a smoke screen, however, since the NRCC is pouring money into Hayes' district and Larry Kissell doesn't have enough money to run television ads.

If you feel like pounding another nail into Robin Hayes' coffin like the ghoulish fiend you no doubt are, you can donate to Blue America candidate Larry Kissell here.

I try to routinely peruse Froomkin's column. He can be quite useful for one trying to drag at least some sense out of the cacophony:

-clip-

With the dead weight of the last eight years sinking his campaign, Republican presidential candidate John McCain yesterday made his most vigorous attempt yet to throw President Bush overboard.

McCain had previously relied mostly on zingers to counter the charge that he is running for a third Bush term. But perhaps recognizing that wasn't doing the trick -- the two men do, after all, share positions on core issues such as tax cuts and national security -- McCain is now describing his areas of disagreement with the incumbent in greater detail, and in so doing, adding his voice to the already considerable chorus of Bush critics.

Joseph Curl and Stephen Dinan write in the Washington Times: "Sen. John McCain on Wednesday blasted President Bush for building a mountain of debt for future generations, failing to pay for expanding Medicare and abusing executive powers, leveling his strongest criticism to date of an administration whose unpopularity may be dragging the Republican Party to the brink of a massive electoral defeat.

"'We just let things get completely out of hand,' he said of his own party's rule in the past eight years.

"In an interview with The Washington Times, Mr. McCain lashed out at a litany of Bush policies and issues that he said he would have handled differently as president. . . .

"'Spending, the conduct of the war in Iraq for years, growth in the size of government, larger than any time since the Great Society, laying a $10 trillion debt on future generations of America, owing $500 billion to China, obviously, failure to both enforce and modernize the [financial] regulatory agencies that were designed for the 1930s and certainly not for the 21st century, failure to address the issue of climate change seriously,' Mr. McCain said in an interview with The Washington Times aboard his campaign plane en route from New Hampshire to Ohio.

"'Those are just some of them,' he said with a laugh, chomping into a peanut butter sandwich as a few campaign aides in his midair office joined in the laughter."

Curl and Dinan write that McCain "rejected Mr. Bush's use of issuing 'signing statements' when he signs bills into law, in which the president has suggested that he would ignore elements of the bills, labeling them potentially unconstitutional.

"'I would veto the bills or say, "Look, I don't like it but I'll obey the law that's passed by Congress and signed by the president." I think the signing statements was not a correct implementation of the power of the executive. I think it was overstepping,' he said.

"And Mr. McCain emphatically rejected Mr. Bush's claims of executive privilege, often used to shield the White House from scrutiny.

"'I don't agree with that either. I don't agree with [Vice President] Dick Cheney's allegation that he's part of both the legislative and the executive branch,' he said."

-clip-

And Mr. Froomkin also covers this farcical business of Bush summoning world leaders to talk finances next month. I would want to think he should be required by all the Geneva Conventions -observing nations (probably, given the guest list, everyone but the war-criminal US of A) as a matter of attendance to offer up some sort of self-effacing mechanism, since he is so obviously personally locked out of exhibiting humanoid qualities. Maybe some sort of carnival exhibition involving shooting down effigies of w?

Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Mark Landler write in the New York Times: "President Bush will convene leaders of 20 nations in Washington on Nov. 15 for an emergency summit meeting to discuss the economic crisis, the White House said Wednesday. But the session, coming less than two weeks after the presidential election, could put Mr. Bush on a collision course with his successor.

"The White House said Mr. Bush would 'seek the input' of the president-elect, and both the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, and the Democrat, Senator Barack Obama, praised Mr. Bush for convening the session. But neither man committed to attending, and the White House conceded it did not quite know how the meeting would play out. . . .

"[F]rom the American political perspective, the timing -- at the tail end of a lame-duck administration -- is terrible.

"If history is any guide, Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain might prefer to steer clear. Historians say Mr. Bush's summit meeting brings to mind similar efforts of another president facing tough economic times, Herbert Hoover. During the Great Depression, in the waning days of his administration, Hoover tried to draw the president-elect, Franklin D. Roosevelt, into policy prescriptions for the economy, but Roosevelt steadfastly resisted.

"'Roosevelt simply did not want to get close to him or be identified with anything he would want to do, because he was terribly unpopular, and the same now exists with George W. Bush,' said the historian Robert Dallek. 'In some ways, he's trying to rescue his reputation, and the last thing Obama or even McCain are going to care about is saving George Bush's reputation.'"

-clip-

And here is tonight's musical interlude, apropos of nothing I can fully account for, but probably therefore incredibly revealing of my inner conflicts, ehh? Probably just the sort of thing my gremlins arouse me with in the wee hours. And that has been happening not infrequently lately - though I may not have the etiology down, I admit. Extra points for recalling album name (year?!) from memory - I certainly could not do that.

If I fell in love with you
Would you promise to be true
And help me understand
Cause I've been in love in before
And I found that love was more
Than just holding hands

. . .

So I hope you see that
I would love to love you
And that she will cry
When she learns we are two
If I fell in love with you.

