John Edwards Says No.

According to Reuters, After giving the keynote speech at CTIA, the wireless industry showcase (that I wish I was at,) John Edwards was asked in a small Q&A session if he would accept the VP slot for either candidate....He said No.
Apparently he also declined to endorse one candidate or the other, but I would've guessed that!
Oh well...Onwards and ...upwards....

c/p RIPCoco

The Silence of John and Elizabeth Edwards...New York Magazine's John Heilemann on Who Councils Hillary and Whatever Else About the Rest of It....

This week's New York Magazine has a piece by John Heilemann , and Ive been turning the thing over and over in my head since I found it in the mailbox, and shortly thereafter got a call from my Mom who, upon receiving hers, was excitedly reporting to me about how this little piece contains some answers about the silence of John and Elizabeth Edwards. Mom was saying that clearly he and Elizabeth had had some sort of falling out with Obama and also that Elizabeth really, really hates Hillary.

Obviously she had just glanced at it, because the gist was really more about who councils Hillary and who is powerful enough in the democratic party to grab control of what seems to be a runaway train. The fact that Elizabeth Edwards finds Obama's health care plan to be not as good as Hillary's and that Obama had been supposedly "brusque" or rude to the Edwards' immediately following his withdrawal from the race, comes off as the gossipy headline but isn't the real story here. This is the sort of thing that you do find from time to time in New York Magazine, in that it can run with the more lurid lead, even in the face of a more substantial story, and people who do what my Mom does, which is to read the first paragraph and then scan the rest, can miss the point. And this is a kind of misleading journalism that is based on what the journalist can glean through his instant message interviews with party bigwigs, and just his gut, is a little misleading. I like Heilemann, but it seems that he is about opinion. Even as it seems like he is on the inside reporting real news, when you look through his columns, they are really opinion pieces, wrapped in whatever connections he has. I'm not saying hes wrong, but I read New York Magazine with a grain of salt, and I hope that everyone else does too.

Well, today Elizabeth Edwards responded to Heilemann's piece on Morning Joe. In her usual dignified way, she attacked just the gossipy parts and left the rest alone...though if Joe had been a better reporter he might have dug a little. The thing is that I don't think that he wants to go there; not really. Elizabeth stated that she didn't find Obama rude and actually found him quite charming. She did confirm that she doesn't like Obama's plan, and prefers Hillary's, and then she left the question of her storied open dislike for Clinton hanging.

Heilemann's in print guess seems to be that Elizabeth may be the reason that Johnny has not made an endorsement. Y'know, I'm pretty interested in knowing what the hell is going on in the Edwards camp, but this reaching and turning some vague snippets into a story that ends with sentences like "Maybe that's why he...." is a little pathetic. The piece implies, or rather states, that Edwards endorsement has been held up by how nice one or the other of the candidates was to him on the day of his withdrawal. Isn't that silly? Does that make any sense? These people are politicians, and yes they have big egos, but they also have thick skin, and there is no way that an entire strategy could come down to how one or the other acted towards him on that one day.

In going over how badly Obama did with the Edward's, Heilemann pushes the envelope further into concern for his diplomatic prowess, in comparison to the story that Hillary was all over them and was almost, maybe able to win Elizabeth over with her kindness and ass kissing. So, then...he goes on to say that if its true that Obama failed to impress Edwards, he doesn't have the diplomatic skills to run the country! And McCain does? Clinton does? Bush does? I dunno...
I suppose that this is one area that Hillary has more experience than the average politician, because she traveled alot as first lady and was around the necessary niceties in diplomatic exchange, but I'd hardly call Obama a slouch, and certainly not because of this! But Heilemann must know that the art of ass-kissing is a very ass-specific endeavor, and best carried out by people who are very adept and the bend over and twist. I find this all a little embarrassing and rather condescending to the Edwards and everyone else involved in this farce of a democratic process...especially the main stream media.


The real point of this story is that Gore and Edwards are the most powerful people in the democratic party right now and...who is going to stop Hillary??? He eventually wends through the merits of Pelosi or Reid talking to her and how much weight or clout Terry McAuliffe or Stephanie Tubbs Jones might have. But ultimately, it appears, that even here, in the lap of gossip, Hillary listens to no one but herself....and that, my friends, is the real reason for everything that is happening.


We're fighting for our lives here, people, lets try to focus on McCain and his lies, lies, lies!
Its apparent that this thing is gonna go all they way because the M$M needs to sell soap, and the daytime drama market is just not cutting it.

c/p RIPCoco

Good News!

Finally, enlightenment is at hand!

A reason to be cheerful

OK, so I lied about not blogging.

In the past, when I've headed to North Carolina the first Wednesday in April, it's to go to Full Frame Fest in Durham. Since I'm no longer reviewing movies on anything resembling a regular basis, and in fact rarely even going to the movies anymore, it seemed pointless to either buy an event pass or accept a press pass this year.

It's not that the world of movie reviewing misses me all that much, and I see far more daylight than I used to. But today there's a reason for moviegoers to celebrate: Roger Ebert is coming back!

Among cinephiles, "real" film criticism is the province of guys like Jonathan Rosenbaum and J. Hoberman, who wouldn't deign to give a good review to anything not made in the Czech Republic. I exaggerate, of course, except that for me, Roger Ebert is a titan of a magnitude I didn't realize until he was gone for the scene and twits like Christy Lemire took over his spot in my local paper.

Aside from an unfortunate obsession with Angelina Jolie's chest that has often colored his view of her work, Ebert is a reviewer for ordinary people. He's able to evaluate a movie based on what it's trying to do within its genre, not just in relation to how it compares to, say, Knife in the Water. And in doing so, he makes his reviews fun to read on their own.

And now, after a long absence due to a recurrence of cancer, he's coming back -- at least to the printed page:

In a letter published in Tuesday's Chicago Sun-Times, the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic and co-host of TV's "Ebert & Roeper" said surgery in January ended in complications, and his ability to speak was not restored. He said the return of speech would require another surgery.

"But I still have all my other abilities, including the love of viewing movies and writing about them," Ebert said.

Ebert, 65, said he's looking forward to his annual film festival starting April 23.

"I will resume writing movie reviews shortly thereafter," he said.

Ebert, famous for his "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down" critiques, had surgery in 2006 to remove a cancerous growth on his salivary gland. He also had emergency surgery that year after a blood vessel burst near the site of the operation.

He had undergone cancer surgery three times before the 2006 operation — once in 2002 to remove a malignant tumor on his thyroid gland and twice on his salivary gland the following year.

Ebert said he remains cancer-free, and is not ready to think about more surgery.

"I should be content with the abundance I have," he said.

I know I am.

Welcome back, Rog. We missed you.

(h/t: Melissa)

On the road

Traveling this morning; no blogging till later on today.

The presidency is no place to resolve the emotional baggage of your youth

We've already seen what happens when we have a president who has massive issues with his father. George W. Bush has demonstrated a combination of extreme need for his father's approval and love, combined with a strong resentment of his father for clearly favoring his younger brother Jeb and a need to show that he can be more successful than his father. Bush has played out his family baggage on the world stage in every facet of his presidency, from spurning the old man's advisors to invading a country that did nothing to us, because in his eyes, the old man didn't have the balls to see the Iraq conflict of 1991 through to the end. It was one thing when George W. Bush, a lifetime screwup, was drilling dry holes in Texas or running businesses fueled by the money of his father's friends, into the ground. But then he was given the entire country to play with, and true to form, he's run it into the ground -- and destroyed another country, Iraq, as a bonus.

Do we really think that another president who has unresolved issues from his youth is going to be able to fix this mess?

The conventional wisdom about John McCain is that he comes from a long line of distinguished military men, and with a strong sense of duty and patriotism, decided to continue this noble tradition. The truth, however, makes him sound more like the current occupant of the White House -- a legacy admission with a distinct ambivalence about carrying on a family tradition:

Following in his fathers' wake, McCain sets course for the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, the class of 1958.

Sen. McCain: It was always a certainty that I was going to go to the Naval Academy as my father and grandfather had before me. Not that I didn't' want to go to the Naval Academy, but my sort of resentment that it was a preordained kind of an operation.

At first he enjoys the physical challenge of basic training.

But McCain refuses to submit to the rigid discipline and often humiliating hazing rituals. He spends the next four years fighting the system.

Sen. McCain: I viewed it as a competition, to see how much I could get away with, and at the same time remain at the school, a very careful balancing act [laughs].

While most midshipmen are towing the line, McCain spends much of his four years crossing it. Partying is becoming his trademark.

Frank Gamboa, Naval Academy Classmate: If you went to a party with John, you were going to party right until the absolute last man coming racing back to the Naval Academy just before the end of curfew [laugher]. So if you didn't want to live on the edge, then you never went to a party with John McCain.

Sen. McCain: We had incredible enjoyable times with each other, and of course our constant search for female companionship consumed a great deal of our time as well. Not to mention the time we spent trying to illegally consume alcoholic beverages So, it was fun.

With bad grades and a rash of discipline demerits, McCain comes perilously close to flunking out of the academy.

