I had a long day, and have spent my blogging time tonight watching Rachel Maddow explicate the Romney fundraiser tapes. What do we think of those? Honestly, they made me sad more than anything. I don’t see anything good coming out of a place where a presidential candidate can state that nearly half the country is dependent on government and doesn’t want to take responsibility for themselves, and the audience doesn’t start jeering.

But that’s just me.

On the up side, we live in a country where a stupid magazine cover like this is responded to with the #muslimrage Twitter party, which turned the afternoon into a happier place:

I’m having such a good hair day. No one even knows. #MuslimRage

Lost nephew at the airport but cant yell for him because his name is Jihad. #MuslimRage

I emailed my former Muslim student Mariam, whose last Facebook update was about being SO PISSED about the NHL. If that doesn’t count, I don’t know what is.

I guess what I’m saying is, I’m pretty beat. Carry on amongst yourselves.

Almost forgot: I have a package on Rx drug abuse, medical marijuana and other mind-altering substances running in Bridge. Links will go live after 8 a.m. Hit ’em and keep me employed.

You might think I’m watching “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” but I’m not. It’s one of those shows you don’t have to watch, because so many other people are watching and tweeting about it for you. Check in with a blog or two, and you’re updated in two minutes. And so I can tell you, that if you have a sensitive stomach, you will not want to watch the Honey BB family’s secret recipe for “sketti,” nor will you want to watch them play one of their fun family games, “Guess Whose Breath.”

But if you are, the clips are here.

Perhaps, if you don’t have the belly flutters at the moment, I can reveal what goes into the Honey Boo Boo family sketti recipe? It’s described here and there as “butter and ketchup,” but that’s not true. It’s margarine and ketchup, unless Country Crock is one of those margarines that isn’t even the conventional stuff, but something more like an edible polymer. Every so often, when some reporter is tasked with coming up with a fresh angle on an election pregame story, they’ll dig up the various local elections over whether or not margarine could be sold pre-colored. Yes, young’uns, that was an actual ballot question in many communities, and if I recall correctly, Columbus was one of them.

This website is a little freedom-y for my taste, but I think its account of “the war on margarine” gets the basic facts correct. If I’d been voting then, I’d have opposed colored margarine, which I grew up calling oleo. Nay, nay, let it be sold in its natural fishbelly-white state, and see how much you like it then.

And I used to buy the liquid stuff that comes in a squeeze bottle. It keeps for years, literally, and is still the only perfect product for making grilled-cheese sandwiches.

Now you know (one of) the worst thing(s) about me.

A perfect weekend, weather-wise, and although I wished I’d done something big and outdoorsy, I did get out a bit, pedaling to the bank and hardware store but mostly catching up on everything — dry cleaning, groceries, the usual Saturday grind. It’s easy to imagine this endless summer won’t end, but of course it will. A few more fine, sandal-weather markets, though, please?

Some linkage:

A couple weeks ago, news of a terrible hate crime swept the local airwaves, of a Jewish student at a party in East Lansing when he was accosted by two punks who yelled “Heil Hitler,” knocked him down and stapled his mouth shut.

Or so he said.

The whole story sounded suspect from the start. “Heil Hiter,” really? Stapled his mouth shut? A stapler attack? That the treating physicians didn’t see reason to even flag as such, and the police weren’t treating as such? Yeah. Well. This weekend the ADL said they were no longer convinced, either. I’d love to know what really happened, but I doubt we’ll ever know.

I haven’t read many reviews of Mitch Albom’s new book, but thanks to Jolene for passing along a pretty good one from the WashPost. And Entertainment Weekly — of all places — came up with this great line:

Albom, a speaking-circuit regular, appears to have composed his novel in PowerPoint. Each short chapter is broken up with bold-type subheadings, letting readers skim the already thin narrative ever more quickly, in outline form. Think of all those precious moments saved!

For Brian Stouder, the class ring story — finally.

Off to bed because my eyes won’t stay open anymore. Let the week commence! Let the coffee brew!

If you want to get some honey, then you don’t go killin’ all the bees. Amirite, Joe Strummer?

