One of the more interesting aspects of this global financial meltdown is how there is now a partisan divide over its cause. More and more right-wingers are focused on the quasi-socialist mortgage guarantors Fannie and Freddie and longstanding federal law that compels banks to make home loans to the working poor. See Michelle Bachmann’s recent Strib op-ed for the party line.

Last night’s 60 Minutes (watch the video) took a different tack. Steve Kroft and his producer spoke to several non-partisan Wall Street insiders, and what they had to say was revelatory. The headlines:

—Bad mortgages make up only 6 percent of the overall mortgage pool, not nearly enough to cause a global financial meltdown. Enough to screw up the nation’s housing market and result in a wave of foreclosures, but the bad borrowers and the sleazy brokers are not causing this.

—Everyone knows about the repackaging and repackaging of these high-risk mortgages into opaque tranches of investments that were sold and resold all over the globe and labeled grade A by the major ratings firms. That’s a big part of it, but not what the markets are reacting to now and not what drove Lehman and AIG under.

—This second wave is rooted in something called “credit default swaps,” which many of the largest financial firms sold to buyers of this opaque sub-prime debt as a form of insurance against a default. Now, the insurance market is regulated and requires insurers to carry reserves to pay off claims. But these “swaps” were not and did not, and the coup de grace came when many of the largest financial firms in the world had to make good on this insurance. How was Wall Street able to sell financial insurance instruments without regulatory scrutiny and maintaining reserves? Apparently because the world of “swaps” and their confusing cousins, “derivatives,” are so poorly understood outside Wall Street (though they have their own trade association to defend them, anyway).

—The ultimate conclusion of these experts is that an astounding level of “blue sky” thinking and incompetence drove this crisis from a housing bubble into a global finance meltdown. Excess in the consumer markets was doubled-, tripled-, and quintupled-down by people who should have known better. And it all seemed so complex that no one could grasp what was going on, not the financial media, not the regulators, not the insiders who should have protected their own firms.

The more your learn about this mess, the more preposterous it becomes, the less confidence I have in our system, and the more outraged I get. But don’t let anyone tell you this crisis is largely the fault of borrowers and mortgage brokers. That crisis could have been contained. This thing just ripples, and ripples, and ripples.

Watch the 60 Minutes video, or read the transcript—it is important information.

If you watched the first hour last night of MSNBC’s coverage of the Pennsylvania election results, you would have been preparing last rites for Hillary Clinton. It was all the drying up of her fundraising base, how long can she continue, etc., etc. There were no returns in yet, so it was conjecture driven, I assumed, by exit polling they were not acknowledging, portending an Obama surprise of some magnitude.

What happened was exactly what the pundits predicted a few days earlier. Hillary matched her Ohio margin and got enough of a bounce to go forward. See ya in Charlotte.

Wait, no.

Somewhere between 8 and 9 p.m., as our Tivo was taping Hell’s Kitchen, the story changed. The results didn’t, but the media decided the expected outcome was in fact unexpected. Hillary then gave a “great” speech. Obama gave a “flat” speech. Why can’t Obama close the deal? Hillary has raised two million dollars in the last hour. In Scranton she beat Obama by 50 percentage points. (Obama had similar margins in Philadelphia, but it was apparently not notable.) If he can’t win in Indiana, bordering his home state, is Obama no longer inevitable?

I hate to take you back to Chomsky and the idea of manufacturing consent, but this is how the press drives perceptions and expectations. PA was a push. Clinton didn’t see a bounce to indicate she had grown her piece of the action, and Obama didn’t deliver the coup de grace. As expected. But Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, Pat Buchanan, and Joe Scarborough decided to move the goalposts to keep it interesting.

By this a.m., the networks were full of talk about how the Obama campaign had peaked, can’t expand beyond blacks and tweedy whites, and how Hillary is forming her strategy to turn back the superdelegate tide, and all it will take is a win in Indiana.

Don’t get me wrong—this is shaping up as a very complicated choice between two candidates who could well lose to John McCain. A Hillary candidacy will be predictable, sharp-edged, and the victory, if it comes, will be narrow, the Presidency inevitably fractious—more of the same.

An Obama candidacy will be unpredictable, perhaps dispiritingly ugly, with the possibility of a landslide loss, but with the potential for incredible upside, rearranging America’s attitudes about race and remaking the tenor of our political campaigns.

But can we be honest and say that was the story six weeks ago, is still the story today, and will probably be the story after the final primaries on June 3?

I watched the first forty-five minutes of the two-hour ABC Democratic debate tonight then turned off the TV. The exchanges encapsulated everything wrong with the American news media as Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos spent the time peppering Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama with an unending litany of gotcha questions rooted in meaningless campaign contretemps.

Rev. Wright, the flag pin, the Bosnia exaggeration, the Weather Underground guy . . . belch.

I know what ABC will say after the hammering they are surely taking all over the blogosphere: Democrats are concerned about electability, and these questions explored how these controversies affected the candidates’ electability.

And it’ll be a self-serving lie like it always is.

Bloggers might be drunk on their own influence, but it is only the validation and incessant repetition from the mainstream media that legitimize this crap and mutes discussion of real issues. I know the campaigns surreptitiously push these controversies in the press’s face, but George and Charlie don’t have to bite.

But they’re bored with the issues and in love with the horserace. They are in their own insider bubble, out of touch with what’s afflicting this country and the change in tone Americans crave—even the Americans who are too simple-minded or vulnerable to resist these hot-button manipulations.

So they devote the most-watched portion of a debate capping the unending PA campaign to a recitation of vomit that demeans the election process, disgusts and wearies voters, and turns politics into a cesspool.

Here’s my vow: I will not watch an ABC news or politics program through the remainder of the election cycle. It’s the only way I have to express my disgust at its trivialization of the most important American election in four decades. I urge you to do the same. 

The punditry is not covering itself in glory this week, it’s covering itself in delusion. A couple notable examples, ripped from the headlines:

Our Internet friend Jason DeRusha asked on WCCO-TV: “Why do men do that?” Meaning go all Spitzer.

His package failed to quote Chris Rock, whose message on men and sex remains the only one of any value or insight: Men cheat because they can. All men want to cheat. They do it in direct proportion to their opportunity and desirability.

Our culture has become so feminized, and feminine values so dominate today’s relationship norms (probably a good thing, on balance) that men understand female sexuality better than women (and some men) understand male sexuality.

Some politically correct men won’t even own up to theirs. (Was Spitzer one of those guys who frowned at dirty jokes and billboards for Hooters?) It’s one area where the Christian right and the over-educated left come together.

The male sex drive is like a mind-altering drug. It compels us to take risks and clouds our judgment about the magnitude of those risks. The biological imperative at the root of the sex drive also compels men to seek variety in sex partners. Spread the seed and multiply.

Or, as the saying goes, “show me a beautiful woman, and I’ll show you a guy who’s tired of ------- her.” Not because she isn’t beautiful anymore. But because his sex drive has moved on as it’s programmed to. That’s why AIDS spread so fast in the gay community—monogamy is much harder to sustain without a woman in the mix.

If women could see a running display of men’s thoughts, they would be horrified. They’d lock the door and not come out of their house. And it’s not just the cads on construction crews, trust me. It’s the IT guys at your office. It’s the lay pastor at your church. But on balance, most men are pretty good at keeping it in their head and their pants.

Which is why what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

When I turned eighteen, the guy I worked for that summer bought me a hooker for the afternoon. It was a sprung on me a la “here’s the motel key, she’s waiting in room 104 across the street.”

I was insecure and overwhelmed and turned the gift down to the girl’s face. My boss said I’d regret it in about an hour. (It was more like two.) I tell this story to women, and they think my boss was sleazy. I tell this story to men, and they want my ex-boss to teach seminars across America on management.

I’m not endorsing prostitution; I’m not claiming most men don’t love their spouses. (I’m not sure they’re mutually exclusive. Women would inevitably disagree.) What I am saying is that male sexuality is in an ongoing battle with monogamy and intimacy and will be until they make us take a pill to stop it. All these ridiculous “why?” discussions just deepen the culture’s denial.

Eliot Spitzer cheated not because he was power mad, not because he is low down and no good, and not because he has a psychological disorder. He cheated because his brain was telling him what all men’s brains tell them and he, like many men, gave in to it because he thought he could pull it off without consequence.

The genuinely interesting question is not why do men cheat? It’s why didn’t Spitzer realize he was more vulnerable than most guys, and who brought him down?

