I don't know what the company named Invesco does -- my gut and English grammar classes tell me that it's probably ''invest.''
But it ''invested'' six million dollars to get the naming rights to the place where the Denver Broncos play football.
Many companies have taken to giving themselves safely opaque names made up of significant-sounding syllables [Altria makes cigarettes, but you'd never know it from its name]. Firms with names like Alltel, Conseco and Corel have paid millions for naming rights to sports venues.
Invesco probably expected a huge PR bounce out of Barack Obama's stadium speech to the Democratic convention; ''Invesco'' would be on everyone's lips -- famous lips, too, from renowned politicians to talking heads.
So what happens in Denver? Multiple millions of people will watch Thursday night as Barack Obama delivers his acceptance speech in what fans and journalists alike still insist on calling Mile High Stadium.
And when Invesco's deal expires in 2021, it won't matter which Sucker Inc. steps up with the next load of naming bucks; people will still call it Mile High Stadium. Alltel, Comerica, Arco -- don't say you haven't been warned.
The photo of Mile Hi -- er, Invesco Field is by Doug Pensinger/Getty Images.
Forget Obama versus McCain, or even Barack versus Hillary; tomorrow morning's showdown between Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom may be a preview of the 2010 Democratic primary race for California governor.
Or is "showdown" too strong a word? Both mayors will be speaking at the California delegates' breakfast Thursday on an all-mayors-all-the-time program. And you can bet we'll hear from both our L.A. guy and the Bay Area man lots of scoffing at a made-up rivalry. I predict a warm embrace, some pokes at the press for desperately trying to find tension, and an Obama-Clinton-style assertion of unquestioned unity.
OK. But really. The whole power (and treasury) of the California Democratic Party is sitting in that huge room. What will the San Diego delegates think of these two guys? The Central Valley folks? How about the real Northern Californians -- not the Bay Area, but the cow (and rice and lumber) counties?
Newsom is one of the few politicians in the state who can make Villaraigosa look like an old guy. Or a Boy Scout. Villaraigosa's one of the few who can make Newsom look like a conservative. Or a small-town boy. Both were Hillary men. Both switched to Obama in June.
By the way, San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris has been a steady presence at the California delegation breakfasts. Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo is in town, but hasn't attended the morning festivities. If anyone else is going to seek the Democratic nomination for attorney general in 2010 -- that is, if Jerry Brown forsakes running for re-election to instead run for, uh, re-election -- I can't imagine who it would be.
In Thursday's letters, writers respond to First Lady Maria Shriver's op-ed deriding the "R-word" -- retard -- which has come into the spotlight courtesy of Dreamworks' "Tropic Thunder."
James Roman, of Los Angeles, doesn't think she has a leg to stand on:
If California's First Lady is so pained by labels, where was her moral outcry each time her husband disrepected our officials as so many "girlie-men"? More importantly, where were her published opinions that defended the downtrodden when the governor chose to demean state employees with minimum-wage paychecks? Or when he vetoed legislation, not once but twice, that would have granted equal rights to gay and lesbian couples in California? Or his empty promise of health-care reform?
The real words and deeds of out First Lady's spouse elicit far more pain than the gags in that fictional movie.
Beau Biden reminded Democrats on Wednesday evening that his dad, vice presidential candidate Joe Biden, has taken the train to and from his home in Delaware ever since being elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972. The elder Biden works in Washington, his son said, but has never been part of it.
Set aside the obvious point that perhaps no one is more part of Washington than Sen. Joseph Biden Jr., the senior senator from Delaware, who has worked in the Capitol since he was 30 (he's now 65). And set aside as well the silliness of the whole outsider trope -- the argument that unfamiliarity with the people and mores of D.C. is somehow an asset.
One of the biggest problems in government today is that jet travel has made a Biden-like commute to work in Washington available to everyone, according to political journalist and author Richard Reeves.
Reeves kicked off one of the hundreds of convention-adjacent events in Denver lamenting the culture of "the new Washington, where people jet in and out." They work around the clock, Reeves said, then go home. In the old days, politicians like U.S. Sen. John Kennedy might walk to work, chatting with colleagues, staffers and other D.C. types, becoming an integral and intimate part of the scene. Now, "each man is an island, almost, in Washington."
The rest of the Politico.com/USC-Annenberg program focused on the (all too) familiar theme of changes in media and how they affect the political divide. But Reeves' comment hits home. It's quite the fashion for politicians to call the political world corrupt and to offer oneself as the ultimate outsider, untainted by politics.
Think Arnold Schwarzenegger, for example, and then think of the commuter relationship California lawmakers have with Sacramento. If it weren't for Southwest Airlines and the ease of getting from, say, San Bernardino or Santa Monica to the Capitol for the day, would members of the Legislature spend more time getting to know each other as colleagues? Would we have a state budget by now?
Or think, frankly, of Barack Obama, the very junior senator from Illinois. He's something new. Sure, he's the first African-American presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. But he's a relative newbie, untainted by Washington. Are we sure that's good?
