Category Archives: Current Affairs

The Worst Has Not Been Visited Upon Us Yet

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Below is a video clip of an interview by Foreign Policy with former FBI interrogator Jack Cloonan on the use of torture in the "war on terror."  Basically he says that it is counterproductive in that it mythologizes terrorists and in turn helps the terrorists recruit a whole new generation of jihadists.  The most chilling lines come at the end when he says that we (the U.S.) believes that our programs work because we haven’t been attacked since 9/11, but the jihadists say that they’ll get us even if it takes a generation.  He ends with the line "The worst has not been visited upon us yet." 

Now I’ll sit back and wait for the "we’re American, Christian and righteous and we’re fighting for freedom in the face of invading Islamo-fascist hordes" crowd to come and say this expert has no idea what he’s talking about.  They know torture works and is necessary because they listen to Rush every day and he tells them it’s true.  And they’ve watched every episode of 24 at least seven times and if it works for Jack Bauer then surely it works for our boys too. 

Of course they wouldn’t agree with Cloonan when he points out that even the Israelis think that torture doesn’t work.  I mean, what do they know?  They just live on a piece of land the size of a US state and are bordered by whole groups of people who’ve stated for the record that they want Israel annihilated.  It’s not like they have a lot of experience dealing with this kind of thing, right?  Yep, Jack Bauer is a much better source of information.

Hemingway Would Have Shot Someone

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How would you like your business to be threatened by the actions of a foreign government even though you don’t do business there?  That’s what has happened to an English travel agent named Steve Marshall living in Spain.  The story’s a little complex so let’s see if we can break it down:

  1. Marshall sells trips to sunny places including Cuba, mostly to Europeans, via lots of different websites that he owns and has run since the late 90s.
  2. In October about 80 of his websites stopped working.
  3. Some of his websites had been put on a blacklist by the Treasury Department because of the tours he booked to Cuba, including literary themed "Hemingway Tours".
  4. His domain registrar, eNom, which is based in the U.S., disabled his sites after being informed that they were on the Treasury blacklist.  They didn’t give him a heads up they were doing it either.
  5. eNom has refused to release the domains to the travel agent because they were legally obligated to also freeze his assets.
  6. All of Marshall’s sites were hosted on servers in the Bahamas.
  7. He still doesn’t have his .com domain names back, but he’s slowly been rebuilding his web business using .net domains registered through European based registrars.
  8. Weird exception to the domains on the blacklist is the www.cuba-guantanamo.com site that is still up and running.
  9. eNom only acted after discovering Marshall’s blacklisting from a blog.  In other words it sounds like no one from Treasury bothered to contact eNom to disable the sites.

Here’s the quote from the Treasury Department rep about their action:

A Treasury spokesman, John Rankin, referred a caller to a press release
issued in December 2004, almost three years before eNom acted. It said
Mr. Marshall’s company had helped Americans evade restrictions on
travel to Cuba and was “a generator of resources that the Cuban regime
uses to oppress its people.” It added that American companies must not
only stop doing business with the company but also freeze its assets,
meaning that eNom did exactly what it was legally required to do.

Here’s Marshall’s reply:

Mr. Marshall said he was uninterested in American tourists. “They can’t go anyway,” he said.

All sounds kind of absurd doesn’t it?  Read the NYT article and you’ll find that there’s a few lawyers who think that the government has overstepped its bounds.  Huh, go figure.

We’ve Come So Far in 40 Years

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When you think of the ’60s what do you picture?  Flower Power? Vietnam? Peace Symbols? Free Love? Marijuana and LSD?  Forty years from now what do you think people will picture when they think of the ’00s?  Probably Iraq, terrorism, Freedom Fries, ribbon stickers on SUVs, Oxycontin and Chrystal Meth.  Heck, you might even think of anti-love.  Check out this story from Arizona about a middle school that is punishing students for hugs that last more than two seconds.  Maybe I mis-typed since really this story isn’t about anti-love, but conditional love.  So there we have it: the 00s are the decade of Iraq, terrorism, Freedom fries, ribbon stickers on SUVs, Oxycontin, Chrystal Meth and conditional love.  That’s what I call progress.

