We briefly interrupt the war in Georgia to announce that The Daughter has written a fine piece on the rise and fall of the lad-mags.

Now I know why I don't write for Playboy anymore!

Wow, the Russian offensive into Georgia has revived all that pent-up mental muscle memory among idle and nostalgic cold warriors. They needn't bother any longer trying to correctly pronounce, or spell Al Qaeda, al-Qida, Al Qaida,

We're back to bi-partisan, throaty denunciations of "Russian aggression." Damn, that phrase is as comfy as one of Ronnie Reagan's old loafers!

From the neo-cons to John McCain to right-wing Democrats like Richard Holbrooke, we've got a lot of sabre-rattlin' going on.  Like Putin is really concerned. I'm sure he's expecting the disembarkment of the 82nd Airborne any minute now on the outskirts of Moscow.

Let's get real, folks. What we're watching --in gory technicolor-- are what policy wonks call the "limits of American power." Contrary to popular myth and fantasy, we do not single-handedly rule the world. There are other bullies out there on the playground and some of them are so big that you have to, um, learn to co-exist with them. It isn't always pretty, but it's nevertheless true.

That means you have to think twice (even once would be nice) about the possible consequences of messin' in the other guy's bizness. For some years now, a host of foreign policy experts have been sternly warning that it was only a  matter of time before an emboldened Mother Russia would push back against the continuous expansion of NATO and its influence. And that time is now.

This is not the exclusive work of George W. Bush. Not by a long shot. Though it would be somewhat more reassuring to have a slightly saner set of clowns at the foreign policy helm than the current crew. But many Democrats are as clueless as the Republicans when it comes to a realistic reckoning with, yes, the limits of American power.  The big push to grow NATO came with Clinton, not Cheney.

That said, John McCain has reacted to the Georgian crisis like a horny old mummy given a mega-dose of Viagra. The New York Times has a tidy little run-down on McCain's rather sulphuric view of the Russkies. And talk about something less than re-assuring. Listen to what McCain is saying and then ask yourself if this is the kind of policy we really want: that on top of eveyrthing else going on the world we should now isolate, and back Russia into a corner?

But not to worry that much. It seems that McCain isn't really interested enough in a new cold or hot war with Russia to really bone up on the subject. It looks very much like like his big, blowhard policy statement on Georgia was more or less plagiarized from... the Wikipedia!  By the way, anybody who pulls such a similar stunt in one of my USC classes doesn't get elected to anything. He gets expelled.

Meanwhile, there's this rather blood-curdling ground-level report coming out of the war zone. It sounds pretty much like a catastrophe.

So you think John Edwards' timing of his confession -- on the Friday night before the Olympics-- was shrewd? Well, then, how about them Russians?

Valdmir Putin is many things but he ain't a panty-waist liberal. He's unleashed a hellish full-scale war against the former Soviet republic of Georgia and the casualties are already mounting.

Count among them the credibility and regional clout of the United State of America.  In a searing analysis in The New York Times, C.J. Chivers writes of the contributing factors and the likely consequences of this conflict:

They included the Kremlin’s military successes in Chechnya, which gave Russia the latitude and sense of internal security it needed to free up troops to cross its borders, and the exuberant support of the United States for President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia, a figure loathed by the Kremlin on both personal and political terms.

Moreover, by preparing Georgian soldiers for duty in Iraq, the United States appeared to have helped embolden Georgia, if inadvertently, to enter a fight it could not win.

American officials and a military officer who have dealt with Georgia said privately that as a result, the war risked becoming a foreign policy catastrophe for the United States, whose image and authority in the region were in question after it had proven unable to assist Georgia or to restrain the Kremlin while the Russian Army pressed its attack...

imultaneously, as the contest of wills between Georgia and Russia intensified, the strong support of the United States for Mr. Saakashvili created tensions within the foreign policy establishment in Washington and created rival views.

Some diplomats considered Mr. Saakashvili a politician of unusual promise, someone who could reorder Georgia along the lines of a Western democracy and become a symbol of change in the politically moribund post-Soviet states. Mr. Saakashvili encouraged this view, framing himself as a visionary who was leading a column of regional democracy movements.

