Plenty of blame to go around

Campaign Contribution Limits: Illinois is one of five states that have no limits at all. Give a grand, fifty grand, a million. Perfectly legal.

Various Limits (38 states + D.C.)
Ban on Corporate Contributions; No Other Limits (4 states)
Limit on Corporate Contributions; No Other Limits (3 states)
Ban on Monetary Contributions by Political Parties; No Other Limits (1 state)

WHITE STATES: No Limits from Any Source (5 states)

Let’s move past cringing in shame and embarrassment over the Blagojevich fiasco and look at how we got here. It’s not enough to blast the “culture of corruption” and wail with John Kass about the “combine.”

It’s structural. It’s also about people – the people who, because they everything to gain by the system as it is, hold hard and fast to the status quo. Who are they? The Dynasties.

Blago is the product of Dick Mell, though they have indeed since had a falling out. Todd Stroger, who has nearly his entire extended family on the county payroll, is the product of John Stroger. Daddy Stroger spawned an ocean of others who were indebted to him as well. Mr. Speaker For Life gave us Lisa. Emil has now provided us with his kid. Comptroller Hynes was created by 19th Ward Committeeman Tom Hynes. And Daley, famously known for saying “what’s the point of political power if you can’t help out your friends and family?” – well, enough said. Dynasties protect and promote their own.

And what have the dynasties created?

No limits on campaign contributions. Illinois is one of five states that allow the unbridled excess of unlimited campaign contributions – be they by political action committees (formed by parties, party leaders or interest groups), corporations, unions or individuals. Who in their right mind just loves some state pol so much that they would give them $25,000 – or hundreds of thousands. I can see it with Obama; there was a lot of love out there. But tell me Blago’s contributors were just loving him up. That’s not love. That’s paying for something in return. The dynasties and those who are indebted to them ensure these laws do not change. That's ****in' golden.

Opacity in government. Illinois does not have freedom of information; we have Guantanamo of information. It’s all locked up and locked down. It isn’t just Blagojevich. How about Todd Stroger’s gag edict on staff? Open meetings? Ha. Ever seen the state budget process? It’s all done (when it used to be done, that is) behind closed doors. Few object. The Dynasties love operating in the shade.

Over-reliance on the feds. Okay, Lisa Madigan deferred to Fitzgerald on the Blagojevich investigation, but there’s lots of corruption to go around. Do she and does the State’s Attorney really have to sit on their hands rather than investigate the stuff going on all around them? In other states, both the AG and state’s attorneys prosecute corruption. It’s not up to one guy – fortuitously nominated by an outsider who knew exactly what he was bequeathing Illinois.

And the people of the State of Illinois?

Is there pride in corruption? The people of Illinois almost giggle when they talk about corruption. The U.S. Attorney’s Office supplies some of the titillating jocularity as it names its investigations like they are B-movies: Operation Greylord, Operation Haunted Hall, Operation Silver Shovel, Operation Safe Roads, and now, Operation Board Games. We compete for the status of “most corrupt.”

Maybe, finally, it doesn’t seem so funny anymore.

Blagojevich - Some knew it before term one

My friend, Corinne is a bit exasperated that she is getting calls and letters from out-of-state friends to whom she feels obliged to respond that, though she lives in Illinois, Blagojevich is not her fault. It's not her fault.

But it is the fault of all those who failed to see what seemed so obvious back in 20002 -- that his rhetoric about "reform" and ending "business as usual" was a fraud, a fraud every bit as serious and devious as the allegations in the federal criminal complaint.

If voters didn't quite get that his reform rhetoric in 2002 was fraudulent, they had no excuse not to get it in 2006 when he ran for reelection. By then his penchant for selling seats (they are "f---ing golden") had already been established. In July 2004, the papers revealed that Blagojevich had taken $25,000 checks from two appointees to the state hospital board on the same day -- eighteen days before their appointment.

Unfortunately, this story got its legs broken by the very reporters who told it. The following January, the Governor’s father-in-law, Alderman Dick Mell, angry with him over a landfill deal, called him out for that and added that he had been “granting plum appointments in exchange for $50,000 campaign contributions.”

From that point forward, the reporters (both Trib and Sun-Times) retold this selling seats story as though it had originated with Mell’s accusation. That turned it into a family feud story and not so much a corruption story.

Most weren’t following this closely. Those happy with the Governor for expanding health insurance for the working poor (albeit without the approval of the legislature) and other labor and human services changes said they were suffering Stockholm Syndrome. Many knew the swirling and growing roster of allegations were true, but none would denounce him because, to them, he was still better than any Republican. And no Dem could touch him because by then Blagojevich had been paid to play in the tens of millions, many of which were in the $25,000 plus amount.

The press may have messed up the selling seats story (did they think the Jerry Springer-like family drama was hotter than fraud?), but the voters didn’t care. Sadly, in both elections, the issue of corruption was so far down on the voters’ priority list that it landed somewhere after highway tolls.

With the national and internation embarrassment Illinois has suffered since the arrest, might these priorities shift -- and even stayed shifted until real reform is achieved?

Blagojevich and Nixon

Since Blagojevich’s arrest, there has been just a bit too much of the Shocked, Shocked thing going on. Didn't at least everyone in Illinois know? How could they not?

I knew he was an ego-maniac, more corrupt than George Ryan could have dreamed, and way out of his league – even as a state rep.

Way back then, he told me then of his plan to be president -- of the USA. But I didn’t know he was full-out flat bats, nor till recently, that he was big fan of Nixon and even stalked him at San Clemente till he got an autograph and photo. Now it all comes together.

Figures, huh?

Illinois in the news: A governor is arrested

Yeah, it’s our turn (again).