If not, his selection of Biden seems all the more on target, regardless of Biden's professed commuting patterns.
Tonight's big after-Joe-Biden event is a party/performance with Kanye West, but only the uber-hip (and uber-generous Democratic Party donors) can get in the door. For everyone else, the next step may be to pick up the National Journal's Convention Daily, flip to the centerfold and see who's partying where.
Let's see -- Gavin Newsom hosting a performance at Manifest Hope? Nah, that's not a party. Ralph Nader and Sean Penn at a rally to let Nader debate? Definitely not a party. Democratic Governors Association at a brew pub? Yawn.
To get serious about partying, those in the know check in with the Sunlight Foundation. The best parties at the convention are also fundraisers, or else schmooze-fests hosted by corporate interests hoping the Democrats will remember their good times in Denver. Politicalpartytime.org lets you know who's footing the bill for the shindig you're crashing, or what you're missing at the one you're turned away from. The blog chronicles the financial back-stories. Really, such cynicism!
Would corporate interests really try to sway Democrats with donations? Such a thought. Here's how Daily Kos walked through the growing affection that the Distilled Spirits Council, among others, has for Democrats.
So let's take a look. Ah, that's more like it. Everyone who's going to see Kanye later may be showing up at 6 to party with Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee -- and Congressional Quarterly. You can dance with Willie Nelson, courtesy of CH2MHill. Jennifer Lopez is hosting an event with New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (no corporate sponsor in evidence). And plenty more.
Of course, some parties are even too hip to be listed by the money watchdogs. Los Angeles City Council President Eric Garcetti, state Controller John Chiang and San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, among others, hosted a party Tuesday night "to celebrate the next generation of the Democratic Party." I knew about it, though, so it clearly wasn't the top echelon of hipness.
One unanswered etiquette question -- when you arrive at the after-gavel parties, do you keep your convention floor credentials around your neck?
The Los Angeles Times does not condone torture. We think the Bush administration's embrace of brutal interrogation techniques is immoral, has savaged America's reputation around the world, given ammunition to every tin-pot tyrant who wants to claim that the U.S. has no more moral authority than his own blood-soaked regime, and puts American soldiers at risk. I'm still pretty much on board with that, but I'm having a slight change of heart. There is one group so heinous, so ideologically rigid and so threatening to our well-being that we may have no choice but to resort to torture to extract its cooperation.
It's time to consider waterboarding members of the Legislature.
Some will argue that torture doesn't work; detainees will say anything the interrogator wants them to say just to make the pain stop, whether it's true or not. This hardly applies to politicians, who need no incentive to tell people whatever they want to hear. California has now gone 58 days without a budget. State workers are struggling to survive on minimum wage; important bills are stacking up on the governor's desk, gathering dust because he won't sign any until a budget is passed; Republican lawmakers are so intransigent about tax increases to close the $15.2-billion budget gap that they want to borrow billions instead, pushing the problem off to the future and worsening an already dangerous debt level; Democrats have dug in their heels over the deep spending cuts needed to balance the budget, as well as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's attempts to impose fiscal discipline in the future.
Both sides seem to have all but given up, and we're running out of options. Igor, fetch the manacles.
I guess golf just wasn't exclusive enough. The genteel-sounding Ladies Professional Golf Association has swung a mashie-niblick at foreign golfers, adopting a rule that would make it harder for non-English-speaking pros to compete in U.S. tournaments. According to Golfweek magazine's website, tour officials told South Korean pros last week that players who've been LPGA members for at least two years must prove themselves proficient in English. Otherwise, they'll be suspended. In a nod to the peculiarities of our language, the golfers were given until the end of 2009 to study for the tour's new test. 행운을 빕니다! Or, as Lorena Ochoa (right), the tour's leading money winner, might say, adios!
The announcement drew mixed reactions from players (the tour has 121 players from 26 countries outside the U.S., with the largest faction being from South Korea). Some said it helps sponsors and pro-am participants -- i.e., the ones who supply much of the money for the tour -- when players can speak English. Others complained that the suspension was far too harsh a penalty. The Asian American Justice Center wasn't so conflicted. "This policy is tantamount to national origin discrimination, which is prohibited under Civil Rights Act," Deputy Director Vincent A. Eng said in a news release.
The delicious irony here is that women of all languages continue to be excluded from some of America's top golf courses, as well as many of the richest professional golf competitions. The LPGA's move may be motivated by complaints from sponsors, but it smacks of a crude attempt to shield American golfers from more talented competitors from overseas. Take a quick glance at the LPGA's leading earners this year to get an idea how strong that competition has become. Too bad Ochoa and Annika Sorenstam are already fluent, huh? Hey LPGA, do you think sponsors will like the product better with fewer of the world's best players, or more? Sheesh.