Fec Indexes Wachovia’s Woes

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Fec lists LOTS of issues with Wachovia.  Wachovia was a Winston-Salem institution until it was absorbed by First Union and most of its operations were moved to Charlotte.  My mom worked there many moons ago, but in this age of mega-mergers it’s anything but a cozy hometown bank and it does not tug any hometown heart strings.

FYI, you know things are tough when an alphabet soup of fed agencies is in town checking under your robe: the SEC, FBI, DOJ and IRS are all checking into the bank.  Hopefully the bean counters will prevail and right the Wachovia ship.  I’d hate to see the building in Charlotte look like Enron’s in Houston a few years back.

Is NC Youth Soccer Lily White?

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I occasionally look in on a blog called On the Pitch which is hosted by a guy who’s a youth soccer coach and administrator here in North Carolina.  In his most recent post he linked to a discussion at NC Soccer Forum about racism in youth soccer.  The original post that sparked the conversation dealt with racial taunts being directed towards players in several challenge and classic matches throughout the state, but I thought that one of the comments concerning the "upper class, white bread" nature of youth soccer to be particularly interesting.

First, let me provide a primer for those who aren’t familiar with the youth soccer structure here in NC.  For the most part there are three levels of youth competition, recreational (rec) , challenge and classic.  You could look at rec soccer as entry level, where all players are welcomed regardless of ability and coaches are generally all volunteers.  Challenge is more competitive than rec, with tryouts and regional travel to games, but still with mostly volunteer coaches.  Classic is much more competitive, with many teams having paid coaches.  Each level of play is also generally more expensive as you move up.  These are rough generalizations and they differ from club to club and league to league, but it gives you an idea of how things work.

When we first moved to the Winston-Salem area our daughter played rec soccer with the Optimist organization for a couple of years.  Last year she decided she wanted to step up a level so she tried out and made one of the Twin City club’s U-14 girls Challenge teams. BTW, if your child wants to play soccer I highly recommend both of these organizations. I can tell you from first hand experience that the expense for Challenge was greater, although not too much, but the competition was decidedly better.  The expectations in terms of time commitment are also roughly double what they  were at the rec level. 

But here’s the thing I noticed most in the switch from rec to Challenge.  I can probably count on one hand the number of non-white kids we’ve played against at the Challenge level.  And I’m not talking a white-black difference, I’m talking white-any other race difference.  Now it’s not like there were a ton of non-white kids playing at the rec level either, but it’s definitely less diverse at the Challenge level at least here in the Piedmont area of the state.  If you asked me to guess why I’d say there are a couple of reasons:

  • Cultural – Unlike the rest of the world where soccer is a kind of every-man’s game and is actually the sport of the masses, soccer in this area and in much of the US is seen as a white, suburban sport.  Think about it, if someone were to play word association with you and said "soccer" your associations would probably be "mini-van", "oranges", "suburbs" and "mom".
  • Lack of integration of the recently immigrated residents – When we lived in the DC area we saw a lot more diversity in the leagues because quite simply there are literally generations of immigrant communities in the area and I think they’ve had more time to break down the barrier between the various communities.  Combine that with the passionate love of soccer that came with many of the immigrants and you have greater opportunity for kids from different cultures to compete against each other if not play on the same teams.  Here in NC immigration is very new and integration is almost non-existent.  Give it a few years and I think we will begin to see a change.

I don’t think that overt racism is a contributing factor to the lack of diversity on the soccer fields.  I think most clubs would gladly expand their talent pools in order to compete.  I’m also not so sure if pricing is as big a deterrent as you might think, at least at the higher competition levels.  There are lots of families that stretch dollars in order for their kids to play AAU basketball so I don’t see why they wouldn’t also do it if they and their kids felt the same way about soccer as they do about hoops.  And even if pricing is an issue you do have clubs that provide financial assistance, as Twin City does for its players.  The point is I really think it’s more of a cultural issue than a money or overt racism issue.