Well, I looked up some of the “Innocence of Muslims” movie — here’s one clip, and you can find many more — just to see if it’s as cartoonishly bad as everyone’s been saying. And you know what? It is. I’ve made movies on pocket-change budgets that looked like “Lawrence of Arabia” in comparison.

Middle-school costumes, fake beards from the pop-up Halloween store, and all those sparkling-white California-actor teeth. But the worst of it? They shot on a green screen. We had a green-screen shot in one of our challenge movies; it took forever to light the goddamn thing. But that’s the great thing about working with people who care; even when the stakes are low and it’s just a silly challenge movie, they honor their work by doing it well. Note, by way of contrast, well, the whole clip. Muhammed looks to his right and the light’s on his face. He gets up, and the light is from the other side. But that’s nothing compared to the way he’s seemingly floating over the desert floor.

The guard is a porn actor. The rest say the Muslim-bashing lines were dubbed in later. The whole story is seemingly made for Gawker, if it weren’t for the dead ambassador and all.

Jesus, why are people so stupid? I ask you.

I’m exhausted; how about you? Some linkage? Sure.

Pretty, pretty Cathy Cambridge.

Duck lips galore. With some horrifying photos.

Can a light-skinned black woman with delicate features play a dark-skinned, heavy-featured African-American icon? Ask the people fretting over whether Zoe Saldana can play Nina Simone.

Zzzzzz.

There’s been a tragedy in Libya, and even if there hadn’t been, we would certainly have better things to talk about today than Bob Greene. But talk about him I must.

Thanks to our own Bob (not Greene) for tipping me to this Robert Feder piece catching up with the former Chicago Tribune columnist on the 10-year anniversary of his fall from grace, which my longest-staying readers will recall as a red-circled date around this blog, too.

The firing of Bob Greene was the first post* here that made a splash outside of my little readership, which had formerly numbered in the tens, or maybe the fives. The experience of being an overnight blog sensation was simultaneously exhilarating and disorienting, but I ended up writing my essay for the Knight-Wallace Fellowship on that incident, and I got that gig, so I guess I owe Bob Greene something. But having just read Feder, I think it still needs to be said: Ten years later, Bob still sucks.

In fact, I think that was the point of the blog that day: Who cares if he diddled a teenager? Fire him for being a lousy columnist.

It’s taken a long, long time, but I’ve come to accept that I am a minority voice in the career of Greene. There are plenty of people, people whose opinion I respect, who don’t think he sucks. There’s Feder himself, speaking of Greene’s current venue, CNN.com:

He doesn’t write about abused children anymore (as he did to excess in his final years at the Tribune), but he often returns to other familiar themes with the confidence and grace of an old pro. Reading him again reminded me why he once was a role model for many of us who came after him at Medill.

And there’s Eric Zorn, from whom I expected something more than this:

I had mixed feelings about Greene — he was, he is, an incredibly gifted observer, canny reporter and smooth writer.

With all due respect to Eric, who is all those things: No.

I’m just going to choose the most recent Greene column from his CNN home page. Headline: In Ohio, candidates are salesmen trying to close the deal. Writers generally don’t write their own headlines, but that is vintage Greene. Candidates are selling something? You don’t say! Wow, I never thought of it that way.

And sure enough, that’s it: It opens with a little bit of finger-on-the-pulse reporting, a woman who lives near a presidential speaking venue inconvenienced when she’s expecting a delivery of furniture. The truck can’t get through the crowded street. Not named. Nut graf:

Ohio is getting plenty of visits from the candidates. During the time I was in the middle of Ohio this summer, Paul Ryan was in the area twice, Mitt Romney was there at least once, and on this early afternoon Obama had made his way to Capital. Scenes like this repeat every four years; there are days in highly contested states when something seems almost amiss if you don’t encounter a motorcade or a police escort.

Followed by:

They are traveling salesmen, the candidates are; they hit the road bearing their products — the products being themselves. And although presidential and vice presidential candidates are the most celebrated politicians in the land, they become not so different from the thousands of other sales reps who lug their sample cases across America every work week of the year.