As a theologian, Nancy Pelosi is a great politician. This was evident in her unnecessary foray on “Meet the Press” into the history of Catholic thought about when human life begins. The San Francisco Democrat's statement “as an ardent, practicing Catholic” that “doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition” was imprecise and impolitic. It also deprived pro-choice Catholic politicians of the best counter-argument to the idea that they should vote their faith on abortion issues.
First to what Pelosi got right: As in many other areas, Catholic teaching on abortion has undergone an evolution. The current insistence that life -– or a human soul –- begins at conception was not always taught by theologians. Some favored the notion that ensoulment takes place at quickening (the stage of pregnancy when the fetus can be felt to be moving).
As a Catholic, Pelosi is free to argue even to the pope that conception is not milestone for ensoulment or personhood. That theory is not infallible pronouncement. But using theology to justify a pro-life position in the political arena confuses the realms of politics and religion in a way that John F. Kennedy was careful not to do in 1960. The better response for Catholic politicians is to argue that personal faith and public duty do not perfectly overlap. Sometime legislators feel bound to vote the way her constituents want her to do.
It’s ominous that Pelosi was scolded not only by conservative Catholic bishops but also Archbishop of Washington Donald Wuerl, who has been a moderate in the debate over whether pro-choice Catholic politicians should be denied Holy Communion. As Tim Rutten observes, the Pelosi flap benefits Republicans in the current election campaign. Pelosi should discuss theology with her priest, not with Tom Brokaw.
The image of the Speaker of the House comes from this week's Democratic National Convention, courtesy of AP Photo/Matt Rourke.
Interrupting your breakfast-table routine with sexual-orientation politics, the editorial board applauds the results of a new Zogby poll showing that more than 60% of registered voters would support an openly gay candidate:
Romantic as it may be, the notion that anyone can grow up to be
president long has served as a metaphor for the openness and fairness
of American society. It is thus remarkable, and reassuring, that nearly
two-thirds of respondents in the poll expressed a willingness to
discard one of the oldest and most pervasive prejudices when they enter
the voting booth.
Admit it -- there was a time when you, too, dreamed of being president, only to come to the grim realization that the pay isn't commensurate with the work.
The board also praises the guidelines that California Attorney General Jerry Brown recently released to help police distinguish legitimate dispensers of medical marijuana from criminals trying to take advantage of the state's permissive policies. And as much as it likes Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe, it urges him not to try to lift the country's constitutional limit on presidential terms.
On the op-ed side, columnist Tim Rutten notes how abortion and the Catholic Church's stance regarding pro-life candidates are reasserting themselves in the conservative wing of the chattering class. (Hey, Tim, you missed one.) UC Riverside Professor Robert Nash Parker blasts the college presidents who've called for more flexibility on the legal drinking age. (He probably didn't care much for our editorial on the topic, either.) (Take the poll!) Finally, NPR web guru Dick Meyer tries to drive a stake through the conventional wisdom that America is a cultural-war battleground. Wait, what about all those book sales? From Meyer's perspective, the culture war story line is just that: a story.
Poll after poll, focus group after focus group show that the vast
majority of Americans -- the Silent Majority, perhaps? -- are
pragmatic, independent and un-partisan in their basic views. They are
eclectic: "liberal" on some matters, "conservative" on others. They are
not slaves to that hobgoblin of small minds, consistency.
Letters received dozens of messages from fans of radio and television personality Dr. Drew Pinsky, in response to an August 21 article reporting deaths and a rape at a rehab hospital with which he is associated. Jonathan Brill, of Los Angeles, summed up most respondents' take:
It seems obvious that no direct of even indirect relationship between Dr. Drew Pinsky and the deaths or rape exists. Yet the tone of the piece is incredibly accusatory....
Your writers make it clear that their focus is not on the loss of life but rather on the sensationalism of a celebrity in hot water.
Also: thoughts on teachers' pensions, whether or not the FBI is investigating City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo (and why the Bureau probably won't be talking about it with the press) and Catholics on abortion.
Hillary Clinton: "The time is now to unite as a single party with a single purpose. We are on the same team and none of us can afford to sit on the sidelines."
There's your "Pee Wee Reese moment" -- as described by Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr., who said Monday that Clinton should stand by Barack Obama the way Brooklyn Dodgers shortstop Pee Wee Reese stood beside rookie Jackie Robinson, breaking the baseball color line in 1947, showing the rest of the team that it could embrace an African-American teammate.
I'm not sure the analogy was quite apt; Reese and Robinson weren't competing for the same job. I think many Obama supporters were secretly wishing for something more like a Jane Pauley moment -- a gracious stepping aside and a modest denial that she had any personal right to the job.
You remember the Jane Pauley moment. Pauley was an icon for professional women in the late 1970s and 1980s as co-host of the NBC morning program "Today." Her first co-anchor was Tom Brokaw, but some tension arose when Brokaw was replaced by Bryant Gumbel, a groundbreaking television journalist in his own right. Rumors spread that the set wasn't big enough for both Pauley and Gumbel, and an internal memo from Gumbel seemed to confirm it.