It’s been just a month since the flag waving in Grant Park -- with the whole world watching and maybe even a little jealous. It was followed by day-after-day of orderly transition and press conferences (some say too orderly – they want free for alls) from Chicago, highlighting again Obama’s smooth, confident and focused work of putting an administration together.

Then, like a gang banger grabbing some bling off a kid around the corner, our governor with the giant mound of hair has to chase after his own bling – whatever he could get for a Senate seat, for approval of a gaming bill, for releasing committed funds to a children’s hospital, and a host of other sales of his office – and our state -- to whomever he could get to bid and pay.

This has been going on for years. To some of us, it is not news, even as the arrest is. We can exhale. Finally. But the timing is aggravating.

Blagojevich is now grabbing international headlines, too. In an entirely disgusting way. Due to his vainglorious and greedy idiocy, we are no longer the city of that magnificent, uplifting and peaceful night at Grant Park, but the Tribune's John Kass’s nightmare-land of venality and corruption. And, predictably, Kass will tie it to Obama – even if the string is as thin as a net of spun sugar.

The out-of-towners – the reporters hunkered in here for the duration of the transition -- will ruminate and speculate. Is there something about Chicago? Is it the Daleys? How is Obama implicated? How could he not be?

Well, for starters, while he didn’t “take on” the machine, he was hardly “of the machine,” let alone its creature. We have plenty of those – the dynasty families that give birth to and then get their spawn elected and elected again.

Obama’s deceased parents did not bequeath him seats in Illinois. And no matter how much that “godfather” label is given to statehouse senate prez Emil Jones in relation to Obama, he was more a church usher; Jones just opened the doors of the statehouse and directed the flock this way and that. He didn’t raise the guy.

So, the drama is still unfolding and will for a long time to come. Blago won’t resign. He’s too full of himself to even consider it. As we sit here gagging on his greed, he’s pouring over the headlines and rejoicing. Finally, he’s getting headlines like his hero Elvis.

On Tuesday night, the flag became ours

Grant Park was awash in American flags as hundreds of thousands awaited Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. The flag wavers were young and old and in between; they were black, white and brown. Near me were an elderly Sikh couple with turbans; they waved flags. The French kids attending college here waved our flag. The guy with dreadlocks and his daughter on his shoulder waved the flag. And the women wearing head scarves waved it, too.

When CNN announced Obama’s win, the flags punctuated the wild cheers thundering throughout the park. And when he gave his speech and against a backdrop of flags standing tall, the crowd waved theirs harder and higher.

For many years, the Republican Party has monopolized the flag -- and patriotism – and claimed it as theirs alone. This started forty years ago when anti-war youth had scorned the flag; to some of us, it conjured painful images of atrocities carried out in the name of the flag – exemplified by napalming Vietnamese children. We identified with the victims of that war – not those dropping the napalm. Jimi Hendrix’s soul-wrenching, screaming, tearing, blistering Star Spangled Banner captured our pain with exquisite accuracy.

But somehow that minority of kids in the sixties who rejected the imagery of the flag morphed, in the Republican imagination, to include everyone in the Democratic Party, the very party the kids were protesting in 1968. The Democrats had as many pro-war and anti-civil rights people as the GOP, but still, the GOP’s meme caught hold – and has lasted for forty years.

During this campaign, the GOP re-litigated the sixties and recycled their worn-out charges of anti-Americanism, launched the notion of “Real Americans” to distinguish them from the rest of us and even suggested that Congress be investigated to ferret out the un-Americans among them. Once again, they tried to narrow the idea of a flag-waving patriot to those who sign on to their platform, live in small towns and can be caricatured -- as Joe the Plumber (inaccurately) was.

They got it wrong. By claiming the flag as theirs and theirs alone, by fomenting hate and fear among their flag-wavers, and by leading with ancient grievances rather than new ideas, they got it dead wrong.

Obama’s campaign brilliantly chose to embrace the flag and not to focus on defending himself against the stew of tired old charges against his and his supporters’ patriotism, but instead to lay out his vision of what we can be as a nation. He did indeed summon “a new spirit of patriotism” – and that’s what prompted the flag waving in Grant Park. We were waving the flag not in defiance or anger as we had seen done at GOP election rallies, but in hope, aspiration, community and love – of nation and one another.

For too long the flag was used by the right as a bludgeon – thrust angrily in the face of any of us who would differ, disagree, contest, protest or dream of that mountain top. Now it is ours, too.

We will be happy to share it.

I've got tickets to the Obama celebration at Grant Park!

Can't wait. And niece Tyra is flying in from Paris to join us!

Political Rage at the Bar at BWI

All the seats were taken and I wanted to grab a quick drink before heading home to Chicago-bama. Cornering the corner of the bar, I invited another seat-seeker to share the left side of my standing room corner.

Immediately, a great big thirty-something man seated to my right offered me his chair and stood to drink his beer. "Thank you," I all but gushed. "It’s so rare and delightful for a man to offer his seat." I complimented him further on his generosity and he explained it was due to his military dad who had trained him right. I echoed his appraisal, saying I’d always found military men to have great manners (even as I was silently recalling an account on the news the night before of dismaying numbers of rapes of women in the military by their colleagues.)

There seemed to be a murmur of here-here by the men seated around us but I didn't pay much attention. They were dim elevator music and I called a friend to see if she had won a ticket to the Obama election night celebration in Grant Park.

She hadn't. I had. She and I kidded around about what I would do with my "plus one" ticket – auction it? No. Use it as bait to get a boyfriend? Maybe.

But then I was off to Gush Two -- about the historic nature of the event, the once in a lifetime nature of it, how I had painted my nails Barack Blue already in anticipation, and how people would be dancing in the streets for at least four or five days when he wins.

