Joshuah Bearman

Spooky Tooth: Kerry 1; Bush 0, Part A

We've got our feet on the glass coffee table at Julie Orringer's parents house in a nice Cleveland suburb. It's the last day of Operation Ohio, Stephen Elliott's literary invasion of this critical swing state, and Julie's parents have been nice enough to let us and the rest of the writers from the reading series who have not yet flown home stay the night. So Julie's here, and her husband Ryan Harty, as well as Jonathan Ames and Andrew Sean Greer.

Steve bought us all fancy sushi dinner — and by Cleveland standards, I think we got the best sushi available — and we watched this most-anticipated first debate in the fancy TV room with the big screen and Bose system that takes three remotes to operate.

There is lots to say about the debate itself, which was a solid victory for Kerry, and the very opposite of the KO the Bush campaign people were hoping for. (Even William Kristol in the post-game with Brit Hume on Fox said "I think Kerry did pretty well, and we'll have a real Presidential race.")

Which reminds me to lodge the (sadly obligatory) complaint about all the news outlets, some of whom had taken the trouble to gather a bunch of undecided voters from places like Columbus, Ohio in a studio somewhere but nevertheless turned the cameras 99% of the time over to "our experts in the spin room," which most of the time means "paid liars."

I wanted to hear if the voters witnessed the same level-headed Kerry and sniveling, petulant, putative President that we all saw coming through in bright, unflinching resolution on the 52" High-Definition Samsung. Instead the screen was filled with campaign operatives in Coral Gables saying nothing. Fox broadcast a couple hours of two Weekly Standard editors tilting the discussion to the right and Mort Kondrake from Roll Call and a reporter from Washington Post representing the center. (And, in what may be the best measure of Bush's performance, all of them, with no Kerry partisans present, thought Bush had failed.)

Over on CNN, we got a couple of curiously attempts at commentary from Mike McCurry that were impossible garbled due to "technical problems" with the remote feed (hmm . . . I wonder where the Bush/Cheney frequency disrupter kit was operating), so Wolf Blitzer then defaulted over to serpentine Republican operative Karen Hughes, whose forked tougue flickered at length about how her boss' empty stares and eyerolling and unpreparedness was in fact very "Presidential." And in addition to that tongue, her malevolent smile would every so often reveal a crooked little fang — seriously, we all saw it — which I decided must be the vestigial egg-tooth Hughes used to hatch from her reptilian shell on whatever planet she and the rest of her lizard people Republican body-snatchers came from. After the third glitch with McCurry, and another switch back to Hughes, I thought we might catch her, thinking she was off camera, pull a live hamster from her pocket, disarticulate her jaw and swallow the terrified rodent whole.

"W," after all, is just two "V"'s.

More to come.

The Man With The Plan

Here was Rumsfeld last week, out at Ft. Leonard Wood in Missouri, revealing his "plan" for post-war Iraq:

"At some point the Iraqis will get tired of getting killed..."

No joke. This is the Pentagon's counter-insurgency strategy. Is that how that works? You don't say. Oh right, we've got all those examples to follow, like in Israel and Kashmir and Sri Lanka -- and Russia, for that matter, where Bush's soul brother Putin showed how to get those evil-doers to just roll over. I guess Rumsfeld never saw the Battle of Algiers screening that the DoD held last summer. Or read The War Of The Flea. Or ever sat in on a basic goddamned security studies seminar. Or picked a newspaper recently.

Bush Plaza, Baghdad

Y'all may have seen this, but if not it's worth noting the following anniversary:

One year ago, Richard Perle predicted that by today things would be going so well in Iraq they'd name the whole place after The Prez.

The problems in Iraq are ahead of us, but we're doing better than people think. And a year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush. There is no doubt that, with the exception of a very small number of people close to a vicious regime, the people of Iraq have been liberated and they understand that they've been liberated. And it is getting easier every day for Iraqis to express that sense of liberation.

Just the kind of oracular vision we've come to expect from seminars over at the American Enterprise Insititute. Full text here.

Brand Aids

What happend to W = Wrong?

I thought it was an OK start at trying to regain some ground in the branding war. W = Wrong is concise. It looks mathematical. But it may not be strong enough. Unless it's fully realized with lines in every speech about George W. Bush was WRONG about WMD's, fought the WRONG war, gave us the WRONG prescription drug bill, gave tax cuts to the WRONG people, etc.

Because, as I've mentioned elsewhere, the whole thing really does come down to marketing doesn't it?

And usually bad marketing at that. Bush's people seem better at it, but that's because they're unrestrained by the inconvencience of truth that the rest of us here on Earth must abide. Things always sound better when spun as fantastic yarns.

But they've used those yarns to reach the critical saturation point — repeating flip-flop so much that every voter has heard it more than the 27 times the human brain needs to permanently imprint an idea. It's even the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Kerry. Winning, sadly, is about repetition.

And now they're starting in with the most fanstitical falsehood of all: Bush = Safer. Never mind that this is empirically false; they're going to say it enough times that it becomes true in the minds of people who don't know any better. We've known this works since Bernayse. I mean, still to this day I will choose a snickers over other powerbars and such in the vending machine if I'm hungry, because there is some neural relationship burned into my cortex that says: "Snickers satisfies." I don't even like goddamn snickers. But I buy it anyway. Kerry's camp needs to read up on the psychology of suggestion, and counter that Bush = Safer business pronto.

Like, for example, with ads showing our fearsome protector reading My Pet Goat as the country is attacked. And the shot of him landing on the aircraft carrier (during which time the Commander-in-Chief logged more hours in the air than in his last three years of Air National Guard service) and that Mission Accomplished banner juxtaposed with the "un-winnable war" quote or even scenes from Najaf or disgruntled soldiers (of which there are many).

And they need to aggressively exploit the main vulnerability in Bush's meme, which is that the guy's a liar. Along with his whole crew. Everyone feels misled about Iraq, even people inclined to support Bush. Same with the withheld cost of the prescription drug bill, and the unfunded No Child Left Behind, and the uniter/compassionate conservative hoo-hah — all tricks or broken promises everyone's familiar enough with to have the dots connected. The "We need a leader, not a misleader" language from the MoveOn ads seems to hit the mark.

Why not hit harder even? Can't someone just say the administration is full of crap? You know, with Texas and all the cattle, "there's too much bullshit in Washington these days" will say it all. Enumerate all the administration's misdeeds with a refrain of: "Let's send the Bullshit back to Texas"? And a sly "Now we know why Bush wears those boots all the time . . ."

Or maybe BS to avoid indecorum. Substitute BS and you're fine. At least for surrogates. There should be an army of surrogates saying something like this every day. And then you get BuSh signs shaped like a cow with the B and the S super-oversized, and at rallies when ever any of the various WRONGS or other deceptions of the administration are mentioned, the whole crowd starts mooing. Full service branding, like with a sports team. Lots of enamel pins. Games online where you sweep cow pies out of the oval office.

Here's an interesting example. W = Wimp, the site says. With a list of examples. But a W = Wimp hat. Put a W = Wimp Tee on your dog. Print the text and pass it on! And then go to ACT and volunteer to call a swing state. Great idea. Let's make it fun to get behind Kerry. Because right now the Republicans are the ones having all the fun.

Poll Positioning

How does that old saw go — something about lies, damned lies, and political polling? Let me just say up front that I like the relative certainty of most statistics as much as the next guy. I mean, who doesn't appreciate Ol’ Gauss or marvel at the elegance of the Law Of Large Numbers? But the fact of the matter is that the polling process is inherently imprecise — susceptible to (statistical and political) bias and sample errors, and providing at this stage in an election limited predictive value. Polling is not like taking samples of bacteria in a lake; it’s an attempt to gauge human intentions, which resist quantification and change over time. Not to mention that the very measurement process — people asking questions and formulating answers — is itself notoriously unscientific.

The ambiguity of polls is something not easily understood by the public. Or, apparently, by most political reporters, who throw the numbers around as if they’re solid quantitative records of political realities rather than ranges of possibility that are easily misinterpreted. And that’s what makes them so dangerous.

Case in point is the release of those two new polls late Thursday night, each showing a vastly different result. Gallup gave Bush a 13% advantage. The Pew Research Poll completed that same night showed Bush with a 1% lead. A friend wrote me a quick note showing his frustration:

God I hate polling. And you know the orgs, who just today wrote a story on the Bush bounce’s evaporation (AP), will jump all over this one.

Indeed, the next morning the Gallup Poll, which is jointly commissioned by CNN and USA Today, became the day’s big headline. Lots of talk about Bush having the Big Mo’. But this was incredibly irresponsible. There were significant methodological problems with the Gallup poll, the main one being that there was a basic sample in how the party identification of the likely voter turnout was figured.

To wit (via The Left Coaster):

Likely Voter Sample Party IDs Poll of September 13-15 Reflected Bush Winning by 55%-42%

Total Sample: 767
GOP: 305 (40%)
Dem: 253 (33%)
Ind: 208 (28%)

The flaw here lies in the fact that Gallup’s result assumes that on election day, 40% of the turnout will be Republican, 33% Democrat, and 28% Independent. Actual turnout has never looked like this. In 2000, the proportional turnout was 34% GOP, 34% Democrat, and 33% Independent. In 1996, Democratic turnout was in fact much higher than among Republicans. Re-weighting the sample to reflect a more likely turnout in 2004 would reduce Bush’s lead to a few points.

But the problem was not just the poll itself. It was also how it was reported. News stories about polls almost never question — or even describe — the methodology. Nor do they put them into proper perspective by noting that the reporting news organization’s poll is just one of many. And herein lies the systemic problem with election polling. Each network or paper commissions its own survey and then acts like they got some kind scoop. They want to get their numbers out first, and tout them as news, and so they choose not to mention that the other guys’ numbers say something different. The competition between proprietary polls forces the media, when reporting on the extremely sensitive and important state of our national elections, to be un-journalistic: they use only a single source — their own poll — while ignoring other, potentially conflicting information.

I was talking about this recently with Lynn Vavreck, a political science professor at UCLA who specializes in quantitative methods, and this is how she described the problem: “It’s what I call incentive incompatibility. The candidates, the public, and the media all want different things. USA Today and CNN and Newsweek — their incentive is to sell magazines and newspapers. What voters want is information. And candidates want coverage. And those things often don’t line up. Civic journalism would be nice. But the media want to sell their products, and that’s why USA Today would splash a big headline about that Gallup poll without mentioning the other polls or dealing with the problems with their poll.”

On top of incentive incompatibility, there’s also the general indifference to nuance that characterizes most front page news stories, which is what we see in the USA Today article about that new Gallup Poll:

BUSH CLEAR LEADER IN POLL By Susan Page

WASHINGTON — President Bush has surged to a 13-point lead over Sen. John Kerry among likely voters, a new Gallup Poll shows. The 55%-42% match-up is the first statistically significant edge either candidate has held this year.

Among registered voters, Bush is ahead 52%-44%.

[That is a very bold — and by extension, not entirely accurate — interpretation of Gallup's numbers. And the second line almost proves itself wrong: THE RESULT IS THE ONLY STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT EDGE BECAUSE IT A) SAMPLE ERROR OR B) AN OUTLIER.]

The boost Bush received from the Republican convention has increased rather than dissipated, reshaping a race that for months has been nearly tied. Kerry is facing warnings from Democrats that his campaign is seriously off-track.

With 46 days until the election, analysts say the proposed presidential debates offer Kerry his best chance to change the race.

[Again, it's not really fair to say that the Gallup poll, or any single poll for that matter, reshapes the entire campaign.]

"It doesn't look like the new consultants and strategies of attacks are the right ones" for Kerry, says Matthew Dowd, chief strategist for the Bush campaign. Kerry in recent weeks added veterans of the Clinton White House to his team and began criticizing Bush more sharply on Iraq and other issues.

Dowd says Kerry at this point would "have to defy history" to defeat a sitting president.

[This is not true. Bush himself was lagging — farther and with much more statististical certainty — behind Gore at this stage of the game last time around. And yet Dowd's comments remain unchallenged.]

"We have seen some bouncing around in the numbers," says Mike McCurry, a top Kerry adviser, "but it is our sense that the race is moving back to a much closer race."

[Only in the 8th graf do we find out about that other poll, the one that confirmed what the rest of the polls say, which is that the race is extremely tight:]

A Pew Research Center poll released Thursday shows a tighter contest. The survey, taken Saturday through Tuesday, gives Bush a statistically insignificant lead of 47%-46% among likely voters.

CNN’s item about the same Gallup poll managed to give the story a little more balance. They lead with the variance, and added a sub-hed noting both polls:

LATEST PRESIDENTIAL POLLS VARY WIDELY

Gallup, Pew Research polls get different results
Friday, September 17, 2004

As both camps' campaign schedules intensify, two key polls indicate different standings for President Bush after the convention.

(CNN) — Two new national polls are giving widely divergent views as to whether President Bush's post-convention bounce has solidified or evaporated.

A Gallup Poll released Friday showed the president widening his lead over Kerry among likely voters to 13 percentage points, with 55 percent for Bush and 42 percent for Kerry.

The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. (Special report: America Votes 2004, poll tracker)

The race narrowed to 8 points among registered voters, with 52 percent choosing Bush and 44 percent picking Kerry.

The level of support for the president was the highest he has seen in the Gallup Poll since January, when he was enjoying a bump from the capture of Saddam Hussein.

Bush's job approval rating also rose to its highest level since April, with 52 percent saying they approved of his performance and 45 percent saying they did not.

However, a poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, released Thursday, showed the race between Bush and Kerry now a dead heat . . .

That addressed the nuance better. But it still fails to question the basic credibility of the poll itself. It had to be left to The Left Coast and others to look at the fine print and discover the sample error. But the damage from poll reporting can be hard to undo: detailed fact-checking, like we’re talking about here, can’t compete with the general impression formed by a bunch of Bush at 55, Kerry at 42 headlines. Ever since similarly suspect Newsweek numbers came out just as the RNC closed, there’s been a perception that Bush is steamrolling Kerry. It's like there's a Heisenberg effect in polling, where measurement can change reality. And hidden down in the details of the Gallup poll was another question, with a result that was statistically significant, that confirms such an effect:

Q: Who do you think is most likely to win in November?

September, 2004
Bush: 60
Kerry: 22

August, 2004
Bush: 44
Kerry: 37

That’s Newsweek covers and USA today headlines talking. It’s sure as hell not the actual numbers, which do show a little Bush boost, but have never once suggested some kind of double-digit, insurmountable lead. Aggregating all the polls, best estimates show a very tight race, as it has always been.

As it also was in 2000. That’s when Karl Sigman, an applied mathematician at Columbia, used state-by-state polling to create a Monte Carlo simulation that assigned an 84% probability for Gore to win. Without trying to describe it in detail, I’ll just say that Sigman came up with a clever way to use fairly basic statistics to predict the electoral college outcome. And he came closer than any of the pundits or other political “professionals.” But even with state-by-state polls made available the day before the election, the model was slightly off in the end. That was because, still at that late date, people changed their minds. Or didn’t vote. Or some groups came out in force, while others stayed home.

So even the day before the election, Polls have limited analytical value. And in terms of democracy, they have almost no value, because they divert the public from the actual issues at stake in elections and may even distort the outcome. This is what Canada realized in the late 90’s, when they enacted a polling ban. It actually became illegal to report polling data in the run-up to Canada’s national elections. It was a short-lived experiment (Canada’s Supreme Court overturned the law under the grounds that it restricted freedom of expression), but not a bad idea.

Great Gerbils!

EXTRA . . .

Included in the new McSweeney's is a daring investigation into the lives and loves of the Great Gerbil (Rhombomys Opimus) of central Asia. It so happens that I wrote it -- all thirty pages of astounding facts, including:

1. Rodent drumming
2. Too many koala bears
3. Psychedelic toads
4. And how quietly gerbils make poops.
5. And it is all 100% true.

I encourage everyone to get the new issue and check it out. There are many other good stories in there as well.

Left Behind In Louisiana

THE SPECIAL COMMENTARY HAS RETURNED!

Mike Davis' provocative thoughts on how Ivan reminds us of the continuing problem of institutional neglect of minorities comes courtesy of TomDispatch.com, which I also recommend.

Poor, Black, and Left Behind
— Mike Davis

The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of Hurricane Ivan looked sinisterly like Strom Thurmond's version of the Rapture. Affluent white people fled the Big Easy in their SUVs, while the old and car-less — mainly Black — were left behind in their below-sea-level shotgun shacks and aging tenements to face the watery wrath.

New Orleans had spent decades preparing for inevitable submersion by the storm surge of a class-five hurricane. Civil defense officials conceded they had ten thousand body bags on hand to deal with the worst-case scenario. But no one seemed to have bothered to devise a plan to evacuate the city's poorest or most infirm residents. The day before the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast, New Orlean's daily, the Times-Picayune, ran an alarming story about the "large group…mostly concentrated in poorer neighborhoods" who wanted to evacuate but couldn't.

Only at the last moment, with winds churning Lake Pontchartrain, did Mayor Ray Nagin reluctantly open the Louisiana Superdome and a few schools to desperate residents. He was reportedly worried that lower-class refugees might damage or graffiti the Superdome.

In the event, Ivan the Terrible spared New Orleans, but official callousness toward poor Black folk endures.

Over the last generation, City Hall and its entourage of powerful developers have relentlessly attempted to push the poorest segment of the population — blamed for the city's high crime rates — across the Mississippi river. Historic Black public-housing projects have been razed to make room for upper-income townhouses and a Wal-Mart. In other housing projects, residents are routinely evicted for offenses as trivial as their children's curfew violations. The ultimate goal seems to be a tourist theme-park New Orleans — one big Garden District — with chronic poverty hidden away in bayous, trailer parks and prisons outside the city limits.

But New Orleans isn't the only the case-study in what Nixonians once called "the politics of benign neglect." In Los Angeles, county supervisors have just announced the closure of the trauma center at Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital near Watts. The hospital, located in the epicenter of LA's gang wars, is one of the nation's busiest centers for the treatment of gunshot wounds. The loss of its ER, according to paramedics, could "add as much as 30 minutes in transport time to other facilities."

The result, almost certainly, will be a spate of avoidable deaths. But then again the victims will be Black or Brown and poor.

On the fortieth anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the United States seems to have returned to degree zero of moral concern for the majority of descendants of slavery and segregation. Whether the Black poor live or die seems to merit only haughty disinterest and indifference. Indeed, in terms of the life-and-death issues that matter most to African-Americans — structural unemployment, race-based super-incarceration, police brutality, disappearing affirmative action programs, and failing schools — the present presidential election might as well be taking place in the 1920s.

But not all the blame can be assigned to the current occupant of the former slave-owners' mansion at the end of Pennsylvania Avenue. The mayor of New Orleans, for example, is a Black Democrat, and Los Angeles County is a famously Democratic bastion. No, the political invisibility of people of color is a strictly bipartisan endeavor. On the Democratic side, it is the culmination of the long crusade waged by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) to exorcise the specter of the 1980s Rainbow Coalition.

The DLC, of course, has long yearned to bring white guys and fat cats back to a Nixonized Democratic Party. Arguing that race had fatally divided Democrats, the DLC has tried to bleach the Party by marginalizing civil rights agendas and Black leadership. African-Americans, it is cynically assumed, will remain loyal to the Democrats regardless of the treasons committed against them. They are, in effect, hostages.

Thus the sordid spectacle — portrayed in Fahrenheit 9/11 — of white Democratic senators refusing to raise a single hand in support of the Black Congressional Caucus's courageous challenge to the stolen election of November 2000.

The Kerry campaign, meanwhile, steers a straight DLC course toward oblivion. No Democratic presidential candidate since Eugene McCarthy's run in 1968 has shown such patrician disdain for the Democrats' most loyal and fundamental social base. While Condoleezza Rice hovers, a tight-lipped and constant presence at Dubya's side, the highest ranking, self-proclaimed "African American" in the Kerry camp is Teresa Heinz ((born and raised in white-colonial privilege).

This crude joke has been compounded by Kerry's semi-suicidal reluctance to mobilize Black voters. As Rainbow Coalition veterans like Ron Waters have bitterly pointed out, Kerry has been absolutely churlish about financing voter registration drives in African-American communities. Ralph Nader — I fear — was cruelly accurate when he warned recently that "the Democrats do not win when they do not have Jesse Jackson and African Americans in the core of the campaign."

In truth, Kerry, the erstwhile war hero, is running away as hard as he can from the sound of the cannons, whether in Iraq or in America's equally ravaged inner cities. The urgent domestic issue, of course, is unspeakable socio-economic inequality, newly deepened by fiscal plunder and catastrophic plant closures. But inequality still has a predominant color, or, rather, colors: black and brown.

Kerry's apathetic and uncharismatic attitude toward people of color will not be repaired by last-minute speeches or campaign staff appointments. Nor will it be compensated for by his super-ardent efforts to woo Reagan Democrats and white males with war stories from the ancient Mekong Delta.

A party that in every real and figurative sense refuses to shelter the poor in a hurricane is unlikely to mobilize the moral passion necessary to overthrow George Bush, the most hated man on earth.

Physics Of Folly

This week the Bush administration announced that it will move forward with that great boondoggle of our time, the National Missile Defense (NMD) system. The system will become "operational" — a curious term since despite the tens of billions of dollars spent so far on NMD, the system doesn't work — while the next scheduled interceptor test will be postponed until after the election. Thus can Bush, in a typical topological distortion of reality, claim to be protecting the country while diverting attention from the basic inoperability of the system.

And it's a system, one must also note, whose installation, even non-functioning, required the United States to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which had been the bedrock of international nuclear security since 1972. Meaning: our current administration upended the long-time stability of the country's arms treaties in order to drop some broken interceptors in the ground in Fort Greely, Alaska and inaugurate a crackpot scheme that will never — ever — protect the country against a missile attack — even if they ring the whole damn country with similar installations and spend a hundred billion more dollars (as planned). Just how much of a financial waste this is defies description. As my father, a physicist at the Jet Propulstion Laboratory who once worked on the Reagan-era SDI program, said: “They may as well put that money in a canoe and set it on fire.”

Why? Because of physics. There are precise and incontrovertible reasons, of the kind described by a fellow named Newton, as to why missile defense was, is and shall always be an expensive failure. But don't take it from me. Below is an interview I did a few years ago with Ted Postol, a physicist and former Pentagon adviser who is now a professor of science, technology and national-security policy at MIT.

Postol is a leading critic of missile defense. Building the system, he argues, provides the worst of both worlds: no effective defense and less international stability. In a telephone interview from his MIT office, Postol explains why the so-called kill vehicles won’t kill anything, why having them will make the world more dangerous, and why the whole scheme is as dumb now as when Ronald Reagan was seduced by the Star Wars fantasy.

L.A. WEEKLY: First, maybe you could describe a little bit about how the missile-defense system works.

TED POSTOL: Basically, it is a system of radars that try to track objects in space and an interceptor, which is a rocket booster with a device mounted on top called a kill vehicle. The kill vehicle weighs maybe 120 or 130 pounds, and it looks like a sort of telescope with small rocket motors on it. The kill vehicle gets launched towards the target of concern — or targets, as you’d expect in a real-world scenario.

L.A. WEEKLY: Does it all happen quickly?

TED POSTOL: Yes. The rocket booster accelerates the kill vehicle to a very high speed — between 7 and 8-and-a-half kilometers per second — and the incoming warhead is itself traveling near that speed. So the crossing speed is quite high. This is why accuracy is important. But the system is not very accurate. The kill vehicle is launched a few minutes before the actual flyby, but it is launched to a point in space where the system has calculated that it will be near incoming targets. And only there does the kill vehicle open its eyes, so to speak, to look for the targets. And when the kill vehicle opens its eyes, it’s a very small field of view, perhaps 1 degree on a side. And then it has about 60 seconds to observe and home in on its target.

L.A. WEEKLY: So the kill vehicle is not tracking the incoming missile the entire way. It goes to what it thinks is the vicinity, and then only has a brief moment to meet the target.

TED POSTOL: Right. It is a projected interception point calculated by the radar — with some uncertainty, I might add.

L.A. WEEKLY: I understand that the infrared sensors of the system are an issue too. The tracking system on the kill vehicle sees the incoming missiles as —

TED POSTOL: Points of light. Like little stars.

L.A. WEEKLY: And the resolution of these sensors is not very good.

TED POSTOL: That’s part of the problem. There’s no dimensional information.

L.A. WEEKLY: Is that a technological limitation that can be overcome? Will we be able to make more accurate sensors in a few years?

TED POSTOL: No, that limitation will not be overcome, and even if it were improved, it would not entirely solve the accuracy problem.

L.A. WEEKLY: And, if I understand correctly, the reason increased resolution wouldn’t solve the problem is that even a better image would still not allow the kill vehicle to distinguish between actual warheads and decoys.

TED POSTOL: Yes. For example, say there’s a warhead flying through space, tumbling end over end as warheads do. And say there’s also a decoy balloon shaped like a warhead, also tumbling end over end. There would be no observable difference that would allow the sensor — even a better one — to determine which was the warhead. This is the fundamental problem. This kind of system is designed to work in the vacuum of space, and in the vacuum of space, the two would behave exactly alike. In space, it is extraordinarily easy to deploy decoys. . .

Because of length, what's quoted here is an excerpt. But I urge you to see the rest of the interview here, which includes a description of the NMD's test failures, and how some Republican staffer tried to jump Postol on the Hill, as well as everyone's favorite topic: lasers!

Ask Not What Kerry Can Do For You . . .

Here is a rejoinder to Democratic defeatists nationwide, from Stephen Elliott. The basic message is: Don't get caught up in those "Kerry-in-trouble" stories and just sit there throwing up your hands at Kerry & Co.'s feckless campaigning. Hit the streets. Or, if you're in a solidly blue state, the phone banks. Do something. Complaining is worthless. Action is all we have left.

From the papers:

"I would really like to see you guys speak up and answer those questions. Because even though I am a Democrat and although I did vote for (Ralph) Nader last time, I even get questions in my mind and you have to speak up. They are really going to run you right over and make you look like idiots, and I really want you to speak up. And what are you going to do?"

— Katie Simenson to John Edwards, 9/7/04

Reply to Katie Simenson of Racine County Wisconsin
— Stephen Elliott

Dear Katie,

Being an armchair quarterback is easy. Sitting in front of a television set and pulling your hair out burns very few calories. Second guessing is a popular sport predating the Olympics. The question is: What are you going to do?

What are you going to do while our president squanders the country's resources and prestige on ill-planned wars in the Middle East? When massive surpluses have become massive deficits siphoning revenue from our communities to service the interest on a debt? When minorities are being denied their vote in Florida, again? When the Congressional Budget Office tells you, once more, that the administration has lied about the price of their wars, their medicare bills, intentionally misstating costs by hundreds of billions of dollars? When experts who disagree with the administration, rather than being debated, are simply labeled Democrats, or worse, liberals? While your social security and your children's education are given away in parcels to those that are already rich beyond your imagining? When you or someone you know doesn't have healthcare and Roe V. Wade is in deep peril and a national draft is just an inauguration away? When polluters are in charge of environmental policy and oil executives are writing your energy bills and your public utilities are being dismantled and sold to the highest bidder? While pension plans are plundered, the company employee is replaced with the contract worker, benefits are slashed, workplace standards are sabotaged, wages are cut, and jobs are shifted to countries without labor policies or environmental laws? And the United Nations — which was formed because the next great war is unthinkable — is ridiculed and derided at the Republican Convention? And when your leaders have been caught lying about the threat of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction and his ties to the terrorists and the response to being caught in their lies is to repeat them, and they are still repeating them today?

What are you going to do as your world becomes less safe, less clean, less free? Because if you went to a fundraiser this week it's not enough. And if you wrote a letter to the editor this week it's not enough. And if you crafted some funny little piece about George Bush and posted it on your friend's website it's not enough. If you spent less than ten hours this week working to remove George W. Bush from office - you aren't doing enough.

Democracy is participation. If you have children and a low paying job and are squeezed for time then you should be doing twice as much because you are the one who will suffer the most. If you are waiting for the perfect candidate to come along you will be waiting for the rest of your life. If you turn off on politics, politics will turn on you in a most disagreeable manner. George W. Bush is what happens when people aren't paying attention to the political process. If you're upset because your candidate is down in the polls and a swath of the nation seems poised to vote against their own interests and yours, then do something about it.

We've been told there are no consequences, we can run up debt without having to pay the balance, we can make war without troops, and when the troops we do send die, the pictures are hidden from us by executive decree. When our country is attacked we're encouraged to keep shopping. We've been told we don't have to conserve energy as the automobile industry works legal loopholes through emission laws and Hummers and SUVs clog our streets and blacken our skies — as if there weren't a direct link to these monsters and the quagmire in the Middle East. We've grown to think government operates without oversight and politicians stopped asking us to make sacrifices a long time ago, after Jimmy Carter went on television wearing a sweater telling us to turn down the heat and promptly lost the election.

Well, with eight weeks left we have to ask ourselves how much we are willing to give, if we care about the fate of our nation, which is the fate of all of us, because on November 3rd it will be too late. And if George Bush wins we'll all be wishing we had done more. Do more now.

____

Some things you can do:

Take a weekend road trip to a swing state to register voters:
www.drivingvotes.org
Throw a fundraiser for your favorite 527:
www.texansfortruth.org
Get involved with your local John Kerry office:
www.johnkerry.com
Donate time on the web:
www.moveon.org

Novak From Whence You Came

Here's a transcript of the petulant little homunculus Bob Novak doing one extremely limber and hypocritical back-bend on Captial Gang last Saturday. He's saying that while he should be allowed to keep quiet who in the White House broke the law by leaking Valerie Plame's name to him, CBS should be forced to reveal its sources for the supposedly suspect two documents in the Bush-The-Duty-Shirker file.

As a quick aside: I kept seeing Novak around the conventions, and at one point, when I noticed I was standing next to him seating in a chair and his head was about a foot away from my derriere, I tried to fart on him. Now I wish I'd tried harder.

Here he is, in his own words:

NOVAK: The — Margaret, I believe — I don't know of anybody who changed their opinion. "The Boston Globe" got a new expert who said the thing probably is authentic. In the same story, they went back to the expert that "The Washington Post" had used. He said it isn't authentic. I think it's going to be very interesting to find out if these are forged or phony documents. That's — as a journalist, I think that's a very interesting story.

I'd like CBS, at this point, to say where they got these documents from. They didn't get them from a CIA agent. I don't believe there was any laws involved. I don't think we'll have a special prosecutor, if they tell. I think they should say where they got these documents because I thought it was a very poor job of reporting by CBS. Why did CBS not go to the — to Killian's family and get — and ask them about it, as ABC did, and got these quotes, and they said they think they're phony documents — I thought — I thought that the "60 Minutes" thing by Dan Rather was a — was a campaign operation, rather than an attempt to get to the bottom of the truth.

HUNT: Robert Novak, you're saying CBS should reveal its source?

NOVAK: Yes.

HUNT: You do? You think reports ought to reveal sources?

NOVAK: No, no. Wait a minute.

HUNT: I'm just asking.

NOVAK: I'm just saying in that case.

HUNT: Oh.

NOVAK: I think — I think it's very important. If this is a phony document, the American — the people should know about it.

HUNT: So in some cases, reporters ought to reveal sources.

NOVAK: Yes.

HUNT: But not in all cases.

NOVAK: That's right.

Fakers

It makes sense that Entertainers for Bush, a home-grown assortment of people intended to add a touch of cultural credibility to the celebrity-starved GOP, was founded by a stage magician. As I've said before, Bush's entire campaign is a second-rate magic show, with much of the country apparently too busy enjoying their $2.99 shrimp cocktails out in the leatherette booths to notice how bad the act is. "I love it when he pulls all those colored napkins out of his pockets," they say to each other with mouths full of watery chocolate mousse. "It just kills me!"

Fittingly, Entertainers for Bush itself is an illusion, comprised not of celebrities but of stage hands, aging variety acts, regional oddities, and unknown bit part players.

Distinguishing himself from the crowd, however, Entertainers for Bush founder Wayne Alan calls himself a "corporate illusionist," a concept that is, of course, right on point with his heros in the current administration. But poor Alan is short-changing himself — instead of doing card tricks for board members on golf courses, he could join the ranks of the real corporate illusionists and start really raking it in. As Cheney, et. al., have demonstrated, you don't even need sleight of hand these days to shake a few billion out of the punters' pockets.

Note From The End Of The World

“Frances is gone. And he turned this fucking place upside down. But we’re safe now … I think.” This was my mother checking in from Green Acres, where she had hunkered down in her condo through the hurricane. “And you know me — I don’t flinch. But I’ve never seen anything like this.”

At the time of the previous call from my mother, Frances’ eye was approaching the coast of Jupiter, a town a few miles north of where she lives. There was a garbled message on my voice mail, which sounded like an SOS transmission from a colony on Mars, just as it was being overrun by howling cosmic shape shifters. Between the static was an ominous wind and a few intelligible words: … no power … trapped … phones dead … try Germaine’s number… 561 …what’s the rest? …

Germaine is a friend of my younger brother, David, aka Skrap. Skrap is David’s hip hop handle, which, as an aspiring rapper, David must have. When Germaine is not working at the Olive Garden, he is Skrap’s producer/manager/accomplice, and he lives with Skrap and my mother in Green Acres. Before Frances’ full force arrived in Florida, the three of them stocked up on batteries, water, and food, and they retrieved my mother’s long-unused Coleman camping stove from the closet.

“But we had no idea what we were in for,” she recounted after the storm was gone. “This thing was a monster.”

She described the carnage: flipped cars, uprooted trees, yachts tossed ashore, roofs torn from houses. “With my own eyes,” she said with the almost gleeful amazement of a witness to catastrophe, “I saw trees flying out of the goddamn ground, Joshuah. Right out my window. You know I don’t like to swear, but this was absolutely un-fucking-believable.”

Worse than the storm itself, says my mother, was the aftermath. The power was still out when she called, making refuge from the miasmic summer of southern Florida impossible. An underground economy quickly developed with ice as the pinnacular commodity. “People are fighting over ice!” she yelled into the phone. “I mean fist fights — right in the parking lots!”

“What are they doing with the ice?” I asked.

“It’s hot!” she cried.

“But the power’s out, so it will just melt in a few hours — right? Seems like ice would be a luxury item compared to food and just regular old water.”

“You don’t understand: WE NEED THAT ICE!” She cried. “Some of Germaine’s friends brought us ice from Naples in the back of their car” — such a trans-state delivery, I should point out, requires a three hour drive — “and when they got to our parking lot, people were clamoring to buy the ice from them before they got it up the stairs. This morning, David went to the store and there were police guarding the ice. They have to keep the hordes away. They’re scalping it in some places — for twenty bucks a pound!”

It’s always surprising how easy it is to peer through the thin veneer of civilization and encounter humanity’s intrinsic impulse to madness. Glimpses appear here and there in places — the beer line at Coachella; the Barney’s Warehouse Sale; the Dutch tulip craze — but what my mother described was a direct preview of the mechanics of apocalypse.

Forty eight hours after Frances was gone, the whole area was still under curfew. No power meant no television. The radio was broadcasting only emergency information: damage reports, shelter locations, food distribution points, and what few stores were open where you could buy things like … ice.

And fuel. Only a few gas stations were functioning, and the lines there were “absolutely un-fucking-believable.” The same was true, my mother said, at the grocery stores, where it was illegal to sell perishables because of the lack of refrigeration. “But I snuck out of there with some cream cheese,” my mother said. “Because I need to have my cream cheese.”

The FEMA food distribution sites, manned by the national guard, were also taxed. Green Acres is in Palm Beach County, where FEMA brought in 200,000 pounds of ice, 120,000 bottles of water, and 1,000 meals. “But they ran out fast,” my mother said. “And some of the relief trucks were hijacked anyway.”

“Huh?”

“Yeah — there was a truck coming down to Palm Beach with those army meals and some water, and it was hijacked. Taken before it got here.” Thus had Frances created modern-day brigandry right in the middle of suburban Florida.

But it turned out my mother didn’t have to depend on the National Guard for food. Her neighbor, Jean, is one of those ladies who has an extra freezer stacked solid with meat, and, as my mother explained, “she had just filled it up before Frances hit with $250 worth of steak and everything. And I mean good stuff, not like your grandmother used to cheap out on. She had this beautiful rack of ribs in there, a nice veal, some pork chops … ”

With no power the meat would go to waste, so they decided to cook it all right then and there. As Frances still raged, my mom fired up the foot-wide, propane-powered Coleman. One neighbor brought over some vodka. Another brought bread. Skrap worked the grill, Jean lit candles, Germaine poured drinks, and the whole wing of her building proceeded to have a fancy apocalyptic barbeque in my mother’s apartment. “It was a little weird,” my mother said. “But, why not? Everyone else was eating canned beans, but we threw a feast. When it seems like the end of the world is coming, you might as well live a little.”

Powell V. Bush

Here's what Colin Powell wrote about pulling strings to get into the National Guard in his 1995 Autobiography "My American Journey":

"I am angry that so many sons of the powerful and well placed and many professional athletes (who were probably healthier than any of us) managed to wangle slots in Reserve and National Guard units. Of the many tragedies of Vietnam, this raw class discrimination strikes me as the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal and owe equal allegiance to our country."

No wonder he's not so crazy about his Commander-in-Chief.

Another Video

This is ABC footage of a protester getting kicked by an RNC staffer on the floor of Madison Square Garden. The woman was arrested. The Republican was not.

Click on the still to see the video.

And if you recognize this fucker, turn him in.

Message From Beyond

John Preskill needs to give back that encyclopedia to Steven Hawking, because the Republican National Convention proved once and for all that there are indeed multiple universes — the one we live in, and the one in the minds of Republican speechwriters — and the monstrous black hole that joins them tore open over the dais where Bush appeared before us with his own message from “beyond the stars.”

That line came at the end of a speech that began with bizarre falsehoods and a litany of hollow gestures accompanied by no details except for some dusty old files from the GOING NOWHERE drawer over at the Cato Institute library. But it was after leading his flock across that barren policy desert when Bush’s real hallucinations began. “We have led,” Bush declared with well-practiced solemnity, “many have joined, and America and the world are safer.” Huh? — oh right, he means in that other universe flickering in and out of existence all around us like quantum foam. With each new sentence Bush led us further into that alternate realm where a complete failure of a foreign policy is praised as a campaign centerpiece. Bush wove together the magical realm only he can see and the one we live in to establish a new, patchwork narrative in which post-war Iraq is a beacon of freedom, and rather than exhausting our political capital in the wrong place, America has harvested so much good will around the world the rest of the bad guys (like the ones in North Korea who do have nuclear weapons) are lining up to raise their white flags.

Thus have the Republicans inadvertently taken the country on an philosophical outing, a prime time journey into the strange frontier of Republican semiotics and epistemology, where words are detached from all meaning, and knowledge is fluid, and there sure as hell is no truth.

Drawing from Machiavelli and Karl Popper simultaneously, the post-post-Structuralists at the GOP have realized they can say fuck it and step off the abyss: Why bother with existing truth when it’s so much easier to create your own? Let the Democrats toil in the rocky landscape of facts and information and seek to explain it. Our words create new realities that needs no explanation.

This has been the guiding principle since the convention opened, starting with Giuliani, who personified such trickery by maintaining an image of moderation while presenting the most authoritarian language of the week. Zell Miller, the first man to grow fangs and hair and start howling on national television, was the only one at the podium time to slip and reveal the true face behind the GOP’s Portrait of Dorian Gray politics. (Having gotten a good view under the Garden’s bright lights, Zellologists nationwide finally have a chance to figure out exactly where in the Australopithecus lineage he belongs.) But it was telling that Miller was dis-invited from the delegates’ box the final night because of his untamed delivery — rather than the more insidious trouble that his twenty minutes of oratory sagged heavy with lies.

Bush’s address was more graceful in it’s unreality.

Listening to it was like trying to comprehend the transcendence of Pi, or the geometry of imaginary numbers. Unfettered by the constraints of truth, Bush laid out an ethereal vision of his splendid record: about having “passed the most important education reform in history”; and how the tax relief was a boon to the economy; and what a glorious time it is now that democracy is flowering across the middle east.

Juxtaposing those words with our own, physical universe became dizzying. The fabulism of one statement was still being mentally catalogued when the next one would come along and rend a new fissure in the spacetime around the Garden.

And as the competing realities oscillated in and out of phase — Bush universe. . . real universe. . . Bush . . . real . . . — the swirling maw of the wormhole over the arena grew, and I worried about being sucked in. Bush tried to invoke Truman, the man for whom The Buck famously stopped. There was wind from the suction as the portal widened a bit further. Then I recalled that it’s Bush who won’t take responsibility for his mistakes, like when he tried to lay blame on his erstwhile Old Europe allies’ intelligence services for the reckless war of his in Iraq that they all opposed. The Garden shuddered from the cosmic friction, and my notes flew off the table.

“What’s happening?” I asked Stephen Elliott, who was sitting next to me.

“He’s taking us to the other side,” Stephen said. His hair was blowing around and his eyes were crossed as he tried to resolve our trans-dimensional existence. Then he asked me why there where so many eyeballs with wings flying through the press stands.

Luke Mitchell from Harper’s wore a beatific smile as the room trembled from the gateway's power. “Dear God,” he sighed, taking off his glasses to look at the light emanating from that other world where only optimism reigns. “It’s . . . beautiful.”

Delegates spiraled up from their seats toward the portal. The security men held on to railings and chairs, but they succumbed as well. Time slowed, and I saw myself walk past as an old man. Then I laid in a richly appointed death bed, watching my own giant embryo floating in space. There were streaks of light and a tremendous, deep white noise, and I began to realize that President Bush is just a regular fella, a straight-talker from the heartland who believes in all of us, in our values and our vitality as Americans, and that if only we had smaller government, and privatized social security to help us save a little nest egg for our families, and maybe some legal reform to keep the trial lawyers from slowing down business, then all the world’s problems would end. Bush would resolve the vale of tears in our tiresome, terrestrial world into a wonderful dream.

“Where are we?” I whispered to Stephen.

“I don’t know. . .” he said, his eyes filled with wonder.

Next to me, the reporter from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette turned into my grandma Dotty. She wore her Hashomer Hatzair uniform and cravat. Behind her was the moshava in New Jersey. It was 1929. “The shomrim love the President. Herzl and Marx love the President!”

Grandma? Is that you? I miss you. But — why do you have your arm around Paul Wolfowitz? Grandpa hated Wolfowitz. When did Wolfowitz join the Movement?

“The Movement joined him.” She said. “I have your favorite Jell-O here for you, Joshy. Orange flavor. Join us.”

The wind howled. It pulled me upside down, and I held on to the press box with one hand. My grip loosened, from four fingers, down to three then two — until, just at the brink of surrender, came that “calling from beyond the stars” at the close of the speech, which was just the catalyst for the wormhole to snap shut, collapsing the multiple realities over the Garden into a single, immutable reality — the one where the actual message from beyond the stars* last week came from the kind of scientific research that Bush doesn’t believe in. The one where Bush waged a one-man war on almost every worthwhile policy of the past half-century. The one where Bush can quote a letter from a Fellow at a conservative think tank and pretend that it was written by one of the soldiers he sent to Iraq. The one true reality, in short, where everything the man says is plain old Texas bullshit.

It was with great relief that I fell back into the chair I’d stolen from the Arizona Republic. With clarity of thought restored, I could again see the convention for the cheap con that it was. And the transparency seemed all the more apparent having visited the void with the Republican spirit guide. As Luke said, putting his glasses back on: “Man, that was like that one acid trip where all is revealed as dust.” Back in the solid world, I realized yet again that if you don’t fall for the GOP’s presto-chango act, their stage show is empty. Without the magic, there’s nothing.

“That’s it?” Stephen said.

“Guess so,” I said, gathering my computer and chargers and notes from the floor. The balloons were falling, but the room was emptying already.

“Let’s go home.”

___

Days ago SETI discovered a special signal, perhaps aliens, which if true would be awesome. Read about it here.

Bush Lied; People Died

Super Duper Exclusive Via Special Synergy With Air America's "The Majority Report."

Click on the still above to play footage.

Now this takes some balls. These scenes are from the floor of the Republican National Convention Thursday night. When the President mentioned Iraq, June Brashares unfurled a banner that with what became the tidiest protest slogan of the week: "Bush Lied; People Died." As Brashares was escorted out she continued to yell those words. Brashares was one of three protesters who made it into Madison Square Garden on the final night to disrupt President Bush's existentially bogus speech. Incredibly, she got in the convention with no credential by boarding one of the shuttle busses departing from a delegate hotel. When she got to the Garden, she claimed to have lost her credential, and security issued her a new one. So as to maximize visual effect, she chose as her protest spot a seat down in the delegation rows on the floor, and the chair she eventually stood on to protest was apparently offered to her by an unwitting Pete Wilson.

The actions were planned by Code Pink, a group organized by Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans. Evans was also in the hall Thursday night, in the press section. She pulled off her dress to reveal a pink slip scrawled with the slogan "Fire Bush! Women Say Bring The Troops Home Now!" It was only a few seconds before security personnel apprehended her and quickly escorted her out Gate 75. The third protestor was Jorge Medina, whose son Irving was killed in Iraq in November 2003.

Code Pink activists were able to infiltrate security the last nights of the convention to disturb the major speeches given by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dick Cheney, and President Bush. As Cheney spoke, Tiffany Burns of Los Angeles stood up and unfurled a banner that said: "Cheney and Halliburton: Making a Killing in Iraq." Burns, Evans and Brashares were all released from Jail and charged with disorderly conduct. Brashares was also charged with assault.

Medina was not charged because the authorities sympathized with his grief over the loss of his son in Iraq. On Tuesday, Fernando Suarez del Solar, another acitivist whose son Jesus was killed in Iraq, stood up during Laura Bush's speech and held up a poster with a picture of his son. As Suarez was being escorted out of the hall, many of the Republican delegates expressed their sympathy and said they agreed with him. Suarez was even able to conduct interviews with media and talk to a couple dozen Republicans before security brought him out of the hall.

Medina also said that as he left he could see the compassion from the delegates in their eyes. "They watchied the picture of my son," he said, "and they didn't say anything to me, except a few said they were sorry." As did the police, who, Medina says treated him very well. Which means his and Suarez's couragous moments were unusually effective. Their statements were able to penetrate Republican indifference and mean something to the other side, making their actions the most moving and important protests of the entire week, and perhaps even the administration.

And check out my latest post: It's an RNC wrap-up about how Bush's speech proved that there are indeed multiple universes -- the real one in which we live, and the one in the minds of the GOP. Find out what it's like to almost get sucked in!

And: Read my exploration of the strange frontier of Republican moderates in the LA Weekly. Like the Discovery channel, it's fascinating and edifying.

Protest footage by Jason Blalock. See more stills from the video on the Majority Report's site.

Man It's Weird Down Here

You can't tell, but this is, like, ten feet from the lava pit.

Infiltrators

In case anyone is wondering about all the booing midway through Bush's speech, it was due to protest from a couple activists inside the Garden. There was one in each of the press stands. The first (pictured above) was to the right of the stage, the second to the left. They were both, I think, affiliated with Code Pink. The first was a man whose son was killed in Iraq. The second protester to stand was Jodie Evans, one of the group's main organizers. She was closer to where I was sitting. When Bush mentioned Iraq, she revealed slogans on her clothes, stood up and said, "Bush lied; people died."

It was only a matter of seconds before security personnel were dragging her up the stairs and out gate 75. Along the way, the Bush crowd above the press stands started booing, attracting the attention of the delegations on the floor, who turned to boo as well. But the booing gave way to "USA" and "Four More Years" chants.

We'll have video of one of the protesters tomorrow.

Red Cups!

"Pro Manolos; Pro Bush" the one on the right says. Where were these girls at the Sleeping With The Enemy party? I didn't know wifebeaters with titty slogans were proper dress for gals with those "conservative values" Bush was talking about a few minutes later!

Isengard

I know this is kind of out of geographic order, but here's the ring traveling past Isengard.

Further correspodence on this topic:

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Knezevich
To: J Bearman
Subject: Re: Help Frodo get the ring to Mordor

Have you found Gollum yet?

-----Original Message-----
From: J Bearman
To: Steve Knezevich
Subject: Re: Re: Help Frodo get the ring to Mordor

No! That is what I need, but it hasn't happened yet. How can I find him?

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Knezevich
To: J Bearman
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Help Frodo get the ring to Mordor

He will find you.

Axis of Eve

I missed this protest somehow.

(Photo courtesy of David Kupfer.)

Wednesday: Pulling Back The Curtain

I. No Ticket

I was really looking forward to the Miller/Cheney late-night horror show double feature last night. It’s hard to beat two for the price of one. But as much as I wanted to see the Vice President — I wonder when Dick changed the family name from Chaney to Cheney? — up close to count how many bats would fly out of his mouth during the speech, I was not in the hall, owing to some michegoss with our organizations’ credentials; and when I tried to wander insid without the proper badge, I was questioned by Secret Service.

“What organization are you with?” asked the man with the buzz cut and earpiece.

“LA Weekly,” I said.

[…]

“Village Voice Media,” I then offered.

“Uh-huh,” he said, staring me down, hoping my face would give away a contradiction or other valuable national security information.

“And this here’s my homie with Harper’s,” I said, jovially pointing at Luke, a friend from that magazine.

[…]

“This whole thing with the colors is complicated,” I added somewhat nervously. “We’re sharing credentials, and so I guess I’m not going in.”

[…]

“Everyone’s trying to get the right beads hanging around their neck, you know?” I added, smiling now to conceal my anxiety at being kicked of the Garden altogether. “It’s like goddamn Mardi Gras!”

I wanted to add “except without the titty,” but caught myself just in time.

The guy left us alone after a few more minutes. But I did notice we were tailed for a while thereafter. Maybe even by a chain of radio-networked security people — although this may have been my imagination, I swear there were eyes on me after that, and I kept wondering if all the earpieces were broadcasting an APB to watch for a guy looking especially suspicious in sandals and a cowboy shirt. Because what kind of weirdo, really, would wear sandals and a cowboy shirt to the RNC?

II. Spook Show

So Luke and I repaired to the leather club chairs in the Barney’s boutique and Completely Bare spa at the back of the Farley Building across from Madison Square Garden. We had a half dozen of those little keg-shaped Heinekens, gathered from the Bell South media hospitality lounge in the basement, and drank them in good cheer with an agent from Immigration and Customs who said he’s not going to vote because “they’re all the same, these politicians,” and waved his hand at the TV as the speeches got started.

It was at that moment that the house lights dimmed and the red-gelled footlights turned to catch Zell Miller, rising out of the stage with his arms and cape outstretched, surrounded by fog and cackling to the D minor opening bars of the Tocatta and Fugue.

I’m not going to analyze the speeches, other than to say that Wednesday night was when the country got a direct glimpse into the dark heart of the GOP — beneath the rotting ribcage, that the heart beats at all is a testament to the power of bile to keep a corpse alive. There are no ideas emanating from the floor of Madison Square Garden other than to frighten people.

(For plenty of specifics, check out Marc Cooper, and even Andrew Sullivan, who described Miller’s speech as full of “bald lies, straw men, and hateful rhetoric.”)

Last night was also a glimpse further behind the GOP curtain, another example of how Republicans try to project an image of power using smoke and mirrors and flimsy carnie theatrics. Up close, however, you can see the strings. It’s like being lured inside Dr. Mephisto’s Terror Trailer at the state fair only to realize that you paid five bucks to look at a midget in Halloween face paint from Rite-Aid talking to a wax head in a jar.

Miller’s spook show was feeble. And Dick Cheney was like a sinister, malfunctioning version of the Abe Lincoln Speaks at Disneyland, pausing between every sentence so the chip in his brain could transmit the next few words and the animatronic motor sequence from the subterranean mainframe beneath Halliburton’s corporate office.

There was a distinct vulnerability in the ferocity of the attack on Kerry and the poor performance. The response in the room may have looked lively on television, but I suspected it still wasn’t anywhere near the intensity of the floor at the DNC, and that was confirmed by Stephen Elliott, who was up close and said that the third night of the convention only reinforced his suspicion that the entire GOP is like a hologram — touch it, and your hand goes right through. “They got nothing, these guys,” he said by cellphone as the cameras on the network feed I was watching at the Barney's spa zeroed on some poor Republican delegates doing some approximation of dancing as the wrap-up R & B cover tunes kicked in. “After Obama,” Steve said as I stuffed my bag with free solar pads and bottles of gentle green tea exfoliating wash and got ready to head to the Billionaires for Bush Coronation Ball. “There was a massive optimism. The lights went on. It was about possibilities. The Republicans are about keeping the room dark. ‘Aren’t you terrified?’ they say, with flashlights below their faces. Don’t be fooled people — it’s just a flash light.”

Linkage!

Several things to check out:

Travis LaFrance looks for the Republican love that I too covet.

The Village Voice is running dispatches from inside the tawdry doings of Republicans at night.

Stephen Elliott's got some new stuff.

Come up with a caption for Bizarro Lincoln. (That guy is a real Republican delegate.)

That's all for now.