Garcia Media Life

I don’t know exactly how this will end for Herman Cain but it probably won’t matter because all is still going according to plan. If the plan is, as many in the political punditry class suspect, that what Mr. Cain wanted all along just in case he didn’t actually become President, was to get some limelight, quadruple his speaking fees and land a sweet gig on a cable news network.

Highly likely, so the theory goes, Cain was as surprised as anyone to find himself the improbable frontrunner for his party’s presidential nomination. More than once in the case of Herman Cain I’ve heard the old line over the past few weeks from political insiders about “the dog catching the car.” Now what’s he do with it?

Except he’s caught more than a car. Now he’s caught a full-fledged tiger. The sexual harassment claims are not a “he said-she said situation.” They are turning more into a “he said-she said, she said, she said and she said situation.” If there really is a news conference coming in the next few days with two or three of Herman Cain’s accusers talking before the microphones and telling their stories, I would think it entirely possible he may get a visit from some Republican dignitaries in short order.

For the good of the party, Herman, this has become too much of a distraction, they will say. Every minute spent talking about your past is once less minute talking about an economy in the kind of shape no incumbent President has ever survived in American history. And Herman Cain can maintain his innocence and bow out for the good of the party while vowing that he may not be running for President anymore, but he will never be silenced. A sad day for America, he might say, but there are bigger things at play than himself- namely an election and the future of the American people and their children and their grand children and their great-great grand children, etc. etc.

Once he’s not running for President the media won’t care anymore and it won’t matter what he said and she said. I’m guessing the inevitable book will drive up the speaking fees for awhile and that a media gig awaits him somewhere out there.

As for the truth and what really happened some 14 years ago, people will have to draw their own conclusions because there are no witnesses. But no matter how bad it looks, no matter how many women go public, Herman Cain will not be destroyed. Just not likely he’ll be leader of the free world.

It’s not even Wednesday yet and there’s a new I-phone I won’t be buying, another non-Presidential candidate no one will be voting for and a country music star making headlines whose political opinions no one cares about.

The New I-Phone

Maybe it’s because I recently spent $200 on an I-Phone 4 and Apple announced today it’s now going to be reduced to $99. Maybe it’s because the new I-Phone is 7 times faster at playing games and I use my phone mostly as a…phone. Or maybe because it was touted as the I-Phone 5 and it’s actually the I-Phone 4s.

But, no, I will not be shelling out $300 for this new “thing.” I cannot keep up with all the new “things.” Often, new “things” don’t work all that well. Somebody let me know when the I-Phone 10 comes out.

The Latest Version of “No”

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie had to call a news conference today because the media did not believe him the previous 107 times he said he would not be running for President. So everyone gathered in Trenton this afternoon to hear him say it again and the non-event is going to be leading newscasts all day today.

Note to political pundits desperate to spice up the increasingly bizarre Presidential race- when a politician says over and over and over and over again that he is “NOT READY” to be President, he knows that’s something that could be used in a campaign ad against him and he is definitely not interested in running for President.

Are You Ready for Some Football?

Actually, no. I had absolutely no interest in Monday Night Football this week because who cares about the 0-3 Indianapolis Colts when there are baseball playoffs that actually matter? So, I missed that ESPN dropped Hank Williams Jr.’s opening song because the country music star made a comment recently comparing President Obama to Adolph Hitler.

Now conservative bloggers are reportedly outraged that ESPN is outraged at Williams who seems to be quite outraged about Barack Obama still being in the White House.

Ok. Why do we care again what Hank Williams Jr. thinks about anything?

Let me make this clear. I expect country singers to sing, athletes to play sports, Hollywood actors to act and politicians to make things up. Don’t confuse me by mixing up your roles in our lives. I’m already confused about what I-Phone to buy and what non-candidate not to vote for.

The conventional wisdom is that the fight for the Republican nomination is really down to two: Mitt Romney and Rick Perry. And damn, they have great hair. I can see either one in the pantheon of Presidents.

John Huntsman, who, based on the Washington Post’s instant blogging last night, is the one Republican Democrats would most want to vote for, should not be ignored. He was also nicely quaffed.