As I wound the call down to down a crab cake (Baltimore!) I sensed a shift in the men around me. As they overheard my call, the charming jovial atmosphere that had prevailed as I had complimented the gent who had given me his seat soured. I looked around and saw a sea of hard, set, angry mouths on the white men in the seats around the bar.

I cut my call short.

A middle-aged man seated to my right opened the dialogue. "Everyone’s not going to be any dancing in the streets.”

Seeing the tight faces around me, I joked, "Okay, not everyone. There will be those getting ammo for their Uzis and sharpening their knives for decapitation."

This was not received with the levity intended. Another man sneered, "So you think all Republicans want to kill Him?” [The Name went unmentioned.]"

"Hell no. Hell no. Just the nuts. Republicans have no monopoly on nuts. I don’t think all Republicans are like that at all. For god’s sake, I’ve been a Republican speechwriter. Most everyone in my family is a Republican. They don’t shoot people."

This did not mollify the hard jaws.

The one who doubted my prediction of street dancing said, “I’m in the Air Force – no one in the military is voting for him."

I said I’d talked to lots of men and women in uniform and military families while traveling and found lots and lots of Obama supporters.

“Liar,” he seethed.

The faces grew tighter. Veins on their necks throbbed. I imagined pitchforks and torches.

One reduced himself to calling me an "intimidating bitch.”

The gent who gave me his seat looked sheepish -- as though by having done so, he'd brought this angry sneering crowd alive.

I had a plane to catch, downed the last of my crab cake and left for the gate.

The guy I had offered to share my corner with had remained silent (but not hard jawed) and caught up with me as I got to the gate. "Rough time, huh?" he asked.

"My skin's thick," I replied. "But why didn’t you say anything?”

“I didn’t want them to kill me. Did they scare you?”

“No, I'm not worried about me. My country, though - that's another matter. Those guys are ANGRY. I’m afraid of how people like that will react when Barack is elected. What do you think set them off?”

“Dancing in the streets, that’s what.”

“What? What’s wrong with dancing?”

“They’re thinking of the song – Martha and the Vandellas. They’re black. They were imagining black people dancing in the streets.”

“And that’s what made them so angry?”

“Yeah, probably. That and your blue nail polish.”

Palin grants interview: "And then I ain't gonna say no more."

Taking off her glasses, but not her gloves, Governor Palin agreed to an interview on ABC. We have a preview.

When asked about Bush's plan to provide $1 billion in aid to Georgia, Palin answered. "That's just not fair. What about Alaska and our other great western states like Arizona? What about them?"

Charlie Gibson pointed out that this was a question about international policy; he was referring to the Georgia bordering Russia and Turkey, the site of the recent deployment of tanks and toops by Russia, not the U.S. state whose governor is Sonny Perdue.

Governor Palin then replied with her famous fury, "I got somethin to say. And then I ain't gonna say no more. You're takin advantage of me. An' if you fine, fancy gentlemen ain't gonna do nothin about it, then you're just a bunch of lousy, yella, stinkin' cowards, the - the whole bunch of ya, and your fancy airs don't come to nothin'. Your Ma'am'in' and your Miss Palinarin' - it don't come to nothin', Mr. Gibson, not... no."

Palin then ran from the room.

In wake of Palin-fever, Obama picks new VP

Waitress and mother of eleven (Howitzer, Glock, Rifle, Tank, Remington, Drone, Grenade, Colt, Nuclear, Hydrogen and a boy named Sue) will be on the Dem ticket

September 3, 2008
Sunny Grinns - UPA

BUTTERCAKES, WEST VIRGINIA - Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama astonished the press and pundits today with his announcement of his new running mate. Betty Jo McCoy, 43, mother of eleven children and a waitress from Buttercakes, West Virginia (pop 327), will replace Joe Biden on the ticket. While withdrawing Biden’s nomination, the new Veep candidate is already being hailed as a remarkable replacement for the “elite” Biden.

“A real American family person”

In announcing the switch, Sen. Obama said, “Betty is the real McCoy, a woman every American can relate to – a working mother, an avid hunter and a patriot.” Apparently rebutting former Speaker of the House Denny Hastert’s statement today that Sarah Palin is "the only person that’s a real American family person that’s come out in this election,” Obama said, “If Betty is not a ‘real American family person’ then no one is.”

McCoy’s children have all been home-schooled, doing their lessons at the café, Grub and Suds, where McCoy has worked for the last twenty years and where Obama presented McCoy at a press conference this morning.

Seven children in the military

Seven of McCoy’s children serve in the military. Her 27-year-old triplet sons, Howitzer, Glock, Rifle, and her daughter, Tank, 26, serve in Iraq. Daughter Remington, 25, and son Drone, also 25, serve in Afghanistan. Daughter Grenade, 24, is serving time in Fort Lewis due to her involvement in certain activities at Abu Ghraib. All seven joined the military on September 12, 2001, having stood in line all night after the attacks to be the first to join the next day.

5 children are single moms; 14 grandchildren

Taking after their mother, five of her children are also single moms. Her daughter Colt, 17, has three children and is eager to join her siblings and support America by joining the military when she turns eighteen. Tank has five children, Remington has four; and Nuclear and Hydrogen, ages 12 and 13, most recently became moms. McCoy helps care for them all and welcomes each of her fouteen grandchildren as wonderful new “bundles of joy.”

“Bristol Palin,” McCoy said, commenting on the GOP vice presidential nominee’s pregnant 17-year-old daughter, “there’s something wrong with that girl. Seventeen and only one child and that one's not even gone and got born yet? And what’s with her sister Willow? Fourteen and no kids? What’s wrong with that family?”

