Loud, long, expensive and ugly, you knew our U.S. Senate race was going to earp up an October surprise. What's unexpected is that it comes at the expense of Norm Coleman, not Al Franken.

When Franken was getting hammered with his Playboy satire and long career of blue humor, I assumed we'd get to here -- around Halloween -- and the RNC and Coleman would drop a fresh barrage of "adult humor" from Franken's vast public archive, all designed to horrify the decent, corn-fed maidens and bachelor farmers of Minnesota -- God-fearing folks who have never laughed at what comics call "dick jokes".

But no. Or at least not as of noon, Halloween Day. The "surprise" is another, larger facet of the on-going "Who Owns Norm?" episode that has kicked around since it was disclosed last summer that Coleman was getting a sweetheart deal on a very modest efficiency apartment in D.C. Frankly, I found that "scandal" grossly underwhelming. As a relative pauper in the multi-millionaires' club that is the U.S. Senate, Coleman was an object of sympathy, as far as I was concerned. Yeah, yeah, rules are rules. But this was hardly a Tom DeLay-Jack Abramoff Scottish golfing junket. The Minnesota DFL's numbingly predictable, hyper-cornball over-reaction to Coleman's boarding house "scam" only fueled more sympathy for Coleman. So he gets a break on the rent on a cheap basement apartment. Big whoop. His crime would be what? Not marrying a beer distributor heiress with eight homes, thirteen cars and a couple private jets?

But the story keeps spiraling, or the onion keeps peeling, take your pick. Until this Texas law suit, with allegations of laundering $75,000 to Coleman's wife, Laurie, I thought the nadir -- the antennae full-up moment -- was Coleman's, uh, "spokesman" Cullen Sheehan's truly cringe-inducing non-denial denial to grilling by the PiPress's Rachel Stassen-Borger over whether Nasser Kazeminy, Norm's all-purpose friend, was buying his clothes for him.

Sheehan's self-abasing press avail -- a huge hit on YouTube -- was like a guy standing in the town square under a huge banner reading, "My boss is probably as guilty as he looks!" I had to look away out of embarrassment for the guy.

Today, WCCO's Esme Murphy is insisting that very much contrary to what Sheehan has said about the Texas law suit, it has not been "withdrawn". Unless those always funky Texas authorities just haven't gotten around to the withdrawal paperwork, it is never good when you say one thing and the official record says the exact opposite, especially on Halloween, four days before the election.

Coleman has now stood up and offered intense denials and high indignation ... to the point of accusing Franken of being behind the whole law suit ... thing. (As though, what? Franken filed the suit?) But Coleman's refusal to take questions on how exactly Franken would have pulled this off, after asserting his indignation, was not a good move. You say Franken did it? Tell us how?

Pat Kessler, WCCO's political reporter, says he's been approached countless times by the Franken crew over the months of the campaign with hot angles regarding some supposedly untoward Coleman activity or another, (that's SOP, of course), but got nothing from Team Franken on this one. "Not a thing. I think they were surprised by it," says Kessler.

And given the general clumsiness of the Franken campaign to date does Kessler think they are capable of playing something with this kind of Ted Stevens-style payola with a championship poker face? "Uh, no, I don't."

He emphasizes that any bombshell that drops in the final days of a campaign has  be viewed "with extreme skepticism", which is not at all the same thing as dismissing it. If not a byzantine move by the DNC, someone, for example, could be using the glare and pressure of the final hours of the campaign to squeeze Coleman's pals for a quick settlement on a wholly bogus claim.

No doubt the Coleman campaign is furious to frantic trying to figure out how to drive this thing out of the news cycle, especially before Sunday night's last debate ... moderated by MPR's Gary Eichten. But "no questions" press avails and indignant assertions that "Franken did it" aren't going to still these waters.

And here I was expecting grainy tapes of Al Franken face down in coke and hookers.

I returned from a richly deserved holiday to discover a small mountain of mail, much of it extraordinarily curious about what was going on with the Star Tribune this election season. Having been out of the country for a couple weeks, I forwarded it on to the paper's out-sourced Readers' Rep, Randy, the seasonally employed bear-hunting guide, snowmobile repairman, and septic system cleaner who offices out of the Dry Dock Tavern in rural Chaffee, Wisconsin. (The Stribhired him, freelance—no benefits or 401k—believing he was a solid Sixth District resident and was stuck with him when it learned the northern Anoka county address he gave was just a duck blind.)

Many of the questions had to do with the Newspaper of the Twin Cities' editorial page and various in-house memos relating to election coverage. Though slathered with Bear Magnet (tm) and annoyed with the bar service on a Tuesday afternoon, Randy offered his customary rapid, call-'em-as-he-sees-'em response, in the great tradition of past Star Tribune Readers' Reps, may they rest in peace.

