MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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Aug 19
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Olympic baseball

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The Olympic baseball tournament is getting interesting.

The United States Olympic baseball team started very slowly in the tournament, losing to South Korea before beating the Netherlands, then losing in extra-innings to Cuba, only to come back and beat Canada and China. In the China game on Monday things got pretty rough. Matt LaPorta got hit in the head after he ran over China’s catcher and knocked him out of the game. Nate Schierholtz avenged LaPorta with this collision at the plate.

The U.S. needs to beat Taiwan and Japan, which is undefeated, to get into the medal rounds.

The baseball tournament–which is being discontinued in Olympic competition (apparently darts and ballroom dancing are under consideration as replacement sports), along with softball, in 2012–has been spectacular, but the only place to follow it is online.

Of course TV has that beach volleyball thing covered.

Aug 19
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Saddleback

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Like any serious political junkie, I watched the entire Saddleback forum on Saturday night.  My assessment, in a nutshell:  Obama sounded like Dukakis; McCain sounded like Reagan.  If I were a McCainiac, I’d be giddy with excitement.

There has been a rope-a-dope meme bouncing around the internet over the last few weeks.  Democratic-leaning pundits have guessed that the Obama campaign’s weak performance over the last few weeks might have been an attempt to get McCain to shoot his negative-ad wad early.  Then the Obama campaign would come out strong after the convention.

I think that Obama’s awful performance on Saturday casts serious doubt on that theory. Obama was obviously unprepared or prepared badly.  More likely the latter.  He gave long, professorial responses (just like Dukakis) where he should have and could have delivered short, coherent, on-message response.

This makes me think that the weakness we’ve seen in the last few weeks as Obama has dropped like a rock in the polls is no rope-a-dope maneuver but actually the result of a lousy campaign.

Aug 18
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October surprise *

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Trey Ellis in HuffPo thinks we should be afraid, very afraid of what Republicans might have up their sleeves for October:

We taxpayers already have shelled out $100 billion on contractors in Iraq since 2003. They have 180,000 employees in country now building what they had assumed would be permanent bases for a permanent occupation of an oil-rich land.

Does anyone really believe that Cheney/Halliburton/Blackwater will relinquish the keys to the American treasury without the nastiest of fights?

For six years Cheney has unleashed a gusher of obscene profiteering with little or no oversight of his petro/reconstruction/military contracting cohorts. You don’t have to be a conspiracy-addicted fan of Jack Bauer’s to understand that they won’t just quietly retire to their yachts in the Gulf of Mexico after regime change and their operations in Iraq are forcibly ended. They understand that not only will they be out of business, but that they could also go to jail — if Democrats hold hearings into war profiteering, just as Truman did as a Senator in 1943.

Remember, when Halliburton et al. first entered Iraq, Republicans had a virtual one-party lock on governance. Democrats acted like frightened little forest animals. The contractors didn’t have to cover their tracks because the vice president of the United States, the de facto ruler of the free world, was their capo.

Me? I sometimes subscribe to the pessimism that the writer voices here. Other times, I am euphoric over Sen. Barack Obama’s chances of winning the presidency. Practically everyone I know supports Obama. My town, which not long ago was a Republican town, is now festooned with “Obama for President” lawn signs.

Yet, this is America we’re talking about. It is at the root of Bill Clinton’s restlessness. Republicans are counting on that thing that Bill feels inately. Bill knows. He has always known this country better than anyone. That’s why he was able to tap what was darkest in the heart of America into two terms in the presidency. Anymore than he wants his wife to win the presidency, he knows that Hillary, warts-and-all, would be easier for Americans to swallow than the pristine Mr. Obama.

Damn Bill!

Aug 18
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Unknowable McCain

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Practically everything the American voters know about Sen. John McCain have been fan notes penned by journalists who act more like his groupies than objective observers. The real McCain is, of course, not the upstanding tower of strength who is going to defend us all from enemies within and without.