Typical family struggles

Both Nuclear’s and Hydrogen’s babies are seriously disabled, perhaps due to their mothers’ addiction to methamphetamine. McCoy is not ashamed of the pregnancies of her daughters or their drug addiction, but says, “We’re just an average American family with family type problems. Stuff happens. We’re tough though and Lord knows I can take on any challenge – I’ve had enough of them.”

Her eleventh child, Sue, a son, 20, is on death row for killing a man in a barroom brawl. He decapitated his victim with a meat cleaver for mocking his given name. McCoy says, “maybe the name was a mistake, but I was plum short on gun names that year.”

Qualifications for vice-presidency: first hand experience

Citing McCoy’s qualifications for the vice presidency, Obama noted with seven children in the military, as opposed to Palin’s one, she is “seven-times the expert on the war and international relations as Palin.” She is also going to be “strong on domestic policy, especially on drugs, corrections and child welfare. She’s been in and out of rehab and jail quite a few times for her own problems with meth and her kids have been in and out of the foster care system for years – a system that needs reforming.”

Like Palin, McCoy, too, is a reformer. “She fought city hall to get a liquor license, which Buttercakes initially denied because of her criminal record,” Obama pointed out. “But it was mostly just assaults and drug possession and she took on village hall like the tough real-world fighter she is.”

Executive experience and leadership

McCoy’s executive experience includes almost twenty years of night-managing the Grub and Suds when the owner is on fishing trips; and she has been elected to preside over the Buttercakes chamber of commerce by acclamation in each of the last twelve years; she has served regularly at this post except when in jail.

Some has criticized her chamber of commerce work as not amounting to much because there are no other members of the chamber, but Obama defended her work at this post by saying, “It’s not how many that elected you that counts, it’s what leadership you show once elected. As chamber president, she mounted an effective campaign to get the parking meters removed from in front of the Grub and Suds for the convenience of its patrons; that’s not only leadership, it shows compassion for the residents of Buttercakes.”

Ebay experience

Also like Palin, who sold her predecessor’s jet on Ebay, McCoy has sold things on Ebay, too, including her collection of Elvis collectibles when she needed cash to get a new transmission for her 1988 Ford pick-up.

Looks like a real American

When McCoy took the make-shift podium at the Grub and Suds, she underscored her appeal to ordinary Americans. McCoy offers a sharp contrast to the slender and some say “elegant” Obama; standing five foot three, she appears to weigh about 250 pounds. Instead of designer clothes, she wore grease-stained aqua stretch pants and a pink floral tunic.

Ready to lead

She said, “While I might not have been voting and all that most my life, I am now for sure. Like so many of you, I never took much interest in politics and all those goings on, but I am fired up now that I am going to be vice president. I got myself to packing already!”

New GOP slogan: "Change That Can Be Medicated"

"CHANGE THAT CAN BE MEDICATED!"

Have you lost your home to foreclosure? Yes, that's a change. But it can be medicated! (Effexor)

Does your your wife lay dying waiting for the surgery that your health insurance won't cover? Yes, that's a change in your life, but it can be medicated! (Effexor)

Is your son up for his 7th tour in Iraq, when he was promised but one? Yes, that's change, but it, too, can be medicated. (Effexor)

When the Republicans bring changes, they suggest the Right medication to cope. Effexor XR. Trust the GOP. Trust Effexor -- For relief from changes too depressing to endure.

The Effexor Effect: After GOP slogan, comedy writers stay home. Too depressed to work

The offices of comedy writers across the country were dark this morning. Almost none had come to work. No, it wasn’t the usual Monday morning slacking; it was something far more ominous.

And no, they had not gone back on strike.

What was emerging was a widespread depression among the writers so profound that they could no longer get out of bed.

They just feel they can’t compete with the Republicans on the Hill in humor or irony-- what should be the writers’ stock-in-trade.

Their condition is being called the “Effexor Effect.”

In the wake of three recent and spectacular special election losses, the House Republicans, who are panicked about more losses in November, announced early last week an effort to rebrand the party. Their new slogan: “Change you Deserve.”

At first, the only thing funny about the slogan to the writers was that it was an only slightly modified version of presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama’s slogan “Change We Can Believe In,” proving to them that the GOP had no new ideas to offer, let alone change. But they didn’t really think it was that funny.

But what sent the comedy writers over the edge was that “Change You Deserve” turned out to be the trademarked slogan of the Wyeth anti-depressant, Effexor XR.

The disconsolate Harry Smithers, a writer for The Onion said the realization of how he no longer had anything to offer dawned on him slowly. It wasn’t until the weekend that he realized he had been licked. “I do satire,” he said glumly, “I make s*%# up. But of all the s*%# that I’ve made up, I’ve never come up with anything as funny as that. I just can’t face the other writers now. And I can’t even think about writing.”

Danny Versito, a writer for Jay Leno said, “Look I’m supposed to do stuff that is out there. You know what I mean, topical, but OUT there.” When this reporter called on Versito, he had a three-day growth of beard, his apartment was littered with vodka bottles and pizza boxes, and his plaid pajama bottoms and Raiders t-shirt were thick with tomato sauce and congealed cheese – all signs of depression. “But hell, how can I be out there, man, when the Republicans steal a slogan from a drug company? And it really happened. That’s just too rich. We couldn’t make up anything that good. So what’s the point?” He glumly hung his head and shook it back and forth. “I can’t compete with that. They’ve won. They’ve won.”

One of Dave Letterman’s writers, a gloomy Pascal Gletch, said, “It’s been hard, really hard. I tried to find some humor in it, but can’t. It’s just gone. All these years we’ve been making fun of the Republicans and now they turn out to be funnier than us. That’s just not right.”

The pall on the writing community has set in on East Coast as well, where the writers from Comedy Central who picked up their phones today expressed shame and embarrassment. “We tried a piece mocking the new GOP slogan for Stewart last week, but you know what? It wasn’t nearly as funny as the fact that the Republicans had stolen it from a drug company.”

The depression took awhile to spread throughout the comedy writing community. “Like everyone else, I went to work last week as usual, like we hadn’t lost our bearings,” said Tommy Grinns, a writer for Late Night’s Conan O’Brian. “But Friday night, I couldn’t sleep, I felt worthless and guilty, kept thinking dark thoughts, even of suicide, and worst of all, I tried everything I knew to get out of it, even going back to my William Hung CDs.” Grinns paused. “But the laughter was gone. The Republicans had robbed me of my laughter, nay my will to live.”

The executives who fought the writers throughout the three-month strike earlier this year are expressing dismay over the absence of writers this morning, perhaps succumbing to the Effexor Effect themselves. Stanley Trueshoes, a spokeman for Viacom, which owns Comedy Central, said, “Even management is feeling it – you know, a loss of interest in normal activities, irritability, fatigue, the whole canoli.” Trueshoes said he’d talked to his counterparts at NBC and CBS, who had also only recently been bashing the writers during the strike. Now they were more sympathetic he says, “or as sympathetic as one can be when irritable and massively depressed.”

According to psychiatrist Pamela Fountain, the writers and executives have all the classic symptoms of depression. “From what Mr. Grinn himself said,” she advised, “he is experiencing virtually all the symptoms for which a psychiatrist such as myself would prescribe Effexor. Sure it’s no quick fix, and there are side effects such as constipation, dizziness, insomnia, loss of appetite, sweating and impotence. But isn’t that a small price to pay? And anyway, think of the up-side. Writers could use a little insomnia – it’ll keep them up and churning away more humor,” Fountain said with a sunny smile. “I think he and the others would do well to start taking it right away. Americans can’t afford another dreary humorless period as they did during the strike.”

As for the Republicans, they are holding fast to the slogan. John Boehner (R-Ohio), defending it this weekend, said, “This slogan, like everything else about the Republican Party reflects our commitment to the things Americans deserve, especially change. We believe they deserve a change. You know, change is good. Change is what we’re for. For that’s what Americans deserve. Because change is good and we’re good.”

Asked for a specific change the House GOP had I mind, Boehner offered, “For one, a change in the way we do business in Washington – a change that gets things done – starting with getting that bridge built in Alaska. That’s a change Americans deserve.”

"Aiding a Surrender to Terror"?

What the %#& did Romney say? The gloves are waaay off now.

Romney, the former favorite GOP robot since Gort ("Klaatu barada nikto!) just announced at the Conservative Political Action Conference that if he stayed in the race it would "forestall the launch of a national campaign and be making it easier for Sen. Clinton or Obama to win. Frankly, in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror."

Can't get much more inflammatory than that. Perfect for his audience of paranoid conservatives fretting over fear of liberal fumigation. They will be hearing panels and speeches apparently designed to ratchet up that fear. "What Do Liberals Have Planned for Your Money?" featuring, among others, Grover Norquist, who famously instructed his partisans, “You look for an issue that unites your side . . . divides the other side and allows you to reach in . . . and take their hearts out," and denounced bipartisanship as "date rape." Will he be calling Barack a "date raper?"

The crowd's hearts will race as they cringe over other frights: How the Liberals Are Criminalizing Free Enterprise. Threats to Our National Sovereignty. Why Judges Are STILL the Problem and What to Do About It.

While all this fear is being spread and accompanying vitriol spewed, I reflect on its ubiquity.

Demonization in American politics is hardly new. While in the earliest contested presidential elections it was considered unseemly for the candidates themselves to sling the mud, or even directly campaign, their surrogates were unrestrained. John Adams’ supporters published attacks that make Romney's accusation today and GHWBush’s Willie Horton spectacle seem positively gentlemanly. Of their opponent Jefferson, they said, “Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes.”

Lest anyone think that the contemporary Christian right originated challenges to candidates’ proper Christian credentials, as they did with Romney, the Adams gang also called Jefferson an infidel who “writes aghast the truths of God's words; who makes not even a profession of Christianity; who is without Sabbaths; without the sanctuary, and without so much as a decent external respect for the faith and worship of Christians.”

The Andrew Jackson campaign was even dirtier. He was accused of murder, gambling, slave trading and treason. Adams’ son’s gang continued the traditions of his father’s. They said Jackson’s mother was a prostitute and that his father was a mulatto, and his wife first an adulteress and then a bigamist. Jackson’s troops hit back that Adams was the gambler, plus a pimp for the Russian czar, and thoroughly corrupt.

Against that, suggesting that Hillary and Barack would "surrender to terror" is almost tame. But let's see what's to come. "Date raper?"

Strange campaign robo-calls

Cook County, in Illinois, the state with the largest number of local governmental units in the nation -- the more to do patronage and ghost hiring by -- has a Water Reclamation District. I got a robo-call today from a candidate seeking to serve on its board.

Her credentials? She is staunchly pro-choice. That's cool, but what the hell does abortion have to do with sewage disposal and clean-up?

Sick jokes to the contrary, Nothing! In Illinois, no post is the post of desire, but just a step to the next.

Earlier, Mayor Daley sent a robo-call endorsing a tax assessement appeals board candidate. I yelled at the robot to no avail. Shut up, Daley! You are all going to wind up in Club Fed! Thanks, Rich, you let me know whom I should vote against.

I voted for Barack today -- 4 good reasons

It's been a hard year for this political junkie. I have been torn up over the primary trying to decide for whom to vote.

You see, I know Barack from my days in Springfield lobbying for poor people and the problem is that when you know someone up-close, you know their warts, faults, flubs and snubs.

Throughout my struggle to find my candidate, I kept saying to myself, if I knew Hillary (or Richardson or Biden an eon ago when they were still relevant), I'm sure I would have seen their warts as well.

So, I decided, screw the warts (which I shall not enumerate here). Everyone has warts.

Here are my turning points / bottom lines -- my reasons for voting for Barack today that coalesced just yesterday.

1. McCain and Independents. Independents will be critical voters in the general. McCain will get too many of their votes over Hillary and that is not a good thing.

2. Our relationship with the world. A number of months ago, someone, maybe it was David Brooks, said that the day Barack is elected, his name and face alone will alter and improve US relations in the world that Bush has done so much to tear asunder. I think Hillary would be an improvement, but not nearly as powerful and evocative a change of America's imagery of swagger and imperial power. Plus, I think Barack's desire (even if not actual capacity -- yet) to be a healer and "uniter" is desperately needed.

3. Rush and the other Screedmeisters. For me, the worst part of the Clinton years was the nightmare of rage the Clintons (innocently, in my view) provoked. I can't bear another four years of their screeching. While I know they will be hard on Barack, they will not be reduced to psycho attacks that I can only compare to the wild boys turned-cannibals in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer. As Liz Taylor's Catherine Holly said, “They had devoured parts of him....or cut parts of him away with their hands or knives or maybe those jagged tin cans they made music with, they had torn bits of him away and stuffed them into those gobbling fierce little empty black mouths of theirs.” Rush's ditto-heads want no less as they seek to butcher Hillary.

Nothing unified the right in its quest for power during the Clinton years more than hating Bill and Hillary. Hate creates passion. Hate energizes. Hate creates focus. Hatred solidified and grew the right wing movement that had been delicately juggling Libertarians and Christian fundamentalists. Hatred brought them all together. As Stanley Fish and Jason Horowitz have pointed out, the Hillary haters are still living in their world of inexplicable psycho hatred.

I just don't want us to have to suffer that again -- even though it's not the Clintons' fault.

4. The Kumbaya Factor. It thrills me to think that finally a black man can elected President. It's about damn time. If it happens, I will be proud of my country and may once and for all stop seeing napalmed babies when the flag waves. (Update: I have since learne this is wrong, wrong, wrong to feel, as the kerfuffle over Michelle's comments have proven. So I should amend by saying, I would be over MORE proud of my country. . . Is that what you want?)

Down by the Riverside.

1/30/08, Afternoon.

I am in a huge convention center in Atlanta with 10,000 black Baptists singing “Down by the Riverside. . . I ain’t gonna study war no more; I ain’t gonna study war no more. . .”

We’re killing time waiting for Hillary to show-up. All the presidential candidates were invited. None of the GOP’s white guys in suits agreed to attend – just like their front runners’ failure to show-up for the Congressional Black Caucus debate last year. I guess the GOP thinks they have the Baptists sewn up -- or they have already written-off the hope of getting any black votes.

Barack was here a little while ago, but he came via a videocast -- about five minutes of nothing. He looked incredibly exhausted and stuttered and stumbled a lot. The video connection followed suit and cut in and out. The crowd was disappointed. Getting up and cheering the dispirited video just wasn’t going to happen.

The convention leader is oblique about Hillary coming – whether in person or via another lame video, but I see some stone-faced white guys along the wall with their tell-tale earpieces with the squiggly wires whom anyone who has been to a presidential campaign event knows to be Secret Service. Hillary will be here in person.

The crowd does not seem impatient at all. The music is rollicking, everyone is standing, clapping, dancing around, calling out, and having a great down-home gospel-singing time. Now they’re doing Amazing Grace, led by four incredible young men with voices from heaven.

Everyone around me in this older middle-aged and just plain old crowd is decked out in Sunday-going-to-meeting clothes -- the women in astonishing glittery hats with feathers, fur and brilliant colors made more vivid by the extravagant arrays of sequins and rhinestones; the men wearing suits with long jackets reminiscent of the Zoot Suits in the forties, many in colors, others in sharp pinstripes. I’m seeing quite a number of fur coats, too.

And shoes! The women have matching fancy high heels and purses. The men compete with alligator shoes in colors not found in nature. When the offering is announced, the preacher at the helm encourages the men to put at least as much as their shoes cost in the bucket, and the women at least as much as their hats.

Hillary arrives. Now she is the only other white woman in the room other than me, The Termite. And one of about six white people in all – the others being those Secret Service guys and some lost-looking hippie who has wandered in. She gives a long, powerful and meaty speech, most of which is not the stump routine, but specific to the audience, honoring the historic significance of this convention and talking about her own Methodist faith.

The audience doesn’t quite know what to do with this. They applaud and many rise from their seats but I can tell that many wanted to go nuts over Barack instead. Half jump up for Hillary; half stay seated and clap politely. Pollsters take note.

Historic Baptist Convenings

Reflections of this (impressed) Secular Humorist.

I have not often had the experience of being present as history was being made. This week I am.

This is the 2nd “historic” meeting of the four main black Baptist conventions (sort of like sub-denominations) where our criminal justice ministry project and the manual I have been writing with them are being announced.

Earlier today we had the Casey-sponsored luncheon announcing the soon-to-be-published manual for congregations to use in working with people caught up in the criminal justice system -- from arrest through reentry, the perps, their family members and victims of crime.

My preacher friends from the Progressive National Baptist Convention with whom I have been working said my presentation was something of a hit as evidenced by people asking if I could serve on their committees. (One of the preachers has claimed me as a member of her church, though I think I have decided on the label “secular humorist.”)

The four black Baptist groups have been splintered for years – mostly over issues of power, control and, since 1961, civil rights tactics. Unifying only now (though not abandoning their four separate identities), they will be better able to address common issues and common dreams.

The black Baptists’ joint meeting is back-to-back with another historic event. Tonight, white Baptists will join this group and together they will proclaim A New Baptist Covenant. This has been the dream of the Covenant’s architect, Jimmy Carter, who broke with the Southern Baptist Convention in 2000, after years of trying and failing to get them to take a less unyielding and strident view of matters both theological and political following its sharp turn to the right starting in the late seventies.

Baptists who have suffered the breaches, divides, expulsions, splinters, schisms, humiliations and sorrows as they lost in the conservative seizure of power of the Southern Baptist Convention and Baptists who were never part of the Southern convention will be coming together to pledge a first-ever unity, inclusiveness and commitment to finding common ground. The Convention many of them left, the 17 million-strong Southern Baptist was invited, too, but it declined – even as some of those 17 million will come as individuals.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Being

1/30, evening.

I see white people. . .
White people are coming, coming in droves into the enormous hall where Jimmy Carter will be kicking off the Covenant meeting. I haven’t been seeing white people for awhile and it seems kind of strange. The first thing I notice are their clothes. My god, I see a sweatshirt! And jeans! The contrast between them and the spiffed-up blacks is more than a little startling.

They are mixing pretty well, though. The room is filling with black Baptists, white Baptists; Baptists from the North and Baptists from the South. It took over 150 years for this to happen.

Now I am just plain embarrassed to be white. White warm-up music is playing on the stage. There’s a guy singing who is a cross between Pat Boone and the busted-for-purchased-gay-sex Ted Haggard wearing a red shirt and khakis – so painfully unhip, it hurts. The music, I am learning, is called “praise and worship.” It has all the soul of kindergarten sing-songs. Ding-Dong School.

The white people sing along, many not even needing to refer to the verses on the giant video screens. The blacks look slightly appalled.

Now there’s a guy who looks like Newt Gingrich but even MORE white bread than Newt, if you can believe that’s possible. He is playing the guitar and forcing us to endure more treacly, syrupy kitsch. Ouch, it’s hurting my teeth! Now he is leading the other musicians and singing audience members with strange herky-jerky up and down fists. What the heck kind of conducting is that?

Oh thank God, and praise Jesus, here comes a gospel choir. They are bringing the house down. Their voices rise and shake the building. People are out of their seats, swaying, halleluiahing and calling-out. I am wondering what the Up With People types are thinking about this and if the now much happier-seeming white people in the audience are thinking that their performers might try to be a tad less dead.

The president of one of the black Baptist conventions takes the stage to deliver a sermon. A woman in the audience falls into a rapturous and very loud round of halleluiahs. With the patience of Job, he calmly waits for her to quiet down (or perhaps she was silenced or removed by others) and begins talking about how strange it is for him, as a black Baptist, to be preaching on an assigned topic and for an assigned number of minutes. Blacks in the audience laugh heartily – knowing exactly what he means. He reluctantly agrees to do both and builds into a rousing sermon – within his allotted time.

Jimmy Carter takes the podium and is speaking of the journey that led to this Covenant meeting and his hopes for finding mutual honor and respect across denominational and ideological lines. It’s not getting people out of their seats, but the tone, fairly humble, is good.

As he winds-ups, I’m slipping out now before the white music starts up again and ruins my uplift.

Al Gore and the pale blue dot.

1/31, noon.

It’s Baptist Al Gore time and he has come with his high-tech PowerPoint show about global warming, the film version of which, "An Inconvenient Truth," won an Academy Award. The audience for this luncheon (which cost $35 – the rest of the Covenant events have been free) is almost all white. 2,500 of them.

It’s a bit crowded (and the food is ghastly).

It’s dawning on me how many national office holders are Baptists – Gore, Bill Clinton, Carter, Bush . . . Gore is engaging, self-deprecating and quite funny. People are whispering that they wish he had behaved like this instead of being such a stiff in the 2000 election.

In one of his slides, the animation bounces down a map of Greenland. Gore is bouncing it, bouncing it again, and then a few more times as he quips that he really liked the bouncy thing on Apple’s Key Note software and was dismayed to learn that its most recent release didn’t have it. But, he tells us, there are advantages to being on the Apple board – they reinstalled the bounce for him.

The room is loving the show – all 90 minutes of it – with the exception of two well-scrubbed teenagers at my table who are decidedly not clapping along and two girls sitting on their hands at the table behind us; the annoying nasty, catty chattering of the neighbor girls’ is incessant and I want to throttle them.

As the lights came up and none of these dissenters join the crowd giving Gore an ovation nearly as long as his presentation, I ask why them they weren’t excited about what they’d just seen. Then I notice that the two at my table have press credentials and I take back my question and say, oh, I get it, the press isn’t supposed to clap. But the girl says, no, it’s because it’s Gore. We hate him. These people wouldn’t stand and applaud Bush, she says, so why should we applaud Gore. (So much for Carter’s hope for bridging gulfs and creating harmony.)

I ask, well what about the presentation itself? What did you think of that? The girl says, we don’t care about that stuff. It’s not our issue. She and the young boy with her scurry away. Yes, these kids are reporters, reporters for the Southern Baptist Convention’s newspaper. But their heads are in a lock-box – one Gore never contemplated.

Sing Tantarara, rogues all, rogues all, Sing Tantarara, rogues all!”

1/31, afternoon.
“What a conspiracy this, between Church and State! Sing Tantarara, rogues all, rogues all, Sing Tantarara, rogues all!” ---Thomas Jefferson.

I am happily ensconced in a heady seminar on religious liberty. The Baptists pretty much created and own the concept, despite the Southern Baptists’ sharp move to all but denounce or rewrite its meaning it in recent years. It’s wonderful to see so many people fiercely embracing the First Amendment and taking a stand against government entangling itself in matters of faith and giving money to church groups.

This is making me re-think my work with the White House Office of God. Jefferson would smite me if he knew – and call me a rogue!

Outfits! Sequinned everything.

1/31, afternoon.

What’s for sale: Outfits! Sequinned everything.

There is no convention without vendors. I decide to visit some of the exhibits and tables. The black Baptists have theirs in a large hall on the lowest floor of this huge complex; the whites have theirs lining the main hallways leading to the meeting rooms. Hmmm.

Both feature preacher-wear and choir outfits, with the white folk’s outfits a lot more subdued. The black wares also include clothes and shoes for the flock, too. Dresses, men’s and women’s suits, hats and shoes. Oh. My. God. Gladys Knight and the Pips would go wild shopping here.

I have never seen such an array of glitz in my life since I used to go to drag queen shoes in Oregon for respite from Pendleton shirts and down vests that my law school classmates wore.

Both sell books, too. Lots of books.

Sneaking a drink with an ex-Southern Baptist boy.

2/1, evening.
Sneaking a drink with an ex-Southern Baptist boy.

I have just come from another terrific religious liberty seminar and another on the criminal justice system and have some time to kill before the evening event. I have headed to the bar at the Smith and Wollinsky joint across from the convention center.

A sweet-faced young man wearing a fedora takes the bar stool next to me. I see what appears to be a convention badge peaking out from under his coat and ask him if he is attending the convention and about the drink in his hand (Baptists, by and large, do not drink).

This leads to a long a delightful conversation about Michael leaving the Southern Baptists and how now, though he is enrolled in a seminary (it is a nondenominational progressive one --Vanderbilt), he has come to think of religion as mythology – to the consternation of his parents, who are also having to deal with the fact that his sister has just come out.

Baptists believe they gayness is a choice made as a consequence of being reared without sufficient religious instruction, so the parents are more than a little distressed. Is this their fault?

Michael is refreshingly curious about the world and ideas and wants to teach theology one day – not preach. He tells me of the pain and incredible fear instilled in those growing up in Southern Baptist churches. Both he and many of his friends experience this.

A college friend borrowed a friend’s class notes for a marketing class and nine months later, he says, the friend was still sleepless and terrified he had sinned. He went to the teacher and confessed and she was flummoxed; there is nothing wrong with sharing notes. He is describing scores of other such cases with many, including him, experiencing random, free-floating terror – attached to no particular thing. Just constant fear.

He explains that the fear stems from the substantial caveat to the Baptist doctrine of “once saved, always saved.” Apparently, the slightest thing can work to unsave the person and send them hurtling to hell. Even Michael lives with that fear, but he is getting over it.

Bill Clinton: Seeing through a glass darkly.

2/1, evening.

Now Michael and I are in the airplane hanger of a hall and await the closing speech to be delivered by Bill Clinton. The endurance contest begins with more embarrassingly bad white music playing as people fill the room.

Thankfully, this pain is alleviated by a powerful black preacher’s sermon on “setting the captives free” followed by the awesome Spellman men’s choir. They rouse with song after song. I am thinking they have been given instructions to be prepared to do something between one and thirty songs because Clinton is so notoriously late.

But here he is, after only six songs. I wonder, will it be bad Bill beating up Barack? Inappropriate-for-the-setting Bill giving a stump speech extolling his wife’s credentials for the presidency? Stem-winding Bill? Statesmanlike Bill? Brilliant Bill delivering a wonky fact-filled address?

He is none of those Bills. Subdued. Almost soft. He talks of the history of the break with the Southern Baptists and distinguishes the historical Baptist faith from that which its convention now demands.

Reminiscent of Lincoln in his Second Inaugural when he said, “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other,” Clinton now says, “we all believe we are fulfilling God's will in our lives. The point that I want to make is, so do they. They read the obligations of the Scripture in a different way.”

He focuses on the meaning of 1 Corinthians 13 – but not verse 13 about love that he reminds us is always read at weddings, but 12, which speaks of seeing through a glass darkly. “For now I see through a glass darkly; but then face to face, now I know in part; but then I shall know even as I am known.” It’s after that passage that we find “And now abideth faith, hope and love but the greatest of these is love."

Clinton says we have to love because we may be wrong about everyone and everything because we see through a glass darkly. And that is his response to how these Baptists should relate to those who have exiled and reviled them for their liberalism and modernism – or traditionalism, if you take a historical view.

Like Dr. King, Clinton exhorts the crowd with the admonition that “we must approach those with which we disagree with an outstretched hand and not a clenched fist. . . no matter what condemnation is leveled at this movement - you must respond with the spirit of love.”

He is none of the Bills I had guessed he would be.

Jimmy Carter gets up again and speaks of his hope that this is a beginning, but we can tell nne knows how to make this stick. The week’s events have come to a close and my new friend.

Michael and I are going to have a drink and talk about this momentous occasion. He doesn’t like the white music any more than I and is eager to leave.

“It’s not as though white people can’t make good music!”

2/2, After midnight, back at the hotel.
“It’s not as though white people can’t make good music!”

I run into some white Baptists at the hotel and we talk about the week’s events. I ask about the white music and I suggest there is most excellent white music out there. Beethoven, Bach, Handel – heck, all those guys wrote astonishing sacred music. Lots more recently, even Elvis did a hack of a job with church music. They explain “praise and worship” is intended to be simple so people can understand it and sing along. (Michael had said he thought it came about when churches became capitalist and sought to sell their music to the masses of believers.) These Baptists seem to think that the classics are too difficult to comprehend and perform (every city’s mass do-it-yourself-Messiah apparently notwithstanding) and folks like Elvis are too . . . I don’t know what. And gospel? I didn’t bring it up.

Closing thought on diverse Baptists coming together and bringing together everyone in this country: It’s the music, stupid.