But McCain hangs on, barely. In May 1958, with President Eisenhower himself passing out diplomas, McCain graduates, fifth from the bottom of his class.

Sen. McCain: President Eisenhower had asked to see the anchorman, the person who had finished at the bottom of the class. I remember at the time regretting a bit that I hadn't done a little worse so that I would have gotten to go up and shake hands with the president.

That McCain wasn't the rigid-backed tightass of his legend is largely because of his reputation as a war hero after enduring five years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi. But while we can argue about whether this makes him a hero or a victim, we cannot ignore that Vietnam is still the prism through which he views his role in the world. George W. Bush saw Iraq as either a way to vindicate himself to his father, or a way to prove that his penis was bigger than that of his father. John McCain sees Iraq, and gaining the presidency so he can preside over the Iraq War, as his way of finally winning the Vietnam War and putting his own demons to rest.

Mark Benjamin, at Salon:

In a major national security speech delivered last week, John McCain invoked his experience in Vietnam to explain his support for a significant U.S. troop presence in Iraq for as long as it takes to prevent a wider catastrophe in the region. "I hold my position because I hate war, and I know very well and very personally how grievous its wages are," the former POW said in an address to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. "But I know, too, that we must pay those wages to avoid paying even higher ones later."

But the truth is that it's always about Vietnam for John McCain. He has invoked avoiding the mistakes of Vietnam with a sort of religious fervor in every important debate about dispatching U.S. troops since he first entered Congress in 1983. As he put it in an Aug. 18, 1999, speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he studies "every prospective conflict for the shadow of Vietnam." In fact, a look at his record shows that he subjects every major foreign-policy decision to a Vietnam-derived test similar to the famed Powell doctrine, a test summed up by the McCain quote, "We're in it, now we must win it."

So entrenched are those lessons that McCain sounds, at times, like he wishes they could be applied retroactively. "We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal," McCain said at a speech on Iraq at the Council on Foreign Relations on Nov. 5, 2003. And for that reason, it might be advisable to take him at his word when he says he'll stay in Iraq for 100 years. Whether Vietnam is the prism through which he judges national security decisions, or the rationale he uses to explain whatever position he decides to take -- and even if the lessons he says he's learned from Vietnam often seem contradictory -- he has applied his Vietnam test to Iraq and come up with the decision to stay.

It isn't as though McCain has viewed every military conflict through this "must-win" prism. He voted against Ronald Reagan's plan to keep American troops in Lebanon in 1983. He had concerns about the first Gulf War. But whether it's because of the sacrifice to his honor that sucking up to George W. Bush for the last eight years, or because of his primal need to win the Vietnam War, he has developed a blind spot where Iraq is concerned.

It's time we put a stop to allowing these men to resolve their issues with their families by putting the blood of other people's children on the line.

Your Cuppa Morning Sedition

Well, not quite. But here in New York, progressive talk radio, which has sucked royally since Air America moved to the weak-signalled WWRL, has become even suckier this week. The suck started with the move, was mitigated somewhat when long-in-the-wilderness Richard Bey was brought on to do an evening show. Then, just as that show was achieving a kind of groove, WWRL owner Rennie Bishop hired Mark Riley and put Bey on with him in the morning. This duo worked well, even though the callers were often not up to the intellectual level of the hosts. But Mark Riley decided he didn't want the hours and went back to his old stomping grounds at WLIB. Bishop brought in the clearly lunatic Coz Carson, and before I could turn around, Bey was out of there. And with Air America having decided to abandon morning drive time altogether, that left Carson to rant and rave all by himself -- without me.

This week, the so-called "flagship station" of Air America Radio, jettisoned two more Air America shows -- the Lionel Show, otherwise known as Mark Green's Boondoggle (well, David Bernstein's boondoggle, actually, but Bernstein was Green's boondoggle) -- a show that will NOT be missed, and the Thom Hartmann show. Hartmann's timeslot here in New York will be taken by Ed Schultz, which I guess is better than, say, Rush Limbaugh, but it's enough to make me miss All Franken. So now WWRL's lineup is chock full of vitamin supplement infomercials, punctuated only by Randi Rhodes and Rachel Maddow -- the latter at least until the suits at MSNBC get smart and give her a show there. And the hour of Seder on Sundays that they had deigned to give us for a while is gone as well.

This morning Air America boasts a new web site, which looks much better than the old one but is even more difficult to navigate and slow as molasses; and the whole thing is enough to make me want to pull out some old Morning Sedition podcasts from 2005 to listen to today, except that our old friend and fellow Seditionist Vernon sent along this clip of Marc Maron on Tampa Bay's Media Talk: