I have to leave bright and early for the auto shop, which recently stopped offering an Ethernet connection for customers chillin’ in the lounge. I’m taking advantage of this turn of events by taking my laptop and working on the sort of stuff that e-mail and Web access only gets in the way of, i.e., writing. Which means not much of a blog today, but I snipped a few zinnias to put in this simple little vase:

Howell Raines always did get on my last damn nerve. Aaron Barnhart lays out only one reason.

When someone remakes “Charlotte’s Web” with an R rating, the writer will go by one name, and it will be Coozledad.

There’s news, there’s non-news, and then there are headlines like this: The Duchess of Cornwall plans to take up pilates or Tai Chi. Can’t you hardly wait to know the rest?!?

And while we’re reading the Telegraph’s health page, ohmygod: Boy, 12, dies from heart failure after using too much deodorant.

I swear, the Brits put out the best newspapers, page for page, in the free world. I can’t believe I get to read them every day through the magic of the internets. Cold comfort at a time when my retirement portfolio is withering like a beehive hairdo on a 90-degree day, but we take it where we can get it, right?

You all have a good Friday, and be kind to one another — we’re all going to be standing in the same bread line someday, and we’ll have plenty of time to fight then.

Perhaps in preparation for the Great Delamination, I went through one of my periodic stints of tree-shaking yesterday, scanning Monster, CareerBuilder and Craigslist for any freelancing opportunity I might be unaware of. I found one asking for freelance writers willing to turn out five 400-word pieces per week, for $2 per.

I e-mailed and asked for clarification. Surely, I asked, that $2 figure was a mistake?

No, it wasn’t, came the reply: “These are very simple articles that won’t require any research,” and that was the going rate. Two thousand words = $10.

I’m consistently amazed by the economics of this thing. To this day, when there’s a big layoff at a newspaper or some other catastrophe in the life of someone who writes for a living, someone will pipe up in the comments on a blog somewhere: They should start a blog and join an ad network, and then they’ll be working for themselves. Win-win!

Meanwhile, Bossy, who gets 10 times the traffic I do — yes, 7,000 to 9,000 uniques a day — can’t make a living from her blog. (Even though she brought this reader great pleasure with her examination of “Something’s Gotta Give,” a film that made me insane, for many of the same reasons. I mean, sure, playwrights have kitchens like that. If their name is Neil Simon.)

Meanwhile, journalists, would you like to be insulted? Take note of the TypePad Journalist Bailout Program. Subhed: “Because your Tumblr and Tweets, while clever, will not pay your bills.” Here’s the bailout: If you’re a recently severed journalist, TypePad will give you a free pro blogging account and access to their ad network, which “pays a lot more than simple Google text ads,” a retail value of about $150. After that, it’s all up to you! Take flight, little journalist! And if you learn that your TypePad blog, “while clever,” will not pay your bills, either, perhaps Starbucks is hiring.

Mommy’s in a bad mood today. Mommy thinks she should go lift weights.

So a little bloggage:

While Mitch Albom was pretending to be Woody Guthrie in the paper — a new low for phoning it in, I might add, and I don’t even want to think how much he makes — he was actually down in Florida hangin’ with his cool celebrity friends at the Miami Book Fair. (See video.) I also wouldn’t rule out the idea that he’s using makeup (man-kup?) or, possibly Botox. There’s something odd about the way his face moves, or doesn’t move.

Finally, a favor for a friend, another former colleague:

My oldest son Derek is a graduating high school senior, and he has been nominated to participate in a video scholarship contest. The scholarship could net him a nice chunk of college cash. ($20,000 to the first place winner). He created what I think (father or not) is the best on the site (certainly the “corny”-est), but the contest is decided solely upon popular vote, not on quality or creativity. (which right now seems to mean which student can get the most people to vote, and vote, and vote … oh yeah, and vote as many times as they can) … between now and November 28th.

The video is here, and it is indeed corny — I say that with love, because corniness seems to be the point. The scholarship is offered by King Corn, so no matter how you feel about high-fructose corn syrup, you can point your browsers in the direction of a good cause. You can vote as often as you like, and you don’t have to sit through the whole video to do so. And certainly, his dad is going to need all the college-finance help he can get, seeing as how he works in journalism.

I was one of the last Americans to learn about the dirty movie featuring the Sarah Palin lookalike, and I am grateful to the young man who told me, because if there’s one thing I need to have scratching around my skull on a long bike ride, it’s imagined dialogue sketches between a pretty woman with an updo and glasses and two Russian sailors whose rowboat has drifted ashore on the American side of the Aleutians.

At least, I think that’s the setup.

Now we discover that, as usual, truth is stranger than even Larry Flynt’s fiction:

At the GOP convention in St. Paul, Palin was completely unfazed by the boys’ club fraternity she had just joined. One night, Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter went to her hotel room to brief her. After a minute, Palin sailed into the room wearing nothing but a towel, with another on her wet hair. She told them to chat with her laconic husband, Todd. “I’ll be just a minute,” she said.

I guess I shouldn’t be suprised. She’s a natural for the take-off-the-glasses, shake-out-the-bun scene, too.

As you know if you’ve clicked around the web in the last 24 hours, this is part of an anonymously sourced Night of the Long Knives designed to place blame for the McCain campaign disaster where it properly belongs: Anywhere but on the anonymous sources’ shoulders. The Fox report going around (she didn’t know Africa was a continent, not a country), the NYT story today (her clothing was originally budgeted at $20,000 to $25,000, and her eye-popping overages were for such items as jewelry and luggage and outfits for the family) — these are to be expected. The entertainment factor, as Roy and TBogg and LGM point out, is just gravy. (And that’s not the entertainment of seeing Palin trashed, by the way; what fun is that? Rather, it’s the fun of watching Michelle Malkin, et al, threaten those who violate message discipline. Somewhere in Hell, Stalin chuckles.)

Anyway I find the whole thing sort of depressing. You wouldn’t think the ability to make William Kristol’s worm turn could carry a woman so far in the world, but never underestimate the power of a strategic flirtation. Or that of the so-called played-out, intellectually bankrupt, last-century MSM. Which brings us to our next topic today, when I called Alan at work yesterday and he said, “You’ll never believe what I’m looking at,” and began to describe people lined up in the street below his window. I thought maybe Barack Obama had parachuted in to the AFSCME offices across the street to spontaneously thank union members for their support, and word had gotten around.

No. They were there to buy a newspaper. Across the country, it’s the same story, as people lined up — at printing plants! — to buy dozens of extra copies. I think we’ve found a solution to our problems, comrades. All we need is…news.

Unfortunately, all the reporters have been laid off. Funny how that works.

Some quick bloggage today, because I’m well-rested, the sun is shining, and I plan to get both strength and cardio workouts in today:

Someone tell Joe the Douchebag his 15 minutes are up. HT: Detroitist.

“Heartwarming” + “unforgettable” + “opening on Christmas Day” = a movie you couldn’t get me to at gunpoint.

Weights class in 20 minutes. Must fly.

This one’s for the Buckeyes in da house, yo. I found it buried in a side rail over at John Scalzi’s site, and it’s old, so forgive me if you’ve already seen it:

On the October 15 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, (host) Bob Grant said: “[W]hat is that flag that Obama’s been standing in front of that looks like an American flag, but instead of having the field of 50 stars representing the 50 states, there’s a circle?” He then said: “Is the circle the ‘O’ for Obama? Is that what it is?” Grant later said: “[D]id you notice Obama is not content with just having several American flags, plain old American flags with the 50 states represented by 50 stars? He has the ‘O’ flag. And that’s what that ‘O’ is. That’s what that ‘O’ is. Just like he did with the plane he was using. He had the flag painted over, and the ‘O’ for Obama. Now, these are symptom — these things are symptomatic of a person who would like to be a potentate — a dictator.” ‘

You want more? Sure you do. Grant went on:

Hey, I could be wrong. But I wouldn’t say this on this great radio station if I didn’t think there was some merit in this conjecture. And I stress conjecture. And so much of what we talk about is conjecture, is theory, is opinion based on intuition, based on some facts, based on some history.

Because, of course, it’s perfectly reasonable to believe that Obama had his own special stars-stripes-and-an-O flag made for him, because he’s an elitist, you know, and that’s what elitists do. Why, as I write this, my own personal NN.C standard is flying over the roof, as it always is when I’m in residence here at NN.C central. My subjects demand nothing less of their leader. Grant goes on:

I don’t want to overdramatize this. Being dramatic, I must confess, does come easy to some of us, because, maybe that’s why we’re in this business. It is show business, is it not? I know some of my colleagues don’t want to admit that, but they are the greatest showmen in the world. And I tell you this. I tell you this quite seriously. I am alarmed at the prospect of his election. I — I would hope that if he is elected, that I could come before you one day and say, “Hey, there was no need to be alarmed, I was wrong.”

If you knew nothing about Bob Grant at all, you’d know he was old by this point, wouldn’t you? Aren’t you already getting the smell of Dentu-Creme in your nostrils from that last part? I think it’s the “greatest showmen in the world” phrase that does it. It’s like Jerry Lewis in the 22nd hour of the Labor Day Telethon. You just know, any minute, he’s going to start crying.

Well, Bob Grant is old — 79. Because older people generally got a more classical education, you’d think at some point he might have caught a glimpse of the Ohio state flag:

I guess not. Back to gumming your food, Bob.

It’s always good to start the day with a big laugh, isn’t it? A big laugh and a huge cup of coffee. On Saturday I had lunch with three of my zombie colleagues, and the talk turned to the things we put into our bodies that are bad for us. The youngest person at the table said he was going to give up coffee for a while.

“Why?” asked the oldest person at the table, who was not me, I’m relieved to say. “You’ll get terrible headaches and you’ll feel awful.” That, in a nutshell, seems to sum up my middle-age attitude toward toxins of all sort: Why abstain? If one is not abusing them, if one uses them only for their mild mood-elevating properties, and in moderation, why fret? Sooner or later something is going to kill each and every one of us. It might as well be coffee.

I’d like to see what death by coffee feels like, some day. Maybe like the depictions of vampire-blood tripping in “True Blood.”

OK, then. When the campaign news becomes too oppressive for me — something that happens several times a day — I’ve become fond of clicking over to WeSmirch, which aggregates gossip blogs. In recent days it’s been led by news of the cross-table sniping in the Madonna/Guy divorce. The rundown: He’s cold, not “spiritual,” entitled. She’s cold, spiritual to the point of looniness, entitled. He wasn’t nice to her after she fell off the horse and broke her arm. She is too tired to have sex, sapped by her four hours of daily exercise, which leaves her feeling, in Guy’s arms, like “a piece of gristle.” In other words, about what you’d expect.

But the best part was when Guy was said to have “abused” Madge by telling her she couldn’t act.

Pause.

BWA HA HA HA HA HA. It’s worth walking away with a relative pittance for that kind of satisfaction.

I’m gym-bound. Fueled by coffee. Let them try to stop me today.

My NPR affiliate is doing a piece on the Free Press’ endorsement of Barack Obama. They’re running down its bullet points as I write this. It’s not a long piece — it’s over now — but still: I am agog.

Never mind the dog-bites-man element here. The Freep has a left-leaning editorial page; for them, endorsing the Democrat is like the Wall Street Journal editorial page touting free enterprise. OK, it’s Monday, slow news day blah blah blah — that is, if you consider the unraveling of world financial markets, coupled with a potential GM-Chrysler merger that will likely be the death blow to the local economy, just two of today’s stories, “slow.” Never mind that. I have worked for newspapers, and I know how the endorsement process works, and all I can say is, why should the public give a shit who any editorial board thinks should be elected to any office?

Endorsements made sense when there were more newspapers in the world, and they had real authority, and great people behind them. Then, you wanted to know who Charles Foster Kane was backing for job one. Whether or not endorsements actually changed a single vote has always been a pretty theoretical question, and even the most generous estimates put the number of endorsement-led voters at tiny-to-miniscule. And yet, newspapers continue to make endorsements, like Brits gathering for high tea nomatterwhat. Looked at one way, it’s sorta charming. Looked at another, it’s a symptom of the problem at the root of the industry — their maddening, “this is the way we do it because this is the way we’ve always done it” attitude.

As I recall, editors like making endorsements about as much as readers like reading them, i.e., not so much. People don’t realize what goes into them; they think it’s all about gathering around a pastry-strewn table and arguing, when what it really involves is weeks of interviews with some of the most boring candidates you’ve ever met. Because the paper doesn’t just endorse for the big races — those are only the ones that make the news. No one writes about the ones headlined: “For 4th District village council: Herminghausen.” And to get to that endorsement, the editorial board chatted up Herminghausen and his opponents, Schiller and Grubman. Before that, if there was a primary, they might have talked to Herminghausen, Schiller, Grubman, Czerny, Skolnik, O’Reilly and Killeen. Multiply that by however many races there are, and you see why endorsement season is extra-martini season on the ed page.

When you think about it, the endorsements that you should pay attention to aren’t the ones that make news. Really, do you feel the need for a second opinion to make up your mind about the presidential race? But how much do you know, really, about the Court of Appeals, or the township assessor, or the 4th District rep? That’s where an endorsement can help, to the extent it says, “This person appeared before us, didn’t wet his or her pants and impressed us with at least rudimentary competence.” There are always a few spots on any ballot you just couldn’t get to in your research. That’s when you need to know Herminghausen got the paper’s endorsement.

Or, as Alec Baldwin’s character said of marriage in “The Departed:” Marriage is an important part of getting ahead: lets people know you’re not a homo; married guy seems more stable; people see the ring, they think at least somebody can stand the son of a bitch; ladies see the ring, they know immediately you must have some cash or your cock must work.

Well, he delivers it better. But you get the idea.

The Detroit News’ editorial page leans right. Now, if they endorse Obama, that’ll be news. We’ll see.

“The Cemetery Precincts” wrapped shooting last night. That means all we have to do now is the editing, the sound, the scoring, the this and the that. Then we have to fight about it, and change it all around, and do it all again. Listen to me: “We.” Most of this stuff will be done by others, but when a production is this small, it’s everybody’s baby, and you sweat every step of the process. I volunteered to put on zombie makeup and be a back-rank zombie, but somehow I got recruited to be the lead in the big gross-out scene, which is so unbelievably gross I don’t think I’ll be able to watch it. The prep:

(I suspect there was a lot of K-Y in that mix.) Thanks to our genius gross-out guy, Dan Phillips, who crafted the effect and signs his e-mails, “Stay scary, Dan.” I’ll say.

Not much bloggage today, but this: One of the things I like about Jon Stewart is his willingness to talk back to one of the nastiest myths of red-state America (at the moment, anyway), that people who live in cities aren’t the real America, or pro-America, or whatever. And he does it so well.

The rest I leave up to those of you who paid more attention to the news this weekend. I’m off to study Russian.

As I drift further from the newspaper business, I write about it less. Frankly, its stupid self-inflicted problems don’t interest me very much anymore, particularly as they — the managers who still have a) jobs; and b) offices with doors that close — seem intent on continuing to generate them.

Still, it seems a day doesn’t go by without a mention of the Tribune Co.’s reinvention officer Lee Abrams on Romenesko, the only media blog worth reading. Abrams, so cheerily clueless, is sort of a clown prince of the newspaper meltdown, an ongoing poor-Yorick scene that we turn to for gallows humor as we contemplate a life spent selling apples on street corners. As you newspaper people know, Abrams recently oversaw the essential project of any newspaper consultant, the first thing they always do, the No. 1 busywork job that can take the better part of a year and thereby puts off the great reckoning that much longer: A redesign. The Trib was remixed in the usual way, into a big, graphics-heavy load of crap that makes designers pee their pants with pleasure and readers say, “Um, where’s the news?”

(The introductory video on the Trib’s website featured a designer using the term “big, exciting promo,” a phrase surely only used by designers.)

The reviews are mixed, but of course Abrams is a big fan. Here’s one of Abrams’ trademark memos, linked on Romenesko, with the usual stylistic flourishes of exclamation points and all-caps:

Of course we get the “it looks like USA Today” comments. Well, USA Today is one of the few newspapers GROWING, so I’m not sure that’s so bad–but MORE importantly, all you have to do is read the Chicago Tribune and you’ll know it’s clearly NOT USA TODAY. IF a colorful and energetic looks that reminds some remotely of USA TODAY and it gets more people engaged in the content….good.

So this is an e-mail I recently received from a Chicago resident and former Trib subscriber. I pass it along not to rain on Abrams’ parade, but on the off chance he might actually want to read it. To make it more familiar to him, I’ve edited it in the new Trib style of eye-catching text. In other words, it’s been Abrams-ized:

We’ve decided to DROP the Trib and take the seven-day NYT. We feel like we gave the redesign A FAIR SHOT over the past two weeks, but we HAVEN’T taken to the new look. Here we are in the midst of the BIGGEST STORY of our LIVES — we really are on the edge of a potential GLOBAL ECONOMIC MELTDOWN!!! — and 70% of the front page is given over to GRAPHICS, TEASERS and HUGE ART. Plus, the geniuses folded the business section into the news section. These are serious times but the Tribune looks and reads decidedly UNserious. FUCK ’em. I’ll keep the Sun-Times for local news and sports and depend the the Times for EVERYTHING ELSE.

See you on the corner!

Not much today; I have to speak to some journalism students this morning (Flee, FLEE!!!) and sleep this afternoon, my rest last night having amounted to four (4) hours. If you call me between the hours of 2 and 4, you’re dead to me.

I’ll certainly be dead to you, anyway. I plan to turn off all the phones.

Anyway, I leave you with this sign o’ the times, via Romenesko.

A man dies in the Chicago Tribune circulation area, and his family takes out a paid obit with this as its last line: “In lieu of flowers, please vote Democratic.” The Chicago Tribune edited that sentence out. Reports the Reader:

Says a woman on the paper’s paid-death-notice desk, “If it’s considered discriminatory or offensive, they take the line out.”

Damn liberal media!

The Sun-Times ran the obit as ordered.

Please try not to shank one another until I get back.

School started today, and I’m a busy person these days, so not much from me. On today’s to-do list: Write treatment for short zombie film; track down Hollywood producer/director last seen in Michigan. I hasten to add these two jobs are unrelated. And to think I could have been a dental hygienist.

(The other day our director called to say, “I called Dan, just to pick his brain.” Ha ha ha.)

All I’m going to leave you with today is this:

Culture wars suck. It’s pointless, enervating and takes time and energy away from important matters. And yet, like gorging on potato chips and chocolate-covered peanuts, it’s hard to stay away. So when I broke my internet diet and dropped in on Rod Dreher, I wasn’t surprised to read this:

I’m listening to three young blogger-radio reporters from a lefty Canadian radio program (lots of “aboot” in the air) talk about their day. They’re on the other side of the blue curtain here, so I don’t know what they look like. One was just on the phone coordinating with “the Socialist World people.” A woman reporter from the site just joined the two guys. She’s been out reporting, and said she talked to an Evangelical about Bristol Palin’s pregnancy.

“She was really beautiful,” the woman said. “This pregnancy thing hasn’t turned them off. If anything, it’s rallying them to embrace her.” The reporter said this as if it well and truly was shocking. She wasn’t being condescending at all; she was really shocked. She spoke with the amazement of an anthropology grad student on her first dig.

Well, of course. Being foreigners, their knowledge of the United States isn’t as deep as ours, and so they assume that when people are willing to spend decades of their lives talking about teenage sluts who don’t deserve birth control and HPV vaccines (“the slut shot” — I’d never heard that charming turn of phrase before this week; thanks, Free Republic!), they might back it up when the chips are down. Stupid foreigners. Spend a little more time in this country, and you might learn a thing or two about the breathtaking hypocrisy of these folks. If Hillary Clinton really wanted to back Barack Obama, she’d cut a very simple 30-second spot right around now, laying out five random facts about Sarah Palin, and add, “Imagine what they’d be saying if I was the one who did these things.” Fade out.

I am looking forward to seeing the newest Palin son-in-law (almost) tonight, who I understand has now dropped out of high school. This story keeps getting better.

I’ve been reading about Mrs. Palin. My head didn’t explode until I read this:

She’s a hit [Mona Charen]
I’m getting tons of mail like this:

Sarah is real!!! What a fabulous contrast with Obama, who is not real. Sarah is from America. Obama is not.

If it was meant to bait me, well nom nom nom, I am eating the bait. I now officially hate these weasel fucks. And that’s saying something.

For 20 years, I lived in Indiana, where you can’t make a Dan Quayle joke in mixed company, where our right-wing editorial page regularly got complaints that it wasn’t conservative enough, where the same thing was said about Rush Limbaugh, blah blah blah. I developed a mantra, which I’ve discussed here before, but indulge me. I’d say: I have arrived at this point in time on my own path, and so has this person before me. We have reached different conclusions along the way. Ommmm. This kept me from going insane and perhaps even made me a better person. I should have said it out loud more often. Hell, I should have screamed it in a few people’s faces. I certainly feel like doing so now.

That smelly little excrescence above, that’s it in a nutshell. These are the people I want gone. Not just out of the White House, off the national stage. I want them out of the country, put on boats and sent to the southern ocean to circle the pole until they break up in the ice and drown. Mona Charen, daughter of privilege, who went from Livingston, N.J. to Barnard to the White House to the Capital Gang to the Corner, approvingly quoting an anonymous turd-juggler calling Sarah Palin “from America” and Barack Obama not from America. [Enter: Ghost of Ashley Morris] Fuck you, you fucking fucks. [Exit: Ghost] You are un-American. You don’t deserve to live in this country. You are simply too much, dare I say, of an elitist.

Since the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan, these people have been the self-appointed arbiters of Who Gets to be American. For nearly 30 years, they’ve sat in their well-paid jobs typing with their soft little hands, making the world safe for themselves. They are liars and hypocrites of the worst sort: Divorce is OK for Peggy Noonan, bad for you. Working mothers named Phyllis Schlafly or Mary Matalin or Mona Charen are good, but your job takes you away from your precious children just so you can be fulfilled, you selfish bitch. Homosexuals who want to live together under a legal contract will destroy marriage, but homosexuals married to opposite-sex partners (Hi, Mrs. Craig!) won’t. Bill “Double-down” Bennett repackages Aesop’s fables as “The Book of Virtues” and gambles his royalty checks in casino VIP rooms, but that’s OK.

I could go on.

Of course it would be Mona Charen who would do this for me. Our paper used to run her column, and I’d read it every so often. Her big issues were communism and culture, and like most columnists, filed dispatches from the home front once in a while. She nearly dislocated her shoulder patting herself on the back for staying home with her children — she’d blushingly describe her child-care arrangements while she penned her deathless prose as “having help” — and occasionally would express her simmering resentment that she’d given up her career (writing speeches for Nancy Reagan: Wikipedia) and its financial rewards for her kids, while others hadn’t. One day she wrote that a family with a $200,000 annual income could hardly be considered affluent. In her, ahem, elite circles, this is certainly true. And yet she claims to be in touch with the “real” America, while everyone with a D after their name isn’t. You couldn’t make this shit up on a head of windowpane, folks. You really couldn’t.

And who wouldn’t be a little resentful? She went to Barnard and George Washington University Law School! All that to write twice a week for Creators Syndicate and be part of the Corner? That’s a waste of a good education. (I keep wondering how long it’ll be before these folks come out against educating girls at all, if they’re just going to stay home with their kids anyway. In this arena, the FLDS folks are bleeding-edgers.)

You know why “the base” loves Palin? It comes up time and again, as it’s about the only really notable thing about her: She had her last baby, even though she knew ahead of time it had Down Syndrome. This is a noble act, to be sure, but I don’t see how it qualifies one for high office. And so much for women being judged as anything other than a collection of female body parts. (The fringiest part of the fringe will wonder, if she’s so pure ‘n’ all, why she even had the test in the first place, opposition to all prenatal testing being a big signifier for these folks.)

But back to the culture warriors. They’ll snicker behind their hands at the funny names black people give their kids but think Track and Trig and Willow are fine names for, er, white children. Palin, from the 49th state, is “from America,” and Obama, from the 50th, isn’t. Palin hunts and fishes in exurban Anchorage — good. Obama works in inner-city Chicago — bad. They’re too self-deluded to see the truth before their eyes, that they’re both “America,” an America that can support and elevate people from such divergent backgrounds, who make such different choices. But they can’t see that, because only people who make choices they approve of get to be Americans.

You might say they don’t matter, these little foot soldiers. Yes, they do. They matter now more than ever, because they’re the amplifiers. They’re the bloggers and other chatterers who pick up the talking points and talk them to death.

Later in the day at the Corner:

Not from America [Mona Charen]

Did not mean to endorse what one letter writer said about Obama not being from America. He obviously is — from the furthest left part. I just loved the guy’s phrase “more precious than pearls is a woman who likes to fish and hunt.” FWIW, I do neither.

Really, Mona? Could’ve fooled me.

By the way, I fish and have no particular problem with hunting, although I’ve never done it. And I’m voting for Obama.

Like a lot of Americans who have had it up to here with the current administration, I watch Keith Olbermann on MSNBC. Like a lot of people who watch Keith Olbermann, I’m not a 100 percent fan. The Special Comments set my teeth on edge, although that’s because they’re badly written, not for the content, and anyway, they’re rare. There are times when the whole business just grates, too — the Fox-baiting, mainly, which feels a little like junior high school. I tire of the same old Washington Post talking heads; give Dana Milbank and Eugene Robinson a night off once in a while. But I give Olbermann, and MSNBC, credit for trying to create an alternative to the rest of cable news, a place where people who’ve had it up to here, etc., can feel a little less alone, if not in the world, then in their living rooms.

Through Olbermann I found the delightful Rachel Maddow, who is such a joy to have a girlcrush on. I love everything about her, but especially her flaws. Her eye makeup looks like it was settled on in a high-level conference between the leadership of the National Organization for Women and a drag queen. Maddow, whose off-the-air aesthetic is crunchy-granola lesbian, with the short hair and the Buddy Holly glasses and the no-fuss wardrobe, wears her required-for-TV blazers as though their linings were actually hairshirts, and who can’t love a girl who’s uncomfortable on TV? I was on TV for a few years, and I was never comfortable there. I feel Rachel’s pain, and love the way she bears her burden with such good humor, destroying Pat Buchanan and the other geezers they put before her. I would love to see her one-on-one with someone like Ann Coulter or Bill Donohue or Sean Hannity, all of whom she would bring down effortlessly with the beams of truth in her mild gaze.

It’s always fun to watch someone on their way up in the world, because you know the next thing is coming. That it would be her own show preceding Olbermann was no surprise, but I was a little taken aback by this memo from the ivory tower, by Rem Reider on the American Journalism Review website. He calls the elevation of Maddow to Dan Abrams’ old seat “a good call,” then harrumphs:

It’s yet another step in the polarization of the American media. Keith Olbermann followed by Rachel Maddow means two back-to-back hours of hard left television.

Whuh? “Hard left?” I must have missed something. Olbermann is a millionaire, and Maddow, if not one already, will certainly be one very soon. To me, millionaires aren’t hard leftists. What both of them are is anti-Bush. To the extent that Rove, et al have succeeded in labeling anyone who opposes the policies of the current president “hard left,” well, I salute them. Good work, comrades!

Reider continues:

For years, American newspapers and television news organizations clung to the idea that they were nonpartisan, down the middle. Sure, there was the endless whining from the right about the “liberal” media. (Today, of course, cries of media bias from the left are at least as vociferous as those from the right.) But however imperfectly, most news organizations tried to report the news without an obvious political point of view.

Then along came Fox, a 24-hour news cable channel with a clear right-wing orientation. And it was a major success, outdrawing cable news pioneer CNN. There obviously was an audience eagerly waiting for it.

…Following Olbermann with Maddow …reflects and reinforces the trend toward separate megaphones for separate audiences. As in the blogosphere, with its pugnacious mix of conservative and liberal Web sites, there is political TV for the left and political TV for the right.

Increasingly, we are a nation of partisans talking only to themselves.

I think about this a lot. A friend who went through j-school with me said the other day, “We were taught that if you shone the light of truth on something, it would be enough.” But it wasn’t. Isn’t that the lesson of the Lesley Stahl/Ronald Reagan flag story? The truth isn’t what you say it is; the truth is always malleable. Shine the light of truth on some people, and they’ll make shadow puppets. Or they’ll say, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” “True enough” is plenty good for most.

Jon Stewart is another one of my faves. I love Jon Stewart because, alone among people who sit behind a desk and talk to me, he seems to be telling me the truth. Middle-aged folks are always clutching their chests and bemoaning that young people watch Stewart the way their parents watched Cronkite, and oy what a crime that is. Well, no. Have any of them watched “The Daily Show?” Have you ever seen him do an interview? It’s funny, but it’s also really, really good. He asks questions you wish so-called legitimate journos would, like, “Are you serious?” The point in his interview with Jonah Goldberg where he throws his head back, mouth agape, and stares at the ceiling says more about his subject, and certainly his subject’s preposterous book, than anything written in the serious media.

It’s true that we’re a nation of partisans talking to ourselves, but maybe that’s not such a terrible thing. Fort Wayne, Indiana, once had six daily newspapers, and it survived. There were probably a dozen or more in the larger cities, and they survived. The so-called “objective” press is a fairly recent invention, and came, I’m convinced, from the business side, not the ivory tower — it’s a lot easier to sell newspapers to everyone if you at least pretend to be fair. (There’s a downside to that. Exhibit one: The editorial page of most newspapers, full of on-the-one-hand-this-on-the-other-hand-that chin-stroking, which ends in, “Who is right? Only time will tell.”)

I do worry what will happen when everyone seems to be working from their own set of facts, but I have to have faith that facts are stubborn things and can be sorted out. You don’t hear so much about the Obama-is-a-secret-Muslim thing these days.

Maybe it’ll be easier for Reider, et al, to think of Olbermann, et al, as entertainment, like Jon Stewart, et al. It is for me, certainly. I read 50 news sources a day, at least. Certainly I can indulge myself in a little Olbermann/Maddow one-two once in a while, right?

I’ll visit your armed camp if you’ll visit mine. A little prisoner exchange, say.

Bloggage:

Twelve-year-old boy taken to hospital after accidentally igniting a gas can while trying to light a fart. When I discussed this with Alan last night, he confessed he’d never actually seen this done and wondered about the length of the flame. Bic-length, or flamethrower? Poor boy (Alan). How did he reach manhood without witnessing this Boy Scout spectacle?

Also, poor boy with the burns on his ass.

Have a good day.