Pauley left the show in 1989. Of course, there were other story lines as well -- that it was all about age and not gender, and was an effort put put Deborah Norville in Pauley's spot. The point is that later, when asked about her decision to move on, Pauley made a point of saying that, yes, she was only the second woman to anchor "Today," but that Gumbel was the first African-American in the post. She refused to speak ill of he former co-host.
Who gets to break the ceiling first, the black man or the white woman? It's pretty touchy, emotion-laden stuff.
"Were you in this campaign just for me?" Clinton asked her supporters. It's the key question, but in this speech, anyway, she didn't sound like she honestly would take "yes" for an answer.
2003 file photo of Jane Pauley courtesy of Mark Mainz/Getty Images
Democrats in the Legislature have some serious budget business to do, but that hasn't kept all of them away from the convention in Denver. Assembly members Dave Jones (D-Sacramento), John Laird (D-Santa Cruz) and Lori Saldana (D-San Diego) joined the California delegation for breakfast this morning. Speaker Emeritus Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles) was sighted. I feel obligated to chide, because what right do they have to enjoy themselves and kibbitz with the state two months into the fiscal year without a budget? Even state party Chairman Art Torres, a former assemblyman and state senator, poked some fun. "I thought they had a budget to take care of" he told the delegation from the podium at their morning get-together.
Fact is, though, they can't do much to help things move along. Their house convenes again Wednesday and they are expected to be back in Sacramento.
Speaker Karen Bass hasn't made the trip. Yet. She was officially the hostess of a California delegation party last night, but it went on without her.
Plenty of people in the hall unhappy about the budget mess, though. You hear it a lot here: "They're gonna do a get-out-of-town budget" -- code for a lousy deal that relies on borrowing from city, county, transportation and education funds, except that "borrowing" implies the lender had a choice in the matter.
"Something's got to change in California about the way we decide a budget," said California teachers Association President David Sanchez. "We have districts starting a school year without a state budget, and they don't know what to expect."
The solutions sound much easier in Denver, where this week, everyone's a Democrat. Sanchez said the answer is in the "conference committee plan," which is another way of saying the Democrats' plan for higher income taxes. Good luck with that one back in Sacramento, where the Republican minority is holding the line on no tax increases, but also won't introduce a budget plan of its own.
Michelle Obama is rightly being praised for her charming speech Monday night to the Democratic National Convention. If anyone -- say, low-IQ New Yorker readers -- thought she was a radical, her self-portrait should have disabused them of that thought. As one commentator put it: "Michelle Obama's speech reflected great nobility. She presented herself as a loving wife and mom, and she presented herself as being in sync with the values of most Americans." In other words, she was June Cleaver, mother of the Beaver.
Fair enough, but she also is a lawyer with the same blue-chip education boasted by her husband. Apparently, campaign tacticians decided that she should de-emphasize that aspect of her persona, much as Hillary Rodham did when she belatedly took the Clinton surname.
Speaking of radical, here's a suggestion that will never be adopted: Make party conventions and other political events off-limits to spouses, parents, children, siblings, high school coaches and pets. The practice of politicians proving that they are family men (or women), which was satirized as early as 1956 in the great political novel "The Last Hurrah," isn't just cheesy. As Larry Craig, Elliot Spitzer and John Edwards can attest, it also can set you up for a fall big-time (as Dick Cheney would say).
But Americans will never give up on the family portrait as a political symbol. The other day a poll was released showing that a majority of Americans would be willing to vote for a gay or lesbian candidate for president. I suppose that means that in the future, life partners of nominees will be coached to portray themselves as "being in sync with the values of most Americans."
Photo of Barbara Billingsley as June Cleaver and Hugh Beaumont as Ward Cleaver courtesy of Billingsley's MySpace page
Coming back from a recent visit to Iraq, scholars Shawn
Brimley and Colin Kahl warn that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki is
endangering the recent progress made by cracking down on the U.S.-financed
Sunni forces called the Sons of Iraq:
During our trip, a common theme among U.S. military
commanders, intelligence officers, diplomats and Iraqi political leaders we
spoke with was the growing hubris of Maliki and his closest advisors. Recent
government successes in Basra, Sadr City and Mosul seem to have convinced Maliki's inner
circle that Iraq's army does not need American help as much as it used to. A newly emboldened prime
minister is now moving out aggressively against his adversaries, including the
Sons of Iraq.
Columnist Jonah
Goldberg takes a break from his weekly critiques of Barack Obama's fitness
for the presidency, opining instead on how the choice of Joe Biden reveals the
emptiness of Obama's "new politics." And James Kirchick, an assistant editor of the New Republic, laments how Jonathan Crutchley, the openly gay founder of a dating site for gay men, was hounded by his customers for having donated to John McCain's campaign.
Over on the left-hand page, the editorial board implored the Hollywood studios to resume negotiations with the Screen Actors Guild, and it called on state lawmakers to pass a bill clarifying workers' rights under state law to bring gender-discrimination claims against their employers. Finally, it reflected on the return China earned from its $41 billion investment in the Olympics. For starters, there was a bounty of gold medals.
Yet what planners in Beijing miscalculated is that no matter how well
you teach performers to smile, the strain behind the lips is still
detectable. The near-hysterical drive by Chinese leaders to put on the
biggest, most spectacular sporting event ever, and to engineer a
generation of Chinese medalists regardless of the financial or human
costs, is rather more disconcerting to the outside world than
convincing.
Biden's the man in Tuesday's letters, as readers pro and con sound off on Barack Obama's vice presidential pick. Writes Lucia M. Conforti, of San Pedro:
Biden represents everything Obama opposed and attacked during the primaries when it came to Hillary Clinton. He voted for the resolution to use force against Iraq, and he has been entrenched in Washington politics for three decades. There's only one word that aptly describes Obama for choosing Biden as vice president: hypocrite.
Don Mac Brown, of Beverly Hills, sees the choice differently:
Biden is the real deal, a politican of impeccable integrity and a great guy. Not only President Obama, but the American people will be able to rely on Vice President Joe Biden to deliver when the chips are down.
How many houses McCain owns, and suggestions for more accurate Olympic medals counts, too.
James Carville may think he was a show-stopper –- in the bad sense. But for me there was a poignancy to former Iowa U.S. Rep. Jim Leach’s soporific speech Monday night at the Democratic National Convention. Leach is a member of that vanishing breed, the liberal or Rockefeller Republican, and there was a freak-show aspect to his appearance in Denver. In justifying his defection, Leach offered a selective litany of progressive positions taken by past Republican presidents and lamented the loss of bipartisanship in Washington.
I have a soft spot for liberal Republicans partly because they held sway in my home state of Pennsylvania for so long. Governors like Bill Scranton, Ray Shafer, Dick Thornburgh (before his drift to the right) and Tom Ridge were the mainstream of the Republican Party in the Commonwealth. Rick Santorum came from a different wing of the party, which remains the new mainstream despite Santorum’s defeat two years ago.
That John McCain is considered a moderate Republican is a measure how much the center of gravity in the party has shifted. Genuine moderate Republicans remain in the Senate, but they are an endangered species. I count four: Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania; Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine; Dick Lugar of Indiana.
My nostalgia for liberal Republicans is as much cultural as it is political. The pejorative term for them is “country club Republicans” who, like Leach and the first President Bush, often belonged to the Episcopal Church, a denomination disproportionately represented in power élites and in news coverage (what editor can resist a gay-bishop story?).
I may be the only one to see this parallel, but liberal Republicans have always struck me as the political equivalent of Anglo-Catholics: those high-church Episcopalians who in their liturgy with its “smells and bells” are more Catholic than the pope they don’t acknowledge. Liberal Republicans live a similarly paradoxical existence in the political world, espousing positions (at least on social issues) more common in the opposing party. We should pray –- in an Episcopal Church, of course –- for their resurrection.
That was the kind of thing you heard walking down 16th Street in Denver Monday night. Twenty-somethings who had had maybe one too many designer brews, holding forth from outdoor pub tables, debated the awesomeness of Michelle Obama after she addressed the Democratic National Convention. Lots of use of the word "dude," and lots of praise for the wife of presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama, who on Thursday is expected to--
OK, wait. "Presumptive"? Why are we all saying that? Is there some suspense hanging in the air? Excitement, maybe, but no suspense. A couple weeks ago we could have said, "Michael Phelps, presumptive 2008 Olympic gold medalist," because there was theoretically an outside chance that Phelps wouldn't win everything in sight, though we presumed he would. But enough with the "presumptive" for Obama.
Sorry. Where were we? Oh, right, Michelle Obama, who clearly beat Teddy Kennedy in the made-for-TV adoration sweepstakes among the drinking young in downtown Denver (see Mark Z. Barabak's Times story on the two speeches and other highlights of the convention's first night). Different story as you walked toward the big hotels, where the crowds got older and the number of credential badges around necks grew larger. "It was good to see Teddy so well" was the sort of thing people waiting for taxis said to one another.
But not all of them. Downstairs from the Pinnacle Club at the Grand Hyatt, where folks like San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and other VIPs from the California delegation were partying late into the night -- courtesy of AT&T -- several women with Ohio delegate floor passes were standing in the taxi line and coming close to blows.
"You can't be serious," said one, staring down her acquaintance. "Get over it. It's not going to be Hillary this time, and because of that you're telling me you would vote for McCain?"
"I'm saying it's not right," came the answer. "It was taken from her."
For all the Obamania, there are in fact, strong hints of -- is it OK to call it Hillarity? -- in town. I still say we shouldn't use "presumptive," but there seem to be lots of Clinton delegates who think even that's too strong. See the Times story.