Other diplomats worried that both Mr. Saakashvili’s persona and his platforms presented an implicit challenge to the Kremlin, and that Mr. Saakashvili made himself a symbol of something else: Russia’s suspicion about American intentions in the Kremlin’s old empire. They worried that he would draw the United States and Russia into arguments that the United States did not want.

Oh, great. Yet another foreign policy catastrophe. Who's keeping count anyway?

Perhaps the consequences for the U.S. over-stated here. Perhaps not. What we do know already is that as a result of this conflict the Bush Administration has lost the presence of Georgian troops in its Iraq coalition. And the U.S. has already been shown to be impotent in protecting a small ally that we helped egg into war with its colossal and ruthless neighbor.

Maybe if George W. Bush has another face-to-face meeting and once again gazes deep into the loving, soulful eyes of  Mr. Putin he will be able to sort this mess out as neatly as he has in Baghdad.

Not that it comes as any great surprise by now, but the confirmation that John Edwards lied about an extramarital affair that started during his campaign is certainly a saddening disappointment.

It's easy to say that a politician's sex life is his own business. That it's a personal matter. That it's something to be sorted out between himself and his family and his therapist. And that if he lied about it, so what? After all, he was only lying about sex (Wow, this all sounds familiar, doesn't it?).

Well, you and I might (or might not) think all of the above. But millions of voters definitely do not. And when you run for the office of president of the United States and you are counting on all of those votes, then you know this as one of the basic facts of life.

And that's what is so worrisome and saddening about the Edwards affair. I liked Edwards. I liked his wife even more. His kids -- which were thrust out on the stump-- were adorable. I suppose the fact that he betrayed them is arguably his own business (though it hardly evokes much sympathy for the man).

The much more salient point is how Edwards flagrantly betrayed the trust of the millions who voted for him and who wanted this guy to become President. This wasn't some youthful dalliance nor even a recently concluded episode. It was a relationship initiated during and as a result of his campaign and which involved the payment of more than $100,000 to his lover's firm for web spots that were never deployed.

In other words, it was politically fatal if exposed. Edwards knew this but was not deterred. And that is why he lied to cover it up. Imagine if he had won the nomination and this became public now.

He was willing to put in play the interests of his constituencies and of his country in order to pursue his personal pleasures. Just like Bill Clinton for whom we can thank mightily for contributing to the erection of the Age of Bush.

I don't know about you. But I sure feel a whole lot safer now that a kangaroo court in the unaccountable gulag of Gitmo has formally convicted Osama Bin Laden's driver. If the CIA could only nab his manicurist, his astrologer and his tailor, I think we would pretty much consider the Global War on Terror wrapped up, no?

Reading even the short news dispatch lined to above should tell you just about everything you need to know to get really sick to your stomach.

Ask yourselves these questions:

How is it that Salim Ahmed Hamdan who -- by all appearances-- was precisely and only a driver, is the first suspect to be tried by the shameful military tribunals established by Dick Cheney?  That's the highest value target we could try after seven years of running what amounts to a concentration camp for the supposed world's most dangerous terrorists? Perhaps because most of those at Gitmo are not so dangerous? And that those who are have been so repeatedly tortured that we can't even make a case against them in a rigged court?

What does it mean that the judge sentenced this guy, effectively, to only 6 months more jail? Perhaps because Hamdan is precisely a "little fish" -- maybe like a guppie-- as the judge described him.

What does it mean that the court admitted hearsay as evidence? Perhaps that as a court it is a farce?

What does it mean that the court did not permit some "coereced" evidence? Perhaps that little fish or nor Hamdan was tortured?

What does it mean that U.S. military authorities immediately announced after the 5 1/2 year sentence imposed on Hamdan (including 5 years time already served) that he isn't going anywhere and wil be held indefinitely? Perhaps that the court is a farce? (Oops, I already said that).

What a national embarrassment this all is. Last week, I recommended reading Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side." If you get through that, pick up a copy of Ron Suskind's new "The Way of the World" and get really bummed out. I can only say what I have said about 50 times in the last few years: The incompetence, hubris, arrogance and reckless disregard for human and American values imposed by this administration will cost us for generations to come. Way, way beyond November.

This is my last of five nights in The Big Easy.