QUESTION:  Hey Randy, help me out with this endorsement of Norm Coleman in Sunday's paper. As I read it, it seems to be saying that Norm finally got around to "independent judgment" sometime in the last year, that they like he has made noises about "bipartisanship" during the campaign, and that they hope he'll stay that way if he gets re-elected. In other words, a few months and a hope. Did I miss what Norm was doing the other five years he was in D.C.? I mean before the election cycle began and he got all green and running around getting money to fix the collapsed bridge and all that good stuff? Maybe the Strib never covered those other years too much. But I seem to remember Norm being pretty gung-ho on charging half-assed into Iraq, not getting all that upset about Bush trying to hand our Social Security money over to Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, and, unless I'm wrong, did Norm ever use his committee to find out what Halliburton and all those sweetheart, no-bid contractors actually did with the billions they say they can't find? I mean, I know Al Franken's a pornographer who rapes women, but what gives?

RANDY:  It's like this, and try to keep up, OK? Did you see what was right above that Norm Coleman thing? Did you? The one about Barack Hussein Obama for President? Good lord, do you know how thin the ice is under that with my buddies Walt and Steve and Buster and the rest of the Forest Lake Poker Run Snowmobile Club? That Obama guy is . . . black! And I got news for you, pally, black is a looonnng way from real America, if you know what I mean. And don't give me all that happy horses**t about him being so much cooler and smarter than Gramps McCain. McCain's a goddam hero. He crashed what, eight planes? That's courage Obama can't even dream of. But the Strib has to play a tricky game. On the one hand, it has got all these Garrison Keillor, bookworm types who couldn't find a Cabela's if they were air-dropped on to one. You give that crowd a little Obama, and then, just to reassure people who are actually honest and work for a living, like I do a couple months out of the year, you give us another dose of Norm. It's just that basic. I heard someone say Norm always sheds his skin in an election year and that endorsing him for doing it only encourages him. But I say, wise up, dude, this a business this newspaper game. There's a lot of mouths to feed. So what you do is tear off a little for each one and toss it in their yap.

QUESTION:  Randy my man, one day our girl Katherine Kersten goes off on Franken for hating Christians, and the next day, her boss, this Barnes babe, circulates a memo telling her and that Commie rectum-licker Nick Coleman not to do anymore political stuff until, you know, after the political stuff is over. Now, I'm 110 percent in agreement that Franken, a Jew from St. Louis Park you know, has nothing but contempt for the Christians that built this country and wrote the Constitution and ran the plantations and that he'd kill Jesus Christ again if he had the chance, but aren't columnists like Kersten and Coleman supposed to be shooting their mouths off about the election? Isn't that what everyone's most interested in right now? I mean other than the new line of leather camo-snowmobile suits they've got in at Gander Mountain? We all know Coleman should be stuffed with Karl Marx novels and dropped off the Lake Street bridge, but Kersten?

RANDY:  I don't want to repeat myself here, but these are tough times, man. Did you see the circulation numbers for these papers? Good lord, a year from now, the only people reading them will be the guys at the printing plant. While I wouldn't be surprised to hear that some big time Jew guys complained about Kersten saying what needed to be said, the fact is all this opinion stuff and getting all worked up about politicians just kind of pisses people off. Who needs it? Me, I like to read about football and hunting. The only time I get pissed with that stuff is if Reusse doesn't rip that Mr. Whipple twit coaching the Vikings. Politics? People get too worked up. They act like it matters. A modern newspaper is all about being liked, which means avoiding a lot of stuff that matters. There's nothing wrong with writing about stuff that doesn't matter or no one cares too much about. Who makes enemies with crap like that? Hell, run more cartoons. Besides if they let Kersten go off on, you know, a Jew from St. Louis Park for Senate and a Muslim from Africa for President, they'd probably feel like they had to let that dick Coleman rip Norm, who used to be a Jew.

QUESTION:  Randy, I know you're the Strib's guy, and you do a hell of a job. But what's with the Pioneer Press not endorsing anyone for President? In fact, how come I can't even find the non-endorsement on Google? Oh wait, it was buried under the Clean Water/Arts Amendment, or whatever they're calling it. I guess I liked the fact that the PiPress just came right out and said they'd only be making half their readership angry if they made a choice between Obama and McCain, but, uh, isn't that what we are all supposed to do on November 4? You know, the choosing thing? Isn't saying . . . .

"Over these years, this newspaper's opinion pages have been run by leaders ["leaders"? Whoa, dudes!] with a variety of political opinions. All shared the journalist's commitment to fairness and balance and to trying to separate daily news reporting from advocacy and opinion. We have not always succeeded but we have endeavored to be fair, and still do. We submit that this separates us from the gabbers and idea-hawkers selling their ideological products."

  . . . kind of like confusing "fairness and balance" (I've heard that somewhere before) with craven gutlessness? Am I suppose to be impressed with their fear of antagonizing a reader? And is it OK if I'm left thinking the PiPress maybe hasn't paid enough attention to the presidential race to even know who to vote for?

RANDY:  Look man, I'm not getting enough coin out of one paper to catch flak for another one. But the PiPress is a little local paper. It's doing the local neighborhood thing. You know, making hard working real Americans in small towns like Grant Township and Woodbury and Lino Lakes feel good about themselves. It writes lots of stories about their kids' volleyball games and ATV issues. That's here. This presidential thing ain't local. Like they say in their story, what the f**k does the Pioneer Press know about presidential? They're sticking to what they know. So OK, ain't much. But maybe this country'd be a lot better off if people who don't know what they're talking about, like PiPress, would just stay away from voting. Stay home, you know what I'm saying? I mean, that'd be fair and balanced. As in: If you don't know nothing, you don't say nothing.