Michele Bachmann, however, had a very bad hair night. The hairdo was inexplicably gigantic. Big hair. Huge hair. Helmet-like, even. Most analysts seem to have reached consensus that she failed to stand out from the pack and then fell into the second tier of candidates. I think it is possible her standing has fallen, but she absolutely stood out from the pack. Same week Ed Rollins steps down from his role as her campaign manager she has the rotten luck of having a bad hair night. Coincidence?

Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul both sport the grizzled, veteran, white-hair look. Perhaps coincidentally, they both seem a little grumpy to me. Newt’s greatest applause lines come after his hyperbolic attacks on the given debate moderator of the evening. I like that whole scary, white-haired, angry Uncle thing. It works for him.

Ron Paul, we learned, wants to cut off air conditioning for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan- but not to be mean. As I understood it, this would make the entire U.S. military intolerably hot, and they would just pack their bags and go home. I could go with that. Leave it to the crazy white-haired Uncle to find a formula for world peace.

I like Herman Cain. I like his 9-9-9 plan. He hardly has any hair, like me, which is another reason I like him. I can’t recall the details of the 9-9-9 plan, but I do like the symmetry of it and I have always been partial to the number 9. And if it fails for some reason, he can always go to the back-up 9-1-1 plan, in which people come rescue you.

And that leaves Rick Santorum who also has a very nice head of very dark hair, though not quite as spectacular as the Romney/Perry combo, which takes the competition hands-down for the impressive thickness and body. And these guys are no spring chickens either.

Tonight, it’s President Obama’s turn in the national spotlight. He’s got a great smile, if unfortunately, not much to use it for these days. But the hair situation with Obama is getting increasingly predictable and, frankly, a little boring. Grey. More and more grey.
I’m with the critics who are urging the President to come out big and bold tonight. Just For Men. And an earring. Blow their socks off, Mr. President.

There’s a lot of debate this day after the storm about whether the media and governments went overboard on Irene…as if we didn’t have a hurricane the size of Europe bearing down on 60 million inhabitants of the eastern seaboard.

Forecasters

Weather science has come a long way and no one can argue that the tracking of Irene was anything but amazingly precise. What the advance forecasts misjudged was the wind intensity of the storm. Some 72-96 hours ahead of the turn toward the U.S. mainland, forecasters thought they might have a category-4 storm on their hands. In reality, though still at hurricane strength when making landfall in New Jersey, Irene was “only” a category-1 and down to a strong tropical storm by the time it hit Coney Island in New York City.

Meteorologists fully understand that they overestimated the wind speed forecasts and will surely be reworking their models for future hurricanes. From the layman’s eye, what appears to be missing in the analysis is the effect on storms once they start getting broken up as they pass over land. That’s a tricky thing to try to project when a hurricane is hugging a coast-line and as this one, actually had three different landfalls; North Carolina, New Jersey and New York. It’s almost as if the wind-speed analysis of Irene’s potential discounted the energy it would lose as it made its way up the coast through the combination of cooler ocean waters and the land masses it went over.

Government Response

New Jersey Governor Chris Cristie and the folks at the National Hurricane Center are certain that the overwhelming and, in some ways, unprecedented government response to Irene- saved lives. Little solace to the 24 37 people whose families are attending funerals today but only God knows what the total death toll might have been had there not been mandatory evacuations, transit system shutdowns and dire warnings from Presidents, Governors and Mayors.

The Media

Yes, the Weather Channel, Accu-Weather, and local and national media brought out all the bells and whistles, super-duper graphics packages, doubled-up staffs and dramatic language through the course of coverage. Of course there was some hype. For people in the weather and news businesses this was the Super Bowl, the World Series and the Academy awards rolled into one.

People like Daily Beast Washington Bureau Chief, Howard Kurtz, got all bent out of shape over the marketing and the splash. Kurtz was angered by the earthquake media coverage too. Surely by now, though, we’ve grown to accept that news coverage in the 24-hour, web and cable-driven news business is filled with hype and spin and marketing. Hopefully, we’re adult enough to take some of this with a grain of salt.

But you know what? A friggin’ 5.8 earthquake that rattles nerves from Georgia to Maine is a big deal and 3,000 people didn’t have to die to make it a newsworthy event in a part of the country where quakes are rare. A gigantic hurricane aimed at the most populous region of the nation is as newsworthy as newsworthy gets. Decry the surrounding hype and the breathless reporting as much as you want- it doesn’t change the fact that both these events really were big, major news.

The Politics

I don’t understand the meme that’s been building in the right-wing world as exemplified by the Drudge Report which is usually the trend leader in conservative talking points. Drudge has spent the better part of the last 3 days complaining about the hype over Irene, downplaying its seriousness and went as far as to link to a web site that questioned the integrity of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration while claiming Irene was not really a hurricane and was making landfall with 33 mph winds, data that was disingenuously cherry-picked to the level of absurdity and demonstrably false.

But what motivates this cynicism? I suspect it comes down to the role of government. Disasters are one of those areas in which governments play key roles and exercise tremendous power. The bigger the disaster, the more people depend on government to warn them, take care of them and then fix whatever is broken in the aftermath. Downplaying the size of a coming disaster deemphasizes the role of government and opens the possibilities of claiming government overreaction and intrusion into our lives.

Grateful for the Overreaction

In the end, if Irene wasn’t all she was hyped to be, she still caused enormous damage and inconvenience, and in some cases, death. If all the media hype and governmental seriousness that was attached to Irene helped keep people alive- then good. I’ll take the hype and make fun of it when it’s silly. The worst of it for me was that I now have 48 containers of bottled water and a half-dozen cans of tuna fish I would not otherwise have purchased.

And God help us when the time comes that the media and government under-hype a potential disaster. That’s called getting caught off-guard and usually results in catastrophe. We should be grateful to have avoided that this week whether it was the ground trembling beneath our feet or less-then-expected winds rattling our windows.

The events of Saturday in Tucson, Arizona shook us all. The violence and bloodshed were shocking. And though previous political assassination attempts in American history have been largely absent an attendant mass shooting, the sheer number of these incidents is stunning.

An educational web site called Digital History has a fascinating and detailed article called Political Assassination: The Violent Side of American Political Life.

Here’s the stunning part:

Nine American Presidents – Andrew Jackson in 1835, Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901 Harry S. Truman in 1950, John F. Kennedy in 1963, Richard Nixon in 1974, Gerald Ford twice in 1975, and Ronald Reagan in 1981 – have been the targets of assassination. Attempts have also been made on the lives of one President-elect (Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933) and three Presidential candidates (Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, and George Wallace in 1972). In addition, eight governors, seven U.S. Senators, nine U.S. Congressmen, eleven mayors, 17 state legislators, and eleven judges have been violently attacked.

The most common unifying characteristics of those who have attempted Presidential assassinations in the United States: unemployed and single. Nine out of eleven had not worked in the year prior to the assassination attempt. Only one was married and had children.

Very few of these attempts have actually been purposely politically motivated. John Wilkes Booth, the Lincoln assassin was a clear cut case of an ideologically-based murderer. Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Senator Robert Kennedy claimed his attack was due to RFK’s pro-Israeli political stance. Booth expected he would become a hero in the South but did not and would write sadly at the cold hand he’d been greeted with by residents of the former confederacy. Richard Nixon would win the Presidency in 1968 and he was, if anything, an even more ardent supporter of Israel than Robert Kennedy.

Almost all have been solitary acts of violence; only in two cases were the acts part of an organized conspiracy; Lincoln and an attempt on the life of President Harry Truman organized by Puerto Rican nationalists.

I do not know what is says or what it implies. But violence against our political representatives is a part of our lives and of the history of this nation and it is not, in any way, unusual or an aberration.

President Barack Obama this week, may have made himself newly electable for 2012. Meantime, Sarah Palin kills animals on her Discovery Channel show to stock up for the winter. Wait…you say..those two things don’t belong in the same article! You’re right. They don’t.

The Angry Middle

Spot-on article on President Obama’s newly-found, feisty voice from the dean of political reporting, David Broder, of the Washington Post. Broder contends that what the President did this week in finding a compromise with Republicans on tax-cuts and jobless benefit extensions was recapture the middle of American politics. And his standing improves with independents with every howl from the deeply unpopular, Pelosi-wing of the Democratic Party.