****

Earth to Pundits: Mississippi is not America

Last night, during the Mississippi primary coverage, it was interesting watching the press unable to maintain its impulse control. I had MSNBC on. The pundits were atwitter over Clinton apparatchik and ex-Rep. Geraldine Ferraro’s unapologetic remarks that Barack Obama would not be in position to win the Dem nomination for president with so little time in government if he weren’t black. And she was being pilloried for having the nerve to say it.

The pundits were incredulous that a Democratic pol would dare to imply that some black people get a free pass in our culture.

Ferraro’s right in broad strokes but wrong in specifics. There are amazing opportunities for black Americans to jump the queue in our society. They can go very far, very fast, in many professions. And they don’t have to be as good as the non-minorities they are competing against in many of those situations.

Admitting that does not distort the reality of life in black America today or minimize the challenges black Americans face. Why would anyone imply that it does? I don’t know why that isn’t obvious to Keith Olbermann.

But that’s not why Barack Obama is leading Hillary Clinton. It’s because he is an inspirational, transformational figure while she is a lunch-bucket politician and a fairly ruthless one, we are discovering. Americans are looking for leadership, and he seems like a leader.

Admittedly, there are liberals who are ultra-besotted with Obama because he’s black, and his election portends a transformation of white attitudes. But for most of us, it’s because he inspires and portends a reordering of American politics . . . maybe.

The punditry was equally useless in analyzing Obama’s win in Mississippi. Obama’s white support was less than in Wisconsin and Virginia. It was a “disturbing trend for the Obama campaign.” So was exit poll data that, for the first time, showed Clinton’s supporters more unwilling to accept Obama as the nominee than vice-versa.

Uh, it’s MISSISSIPPI. Look at the demographics. Obama underperforms in states where the bulk of the white population is undereducated. But we can’t admit the truth about Mississippi on TV, so we just cite “disturbing trends.”

Why can’t the pundits accept that the fundamental dynamic of this campaign has not changed in weeks and will not change until the end? As in all campaigns, Clinton and Obama have disparate bases with divergent makeups, and each has difficulties attracting the other’s base. The question for the superdelegates (and it’s why they’re there) in August will be which one will be better at cobbling together 270 electoral votes against John McCain?

But every Tuesday the pundits seek to label the natural state of electoral politics as a “disturbing trend” portending some revised end game. It’s nonsense. (And why end it so fast boys? Aren’t MSNBC’s ratings higher than in years? That’s not due to Lockup: Raw, trust me.)

Last week Clinton was ascendant. Obama couldn’t close the deal. This week we’re back to where we were two weeks ago: the numbers just don’t add up for Clinton. Dontcha feel a little used?

And now we’ve got six weeks to Pennsylvania. It’s not going to get any clearer. It’s just going to get more stupid.

There, I said it. And on a commercially driven website. I am using the Super Bowl to advance the fortunes of my employer. It’s only minutes before we hear from the lawyers, I’m sure. Cease, and desist.

As we approach the game this weekend, I am more and more aware of the gradual replacement of the name “Super Bowl” in our culture with the phrase “The Big Game.” It’s long been rife in advertising, ever since the NFL started pursuing businesses trying to make money off its event without becoming a paid sponsor.

Want to advertise your salsa’s utility for Super Bowl parties? Like to promote a plasma TV as just perfect for watching the Super Bowl? Can’t do it anymore if you don’t want to pay the NFL. So instead, marketers call it The Big Game. Everyone knows what they’re talking about, and the greedy NFL and its coterie of billionaire owners, sour coaches, and recidivist players gets nada. Nice.

But have you noticed the phrase “The Big Game” showing up in casual conversation? I was sitting at a restaurant’s bar the other day, and the guy next to me was talking about “The Big Game.” “The Super Bowl, you mean?” I said.

“Well, yeah, but we’re not supposed to call it that,” he said.

Then on the Today Show, Matt Lauer introduces a cooking segment of chicken legs that might be suitable for halftime munching, and he says “The Big Game.” Cut to the TV news—“big game.” Newspaper headlines—“Big Game.”

What’s going on? As best as I understand the law, as long as you’re not using the term Super Bowl to promote a product that is separate from the Super Bowl, you owe the NFL nothing. TV anchors can say it. Guys at restaurants can say it. Even Hillary Clinton can say it. (Bill can’t.)

Much the same situation exists with the upcoming Oscars. The “Academy” maintains very tight control of its trademark and pursues anyone who uses it to promote a party, prix fixe menu, plasma TV sale. Problem is, there’s no real catchy generic label for the Academy Award.

Unless you’ve sat through one end to end. Can we all agree on “The Big Snooze®©™?”

Kinda catchy. And no lawsuits.

“Dad, do you have E.D.?” my nine-year-old asked, earnestly.
“Uh, what’s E.D.?” (scrambling . . . )
“You know, that thing where your thing doesn’t work.”
“Oh, that thing. No, my thing works.”

If this conversation had happened with me as a nine-year-old in 1972, my dad could have been confident I not only didn’t understand what E.D. was but had no idea of the things my thing could one day do. But in Tila Tequila’s America, who knows? The boy does ride the bus with eighth graders.

“Could I maybe have E.D.?”
“No, I’m pretty sure you don’t have it.”

Believe it or not, this blog is not about erectile dysfunction. It’s about why my son knows so much about it. Or doesn’t, as the case may be. It’s about why we are bombarded with TV ads for Cialis, et al., during every TV sporting event.

Believe it or not, this blog is not about my son knowing all he wants to know about E.D., although I’d prefer he wait a couple years.

It’s about whether pharmaceutical companies need to charge so much for medicines. As you know, Americans pay more for prescription drugs than any First World nation and have some of the strictest patent laws protecting drug companies from generics.

Big pharma insists federal intervention in drug costs will kill their profits, thus putting an end to innovation, thus turning the world sick and impotent.

“Dad, have you ever had a heart attack?”
“No pal, I haven’t.”
“Do you take Lipitor?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Maybe you should, so you don’t have a heart attack.”

Maybe it’s just the TV shows we watch, but I can’t escape Lipitor ads either. And I don’t watch anywhere near the average amount of TV. Which leads me to believe big pharma is spending a veritable fortune advertising meds we can’t buy without convincing a doctor we need them—advertising that has only recently been legal and is not in most westernized nations.

Clearly this advertising is effective. And doctors apparently don’t like to say “no,” or there’d be no Lipitor commercials and many fewer antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Much of this advertising is to convince consumers to ask for new, patented medicines that have to compete with off-patent, cheaper generics.

I’d be a lot more sympathetic to the industry’s claim that it needs to charge us so much if it wasn’t spending sums each year on ads that would probably sustain its research for decades.

I wonder how much of a drug’s cost goes to fund marketing budgets? And I wonder what value there is, if any, in allowing prescription drug advertising to consumers? It basically assumes doctors can’t make the right decisions about what patients need without TV ads to spark patient inquiry.

Let’s save the drug companies some money and return drug advertising to where it belongs—medical journals. If the drug companies can’t get behind that, maybe it’s time to regulate prices and/or shrink the length of pharmaceutical patents.

I know I’d enjoy seeing those old Alka-Seltzer ads instead.

Did my eyes deceive me, or is the Zigster soul-shaking Adrian Peterson after his NFL record 296-yard game on Sunday? (Sign of the apocalypse #474-A: The Wilfs go hip-hop.)

If you’re not watching the American TV iteration of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, you are missing the best TV of the season. Episode three airs Wednesday night on Fox and I have high expectations, since the first two episodes have been a running horror show/comedy panic. Even if you hate Hell’s Kitchen, and there is good reason to, this show will rock your Wednesday.

For the uninitiated, RKN is an American version of a show Ramsay does for the UK’s Channel 4 (which offers some of the old shows on-demand), and has aired in the U.S. on BBC America. In each episode, the über-chef spends a week at a small UK restaurant whose fortunes are flagging and attempts to fix its problems. The series showed the often-explosive Ramsay to be a passionate and savvy restaurateur who is able to translate his high standards to operations lacking the kinds of budgets and monied customers his restaurants cater to.

The British RKN was occasionally funny, but more often a fascinating look into the lives and eccentricities of small businesspeople. Fox’s version, so far, has focused on more dysfunctional people and operations: A Sopranos-wannabe Italian restaurant in Babylon, Long Island, and a filthy Indian joint in Midtown Manhattan. The sight of Ramsay losing it as the goombah fulminates and the roaches scurry, his incredulousness at the sheer depths of the incompetence at play make it hard to turn away from the screen.

The UK episodes, not so much the Fox freak shows, were an endless litany of evidence of the idiocy of so many chefs and the owners who enable them. Time after time RKN subjects were trying to pawn of third-tier haute cuisine in communities that could neither afford nor appreciate it, simply because it satisfied a chef’s ego. Ramsay’s response is always the same: know your customer, keep things fresh, simple, and of good value. It would seem so easy.

The British shows are now in hiatus, but another season is in the offing. The Fox show is earning mediocre ratings up against Bionic Woman and Private Practice. But it deserves to live to see a better time slot. Compared to the piffle of Hell’s Kitchen, either version of Kitchen Nightmares is well worth experiencing.

Ken Burns’ The War begins this weekend on PBS. The World War II documentary, told through the eyes of residents of four American towns, is already critically acclaimed and has special interest for us, as it trains its eye on the southwest Minnesota community of Luverne.

I would like to watch it, but I will not. And I’m sure when you look into the commitment involved, you will probably pass as well. PBS’s handling of the documentary illustrates much about the network’s flagging fortunes and inability to attract younger viewers. There are many closer to the TV business than I who question whether PBS will exist in a generation. (And I say this as someone who loves several PBS programs, most notably Frontline, the best American journalism on TV, which returns in October.)

Burns’ miniseries is fourteen hours long. That’s not an outrageous length by miniseries standards. But PBS has chosen to air the series in two-hour blocks over a ten-day period. This is PBS’s standard mode of handling multi-hour “specials” and it guarantees the network an audience of largely seniors and shut-ins.

In our busy culture, it’s wildly presumptuous of PBS to expect this level of time commitment over such a short stretch of time. Why it couldn’t air an hour each week, or even two, and run the thing over a period of two or three months is confounding. That’s how virtually every other network does it.

I don’t know about you, but hell would freeze over before I could devote eight hours one week, six the next, to a single television program. Yes, I know, that’s what DVRs are made for. But if I were to put fourteen hours of programming on my DVR at high quality, which a program like The War demands, it would require that I delete everything else I have on it and cease recording other programming until I view The War.

Ken Burns documentaries are not crowd pleasers. They are slow, often turgid, and frequently visually uninteresting. But they are scholarly and rich in originality for those who make the effort. By scheduling The War in a way only those with nothing to do can accommodate, PBS has guaranteed itself another critical success that never reaches its potential.

I usually find the rest of the country’s take on Minnesota, particularly when it airs on TV, clichéd and vapid. Food Network gives us a fair shake typically, and I didn’t even mind Rachel Ray’s recent foray in her Tasty Travels series. (Yum-O.) And I have great expectations of my colleague Andrew Zimmern’s season two Minnesota-based episode of Bizarre Foods on Travel Channel. (It will air in 2008.)

But possibly the best nationally produced Minnesota show I’ve seen is the current episode of Alton Brown’s Feasting on Asphalt series where he motorbikes across America in search of the regional food and food culture. Brown is one of the most knowledgeable TV foodies out there, he’s funny, and because he lives in Atlanta, he’s not NY/LA-centric.

But I did not expect the episode “Lutefisk Express”—the final episode of season two, in which Brown biked up the Mississippi—to be quite as entertaining as it was. He starts in Alma, Wisconsin, at a fishing pontoon/greasy spoon, hits the Whistle Stop Café in Frontenac (gotta get there for pie, lard crust you know), restored my faith in Mickey’s Diner, did a turn at Olsen Fish on the lutefisk line, stopped at Bob’s Java Hut on Lyndale and got a tattoo upstairs at Uptown Tattoo, watched Soile Anderson make a smorgasbord, encountered some Viking-wannabes in Crosby, and ended up at Itasca State Park.

The fish platform in Alma and the Whistle Stop in Frontenac are real finds. I was shocked to learn how committed Mickey’s owners are to real food (and butter), laughed myself sick over Anderson’s Finnish accent (so thick the show used subtitles). Brown is not a camera hog and is content to let his crew share the stage, he really knows food and food science, and I find his personality to be mighty good viewing. Feasting was not a show I had on my DVR list this summer (or last) and now I regret it. Since it’s cable, I’m sure it will return many, many times.

If you’re interested in checking out “Lutefisk Express,” it airs Saturday at 3 p.m. and Sunday at 6 p.m. on Food Network.