The real McCain, as regular readers of this pamflet know, is a corrupt and craven politician and a serial philanderer who abandoned his family when they were no longer of any use to him. He married into money to further his ambition.

As a creature of Washington, lobbyists and journalists have been his company of choice, keeping his corruption in plain sight where the very same journalists he consorted with, journalists who habitually lionize him as incorruptible, would be sure to miss it.

Frank Rich of The New York Times tried to sort through some of the distortions about John McCain yesterday.

Excerpt:

The truth is we have no idea what will happen in November. But for the sake of argument, let’s posit that one thread of the Obama-is-doomed scenario is right: His lead should be huge in a year when the G.O.P. is in such disrepute that at least eight of the party’s own senatorial incumbents are skipping their own convention, the fail-safe way to avoid being caught near the Larry Craig Memorial Men’s Room at the Twin Cities airport.

So why isn’t Obama romping? The obvious answer — and both the excessively genteel Obama campaign and a too-compliant press bear responsibility for it — is that the public doesn’t know who on earth John McCain is. The most revealing poll this month by far is the Pew Research Center survey finding that 48 percent of Americans feel they’re “hearing too much” about Obama. Pew found that only 26 percent feel that way about McCain, and that nearly 4 in 10 Americans feel they hear too little about him. It’s past time for that pressing educational need to be met.

What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image. As this fairy tale has it, the hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton has stood up as rebelliously in Washington as he did to his Vietnamese captors. He strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president’s response to Katrina; he fought the “agents of intolerance” of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom DeLay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence-peddlers.

With the exception of McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.

Continue . . .

Aug 15
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McCain’s shifts

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From The New Republic

[John] McCain has spent years manipulating the public’s perception of his stance on abortion and reproductive health. He’s been against overturning Roe v. Wade and he’s been for it; he’s embraced the idea of a pro-choice running mate and, more recently, recoiled from it. It’s no wonder the public is confused.

The right has been twisted in knots for years over whether McCain respects “life” enough to earn its support. And, among Democrats and pro-choicers, the confusion is even greater. Poll after poll shows them unclear on McCain’s positions. Planned Parenthood’s president Cecile Richards says that, even after McCain secured the Republican nomination this year, long-time Planned Parenthood supporters she met with didn’t know the candidate’s position on Roe v. Wade. McCain’s maverick reputation and his calculated political meanderings on choice add up to one thing: The public thinks McCain just might be a moderate on abortion.

Continue . . .

Aug 12
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White Chicks Dig Obama

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Fan Club

Jake Tapper of ABC News counts the number of young white women professing their adoration of Sen. Obama in Sen. McCain’s latest web ad, called “Hot Chicks Dig Obama”.

His count? Four.

Just for kicks, I decided to find out whether Tapper was just being selective in his reporting. Four white women might not be all that important if there are lots of other people featured in the ad. So I watched the ad closely, and here’s what I found.

Black Females: 1
White Females: 6
White Males: 2

Now let’s look behind the numbers.

The first person who appears in the ad is a black female news anchor. She’s in the shot only briefly and isn’t fawning over Obama.

The second person who appears is a white (or perhaps Latino) male who says that he almost cried when Obama gave him an autograph. For whatever it’s worth, this guy sets off my gaydar bigtime. He’s featured very prominently in the ad.

The next shot is bizarre. It’s of an overweight, middle-aged white woman who appears to be giving some kind of salute in the back of a gymnasium. I can’t understand what she’s saying. Seated next to her are another white woman and a middle-aged white man — perhaps her family.

Then we get our first closeup of a nubile white woman. She compares Obama to Bono and comes across as a little ditzy. She’s blonde.

Next up is a young white woman who works at Taco Bell. She’s not even talking about Obama. She says something about being busy. She has a nice smile, but the statement seems a little vapid. We can’t see what color her hair is.

Next is a young white woman (blond) talking about Obama’s aura.

Then a young white woman with brown hair talking about his “soft eyes.” There’s another young woman standing next to her while she says this. That woman is licking her lips as her friends talks about Obama.