It’s also tough for Republicans to keep calling the President a socialist, when an actual socialist, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, opposes him so thoroughly and visibly on the Senate floor on all this. Broder confirms what I’ve always suspected of this President. He is a left-of-center pragmatist with a capital “P.”

Sarah Palin’s Refrigerator

My status as an elitist, East Coast urbanite was thoroughly confirmed last night as I accidently came across episode-4 of Sarah Palin’s Alaska on the Discovery Channel. Sarah joined her dad, Chuck and a friend named Steve Becker in hunting down a cute caribou. As they aim their rifles at the defenseless creature, I found myself screaming at my flat-screen, “Run, little guy, run!”

Sarah, as it turns out, is NOT a great shot with a hunting rifle. She missed the creature three times as the weapon jolted up against her shoulder and seemed to cause her to miss high, above the animal’s head. Anyway, somebody (not her) finally wounds and kills the caribou and then they begin gutting it. Sarah explains why it is they cut off the four legs first and pack them up in some container, then adds it was a really good thing they killed this sucker because now everyone will have enough meat to eat for the winter.

What????? It is reported that between speaking fees and book sales alone, Sarah Palin has made $12 million since July of 2009. I respectfully maintain that as a matter of sheer survival, cutting up this caribou they killed last night into dozens of tasty packages tossed into the Palin family freezer…was not entirely necessary.

I think it’s safe to say the predominant theme in American culture and politics these days can be distilled into one word: Anger.  Anger takes shape in many forms, but the single most popular seems to be “lashing out.”   

I noticed it today, when I read numerous headlines about Sarah Palin “lashing out at the Wall Street Journal.”  A WSJ reporter claimed Palin was not factual in recent criticisms of Federal Reserve policy when she prefaced her remarks by pointing out that everybody knows how much food prices are soaring these days.  The WSJ reporter pointed out food prices are actually quite low and increasing at the lowest rates in decades.  Palin “lashed out” at the reporter citing a recent article in his own newspaper that reported food prices were soon going to start spiking.

Anyway, it struck me that this phrase, “lashing out,” has been used in connection to Ms. Palin a lot.   So I googled it and got 278,000 results in .24 seconds.  All this “lashing out,” by the way, goes a lot of ways.  A lot of people are lashing out at Sarah Palin or lashing out at Sarah Palin’s critics almost as much as she is lashing out at others.  

All of which proves reporters and headline writers need to seriously invest in buying Thesauruses.  Surely, there have to be a few synonyms out there somewhere.   

On we go to the Lash-Out Fest:

 9/3/2008     Palin Breaks Silence Lashes Out at Obama

1/9/2009      Sarah Palin Lashes Out at Media Again

1/9/2009      Sarah Palin Lashes Out at ‘Very Scary” Media Coverage

1/10/2009    Sarah Palin Lashes Out at Bloggers, Mainstream Media

4/3/2009      Sarah Palin’s Camp Lashes Out at Levi Johnston for Sex Talk on Tyra

6/67/2009    Sarah Palin Lashes Out at Kerry

11/17/2009  Sarah Palin Lashes Out at McCain Staffers, Media in Oprah Interview

2/2/2010      Rahm Emanuel’s “Retarded” Comment: Sarah Palin Lashes Out

2/17/2010    Sarah Palin Lashes Out at ‘Family Guy’ Down Syndrome Joke

3/13/2010    Sarah Palin Lashes Out at Liberals, D.C. and Media

3/27/2010    Sarah Palin Lashes Out at “Lamestream Media’s Lies”

5/25/2010    Sarah Palin Lashes Out at Journalist Joe McGinniss for Moving Next Door

6/17/2010    Palin Camp Lashes Out at Levi Johnston’s Sister

7/25/2010    Sarah Palin Lashes Out at Media, McCain Campaign and Journalist

7/30/2010    Sarah Palin Lashes Out at President Obama’s Appearance on the The View