The question for youth soccer leaders is this: do you want to continue to be seen as the "white bread, upper class" sport?  If not, how do you change the image of the game?  How do you make everyone feel welcome? 

My feeling is this: youth sports provide a wonderful teaching and learning opportunity.  I’ve played sports all my life and I’ve always enjoyed the fact that when we the players get in between the lines we usually forget who’s what race, who comes from where, and who has how much money.  All we care about is competing and winning and so we’re held accountable to only what we do in between those lines.  We also see each other more honestly.  We see who really has character and who doesn’t, who has courage and who wilts under pressure, who is supportive in the crunch and who points the finger when things go bad.  In other words sports are a great venue for discovering what’s beneath each person’s exterior. 

I’ve made friends with people I never would have talked to without the common ground of a basketball court or soccer field and for that I’m eternally thankful.  That’s also why I think it’s better for youth soccer and those of us who participate in it if the pitch becomes a little more "rainbow-y".

Jock Sniffing, or, Our Congress at Work

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I usually don’t like to write about what everyone else is writing about on a regular basis because, you know, there are a lot of people smarter than me to get your current events from.  However, every once in a while I just can’t resist.  Now’s one of those times.

We’ve all read or heard about Roger Clemens’ appearance on the Hill yesterday.  What I’d like to focus on is the fact that my Congresscritter, Virginia Foxx (R-NC 5) is on the committee that the Rocket testified before and her behavior was chronicled by none other than Boston Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy.  From his column:

There was plenty more jock-sniffing. Representative Danny K. Davis,
Democrat of Illinois, told Roger, "It was a pleasure meeting you last
week." Representative William Lacy Clay, Democrat of Missouri, asked
Roger what uniform he plans to wear into the Hall of Fame.
Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, produced
four photographs of Clemens, a progression dating to his Red Sox days,
and insisted, "You appear to be the same size."

Good observation,
Ginny. That’s like saying Michael Jackson’s features haven’t changed
since he posed for the cover of "Thriller."

Oy.  And then there’s this comment from "Glenn Aspaugh" on a post I wrote earlier this week about Rep. Foxx:

Dear Representative Foxx , I would really like to know why Congress
feels compelled to waste my taxpayer $$ which by the way are
considerable, on delving into allegations of steriods in baseball. If
I’m not mistaken Medicare and Medicaide are shortly headed toward
bankruptcy ,we’re in the middle of a war, and there still has been no
real immigration reform. Yet yesterday I see Roger Clemons getting
grilled before Congress wasting my tax $$ answering questions about his
alleged steriod use. Frankly WHO CARES?? This is a great example of why
the American public is sick and tired of Washinton politics and
wasteful spending. It would be refreshing to see some REAL problems
getting solved for a change. Thank you for your time. Glenn Alspaugh

I’m with you Glenn. Now of course this isn’t the first time that Rep. Foxx has been taken to the woodshed for some comments. Here’s a classic from last year, after returning from a tour in the summer of ’06 to pre-surge Iraq (editorial comments were mine):

The war in Iraq is
going well, Iraqi government officials are determined to have a united
government, and American soldiers are satisfied with their equipment
and their mission, said Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-5th, who visited Iraq
yesterday and Sunday…

Foxx and other members
of the congressional delegation stayed with troops overnight in a
military compound in Baghdad that is one of Saddam Hussein’s former
palaces and had lunch together yesterday. (Ed. Comment: Sure she got a real good idea of what the situation on the ground looked like from there)…

Yesterday, after
Foxx’s visit, there were several kidnappings in Baghdad, the latest in
a string of sectarian violence that has escalated in recent months.

Foxx said she did
not see any evidence of this (Ed. See comment above). but said that the government officials,
particularly al-Bolani, are committed to making sure "the terrorists
don’t create a civil war."…

Ideally, she said,
military leaders and government officials told her they hope to have
Baghdad "secure" and a "place where people can feel safe" by the end of
the year. (Ed. She really bought this?)

There have been
reports that American military personnel do not have adequate supplies
or that their morale is low. Foxx said that her meetings with soldiers
did not support this. She said that at one point she asked the
soldiers, while their supervising officers were not within earshot, in
hopes to get the most honest answer, and they told her they were fine.

"There was no sense of any problems," she said, "There was no indication of unhappiness." (Ed.
Oh come on, in the private sector that would be like a VP going around
her CEO to bitch to the Board of Directors.  It ain’t gonna happen).

Now after the surge some of these comments don’t seem so absurd, but at the time they sure did.  And the fact that she took the anecdotal evidence of speaking to soldiers out of earshot of their C.O.’s as some sort of definitive evidence that morale was good is borrowing directly from the play book of her idol GWB when he said he’d looked into Vladimir Putin’s soul and liked what he saw. 

I’m thinking that if you own a used-car lot or are looking to unload some Florida swampland you really want Rep. Foxx to come shopping at your place.

Heard at the Diner

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Yesterday morning I was at the local diner grabbing a bite to eat and reading my copy of the Winston-Salem Journal.  Normally I can tune out the folks around me, but this morning the following sentence snuck through my defenses:

"Well, you’d never know it from our local liberal media but Bush has actually done a damn good job, especially with the war."

This caught my attention because I was sitting there holding my own copy of the local liberal media not three feet from the old guy who said it.  I was wondering what he’d say if I let fly with what I thought about Bush when he went on to say (I’m paraphrasing here), "Hell, some of the most effective presidents we’ve had were considered failures at the time.  Look at Abraham Lincoln…" And then one of his buddies, trying to yank his chain said, "and Herbert Hoover!"

From there they started grumbling about how bad things were gonna get if we elect another Democrat, "It’ll be just like the late 70s when we had Carter," and that transitioned into reminiscences about the Iran hostages being freed when Reagan was inaugurated, "He scared Khomeini to death because he knew Reagan would pull the trigger if he had to."  I wanted to do a little chain yanking myself by asking if they believed the October Surprise theory that held that Reagan’s people negotiated with the Iranians to delay the release to make sure that Reagan won the election over Carter.  That would have been fun, but I decided not to because I was always taught that eavesdropping is rude.

Quick aside for an Andy Rooney moment: You ever notice that eavesdropping is only rude when someone else is doing it?

Anyway, the old guys finished up what they were doing and got up to leave.  Any notion I had that maybe some of this was directed at me because they felt I was some sort of commie, I was reading the Journal after all, was quickly forgotten because I don’t think they could see 12 inches much less the 3 feet it would have taken to see me.

So I just thought "To each his own" and would have forgotten it totally if not for a call I had with my Dad this morning.  In the course of our conversation he pretty much blamed Bush and his cohorts for ruining the Republican party and then said he’s thinking about voting for Obama AND he’s already voted for a Democrat for Congress in 06.  This is a man who’s a life-long dyed-in-the-wool traditional conservative, the kind of Republican who looks for fiscal responsibility and reasonable governance of free markets out of his leaders.  In other words he’s representative of the vast majority of Republicans I’ve known all my life and who seem to be fleeing the party in droves. 

I can’t tell you how many of my friends and acquaintances who have voted Republican all their lives are now looking elsewhere, and I’m not talking about those yokels who are throwing "suicide" votes in the hopes that Obama or Clinton will screw up so bad that Republicans can take over again in ’12.  How stupid is that?  These are people who believe in smaller and more efficient government, lower taxes and law and order.  They believe in balanced budgets and effective services, but less "nanny-state" programs.  They believe in free markets, but not that doing business should be free.  If the Democrats find a way to absorb these people and deliver at least a healthy percentage of what they’re looking for we could end up with a significant migration of centrist Republicans to the Donkey side.  The Republicans will be left with all the folks like those fellows at the diner, the hard right-wingers who never met a problem that couldn’t be solved by swinging the Republican hammer at it.

Since I’m even entertaining these thoughts I only have one thing left to say: hell hath frozen over.

Can We Just Fast Forward to November 4? Please?

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I had lunch on Tuesday with a friend who shall remain anonymous to protect his identity.  He urged me to blog more about big issues like the war, our country’s moronic leadership and all the illegal immigrants flooding our border from Canada.  Said I have an informed opinion and, besides, it’d do great things for my traffic.  Of course all my friends and family have told me it bores them silly when I write about such things and I think it’s because they know I don’t know squat about spit.  But since ignorance has never stopped me before I guess I’ll give it a whirl.  Here goes.

Can we please, please, please just skip forward to November 4, 2008 and then just go right to inauguration day 2009?  At this point we’ve whittled our prospects for a new president down to four people who can’t possibly be any worse than what we’ve got and the differences between the four are essentially the same as the difference between a Honda Accord and a Toyota Camry.  Slightly different body, pretty close to the same price and about as exciting as oatmeal.

Personally I’d least like to see Huckabee ascend to the throne that King George II is abdicating if only because I’m sick and tired of hearing Onward Christian Soldiers.  Yes, yes, yes we’re fighting a war but for God’s sake it’s not the Crusades no matter what the Bible-thumping nimrods like Cal Thomas think.  Honestly I almost don’t care what else Huckabee thinks, I just don’t want to spend even one more day with a President who thinks he’s there due to divine intervention. Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s what his website says: "My faith is my life – it defines me. My faith doesn’t influence my
decisions, it drives them."  I think we’ve had about enough of that.

I’d have to put Clinton as my next-to-last pick.  Why?   I think she’s just as obstinate as King George II and maybe even less likely to say the words, "Sorry I was mistaken."  We’ve had plenty of stiff-lipped resoluteness over the last seven years and look where it’s gotten us. 

That leaves me with Obama and McCain.  Eh.

We have all kinds of big issues facing us (crappy economy, crappy health care system, crappy foreign policy, etc.) but I find myself thinking that really all I want is for our next president to restore our good name and start to rebuild our honor.  I find it disturbingly ironic that when King George II was elected it was seen as a way to lift the Presidency out of the moral gutter that Clinton had dragged us in.  Maybe without 9/11 we’d have simply had four or eight years of a president who really didn’t do much of consequence but ran really well organized meetings.  Maybe God would have merely been invoked in King George II’s great campaign to further redistribute our booty to his silver spoon cohorts rather than in his campaign to smite the infidels sitting on top of his oil fields thumbing their noses at his daddy.  We’ll never know since fate conspired to punish us for our hanging chads.  Did you ever think we’d get to the point where someone could look at Clinton’s, uh, indiscretions and say things like "At least all he did was diddle the intern, it’s not like he blew up the Middle East or anything?"

Since there’s no use crying over spilled milk I guess the best we can do is hope that we get through this year without the King doing too much more harm before our next "president" can come in to start reminding the world that we aren’t all a bunch of torturing, incompetent bureaucrats who leave their own people to die and fester in swamped cities while we do a fly-by.   We need someone to remind the world of all the good that we’ve done and that we continue to do.

So can we just fast forward 10 months and be done with it?  Whether it’s Senator McCain, former Arkansas Governor Huckabee, Senator Obama or Senator Clinton…oh man we’re screwed.

Caveat Emptor Indeed

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Well I guess we can call the tanking of the US mortgage and real estate industries a real problem now that 60 Minutes has done a story about it.  One part of the story features an interview with a family who signed on the dotted line for an adjustable rate mortgage without consulting an attorney.  The reporter, Steve Kroft, asks them why they didn’t view this as a big, risky investment and get professional advice and the reply from the husband was that he was just looking at it as a way to get his family out of an undesirable neighborhood into a good neighborhood.  His wife pointed out that they’d told the lending agent they were dealing with that they could only afford a certain amount per month (around $2,400) and the agent went ahead and sold them the ARM anyway.  Now they’re trying mightily to keep up but since their house is now worth less than they paid which means there’s about 0% chance to refinance and their monthly payments are more than they can swing they’re in deep doo-doo.

The response that many people often have to stories like this, including myself, is caveat emptor…buyer beware.  The problem with this attitude is that modern American society is a very complex place to live, and although real estate is regulated to a certain degree there is still plenty of room for people to unwittingly get screwed.  You need look no further than the other end of the mortgage industry to see how the market is almost incomprehensible to even the most sophisticated minds.  According to this article in the New York Times the chief executive of credit rating agency Moody’s said that "his agency had made significant mistakes in the rating of structured
finance products, but added that the agency had been deceived by people
who put together the products."  Here’s an excerpt:

“In hindsight, it is pretty clear that there was a failure in some
key assumptions that were supporting our analytics and our models,” the
executive, Raymond W. McDaniel Jr., told a panel at the World Economic Forum, where he heard complaints about conflicts of interest and suggestions that large fees had influenced the ratings.

He
said that one reason for the failure was that the “information quality”
given to Moody’s, “both the completeness and veracity, was
deteriorating” as the subprime mortgage market grew.

In a brief interview later, Mr. McDaniel did not provide any specifics about who had misled the rating agency.

Rating
agencies are paid by the companies they rate, a fact that has been
harshly criticized here and elsewhere. “The issue is the reliability of
the system that generates the ratings,” Jacob A. Frenkel, a former
central banker who is now vice chairman of the American International Group,
said in an interview Friday. If investors are to rely on the ratings
agencies, he said, they “must be compensated by investors.”

My point is that the problem with caveat emptor is that if we rely solely on that kind of "every man for himself" mentality then the free market is much less free.  Look at it this way; while many people in the mortgage industry were enriched in the short term many, many more people have been harmed.  Thousands of people have lost their jobs, companies have gone out of business and literally millions of homes are going into foreclosure which means that just as many families have lost their piece of the American dream.  Who knows how long it will take these industries to recover, and how long it will be before many of these families will be able to buy their own homes.

As with most modern American stories this one has lots of gray areas.  In another part of the 60 Minutes story Kroft interviews a young couple who say that they’ve been advised to just walk away from their house and let their credit take the hit now that their monthly mortgage payments are moving up and the value of their house is plummeting.  The couple readily admits that they knew exactly what they were doing when they signed on for their ARM.  The woman says something like "How does it make any sense to pay $3,200 a month for a 3-bedroom house?" to which Kroft replies with something like "Well you agreed to the terms of the contract."  The couple doesn’t want to take the hit to their credit, but they just don’t see the value in overpaying for their house and they don’t think they can refinance now that the house is worth less than the note.  Basically these folks gambled and lost, much like the mortgage companies and financiers who created the vehicles that enabled this behavior.  Still, basic ethics say that if these folks knowingly took this gamble and can still afford the payments on their house they should pay it. 

The thrust of Kroft’s story is that this is essentially a case of good old fashioned greed on all sides of the equation.  Really that’s overly simple.  I’m sure that there are many people who sold these mortgages that truly felt they were enabling the American dream, and that if things got tight for the borrowers they could always re-finance.  I’m also sure that many people took the ARMs because they wanted a better life for themselves and their children and thought that if worse came to worse they could re-finance.  Of course there were also lenders who didn’t care about the American dream and just wanted the commission on the sales, no matter who they hurt to get it and there were borrowers who saw a way to game the system and did it. 

The result we have to deal with, beyond the short term financial pain we’re currently grappling with, is that there is very little trust left.  Investors and borrowers no longer trust the financiers, which means that there’s now sand in the gears of our markets.  Without trust on all sides of the equation we’ll have an adversarial marketplace that will inhibit its growth, and that’s bad for everyone.  I know that support of government regulation is antithetical for most in the business community, but the reality is that government regulation can enable markets by giving all of the players a sense that they are playing on an even field.  Sure there is such a thing as over regulation, but there’s also such a thing as under regulation and we’re seeing the results now.  Let’s hope our esteemed leaders find a healthy balance in the near future.

American Idiots

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Driving to a lunch meeting today I tuned the car radio to the local public radio station and one of the topics being covered was the upcoming Democratic primary in South Carolina.  The show’s host was interviewing an editor of a South Carolina newspaper about poll results showing Obama was ahead of Clinton in the polls, and how Obama was surprisingly popular with women, but that what really showed through was that Obama was popular with young men and women.  In other words he owns the young voters.  Blah, blah, blah. 

What really caught my attention and almost caused me to run off the road was when the host asked about John Edwards.  The editor said that Edwards was popular with issues-oriented Democrats, but that not enough of those existed to help him win.  Further, he said that the average Democratic voter was more focused on candidates’ images (morals?) than on their stances on specific issues.  So even though Edwards was the first candidate to offer any substantive proposals for things like health care reform it wouldn’t do him any good in getting elected.

Sadly I think the editor was right.   Average Americans just don’t seem to give a rat’s ass about issues outside their immediate daily lives.  It’s not that we’re all stupid it’s just that most of this stuff is boring and we have so much going on in our lives that if we’re given the choice between watching American Idol while sucking down a couple of adult beverages or trying to wrap our brains around some big-picture economic policy I think most of us opt for killing brain cells.

On the other hand maybe more of us would pay attention to these big issues if they were actually communicated to us in ways that are digestible.  Perhaps someone could put together a scorecard that says something like, "On health care Obama believes this, Clinton believes that, Edwards this; on raising the minimum wage Obama says this, Clinton that and Edwards this, etc."  But no, what we get from our esteemed Fourth Estate is akin to what the sports pages give us in the run up to the Kentucky Derby.  "Clinton looks good because exit polls in Vermont showed that left handed feminists with moles on their left buttocks liked her so she ought to do well in parts of Florida."  Sounds a lot like "The filly Absurd is going off at 2-1 based on her last run at Aqueduct which has a similar track to the one in tomorrow’s race" doesn’t it?

I’m not the only one who thinks the press has botched their political coverage.  Matt Taibbi writes in Rolling Stone:

This 2008 presidential race looked interesting once, a
thrillingly up-for-grabs affair in which real issues and real
ground-up voter anger threatened to wrest control of America’s
politics from the Washington Brahmins who usually puppeteer this
process from afar. And while the end result in Iowa — a
historic and inspirational Obama victory, coupled with a
hilariously satisfying behind-the-woodshed third-place ass-whipping
for status quo gorgon Hillary Clinton — was compelling, the
media has done its best to turn a once-promising race into an
idiotic exchange of Nerf-insults, delivered at rah-rah campaign
events utterly indistinguishable from scholastic pep rallies. "If
there’s policy in this race," one veteran campaign reporter tells
me with a sad laugh, "I haven’t noticed it."

And while it’s tempting to blame the candidates, deep in my
black journalist’s heart I know it isn’t all their fault.

We did this. The press. America tried to give us a real race,
and we turned it into a bag of shit, just in the nick of time.

Actually I think Taibbi should include we average Americans in the blame game.  If we demanded better coverage of the issues from our media, if we rewarded smart stories about the issues with our attention then maybe the media would deliver it.  Sure we’re all tired after a long days work and yes it’s easier to mindlessly watch crap like American Idol, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t tune in for a half hour of informative television about something that will affect us for the next four years or more.

But it’s a kind of chicken and egg thing isn’t it?  You could argue that the reason we aren’t more engaged is because the best the media can offer us is Tim Russert and company, or you could argue that the media would give us more informative programming if we’d show that we’d consume it.  Whatever.

Actually we might already have a solution (or two) at our fingertips: Comedy Central.  With its "news parodies" The Daily Show and The Colbert Report the network that gave us South Park is also giving us the only television that comes close to covering the issues.  By skewering the blowhards on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC and taking the self-centered politicians to the woodshed on a regular basis these shows unwittingly educate us in the process.  So I guess my little rant here is really worthless.  Just listen to the other Jon and we’ll be OK, because if you don’t we might just end up with another Bush.

Here’s a little Daily Show sample to enjoy over the weekend: