The gall of Frank Rich, poaching on my pet peeve. While our IT mavens run a few checks to see if I can accuse the NY Times's eminence gris of outright piracy, I'll take the high road and applaud Rich and anyone else who wants in on the complaint that our so-called experts on politics and public affairs capped a year of looking ridiculous with a full out orgy of gross misperception while out in Colorado last week.

The "Clinton drama" they all—even up through the Tom Brokaws of the chattering class—imagined, dissected, re-imagined, contrived, and then dismissed as though it never crossed their minds, was highly emblematic of the disease infecting mainstream TV news, namely the commercial need to seize on a salable storyline with familiar, recognizable characters and beat it to the consistency of steak tartare, even if it means ignoring far more relevant—but less pulpy and digestible—stories.

It was, as I've said, foolish in the extreme to imagine the Clintons weren't going to put on a full-force show of support for Barack Obama. Likewise, it will be silly (and dishonest) if the same big media offenders do not apply high skepticism to Republican machinations over the choice of Sarah Palin as John McCain's VP and their reactive responses to Hurricane Gustav.

On Palin, the interwebs have been afire with analysis of the selection since the moment it was announced. Having followed the Pawlenty possibility closely, I fail to see, down there on the bottom line, what Palin brings that he did not. (And I'm fascinated to find out how PO'd Pawlenty is at getting jacked around as he was. Word is, he feels used.)

The cliche about VP selections is that they are the first demonstration of a candidate's judgment. That implies a criteria that places indisputable executive competence over naked political strategy. Pretty obviously, McCain (or his closest advisors—there is the rumor that they talked him out of Joe Lieberman) over-valued the naked part in their choice of Palin. (And yeah, I guess that is a not so sly allusion to the fact that maybe for the first time in American history, men might look at the office of vice president with a level of lascivious intent.)

What stuns me about the choice isn't that Palin is a talk radio-worthy far-Right-Winger, OK with teaching creationism in public schools and cherry picking science for political effect. All that anachronistic superstition and craven kowtowing to religious money interests is what got her the gig over Pawlenty (who, as we saw on Meet the Press this morning, is now eager to establish HIS creationist crede.) What surprises me most is how little personal interaction McCain has had with her. He barely knows the woman. That strikes me as ready-fire-aim risk taking.

One usually credible source guesstimated that the two had "maybe" spent fifteen minutes in each other's company prior to the dog-and-pony show in Dayton Friday. My question then is: What certainty can McCain have that any and all skeletons in Palin's closet have been vetted and that she's ready for the ferocity of the Internet/new media . . . if not the TV pros, who may just be distracted enough by a Tina Fey lookalike on the stump to avoid serious inquiry into that squirrelly business with the brother-in-law and whatever else comes up?

Fundamental point there: The choice of Sarah Palin has the feel of McCain being force-fed a raw political calculation over someone in his comfort zone—like Lieberman or Pawlenty. The Republicans have been playing this heavily stage-managed game since Ronald Reagan. Through operators such as Michael Deaver, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, and now Rove acolyte Steve Schmidt (running McCain's operation), they are OK with propping up and isolating candidates impatient with details and lacking the personal intellectual abilities to make their own risky decisions.

After the Obama-at-Invesco Super Show—watched live by more people than tuned in for The Oscars, the opening of the Summer Olympics, for God's sake the finale of American Idol—I'm more convinced than ever that Republican pros know McCain doesn't have a chance in hell. (I'm still picking Obama by eight points.) You take Michele Bachmann-like Sarah Palin over understated, triangulating Tim Pawlenty when you absolutely have to have the worst of the religious nut bags on your bus.

Now we watch as Hurricane Gustav sucks out what little air was in the Republican get-together. Privately, McCain himself has to be thrilled that neither George W. or Dick Cheney will make the scene in St. Paul. Those two are a couple gigantic millstones in any appeal to the middle class. (Personally, I'm devastated. My dream of being in the same building as 18,000 teary-eyed Republicans singing Auld Lang Syne and watching George and Dick take a couple victory laps has been blown away on the threat of a re-play of the single worst natural disaster in American history.

But what to make if McCain injects himself into preparations for wide-scale disaster relief? Will the cable news pros who prattled on hyperbolically and nonsensically about the Clintons throwing a wrench in Obama's show devote anywhere near as much time to the relevance of a . . . candidate for president, with no authority to order anything . . . using a natural disaster as a campaign photo op?

If McCain phones in his acceptance speech from anywhere near Louisiana and requires the presence of so much as one cop who could be providing rescue services, someone—a lot of people—should be screaming like Category Five banshees.

In his lead, Frank Rich chastises the media with Obama's line that we've got problems too big to indulge in "a big election about small things." The convergence of Sarah Palin and Hurricane Gustav offers our news class . . . another . . . opportunity to demonstrate a professional sense of news judgment and proportion.            

Ladies, gentlemen, and trolls:

The three finalists in our (maybe first annual) "Can You Out-Kersten Kersten Contest." Vote at the bottom.

KERSTEN FINALIST #1—KATY AND THE BOMB

By Katherine Kersten

The dropping of the atomic bomb and its simultaneous incineration of 80,000 Hiroshimans was a beautiful act of courage. Those brave boys of ours were in for some real heat if we didn’t apply the heat. And did we ever! Go boys!

His Holiness Pope Benedict has informed us that the holy mass will now be spoken in Aramaic, with backs turned to the congregation, and with all of those “politically correct” changes ushered in during the enlightenment shown the door. Anyone who once supported the Vatican II nonsense will be hanged. Everyone who ever attended St. Stephens and St. Lenin of Arc are to paraded in front of the lions at the Apple Valley Zoo. Thank goodness!

The other day I saw a lady from Edina recycling her garbage, separating the plastic and the glass and the newspapers with a smug look on her face. I almost split my girdle laughing at her. She thought she was so superior to me. She had no idea that I am a Fellow of the Center for the American Experiment!

I have never been an affirmative action columnist! I established my bona fides in the trenches at the Center for the American Experiment. I blew (kisses at) Ron Carey at the Kennedy Versus the Machine extravaganza kickoff at the Thunderbird Ballroom.  I delivered the goods for Scott Johnson, the Tom Paine of our time. No one at the Star Tribune will talk to me but that is OK!

I work at home with my 400 pound corgi Margaret Thatcher. This is my holy choice.

My teen sons and I and my husband recently attended the third anniversary viewing of Passion of the Christ, and I was struck by how much time has mellowed the fussy fuss surrounding this beautiful epic about the dirty Jews who killed our Christ. It seems so clear to us now that the Hollywood lefties who did not give Mel Gibson the Oscar had no real answer for why we should not kill them all.

What will a gay think of next? Now they want to outlaw hate crimes!

As Peoloniuous the XVII said in his memorable epistle to the Somorinonans: A law to regulate pool drains is a law that chokes us all!!

Have you tried the fanTAStic build your own burger bar at Fuddruckers? Now it is closed. You can thank those tax and spend liberals…..

I don’t see the problem in killing everyone I disagree with.

KERSTEN FINALIST #2—KATY AND WOMEN ON THEIR BACKS

By Katherine Kersten

By the middle of this century, people like you and me will be in the minority in this country. Don’t believe it? You’d better, because a recent report says that by the 2040s people not like us will be running things as we know them, turning the beloved homeland of our forefathers into a diversity-infested nightmare.

How did this come about? Blame the 60s, pro-choice feminists, liberal clergy, women’s lib, gays, rap music, mini-skirts, civil rights fanatics and Democrats.

But before we throw in the towel, hope exists on this bleak horizon in the form of an exciting new organization. Yes, that’s right! And that’s Concerned Women Who F**k for America. Founded by a group of housewives and mothers, CWWFFA seeks to lead a national crusade of like-minded, patriotic American women of child-bearing age to increase their sexual intercourse to at least three times a week, all within the sanctity of holy Christian matrimony, of course.

The National Executive Board of CWWFFA is a Who’s Who of powerful, patriotic Christian women: Phyllis Schlafly, Beverly LaHaye, Laura Schlessinger, Lynne Cheney, Ann Coulter and several others. All20these influential women are aware of the hideous threat facing people like you and me, and they are intent on stemming this frightening tide.

“We have to begin now to rapidly increase the population of People Like Us (PLUs),” says Mrs. Patience Anne Fortitude of Eden Prairie, president of the Minnesota Chapter of CWWFFA. “Unless women begin to have more children immediately, PLUs will be doomed to minority status in the coming decades, a prospect that we feel is worse than death or living in a world run by Democrats.”

As repugnant and distasteful as many virtuous women find sex of any kind, CWWFFA leaders understand the sacrifice needed to insure that PLUs maintain their majority status in America. They also understand the need to reach out to women everywhere in this great land to encourage them to produce more offspring. The days of putting off motherhood for careers and selfish interests are over. You’d better believe it!

“Yes, it’s true that many women will be turned off by the notion of sex more than two or three times a year,” says Mrs. Fortitude. “But, on the other hand, our mission is to make it clear to these women that it is their Christian, patriotic duty to engage in sexual intercourse, whether they like their husbands or not, for the good of our country and the survival of PLUs. In fact, when it comes to sexual relations, I often find myself telling women to remember La dy Hillingdon’s journal entry of 1912:  ‘When I hear his steps outside my door I lie down on my bed, open my legs and think of England.’ In our case, it’s America, of course, but the sentiment is powerfully the same.”

Many suburban churches and other patriotic organizations are involved in promoting this important cause. At Hour of Guilt Church in Eagan, women are asked to stand up during the service and report to the congregation how many times they had sexual intercourse the previous week. There’s also a web site —www.onourbacksforamerica.org — where women can report their sexual activity and pregnancies.

“This is a crucial time in our country’s history for PLUs,” says Mrs. Fortitude. “It’s time for women to get out of the office and onto their backs, because America is depending on all of us. It’s up to us.”

KERSTEN FINALIST #3—KATY AND THE DINOSAURS

By Katherin Kersten

Swing Low, Sweet Oblivion: The Dinosaur’s Song

Neighbors in Zimmerman were left yesterday with the sad residue of the familiar suddenly unexplained. A husband -- perhaps ensnared in the same online “swingers club” that entangled his wife with another man -- killed them both and then himself. The pleasures they sought, now turned to tragedy. Hopeful lives, now and forever a source of lurid speculation.

Little boys love dinosaurs. This passion appears suddenly and embraces the benign Barney as well as the mincing velociraptor, but none excites adolescent passion like the Tyrannosaurus Rex!

Why this inexplicable delight? Feeling an emerging sense of power? Or simply savoring strings of alien syllables on still-forming tongues?  It is one of life’s deep mysteries.

Then, suddenly and inexplicably, like the extinction of these leviathans themselves, the fascination disappears. Girls, it seems, rarely fall prey to such “Jurassic Fantasy” in the first place, preferring instead more practical rehearsals of domestic life.

It’s not as if all boys put away all childish things as they move toward the solemn responsibilities of finding true love, marrying, and providing the financial and spiritual sustenance a family requires for childrearing. It’s just that their journey is longer, darker, and fraught with urges that are only dimly understood.

“Scholars have long debated why dinosaurs were put on this earth, only to be extinguished,” says Dr. Philip Ownius of the Christic Institute for Evolution Studies. “They pore over the ambiguities of a broken ‘fossil record’ and theorize about meteor impacts and ‘climate change,’ but deny the obvious: The Flood.”

Some “experts” will tell you The Flood is a myth and Noah was not an historical figure -- that he was simply conjured up to quell fears of ignorant primitives whose culture was “traumatized” by melting ice caps.

Dr. Ownius knows better. The Flood was an “act of a loving God,” and the dinosaurs’ extinction intended as a warning.

Because they had been placed on earth only to be extinguished, they had no imperative to reproduce. Eat, kill and make reptilian “love,” was God’s message, and forever be banished from paradise. A lesson, of course, that our liberal “professors” would not be caught dead professing.

Further, “Islamic teachings deny The Flood and evolution,” Ownius says. “Little boys in the Judeo-Christian tradition spontaneously gravitate to dinosaurs, while Islamist children do not. This correlates with our nation’s respect for marriage and love of freedom, while the Islamic world produces loveless multiple marriages and terrorists.”

It’s an intriguing premise. One sure to draw scoffing from those who will note our high divorce rate and “imperialism.”

So how do we explain the senseless murders?

In the right hands, the computer, like sex, can be a wonderful, intimate gift. But it also leads to one of the darkest basements of the soul, where gratification is variegated and swift, and triangles beckon like the sirens’ song. Come down, they sing, come down. No one will know.

And now, no one will ever know what sang in the killer’s heart. Or how Barney turned into Rex.

Talk about a good soap opera. The clothes ain't much, but damn, the pissy eye scratching, the open feuds, and forget back stabbing, this gang is sinking the cutlery right into one anothers' chests.

The Clintonistas and the Obamamites? Nope. They've been perfectly chummy and adult. Very well-behaved. It's that MSNBC crowd. Who needs Big Brother 10 when we're trapped with this bunch? Not being a fan of Joe Scarborough, I missed his on-set meltdown the other morning, ripping into "colleague" David Shuster, who had the temerity to get confrontational with the ex-Republican congressman about Iraq policy—to the point that Scarborough was later quoted fuming about people with "hidden biases" on his network.

Then there was perpetually windblown Chris Matthews, a man never more than a half-second twitch from terminal spittle-flecked verbosity, getting PO'd at his co-host, Keith Olbermann, and Olbermann sandbagging Republican "analyst" Mike Murphy, who in fairness to Olbermann truly is a vacuous gas bag. (Murphy's assertion that Bill and Hillary would vote for McCain resulted in BOTH Matthews and Olbermann going after him last night.)

All in all, it's silly, juvenile, and very entertaining. The irony being that these people—these media professionals—were a significant faction of the crowd predicting Clinton-inspired chaos in Denver. They foresaw Bill and Hillary pouting and scheming and screwing things up so badly for Obama the whole DNC mob would leave home and start door-knocking for Ron Paul. Now, the stark contrast of the convention's reality to the laughably uninformed nattering of cable TV's political insider class has to be an improbable plus for Obama. How? I say anyone daft enough to believe anything said by anyone in the Blitzer-Scarborough-Matthews bubble world has to be thinking today, "Wow, all that went off pretty smooth. This act is under control."

The fact that it has, barring Bruce Springsteen endorsing Dick Cheney tonight from Invesco Field, is due in no small part to the Clintons, the unrivaled First Family of Political Soap Opera.

Bill Clinton last night was as adroit and pitch-perfect as you can get. It was Yo-Yo Ma with a TelePrompter. And was anyone surprised? Anyone?

My favorite Bill Clinton moment remains his 1999 State of the Union Address. Every drooling goober of the Hate Clinton Torch and Pitchfork Brigade, many of them sitting members of Congress and the major media, were assembled to watch him fold under the lights. Lewinsky, impeachment, twenty-four-seven 150-decibel nutbag radio shills, everyone was certain they had him . . . this time . . .finally. But instead of collapsing into a fetal tuck, Clinton stood up as though oblivious to the whole oceanic flow cutthroat bulls**t of and slammed the pack of them . . . with a flawless, high-minded, cool-as-a-fall-day address on the state of the union, which was, as the public knew (and he knew), pretty damn good at the time. Moreover, since Clinton knew how to read a poll, he knew the public was also inclined to believe the country would be even better off if the "loyal opposition" sitting out there in their upholstered leather seats, blood dripping from their fangs, would ever find time to do something more constructive than leave slime tracks around Capitol Hill.

Bill Clinton has no rival when it comes to the combination of reading the fluid dynamics of a political moment, the likely strategies of his worst enemies, and the mood of any room he happens to be speaking in. Which of course is a significant reason why opposition hacks despise him with such psychotic vigor. "It's all so calculated!" Uh, no duh. Politics is a game of reading and playing perpetually shifting strategies. Bill Clinton not only understands that, he has the native energy and intelligence to play it . . . effortlessly.

Hillary . . . mmm, not so much. As professional politicos go, she's good, and a LOT more human on the retail level than her most unhinged detractors ever give her credit for (a big mistake on their part, that she regularly exploits), but she is not and never will be the whole package that Bill is. Maybe it's the pant suits.

During the primary campaign, I often wondered what Bill was thinking in his most private moments. He had to be constantly thinking how he'd play a given moment differently but then snap back and remind himself that that wasn't the game du jour. Hlllary was the main act. He couldn't play it for her. At some point, following that logic, Bill Clinton had to recognize the fundamental gifts Barack Obama was bringing to the competition. Bill knows talent. So although he had no choice but to apply pit bull ferocity to Hillary's campaign—because that is what you do—he also had to know she was up against a force of nature, a once-in-a-lifetime package of political assets and that she was not going to win this one.

The Clintons love to win almost as much as they love to breathe. But it is preposterous for the feuding cable freak shows to assert with such certainty that they now prefer Obama to lose.

As they leave Denver, the Clintons, having said they whole-heartedly support Obama, are now going to have to prove it with a campaign effort so energetic, no one in the Democratic hierarchy has any doubt about their sincerity. Their political futures depend on them delivering the goods. More to the point, if they can deliver Hillary's Appalachian Catholic women (for lack of a better term), that discernable enough fact will place both Obama and the Democratic Party, for which Bill intends to play patriarch for at least another twenty years, in their ever-asting debt.

The Clintons love power, and indebtedness is power.         

Approximately two minutes into Mark Warner's keynote speech tonight, I started yelling at the screen. "Dick Cheney! Dick Cheney! Dick Cheney!" No opposition party has ever handed its rival the groaning buffet table of succulent, corrupted meat and ripe, fraudulent fruit that Dick Cheney's neo-con catastrophe has handed the '08 Democrats and this . . . this . . . cell phone salesman, Warner, is babbling on about how good ideas don't come with "Rs" and "Ds" attached to them.

You, Warner, out there in the Oort Cloud, the rest of us are down here, where the guys you don't want to mention have royally screwed every pooch on the continent.