10/31/2010  Sarah Palin Lashes Out at ‘Corrupt’ Alaska Reporters

11/1/2010    Sarah Palin Lashes Out at Politico

11/1/2010    Sarah Palin Lashes Out at “Corrupt” Reporters

11/3/2010    Sarah Palin Lashes Out at ‘Clueless” Ed Gillespie

11/9/2010    Sarah Palin Lashes Out at Stimulus

11/10/2010  Palin Lashes out at Bernanke, Urging Him to Cease and Desist 

And now the Lash-backs:

 8/29/08       Team Obama Lashes Out at Palin

9/2/2008      Santorum Lashes Out About About Palin Coverage

9/3/2008      John McCain Lashes Out at Media Over Palin Attacks

9/5/2009      Levi Johnston Lashes Out at Sarah Palin

9/11/2008    Matt Damon Lashes Out at Sarah Palin

9/14/2008    Lindsay Lohan Lashes Out at Sarah Palin

10/10/2008  Rush Limbaugh Lashes Out at Anti-Palin Pundit

10/17/2008  Biden Lashes Out at Palin’s Pro-America Comment

12/11/2008  Powell Lashes Out at Palin

11/24/2009  After Apologizing to Rachel Ray, Martha Stewart Lashes Out at Sarah Palin

8/25/2010    Lisa Murkowski Lashes Out Over Sarah Palin’s Endorsement of Joe Miller

10/27/2010 Charlie Crist Lashes Out at Extremists Sarah Plain, Marco Rubio

11/3/2010    Levi Johnston Lashes Out at Palin; Not Qualified for Presidency

11/9/2010    GOP Rep. Spencer Bachus Lashes Out at Tea Party, Sarah Palin

Yes, conservatives are angry.  Liberals are angry.  Moderates are angry.  To paraphrase Rodney King:  “Can’t we all just stop lashing out at one another?”

The world has officially turned upside down. Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve Board Chairman and advocate of the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 is now calling for a complete repeal of those tax breaks. All of them. He says we can’t afford them.

Stimulus spending has not worked, he reasons, because American businesses continue sitting on the sidelines with record cash reserves, not hiring or investing in much of anything. They are crippled by fears of what our huge federal deficits could bode for the future and so Greenspan says the best course now is to repeal the tax breaks, make serious spending cuts and reduce the massive federal deficit.

This is all nice in theory but there isn’t a political snowball’s chance in hell that the Bush tax cuts are going to be repealed. Of course they add to the deficit- just like stimulus spending. But they’re popular. People complain when governments ignore pot holes, offer inferior public education, do a lousy job shoveling snow off the streets and fail to provide adequate police and fire protection. They just don’t want to pay for these services. Worry not- they will soon be disappearing. There’s not a solvent government left in the United States.

Now with the November elections coming and massive losses predicted for Democrats, we are headed for divided government, which in the past, hasn’t been so bad. Bill Clinton lost his Democratic congressional majorities in 1994 and he and the Republican-led Congress promptly ended welfare as we know it, passed free-trade legislation (NAFTA), and ended up with record budget surpluses. But something tells me we’re headed for gridlock and nothing resembling bi-partisan government.

The worst thing of all about the coming mid-term elections has nothing to do with the possible results. It’s that it rings in the beginning of the 2012 Presidential election silly-season. We better hope the economy heals itself because it doesn’t look like politicians are going to be acting like mature adults and do much of anything to either reduce deficits or put us back to work.

Hate to be such a bummer but Greenspan, I think, speaks the truth when he says “Our choice is not between good and bad but between terrible and worse.”

We have an Indiana Republican and hero of abstinence who cheated; and a Democratic Attorney General and Senate candidate from Connecticut who pretends he fought in Vietnam. Oh, I don’t know- maybe it’s all the lying and hypocrisy?

And it’s not just one political party; it seems to be the whole wretched lot of them.
Tell you what, Republicans may do better than Dems in November but that’s only because there are more Democratic incumbents. If there was a third party called the “Honesty” party- they’d all be swept out of office. I don’t believe these “Tea Party” candidates are going to turn out any better either. That’s what happens to reformers; they get a taste for power and they join the elite classes and start playing the same egotistical games.

Hypocrisy

This is Indiana Republican Congressman, Mark Souder.

This is Congressman Souder being interviewed by a part-time staffer named Tracy Jackson on the subject of abstinence.  Ms. Jackson is the alleged mistress.

Here is a portion of Congressman Souder’s resignation letter:

To serve has been a blessing and a responsibility given from God. I wish I could have been a better example. I sinned against God, my wife and my family by having a mutual relationship with a part-time member of my staff. In the poisonous environment of Washington, D.C., any personal failing is seized upon, often twisted, for political gain. I am resigning rather than to put my family through that painful, drawn-out process.

Did you get that? It’s all Washington’s fault.

Deception

This is Connecticut Attorney General, and Democratic Senate candidate, Richard Blumenthal.

This is Richard Blumenthal two years ago at a ceremony honoring military veterans.

“We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” Mr. Blumenthal said to the group gathered in Norwalk in March 2008. “And you exemplify it. Whatever we think about the war, whatever we call it — Afghanistan or Iraq — we owe our military men and women unconditional support.”

This is from Monday’s New York Times:

There was one problem: Mr. Blumenthal, a Democrat now running for the United States Senate, never served in Vietnam. He obtained at least five military deferments from 1965 to 1970 and took repeated steps that enabled him to avoid going to war, according to records.

Qualifications for Office

Actually, let’s start in reverse. Anyone who wants to run for political office should be immediately disqualified. Already, their ego is out of control.

So what do we do?

We draft people. Like jury duty. One year at a time. Pay them well so they don’t get tempted. A year should not give them enough time to quite learn all the ways of Washington and “K” Street lobbyists. The year’s up and back home.

Citizen lawmakers instead of professional career-climbing, hypocritical, lying egomaniacs.

Just a thought.

It’s only mid-week but already I have run into a few headlines and stories on the World Wide Web that have caught my attention and need to be adorned with snarky commentary.

Politics & Media

This headline was interesting:

Can Michael Steele Survive the RNC Bondage Club Scandal?

It’s one thing to affix “gate” onto all scandals. It’s something else altogether to have the words “Bondage Club” affixed to your scandal. The answer to this headline, it seems to me, is: No. Nobody survives something called a Bondage Club Scandal. But we’ll know he’s really done when the media start referring to it as Bondage-gate.

Here’s a Matt Drudge headline that raised an eyebrow:

High earners hit as 50% tax rate goes into effect…

It’s right above another Drudge headline that reads:

Dem trouble in Spring Special Elections…

Wow, I’m thinking to myself. Damn Democrats- raising taxes to 50% in a recession, how tone deaf can you get? Except when you link to the tax rate story, you find they’re raising taxes on rich people in ENGLAND. That Matt Drudge is such a trickster!

Aviation

Spirit Becomes First U.S. Airline to Charge Fee for CARRY-ON Bag

What is it with airlines? They now charge for stowed luggage, pillows, blankets- and now carry-ons? When will it end? To save on fuel during take-offs, will they cut holes beneath passenger’s feet, so we can all provide a good, running Flintstone start? Or better yet- this Flintstones aviation concept:

Women Arrested For Trying To Take DEAD Relative On Plane

This occurred in Europe. The ladies had the 90-year old dead guy in a wheel chair with sun glasses on. I believe they may have been inspired by Weekend at Bernie’s. Apparently it’s expensive and involves a lot of paperwork to send a body from one country to another, so this was a cost-saving exercise. They bought the guy a ticket and everything so I can’t imagine what the airline was angry about.

Celebrities I Didn’t Know Were Celebrities

Heidi Montag’s Plastic Surgery Prevents Her From Hugging, Jogging

I have no idea who this Heidi Montag woman is. But I can imagine this plastic surgery situation must have come as a real blow to her hopes for qualifying in the new Hugging-Jogging competition at the 2012 Olympic games in London.

Mmmm: Lionel Messi Sculpture Made Entirely Of Chocolate

I had no idea who this Lionel Messi guy was. Turns out he’s the latest, best soccer player in the world. The point is that he has set a new standard for celebrities. It will no longer be enough to release grainy-looking sex tapes or have former Spice Girls as girlfriends. You will now have to be memorialized in cocoa and sugar. Here’s the chocolate version of Mr. Messi:

Doesn’t his left hand look huge?