The next shot is a white man holding up a button to the camera and delivering the ad’s tagline: “Hot Chicks Love Obama.” This guy almost doesn’t count because the shot is so quick and you can barely see him. He’s almost completely obscured by the button.

The ad closes with Mike Meyers and Dana Carvy, in character as Wayne and Garth, saying “we’re not worthy.” I didn’t count them in my tally of white guys.

Although there are some white guys and a black woman in the ad, this spot is really all about the gay dude and white chicks who dig Obama.

I know from personal experience that black and brown chicks dig Obama, too. So I’m left to wonder: why is it that the McCain campaign seems to want to associate Obama with young, nubile, white women (and a gay man)?

Aug 12
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Georgian Nights and Days

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A friend elsewhere (on Facebook) criticized my post yesterday about the Caucasus crisis.

He said, in part:

“with due respect, I’m a bit worried that even avowedly progressive people like you in America seem to hold rather one-sided view of the current South Ossetia crisis: without apparently/admittedly realising that a mirror-image history of our action over Kosovo is repeating itself!”

I don’t deny that my reaction to the crisis has been knee-jerk:

Russia, a nation with 142 million people on the world’s largest land mass, stomps Georgia (Pop. 4.6 million), one of the world’s smallest nation.

That was and still is my reaction to this crisis.

I should say that I do not have any romantic notions of the light of democracy being extinguished in Georgia. My progressive leanings does not blind me to the flawed character at the center of this drama.

Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili is a thug and a con man. He was at the head of a mob of drunken louts (I would not know this but he allegedly, clad in jeans and a leather jacket, held a single rose on his way to parliament that day–hence, the ‘rose revolution’) who used the excuse of a disputed election in November 2003 to storm the parliament and literally drive then president Eduard Shevardnadze out of office.

I don’t doubt that the United States, tired of Shevardnadze’s halting steps toward full alliance with the West, put Saakashvili up to that bit of political adventure.

My interlocutor’s Kosovo comparison is actually more than a bit flawed.

The ethnic Ossetians do not really have much of an argument with Georgia. What discord exists in the region is usually fomented by Russia and the puppet regime (made up of Russian officials and intelligence agents) it set up there in the early 1990’s after it invaded. There is no history of ethnic violence, no threat of Georgia, despite Vladimir Putin’s claim, ethnically cleansing the Ossetians.

It is a sort of pretend breakaway region in that it is Russia trying to gouge it out of Georgia. The region is an internationally recognized region of Georgia. But Russia sees it fit to cause mischief just to let Georgia know it is there.

As president, Saakasvhili has been extremely foolish, taunting Russia by making cooing noises at NATO, asking for membership and parading its military, equipped by the West and the U.S., provocatively. You should not be flirting with nations and institutions that one of the worlds major powers (and still very dangerous because it is wounded and has an inferiority complex) considers hostile to all its interests and aspirations when you share a long border with that power.

As I said yesterday, Brother Putin (Vlad the Impaler) don’t play that. He will squash you like a bug. I am actually surprised he did not just kill Saakasvhili and be done with it. That’s what he did with most enemies inside and outside Russia.

When Putin set up that recent provocation in South Ossetia, Saakashvili’s response was not wise, not at all, the opposite of what a statesman would do.

In fact, he responded like a drunk would when challenged to a bar fight. Not having the judgment that he was in no condition to fight, he waded in and, in the process, hurt his nation.

Saakashvili, if he’s not killed, will have no country left to run (Putin might even take his beautiful wife, Sandra Elisabeth Roelofs, for his own). Saakashvili will end up pumping gas out of “that lone gas pump in a desert” that his country, Georgia, is about to become.

Aug 11
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A Clear Voice

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The United States is not speaking with a forked tongue about Russian atrocities in Georgia before the United Nations Security Council.

Russia and the U.S. traded hot accusations at the Security Council over Moscow’s aggressive handling of its military operation in Georgia’s breakaway province of South Ossetia and the bombing of Georgia proper.

Georgian diplomats at the U.N. asked for “immediate diplomatic and humanitarian intervention to protect georgian from russian ongoing aggression.” A U.S.-European resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire is pending but Russia is certain to veto it.

I am not sure how much U.S. Ambassador to the UN Zalmay Khalilzad was freelancing before the Security Council on Sunday and how much administration policy he was voicing:

“We must condemn Russia’s military assault on the sovereign state of Georgia, the violation of the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, including the targeting of civilians and the campaign of terror against the georgian population,” Khalilzad told the council.

Which brought an angry retort from Russian Ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin:

“This statement, ambassador, is absolutely unacceptable, particularly from the lips of the permanent representative of a country whose actions we’re aware of, including with regards to civilian populations . . .”

Churkin was obviously about to discuss U.S. atrocities in Iraq, including indiscriminate bombing of civilian population in that country over the course of the last several years. But, as we know that American ears are too delicate for truth about their own country, CNN U.N. Correnspondent Richard Roth broke in at this point, speaking over Churkin’s voice, with a useless observation about this being the most heated confrontation between the two superpowers since the cold war.

It is a useless observation because it sought to obscure how the Iraq war has degraded America’s moral standing the in the world. In the past, America could speak with moral authority on an issue such as this, and have the world pay attention. No more. Russian laughed in our face and told us to butt out.

It did not stop Khalilzad, of course, from speaking out forcefully. Khalilzad was famously reprimanded by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for appearing on a panel alongside the Iranian foreign minister at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland at a time when the Bush administration was not talking to Iran.

Rice has contented herself with working in the background on the Russian-Georgian crisis. George W. Bush, meanwhile, has been strangely mealy-mouthed in public statements about the crisis.

Khalilzad told the Security Council on Sunday that the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had told Sec. of State Rice in a phone conversation that Mikheil Saakashvili, the president of Georgia, must go. He then turned to ambassador Churkin and, dramatically, asked:

“Is the goal of the Russian Federation to change the leadership of Georgia?”

Churkin waved away the question inside the council but told journalists outside the chamber that some leaders, meaning Saakashvili, should contemplate how useful they’ve become to their people.

“Regime change is purely an american invention, purely an American invention,” Churkin, nevertheless, insisted. “We never apply this terminology in our political thinking.”

Khalilzad persisted that Russia’s overreach in Georgia could undermine the relationship of the two powers

“We want to make sure our Russian counterparts to understand that the days of overthrowing leaders by military means in europe, those days are gone,” he said.

Churkin, sly and charming, told reporters the truth:

“I don’t think we’re in danger of somehow jeopardizing our relationship with the United States.”

He is right.

No one, not the U.S., not the Europeans, will do a damn thing to help Georgia. Georgia is dead and gone, hors d’oeuvre, to Russia’s insatiable appetite for territory. In a time not too far in the future, all that will remain of the nation we now know as Georgia will be comprised of a desert, a couple of gas pumps, and oil pipelines leading out to the Black Sea.

Who will stop Russia?

Aug 11
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No Hillary Roll Call at Convention

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The potential for Clinton (both Hillary and Bill) mischief is too great. Bill thinks he knows what’s best for Democrats and the country, and that’s for Hillary to be president.

RUSH “the Great Idiot” Limbaugh (speaking alternatively as himself and Bill Clinton): Remember all those times, ladies and gentlemen, I warned you never, ever trust a Clinton?  Nothing that happens with the Clintons is a coincidence?  Isn’t it interesting, with the Lord Barack Obama plunging in the polls, there’s a story today from the Huffington Post about how he’s losing in Pennsylvania, and they can’t believe it.  He ought to be cleaning up in Pennsylvania.  We can believe it.  We saw him lose Pennsylvania to Mrs. Clinton, and there was no evidence that he was going to pick up the votes that she won, so they’re all concerned about that.  And Bill’s out there now starting to give interviews about whether or not Obama is qualified, and of course Bill’s also doing some other things out there.  You know, he’s probably picking up the phone, he’s making phone calls.  You know he is. (doing Clinton impression) “Look, this guy can’t win.  Look at that media contention, went over there, went over there to Europe, and he’s plummeting in the polls.  The guy can’t win, he can’t win. His numbers are sliding.  I warned you. I warned this is going to happen.”  You know those phone calls are being made.  Mrs. Clinton, after earlier in the week saying she did not want her name placed in nomination at the convention, now says she does.