Earlier in the day, at the California delegates' breakfast, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi shook her finger at the crowd (which is weighted heavily toward Clinton supporters) to remind delegates that McCain is, well, a (gasp) Republican.
The photos of Ted Kennedy and Michelle Obama were snapped by Keith Bedford/Bloomberg News and Charles Charapak/AP, respectively.
Even by the low standards of campaign attack ads, there is something pathetic about the John McCain commercial commiserating with Hillary Clinton for not being tapped by Barack Obama as his running mate.
"She won millions of votes but isn't on his ticket," a McCain commercial said. "Why? For speaking the truth."
There is poetic justice for Clinton in being drafted by the McCain campaign. Her attacks on Obama in the primary season -- like all such broadsides -- were transparently tactical and insincere. Clinton was no more appalled by Obama's ties to dodgy businessman Tony Rezko than Rudy Giuliani was by Mitt Romney's employment of illegal aliens to manicure the lawn of his Massachusetts mansion.
Politicians and journalists know these silly shotgun attacks are meaningless, and become inoperative as soon as the primaries are over and a nominee has been anointed. But a lot of voters aren't in on the joke, which is why McCain's crocodile tears for Hillary might actually deter some Democrats from voting for Obama. If not, he could ask her to join him on the Republican ticket.
The photo of John McCain and Hillary Clinton practicing for the inaugural (no, check that, they're at a 2007 dedication ceremony for a military rehabilitation center in San Antonio) is by Ben Sklar/Getty Images.
...the mayor of Los Angeles is doing his best to make his presence felt in Denver at the Democratic National Convention. Antonio Villaraigosa spoke last night to the New Hampshire delegation, this morning to Florida, and is expected to speak later this week to Texas and, of course, California.
The Florida delegation was a bit giddy over a committee ruling yesterday granting full voting power on the convention floor, so perhaps it was of little moment that members seemed to be giving Villaraigosa only a sliver of their attention during his morning remarks. "Don't worry," he said to a delegation official from the podium. "They are all happy to see each other, so don't get concerned about the chatter."
At least a few were listening, because Villaraigosa was applauded when he mentioned the Kyoto accord, healthcare and party unity. Unity, of course, is a big deal, and the L.A. mayor's most important role here may be helping to win over the hearts, and not just the votes, of Hillary Clinton supporters. Villaraigosa was a Clinton campaign national co-chair, and if he wanted to, he could stoke the lingering resentment that some Clinton supporters feel. But he told the Florida crowd that he was a now an unabashed supporter of the Barack Obama-Joe Biden ticket.
California and Florida are quite similar, Villaraigosa said afterward. California, too, would be a swing state -- if it were not for the Latino vote. Although Florida Latinos include the state's large and generally Republican Cuban population, the mayor said the demographics are changing, with the population being diversified with immigrants from Mexico, Honduras and other parts of Latin America. "Florida is going to be a blue state," he said.
The Zogby polling organization has released a startling finding: More than 60% of American voters say they would elect an openly gay president.
The notion that anyone can grow up to be president –- preposterous as it may be –- long has served as a metaphor for the openness and fairness of Americans society. That a majority of Americans say they would vote for an otherwise qualified gay candidate for the White House is thus a symbolic milestone. It also is consistent with other polls indicating a shift in attitudes toward homosexuality, particularly among young people. In May, in the aftermath of the California Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, a Field Poll concluded that 51 percent of California voters favored allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry. (The sample size was 1,052 registered voters.)
Critics of the poll will insist that it’s an aberration or nitpick the methodology. It can be argued, for example, that the poll doesn’t reflect the homophobic equivalent of the Bradley Effect (named for former LA Mayor Tom Bradley). That is the theory that some voters, asked if they will support an African-American candidate, say yes even when they don’t mean it.
But suppose the response to the Zogby poll is inflated by some respondents’ belief that it is politically incorrect to oppose gay rights. That in itself is a statement about how far gays and lesbians have come in achieving public acceptance.
Now that you've digested our take on Barack Obama's selection of fellow senator Joe Biden as his running mate (hmmm, two senators ... Kerry-Edwards ... Gore-Lieberman ... McGovern-Eagleton....) here's a few links to what other editorial boards around the country are saying.
The Wall Street Journal devotes extra column inches to the choice and (gasp) doesn't think it was the worst move ever. In fact, the Journal's board likened Obama's choice of Biden to George W. Bush's selection of Dick Cheney in 2000. (Before you get caught up in that comparison, read Joel Achenbach's description of Biden as "the un-Cheney.") As if to make up for the praise on the editorial page, the Wall Street Journal also ran an op-ed by Fred Barnes contending that Obama sealed his own defeat by picking someone almost as liberal as himself.
In Monday's letters, readers write in about Republicans in California government: how much of the current budget crisis in Sacramento is the GOP's fault? Many writers say Republicans are entirely to blame, but Debbie Clark, of Burbank, begs to differ:
We ridicule ultra-conservative Republicans such as Tom McClintock when they argue for not increasing taxes, or cutting back or cutting off funds for various budget items. And then the Times chimes in crying out for some good ol' Republican responsibility.... The Republicans have become the whipping boy of California and this should stop immediately.
The editorial board hasn't decided yet whom to endorse in the 2008 presidential race, but it praises Barack Obama for selecting a running mate who appears up to the job. Yes yes, we know, Joe Biden hasn't undergone the withering media scrutiny yet that will make us all loathe him by Election Day. The point here isn't to judge Biden by policies or peccadilloes, but by stature:
We're not so naive as to believe that electoral calculations played no part in this choice. But Biden passes the "ready on day one" test better than most vice presidential candidates. Think of Dan Quayle, the telegenic but callow Indiana senator plucked from obscurity by George H.W. Bush to shore up the support of conservatives. Or Geraldine A. Ferraro, the obscure New York congresswoman selected by Walter F. Mondale because he believed a female running mate would energize a listless campaign.
Never afraid to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, the board rejects a proposal to provide public financing for candidates vying to be California's top elections official, the Secretary of State, because of its inequitable funding source: higher fees on lobbyists. And it urges state Assembly Speaker Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles) to rescue a vital renewable-energy bill before the session ends.
Over in OpEdville, columnist Gregory Rodriguez shouts out a "Hell no, we won't go!" to the Democratic and Republican party conventions. His call for Americans to tune out and turn off is rooted in a more generalized contempt for the technology-fueled bogosity of contemporary life:
My revulsion for the conventions doesn’t stem simply from disdain for partisan politics. Nor am I suggesting that Americans ignore the substance of politics. But to my mind, conventions are emblematic of everything that’s wrong with American culture. For all our belief in freedom, which by definition breeds unpredictability, and our pride in our cultural dynamism, U.S. culture is becoming ever more self-conscious and scripted.
Also on the page, local radio host Barbara DeMarco-Barrett tells of a bike ride with her 13-year-old son. And Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University, explores the psychology behind the public's deep pessimism about the economy and discovers we're acting like the yoked dog, not the control dog. Now that's depressing.
The toothy photo of Joe Biden is by Emmanuel Dunand of AFP/Getty Images.
Looks like Harold Simmons doesn’t mind spending big money for what he believes in, starting with ... Harold Simmons.
Simmons is the corporate raider and sept-billionaire (worth more than $7 billion, according to Forbes) who gave millions to finance the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry in 2004.
And now, according to my Times colleague Dan Morain, he’s written a check for all of the $2.87 million it’s costing to run ominous-sounding ads in Ohio and Pennsylvania about Barack Obama’s relationship with William Ayers, an Illinois professor and a former member of the Weather Underground who served on a charity's board with Obama and hosted a fundraiser for him 13 years ago. Obama has said he ``engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old.''
Here in California, where our thirst for water is even longer than our memories, we knew about this Texas billionaire long before 2004. He thumbed his nose at us way back, during the drought of 1989-90.
In the rich Santa Barbara suburb of Montecito, the part-time getaway hometown to the likes of Oprah Winfrey, water was then so scarce that the water district regulated its use, and some Montecitans painted their grass green or let their gardens go naturally brown, the way that people patriotically patched their tires and their stockings during World War II.
Not Simmons. He spent only about ten days a month at his 23-acre Montecito estate, but no way was he going along with the local conservation program. After he high-handedly kept the taps wide open to maintain his gardens on uber-green, the water district finally turned his flow to a trickle.
Undeterred, Simmons applied for a permit to drill a well and even paid a private company to truck in yet more water. He was fined $25,000 after using enough public water to keep your average family of four supplied for … 28 years.
And this is a guy who’s once again using his checkbook to lecture all of us on what constitutes good citizenship?
In Sunday's Letters to the editor, readers respond to stories about crime scene paparazzi and textbooks, as well as to Chris Ayres' op-ed about why he loves his house, which he purchased at the height of the real estate bubble.
Allan Coie, of South Pasadena, comments on Bill Plaschke's column about gold medalist (and son of undocumented immigrants) Henry Cejudo, noting that we shouldn't pat the U.S. on the back:
...to even the most casual observer, the story was about the triumph of grit, determination and personal talent against the odds stacked against him by a country and its institutions doing their darnedest to keep him out.
Ooops. The so-last-century mainstream media beat Barack Obama's campaign to the punch, revealing the name of his running mate hours before the campaign started reporting the choice to supporters via shiny new technology. In case you've forgotten, the campaign had promised to alert its followers first, via text messages and e-mail. But by 10 p.m. last night, the LA Times had confirmed Joe Biden as the Dems' No. 2, as had the NY Times, and I'd be surprised if numerous other papers weren't running with the story, too. (Ditto for the cable news nets.) So as I sit here, still waiting for my copy of the Obama text message (I'm not an Obama backer, I just do the things reporters do), I've got to wonder: will the new-media types who got swept up in the sheer niftiness of the gimmick be a little more skeptical next time? Take, for example, the Huffington Post, which gushed on Aug. 13:
That's right, Obama is announcing his VP via text message — not via
leak to a trusted MSM source, not in an editorial in the venerable New York Times, not in a sit-down with a Big Three anchorperson, not even in an eleventh-hour blog post on a wildly popular news-and-opinion site. Instead, he's doing a total end-run around traditional media and breaking some very big news directly to The People.