All that stuff about science. Great. But . . . first rule of show biz, Warner . . . Give the People What They Want. In this case, that means you remind the people—like with a rhetorical bat upside their heads—that Dick Cheney and his marionette, George W., are still conflicted about grade school stuff like friggin' evolution. Likewise, half the Republicans who ran to replace them. Then what you do is trot out every medieval, anti-science plot this crowd has ever hatched, from threatening scientists who dared acknowledge climate change to caving into religious nut bags over stem cell research and on and . . . and on and on. It'd take a while. But you can talk fast.

So Warner thankfully bows out, and who do I hear echoing me? Pat goddam Buchanan. Someone is losing their bearings.

Buchanan, the guy who helped cook up Richard Nixon's Southern strategy—the one that shamelessly exploited the segregationist bigotry the Republicans have been milking for forthy years—was as exasperated as I was. "Dick Cheney! Dick Cheney!" Buchanan was shouting to the great amusement of his MSNBC colleagues and the hyper-partisan crowd watching their tent show live from Denver. (These guys will be in Rice Park next week.)

Even Buchanan couldn't understand how the Democrats could miss a target as massive and fetid as . . . Dick Cheney.

Boiled to its essence, Buchanan told Rachel Maddow, Eugene Robinson, and Norah O'Donnell, this is politics. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have a great vision of a future full of green gadgets all made by shiny-faced, hi-tech workers right here in the USA. But a huge part of the game is reminding people what they are against. And when you've got a reservoir of antipathy, disgust, and revulsion at the crooks and boobs who've screwed things up as badly as Cheney and George busting cracks in the dam . . . you open the sluice gates and let if flow. And not just a polite little bit. You let it flood the sleeping villages downstream. It's free TV, you twits. The other guys know how to play this game.

Good God! Where are my meds?

Hillary Clinton rescued the night with a speech that did everything she needed it to do. But then I wasn't buying the talk-for-talk-sake chatter that had either Bill or her throwing some kind of egotistic hissy fit at the podium of the Pepsi Center or in any way failing to play the party game. Say what you will, neither of the Clintons is stupid, and we all know they are intensely focused on husbanding and cultivating their political influence. Hell, they'd shrivel up like the Wicked Witch of the North if they weren't the go-to kids for big-money Democrats. (And I say that as a guy who'd happily vote Bubba for a third term.) Those two have known all along that there is only an upside to their showing whole-hearted, over-the-top, jig-dancing support for Obama. Bubba and all his foundations and initiatives prosper, and Hillary accumulates even more influence for whatever she wants to push in the Senate . . . and any contigency in the future.

Along with asking, "Were you only in this for me?" Hillary laid into McBush to the delight of every pissed-off liberal, Democrat, and Independent watching. It was very good. The people went home happy.

But it wasn't nearly enough. Tomorrow, (Wednesday), on day three, between first Bubba himself and then Joe Biden, who is on board as Obama's Veep as much for his adroit touch with dagger-like rhetoric—"a verb, a noun, and 9/11"—as his foreign policy experience, it should be a sweet night for those of us hungering for the sight of Dick Cheney's gizzard on a plate. (I can wait another few months for the sight of Cheney in an orange jump suit being perp-walked for arraignment.) No one ever needed to tell Bubba or Biden how to put on the show people like Pat Buchanan and I want to see. 

Chuck Klosterman has a good column in the latest Esquire (Tom Brady cover). It’s titled, “The Great American Stasis,” and the nut graph is this: “The mass media is the single most detrimental entity within the United States right now. It’s having the exact opposite effect of it’s theoretically intended one – it’s making people less informed and less complete.”

I know, I know. “What a downer.”

This was rattling around in my head as I sat down to a little live-on-tape blogging of the first night of the Democratic National Convention. With the big news networks farming most of the “action” (sic) out to their cable nets, I decided to check out reality for the few viewers still out there trying to exist without cable.

Limited to over-the-air signals from ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS, the test was to see what the options were for “average Americans” from 6:45 to 8:45 p.m. Monday night. Primetime America.

“Less informed” my a**.   

6:44 p.m. A Seinfeld rerun is up on the NBC affiliate. It’s the episode where Kramer is in the AIDS walk but won’t wear a ribbon, and Elaine is vetting boyfriends to see which is “spongeworthy.” This episode has played more often than "The Star Spangled Banner” at the Metrodome. On CBS, Wheel of Fortune is live-on-tape-with-editing from Chicago. Vanna still looks twenty-eight in the long shots. On ABC, Entertainment Tonight’s Mary Hart is flashing both leg and teeth hyping a piece on Hollywood’s “summer romances.”

“Which romances are making the publicists sweat?” she asks. Uh, Mary? They only sweat if you don’t run this stuff. Apparently Jessica Simpson and Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo are still an item, and according to some young woman (Who is she? A clerk at Ralph’s?), Jessica gave Tony a lap dance for his birthday. I hope he calms down before he has to play the Patriots. Meanwhile, over on PBS, the only network covering the DNC, Jim Lehrer has David Brooks of The New York Times (with a superb tan) and rumpled, dumpy Mark Shields. Brooks is explaining that, “High school-educated people are Hillary people while college-educated people are Obama people.” So the big challenge, I guess, is to sell Obama to the crowd with 600 SATs.

6:46 Oops. Lehrer signs off. PBS cuts immediately to a Chevron ad for "green" deep drilling. (Note to self: Check the last time Lehrer did a show on offshore drilling.)

6:55 Mary Hart signs off. “Give us twenty-four hours,” she says, “and we’ll give you a whole new half-hour of dish.” Something hot and cheesy, I’m guessing. ABC cuts to an ad for Ford’s new overweight SUV, the Edge.

7:01 NBC primetime begins with Howie Mandel and Deal or No Deal. In a flash, the briefcase girls are strutting down the stairs in platinum wigs. Over on ABC, we have some reality show hosted by fallen mega-star (and previous recipient of Jessica Simpson lap dances) Nick Lachey. The test for his teenage contestants, “Can you make a good first impression?”

7:03 PBS: Mark Shields and Brooks are chatting agreeably. (“Who wants agreeable in politics?” you’re asking.) They cut to Judy Woodruff in headphones. “The crowd,” she says, “is waiting for the big attractions.” By this she means a Ken Burns film about Ted Kennedy. After that, says Woodruff, it’s all about telling the TV viewing audience who [Obama] is. She adds, “We’ve been here three hours, and there hasn’t been a lot of official business." Some of the delay is because, “[The Democrats] are waiting to tell the TV audience,” who, as far as I can tell, are watching Howie Mandel.

7:07 PBS is showing a film about Nancy Pelosi. Did they mention the winery she owns? I don't think so. Pelosi appears in a great-looking white suit—probably not off the rack from Marshalls. One line stands out: “Politics,” she says, “is a continuation of my role as Mom." Really? I’d like to see you spank Tom DeLay.

7:09 On ABC, Lachey’s contestants—oh wait, this is High School Musical: Summer Session—are dressing up as chickens, gorillas, and bananas. One squealing teenager is being advised to, “delve deeply into the consciousness of a banana.”

7:10 On NBC, there’s an ad for John McCain on Jay Leno. That McCain is one funny guy. Did you hear the one about his houses?

7:14 Back to PBS, where Pelosi is saying, “I’m very proud of the Democrats in Congress . . ." When I stop coughing, she still hasn’t offered an explanation for that FISA court bulls**t and telcom immunity.

7:15 On CBS, it’s some sitcom about four geeks. (Checking listings, checking listings, oh, The Big Bang Theory. Damn, am I glad I don’t have to watch this stuff anymore.) Raj, the brainy Indian guy wants the TV star Blossom to join their Physics team. This seems unlikely. But then Blossom hasn’t worked in years, right?

7:16 On NBC, Howie Mandel is caught doing a terrorist fist jab with a large lady contestant. (Programming note: Can’t get Fox at this location.)

7:17 Back to PBS and Pelosi. She’s trying to get the audience to play along. “We say John McCain has the experience of being . . . wrong.” The crowd finally gets hip. They’re supposed to chant, “ . . . and John McCain is wrong.” A little slow on the uptake, kids. Too long at happy hour in high altitude, I’m thinking. Pelosi reminds everyone that, “The war in Iraq was catastrophic mistake . . .” I don’t think anyone in the Pepsi Center thinks otherwise.

7:19 On ABC, it’s backstage at High School Musical for those “private” confessional moments we’ll only share with the whole country. “What I think makes me and Tierney’s relationship so special,” says one blond contestant, “it’s like whatever comes out of my mouth comes her of her mouth.” Eeeeeeew.

7:21 On NBC, the large woman has decided on something, and some other people leave the stage high-fiving the audience. I don’t understand this game. I think I hear her say, “That’s a lot to give up. I could have been thin.” What? Huh? Is this that fatty dieting show?

7:22 Back to PBS where David Brooks is panning Pelosi’s speech. “Pretty generic,” he’s calling it. That’s a nice way of saying her sing-songy speaking style takes thirty seconds to get really old. He asks again, “Can they describe who Barack Obama is?” Describe who he is for whom? The people who aren’t watching? Brooks does say that in a contest between “a generic Democrat and a generic Republican, the Democrats win this year.” Shields, looking more rumpled by the minute, notes that the Pepsi Center crowd, “seemed strangely subdued to me.” More like “comatose” to me. Down on the floor, Judy Woodruff has snagged a big “get,” an interview with the chair of Joe Biden’s Delaware delegation. Of  Biden, the guy says, “He was a comer then, and he’s a comer now.” Did I miss a Cialis commercial?

