Visions of the Future

Since 2006, the architecture magazine eVolo has empanelled an international jury to judge a prize for designs that express new ideas for skyscrapers--essentially, designs for the skyscrapers of the future.  Futuristic design has a long history, with possibly the most famous being the structures designed and even built for the 1939 New York Worlds Fair.  These were soaring, optimistic visions for an amazing future.

The designs selected as winners and runners-up in this 2012 competition are strikingly different.  This is the first prize winner, designed by three Chinese architects.  With spindly legs, resembling both the original H.G. Wells and especially the Steven Spielberg vision of War of the Worlds Martian machines, the structures are appropriately futuristic--but the purpose of these "Himalayan Water Towers" is to store water and regulate its dispersal, in response to the faster melting due to the Climate Crisis of the ice sheets that provide 40% of the world's fresh water.

The second place design, also from China, provides residences for mountainous areas scoured by industrialization and mineral extraction.  Third place went to a Taiwan design for a New York landfill tower, three times the height of the Empire State Building, which will process garbage and turn it into energy. 

Among the 22 honorable mentions:  a design from the Ukraine for Japan, of fortress skyscrapers protected against Climate Crisis and other disasters, and a "Migrant Skyscraper" design from Poland, which is a total living environment literally on giant wheels, so the population housed within can be quickly moved as disaster encroaches.

In fact, nearly every design is responding to the Climate Crisis or other ecological catastrophe (like the underwater structure to be sunk into the sea in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, to process the accumulating plastics.) One is actually called Noah's Ark.  This is the future these architects are designing for.

The countries represented in the honorable mentions are South Korea, Mexico, Switzerland, Romania, Spain, Serbia, France, the UK and Iran.  The U.S. is represented in four projects: two by architects with Chinese names, and two in partnership with China, Japan, Greece and the UK. 

3 Pointer

Talk about the luck of O'Bama.  And we don't even have to mention the luck of the draw in his GOPer opponents.

His task was to get a little best buddies thing going with the stiffly anonymous--and conservative--PM of the UK, David Cameron.  So: why not a little ride on the very impressive Air Force One, with lots of informal time to talk?  That worked--they talked the whole trip.  Check.

The destination was an NCAA tournament basketball game--Cameron had never seen b-ball, so it's a good story, too, and something for him to talk about at home.  There were several possible venues--why not the one in Ohio?  It might have crossed somebody's mind that Ohio is an important state in the 2012 election-- no GOPer has won the presidency without winning Ohio.  And so at halftime the President tells the local press,"Sometimes when we have foreign visitors, they're only visiting the coasts. They go to New York, they go to Washington, they go to Los Angeles, but the heartland is what it's all about."  So what's the headline in the Dayton newspaper?  The Heartland is What It's All About.  Check.

So far it's smart diplomacy and smart politics.  But here's where the luck comes in:  the game that President Obama and PM Cameron saw.  Western Kentucky, the decided underdog, was down by 16 points with five minutes to go.  They won the game by one point with a full court press and clutch shooting in "the most fantastic 5-minute finish in NCAA tournament history."  So it becomes a game that Cameron and Ohio--not to mention Western Kentucky--will have imprinted on their memories.  Check: three point play.

Of Health and Polls

GOPers think they have a winning issue in gubment control of healthcare, in Obamacare and even Medicare as expensive and intrusive.  That's somewhat why Romney makes them nervous--he has to grow a really long nose to distance himself from Romneycare.  But how winning are these issues?

The facts have never been in their side, and ironically a new study suggests that Medicare costs are coming down because healthcare costs are stabilizing and declining, and that may well be because of Obamacare, which is just effectively getting started.  And this study expects the trend to continue.

There's some questions anyway whether Obamacare is a minus for the reelection campaign, and might well be a plus (the Obama campaign thinks so, especially with particular groups, like women and Latinos.)  Ironically, getting it fully discussed in a presidential campaign might dispel some of the idiotic misconceptions about it, especially now that some provisions have taken effect and are working as intended.

Also this past week, there's been buzz about the sudden plunge in President Obama's favorability number in a couple of polls, notably the New York Times.  But since then another poll has emerged that show him gaining. Reuters: For the first time since early July, more Americans approve of the job President Barack Obama is doing than disapprove, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll that shows his approval rating now at 50 percent.

 But for those who need to jump to conclusions about the poll they've jumped to conclusions about, the rise in gasoline prices seemed the only possible culprit--a perception encouraged by GOPer mouths.  Only there is this poll that says it ain't true.  Two-thirds place the blame elsewhere, and more trust President Obama to deal with it than the GOPers.  The National Journal story headline is Poll Shows Public Supports Obama on Gas Prices.  

PM Update: Two new interesting polls.  The new Pew poll which also shows President Obama at 50% approval, and with a 12 point lead over Romney. 59% expect him to win reelection over Romney, 68% over Santorum.  And a U. of Maryland poll shows that 70% of Americans surveyed favor diplomacy to prevent Iran from going nuclear, with only 25% favoring Israeli air strikes.  Together with other surveys that show majorities in favor of withdrawing from Afghanistan, this is further evidence that America is now anti-war.

Later PM Update: The outlines of the Pew poll (Obama's higher favorability, beating Romney and Santorum)  are confirmed by another new poll by--get this--Fox News. 

After the Circus: Get Ready for the Hate

Despite Richie Richney outspending everybody (or more accurately, his SUPERPACS, which paid for over 90% of the on air ads) he could do no better than third in the Alabama and Mississippi primaries on Tuesday.  At late as this weekend, his campaign had convinced some of the punditocracy that he could win either or even both states.

Casino Newt Gingles was the evening's Biggest Loser--these were states he needed to win--but he lost both to Little Ricky Sanctimonious.  But has he been voted Off the Island?  Well, yes, but he refuses so far to go.  Great television, huh? 

Casino Newt, man of the people, needs his Casino Daddy to keep financing him or he'll have to walk to the next primary .  Even if he stays in, he may become increasing irrelevant to voters not in the deep South, but his few percentage points in Ohio and Michigan could have made Sanctimonious the winner of those states.  His rationale partly was to win a plurality in five states, so he would be guaranteed a speech at the GOPer convention, as well as other goodies.  He's won two states and there's nowhere else he's likely to win a third.  So he's lost even that. If his motivation is to hurt Richney, his best strategy is to drop out and support Little Ricky.  There is some peril in that--if it indeed becomes a two man race, then Ricky has no excuses if he loses to Richney in any primary. 

The Rabid Religious Right vote of these relatively few GOPers in these states was 75-80%.  By voting overwhelmingly for Ricky and Casino Newt (with Richney getting under 30%) they demonstrated their desire, in Jonathan Chait's words,"to nominate a genuine maniac as opposed to a fake one."
Polls in those states also determined that GOPers there overwhelmingly believe President Obama is not Christian either.  It's not clear they distinguish between "Muslim" and "Mormon" or even know (or care) there's a difference. Unless it's that Muslims are black.  You know, black Muslims. 

The nice pundits kept referring to these white evangelicals as expressing their "anger" at President Obama.  The correct word is not anger, it's hatred.  It's race hate, however bound up it is with other views and rationalizations.  And this portends a very very very ugly general election campaign ahead.

Ironically it could be even worse if Richney is the nominee, as still is more likely (though not as certain anymore.)  Because Richney will have little positive to say that the GOPer's essential Southern base want to hear.  So they will live on the negatives out of Richney's mouth--especially the dog whistle racism, how President Obama is not up to the job, etc.--but even more they will live on the ads and other campaign materials furnished and paid for by the millions and millions of SUPERPAC millions.  The TV/You Tube ads will be hateful enough, but the hate gets increasingly graphic and obvious farther down the chain: radio, robocalls, email, print. 

That race baiting was a forbidden tactic in 2008 should not lull anyone into the assumption that it means America became race neutral or enlightened--that may be truer of younger generations but it is still not true in general, and especially in the South.  Facing the fact every day that a black man is President of the United States has made hatred increasingly overt.  Hate groups are on the increase.  And the racism and hate that will infect this campaign has already begun.

It will be tricky to deploy--there is substantial danger of backlash, and of motivating Obama voters to rise in his defense--but this is a year in which GOPers seem unable to help themselves--they are consumed by fear and hate.  The abandon with which they go to extremes even against each other suggests that we will see more virulent hate than in any campaign for more than a century, and given the money to be spent, probably ever.  But it may also mean that in this way as in others, this election is fateful: either a Dark Ages victory or a last stand purging, an inoculation.

Not that there won't be costs to GOPers themselves, as in a silly circusy way there already has been.  Chait also points out how GOPers making a spectacularly stupid issue out of President Obama (like every President since and including Reagan) uses a teleprompter. "And speaking of a failure to communicate, the Republican war on teleprompters has poetically backfired. It began as a quasi-racist meme among the fever swamps of the right, a way for right-wingers to express their belief that Obama is a brainless talking doll. By catering to it, Republicans backed themselves into a position where they can’t use teleprompters at all. The result is a series of rambling election night speeches which manage to be at once frightening and dull. The speeches, like the race, just go on and on and on."

Emerson for the Day

"I love Nature partly because she is not man.  None of his institutions control or pervade her.  There a different kind of right prevails...He is constraint, she is freedom to me.  He makes me wish for another world.  She makes me content with this."

Thoreau

Blame

The necessary deeds of our times--the global recognition of the Climate Crisis, its urgency and the moral importance of addressing it, and then the urgently deployed efforts to slow down and stop what's causing it--have not been done. So far, as a society, and particularly as Americans, we have failed. 

We all share in this failure, that goes back more than 20 years.  The environmental community, with its inability to articulate, organize and act.  Political leaders who did not lead.  Citizens who indulged our fears and wallowed in denial. Communicators who for any number of reasons failed to effectively communicate the reality.  An economic structure that allows the greed of the few to trump the needs of the many, and of the future itself.  In this country, a reactionary political culture that discarded any more complex understanding in favor of shocking bigotry and sad fundamentalism, in a new Dark Ages of self-inflicted ignorance in the happy smog of smart phones.  Together we focus on the dazzle of the sometimes incrementally important events and issues that wind up distracting from the vitally important.

More broadly, it amounts to the failure of humanity to meet its greatest challenge.  Lots of generations through history have failed--let us count the wars, the piously murdered.  But just as our capabilities today are the largest, our failure is likely to be the most consequential.

One measure of our failure is our eagerness to blame everybody else.  But the evidence is there, despite the ebb and flow of polls on whether "global warming is real."  In particular, environmentalists who want to blame politicians etc. need to look in the mirror, because they too have blown it.  Their organizations remain fractured.  The leading online climate information and advocacy site is yet another exercise in egotism and Washington self-hypnosis.  The vocabulary deployed by environmentalists is pitifully inadequate, and their efforts to make a political difference may be valiant, but so far they are not up to the challenge.

For example, Bill McKibben, a hero in this fight along with a few others,  is struggling to retain some optimism.  He hailed the recent U.S. Senate vote to deny the Republican's cynical attempt to demand the Keystone Pipeline be built to carry tar sands oil down from Canada, over the President's objections.  He said it was a victory over the oil companies and the Senators they have in their pockets.

But this victory was not gained for the reasons that McKibben opposes the pipeline.  The environmental objections have to do with possible pollution and other such matters along the proposed pipeline route.  The climate crisis argument simply has not sunk in.  Even liberals now assume that once the pipeline is re-routed to respond to these other objections, it will be built.  That in itself is proof that the climate crisis argument hasn't even been heard.

And so the pipeline will be built, and the fracking will go on, victimizing those too poor to get themselves out of harm's way.  Just as the poor and the powerless pay the biggest price for the toxic effects of the piled up waste and pollution of our economy and society.  It is the second law of capitalism.  The first is that capitalism cannot exist without slavery, because it never has.  The second is that the costs of capitalism are paid in the health and lives of the 99% and the planet.  Capitalism alone cannot distinguish between use and exploitation, between creation and destruction.  The cynical rich are banking on their ability to weather the Climate Crisis, protected by their wealth, while the poor as usual bear the brunt--in this case, are snuffed out by the billions.  It ultimately is not a good gamble, at least not for their descendants.

Of course, the responsibility is not evenly distributed.  Fossil fuel billionaires and their witting and unwitting political, lobbying, PR, fundamentalist Christian zealot allies are first in line, by a long, long ways.  But though we do not share responsibility equally, we have all failed.  Of those who know and acknowledge the Climate Crisis reality, part of that failure is in misplaced blame.

President Obama has had to fight bitterly for even small incentives to encourage green energy, against oil-blooded GOPers.  But he has also approved more oil and natural gas production, which from an economic and energy point of view, is his governing responsibility.  He's not even getting much in the way of political credit for it so far.  Republicans claim he is stifling oil production when he is not.  So in a political sense, he may as well not encourage oil production.  But from a practical point of view, given the political context we all have created, he is engaged in the art of the possible.  As everyone else is.

But to save humanity from suffering and destructive change, and to save life on the planet from destructive change that will ultimately redound on us, we have failed.  It may be that the coming wave of the Climate Crisis has been in the cards since before more than a handful of scientists suspected the Climate Crisis future.  But what we've been doing in the past 20 years,and what we're doing now, is making the future worse, making the effects deeper and longer, and threatening civilization and life on the planet as we know it. 

As a global civilization, we may have 35 years to become carbon neutral, and thereafter carbon negative, in order to save the far future of humanity and life on the planet.  Or we may not. But it may be the difference perhaps between losing 2 or 3 billion people and losing all but some millions, or thousands.  It's the difference between losing virtually all the primates and many species of animals and plants, and losing almost all of the planet's life except a few small species. 

In the meantime, we have to also deal with the effects of what's inevitably coming much sooner, what's already begun.  To say we have failed so far is not to say we haven't tried.  Many of us have tried, so there's no sense getting defensive about it.  We just have to face the fact that so far, we have failed.  And we have to figure out how not to continue to fail.

We must not give up. We still must do our best, but we must also redefine what we do, if necessary.  And in general, it's necessary.  Because what we have been doing has not worked and is not working.  That's not even a reason to abandon everything we're doing--some efforts won't pay off for years, perhaps not in our lifetimes, we may never know how successful they've been.   But we have to reexamine. We have to reimagine. And stop blaming everybody but ourselves.

As I write this I realize that those who are most likely to read these words and take them to heart are the least responsible.  I am asking most of all that the people who are making this their business admit their failure and reexamine what they are doing, and not waste their time and ours by blaming others.  I am asking that those in position to influence public perception take this more seriously, and work harder to communicate this reality.

Our lives may be honorable.  We may have done great things--to me, raising and educating children is a great thing; creating something that has a future is a great thing.  But this is work for that future.  Admitting failure is not to admit hopelessness.  Hope is not a feeling.  Hope is an action.  Hope is (among other actions) a thought expressed, an expression communicated.  It is effort aimed at the human horizon, at the soul of the future.

Sweet Deception

Thursday was another sunny day.  The evening before, just after sunset, the southwest sky was dominated by the big and bright Venus and Jupiter, and to the north there was red Mars, now at its closest point to Earth, and near it the rising luminous full moon.

As much as I love such a night sky, and as much as I bathe in the warm sun and the cool air, I know it's not supposed to be this way, not so regularly, not in what's usually our rainy season, not in early March.  It's hard to complain about the sunniest winter I've ever experienced here (probably last winter comes in second.) There are undoubted benefits, just as there are elsewhere in the U.S. where the winter has been warm, where there has been little or no winter at all.  For instance, an oped in the New York Times recently pointed out that the warm weather has so far killed the flu season--which usually costs the economy, costs comfort and health, and costs some people their lives.

We're in the warming part of global warming, and for a lot of people in a lot of places, it's pretty sweet. (Not where the warm air helped spawn deadly tornadoes last week.)  But it's unfortunately as deceptive as that sweet name "global warming."  As I've argued for ten years now, the term makes the Climate Crisis seem too safe, and even sort of nice.  Warmth is a good thing.  When people get too warm, it's a minor inconvenience.  It's only when it's hot, when it's too hot, that things start getting serious.

And things will.  Even after this winter there will be consequences.  We may have skipped over flu season, but because of the lack of cold that slows or kills insects, we may be in for a pest-filled spring and a summer higher in disease and danger from insects.  Not to mention what this may portend for summer temperatures.

If over the next few years winters stay warm and summers get hotter (as on average they have been), we're apt to see the return of insects and other troublesome creatures in ways several generations haven't experienced.  I think of the ever-present houseflies in my childhood, that were even more of a plague in Mark Twain's day.  Though they've all but disappeared from everyday life, their presence may become greater in a hotter world, along with the diseases and other health problems they bring.  And that's just one possibility among many.

Here on the North Coast our seasonal rainfall is down by at least a third of normal, and snowpacks in the Sierras are half or less than what they should be.  We'll probably start paying for that very soon with an early fire season, and perhaps with water shortages this summer.  The long-term effect on the ecosystem--on the Redwoods--is incalculable at this point, but it's certainly not good for them.  They depend on rain, and on the moisture from fog which over the long term has itself been declining.            

This is the bittersweet effect of this warm winter, as is the higher number of Americans who suddenly believe the world is getting hotter after all.  It's hardly a matter of belief anymore, but of observation.  Even in this temporary sweet spot of the relentless change.

Your Old Road is Rapidly Aging

Some penetrating new political commentaries outline the long term and perhaps the present problem the Grand Old White Peoples Party has. 

In a piece that begins by quoting Romney's harsh position on aid to students (the headline is Pay For Your Own Damn College!), Jonathan Chiat at New York Magazine concludes: "Republicans are defending the shared cultural prerogatives of a certain group of people. That is why I am arguing that the shifting demographic tides will require the GOP to undertake a major reorientation in order to maintain its competitiveness. There’s simply no way to transpose their sense of what is and what is not a legitimate government function onto a progressively younger, browner electorate. (Latino voters overwhelmingly support Obama’s health care reform.) Their conception of us versus them can work for a while – it worked quite well with the anomalously old, white 2010 off-year electorate – but the them is rapidly outnumbering the us."

Specifically with the fastest growing population group, Latinos, GOPers are persistently and even doggedly digging themselves a black hole into which their electoral fortunes are already falling.  When asked which party supports their chance to achieve the American Dream, only 10% chose the GOWP.  President Obama beats any GOWP opponent by a factor of 6 to 1.  Said a GOP strategist  in this Monitor piece that outlines the problem, "If we don’t do better among Latinos, we are not going to be talking about how to get back Florida in the presidential race, we are going to be talking about how not to lose Texas.”

Meanwhile Josh Marshall at TPM offers the most cogent explanation for the mindset of Mitt Romney: as a businessman, his core values are bloodless business values which he freely expresses as let Detroit go bankrupt, let the housing market hit bottom, pay for your own damn college, etc.  But on other issues that don't touch this business mindset, he'll say whatever works on the principle of market testing: there's no sense trying to sell a product that your market testing tells you won't sell to the people you see as your market.  Hence his "flip-flops" on everything else.

President Obama on War and Peace

Excerpts from President Obama's press conference on Tuesday:

"When I came into office, Iran was unified, on the move, had made substantial progress on its nuclear program, and the world was divided in terms of how to deal with it. What we’ve been able to do over the last three years is mobilize unprecedented, crippling sanctions on Iran. Iran is feeling the bite of these sanctions in a substantial way. The world is unified; Iran is politically isolated.

And what I have said is, is that we will not countenance Iran getting a nuclear weapon. My policy is not containment; my policy is to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon -- because if they get a nuclear weapon that could trigger an arms race in the region, it would undermine our non-proliferation goals, it could potentially fall into the hands of terrorists. And we’ve been in close consultation with all our allies, including Israel, in moving this strategy forward.

At this stage, it is my belief that we have a window of opportunity where this can still be resolved diplomatically. That’s not just my view. That’s the view of our top intelligence officials; it’s the view of top Israeli intelligence officials. And, as a consequence, we are going to continue to apply the pressure even as we provide a door for the Iranian regime to walk through where they could rejoin the community of nations by giving assurances to the international community that they’re meeting their obligations and they are not pursuing a nuclear weapon.

That’s my track record. Now, what’s said on the campaign trail -- those folks don’t have a lot of responsibilities. They’re not Commander-in-Chief. And when I see the casualness with which some of these folks talk about war, I’m reminded of the costs involved in war. I’m reminded that the decision that I have to make in terms of sending our young men and women into battle, and the impacts that has on their lives, the impact it has on our national security, the impact it has on our economy.

This is not a game. There’s nothing casual about it. And when I see some of these folks who have a lot of bluster and a lot of big talk, but when you actually ask them specifically what they would do, it turns out they repeat the things that we’ve been doing over the last three years, it indicates to me that that’s more about politics than actually trying to solve a difficult problem.

Now, the one thing that we have not done is we haven’t launched a war. If some of these folks think that it’s time to launch a war, they should say so. And they should explain to the American people exactly why they would do that and what the consequences would be. Everything else is just talk."
[ ]

"And so this notion that somehow we have a choice to make in the next week or two weeks, or month or two months, is not borne out by the facts... And so I do think that any time we consider military action that the American people understand there's going to be a price to pay. Sometimes it's necessary. But we don't do it casually.

When I visit Walter Reed, when I sign letters to families that haven't -- whose loved ones have not come home, I am reminded that there is a cost. Sometimes we bear that cost. But we think it through. We don't play politics with it. When we have in the past -- when we haven't thought it through and it gets wrapped up in politics, we make mistakes. And typically, it's not the folks who are popping off who pay the price. It's these incredible men and women in uniform and their families who pay the price.

And as a consequence, I think it's very important for us to take a careful, thoughtful, sober approach to what is a real problem. And that's what we've been doing over the last three years. That's what I intend to keep doing."

Stupor Tuesday: The Death of Mr. Inevitable

There he was confidently smiling up on the high wire, stepping off and...oh no!  Mr. Inevitable goes splat.

It's pretty clear after Stupor Tuesday's voting that the GOPer base does not want Richie Richney as their presidential candidate.  For Richney to transform once again into the superhero Mr. Inevitable, he needed to spin around three times while chanting the magic words: I won Tennessee!  I won Ohio!  But instead he lost Tennessee, by a lot, to Little Ricky Sanctimonious, who also beat him in Oklahoma and North Dakota.  They essentially tied in Ohio, though Richney gets the victory by a few thousand votes with a surge late in the evening.  But that it took all night testifies to his weakness. 

Why was the CPW so wrong about Stupor Tuesday?  Partly because the most conservative voters--the ones who consider anything other than Fox and Rush to be the lamestream media--like to lie to pollsters, or avoid them altogether.  Partly because vote totals combine early and absentee ballots and voting day ballots, in an apparently volatile year when choices change from week to week, and now from hour to hour (polling showed Richney gaining over the weekend, but Tuesday "deciders" breaking for Ricky) so polls and CPW predictions are pretty useless.  But one conclusion that the CPW may make in the next few days is that the hostility towards Romney by the Christian Right GOPer base remains very strong, and apparently impervious to Establishment endorsements and endlessly repeated negative ads. 

Richney won more delegates than anyone Tuesday, so he is still the frontrunner.  But even with all this week's high profile endorsements, and even with outspending everybody else by at something like 10 to 1, he could not put Sanctimonious away, and Casino Newt won Georgia pretty easily too.

So here's where things stand in the GOPer nominating circus: nobody can win enough delegates by primary and caucus elections to have a winning majority before the convention.  The Richney people conceded today that he couldn't.  And there does not appear to be a way that any of the other candidates can either.  This is going to the GOPer convention without a numerical winner.  (Richney won the Virginia primary, where his only opponent was Ron Paul, because the other candidates fumbled the eligibility requirements.  Less than 6% of GOPers voted in that primary.)

Richney cannot get the votes of the non-rich and Evangelicals.  Combine the votes of Little Ricky and Casino Newt, and Richney is toast in most of these states.  But while Ricky's folks are going to try to convince Gingles folks that he should drop out in favor of Ricky, it's unlikely to happen.  Casino Newt can see that Ricky can't possibly get to the convention with enough delegates, even if they combine forces.  But if nobody has the nom by convention time, Gingles goes there with the power of his delegates, and at least theoretically becomes a kingmaker. 

I remember walking by the freak show tent at carnivals in my youth, reading the enticements, but I never went in (Nice Catholic Boy that I was.)  Whatever pleasure to be had there would be perverse one way or another, maybe perversely scary and more likely  perversely hilarious, but hard to see how I'd emerge from it feeling anything but dirty.  That's what this circus feels like.  It is so crazy, and yet we are talking about the presidency of the U.S. at a critical time in human history.  HUMAN history, and the history of life on this planet--which nobody is talking about!  It's perverse to the max.  None of these clowns is fit to be President of the United States.  Fortunately, we've got a real President.  If we can keep him.

Stupor Tuesday

Come one, come all, it's the biggest circus show so far this year, it's SUPEr TUEsday!  Get your popcorn, get your peanuts, and wear your boots and slickers cause the mud--let's call it mud--is gonna fly!

But the usual drumbeat by the carnival barkers is a bit muted this time, as the CPW (Conventional Pundit Wisdom) is that Richie Richney is going to have a big night.  The Sanctimonious campaign is finally revealing itself to be the Wizard of Oz frantically pulling levers behind the curtain, but the wheels have come off.  Richney's big edge in money and organization plus Little Ricky's inability to come through with a compelling or even coherent message should tell the tale.

Well, if you've been hanging out here, you might have figured that it was only a matter of time.  Not that the Richney campaign has improved any.  The candidate is just as terrible as ever. His fumbling of the Limbaugh bullying is yet another moral and political coffin nail. The only thing the campaign itself seems to have learned to do is pack debate audiences and caucuses with its "loyalists" (though that may be stretching the term a bit to include the well-paid.)  But the collapse of the other phony campaigns was inevitable.  Their only hope was to somehow become so viral that the party would have to provide real apparatus in the general. 

So Richney, whose proudest boast now must be "I'm less incompetent than the others," is likely to win Ohio, the Must Win of the night, and even Tennessee, which is close enough to being a southern state that he can even plausibly call himself a GOPer.  So before the night is out we may see the Final Return of....Mr. Inevitable!  Though from back in the shadows, speeding suddenly into the limelight for one last comeback, could it be, could it be?--Casino Newt rides again!  

A Bully Too Far

For months now the Rabid Right methodology of total nuclear warfare against all opponents on everything, which won them some victories through the shock and relentless ultraviolence of their attacks as well as their unprecedented boldness in relentlessly repeating lies,  has come back to haunt them.  When adopted by the GOPer Congress and many state governments after the 2010 elections, it had a blitzkrieg effect, but in recent months, the extremism of the content as well as the tactics have become obvious, and unpopular.  Then when GOPer presidential candidates began to compete, they didn't know how to do anything else but attack each other with a virulence that effectively destroyed the opponent but with the tawdry violence rebounding on the attacker.

These are the tactics of bullies, and for awhile they were successful, as bullies often are.  But with Rush Limbaugh, the personification of the GOPer bully who looks and sounds the part, that helpless excess has exposed both the tactics and their extreme positions as never before.  Limbaugh attempted to bully a young woman whose entire career as a public figure added up to a few hours, first when she was not permitted to testify to a congressional committee, and then when she did testify to an unofficial hearing about the health implications of insurance coverage for contraceptives. 

Limbaugh went after her in the only way the Rabid Right knows--viciously, violently, relentlessly, thoroughly, repeatedly, with no limits.  This time however the bullying met immediate response.  Social media and email lists rallied the response, resulting in advertisers and radio stations abandoning his radio program, with the suggestion that the biggest shoe of all might drop--Armed Forces Radio, petitioned by female military personnel.  In the midst of this, the bullied young woman, Sandra Fluke, got a very public call of support from President Obama.  That raised the stakes even more. 

This battle is hardly over, perhaps hardly begun, as Rabid Right pundits rally a defense and a counteroffensive with advertisers.  But what also sets this apart from other political battles is that it is personal--it is about sisters, daughters, wives, grandchildren, mothers.  The terms of Limbaugh's bullying made it an attempt to bully American women.  It could turn out to be the spark for today's young women to take up the cause that even their mothers may have thought was already won.

Thanks to the swarming effect of digital media and cable news, this is going to be a very long election season--so long that seemingly the only way to get through it is to forget each past week as quickly as possible, so it may well change dramatically over and over.  The polls may change many times.  Other events will dominate the roaring buzz.  But this latest act of bullying may turn out to have lasting consequences.            

Emerson for the Day

"Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man.  But all these times and places and occasions are here...We are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality which surrounds us."

Thoreau

Speechless

"You can't pray a lie."
Mark Twain (Huckleberry Finn)

The week's "news"--Rush Limbaugh, Judge Richard Cebull, Joe Arpaio, Sanctimonious, Richney, etc.--is beyond comment, beyond absurdity, beyond irony, beyond the pale.  Meanwhile we are rapidly distracting ourselves beyond the point of no return.

Circus News: Race to the Bottom

The victor?

Richie Richney got 42% of the low turnout GOPer primary vote in Michigan,  Little Ricky Sanctimonious got 38%, Ron St. Paul just under 12%, and Casino Newt got 6.5%.

By coming within 3% Sanctimonious does nothing to discourage voters in Super Tuesday states from seeing him as a viable candidate, particularly in Ohio, another midwestern erstwhile industrial state, with major population centers close to the Pittsburgh media market,  Little Ricky's erstwhile home base.  He's going to need that mystique because he has no organization to organize his voters and expand his voting pool.  But if Ricky can win Ohio, and he and Gingles deny Richney all the southern states,  it's not going to bring back Mr. Inevitable any time soon.

Richney outspent Sanctimonious by only 2 to 1 in Michigan.  It will be vaguely interesting to see where he puts his money for Super Tuesday.

 With my previous post in mind, I took special note that Sanctimonious did not win the Catholic vote in Michigan.  Richney did.  But Little Ricky ran away with the Evangelicals.

Who do you think won the black vote?  Well, nobody.  There wasn't one.  The percentage of African Americans (and there are a few in Michigan) who voted in the GOPer primary was 0%.

So the GOPer circus drags on--looking more and more like the circuses and carnivals in their last days--frayed, tawdry, small, freak show wagons leaving nothing behind but elephant shit.

So as an antidote to the dwarfs who would be President, we have a President, and here's the link to his inspiring speech to the UAW today, talking about what he stands for, and also about what he did, walking the walk:  "I placed my bet on the American worker.  I'll make that bet again any day of the week...I'm not going to settle for an America where a few do really well and everybody else is struggling."
    

Roots---and Branches

Pittsburgh from the North Side 2007  BK photo

Three of the four remaining Republican presidential candidates are in some significant sense from Pennsylvania, and from parts of the state near where I was born and grew up.

Ron Paul was born in Pittsburgh and went to high school in the Dormont section.  He worked as a resident doctor at a hospital in Pittsburgh for awhile, and I can hear Pittsburgh in his voice.  Newt Gingrich was born in Harrisburg, and grew up in a small town area near there.  Rick Santorum grew up in Butler County, attended both Penn State and the University of Pittsburgh, worked in a Pittsburgh law firm and began his elective political career in the U.S. House representing eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh in 1990, which placed him maybe 25 miles from my hometown, and much closer to where I was living in Pittsburgh that year.

Hummelstown PA Public Library in 1950s, where Newt
Gingrich once lived in his youth

It seems that Ron Paul's family was a little better off than mine, but probably not by much.  Otherwise these were lower middle class or working class families.  Gingrich was born a little before me, Santorum more than a decade later.  Santorum's background is closest to mine: first generation American of an Italian-born parent, Catholic, Catholic high school.  That our political differences are pronounced is not that remarkable, but it is interesting to me how we relate to our backgrounds, and what those backgrounds were and are.

Santorum told his story of his grandfather in relation to working class values and American values, notably in his post-Iowa caucus speech.  He said his grandfather emigrated from Italy in 1925, because he "figured out that fascism was something that would crush his spirit and his freedom, and give his children something less than he wanted for them."  He left his wife and child (Rick's father) in Italy while he earned a living mining coal in southwestern Pennsylvania, living in a company  town, getting paid in "coupons" or scrip.  He then sent for his family, and continued working in the mines until he was 72.

This is basically not an unfamiliar story.  My Italian grandfather left his pregnant wife behind in Italy when he emigrated, about five years earlier, and got work at his trade of tailor.  My mother was born in Italy, and four years later my grandfather sent money for the passage for her and my grandmother.
On my father's side, my Polish grandfather was a coal miner, as his father had been before him, and so my father grew up in a company town in southwestern Pennsylvania. 

unemployed miners and others at the United, PA post office
in 1935, the company town where my father grew up. The local
mines were closed, and they were waiting to see if their
families were selected for the new town the New Deal
was building as an experiment, eventually called Norvelt.
As Norvelt was being built, my father was at a CCC camp. 

There are elements of Santorum's story that are puzzling but still possible.  Thanks to the Immigration Act of 1924, 90% fewer Italians were able to get into the U.S. in 1925 than when my grandfather arrived.  What I know about the coal fields in southwestern PA makes me wonder how old Santorum's grandfather was when he came over, because those mines were pretty well shut down even before World War II, so I wonder where he worked until the age of 72.  (In the Iowa speech Santorum mentioned "Somerset" but it's unclear whether he meant Somerset, PA or Somerset Iowa.  There were a lot of coal mines in Somerset County in southwestern PA, so he may have been referring to where his grandfather worked.  Most of those mines were active early in the 20th century until perhaps the 1930s.)

Riva del Garda today, where the
main business is tourism

Of course every family is different as where they came from is different.  The Santorums were from Riva del Garda in the northern province of Trentino.  (My grandfather, like Santorum's, fought in World War I, and he was gassed somewhere in northern Italy.)  My grandfather and grandmother were from a mountain village in the Abruzzi, fifty miles or so from the Adriatic Coast in about the middle of the coastline.  Not long before this, those were
just about different countries.  Italy as a nation was a recent invention.

As far as I know, my grandparents and their families were not particularly political in Italy, but apparently that's not the case with the Santorums.  This story based on interviews with the Santorums still there say that Rick's grandfather was an ardent Communist, which meant something different in Italy than in the Soviet Union say (Communists became part of government coalitions) but it was definitely a party left of the socialists, and it would have made him a political enemy to the Fascists of Mussolini.

Otherwise I expect there are commonalities in our family stories that Rick doesn't mention.  After long and bloody conflicts, the coal mines were finally unionized, and various New Deal programs encouraged company towns to permit home ownership, and made that more possible with higher minimum wages.  Italians had begun flocking to the Democratic Party when it nominated Al Smith, a Catholic, for President in 1928.  FDR's programs and appeal made Italians a solid Democratic constituency for the next generation, helping John F. Kennedy win the Presidency in 1960.

Allegheny River, Pittsburgh 2007. BK photo

Western Pennsylvania was replete with immigrant families from Italy, eastern Europe and Ireland, mostly Catholic.  Pittsburgh had a class overlay of wealthier Scots and other Protestants, and an educated Jewish minority that especially made its impact in the arts and sciences, but the popular culture was largely Catholic.  It was somewhat like that in the America of the 1950s, of DiMaggio and Sinatra.  But then succeeding generations joined the economic boom, and Pittsburghers left the neighborhoods for the suburbs.  There was similar movement, though only by a few miles in distance, in my home town.  Ethnic and political identity began to change.

So I don't know what Santorum really saw and heard of his grandfather's world.  I remember the real presence of unions and labor union history, the legacy of FDR and the suspicions of big business spoken in and around the former company town where my father grew up.  But Santorum's life was touched perhaps even more directly by the legacy of FDR and his vision of the federal government.  Santorum's father served in World War II and went to college on the GI Bill.  For awhile in Santorum's youth the family lived in housing provided by the Veterans Administration, because both his parents worked for that federal program.  Santorum applauds himself for getting ahead with hard work, but he got ahead much of his life as an employee of the federal government, in the U.S. Congress, and then used those Washington contacts to become a millionaire.

Cathedral of Learning, built by WPA
at U. of Pittsburgh, where Rick
Santorum got his MBA

But I can at least rationalize a meaning from Santorum's seemingly self-destructive statement over the weekend that in wanting every American to have the opportunity to go to college, President Obama was a "snob" trying to further the agenda of indoctrinating young Americans with liberal ideas from their professors.  This is bizaare on so many levels.  Santorum praises hard-working Americans who haven't gone to college (as if President Obama denigrated them, which he did not) but even manufacturing--or mining--jobs these days require greater skills, obtained through higher education (as President Obama recognized with his emphasis on junior colleges.)   And if Sanctorum is going against 99% of women who use contraception, he is mocking 99% of Americans (a real poll number) who hope to send their children to college.

But this operates perhaps on a different level.  There was and likely still is a tremendous conflict within the working class/lower middle class, that on the one hand wants its children to go to college and succeed, even if it means moving to a big city far away, and on the other hand feels betrayed when children leave, and fears that their education separates them, and makes them feel superior to their parents and their hometown.  It's the Working Class Hero syndrome, characterized by words that so many of us have heard: "Who do you think you are?"  In a sense we always hear it, from everybody, where we came from, where we aspired to be, and where we ended up.

The Catholicism of Rick Santorum is very different from the Catholicism in which I was raised, which might have partly to do with that decade difference.  Catholics were an immigrant minority in the 1950s, and in need of religious tolerance in a predominantly Protestant nation.  In the 1960s, there was the social gospel and ecumenicism of Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council.  It was still dogmatic and there were fanatics, but the separation of church and state was largely accepted as a good thing.  "You can't legislate morality" is a phrase I heard often in Catholic high school.

For the general differences in world view and history of those Catholicisms I can do no better than to point to recent excellent posts by Andrew Sullivan here and here.   Not only is he both succinct and comprehensive, he's much more involved in contemporary Catholicism than I am.

But the difference in all this is signaled by Santorum's attack on President Kennedy's speech in 1960 on the separation of church and state.  Santorum said the speech made him want to throw up.  This is familiar Rabid Right language, straight off their blogs.  They tend to express disagreement through physical symptoms of disgust.  But to everybody else, it's extremely harsh language.  For one of the Catholic candidates for President in 2012 to say that about the only Catholic to be elected President--and a President admired if not revered by many Americans, especially Catholics--is extreme to the point of alarming.  What is the source of this disgust and anger?  Santorum mischaracterizes what JFK said (as Sullivan explains) but that's not really the point.  He is playing to an evangelical/fundamentalist religious right that apparently now includes major elements of the Catholic Church.  Sullivan summarizes:

"There can be no absolute separation of church and state, let alone a desire to keep it so; and in their necessary interactions, the church must always prevail, or it is a violation of the First Amendment, and an attack on religious freedom. The church's teachings are also, according to theoconservatism, integral to the founding of the United States. Since constitutional rights are endowed from the Creator, and the Creator is the Judeo-Christian one, the notion of a neutral public square, embraced by liberals and those once called conservatives, is an attack on America. America is a special nation because of this unique founding on the Judeo-Christian God. It must therefore always be guided by God's will, and that will is self-evident to anyone, Catholic or Protestant, atheist or Mormon, Jew or Muslim, from natural law."

How many Americans believe this?  This is not about common values, derived from many belief systems and common experience, but about narrow dogma held with absolute certainty. Does this reveal a Rabid Right agenda, or is this just another 1%, though a different one from Romney's?  That's something the elections this year may make clearer.

This Pgh Post-Gazette photo of Pittsburgh's South Side
includes a building where I lived for a year in the late 1980s.
I lived a few more years in Squirrel Hill/Greenfield--both
pretty close to Santorum's congressional district.

So what do I conclude from this geographical and partly socioeconomic coincidence?  At a certain level, I do seem to know these guys.  Ron Paul and Gingrich are like the self-righteous guys in bars who've read a book that blows their mind and defines their world view.  I can almost touch Santorum's feeling for family, and his anger at being overlooked because of where he's from.  But he's also from the foreign land called Rabid Right that I observe and try to figure out.  I know that apart from lying to themselves (as we all do, but it seems they do it a lot) they lie a lot there to others, and believe themselves justified in lying.  And that seems to be the result of a worldview I just can't understand. 

But I know it is threatening the future.  At a time when this country is going to need to work together more closely and more intelligently than ever, they are splitting off into paranoid and hostile camps, adhering to dogma and immune to reason or fact.  Santorum has recently been very vocal in support of the immensely damaging "Climate Crisis is a hoax"--in his view a deliberate and politically motivated one--which in his case is based on a theology that (as this perceptive commentary notes) separates humanity from the planet which sustains it.  This political pressure to ignore the Climate Crisis at a moment when every action taken or not taken will make its mark on a future stretching hundreds of years into the future, may be within the realm of being understood, but it is tragic, and in every sense of the word as I've learned it, unforgivable.

As for this vision of a theocratic dictatorship ruled by the zealots of the Rabid Right, well, that does make me want to throw up.

Conventional Circus

A couple of weeks ago, when Little Ricky began making a move up the polls, the conventional punditized opinion was that if Richie Richney even won Michigan by just a few points, it would be a huge deal, as good as a defeat.

But when Richney started climbing back up, it seemed a victory, no matter by how small a margin, would be a victory.

Richney definitely had the momentum until he subverted himself with his fiasco of a Ford Stadium speech and his attempt to curry favor with NASCAR blue collar fans by noting that he knew some NASCAR owners.

But Ricky Sanctimonious, poised to take advantage of these missteps,  has done himself no favors by becoming even more irrational and fanatical.  These guys are their own worst enemies.  The result is that Michigan is likely to be close and in the long run it will be about who loses it better, and therefore loses it.

At the moment, despite the latest polls showing a trend towards Little Ricky, Richie Richney (who probably has already won Arizona in early voting) is likely to win Michigan, if only because he has some organization in place to get out his vote, which helps especially with early voting.  But he managed to blunt his own momentum by turning people off again in the past few days by reminding them why they can't stand him. But unless there's a substantial if mischievous Dem crossover, it may not be enough to hand Sanctimonious the victory speech. 

What will interest me most about this Michigan primary if Richney doesn't win is the sense of confidence that the Richney campaign has that it will win.  I take this as confidence in their "ground game" and the money they can spread around.  After all, they won this state in 2008, easily. If their judgment is that faulty, then there is something wrong with the campaign organization as well as the candidate.  Which suggests that money can't buy everything.

 Lately Sanctimonious has been talking not like a candidate but like a Herman Cain--somebody trying to enhance his standing with a specific public that will buy his books and stuff, and pay him big bucks to speak, when this is all over.  The other reading of this is that he's been really talking to the larger evangelical base that will be voting in the South next week, on Super Tuesday.

  So after the carnival of ineptness of the past two weeks we're almost back to where conventional punditized opinion was when their mouths turned to Michigan: a Sanctimonious victory, however slight, will shake the entire process to its foundations.  A Richney victory--unless it's a really big one-- will be a bit of a reprieve for him and for the GOP and the process, but it won't be definitive.  He'll have to survive Super Tuesday more or less intact to get to more favorable primary states later in the spring.

Then there's Casino Newt, who got another infusion of big bucks from his Casino Man for Super Tuesday.  As Rachel pointed out, this one billionaire who likes Newt and also Richney but hates Santimonious, is keeping Newt in the race to siphon off Little Ricky's votes in the South, thus buying the GOPer presidential candidacy for Richney.  One billionaire strategically placed is all you need in 2012.  Heck, one multi-millionaire in the primaries.

All this is showing up in polls as strengthening President Obama.  The question is whether voters make up their mind now and ignore the campaign later, or whether this is a fairly fleeting impression.  That's something we won't know unfortunately until after the general election votes are counted in November.  But experience suggests that it's unfortunately wrong to underestimate the potential for irrationality in the American voting public.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

“The irony I invoke is not cruel. It does not mock either love or beauty. It teaches us to laugh at evil men and fools, whom, without it, we might be weak enough to hate.”

Anatole France

Sky Show

It was a strange sort of night here on Saturday.  There weren't many stars in the sky but the visible ones were very bright.  This was especially true of this amazing sight: the crescent moon with a bright star just below it, and an almost as bright one above and to the side.  The "stars" (Venus and Jupiter) were huge, and the moon was incredibly bright.  They were everything that was visible in the southwestern sky.  It was almost like being on another planet.

Saturday evening and early night were the closest the crescent moon and Venus would be (top illustration.)  Sunday evening and night Jupiter will be the closest to the moon. (This one.)  If the current weather forecast holds, we won't see anything here for the cloud cover.  But maybe where you are...  

Weekend Update

Anticipating the loss of their biggest star, Donald Chump, when he threatens to run for prez one time too many, NBC has announced a new series, VAGINA COP, starring the handsome Governor of Virginia Billy Bob McDuck. 

According to the pilot script now under consideration, the clean-cut hero (McDuck) gets himself into a pickle when he believes he's signed up to be a Virginia Cop, but instead finds himself on the special task force tasked with forcing women to get ultrasound exams, and especially to pay for them: the VAGINA COPs.  He "heads" a crack investigation unit to detect when women are really being raped or really not pregnant or really trying to get abortions though they pretend to want mammograms and birth control devices.  Even then, the VAGINIA COPS must enforce the zygote is a person law so they're on the lookout for illegal birth control pills, and the drug offenders who take them, or purchase them, or sell them.  Once the federal laws are passed they can just be sent to Gitmo, but for now, it's all about police work.

Also starring in VAGINA COPS is Richie Richney as the stuffy arrogant Captain who does everything by the book, always says the wrong things when he's trying to be one of the guys, and generally gets everything wrong.  In the first episode he spends all morning deciding which of his cars to drive to work, and then gets angry because the trees he passes "are all the wrong height."

 The cops in his command make fun of him, led by the cheerful bad boy of the VAGINIA COPs, played by Casino Newt Gingles.  He thinks everybody is out to get him, but he doesn't actually care.  Newt's partner is the straight arrow of the outfit, played by Little Ricky Sanctimonious, who believes being a VAGINA COP is a high moral calling.  Watch the fun as Newt plays one practical joke after another on Ricky--who falls for them every time.

McDuck is the new guy in the unit and he must deal with all the old timers, including the most mysterious one--a cop with a past in the organized crime unit and a bad reputation who is trying to salvage his career as a VAGINA COP--that is, if he doesn't eat himself to death first.  The character called Sipowitz is played by the godfather of Jersey Shore, Crisp Crispie.  

The network is unsure whether to bill VAGINA COP as a comedy or a tragedy.  Rumors that Lawrence O'Donnell is producing can't yet be confirmed.  

In other news--and I bookmarked this before Rachel did it--a Georgia Democratic state legislator proposed another form of birth control be outlawed--vasectomies.

And to make this week complete, when asked what segment of the electorate that voted for President Obama the GOPer candidates are trying to take away, journalist Joe Klein deadpanned: "They're doing great with that segment of young voters who are opposed to contraception."

On It

For the first couple of years of the Obama administration, the complexities of ongoing policy, administrative and legislative efforts to turn this ship of state around from the Bush years and to respond to the Great Recession sometimes meant that issues that arose suddenly didn't get addressed before they mushroomed into bigger problems.  But that's not happening anymore.

President Obama directly and forcefully addressed the question of gasoline prices on Thursday.  This I expect will be just the opening salvo in a spirited counter-offensive to the disingenuous efforts of GOPers to make political hay.  Gas prices are literally where the rubber meets the road for many people, and one of the few topics that gets discussed by people who don't like to talk politics.  Where I think GOPers misread the situation is in regards to alternative energy. My touchstone here is western PA, where a local supermarket chain literally saved itself from possible bankruptcy by offering an incentive of free gas indexed to the grocery bill.  I visited there during the last gas price jump--during the Bush administration--and was surprised to hear people talking about alternative fuels.  People are interested in what works, and despite emotions they are aware of larger problems that don't have simplistic solutions, and are likely caused by international politics, financial manipulations and the agendas of oil companies. 

The McCain campaign made fun of candidate Obama's suggestion that properly inflated tires help gas mileage, yet that's precisely what people want to hear: solutions they can implement.  It can be a delicate dance--it didn't work so well for Jimmy Carter--but especially when U.S. oil production is significantly higher than under Bush (and when the government has approved more drilling than oil companies are willing to do),  the simplistic "bumper sticker" solution of drill more may not wash anymore.  And people are even more suspicious of oil companies than the government.  GOPer politicians lie just as outrageously about Obama administration policies and actions on energy as they do on--well, everything else.  So the pushback has to continue, with the facts.

For a perhaps different constituency, the Obama administration is addressing the hot topic of privacy on the Internet with a privacy Bill of Rights that the major players have signed on to.  This comes as there's more controversy among users, and concern from state attorneys-general.

Meanwhile, I expect President Obama is having urgent if off the radar meetings on Syria, where the situation is worsening, especially in the area where three journalists were killed, including a Syrian and an American who both pleaded for the outside world to pay attention to what is happening there.  Now the survivors are surrounded, and government tanks and troops are going in for the total kill.  Secretary of State Clinton is currently involved in meetings seeking international action.

The Sanctimonium Shadow Show!

The 20th--yes, friends, count'em off, the 20th, and maybe, could it be, the last?--GOPer debate was held in Arizona Wednesday evening,  Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, the day after Mardi Gras.  Yeah, the party's over--but for who?

The cable pundits on MSNBC and CNN were pretty unanimous that Sanctimonious didn't have a good debate, and so may well have clobbered his own momentum.  But the online punditry was less certain--it was a dull draw which favors Richney, and there was even opinion that Sanctimonious won it (HuffPo was particularly outspoken on this.)  Everybody admitted that the audience was stacked with Richney supporters, which made the live debate seem like Richney won.   Jonathan Bernstein cautions  that in a debate with no obvious winner, its effect on the upcoming primaries will depend on how the Rabid Right media spins it, and what excerpts they show. 

Just about everybody agreed on one thing: it was an awful, dismal debate, even "one of the worst."  Several came out and said that the debate winner was President Obama. 

As usual, the Economist crew were the most entertaining live-bloggers.  Two choice tidbits:

Obama's bowing again, this time to the mullahs, according to Romney. Does that man never stand up straight?

I have a theory that Paul would be less popular were he more coherent.

The Economist concluded:

It's strange to think this may be the last debate. We've come so little distance despite the crowded debate schedule. The candidates seem no more polished, poised or assertive than they did at the beginning. It's amazing how bad at debating they've been. I'm sure it's not easy, but it hardly inspires confidence.

To which the American among them added:

I am ashamed of and afraid for my country.

But as far as the clown show goes, the spin on the debate will matter only if it supports the outcome in Michigan.  The polls indeed are showing that Richney is inching up and even ahead, though whether the people polled are representative enough of the people who will actually vote (crossovers are permitted) is open to question.  However, there are some early votes counted, and Richney has a strong lead in those.  (His big lead in Arizona early voting, and the proportion of early voters there to the total, pretty much ensure a victory in that state.)   So at this point it looks like--once again--yes, it's believable, it's incredible, but it could be true--Mr. Inevitable will return!

But if the punditry reaches that conclusion by the weekend, and Sanctimonious actually wins Michigan, then Richney may really be in trouble.  But...Sanctimonious (or him plus Gingles) will have to pile up a lot of Southern wins on Super Tuesday to really derail him.  All Richney has to do is win Super Tuesday and it's over, and he's ....well, you know. Mr.....

Meanwhile, Chuck Todd of NBC is saying that the emphasis on birth control over the past week is really hurting the GOP in national and battleground state polls for the general election.  The proposed Virginia law to force mandatory invasive ultrasound (now perhaps downgraded to semi-invasive) for women seeking abortions has consequently gotten national attention.  But other states have done it and are contemplating it, something that Rachel Maddow and almost noone else has been covering.  Now maybe voters will be paying more and closer attention.