To her credit, HuffPo scribe Rachel Sklar noted (as the New York Times' Garrett Graff points out in this story) what probably is the real reason behind the text-message gambit: to collect voters' phone numbers. In fact, not long after I signed up, the campaign hit me with an unsolicited text missive that made me regret being such a sucker.
You might also argue that the text-message thing was just a bit of theater designed to make the nation's big media outlets chase the story of Obama's pick more feverishly. But that's silly. It's a presidential race -- the pack couldn't get any hungrier.
Each week, Letters to the Editor receives thousands of e-mails, dozens of letters through the good old U.S. postal service, and even a few faxes here and there.
After we cut out spam, obscene mail, letters addressed to more than one recipient, letters that seem to be the fruit of letter-writing campaigns (last week's biggie: complaints about Jerome Corsi's "Obama Nation") and letters with attachments (which gum up our computer systems), we usually are left with several hundred eligible items, from which we select the somewhere around 100 that get published in the newspaper every week.
In the week starting Aug. 17, we received almost 600 usable letters, 346 of which were in our Top Five Topics:
The presidential election: 181 letters, reacting to 15 stories covering everything from the forum at Saddleback Church to Cindy McCain's hand injury;
Russia: 86 letters, responding to three stories about the conflict in Georgia;
State budget: 33 letters, responding to six stories about budget paralysis in Sacramento;
Energy: 31 letters, responding to four stories about skyrocketing gas prices and the people who pray for them to fall;
Electoral college: 31 letters, responding to a Times editorial calling on California to dump the electoral college. Most respondents thought it was a lousy idea.
More thoughts on algebra requirements for 8th graders, too. Andrew Needle, a teacher in Van Nuys, thinks we've all made the algebra monster out to be more scary than it really is:
Elementary students are told time after time in numerous ways that algebra is hard. "You'll learn that in algebra." Their older siblings are having trouble in algebra. Parents tell us (in front) of their students that, "They come by being math-phobic naturally because I had trouble in algebra."
Algebra is simply a game... and as with any game, you need to understand the rules and practice.
Chris Daly, an Air Force veteran living in Yucaipa, wonders why ex-Marine Jose Nazario will face a civilian trial:
No one who has not been under fire can have any idea of the thought processes and emotional responses it engenders or the rules that are in place.
When I returned from my war, Vietnam, and was asked by friends who had not served to explain what it was like, I quickly learned that trying to do so was akin to a bird explaining flight to a snail.
The editorial board goes for the Provocation Trifecta today.
First, it praises the California Supreme Court for declaring that doctors cannot refuse care to a person based on sexual orientation. That ruling came in a lawsuit brought by a woman who claimed a San Diego County obstetrics and gynecology group refused to artificially inseminate her because she's a lesbian. Second, it expresses hope that Catholic Archbishop Raymond Burke of St. Louis will be too busy in his new job at the Vatican to meddle in U.S. elections. Burke is best known for declaring during the 2004 campaign that fellow Catholic John Kerry should be denied communion because he supported abortion rights. Finally, it urges lawmakers to consider lowering the drinking age to help colleges and universities combat an epidemic of binge drinking. (Take the poll!) Don't bottle up your outrage -- post your comments here, or at the bottom of each editorial.
On the Op-Ed page, scholar Mark Paul of the New American Foundation details how California voters could drive the state much more deeply into the red in November by approving one or more costly propositions:
Leave aside whether these measures are worthy as policy. Just look at the dollars involved. If voters pass all six, we will cumulatively add about $2.7 billion a year in bond debt service and direct state spending to the budget -- without including an extra dime to pay for them.
Columnist Rosa Brooks accuses neocons of trying to revive the Cold War, although she stops short of blaming them for the Russian invasion of Georgia. (That's so last week!) Michael Kleinman, a veteran of humanitarian efforts in Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, discusses the uptick in direct attacks on aid workers in and around war zones. And columnist Patt Morrison gives at least seven good reasons for the quadrennial political conventions to move from the real world to the virtual one:
I've been to four or five party parties, and I'm convinced that there's almost nothing that happens in the hall that needs to take place in real life and real time anymore. Like the "footprint" fireworks at the Chinese Olympics, political conventions could be crafted entirely in a computer.
Right on! My avatar is ready, whenever the Dems and the GOP are.
I don't know what the company named Invesco does -- my gut and English grammar classes tell me that it's probably ''invest.''
On the op-ed side, columnist 
Letters