Love that writerly sentence inversion! Impressed, I am not. It helps usher in the tritest observation possible, that politicians are actually? When you think about it? Trying to sell you something. Wow. That’s heavy.

It goes on. We never hear from the furniture woman again, but we do hear from Arthur Miller, although I think this big finish really pegs the needle:

In less than nine weeks, two of the four men crisscrossing the nation — Obama, Romney, Ryan, Joe Biden — are going to find out that they failed to make the sale after all, and two of the men are going to find out that they have successfully culminated the transaction. The nervous uncertainty of that is what can make their high-level pursuit at times feel utterly life-sized.

Arthur Miller, in that same play in which he introduced Willy Loman to the world, understood the compulsion behind all of this quite well:

“A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.”

Or, as John Cougar Mellencamp put it more concisely: And there’s winners, and there’s losers, but that ain’t no big deal.

So let’s move on. Feder singled out the remembrance he did of Jeffrey Zaslow, the Wall Street Journal reporter and author who died last winter. Greene “recalled heroically” his more-talented colleague, Feder wrote, so let’s see what that was all about.

The good news: Better. Greene clearly liked and respected Zazz, but once again, faced with the task of finding one original thing to say about him, came up short. His lead:

“What # are you at?”

The brief e-mail arrived late on the morning of January 24. I keep looking at it.

It was from Jeff Zaslow. We first became friends more than 25 years ago. We got together as often as we could when we found ourselves in the same town, usually for long, laughter-filled dinners; Jeff, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, in recent years became the author of multiple big bestselling books, most of them on inspirational themes.

“What # are you at?”

I guess we’ve all experienced the disorientation of losing a loved one suddenly, of having to clean an office or a closet, thinking this was his, but where is he? This box of ashes, this corpse — I talked to him three days ago. Where did he go? Most of us, however, wouldn’t find a totally mundane, four-word-one-syllable email worthy of not only being the first words in our tribute to our friend, but something to repeat. What planet you on, Bob? Planet Bob, where he’s been doing this stuff for years.

It goes on, and yes, it gets better, but as always, the conclusion drawn is mundane. I’ll save you the trouble. You know why Zaslow was a success? Because he worked so hard. You’re welcome.

I said before that the first rule of writing is to tell the truth. So here it is: Greene is a hack, Albom is a hack, but Nall is a hack, too. Was a hack. Writing a newspaper column quickly becomes a grind, no matter how hard you work at it, no matter how brilliant you are. I wrote many, many shitty columns. I, too, tried to spin grand life lessons from trite observations. It is so hard to do it well, to not suck on a daily basis, sparkle occasionally and shine often enough that people want to keep reading you. The best you can hope for is a snappy prose style that will lift even your stupidest material on an ethereal soap bubble of wonder. That’s Jon Carroll’s secret, but even he fails, and fails often. On the other hand, one column as good as this can make up for a decade of failures. I think I read that column every day for about a year when I was miserable at my job, like a prayer. (Bonus: One of my editors also worked for the Mr. Stern Carroll disliked so. Said Stern wasn’t so bad. Lesson: Never let reporting get in the way of a great column.)

I’d like to point out that Carroll’s is an example of how to write about a death that affected you profoundly. Note that the lesson at its center is no less pat than the one in Greene’s. And yet, look how much better.

I guess, finally, what bugs me about Greene, about Albom, about all the other hacks out there phoning it in, is how they don’t seem to get it. They have the best jobs in the world, and they don’t feel any obligation to get better, to get smarter, to be anything other than crowd pleasers of the easiest audience outside of a cruise ship.

Zorn, despite that early stumble into praise, gets it exactly right at the end:

All writers have their private lives, of course, but columnists, in particular, at least ought to be genuine. Greene, however, always seemed to be channeling a character called “Bob Greene,” behind which the real person hid.

…the one book he hasn’t written — either doesn’t want to write or is perhaps incapable of writing — is a brutally candid account of his phenomenal rise, long cruise at altitude, devastating crash and painful period of recovery (tragically, his wife died of a respiratory illness four months after he left the Tribune).

A book by Bob Greene, in other words, and not by “Bob Greene.” It would be the capstone and perhaps spark the revival of a remarkable career.

Yep. It’s one I’d read. I don’t expect to ever do so.

* I’d link to the post, but it’s gone into the ether. I know I have it saved on a CD-ROM backup somewhere, but I’m not going diving for it now.

I’m having a Scotch tonight for my friend Ben Burns, whose funeral was today. Half the town was there; I arrived 20 minutes before the service started and had to sit in the balcony. A bagpiper played on the steps of the big Presbyterian stone pile on the lakefront, one of those too-GP-for-words churches, although Ben wasn’t like that at all. He grew up on a dairy farm up near the Thumb and lived all over the U.S. before he came back to Michigan and worked his way up to the editor-in-chief’s position at the Detroit News. I didn’t meet him until just a few years ago, long after he’d left the paper (sale to Gannett; need I say more?). He was one of the three partners in GrossePointeToday.com.

It was a beautiful service that struck a delicate balance between sadness and celebration. Ben was 72, past the usual threescore-and-ten we consider a full life, but it still seemed too soon. He’d been living with a blood condition for 15 years when it morphed into leukemia, and he died in less than two weeks. Two weeks! He was scheduled to teach a class at Wayne this term. I got the email, went to see him in the hospital and missed him. Left a note. Called him, but he was resting and not taking calls. So I wrote him a note, mailed it and he died the next morning. Two weeks. You think you have time for these things, but people? You don’t.

This is good Scotch. Macallan, 12 years old. Like 80-proof candy.

Ben made the best of his life. He was funny in a quiet, droll way, which made his stories even funnier — like the time he took a woman he was dating to a big, loud party, lost track of her and discovered her in bed with the hostess. He had a big Spinone Italiano named Mac, after a photographer he’d worked with. The photog thought he was having a nervous breakdown, so Ben took him to the psych ward for the rest cure. They had to sit for a few hours, as even psych wards have to practice triage, and it must have been a full moon or something. The photographer watched the passing parade all the time, and when his name was finally called, stood up and decided he was feeling better and wouldn’t be checking in. I guess something in the animal’s face reminded Ben of the photographer, and every time I looked at his big, goofy muzzle I would try to see the picture-taker within. The dog laid by Ben’s hospice bed until the very end. I don’t know what happened to the photographer.

When someone dies, we talk a lot about legacies. Ben’s: Four spectacular children, a beautiful wife, career accomplishments to fill 10 glory walls. (My fave: a photo of him standing next to Arthur Ashe, autographed by the tennis star: “Ben — Stick to basketball. — Arthur.” Ben was 6-feet-8.) And a reputation for friendship and mentorship, service and all-around decency that streamed across the sky like a comet’s trail.

The opening hymn was “Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee.” The closing was “Lord of the Dance.” Joy. Dancing. That was his life.

(If any of you read the obit I linked to and like it, please know the best parts — the pickle fight, Kwame’s recalcitrance — were Ben’s, written as a brief autobiography for a speech introduction or something a while ago. I wrapped them up with a new top and bottom. I hope he would have appreciated the irony of writing his own obit, but who else would come up with details like being voted one of Metro Detroit’s “most woman-friendly men?”)

No links today. The Macallan is all gone, and I’m headed for bed.

I didn’t sleep well last night, due to a too-light dinner and a heavy workload. Nothing like waking up at 4 a.m. with hunger pangs and the usual dead-of-night conviction that ALL THE WORK YOU DO IS SHIT, AND SOONER OR LATER THE WORLD WILL DISCOVER THIS.

I read the iPad for a while, dozed off, got up for good at 5:30. It’s amazing how many people are updating their Facebook and Twitter at that hour. There are really only a couple of hours in the very dead of night when my stream is dead. I know this because one of my Twitter follows is @big_ben_clock, which does nothing but chime on the hour. When two or three of those stack up, I know the United States is sound asleep, coast to coast.

I should follow some Europeans. At that hour, the day is already moving at full speed over there. (And yes, I could simply try to go back to sleep like a normal person, but how can you do that when the world is thrumming with news and information?)

But as usually happens, my wee-hours fears were for naught, the day went well, and I just finished a salad-and-pasta meal with two glasses of wine. I would very much like to watch “Bachelorette” on demand, but fear I’ll be taken down before it’s over. Carbs + alcohol = an early bedtime for me.

In the meantime, I’ll tell you about the fall movies I’m planning to see. Roger Ebert reported a bit from Toronto this week, and says he’s willing to bet “Argo” will be the year’s Best Picture Oscar winner. On the list? Why, yes. Also, “The Master” and certainly “Cloud Atlas,” because I lurved the novel so, so much. Roger says: Stirring and grand, and maybe great, but maybe not. Honestly, as usually happens with books I love, I’m less taken with the plot — although the plot(s) in “Cloud Atlas” are mind-boggling — than I am with the author’s prose style, which movies generally don’t deal with.

And yeah, I think “The Sessions,” but that will probably be a wait-for-DVD. And likely “Lincoln,” although if I can’t go as Brian Stouder’s and Jeff the MM’s date, what’s the damn point?

Did any news happen today? We had a little office chat about Nate Silver, who is so bullish on Obama’s reelection that he’s either going to make his career on Election Night or be struck with the urge to take a long vacation. He was scarily right last time, but who knows what that means?

I was perhaps too flip yesterday in dismissing Jonathan Kozol’s own too-flip observation about homelessness. At the time he made it, I recall a changing world in which great wealth was flooding into the nation’s large cities, closing the SRO hotels that had housed the addicted fringe. They were driven into the street with the freed mentally ill, and walking among this cohort in places like New York, Chicago and even Columbus, it was easy to get frustrated with anyone who suggested a simple solution. As many of you have pointed out, housing is the solution to homelessness, but it has to be the right sort of housing, and it has to be bolstered with appropriate support. If I oversimplified, I apologize.

Tom & Lorenzo have been at Fashion Week and critiquing actresses at the various Toronto film festival premieres, and I’m enjoying both very much. Adding to bucket list: Once, just once, inspiring a smart fashion eye to say, “Bow down, bitches.”

September 11, 2012 — an odd-year anniversary, but discuss if you like.

You only have to visit Yellowstone National Park once to know how it goes: If the traffic’s slow, there are animals nearby. When you arrive at the park, you’re handed a thick sheaf of material with very explicit, liberally illustrated warnings about the dangers of approaching wildlife. Don’t be fooled by a seemingly passive animal! Etc. There are usually drawings of a bison, moose or elk sticking an antler into some idiot’s ass, with underlined text saying these attacks can be fatal or cause grievous injury.

And yet, talk to any ranger, and year after year, tourists leave the park on a stretcher, and the offending beast has to be put down, because of idiots.

One told me they had a particular problem with Japanese visitors, this being back when Japanese visitors were all over the Western U.S. on holiday. “I don’t know if they don’t understand English well enough, or what, but those guys act like every animal in the park is animatronic or something,” he said. (Hence the illustrated warnings.) Just that summer, one had walked up to a resting bison and plopped right down on the beast’s back, while his friend took a picture, or at least that was the plan until the thing jumped up and stuck the idiot in his hindparts.

So when someone sent me this video, and I noticed the long black hair on the tourists involved, I thought nothing could possibly cleave to ethnic stereotypes quites so neatly, that it must be a coincidence, and to be sure, it seems to be. When you hear the people talking, they speak in perfect American accents. And the kind of blatant lack of common sense that would allow a parent to walk right up to a 1,500-pound bull bison with his children, ignoring every warning sign — the raised tail, the angry head-shaking — and then still act like your kid’s near-death experience is a hoot and a half? That brand of dumb crosses all ethnic boundaries.

Out of the gene pool, Gene.

I had a tough last few days, and I’m still catching up. A good friend died, not unexpectedly but before I was ready for it, which is to say, I had dropped what I expected would be my final note in the mail to him the day before. Sigh. And I’ve been working on a short-deadline package that will require one more rewrite, so I cannot linger here.

Coupla links:

Here’s a hug for the president. Wonder how the Secret Service felt about it. Probably like that bison. Update: NYT said the guy got permission first.

Cops roust an after-hours joint/brothel in Detroit. Does any other place in the country refer to these establishments as blind pigs? (The bars, not the brothels.)

Jonathan Kozol has a new book out, looking back at some of the poor children he’s written about through the years. I lost a lot of interest in Kozol after I heard him say that the answer to homelessness was housing, but there’s no question the guy’s been a hero of the literacy movement.

Let’s try this again tomorrow, when the deadline’s over.

It’s been interesting to watch the reaction to Clinton’s speech last night. Of course, Monday-morning quarterbacking of all things is a great and glorious tradition in American life, but you don’t often get to see it done on a stand-up act like that.

Tom Junod on Clinton the conductor:

A simple line of script, such as “my fellow Americans,” would become “my fellow Americans, all of you in this great hall and all of you watching at home” — it would be amplified, elongated, exaggerated, and it would once again remind you that the first talent Bill Clinton revealed was for playing the saxophone.

…He had a talent for familiarity here, as ever — a talent for wearing a blue suit with a red tie, a talent for biting his lip, a talent for waving his finger, a talent for being Bill Clinton that allowed him to get away with everything else. He raised one finger, he raised two fingers, he raised one hand, he raised two hands, he lifted his chin, he dropped his chin, he licked his lips, he flicked his tongue, he lowered his voice in abashment and he raised his voice in something like anger, and every single one of his stock gestures served to remind the audience of who he was and what he meant to them, and allowed him to control the dynamics in the room. He was what everybody said he was — he was a jazz musician and a rock star, but he was also a conductor, and when he lifted his hands, palms up, people rose from their seats, and when he lowered his hands, palms facing the floor, they sat back down.

Molly Ball on Clinton the master:

Bill Clinton spoke for nearly 50 minutes. His speech was dense, didactic and loaded with statistics and details. The paper version handed out to reporters took up four single-spaced pages in a tiny font, and he departed from it frequently. It may have been the most effective speech of either political convention.

…Clinton made arguments. He talked through his reasoning. He went point by point through the case he wanted to make. He kept telling the audience he was talking to them and he wanted them to listen. In an age when so many political speeches are pure acts of rhetoric, full of stirring sentiments but utterly devoid of informational value — when trying to win people over to your point of view is cynically assumed to be futile, so you settle for riling them up instead — Clinton’s felt like a whole different thing. In an era of detergent commercials, he delivered a real political speech.

James Fallows on why Clinton’s speeches succeed:

Because he treats listeners as if they are smart.

That is the significance of “They want us to think” and “The strongest argument is” and “The arithmetic says one of three things must happen” and even “Now listen to me here, this is important.” He is showing that he understands the many layers of logic and evidence and positioning and emotion that go into political discussion — and, more important, he takes for granted that listeners can too.

Yeah, it can get a little tiresome. But there’s more!

The Clinton text vs. the delivered product. Compare and contrast.

Finally, Charles Pierce, because, duh, Charles Pierce. (Link fixed.)

And now it’s time to watch the new big dog speak. I have to get up early tomorrow and work all day, so I’m leaving it to you guys to carry later tonight and in the morning. Let’s see how it goes.

We don’t have a great deal of breaking news in our part of the suburb-o-sphere, but an interesting one dropped today, which was the first day of school for the two high schools: The Grosse Pointe South Blue Devils football team will welcome a transgender member this year, a girl named Meredith who would rather be referred to as “he” and called Seth.

I posted this on the GrossePointeToday.com Facebook wall, and a couple of other people did the same. Given the repulsive commenting going on at Patch these days — are there any internet news outlets with comment sections that aren’t sewers? — I expected the discussion, if you can call it that, to deteriorate rather quickly.

But no. Between three Facebook walls, I count about 50 “likes.” But here’s something interesting — of those 50 likes, 48 are female. Only a handful of comments, but all but two were from women, all getting misty-eyed with pride and tolerance. Two men weighed in; one made a mild joke, the other wondered what the world was coming to and made a sad face. 🙁

So what do you think this says? Are women more likely to be proud of their transgender children, or is this a football thing?

I don’t really care all that much, but I do find it interesting. This is a community that blows hot and cold on inclusion. The repulsive commenting I mentioned earlier concerns guess what? race and is bad enough I’ve wondered whether I should just set the house on fire, collect the insurance and move to Ann Arbor. But a transgender high school running back? Arms wide open!

Oh, well. Night has fallen, and I’m waiting for returns to come in on what I hope is the final act of the Thaddeus McCotter story — the $650,000 special election to fill his seat for all of six-count-’em-six weeks. The column at that link pulls punches, but it’s hard to figure what more punches would do for McCotter:

The primary will determine which two candidates will be on the Nov. 6 ballot to be elected to fill the remainder of McCotter’s term. The winner could serve less than two months before being replaced by the winner of the general election, who will take office next year, but representing a district considerably gerrymandered from the one that sent McCotter to Washington.

It was redrawn by his fellow Republicans to help McCotter hold the seat, but the former Wayne County commissioner and state legislator from Livonia carelessly left his re-election petition filings up to an office staff that botched the job — deliberately and fraudulently, based on criminal cases now pending against a handful of them.

The Republican political establishment tried to avoid taxpayer ire over the cost of the special primary — required to assure the district does have some representation in Washington — by settling on a consensus candidate and discouraging others from filing so the contest wouldn’t be needed. But five Republicans rejected such rigging and filed in the special primary, including Kerry Bentivolio, the ex-teacher from Milford who won the regular GOP primary last month and will carry the party banner in the redrawn district in November.

…Confused? Thank McCotter, whose last months in public office were dominated by an impossible quest for the Republican presidential nomination and the drafting of a sit-com script. Aside from a couple of terse statements, the normally loquacious McCotter has been unavailable — and unaccountable — since leaving office.

I’m going to say this and then I’m going to shut up: We’ve been hearing a lot about voter fraud lately. And here we have, in the McCotter case, a clear-cut case of election fraud, four people charged with falsifying nominating petitions for one filing deadline, and evidence they did it in the previous two elections. Who is howling about this? Virtually no one. My Wayne State colleague Jack Lessenberry takes a few whacks at him — and a few others — here, but that’s about it.

So much for that, eh?

A bit of linkage:

Tom & Lorenzo take a look at Shelley O’s look last night. Via Jolene. Something I learned today: Tracy Reese is a Detroiter, and the dress was a custom design. It certainly showed off the First Guns to maximum advantage.

Mark Bittman says what I was trying to say last week, about restaurants, particularly fine dining:

It simply isn’t what I want anymore. It’s become painful, not in the visiting-the-dentist sense, but in the “you have to go to synagogue; it’s Yom Kippur” sense, a long, drawn-out affair in which even the obviously beautiful and enjoyable parts — the $10,000-a-week flower arrangements, the custom glassware and china and sometimes even the carefully prepared if almost always overly subtle (to my taste) food — were overwhelmed by the sheer tedium.

These are temples of ceremony, with (normally absent) chefs as priests; they’re circuses without clowns or trapezes.

It goes on. Read.

Finally, those of you who follow journalism might know that our own Hank Stuever is spending the term teaching at the University of Montana, as a visiting prof. His class is about writing pop culture, and here’s the good news: You can follow it online! On Hank’s blog! Scroll down to the entry called “Montana,” and come back up. Charlotte, I expect this might interest you.

And so we greet Thursday. Already.

Update: I finished and scheduled this while Bill Clinton was speaking, but before the speech actually achieved liftoff and took off for the stars, with a vapor trail of puppies and bacon streaming behind. I watched the remainder in bed, on the iPad, chuckling and switching back and forth between the stream and Twitter. I think I’d buy, in hardcover, a collection of the best tweets last night, which were hilarious. (I’m indebted to Jill Biden for the puppies-and-bacon imagery, which was in hers.) My fave might be the several who sketched some version of Clinton as James Brown, throwing off cape after cape to run back out and play another encore. Who says public speaking can’t be entertaining?