7:27 PBS stays tuned to a Jimmy Carter movie. It’ll need Jessica Simpson to open big in the Bible Belt.

7:28 On NBC, the large lady on Deal chooses “Number 1!!!!”. On ABC, Lachey is sitting on a desk in a classroom—High School Musical . . . get it? He’s telling the kids, “This is a huge point. Don’t forget your friends.” Some fanzine idol named “Zack” is telling them, “Nervous energy is the best energy.” “Zack’s advice was really great,” says another sunny blond. Apparently the guys don’t talk much.

7:30 How I Met Your Mother comes on ABC. Doogie Howser, who I figured for gay, is in bed with a good-looking brunett. It is post-facto, if you know what I mean.They’re agreeing never to speak of what just happened. He asks her if he can say, “Guess who just nailed the chick from Metro News 1?”

7:31 Getting woozy, I walk away to finish reading the morning NY Times. Hmmmm. This Swiss—CIA—Pakistani nuclear spy-game story is pretty damned good. Also, the Louisiana Delta is still disappearing. Remind me to tell the story of wandering into a bar in Delacroix that one time.

8:11 OK, enough of this news crap. Back to the tube. On PBS, Caroline Kennedy is warming up the crowd for her uncle. She’s a better speaker than Pelosi, but Pelosi is the better clothes horse. On CBS, Two and a Half Men is still on the air. This show is a hit? Jon Cryer is telling a blond (a lot of blonds on primetime TV), “I have no romantic feelings for you at all.” Another blond appears at door. The first blonde, weeping, tells him, “I thought I could spice up our relationship with a three-way.” Cryer starts back-filling. What happened to the Parents Television Council? On ABC, it’s another sitcom. A blond in an expensive fur is telling the doorman, “I’m not a virgin any more.” Obviously I missed something. Back over to PBS. It’s the Ken Burns film on Ted Kennedy. Nice sailing shots. But isn’t sailing “elitist?” Maybe next time, twin 300 horse Mercury inboard-outboards.

8:27  Ted appears on PBS. Lots of “Kennedy” placards. If you dial out the color it could be 1960 all over again. The old guy sounds pretty strong. The phrase, “Barack Obama -- President of the United States” will be shouted no less than 3000 times this week. Joe Biden is caught on camera applauding Ted’s promise to be there on the Senate floor next January. Ted hammers “Health care. A fundamental right. Not a privilege.” Pretty much like he has for 40 years.

8:31 Ted: “This Novem-bah the torch will be passed . . ." Man, does that take me back. Who else remembers Vaughn Meader? It’s a short speech. Maria Shriver is in tears.

8:32  On NBC, Deal has given way to Toughest Jobs, or something. The crew is out on a crab boat off Alaska. A woman—can’t tell if she’s blond—is saying, “I’m bruised, and I’m battered . . ." On CBS,  three women, two of them blond, are dishing with Julia Louis-Dreyfus on The New Adventures of Old Christine. On ABC, it’s another sitcom, a mom and dad are telling their (blond) daughter, “If you like this boy enough to stalk him . . . ”

8:34 On PBS, Mark Shields is saying of Ted Kennedy, “After 1980, he devoted his energies to becoming the greatest senator of the century.” He says Kennedy has, “Personal skills unmatched in the Senate.” To which David Brooks says, Kennedy “has a staff unmatched by anyone else in the Senate.” Shields remarks as how unlike Kennedy, “old line Southern Democrats knew they’d never have a chance to run for president, so they became legislators.”

8:37 NBC is running an ad for Death Race. On CBS, Christine (Louis-Dreyfus) is telling Wanda Sykes “OK, tell him I’ll go out with him. But tell him I don’t put out.” ABC is running an ad for Grand Casino.

8:40 PBS’s Judy Woodruff is interviewing two women from the Massachusetts delegation . . . Molly O’Brien and Mary O’Grady. Hello, Central Casting.

8:41 Margaret Warner on PBS is asking presidential historian Michael Beschloss whether “Ted Kennedy helps Democrats transcend liberalism.” At least that’s what I think I heard. Beschloss tells Warner (and these two might embody every joke anyone has ever made about eat-your-broccoli PBS), “The Democratic party today is a Ted Kennedy party.” He says Kennedy is “as close to the DNA of the party as any other figure,” including Obama. He also calls Kennedy, “One of top five senators in U.S. history.” I guess that bumps Rick Santorum off the list.

8:45 On NBC, the woman is breaking down on the crab boat. CBS’s Christine is telling hunky Blair Underwood, “I think my (date) has diarrhea.” Good to know. On ABC, it’s an ad for Wendy’s monster “Baconator”. Two slabs of hamburger, plus cheese topped with six strips of bacon.

8:46 No mas. Let’s see who Kerri Miller digs up for her 9 a.m. radio show.

For a few years back in the '90s, Larry King wrote the single worst column ever produced for a major newspaper. It was complete gibberish. As though Larry were strung out on a David Carr-like cocktail of uppers, downers, and Red Bull. USA Today ran the thing, which was just Larry's stream of conscious babbling.

"Saw Liz Taylor Friday night. Gal's still got it. Wow, that new Lincoln Town Car is a sweet looking ride. I hate it when they don't put real butter on popcorn. I think Bill Clinton is a pretty smart guy. Damn, I am completely f***ed up . . ."

It made no sense. But it ran because Larry was Larry. Getting paid to write something like that—I think Larry literally phoned it in between marriages and divorce courts—has always been a dream of mine. I guess that's what blogs are for.

Here's a collection of streaming thoughts for Monday . . .

THE OUT-KERSTEN KERSTEN CONTEST:

The judges will reduce entries to a final three and post them on Wednesday for a public vote. (We have ways of knowing if you vote 400 times for yourself.) Several e-mailers have thrown up their hands at the competition Kersten herself laid down with her Sunday column about all the "girl on girl action" she's seeing everywhere these days.

But after checking (i.e. making up) the rules, we have decided that even if Kersten outdoes herself, she is ineligible for this contest. Moreover, for those (who work with her) and feared being outted, this is, or can be, a blind contest, in that you may write and accept the $100 prize in a nome de wonk. The contest closes at 6 p.m. today.

THE OLYMPICS

I didn't watch a lot of it, so I didn't write on it when the games were in motion. But I did tune in for the truly over-the-top closing extravaganza last night. If nothing succeeds like wretched excess, I guess that show pretty well tops it. Maybe London can beat it if they set fire to the Thames.

The general vibe as regards NBC's coverage, which is being hailed as a stunning success by Bill Carter in the NY Times and others, was that it was "inane," "patronizing," "redundant," yadda yadda. In terms of unique criticism, that sort of thing is right up there with accusing the Oscars of being "too long," "self-congratulatory," and "stuffy."

From the little I watched—Michael Phelps, some gymnastics, the women's marathon, platform diving, synchronized swimming (my kid yelling, "Dad, Dad come see this!"), and some track, I thought NBC's commentators did a fine job of setting up the drama. I mean, other than Phelps, I had no idea who any of these people were, much less where they interacted competitively.

Yes, the Phelps hagiography got way out of control. A split screen interview with Mark Spitz and him fell into and disappeared beneath the surface of a pool of cloying verbal quicksand faster than either could say, "No YOU are the greatest ever." It didn't help that Phelps is not exactly a glib quote machine. But yes, NBC flogged that horse for everything it was worth—and it has the ratings to prove it worked.

The two things that caught my eye were the omnipresent pictures of Mao as NBC panned around Beijing and the VISA commercials of Americans gone ga-ga over the Olympics.

On Mao: This is obviously the Chinese's call, and it would have been a big time offense against protocol for Bob Costas or Brian Williams to have reminded their audience that beloved Chairman Mao is by most historical standards the greatest mass murderer in human history. But the continuing celebration/deification of Mao by Chinese officialdom, if not the general culture, is a chilling reminder of how far the Chinese have yet to go in rehabilitating their collective psyche. It would be like the Germans inviting the world in for Oktoberfest and flaunting iconic images of sweet old "Uncle Adolf." (The Russians are only barely over their delusional veneration of Josef Stalin.)

Maybe someone on NBC pointed this out, and I didn't see it.

On the VISA commercials:  As far as I could tell, the Olympics were what they've been for decades here in the sports/media glutted USA—just another big sporting event. I certainly didn't see anyone chanting "U-S-A" on street corners in Minneapolis. (Applause did break out at a Twins game when Phelps won one of his races). But the whole Norman Rockwell America thing, where the fire trucks roll up and down the leafy streets amid a proud cross section of Americana—young, old, white, black, Asian, etc.—all waving flags and deeply invested in our Olympic "heroes" is, as far as I can tell, an advertising  conceit and nothing more.

More to the point, a sales campaign like that makes you wonder when the last time anything of the sort actually existed?

FINALLY, McCAIN'S WATER GAFFE:

As someone who has been hiking the Grand Canyon for years and, lately, kayaking Lake Powell, I've got an interest in the Colorado River. The river, as you may know, is now sucked dry before it gets to the  Gulf of California. Cheap water—subsidized by the same big government every independent-minded Western rancher loves to complain about and vote against—has enabled the boom of places such as Las Vegas, Phoenix, California's so-called Inland Empire, and so on.

But the other day, McCain blundered into a comment about "renegotiating" the eighty-six-year-old Colorado River compact . . . in order to send more water to Arizona. Aides quickly tried to patch over the seventy-two-year-old's comments. But that, as they say, is now "out there," and you can bet Obama will have ads up all over the West playing the hell out of that one. Although this is pretty arcane stuff to Minnesotans, it is life and death to everyone in the Colorado River drainage.

There are plenty of things to change about how water is managed in the drought-stricken American West. Among them is charging the actual cost of the water instead of letting the rest of us in effect subsidize Vegas and Phoenix's absurd and unsustainable overgrowth. But "renegotiating" to get more to his current constituents ain't one of the good ideas.

It is, in a word, a "judgment" problem.

The moment is nearly upon us. The streets have been scrubbed. The indigent have been scrubbed. The prices have been jacked up, and every newsroom in town has made exhaustive plans to cover the big news of the Republican National Convention. All we need now is . . . well, news.

The striking thing about news planning for the big RNC get-together—you know, as the Daily Show billboard says, the quadrennial gathering of "rich white oligarchs"—is that almost no one expects to cover "news" as we used to think of it at these things. John McCain will pick his running mate next Friday, before the masses descend on St. Paul. (Please, God, make it be Mitt Romney. The rest of my life will be one act of goodness if you just give me that.) So unless, John "Always Remember, I Was a POW" McCain nods off in the middle of his acceptance speech or has to ask a staffer how many wives he has, there's no expectation of anything particularly newsworthy coming out of the official business of the convention.

In fact, my always fallible radar for the "hottest 'get' in town"—the star media colleagues most want to score an interview with—says McCain, W., and Cheney could stay home on their respective estates and let the press horde have at . . . Jon Stewart. Recently touted as, "The Most Trusted Man in America," the appeal of Stewart dwarfs any detectable interest in the usual crowd—the Katie Courics, Charlie Gibsons, Brian Williams, and Wolf Blitzers of the world.

It isn't difficult to understand why, is it?  Even back when McCain was "St. John," the darling of every political reporter desperate for the kind of boys-being-boys barroom bon hommie they've all dreamed about, Stewart was the one putting the toughest questions to McCain, even as they flattered each other with affectionate zingers. His high standing among the public has plenty to do with being able to play outside the "balance" game so essential to commercial news. Where the big networks have to deliver a product that defends and offends in roughly equal doses, no matter who is clearly the idiot or scoundrel, Stewart (and his crew) are free to engage in the "new media's" greatest virtue . . . the truth as they see it—and you can check their sources.

So much has been said about Stewart's ascension in reaction to (his) public's revulsion at the so-called mainstream media's craven performance from 9/11 until the 2006 election, it's easy to overlook how poorly the network stars (and their provincial cousins at regional newspapers and television stations) performed during the 2000 and 2004 elections. To condense the prevailing news memes from those contests: George W. Bush, though clearly lacking the executive experience, intellectual curiosity, and level of preparedness for dealing with international and economic crises, was "a guy you'd have a beer with" while Al Gore "lied about inventing the Internet" and ran a bad campaign. Then in '04, Bush was still the guy on the stool next to you at the bar while John Kerry was an elitist who could speak French . . . and ran a bad campaign . . . by not refuting the Swift Boat liars faster than he did. Basically, campaign skills trumped any question over who was a fool and who knew what they were talking about.

Stewart's people weren't the only ones throwing up their hands. What Stewart's shtick did and continues to do is scald the mainstream press for its gross failure of nerve and probity. By definition, if you're in the game of journalism, you go after what's meaningful and relevant and hammer on it until the fools and crooks relent, or you give up your claim to be the public's most credible source of information. Stewart and his crony Stephen Colbert have consistently, reliably done that; ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and MSNBC have not, hence their high standing.

The question, now that the presidential campaign is beginning in earnest, is whether the American press will once again take their cues from half-baked "reads" of "average American consensus"—which is fundamentally just horserace stuff, what tricks and spins work, what don't—or whether they persistently pursue the far . . . far . . . more relevant stuff of who is lying, bulls***ng, prevaricating, or flat-out clueless. Screw having a beer with the next president; the big upgrade would be someone who is, as Stewart has joked, "a LOT smarter than me," not to mention awake and functioning . . . in my interests, not that of his social peers and benefactors.

With that in mind, the litmus test here at the start of the fall campaign will be how vigorously the press pushes and assesses the "preparedness" and "judgment" factors. Both Obama and McCain are making accusations against the other. I know Stewart and his team regard these questions as valid enough to monitor daily. Will ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, or MSNBC? Mark me "Dubious." To do so would risk charges of bias. It is far safer to report on and gauge campaign strategy.

Likewise, I expect Stewart and Colbert to be the only ones brave enough to scream, "Enough!" on McCain's all-purpose deflection shield: his five years as a POW. This bit is now well into Rudy "A noun, a verb, and 9/11" Giuliani-land.

McCain—the common guy running against an "elitist"—can't remember how many houses he owns. Why? The answer? "For God's sake, you troop-hating bastard. He was a POW! He was tortured! How dare you?"

McCain can't remember what kind of car he drives. "He was a POW!"

McCain thinks (Shiite) Iran has been funding (Sunni) Al Qaeda. "A POW! Tortured!"

An Iraq-Afghanistan border? "POW!"

It is beyond ludicrous. To mix metaphors, it is a slab of red meat-on-a-tee ludicrous. Clumped together, it is indicative of both a stunning out-of-touch bubble mentality and, when you cheapen your POW experience for rank political expediency, shockingly poor judgment. But the mainline press—hyper-sensitive to blowback from the "American values" reader/viewer/advertiser, people who believe military service inoculates a candidate from criticism, unless he's John Kerry—will not dare tread where Stewart and the new media are going.

Instead, I look forward to their breathless thumbsuckers on the RNC platform committee's capital gains  report and their deeply sourced assessment of what Cindy McCain wears at the podium.

The record will show that it was about 10:30 yesterday morning when I first heard the phrase, "The dark basement of the soul." It came in an e-mail, and I thought maybe the sender was high on absinthe and opium. Was she channeling Edgar Allan Poe by way of some sweaty evangelical preacher? "The dark what of the what?"

It turns out it was a line from yesterday's Katherine Kersten-o-gram in the Star Tribune. By noon, the entire column, titled "Violence, sex industries pry into our soul's dark basement", had achieved the status of a Kersten classic. Every pillar of her dogma was waxed and illuminated. Fear of gladiatorial combat. Fear of stripper poles. Fear of crotch shots. Fear of liquor shots. Fear of animal-like moans. Fear of . . . well, you get the idea. It was right up there with her forty-part series sowing fear about The Flying Imams, terrorist bicyclists, and, of course, the Inver Grove Heights bomb-making madrassa, otherwise known as the TIZA Academy. (Almost as significant: As of this morning, the Strib had not yet mysteriously lost all of the comments to her column. Apparently none of her readers complained about a major advertiser.)

As we know, Ms. Kersten writes . . . in public . . . because Star Tribune management felt it was overdue for someone to counterbalance the pro-gladiatorial, pro-crotch shot, and pro-animal-like moan worldview of brutish males such as Doug Grow and Nick Coleman. But countering those two violence-drenched pornographers is a big, tough job. Do you have any idea how many Minnesotans are obsessed with gladiatorial stripper-pole moaning? A lot.

So I got to thinking: The Strib needs help. This is too much for one person. Which is where you come in. With the assistance of MSP Publishing's marketing department—and this is real—we are offering a swank dinner for two—a $100 gift certificate to r. Norman's—to whoever out there produces the best 500-word column that "Out Kerstens Kersten". (E-mail your submission to blambert@mspmag.com).

Fans of The Dark One, as we know her, are familiar with the essential components of her jeremiads. In addition to what I just mentioned, it's probably best to read Powerline.com for a few days to anticipate what she'll fear next. Then mix in a line or two from some obscure Cato Institute or Heritage Foundation white paper (look for something on Muslims' genetic unwillingness to assimilate); insert a glowing reference to woefully under-equipped and mercifully departed U.S. Attorney Rachel Paulose; decry the shallow logic of the dim; silly people who think citizens must pay for safe bridges; and tie it all up, if you can, with a comment about the valor displayed by Dick Cheney and/or Halliburton in fighting the War on Terror.

But those are just suggestions. Do as you see fit. Consider next Monday, August 25 your deadline, and we will post the best and let you vote for the winner.

I don't claim to be good at this. But here's my shot . . .

The Udder Depravity of the Modern Dairy Barn

As a child, my father and I, followed closely behind by my mother, made annual visits to the Minnesota State Fair. Dressed in my shawl and dark, ankle-length dresses, these remain happy memories for me. Memories of a time when families visited the Fair without fear of pornographic assault. It was a warm, golden time when America was reassured by the moral strength projected by Richard Nixon's White House. A time when families were buttressed against cheap Hollywood vulgarity by spiritually anchored programming such as Hee Haw and the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart's Camp Meeting Hour, which my father ordered on LPs and played for us Sunday nights on the Victrola.

I wish I could say that that golden glow still permeated today's Great Minnesota Get-Together. But sadly, the golden light has turned a pale, sinister, sickly yellow. That was the light that sifted in, like Satan's fetid breath, through the windows of the Dairy Barn yesterday evening as I guided my young children, ages twenty-three and twenty-seven away from the bacchanalian excesses of the "Midway."

For those fortunate enough not to have faced this gauntlet of bodily defilement and lascivious intent, it is a place where young men, their bodies defiled by tatoos of twisted, demented Islamic-like design taunt and leer at young women, many of whom indulge in permissive displays of under garments and straps, the most intimate of attire best concealed until long after marriage.

And the "Midway," ("Midway" to what? I ask. Hugh Hefner's torture room?) is accessible only by running the length of the state-sanctioned debauchery of the so-called Beer "Garden." It was here where I saw one young couple, lacking any sign of parental supervision, entwined in the lewdest of carnal embraces. The young man, his face sotted with alcohol, flaunted his bestial grasp of the young woman's bare shoulder and waist. Had I ventured closer, I'm certain I would have heard their animal-like moaning and gladiatorial slurping. I doubt either had given a thought to the sanctity of the act they were performing much less family planning.

Seeing no reason why I as a parent should be forced to explain this repugnant scene to my children as a consequence of the all-condoning, all-accepting liberal culture, I turned my family away yesterday, skirting the Beer "Garden" by way of the Hippodrome. This path took us close to the booth of a Christian broadcaster, a solitary candle of hope amid a whorl of high-tech paganism.

As Sir Ducky Landsdowne IV recently wrote in his much-discussed paper for the Blackwater Institute's Middle Eastern Studies newsletter, "Western culture has not only abdicated moral rectitude to Muslim fanatics, it feeds their hostility with constant massive doses of its own self-degradation." (Sir Landsdowne will speak at the next gathering of The Center of the American Experiment on the topic of "Taxpayer Validated Muslim Extremism and the Myth of Global Warming." Tickets are still available.)

My hopes of reclaiming the innocence and cultural nurturing of my youth, by confining my family's visit to the animal exhibits, was dashed almost as soon as we entered the Dairy Barn. The fresh-faced agrarian children of my girlhood, their skin a gleaming, buttery white, their eyes a vivid blue, their 4-H stalls festooned with "Dump the Hump" stickers and "Wanted" posters of homegrown liberal terrorists like Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden, had been replaced by sad stew of sullen-eyed, self-involved brats. (I'm sorry. There are no kinder words. Sometimes one must be blunt.)

I had only finished recoiling from the shock of seeing two Madagascarian females (I think) moving unimpeded by security through the building even though they were cloaked head-to-toe in gauzy brown cloth (but not so tight as to reveal what might very well have been the explosive-laden belts of suicide bombers), when my children and I were confronted with a sight of nearly unspeakable, gut-churning depravity.

Before us, on a stool in a stall covered with fresh straw, a young man with long, stringy, greasy hair wearing a T-shirt that read, "A President's IQ Should Be Three Digits. Obama '08" was tugging, slathering and stroking the engorged long pink things under a cow. And this in full view of anyone who happened to pass. I may have emitted an animal-like sound of my own as I grabbed up a towel and thrust it over the eyes of my children.

Has the cesspool of anything goes, permissive liberal hate dogma dragged us so low we vilify the leaders who have kept us safe from homicidal Muslim fanatics on $10 T-shirts, and we allow unkempt children to masturbate farm animals in public? Apparently so.

I stand at the door to the dark basement of our collective soul and cry for lost virtue.

I'm admitting right here at the top that I don't have a lot more to go on . . . other than the obvious.

One of the guiltier pleasures in this transitional time, as the real action and fun of newspapers moves from their stiff and constrained print product to the lawless frontier culture of the Internet, are the comments to anything my old pal Nick Coleman writes for the Star Tribune.

As my trolls here are fond of arguing, Nick is a reliable provocateur. (Actually, my trolls never use the word "provocateur." That implies something positive. They simply accuse him of writing the same five columns over and over, boot licking for the DFL, demanding everyone pay more taxes, and generally being a degenerate old bastard who should slither back under his rock. To which I say, "Hey, that's what I love about him . . . that degenerate part.")

The trolls on the Strib's site are even worse. There is a very sick crowd lurking under those bridges. If Nick wrote a warm, gauzy column about his sweet old Irish grandmother baking him pies and reading him bedtime stories as a child, the trolls would accuse him of being a homosexual, troop-hating commie with a degenerate appetite for small animals. It doesn't matter. Nick is their antichrist. The guy single-handedly confirms everything they've ever suspected about the mainstream media, which is a lot, none of it good.

So what happened Thursday (yesterday) after Nick wrote a column about a seventy-nine-year-old Irish lady getting brusque treatment at a Plymouth Target? Well, by mid-morning, something like 350-400 comments had piled up. Some were the usual suspects, accusing Nick of orally gratifying commie pedophiles, but a lot of the others were voicing their complaints about Target and its return policy. (The elderly Irish woman was returning a couple shirts and wanted $30 back . . . in cash.)

Some kind of nerve had been touched, which in the old days was a sign a columnist had done a good day's work.

But then . . . poof . . . gone . . . all comments on Coleman's Target column disappeared.

What happ ened?

Well, here is where I have to tell you I don't know. I e-mailed the Strib's Will Tacy, its digital guru, and Nancy Barnes, its top editor, with no expectation at all that they'd respond . . . and they haven't. In my position as "just a blogger" not to mention one who doesn't play fair (i.e. writes negative things about Strib management without including their comments . . . ), top Stribbers see no worthwhile reason to respond to something like this. There's no upside. Furthermore, as they see it, I'm a degenerate commie toe-sucker.

But I think we can all imagine what happened. In the modern newspaper world, where giant companies like Target are no longer "advertisers" or "clients" but "corporate partners," it is fair, I think, to ask whether someone at the Strib yanked all the comments, including those ripping on Target, in order to avoid the call from Target headquarters telling them to squelch that noise . . . or else.

Coleman and other writers at the Strib made inquiries up the chain of Strib command trying to get an answer to the whacking of the Target comments, but, much like a lowly, miserable blogger, they got nothing back. (It's possible Strib managers regard anyone with the temerity to ask about something like this as a degenerate commie toe-sucker.)

Now obviously there may be an innocent explanation. Maybe a Nigerian-born cyber virus wormed its way into the Strib system and zapped everything using the word "Target." Or maybe an online editor spilled coffee over the t-a-r-g-e-t keys. Something like that.

Or . . . maybe . . . this was what it walks like and quacks like . . . an exercise in preemptive censorship designed to avoid offending a major source of revenue.

On a straight business level, that's understandable, I guess. Why PO the guy who's buttering your bread, right? Except of course that a big, major daily newspaper is supposed—SUPPOSED—to be braver than that. It's not like the old Irish gal, or Coleman, or all the commenters were accusing Target of being the next Enron or Halliburton. It was just a public debate over a very big public company's return policy. A customer-service issue. Something big retailers are supposedly all about, and something it might do them good to hear . . . in the interests of improving . . . customer service.

More to the big point herein: If any Strib manager put the clamps on a comments forum (for God's sake) out of fear of offending a major local corporation, what faith does that inspire that those same managers are prepared and willing to ferret out bona fide fraud and wrongdoing in other big local insitutions. Like say, you know, a gargantuan HMO making money hand over fist in a time of astonishing increases in health insurance premiums, complete with executives racking up science-fiction levels of compensation?

Because I never really got to know Don Boxmeyer, the St. Paul Pioneer Press writer/columnist who died late last week, I won't get into an extended eulogy. Our mutual colleague, Dave Hawley, filed a gracious and thorough obit/remembrance to the PiPress a couple days ago and clearly knew Don much better than I did.

What I do remember is that Don, sixty-sevent when he died, was an archetypal nice guy. A sweetheart. Exactly the sort of next-door neighbor everyone hopes to have; self-effacing, good humored, curious, full of fascinating firsthand stories and blessedly light on the self-serving bulls**t. Don knew at least two things vital for any writer. A: He knew how to listen (not to me, no one ever learned anything from that, but to the people he wrote about), and B: He knew how to read his audience. If he sensed you weren't tracking with whatever he was talking about, he cut himself off and moved on. We were out in Stillwater on some story a few years ago, and he got talking about another story he had been working on. Just as he got rolling, I got distracted by something going on nearby. Don stopped talking and apologized for "rambling on." I felt bad and tried to assure him it was just the commotion and not him and to please continue. It was an awkward moment. But like I say, we didn't know each other all that well.

I regret never taking the bus tour of St. Paul Don gave with (I'm told) stories of every damned alley, bent sign post, and neighborhood bar in the city.

About the time I got to the PiPress in 1989, Don had settled into the role of the "local color" columnist, as opposed to Joe Soucheray's curmudgeonly voice of bootstrapping wisdom and Nick Coleman's populist political fervor/indignation. In that mix, Don was decidedly number three and probably slid lower in the pecking order of the paper's "stars" after Katherine Lanpher was bumped up to columnist status. The contrast of egos among that quartet couldn't have been sharper, and I say that as someone who has great affection for both Coleman and Lanpher. (Joe is Joe.)

Newspapers are like any other workplace with the exception that you sign your name to your work, and some of us got our picture in print three or four times a week. Like Ace Widgets, there is no shortage of people in a newsroom who believe they are the one true alpha dog and resent any suggestion to the contrary. But I would be astonished if Don Boxmeyer ever once complained to anyone that he wasn't being promoted sufficiently, or properly, or ever threw a s**t fit in the editor's office demanding a raise. Maybe I'm wrong. But he struck me as a guy who took what he was given.

That last quality may not even be a virtue. Even in the 1990s, remembered today as the final golden era of newspapers, the PiPress was notoriously tight with cash. You needed leverage to get a nickel for travel or anything beyond a desk and a phone. (And those were the "fat" days.) Where others were shameless—and successful—about playing their leverage card(s), I never got the impression Boxmeyer even attempted to play that game.

I can't decide if Don Boxmeyer's neighborly virtues would serve him well in today's newspaper environment. On the one hand, the meek and productive would seem to be the ideal employee in papers managed by perpetually second-guessing (and second guessed) editors and owned by companies that couldn't care less if some guy out in Yakupitsville has a pitch-perfect ear for neighborhood lore. On the other, the survival game at papers today requires a level of self-aggrandizement designed to keep you off the next buyout hit list.

Then there's the question of whether any major news entity gives a damn about the sort of stuff Don wrote about. Editors whose careers are umbilically knotted to corporate template notions of "news"—a concept where relaxed storytelling about less than urgent topics is an archaic indulgence—are not likely to ever bring a writer like Boxmeyer on staff, even if he does know everyone in town and their second aunt. Papers today are written and edited for "busy consumers" not readers.

You struck me as a genuinely good guy, Don.

If Joe Biden had the best line of the primary campaign, the one where he described every Rudy Giuliani speech as, "A noun, a verb, and 9/11,"  Barack Obama is an early contender for the best of the fall campaign with his shot last week, saying, "It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant," after John McCain's team of Karl Rove acolytes tried to rouse their rabble by mocking Obama's claim we could save as much oil as we'd ever get from drilling if we kept our tires properly inflated. It didn't matter a bit that this is common knowledge, accepted practice, valid, true, factual, and verifiable.

Historically,the Rove Machine—in the person of Steve Schmidt, now McCain's "senior adviser" and one of several Rove pupils guiding McCain's unsteady hand—has regarded campaigns built on truth, facts, and reality the sort of thing only wimps get bogged down in. More to the point, they are unabashedly cynical enough to know that their game works. To use a couple media analogies, there are a hell of a lot more KQ Morning Show-style galoots out there than Jeopardy fans. Or, in classroom terms, if you can get the knuckleheads in the back of the class slapping their thighs and guffawing loud enough, you can drown out the nerd in the front row . . . with the correct answer.

That "these guys take pride in being ignorant" line was running through my head as I watched (my guy) John Edwards do the public contrition thing last Friday on Nightline.

By any modern standard for philandering males baring themselves before the public, Edwards did well. Despite the months of denials since the story of his wild thing with bigtime party girl Lisa Druck (now known as Rielle Hunter) first broke, when he finally confessed, it was a better show than Bill Clinton ever put on, better than Eliot Spitzer and way . . . way . . . way beyond hapless moralists such as Ted Haggard, Jimmy Swaggart, David Vitter, Mark Foley, Newt Gingrich, Henry "Youthful Indiscretion" Hyde, and better even than Larry Craig. (Although in terms on unintentionally hilarious verbiage, Craig's greeting to the crowd gathered to hear his statement that he wasn't gay—the one where he said, "I'd like to thank you all for coming out today"—may beat both Biden and Obama in some final tally.)

As I've said, I preferred Edwards over Obama in the primary. Silver-tongued trial attorney though he indisputably is, I thought he had the most well-thought-out economic recovery and health care plans. No less an authority than Paul Krugman thought so, too. (Typically, the "these guys take pride in being ignorant" crowd has yet to come up with anything remotely as detailed as what Edwards put out. But that affordable health care stuff is for brainy elitists. Not the "real" Americans guffawing in the back row . . . and going broke over health care costs.)

So it is disappointing to watch another talented politician shoot his foot off over a fling with a party girl.

At this point, I remember the line from some feminist who expressed her disappointment in the quality of the woman Clinton had around his neck and who said something to the effect how, if he had been caught with Susan Sarandon, she would have thought better of him. Likewise here. Aren't you asking yourself, "What does Druck/Hunter have going for her that she can reel in a guy like John Edwards, who must have a half dozen women a day giving him the signal that, you know, something could happen?" They apparently met at a New York restaurant.

And although it was interesting to watch the main stream media—those still scarred from getting wagged by O.J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky's rank tabloid appeal—take a "go slow" approach to Edwards's face plant (as my pal David Carr likes say), the proudly ignorant crowd predictably stomped their feet and brayed about liberal bias, avoiding any awareness that the right thing to do is to wait until you can prove something before you print it.

But as comparatively superior as Edwards's mea culpa to ABC's Bob Woodruff was—taking whatever questions Woodruff wanted to ask, letting ABC edit it as they saw fit, and not doing the usual Republican-in-peril bit where they give an "exclusive" to FoxNews in exchange for a few minutes of softballs and fellatio—there are things that don't sit well with me. Obviously someone is funneling money to Druck/Hunter, and if it is Edwards's Texas money guy, Fred Baron, you've got to ask why? Who is Druck/Hunter to him or anyone that she should be set up in a $3 million Santa Barbara pad? That sounds a little too "hushy" for me. And, likewise, if Edwards's "staffer" (whatever that means) Andrew Young—a guy with the police record of a carny rat—is the father of the baby, why would any sugar daddy being making sure he's set up all cozy and comfy?

My general position on public confessions is that you only get one shot. If you screwed up, say so, and the average person will eventually get over it. BUT . . . if you go on TV, do the breast-beating, give 'em the old "I take full responsibility" line and still cover stuff up and lie . . . well, it's been nice knowing you.

Back to the "pride in being ignorant" crowd. This is their kind of stuff, and like Bill Clinton before him, John Edwards served it up to them, freshly plopped and steamy hot. Among the proudly ignorant—the kind of unanchored people Lee Atwater riled up for daddy Bush in '88 and Rove convinced to have a beer with George W. in  '00 and '04—sexual hypocrisy trumps any other kind of fraud, deviance, incompetence, and scandal.

In that way, it is gratifying that the mainstream media left the Edwards story to the Enquirer and bloggers. Maybe the media—what remains of it—is beginning to appreciate the downside to pandering to the proudly ignorant since wasting precious editorial resources reporting sexual trysts means antagonizing actual thinking adults—the nerds in the front row if you will—who consume a lot of information every day, know damn well what is appalling, and take very few of their cues from drive-time DJs.

THAT crowd looks at the Edwards mess and says, "Way to screw up, dude. But I don't care." If THAT crowd wants closure on something scandalous, the next administration's Justice Department (which John Edwards might still lead) has about a half dozen fully formed criminal cases involving the very top of the Bush administration ready to file.

In fact, if the mainstream press wanted to sink its teeth into something scandalous on a truly epic scale, they might follow Pulitzer Prize-winning and former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind's lead and push further on the multiple sources he has on record confirming that the White House ordered forgeries asserting a connection between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and Hussein buying yellow cake in Niger. As Suskind is saying, this is actual, bona fide, real, factual, true, and verifiable evidence . . . of a scandal involving tens of thousands of dead and maimed troops . . . and other people . . . and trillions of dollars of waste.

It's not like those who "take pride in being ignorant" are ever going to care about that. Not when they can hoot and drool over a sex story.

(UPDATE: I neglected to add the usual disclaimer about the three MPR stations to the original post. MPR, being the rigid rule-bound place that it is, discloses no information about specific demographic groups, which other broadcasters routinely leak. I couldn't begin to guesstimate the gender breakdown for KNOW, KSJN, or The Current. But KNOW is reliably in the top five among adults.)

Next June, the so-called Personal People Meter arrives to revolutionize radio ratings in the Twin Cities. Or so they say. The Arbitron ratings system (which, at this point, I generally refer to as a sick joke science-wise) is a creaky written diary-based affair that almost everyone believes favors the most familiar personalities and signals in town. (Ask yourself how diligent you'd be writing down everything you listened to as a favor to some big company?)

Around here, where KQRS's Tom Barnard still dominates like no one else in the country (no other local show crushes their local competition like Barnard does), conventional wisdom is that diary keepers too busy to actually recall what they punched up driving in to work simply pencil in a straight KQ ticket from dawn to dusk and call it good enough for government work.

The PPM, as it is called, is a portable device that constantly grabs signals from wherever you happen to be—cruising to your pedicure and listening to Lori and Julia or sniffing cedar planks at a lumber yard with the overhead speaker blasting 93X—and accurately records THAT for your electronic diary.

Point being, the PPM might be a game changer . . . or not.

Until next summer, we're stuck with what the radio industry has got—what it sells, hires, and fires by.

Just for giggles, I thought you'd be interested in a breakdown of la difference between radio for ladies and radio for gentlemen. These ratings (shares, actually), come from the spring book, roughly April–June '08.

MORNING DRIVE (6–10 a.m., Monday through Friday. Adults 25–54)

Rank          Station        Share
1.............KQRS.........23.1
2.............93X............5.5
3.............K102...........5.3
4.............KS95...........5.2
5.............Cities 97......4.7
6.............KDWB..........4.6
7.............KFAN...........4.1
8.............WCCO..........3.8
9.............JACK............3.0
10............WLTE...........2.7
11............KOOL 108......2.3
12............FM107..........2.1
13............KTLK............1.9
(tie).........The Beat.......1.9
15...........AM1500..........1.8
16...........Air America.....1.2
17...........The Patriot......0.9

Then, breaking that down gender-wise. The top ten of each:

MORNING DRIVE

(Women 25–54)

1.............KQRS...........14.7
2.............KS95.............8.8
3.............Cities 97........7.7
4.............K102.............7.6
5.............KDWB............7.3
6.............WLTE............4.6
7.............KOOL 108.......3.8
8.............FM107...........3.8
9.............WCCO...........3.4
10............The Beat........2.8

(Men, 25–54).

1.............KQRS ............29.7
2.............93X................8.6
3.............KFAN..............7.1
4.............WCCO.............4.0
5.............K102...............3.5
(tie).........JACK...............3.5
7.............KTLK...............2.9
8.............AM-1500...........2.7
9.............KDWB..............2.5
10............KS95...............2.4

Then, switching to afternoons . . .

AFTERNOON DRIVE (3–7 p.m., Monday through Friday. Adults 25–54)

1.............KQRS...............8.3
2.............KS95................6.6
3.............K102................6.3
4.............Cities 97...........6.2
5.............AM 1500............5.0
(tie).........KDWB...............5.0
(tie).........KFAN................5.0
8.............93X..................4.7
9.............JACK.................4.0
10............KTLK................3.5
11............KOOL108............3.4
12............FM107...............3.3
13............WLTE................3.0
14............WCCO...............2.9
15............The Beat............2.1

(WOMEN 25–54)

1.............KS95................9.9
(tie).........Cities97............9.5
3.............K102................7.3
4.............FM107..............5.9
5.............WLTE...............5.8
6.............KQRS................5.6
7.............KDWB...............5.4
8.............KOOL106...........4.7
9.............JACK................4.0
10............The Beat...........3.0
11............WCCO..............2.4

14............KTLK................1.3
15............Air America........1.0
(tie)..........AM 1500............1.0

19............KFAN................0.6.

(MEN 25-54)

1.............KQRS................10.4
2.............KFAN..................8.4
3.............AM 1500..............8.3
4.............93X....................6.5
5.............K102...................5.5
6.............KTLK...................5.3
7.............KDWB..................4.7
8.............JACK...................4.1
9.............KS95...................3.9
10............Cities97...............3.6
11............WCCO.................3.3
14............The Patriot............1.3
15............FM107..................1.1
(tie)..........Air America...........1.1

Thought you'd want to know.

The best way to avoid burying the lede is to stick it in the hed.

I've been wracking my alleged brain trying to remember the last time one of my n'er do well cronies was a guest on The Colbert Report. Oh wait . . . never. Until tonight when David Carr, no longer a member of the n'er do well class, drops by America's O'Reilly antidote, Stephen Colbert, to plug his new book, The Night of the Gun, the saga—and I do mean saga—of his fall into crackhead abyss here in the Twin Cities back in the late '80s.

As someone who knew Carr before, during, and after, I've already had my way with him, a couple times. Both here, in the current issue of Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, and a couple years ago in The Rake. Now, the national press can play catch-up. Which they are doing with a vengeance.

I've kidded Carr that being the media columnist for The New York Times might—MIGHT, I say—have an insulating effect on the rest of the national media and maybe even the notoriously snarky Manhattan literati, assuming the book was at least arguably good. (It's a very good read.) I mean, are you, sour little books editor for the New York Whatever, really going to rip the Times's media gorilla just for your personal, petty amusement? Are you going to make an enemy of a guy who can dismiss you through omission? I don't think so.

At any rate, early reviews and reception has been favorable to fawning. Like this long piece in New York Magazine.

What interests me here are the references to Carr's obsessive qualities that make him uniquely suited to the web and establishing a foothold in the Internet's dawning days. Obviously, as the piece notes, it helps —big time—to have talent. In particular, the kind of talent that is skeptical, competitive, and omnivorous. Carr's ability to cross-reference unexpected cultural imagery, factoids, and stir with . . . an unabashedly personal voice . . . is vital to the work he's doing in his regular Monday Times column and his video blog The Carpetbagger (where he swims in the industry minutiae of Oscar season.)

It is my experience, and that of others here in the Twin Cities, that neither paper has—as yet—developed an online personality the equivalent of what the Times has in Carr. More to the point, the personal voice that is essential to web success is still largely repressed. You can argue this is a combination of factors. Lack of institutional stature. (Neither paper remotely replicates the standing of the Times.) Lack of individual talent. (Is there anyone like Carr out there?)  And, my favorite, a woefully constricted sense of imagination on the part of managers green lighting online endeavors.

That is another way of saying they either don't have any instinct for web-style shtick, or they are incapable of dealing with the monsters you create when you encourage personality.

I've said before, there is no shortage of characters at both papers who could be exploited for their web-worthy iconoclasm and distinctive voice. But neither paper appears capable of risking anything to push those characters forward in a way that would make them—the horror!—"representative" of the paper itself.

At the rate both are sinking, this timid, "responsible" approach to the Internet is more like a drowning man mistaking an anchor for a buoy.

I'm out in Seattle tonight, and I have seen the future. Setting up at a table outside one of eight coffee shops in line of sight on Queen Anne Hill, I hit the Wi-Fi finder on ye trusty MacBook and get . . . fourteen overlapping signals. Is this why the terrorists hate us?

Happy hour tonight with a former highly-placed source at a Twin Cities television station went on a bit longer than I had planned. So if this post is more incoherent than normal, accept my apologies in advance.

Our conversation touched on yesterday's national campaign issue du jour—McCain accusing Obama of "playing the race card," which Obama allegedly waded into in response to McCain's ad comparing Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in terms of "celebrity" appeal. My happy hour companion, an unapologetic Republican, who is charged with guiding news decisions for Seattle's dominant TV station (anchored by ex-KSTPer Dennis Bounds), said he found it all "fascinating," "great stuff," "I couldn't take my eyes off it."

My argument—that he had been played by the Republican common denominator machine that has no compunction about pressing any underbelly button it needed to close the deal—got lost in another round of Mackerel Chugger Ale or something. But I assured him what McCain's people—and this Rick Davis guy mouthpiecing for McCain, who obviously sees no flies on the legacy of Karl Rove—are doing with Obama is being echoed in Minnesota, where Norm . . . friggin' . . . Coleman is producing more common denominator-friendly attack advertising than career comic Al Franken.

What gives?

As much as I, a card-carrying, touchy-feely, highbrow elitist wants to think that thoughtful, well-considered positions on major issues, particularly those that restore this country's grievously sullied reputation for decency and fairness, matter more than cheap advertising tricks . . . well, who of us doesn't remember The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, or Harry and Alice, that charming middle-American couple deployed by the HMO industry to sell quarter truths and outright lies about "Hillary Care" back in  '93?

Advertising for knuckleheads works and not just on the knucklehead crowd that has paid so little attention this year it still thinks Barack Obama is a Muslim and that of the two candidates here in Minnesota, Al Franken is the one closest to a hedonistic pornographer. The meme that McCain's team is trying to develop is of Obama as messianic neophyte while Coleman's team is managing to paint Al Franken as a show biz pervert with Norm as the laid-back jokester.

Good God almighty!

If Coleman's ads with the three jowly bowling dudes (does Norm worship at the church of Lebowski?) weren't any good, we could ignore them as silly and desperate. But they are good. More to the point, they're far more engaging than anything Franken—who made his living off his sense of humor and a talent for satire—has produced. The Coleman strategy is diabolically clever. As I've said before, Franken finds himself in a position where he doesn't dare be the person he actually is. He appears to be living in constant fear of betraying a hint of the humor that gained him an audience—and credibility—in the first place . .  as though flashing satiric humor will only remind unsophisticated Minnesotans of his "pornographic" propensities.

Nice going, Norm.

Granted, it is only August 1, but both Obama and Franken have to get hip to a dual-track game. Their rock-solid base, appalled by the criminal incompetence of the Bush era, will lap up their message of earnest renewal from here to election day. But the, shall we say, "uncommitted" crowd, susceptible to arguments that Bush-hugging McCain and Bush-acolyte Coleman, is less worrisome than a wholesale change to . . . a cool black guy . . . and a Hollywood hipster . . . must be approached and convinced in a manner that engages THEM, and that means to can't be too high-minded and should be . . . amusing.

The language and imagery of pop culture has a steep downside in terms of developing a conscientious adult culture. But we're talking winning elections here. Something Republicans are very good at because they have no qualms about stooping to appeal to the public on a level it finds entertaining and, therefore, understands.

Oh wait. What's this? Floreffe Ale . . . "brewed with sugar cane." Niiice.