OK, I gotta run. I got Bear Magnet (tm) leaking into my socks.

By the time my wife and I return home Sunday from our all-lomo (beef tenderloin) all-the-time tour of Argentina, I’m told at least one of the two Twin Cities dailies will have risked/boldly dared an endorsement in the presidential race. You know, that Democrat-Republican thing? Every four years? This time Obama and McCain? Maybe you’ve heard about it.

Or, barring anything so . . . so . . . out there as a choice between the two candidates, maybe one or the other will offer an opinion on the deep thoughts of tail-gunner Michele Bachmann, protector of a select few of us from all those America-hating . . . others.

But yesterday, after returning from a very entertaining, white-knuckle drive over a 12,300-foot pass to a Bonneville-like salt flat (Salinas Grandes) just east of the Chilean border, I found an e-mail confirming what I had suspected. Namely, that neither newspaper, at least as of Wednesday, had offered any editorial comment on Bachmann’s likely game-changing prattle and the St. Paul Pioneer Press, had— insert sound of hand loudly slapping head—endorsed “no one” for president.

I’d laugh if it weren’t such a pathetic joke.

Let’s not wonder too much more, shall we, why citizens involved in their local culture are so indifferent to the off-the-cliff demise of daily newspapers? If one criteria of leadership is the courage of your convictions, our two dailies—under their current, anxious, fretful-to-panicked ownership—appear to have taken a pass on both the conviction and the courage parts.

I’m not Jewish, but I still call that “putz” behavior.

Since we can all assume the PiPress and the Strib have by now heard about Bachmann’s comments, (and the Republican National Congressional Committee pulling ad money out of her race), as well as that Obama-McCain presidential thing, we can fairly infer that each editorial department (staffed with people I personally admire—something I can’t say for the owners, who make the final calls on such things as “official” endorsements) decided it was not in their best interests to say anything about Bachmann, and in the case of the PiPress, nothing of any significance at all about the presidential race.

Now, as I say, I’m down here, 5,000 miles south, stuffing my face with staggering amounts of grass-fed beef, and swilling $5 wine that’d I’d pay $20 for back in sweet home Edina, so I could be completely wrong. Maybe I‘ve missed both papers’ scathing, instantaneous response to Bachmann’s call for “Crucible”-like witch hunting. The sort of journalists-on-red meat you expect from (functioning) big city newspapers committed to an informed citizenry and respect for the rule of law. If I have missed it, I’ll be mortified in short order. (And I‘ll blame it on the vino.)

And yes, I did read my compadre viejo Nick Coleman’s shot at Bachmann. But Nick will be the first to tell you he hardly speaks for Strib management.

But if I’m not wrong, the stunning timidity on view here is an appalling indication of the self-induced irrelevancy of both publications. If they don’t dare to speak up on the big stuff, let them stick to high school football and fashion reporting.

But let me play the Naked Cynicism card. I believe I know what explains this display of risk avoidance.

As I was, uh, “departing," the Pioneer Press in 2004 (circa Par Ridder), there was an intense focus on a new, bold, suburban direction for coverage—the burgeoning ‘burbs of Woodbury and north, in particular. This would be a large chunk of the ultra-conservative Sixth District. The PiPress saw money up there and wanted to extend its presence . . . before the Strib did.

Ridder and his sycophantic management minions at the time were careful never to say, explicitly, that this heightened appeal to the Sixth District required calibrating the political tone (of the entire) paper to avoid offense/win favor with the district’s conservative voters. But it was clear enough that that was exactly what was going on, at least to anyone with more than a few months of experience in newspapers management-speak.

(Ridder did say, explicitly, that he wanted to position the PiPress’ editorial page as “a conservative alternative” to the Star Tribune.)

To follow the bouncing ball—when your business plan requires you to, uh, appease a primary clientele— you do things like decline to endorse anyone in a genuinely historical presidential election, and you stuff a sock in your editorial yap instead of calling out the congressional pin-up girl for her talk radio-style ding-battiness.

The Strib is a bit different. But only a bit. It’s reach—still—is significantly greater across the entire metro than its St. Paul rival. (The Strib’s primary territory includes all those lazy, “anti-America” pockets of liberalism in south Minneapolis, Kenwood and even . . . Edina.) But like the PiPress, the Strib is intensely concerned with appealing to the sprawling exurbs and creating an image of “balance”—you know, one half informed, fair, reality-based and one half whatever the rest of the crowd out there wants to hear.

As I say, I could be missing the sharply-written voice of righteous indignation over Bachmann’s historically illiterate yammerings—that stuff that avid news consumers expect from big-city dailies (at least those claiming “leadership“ status). Likewise, maybe I’m misreading the PiPress’ non-endorsement. Maybe it was an exceedingly clever way of actually asserting conviction.

But I’m thinking not.

I feel like I've been ranting and foaming at the mouth for years about the sick symbiosis of politicians, media pundits, and citizens who either don't know what's true or don't care. Since the rise of Rush Limbaugh in the late '80s, this embolism of cynicism and nit-wittery (might have made that up) has been growing and festering. If we're lucky though, this election and little sac-bursting explosions of startling clarity—like Michele Bachmann on Hardball sounding like the lipstick reincarnation of Joe McCarthy—might spare us all a trip to the ICU and the morphine drip.

I won't pretend that the Argentines over here in Salta (a city of "perpetual spring," the brochures all say) know one damned thing about Ms. Bachmann. But judging from the pieces of conversation you overhear, and knowing that the Argies have fresh memories of totalitarian mayhem, it's abundantly clear that they have had enough of what Bachmann represents in the United States and everywhere else. (Ditto those presidential preference polls for other foreign countries, like the one where the Canadians prefer Obama something like six-to-one.)

It might be that countries like this—with memories of repeated cycles of economic devastation and military-to-militaristic rule, where they actually did have "searches" to see who was "pro-Argentine" and who was not—know more about the fire we've been playing with and what Bachmann is actually suggesting than we do. (Many of the latter—the "who was not" crowd—were tortured down here, before being thrown out of airplanes.)

I see that Elwyn Tinklenberg, Bachmann's DFL opponent up in the carefully jiggered uber-"conservative" (read: really kind of bonkers) sixth district, claims he received $500,000 in contributions in the twenty-four hours after Bachmann's proto-fascistic tour de force on national television. That's good news. (Maybe he'll only lose by two points instead of ten.) I'm guessing a big gob of that came from out of state. (And damn, didn't you just love the way Chris Matthews stuffed his glee at Bachmann's steadily building self-immolation? There was no Ted Koppel asking Al Campanis if he'd like to rephrase any of that. Huh uh. Matthews let someone—clearly in way over her head, but fanatically eager for the limelight—have all the rope she wanted. Ignore that trap door, sweetie.)

As Colin Powell said today in both his endorsement of Obama on Meet the Press and later in an impromptu interview, (where he specifically mentioned "the congresswoman from Minnesota"), times are way too serious to pretend Bill Ayers or whether someone in a Muslim or sufficiently "pro-American" matters.

But Bachmann and her kind—Sarah Palin, the Rovians running McCain's campaign, Sean Hannity, nine out of ten "personalities" on talk radio, and nearly 100 percent of its listeners—don't understand anything beyond the buzzwords, slogans, kill-phrases, and hollow paeans to patriotism they hear on the radio and at CPAC conferences. More to the point, their reckless indifference to reality is now strikingly obvious to the general public. And that, we can only pray, will be what destroys them. Like a wind-fed grass fire destroying the locust swarm. (Ten years later the locusts return, but that's life.)

Okay, the Rove team running the McCain campaign might be smarter than Palin and Bachmann—the two prominent "don't knows" of the moment. But the Rove students are deep in the camp of the "don't cares," which, considering their money and connections and ability to influence the deeply confused, may be worse than being on the dim side.

The big change from the early '90s, when the "don't know and don't care" shtick took off, is the Internet and a highly interactive, hyper-aggressive progressive/liberal corps of watchdogs consuming every second of feed from hundreds of sources in search of bona fide "Macaca" moments like Bachmann's on Hardball. One moment, Bachmann, who I assume truly has no awareness at all of how much her professional world view mimics Joe McCarthy and East Germany, is babbling the patois of the talk radio Stasi and seconds later she's got more national attention than she ever imagined, almost none of it good.

The downside here is that after a decade and a half of deluding themselves into believing they were "the real middle America"/"real Americans," the reality of falling back to the status of a marginalized, ridiculed cult could accelerate some pretty serious psychosis.

Under Obama though, there might be some new federal assistance for mental health issues.

According to a U.S. Embassy figure, quoted to me, there are 20,000 Americans currently living in Argentina. Roughly 200 of them, with maybe a few Argentine boy/girlfriends turned out at a place called the Sacramento Resto Bar in the Uptown-like neighborhood of Palermo Hollywood tonight to watch the last mano a mano between Barack Obama and John McCain.

Did i mention they were all Democrats? The debate watch was the fifth of the season organized by "Yanqui Mike" Skowronek, a former Chicago "logistics expert" turned Argentine cattle rancher and now also national chairman of Democrats Abroad In Argentina, an officially-sanctioned appendage of the Democratic Party. (He had seats on the floor in Denver last summer.)

I told Skowronek outside after the big show that when I Googled "obama mccain debate watch buenos aires" I got his event, but no amount of searching turned up anything similar for the Republicans. All 20,000 Americans down here can't be Democrats, can they?

"It's hard to find Republicans" said Yanqui Mike. "The Embassy finally put together a voting day, October 8th. About 800 turned out. But all the volunteers were Democrats." The lack of Republicans is so extreme that Mike says anytime he has to approach the Embassy about anything remotely political he's required to have a Republican counterpart ... which he can't find. "I've told them, 'Hell, then I'll organize the Republicans, too."

Ken McKinney, a Houston, Texas native, siting next to Yanqui Mike piped up, "I've lived here a year and I haven't met one Republican."

The intensely partisan crowd, with a Buenos Aires TV station on the scene, (CNN Espanol has been in four times, says Mike), left no doubt that this election has drifted into what the NBA calls "garbage time", with Obama working the clock, making an occasional windmill dunk and McCain screaming "foul" and pumping up desperation 40-footers. Obama wadsn't so much cheered as McCain was laughed at and derided with groans every time he promised to "cut your taxes" and how "the problem my friend is spending" (not, you know, gross corruption, malfeasance and the lack of the slightest adult supervision of a multi-trillion dollar government.}

The crowd -- like the vast majority of Americans back in the States -- had heard all this before, and merrily mocked McCain's stalest cliches. (Does anyone believe drilling off Florida will reduce the price of gas "soon"?) His dance around the nutjob shouters at his and Sarah Palin's rallies, and his suggestion that the remarks of civil rights legend Cong. John Lewis were even remotely equivalent to talk radio boneheads screaming, "Kill him!", brought loud snorts of derision. Okay, not nearly as loud as when McCain asserted that Palin was "a role model for women", or when he said that he wouldn't apply a Roe v. Wade litmus test to his Supreme Court nominees ... but that, well, anyone who thought that Roe v. Wade was a good idea obviously "would not meet [the] qualifications" he had in mind ... but loud.

I hadn't watched a debate with CNN's instant reaction meter until the one tonight. As I've said, it's hard to imagine who these "uncommitted Ohio voters" are. Have they all just been released from their mad uncle's root cellar dungeon?

The chattering classes don't seem impressed with CNN's gimmick, but ad agencies love it and I was (stupidly) fascinated to watch sentiment swing from emphatically pro-McCain (particularly among the men) at the outset to substantially pro-Obama at the end, (particularly among the women). The men ate up McCain's early boilerplate on about how he would balance the budget within four years, and seemed indifferent-to-negative about Obama ... until the debate turned to health care. Then, like their last debate, the numbers for Obama spiked, with "uncommitted" women burying the needle in full agreement. Both men and women also responded well to Obama talking about how parents must play a bigger role in improving education and how Detroit needs a kick in the ass to build more fuel efficient cars. Likewise, they liked Obama's response on abortion.  By contrast the responses for McCain's "categoric" support of the people coming to his rallies, etc. slumped lower and lower.

McCain's insinuation that Obama was "pro abortion" also tanked.

If McCain has that much drop-off over 90 minutes from people just released from root cellars, he might as well turn off the lights and toss the keys in the mail slot.

Having predicted a Reichstag fire scenario for the last two elections, with win at all cost Republican operatives staging some outrageous calamity to swing the fear vote, I'm reluctant to go there again this year. But it'll take something like another terror apocalypse to restore John McCain to a level of credibility that could win this election. He has squandered almost all the non-partisan and Democratic good-will he had going in -- largely, time will prove, by allowing his Karl Rove-inspired campaign strategists to choose Sarah Palin as his running mate and resisting any impulse he may have had to try something candid and authentic.

My wife, playing producer, pulled in Yanqui Mike, an intriguing art scene New Yorker named Van Huyghue, a black guy decamped into one of Buenos Aires' most fashionable neighborhoods, and a stylish woman our age, named Marcia Williamson, who, with her husband, has lived in Buenos Aires for 13 years, in part due to their revulsion with American conservatives.

"So what's the vibe among the Argentines over the election," I asked.

"Well, you can imagine. They hate the Bush administration and they relate it to McCain. But truth be told, they're never really big on the American government. You know, of course, that it isn't so different from everywhere else in the world. If other countries could vote for our president McCain would hardly get any votes at all."   

There are still several daily newspapers down here in Buenos Aires. As in so many big American cities in the days of yore, the biggest of them, La Nacion, was rock-ribbed and hyper-"patriotic" conservative. When the lefties got unruly back in the late Sixties and early Seventies, La Nacion stepped up and played locker room cheerleader for the military junta that proceeded to torture, kill and "disappear" 30,000 citizens, while destroying the economy and eventually lead the country into a completely idiotic war against England over The Falkland Islands. (Those junta boys were not going to pussy foot around and go all "direct negotiating" with the enemy).

A rival paper, Clarin, this morning had a big headline shouting about "Euforia..." overtaking Wall St. as the British-led banking "nationalization" plan sparked a 900-point rally on Monday. (Today ... not so much.) But the best part was a front page photo, still above the fold, of New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, with the needs-no-translation line, "Nobel de Economica para un critico de Bush."

... above the fold. Argentina. How did the Strib play that one?

Our friends here had us over to their house in a quiet, middle class neighborhood for another round of "asado" -- a.k.a. massive amounts of meat, all of it delicious -- and recurring curiosity about the American election. In an effort to keep things light I dropped in a few of my favorite Bush-a-propisms. Always good for a laugh. Which led them to tell the story of one of their ex-Presidents (post-junta), a good-looking dude by the name of Carlos "The Turk" Menem. Long silvery hair, weird bushy sideburns. Drove the women crazy. But basically as dumb as a stump. All pomp, no circumstance.

The big laugh was their story of Menem, who apparently was constantly trying to impress the public that he really wasn't as dim and incurious as he seemed, mangling a soaring cornball metaphor about how he or Argentina was going to "rise up from the ashes like the phoenix", only somehow he replaced "phoenix" with "Felix ... the cat"  As in ... "despite all these problems Argentina will rise up like the Felix ... ". Very good stuff. Kept the masses howling for weeks. And of course it was all too familiar of the reign of the C- students we've been living under back in the States for these last eight years.

I'm grasping on to Paul Krugman's Nobel Prize, (and yes, I do remember Henry Kissinger getting one, too), as a small triumph for the significant number of people out there who are not just smart, but who have also been proven right ... about the really, really big stuff. Not whether the Vikings will win on Sunday, or whether some spending bill will get through the House. But stuff like war, peace and economic chaos.

A couple days ago The Huffington Post ran a Hall of Fame piece touting the people who were on record years ago predicting precisely what has been going down on Wall Street these last few months. Point being, we should value -- and reward -- prescience a lot more than we do. A LOT more.

If we did, people like Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini would be more familiar on primetime TV shows than Sean Hannity and Jim Cramer. Conversely if we actually punished stupidity, we'd sentence most of the bloviating heads of the so-called business press and CNBC to drive-up cashier jobs at McDonalds for spending so much more time celebrating the go-go gilded age of hedge fund tycoons than warning their readers and viewers about how little value was actually underlying these instant fortunes.

But we don't do that. And I doubt we'll start now. Up until now dead wrong be big fun.

Profound stupidity -- the kind that just reeks of lack of curiosity, research, independent critical thinking and respect for truth -- is still infinitely more salable in our commercialized media (news and otherwise) than people like Krugman, who actually know what they're talking about. It also succeeds on-line, where John Hinderaker of the three PowerLine attorney/bloggers has made a national reputation for being colossally, recklessly wrong about everything from Paul Krugman, to George W. Bush, to Iraq, to any economic and legal argument you can think of, without ever honestyly correcting himself.

In the Twin Cities, we've just had the latest incident of broadcast nincompoopery, the one with two radio jocks for exclusively right-wing KTLK, Chris Baker and Langdon Perry, blathered on about how Magic Johnson "faked" AIDS. Quite obviously neither of the two jocks had the faintest idea if what they were saying  was true ... nor did they care. Basically, the commercially salable act -- certainly on talk radio --  can be reduced to C- students shredding news and issues in a C- way for an audience of C- listeners. (Frankly, I think talk jocks say the moronic things they do because have a basic contempt for the intelligence of anyone who'd listen to them.)

People took notice of this particular KTLK idiocy -- you could pull out a dozen like it any day of the week -- because there are now on-line watchdogs who actually monitor this crap. They tipped Johnson himself to it, who responded on the record. Nothing like a big time celebrity telling you you're an idiot to get you some sweeet national pub.

Unfortunately, the next time some ... profoundly stupid ... "broadcaster" flips a switch on a radio mike in the Twin Cities  -- in the 21st century -- and starts trying to stroke up audience reacion by railing against the "hoax" of evolution -- (I've actually heard this one) -- no one is going to tip Charles Darwin.

Any intelligent, moral person should be heartened to see backlash to the ignorance and border-line violence in recent McCain and Palin rallies stoking Obama's poll numbers. Voters seem to be reacting to the sheer ugliness of it all ... if not the stupidity. But as I've asserted ... ad nauseum over the years ... in some part, and maybe not a small part --  you get unstable, irrational people acting out at public rallies because large companies, like Clear Channel and NewsCorp (FoxNews) and various syndicators see dollar value in legitimizing anger, gross misinformation, divisiveness and fear with their media properties. They have given credibility to ignorance and anger. That ought to be a license pulling offense.

Conventional wisdom continues to say there's no money in being right, at least if that means tolerating "personalities" who aren't loud, offensive, relentlessly self-aggrandizing and immune to self-examination. Maybe another couple catastrophes -- and the work of "bloggers" on "websites" (a nod to Norm Coleman) -- will clarify for us why the real value is in who is right, instead of who just sounds certain.

Really knowing how to pick 'em as I do, my wife and I arrived in Buenos Aires yesterday amid the meltdowns of both the international financial system and John McCain. Within a couple hours we were in a restaurant/bar off a plaza filled with flea-marketeers (soon to be a prominent feature in the Nicollet Mall?). A TV screen on the wall behind my wife was tuned to some all-futbol sports channel with occasional breaks for tidbits of news.

One of the "bites" was of McCain "en Minnesota". The room was too loud to even hear if they were running audio. But since apparently every inch of this city is covered by FREE Wi-Fi (unlike goddam American airports ... don't get me started) it wasn't difficult to dial in and read how splendidly Twin Cities "conservatives" had behaved with the eyes of the nation and the world (sort of) upon them. Put simply, "we" looked like a lynch-mob, the kind of raging droolers every demagogue requires to mount irrational, nationalistic attacks.

Before leaving Minnesota I was talking another local writer about how astonishingly bad a campaign McCain has run. Never mind the ugliness and venality of it (well "mind it", but you know what I mean), it has also been fundamentally incoherent. WHAT is he ever really talking about? He knows how to "catch bin Laden". He'll get "smart people" together to "fix Social Security" and the financial crisis and ... well, as the classic birthday card says under the photo of the geezer boring his wife with patently vacuous opinions, "another year older and a another year closer to talking crap."

I've never thought McCain had any serious chance of winning, not even with Obama needing a 4-5 point "racist" premium on top of any margin he might build up. Even the largely clueless "persuadables" are aware of the near total break down of ethics and competency under George W. and want a whole new crowd in D.C.

The point being that McCain is going to have to decide real soon -- and maybe he finally did in front of the torch carrying SUV-driving villagers in Lakeville -- whether he is going sink in ignominy and disgrace, with this appallingly raven campaign a permanent stain on his name, whether he wants to salvage some semblance of dignity and honor. Summoning the simple courage to tell our exurban mob that Obama isn't "an Arab" and that he "respects" him is one very small step toward redeeming what has been a sustained, three month-long, self-inflicted gutting of his own reputation.

Of course if you read the biography of McCain in the current issue of Rolling Stone, you are reminded that McCain's vaunted persona of "country first" honor and integrity is more a factor of his hagiographers, and a woefully credulous jock-sniffing press corps than anything bona fide. (But since when do "bona fides" matter in politics?)

The Buenos Aires residents ("portenos", as I'm learning), with whom we had dinner last night were universally hopeful of a Obama victory. I'm hoping they don't notice the proximity of Lakeville to Minneapolis and St.Paul.

I'm maxed out on "real people". I want a debate format by elitists for elitists.

If the polls continue their recent trend Barack Obama will be judged the "winner" of tonight's debate in Nashville. That's understandable in that his answers ... to appallingly dull questions ... were coherent and interrelated, (yes, energy first, for both economic and national security reasons), while to my ear McCain only nattered endlessly about how great America is, how much he believes in America, why America can't be defeated and how America's best days are ahead of it. If he were selling cars I would have opened the hood to see if it even had an engine.

My previous criticisms of both Obama and Biden -- (not aggressively slapping down McCain's assertions of wisdom and judgment) --  obviously didn't get through to the campaign hierarchy. The operative strategy is clearly to maintain "presidential composure", and it is working for them.

So let's rip these hackneyed formats we're using, this year in particular, when no moderator dares demand a straight answer. Both campaigns signed off on the rules, including tonight's "town hall" with "undecided" voters. As hard as I struggle I still find it impossible to imagine that anyone planning to vote hasn't made up their minds by now. Whether the screened and selected "undecideds" really are undecided is something not even the Gallup people -- who picked them -- can know for certain.

What is certain is that, as we have seen time and time again, the vaunted "real people", don't ask questions any more interesting or twisty than gnarled reporters. More to the point, well-formed questions with no obvious springboard for stump speech talking points ... and persisting follow-ups ... is what is missing from debates as we're staging them now. What the country -- and the world needs in a global economic meltdown -- is a questioning process that establishes what these candidates truly do and do not understand.

For example: I've long been in favor of requiring the candidates to face a series of panels on various important topics -- foreign affairs, social issues, etc. But if there could only be one it should be on the economy. Instead of one bland, numbingly even-handed moderator (Jim Lehrer, Gwen Ifill, Tom Brokaw), you would bring in a trio of acknowledged experts on economic theory and practical function. A Milton Friedman-ite for the Republican, Paul Krugman or Brad DeLong for the Democrat and some international wizard to throw questions, with virtually unlimited follow-ups. If I've got three hours to watch something as numbingly boring as the Vikings' offense, I've got more than 90 minutes to see who between Obama and McCain has the most facile mind for dealing with duelling economic theories. More to the point, three bona fide experts on any topic -- even $3 million overhead projectors -- would cut the likelihood of peddling utterly fact-free bulls**t to almost zero.

Am I the only one who, after three debates, is still waiting to hear something I haven't heard a hundred times before? I accept that these elections are as protracted as they are solely to give the uninvolved and not-too attentive a chance to finally pay attention. But even that crowd would be better served by a level of questioning above the level of the morning newspaper.

The only truly interesting question out of the "real people" in the Nashville audience was from the woman who asked whether either gentleman believed health care should be treated like a commodity -- which I took to mean a product-system, like plasma TVs or ladies' handbags, that, you know, shrewd operators can freely game for astounding profit-taking ... UnitedHealth, anyone? 15% annual premium increases, anyone? Anyone?

Unfortunately, under the rules, that woman was not allowed to ask a follow-up, nor was Brokaw. (Although he did press Obama and McCain on whether health care was a "right, a privilege or a responsibility" ... to which Obama said "a right" ... correct answer, my man. McCain saw it as "a responsibility" ... for families to figure out one way or another.)

As I say, in an ideal world, there'd be an all-expert panel of health care experts, testing candidate familiarity with and coherence on their own health care plans. Ditto, Middle East affairs. (Maybe then we could settle once and for all the real influence within Iran of the Republicans' all-purpose boogeyman, Mahmoud Ahmadinijad.) Science would be good, too.

In fact, since every campaign seems to come with an intellectual millstone like Sarah Palin, reducing major issues to hockey rink taunts, we really need a mechanism that forces in high-level authoritativeness just to tilt the playing field back ever so slightly toward those of us who actually made it through high school.

Oh, and wasn't it interesting that McCain himself did not attempt to repeat in a televised debate his campaign's current crackpot rhetoric du jour? The one about Obama and "domestic terrorism"? Better to let Palin, a "real person" speaking to "real people", blather on like a drunk.

Let the campaigns agree to three of these monotonously predictable rituals in exchange for one "elitist" panel, stocked with people with with PhDs, dozens of peer-reviewed publications and/or 30 years of high crediblity work in a given discipline, and let them see if they can peel back a few layers of the campaign onion.

By virtue of not seizing up during tonight's debate at the sound of a Supreme Court case other than Rove v. Wade, and by laying it on thick about that crazy bastard Ahmadinejad and all the reformin' and maverickin' for the "real" folks on Main Street she's gonna do, Sarah Palin avoided commiting an error so grievous it could be fatal to the reeling McCain campaign. Which means at the bottom line that she "done good", as "real" Americans always say.

Based on the subterranean level of expectations for her, Palin's night has to be viewed as a success by her team, which, face it, needs something to cheer about after the hourly run of blunders of the last couple weeks. How her performance effects the polls, I have no idea. But I suspect it will stop the freefall in her approval numbers. She played well enough to her base -- the one David Brooks of the New York Times says "confuses talk radio with reality" -- and I suspect she surprised and reassured a few "persuadables" by speaking in more or less coherent complete sentences.

I watched the debate in the bubble of a conference room at KMSP-TV with my old radio partner, Sarah Janecek, prior to doing our own talking head post-debate analysis bit. As someone who been listening to Joe Biden for three and a half decades, it's impossible to imagine anyone not being utterly familiar with his act. Personally, I've always liked it. As an old band instructor used to say, "The guy's got schmaltz." Windy and teary in equal measure, I never doubt Biden cares, and cares enough to know what he's talking about. It takes no stretch of imagination to see him as President.

This is a way of saying I was so riveted by Palin I was nearly oblivious of Biden. Unlike others, I expected a much better performance in the debate than with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric. An ex-TV sportscaster, she understands how to play to a camera, how to burn up a sound bite, how to use gesture and facial expression to convey what words can not. All that winkin' and countryfied twangin'. "Folks" respond to that stuff. At least they do when they've got nothing else to worry about.

The question today is whether that equation has changed dramatically, as retirement plans evaporate and expectations of enjoying the better things in life takes (another) major setback? Do the "folks" out there still care as much that the people they vote for are "like me"? I'm thinking not, and that conventional wisdom among "real" people (which in Republican-speak is anybody who doesn't live in a large city, spends most of their time huntin' and never thinks twice about sending their kid off to fight any war Washington says is a good idea) is now saying, "I just want those guys gone and some new guys in there."

As with Obama-McCain last Friday, I was stunned again that it took until 82 minutes into the debate before Biden essentially said "enough is enough of this 'maverick' bulls**t" and hammered loud and hard on the countless times McCain has pandered to standard Republican group-think and gone along like a good little doggie with the worst judgments of conservative economic orthodoxy and Bush-Cheney war-planning.

Thank you, Joe.

But, come on, what is so hard about owning the "judgment" question?

Not that it mattered all that much, because Palin was the show tonight.

Last night I spent two hours crafting what I still believe was a brilliant blog about Sarah Palin living the dream imagined by the great feminist leaders of my generation, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinhem, etc. It was gold, I tell you, gold. But I managed to hit some button somewhere that evaporated the whole damn thing just as I was trying to save it. (Fortunately I had closed the window so the elderly neighbors weren't awakened to my Paulie Walnuts torrent of profanities.)

The basic notion was that, Geraldine Ferraro withstanding, Sarah Palin -- ex-sportscaster, beauty queen and classic talk radio anti-intellectual -- is the only woman to break through the last and greatest glass ceiling. (Unless, I mean, a woman becomes Commissioner of the NFL.) Sarah Palin. Can't think of any newspaper or magazine she reads. Can't think of any Supreme Court decision other than Roe v. Wade. ( I mean, Dred Scott, for chrissake. Even if you don't know what it means, you've heard of it, right? Someone has to check her high school grades.) Anyway, point being, Sarah Palin ... not exactly what the great old gals had in mind when they sought gender-blind parity with the white, male power structure.

Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Betty and Gloria and rest would look at incurious dilettantes like Warren G. Harding and George W. Bush and say, "There's no reason an intellectually incurious woman shouldn't be president, too!"

If Biden's challenge tonight was to avoid any accusations of "condescension" or "sexism", he pulled that off just fine. But that concern, expressed by other talking heads, struck me as highly ironic in the context of the long march of feminism. After 35 years -- almost exactly as long as Biden has been in D.C. -- I think the majority of Americans are well passed the point of subjecting women seeking power and influence to a different, softer, more cushioned set of rules than their male counterparts. After 35 years we've all worked with and for big girls -- who for better and worse -- are every bit the equal of the men who used to hold those jobs exclusively.

Sarah Palin as President of the United States is still inconceivable, and a majority of the public have come to that realization what with her unpracticed give and take with Gibson and Couric and the precarious state of economic and international affairs. My point now is that there's no reason why the McCain campaign should continue keeping her in her protective bubble. She handled the debate well enough. Go get her a slot with Tom Brokaw and George Stephanopoulos this Sunday. Let her take questions at a real, routine press conference.

That's the kind of equality the old warriors were fighting for.