What’s to prevent HRC’s supporters, egged on by Bill behind the curtain, from hijacking the convention? If not for the nomination itselt, then for the VP slot (even if one had already be designated)? If not that, then some other outrageous demands.

Already, Clintonites are questioning why Obama is not up higher in the polls, despite their handing the McCain campaign a playbook to use to attack Obama.

Now, Clinton staffers, aided by some in the media, are asking questions about the Edwards affair and what impact it might have had on the nomination race if it had been known last year and Edwards was not in the race. As I remember, Edwards won no state (maybe one or two), his support nationwide, despite a galvanizing message, negligible.

HRC had the advantage of money, name-recognition and the entire Democratic party establishment and machinery behind her and lost to a virtual unknown, including a run of 11 straight loses at one point.

Some fear that Clinton’s mischief is not so much to get the nomination this time but to drive down Obama’s support so McCain wins so she can then run in 2012. HRC generously praised McCain during the primary, at one point even saying that she and McCain had crossed some leadership threshold that prepared them to lead the nation whereas all Sen. Obama had was some speech he made.

McCain’s campaign manager said over the weekend that he could consider making a pledge to serve only one term if elected.

Clinton is now saying that some of her supporters would like her quest to be validated with a roll call vote on the nomination on the convention floor in Denver. The roll call vote is usually a proforma affair, with the outcome foregone. Except, these are the Clintons we’re talking about.

Why won’t the Clintons just go away already?

Aug 10
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What?

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I have a million television stations as part of my Verizon Fios account. But, inexplicably, I don’t get MSNBC. I’ve tried to get to the bottom of this but, as Verizon has the worst customer service of any corporation that has ever existed on the face of the planet, I’m still waiting for a credible reason for why this is so.

This is probably the reason why I missed the utterly stupid statement that David Greggory made to open a show on Friday night. As usual, Media Matters was on the case:

On the August 8 edition of MSNBC’s Race for the White House, host David Gregory baselessly suggested that former Sen. John Edwards’ (D-NC) disclosure of an extramarital affair has some relevance to Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Gregory opened the show by saying, “Tonight, more on Edwards and the fallout from his admission today about a sexual affair: Is this another skeleton in the Democratic closet that Barack Obama must struggle to overcome?” Gregory also said that, “now, questions about his [Edwards’] future abound in the party and whether this creates another shadow over Barack Obama as he gets ready for the conventions.”

From the August 8 edition of MSNBC’s Race for the White House:

GREGORY: Tonight: the Edwards affair. He admits an extramarital affair dating back to 2006, telling ABC News, wife Elizabeth learned of it that year. He lied repeatedly to cover it up as a presidential candidate. And now, questions about his future abound in the party and whether this creates another shadow over Barack Obama as he gets ready for the conventions. All of this, as the race for the White House rolls on.

[…]

GREGORY: Welcome to Race for the White House on a busy Friday. I’m David Gregory — happy to have you here. It’s your stop for the fast pace, the bottom line, and every point of view in the room. Tonight, more on Edwards and the fallout from his admission today about a sexual affair: Is this another skeleton in the Democratic closet that Barack Obama must struggle to overcome? Will Edwards appear at the Democratic convention? All of that ahead.

—J.S.

Now, if I follow this correctly, John Edwards, a former rival of Barack Obama had an affair. He lied when asked about it. And, somehow, this is Obama’s problem?  How?

Edwards does not currently hold any office and is not running for any office at the moment. In any case, he is an adult who has behaved abominably to his family and a few other people, including, probably, a young child who had no choice in the matter.

But, exactly how and why is this Obama’s problem?