I'm sure you by now realized that that great chart-topper was "Our Day Will Come." I'm pretty certain I actually possessed the 45 - along with a few other classics like the Cascades' "Rhythm of the Rain." Where that vinyl is now I have no idea.

Regaining Our Senses and Looking Into Our Hearts - or Maybe I'm Just a Fool?

Blogger-cramp. I'm unclear how it relates to writer's block. I have a multitude of links back-logged, and several resulting posts that were "almost there" but somehow did not make it. But indeed, there is a timeliness issue when it comes to the political stuff that has recently been for better or worse my main focus, and that does afflict me big-time.

Glenn Greenwald, like most sentient folks, is quite skeptical of the mouthings of one Colin Powell. As during the Vietnam war, it is a very tricky dynamic. The warriors (i.e., senior military leaders) are truly in a pickle when they are thrown into a conflagration that doesn't match up with the standard chess game. It's not clear how much Iraq was a grudge match, but the idea that Slimey's energy meetings in early 2001 were intensely focused on the details of Iraq's oil fields is quite telling.

I'm anything but a fan of Colin Powell, and have no idea what impact (if any) his Meet the Press endorsement of Obama will have (full video is below), but I was really glad to see him make the following point in explaining why he has rejected McCain's candidacy:

I'm also troubled by, not what Sen. McCain says, but what members of the party say, and it is permitted to be said such things as: "Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim." Well, the correct answer is: he is not a Muslim. He's a Christian. He's always been a Christian.

But the really right answer is: What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is: No, that's not America. Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she can be
President?

Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion: he's a Muslim, and he might be associated with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

Powell went on to say that he "feels strongly" about that point, and cited a photo essay he saw regarding U.S. troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan which included a photograph of a mother in Arlington National Cemetary with her head on the tombstone of her 20-year-old son, who was awarded a Purple Heart and Bronze Star and was killed in Iraq, and the photograph showed the headstone adorned with the "crescent and star of the Islamic faith," and his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, a Muslim-American (I believe this is the soldier to whom Powell was referring).

-clip-

Musical interlude courtesy of Steven Earle (terrific disk and chart both "Jerusalem"):

I woke up this morning and none of the news was good
Death machines were rumblin' 'cross the ground where Jesus stood
And the man on my TV told me that it had always been that way
And there was nothing anyone could do or say

And I almost listened to him
Yeah I almost lost my mind
Then I regained my senses again
And looked into my heart to find

That I believe that one fine day all the children of Abraham
Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem

Well maybe I'm only dreamin' and maybe I'm just a fool
But I don't remember learnin' how to hate in Sunday school
Somewhere along the way I strayed and I never looked back again
But I still find some comfort now and then

Then the storm comes rumblin' in
And I can't lay me down
And the drums are drummin' again
And I can't stand the sound

But I believe there'll come a day when the lion and the lamb
Will lie down in peace together in Jerusalem

And there'll be no barricades then
There'll be no wire or walls
And we can wash all this blood from our hands
And all this hatred from our souls

And I believe that on that day all the children of Abraham
Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem

Believe me, those words set to music are painfully moving.

Joan Walsh, also at Salon, has some big-time Powell-sharing for us:

Colin Powell destroyed the last hope John McCain had to defeat Barack Obama and become president. I have never heard such a devastating and thoroughgoing critique of McCain's issue-free, fear-mongering campaign. While Powell's endorsing Obama on "Meet the Press" Sunday was expected, the way he did it was stunning.

Powell called the current economic crisis "a final exam" for both candidates, and basically said McCain failed. "He was a little unsure how to deal with the economic problems. Every day there was a different approach," Powell told NBC's Tom Brokaw. Remarkably, he said he was "concerned at the selection of Gov. Palin," who he called "distinguished" but added, "I don't believe she's ready to be president, which is the job of the vice president." He saved his harshest words for his own Republican Party, which he said had "moved more to the right than I would like to see it." He blasted McCain and the party's focus on issues like Obama's connection to former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers, specifically denouncing the shameful "robo-calls" tying Obama to Ayers and terrorism.

To focus on Powell's damning comments about McCain, Palin and the GOP should not obscure that his endorsement of Obama was enthusiastic and strong. He called Obama "a transformational figure," praised him for his "inclusive" campaign, his "intellectual curiosity" and his leadership. He acknowledged his 25-year friendship with McCain and sounded genuinely sad when he said, "It isn't easy for me to disappoint Sen. McCain as I have this morning, and I regret that."

It's hard for me not to see Powell's endorsement of Obama as a way to clear his conscience for the role he played in selling the Iraq war, which Obama opposed from the beginning. Powell brushed aside Brokaw's questions about his role in making the case for war, insisting it's "not a correct assessment by anybody that my leaving the administration would have stopped it."

Leaving all the politics aside, like Glenn Greenwald, I was most moved by Powell's attack on the way the GOP is using rumors that Obama is a Muslim.

-clip-

Powell's defense of American Muslims shouldn't be so remarkable, but it is. More than anything else, the Obama campaign's recent strength could show new limits to the politics of scapegoating and bullying that have defined the Bush years.

-clip-