It's been great being a tourist because there is simply no city in America more gracious to visitors than Nawlins. Gracious and grateful. Because, unfortunately, the simple act of buying a chickory-laced cafe au lait and a plate of powdery beignets at the Cafe Du Monde still feels like an act of solidarity with a forgotten and devastated land than it does an oblivious moment of summer frivolity.

We didn't come here this week to preach politics or to be preached at. And most of our time has, indeed, been spent scarfing oysters at Acme, listening to the cajuns sing at Mulate's, devouring the best rack of lamb ever at Adolfo's, catching an unforgettable all-night jam in the Merigny, and tripping out three nights in a row on both Big Al Carson and Marva Wright.

But three years after the disaster, Katrina still festers, burns and pervades the lives and thoughts of those still here. And those who have come back. Even Wright's roof-shaking, improvised and elongated rendition of the old standard, A Change Is Gonna Come, last Sunday night to close out a set on Bourbon Street, turned into a wrenching, inflamed anthem to persistence and resistance bringing down the house with a repeated vow to "stand, stand, stand, stand, stand."

Yes, there's been rebuilding. Even a certain rebirth. But with 200,000 people still displaced -- about 40% of the pre-Katrina population-- most experts now agree that what you see is what you get i.e. that the recovery and return has now peaked and plateaued. In sum, the city is stunted at about 2/3 of what it was before 2005.

In the meantime, there remain tens of thousands of blighted and abandoned properties. The infamous Lower 9th Ward still looks much like post-war Berlin. Devastated. Bombed out. Ghostly quiet.

Except here there is no Marshall Plan. More to the point. There ain't nothing. "There is no plan that I know of," flatly said the Grayline bus driver who took us on the still-going Katrina Tour as we traversed block after block of almost desolate urban landscape.

And that's what truly boggles the mind about this place. Not the scale of destruction itself. That's pretty easy to understand once you grasp the odd topography and chart out the failures of the levees and canals and pumping systems.

What's unfathomable is with what indifference this richest country in the world tolerated the destruction and virtual abandonment of one of its most historic and beloved cities. The failure of political imagination is simply incalculable. How did rebuilding New Orleans somehow not become a national crusade?

You would think that even the most craven and opportunistic of administrations would have rushed in to at least capitalize on reconstruction. Anyone with a real brain in the White House could have taken a lesson, say, from Argentina's Juan Domingo Peron, who built a still-standing now 60 year old political empire out of providing massive doses of post-earthquake populist relief.

What it costs to sustain the stupidity of the Iraq War for a couple of months -- $5 or $10 billion-- could have been poured into here. Tens of thousands of locals could have been gainfully employed in rebuilding their own city and not just warehoused in carcinogenic trailers (from which the most vulnerable are now being formally evicted).

Perhaps I have imbided one Mint Julep too many to indulge in such bleeding heart sentimentality. It seems just a tad unrealistic, doesn't it, to harbor --even for a moment-- such grandiose expectations.

Turns out, that such reconstruction isn't even being carried out in the precise place where we have sunk all that cash-- hundreds times that amount of cash. And blood.

Take your choice. New Orleans or Iraq. Shameful monuments to the moral bankruptcy and total failure of both domestic and foreign policy.

I'm heading out to New Orleans Friday and will be off duty for a handful of days. So try to survive without me.

Meanwhile, I couldn't help but hiccup over this little dandy item: The publisher of the local, second-rate, third-tier newspaper has issued a dress code edict, talking to his already demoralized and historically underpaid staff as if they were a bunch of mohwaked, adolescent slackers:

* Managers and professional employees should dress for business daily; never jeans or tennis shoes. If unsure, recall how you dressed when you interviewed for your position.
* Casual Friday is an option. Business casual always presents a good appearance, never jeans, running shoes, T-shirts, flip-flops or beachwear.
* Business casual is a good choice for evening work in all departments outside of production.
* Clothing should be clean, unwrinkled and in good repair.
* Denim including designer jeans is never appropriate for the workplace.

Maybe this explains the ongoing collapse of newspapers. Too many reporters in jeans and tennis shoes!

Or, alternately, too many newspaper execs with their heads firmly inserted in ... well, you know the rest. In the current newspaper atmosphere, if you've got nothing to worry about except how your reporters dress, I think you sorta deserve to go out of business, no?

(By the way -- this newspaper's office is in Woodland Hills where I live. It's the absolute hottest spot in the city of L.A. where temperatures routinely run into triple digits over the summer).

I just finished teaching a 10 week fellowship of graduate M.A. j-students at USC (where it's usually about 15 degrees cooler) and they did absolutely outstanding work -- often dressed in jeans, tennies, flip-flops, and beach dresses (not to mention yours truly who showed up every day in t-shirts). Obviosuly, when they had to go out and do interviews, they changed into something presentable. I hope they never have to work for the narrow-minded type of robot who wrote that dress code memo.

While we're at it. Please take a moment to look at my students' work. It's just been posted on this rather spectacular website built with the assistance of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

Ceeya next week. And no tennies!

When the tallies of Campaign '08 are finally written, it's now certain that McCain will have won. He will have beaten out Bill and Hillary Clinton in the category of just who most belittled him or herself during this election cycle.

McCain's latest ad is neither aggravating nor insulting. It's just plain pathetic how someone considered so broadly to be An American Hero has so quickly converted himself in An American Schmuck. A Little, Tiny Schmuck.

The dynamic of this election -- I truly believe-- after a year-and-a-half and millions of words of complicated analysis will now come down to one very simple incontrovertible question: In this time of a senseless $3 trillion war, a record-busting deficit, $4 a gallon gas, crashing banks, 50 million uninsured, mass export of jobs, and a flaunting of the U.S. Constitution is it a greater liability to be the candidate of the ruling party or to be black?

Period.

Everything else is white noise. Quite literally.

************

Lots of mental onanism this past week about impeachment. What world do these folks live in? It's about indictment, stupid. Not impeachment. Here's my latest column on that issue.

What a grueling week this past one has been trying to follow the presidential campaign. It was wall-to-wall "don't believe your lyin' eyes" if you were paying any attention whatsoever to the media chorus.

My god.

Did Obama do what he had to do? Was a crowd of 200,000 to big or too small? Wasn't that place he gave the speech glorified by the Nazis? Was it presumptuous of him to meet with so many heads of state? Were knuckle-dragging trolls in Ohio and Pennsylvania now gonna think he was too French? And, what about that Sarkozy guy? Is he some kinda closet liberal? What did it mean that Obama's visit to Downing Street was so much quieter? Did he flip-flop on Iraq? Were the pictures coming out of Baghdad approved by him or the Pentagon? Was he now too black instead of not black enough? Did he dis the troops? And, of course, the media spending hour after hour after hour in asking itself was it too soft on Obama? Then the real zinger: Was Obama's trip abroad so good that it was actually too good?

My question to add to this list: How many angels can dance on the head of Brian Williams?

Actually, the truth was much simpler. Obama pretty much pulled off just about one of the most successful weeks of presidential campaigning in recent memory. Hats off to my USC Annenberg colleague, Jon Taplin, who sums it all up in two words: "looney tunes." That's how he describes the official bloviators who were suggesting that the Obamapalooza might have been for naught.

Taplin rolls out the latest Gallup tracking poll that reveals the sizeable bump that Obama reaped from his trip. He's now leading McCain by a healthy 49-40 margin. Let's repeat that: a black freshman senator with a funny arabic/african/muslin/ferner name is leading the 26 year veteran of the U.S. Senate and former POW by a near double-digit margin.

Yeah, a real cliff hanger.

What made Obama's trip so important is that it was, indeed, Reaganesque (as Taplin points out). What Americans saw was something remarkable. For the first time in a half-dozen years they saw the world, quite literally, show respect and admiration for at least a potential U.S. president. That's what you call restoring national pride. Allowing Americans to stop grimacing when a barely literate boob who has trouble putting two sentences together pretends to speak on our collective behalf.

John McCain's campaign, meanwhile, is literally struggling for air. It has become 100% reactive -- the sure sign of a loser. Instead of setting forth any pro-active agenda, McCain has been merely riding each daily news cycle. His message of the day is one cheap shot after another -- whining, carping and reacting to whatever Obama says. What's McCain after? The sympathy vote?

In his illuminating book, Here Comes Everybody, NYU's Clay Shirkey recounts a marvelously ironic and relevant anecdote dating back to 1492. The printing press was already a half century old, and the ancient profession of being a scribe was in the process of being expunged. The invention of movable type had robbed the small circle of scribes of their monopoly on producing the written word.

So in that same year that Columbus bumped into the Americas, Herr Johannes Trithemius -- the Abbot of Sponheim -- wrote a spirited defense of scribal tradition titled De Laude Scriptorum. As Shirkey points out, this screed would be remembered only as a reactionary defense of the old order at any cost if it weren't for one niggling detail. The good Abbot's work was not published and copied by scribes. Nope. It was published in mass by one of those new fangled printing machines!

We've got just such an ironic happenstance this week. Lefty journalist Chris Hedges has let loose a holy celebration of the dying newspaper and a throaty condemnation of the Internet -- by publishing it... on the Internet. I'm not going to quote from the piece as you can read it for yourself (on the Web). Suffice it to say that it reads like like the last groanings of a dying priesthood. Though it's clothed in anti-corporate rhetoric, Hedge's piece is but a nostalgic whine for something that is very much on its way out and represents a closed-mindedness worthy of a card-carrying member of the Minutemen.

Too bad. Hedges did terrific work when working as a daily reporter for a number of top flight newspapers including the Chri Sci Monitor and The New York Times. He brought a cutting edge to his memorable dispatches from El Salvador, the West Bank and the Balkans (among other hot spots) that sharply distinguished him from the pack of go-along-to-get-along MSM reporters (which makes it ever more baffling why Chris is now so nostalgic for the good old days when the corporate news rooms monopolized the news agenda). WTF?

In this latter phase of his career now retired from daily reporting and dedicated to writing books and magazine pieces for The Nation -- indeed, now that he has been liberated from the strait jacket protocols of "objective" newspaper reporting-- Hedges has perhaps overcompensated a tad and  has become something of a fire-breathing ideologue of the left (albeit with a decided Christian edge to his perspective).

Jeff Jarvis finds Hedges' anti-Web blast as wearisome as I did. So he only half-heartedly takes Hedges' "argument" apart in this riposte. Then again, it didn't take much more than a short puff to blow Hedges down.

Last week, by the way, Jay Rosen described nostalgic professional reporters as something akin to an uprooted tribe that -- now forced to migrate-- don't know exactly what to take with them and what to leave behind. It's a perfect description of Chris Hedges who sounds like he's been wandering around a bit too long in the blazing sun.

So says the foreign editor of Der Spiegel after Obama's speech to nearly a quarter-million Berliners today:

Anyone who saw Barack Obama at Berlin's Siegessäule on Thursday could recognize that this man will become the 44th president of the United States. He is more than ambitious -- he wants to lay claim to become the president of the world.

It was a ton to absorb -- and what a stupendous ride through world history: the story of his own family, the Berlin Airlift, terrorists, poorly secured nuclear material, the polar caps, World War II, America's errors, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, freedom. It's amazing one could even pack such a potpourri of issues into sentences and then succeed in squeezing them all into the space of a speech that lasted less than 30 minutes...

He also could have said: We are a world power, the only one that exists on this planet at the moment, and I am going to act as if that were the case. But you're also allowed to participate in the attempt to try to save the world -- at least a bit of it. In that sense I am different from George W. Bush -- very different. Indeed, Barack Obama has his own sound -- it's more utopian, he speaks of the general human desire for better conditions for all of humanity; and he speaks of the longing for strong and dynamic presidents and chancellors who are capable of acting on a global scale. With this drive and this radiance, he managed to drive Hillary Clinton out of the campaign. It is also the way he is going to outpace John McCain on November 4. It is the way he took the hearts of Americans by storm and it is the way he is now taking Europe by storm.

Anyone who saw him make the short way from the Victory Column in Berlin on Thursday to the podium saw a man with the serious gait of a basketball player, a man who seemed young, decisive and focused. For those who witnessed his appearance in Berlin, it is hard to imagine that John McCain still has any chance. McCain is 25 years his senior, a man who because of the torture he endured in Vietnam is in constant pain -- unable to comb his hair or lift his arm in celebration.

Europe is witnessing the 44th president of the United States during this trip. 

A hat tip to Bill Bradley for this find. The analysis from Der Spiegel overlaps mine of earlier this week when I wrote that if there were a referee overseeing this election fight, this might just be the moment already to step in and stop the bloody pummeling. How  a fumbling, bumbling McCain is gonna as much stay on his feet till November seems a mystery.

In that respect, My Brilliant Daughter offers some stern advice to Senator McCain.

Yes, it's true.

My Brilliant Daughter has fired up a new blog... and it's already blazing hot. Bookmark it, quick! Before it's all gone.

P.S. It ain't for the squeamish. Only the smart.

Been traveling. Indeed, posting this from an airport. But wanted to point your attention to this piece just out in The New York Times extolling the growth of our OffTheBus reporting project.  Think about joining up with us.

Judge him as you please, but it would be difficult for anyone in good faith to deny the sheer brilliance of Barack Obama's current world tour. And isn't even half over.

Watching the AP video footage of him in Afghanistan, it was really difficult not to notice how many of the troops standing behind him and around him had one obvious thing in common: they were black. And, yes, they along with all the other G.I.'s in focus seemed to be ecstatic to meet him.

I'm not about to start doing any collective mind reading, but if you're a grunt somewhere near the battle lines it's got to feel good to see a possible commander-in-chief who sorta looks like you and is only twice your age -- not three or four times older!

Now comes Iraq -- where I'm gonna guess-- Barack is also going to be a smash hit among the troops. And don't you just love the political howling around this trip of his.

First comes Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki wrapping himself up in knots, straining to explain just exactly how it is that he doesn't agree with Obama's withdrawal plan. When he really does.

The only thing that beats that was listening Sunday to the unctuous Holy Joe Lieberman on Fox News. He was loudly bitching that Obama was wrong, wrong, wrong to stick by his Iraq withdrawal plan without having first gone to Iraq to hear from U.S. commanders on how we are now "winning the war." Wonderful! First the McCain campaign taunts Obama about not going to Iraq. And now that he's going, the campaign toadies like Lieberman whine about Obama having his own judgement independent of the self-serving views (whatever they may be) of the Pentagon brass.

S omeone ought to grab Lieberman by the collar and remind him fo two things:

1) Thanks to that fading document known as the U.S. constitution, here in America decisions regarding war and peace are made by civilian politicians and not by on the ground commanders. Thank you very much.

2) Please stop insulting our intelligence by telling us you have to physically be somewhere to understand somewhere. What kind of second grade poppycock is Lieberman pushig? The argument that Obama can't have a rational political/military position on the war because he hasn't recently been in Iraq is the sort of political doublespeak that turns stomach. Um, Joe, you never heard of briefing books? Of intelligence reports? Of telephones? Of consultation with experts? Of plain logic?

By the way. I'm among those who hope Lieberman, in fact, does accept a speaker's slot at the Republican National Convention. He deserves a prominent place among the xenophobes, the war mongers, the Christian Right, the yachtsmen, the used car dealers, and the hinterland Rotarian warriors who make up the audience of such tawdry spectacles.

I found Joe repugnant and refused to vote for him in 2000. And my opinion of him since then has only darkened.

If you happen to be passing through downtown Los Angeles and you swing by the intersection of Second and Spring, you'll notice a blood-staned banner hanging from atop the L.A. Times building reading "Mission Accomplished."

Potty-mouthed billionaire junk yard operator Sam Zell has pretty much finished the hatchet job on the local newspaper. All papers are in some state or another of crisis, but this has to be a world record in the fastest trashing ever of a major publication. You can read about today's bloody developments here, here, here, here, here and here.

As the heads were rolling today, I had lunch with an old high school chum I hadn't seen since 1968. He told me a great, related story. Until a year ago, he had worked the previous two decades in a high-profile post for a Very Big Corporation. When mgmt shifted last year and things started gettng nutty, my friend made a desperate and bold run for the door. A fiftysomething with a home, family, and lucrative career, he bagged it to go freelance.

Fortunately, things have worked out and he's done well this past year on his own. Anyway, in his old job he knew a lot of journos. He told me today that in the last few weeks at least three veteran reporters or editors of the L.A. Times he knows came to see him -- informally-- 'cuz they wanted his counsel. Like, was it really possible to be 50 years old (or more), walk away from the corporate teat and actually survive? They wanted to know how he's done it.

I know some of these same folks and they're good and talented people. I have little doubt that post-L.A. Times they will find another (and more worthy) employer.

But there is, nevertheless, some pungent historic irony in this. A lot of my writer/reporter friends (including yours truly) came up the hard way i.e. mostly as freelance and/or independent writers. We had the freedom that came with independence but we also had the constant and sometimes nerve-wracking insecurity and uncertainty that came with it. You'd get some sort of super-duper magazine writing assignment for 10g's and then figure out it was gonna take u 3 months to do it -- and you didn't know if another offer would follow.

There were certainly times, many times, as a younger man when I had my periods of great doubt and wondered if I wouldn't had been better off taking a more traditional career path.

Now, I see that I -- and others like me-- were actually the lucky ones. Circumstances forced us to be entrepreneurial, to always be generating more work, diversifying our talents and seeking additional streams of income -- just to make a living. We learned to live by our wits and take absolutely nothing for.

And now it's those who matured inside the corporate journalism world who are more freaked out by the immediate future. When you work for 25 years at a place like the Times, when it's more or less your only employer during your adult life, you have no friggin' idea how to pitch a story, bag a book contract, or secure a writer's agreement when the boss forces you out. You sort of get institutionalized, if not infantilized. It sucks.

And fast.

Make that very fast.

I really, really tried to take the last few days off and let the blazing Southern California desert sun blot out my rational consciousness. I swore off TV, limited Web stuff to the bare minimum, didn't pick up a newspaper, didn't listen to or return phone messages, put the BlackBerry on charge mode, and tried to split my time between lizard lounging and finishing off some backlogged writing.

It only partially worked. Problem is, I was still doing some driving and I couldn't exercise enough discipline to switch off that damn XM Radio in my car. Moreover, there was just too much delicious stuff happening all around me to just ignore it.

So, if you've been plugged into the news for the last 72 hours, there's probably little reason to read any deeper into this post. I have little of any substance to add to the National Chatter. Just some free-associated impressions from the fragmentary bursts of data that penetrated my porous weekend cocoon.

The Jesse Jackson Affair: In a word, cool. The Reverend is sorta way beyond his prime and his hot mike words about axing off Obama's gonads seems a fitting bookend to his Hymietown remarks of the 1980's. What I found most startling about this whole thing was the media's uniform silence on Jackson's own record as an absent father. Do y'all remember this little hiccup from seven years ago? No wonder The Rev took so much umbrage from Obama's sermons about personal responsibility. This isn't some abstract issue for Reverend Jackson. In his case, it has two legs, two arms and repeatedly says "Where's my Daddy?"

The Phil Gramm Affair: Lovely. I've always found Phil despicable ever since I watched him fizzle as a guest speaker at a national NRA convention (Wasn't he running for President or something?). Now, I have more reasons to despise Phil! Nothing like a fat, comfy millionaire, married to another millionaire and former Enron board member, telling the masses they are hallucinating when they look at gas prices, pink slips and past due mortgage statements. Poor Dr. Gramm (imagine, some university out there let this guy walk away with a PhD in economics no less!). And poor, poor, miserable John McCain whose campaign seems to be melting away as quickly as a bowl of M & M's at a kiddie birthday party. Memo to Phil: Next time, make it quicker and clearer. Just say: "Let them eat cake."

The Green Party Convention: Now, that was a whopper! Last last year I already wrote one obit for the Greens but I fear -- after listening to the broadcast speeches of their newly nominated national ticket of Cynthia McKinney and Rosa "Who The Hell Am I?" Clemente-- I now have to dig up the corpse and give it one last fisking. Holy cow, what a descent into madness! There was a time, about a decade ago, when here and there (and mostly there in a few odd places like Maine and New Mexico) there were a few patches of Green that seemed semi-rational, even promising. There were candidates, activists and even some low-level elected officials that seemed to reflect a forward-looking, accessible reform politics that based itself on a rejection of the big money corruption of the two major parties. At least at the local level, the Green seemed a possible option that could cut across partisan lines and embrace a rainbow of stretching from lefty liberals to cranky libertarians,

Well. those days are over, Jack! The new (barely breathing) Green Party is going down the road of the laughable and now almost extinct Peace and Freedom Party: by choosing McKinney and Clemente (a programmer at New York's Pacifica station!) the Greens have ossified into a tiny, shrill, "revolutionary" cult. McKinney's speech was peppered with allusions to uncovering "the truth" about 9/11 (code words for Bush Did It) and on several occasions trumpeted her renunciation of any "allegiance" to the American government. Now, that's what I call a novel position for a presidential candidate. For her part, Vice-Presidential pick (!) Clemente evoked glorious adulation of 60's fossils like the Black Panther Party, Fred Hampton, the Young Lords and, you guessed it, The Weathermen!. She then praised "political prisoners" like -- of course-- Mumia as icons of resistance to a criminal U.S. government. I had to look this character up on the Web and was rather shocked to read she attended (and presumably graduated) from Cornell. If that's the case, she's quite an actress as for someone as highly educated as she is, she's adopted a public speaking style that makes her sound like a street hoodlum. Nice work!

My easy prediction and not mine alone: The Green Party will get a record minimum of votes this year. Hopefully, this will be the last we ever hear of it.

I think in 1998 or so I wrote like a $50 check at a Green Party fundraiser somewhere outside of Santa Fe. I want my money back!

UPDATE: One of our astute readers sent this to me. Before you click it open see if you can guess how many contributors there are to the Green Party's congressional campaign committee.

Here's my fourth and my fifth and final debate round with Patterico on the future [sic] of the The Los Angeles Times -- or what's left of it.

Seems like this week The Terror has truly been unleashed. Robespierre would be impressed with the pace and severity of the head-choppings. The blood splatter is reaching out here to Woodland Hill, 25 miles from Sam Zell's guillotine. Nice work, bud.

I enjoyed mixing it up with Patrick "Patterico" Frey. He's a nice and thoughtful guy, if politically errant. Anyway, Patrick's a lot more civil and level-headed than his many of his commenters who, unwittingly, reveal the depth of the current conservative crisis.

These folks actually believe that a billion-dollar capitalist enterprise like the Times/Tribune is either run by a bunch of soft-headed, anti-American socialists or by guys so dumb that they didn't notice their editorial employees are dominated by Sandinistas. What else do they know? That America, in the throes of an economic melt-down are a nation of whiners? That victory is around the corner in Iraq? That health care is not a right, but should be left in the hands of the same sort of private sector executives that run, say, the L.A. Times? That flouride is a plot by the Mexican government to take back Aztlan? Whew! Those are some bitter, angry and delusional folks!

As my readers know, I've earned my stripes being exposed to and living among many loonies of the Left whose politics are informed by an end-times paranoia (Just look at the donkeys currently dominating KPFK who now make the near totality of their fund-raising nut by pushing the most insulting and disgusting conspiracy theory premiums).  But, turns out, that much of the Right is affected with the very same disease.  same sh**, different name.

Put simply, it's the syndrome of having your head so far up the rear end of your pre-determined ideology that you can''t even catch a fuzzy outline of reality. Pinning the downfall of The Times on a supposed and determined liberal cabal is about as credible as arguing that Building 7 was blown up by the Mossad.  Hey, but I guess that sort of comforting fairy tale is cheaper than Xanax.

There's a whole lot of people angry tonight at Barack Obama for his Senate vote Wednesday immunizing the telecom giants against legal action for their role in what was clearly lawless and warrantless wiretapping.

My position on this has been clearly on the record. As mentioned before, I am was one of the plaintiffs in the ACLU lawsuit against the phone companies for their role in domestic snooping -- one of the legal efforts totally erased by todays 69-28 vote in the Senate.

I'm not angry about Obama's vote as much as I am saddened about it. Obama has tried to explain his reversal position on the immunity issue, but not very effectively or convincingly. Some 25,000 of his own supporters have organized a protest group on his mybarackobama.com web site. But that didn't stop him.

As I wrote last week, it's really not very difficult at all to figure out Obama's motivation. He wants to get elected and he's calculated that to do so he can show no "weakness" on national security. I wish it were different. I think it might be. But I'm not sure. And that's the part that's really depressing for me.

Indeed, on the same night that so many in the netroots feel betrayed and improperly represented by Obama, NBC Political Director Chuck Todd reports that the Democratic nominee is successfully rewriting the political map and is already locking up new states in the Pacific Northwest, the Northeast and around the Great Lakes Region.

So is that the way American politics works? Is the conventional wisdom correct? That the election is won by seducing the wavering, moderate middle and not by expanding the electorate?

Is posted here.