…in the Obama transition appears to be Doris Kearns Goodwin. I swear sometimes I feel like one more mention of “team of rivals” in any news article will send me over the edge.

While I’m talking about things I’m sick of in the media, there’s also an aspect to the potential GM bailout that really bugs me. No one seems to challenge the assertions made by pundits from the Wall Street Journal, Heritage Foundation, etc who claim that the UAW has some responsibility for this mess. Union auto workers have seen their numbers and their standard of living decline for forty years. I’ve seen some of these guys tell some damn misleading stories about the role of the UAW in GM’s fortunes. Autoworkers build the cars. They don’t design the cars. They don’t source the parts. They don’t decide how the cars go together. When the company shuts your plant down or lays you off, you don’t get paid. I watched my UAW uncles not get paid by Ford for years in the late 70s and early 80s. I watched them lose their homes and their cars and one of their marriages. I watched one of my uncles work for years at less than half of his UAW wage laying coaxial cable until Ford had recovered enough to hire him back.

The difference between UAW workers and other manufacturing workers in this country is really just that the UAW has had some say in how much they’ve lost over the last forty years.

Rachel Maddow takes apart the argument that Democrats should play nice with Joe Lieberman to get a sixty seat majority in the senate. Brilliant, but you really need to watch the whole six minutes.

Unfortunately the media plugin I’m using doesn’t seem to work with MSNBC’s embedded video code. Here’s a link instead.

I have developed an ongoing fascination with Chuck Hagel over the last couple of years. He’s a principled guy. When I say that, I mean in it in almost precisely the opposite of how most ideologues and partisans mean the word when they use it. I bought his book, America: Our Next Chapter this summer, but had a hard time reading it. I eventually did read most of it, but skipped a few chapters. It was terribly pedestrian. Hagel, however smart he may be, is no intellectual. Even with a co-author who no doubt did the heavy lifting of putting Hagel’s thoughts to paper, it often comes off like a high school student’s “write your own biography” assignment. You need not be an intellectual to be smart and to be shrewd. Tonight, I read an interesting portrait of Hagel that came out in the New Yorker just before the election. It’s worth checking out.

About ten days ago, I saw Tim Robbins on Real Time with Bill Maher. Robbins started off his appearance by talking about voter suppression and how you would need to fight it if you showed up to vote and weren’t on the list.

Tim Robbins was not on the list at his polling place this morning. This is the same polling place where Robbins voted in the primaries. It is, he claims, the same polling place where he has voted for years and years. Robbins was forced to go to the main board of elections office to have his registration verified and then was able to vote.

Irony or retribution?

I was reading a Reuters article today* that asks the question what’s next for conservatives if McCain loses. The nice thing about the article is that you get a slight sense that the conservative activists have already written 2008 off. They’re actively talking amongst themselves about 2010 and 2012. I was heartened to read two things in the article that make me very happy if the conservatives really go down this road. One is that they’re talking about Sarah Palin as the conservative standard bearer for 2012. Given some of the things that have been coming out in the last week about tensions between the McCain and Palin camps, this isn’t a real surprise. But the other is that they’re talking about the culture wars as a path back to victory. Racist, fascist asshole William Donohue who is head of the Catholic League has this to say: “I’ve been on the phone the last couple of days with some of my friends … and we’re getting ready for the biggest culture war battles ever,” Donohue said.

If they think that’s their path to beating Obama in 2012, they’re dead wrong. It’s not the way back to majorities in the house or senate either. I agree with the log cabin Republican guy in the article who says in the long run that’s the path to to being a party that holds onto 160 or so house seats in the south and midwest.

*I lost the original link when my first attempt to post this blew up. I’ve found the same article at the Canada post site.

Another great moment for Chris Matthews today. He was listening to right wing nutjob congresswoman Michele Bachmann prattle on about how Barack Obama associates with all sorts of anti-American people and then starts implying that anyone who is liberal or leftist might be anti-American. Matthews just started questioning her about the rhetoric she was using, asking if some of the people she had directly referenced like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid were anti-American. She kept this awful, unflinching stepford wife smile on her face and wouldn’t back down from it. He pointed out what large percentages of the country are self-described liberals and conservatives and asked again if all the liberals were anti-American. She demurred, but then went back to implying that there may be members of congress who are anti-American. Matthews finally asked her how many of the congresspeople and senators that she serves with does she suspect of being anti-American. She said that it would be good to know and said flat out that the media should start investigating and do an expose on the anti-Americans serving in congress. She was pretty much directly calling for a new McCarthyism.

There are times when I wish I had even rudimentary photoshop skills. I’m so sick of hearing John McCain say “I’ll make ‘em famous” in his earmarks schtick. First, what he means to say is that he’ll make it known which senators and congresspeople are requesting the earmarks. Most of them are already kinda famous. He also never actually mentions the people he’s referring to most of the time, so if you were to follow his construction, he’s usually actually saying that he would make the earmarks themselves famous. Every time I hear him say that, I think that maybe he’s just recently seen Young Guns II and has delusions of being some earmark killing gunslinger, a Senator nee President Billy The Kid. I’d like to see his face photoshopped onto an Emilio Estevez poster from that movie with the “I’ll make ya famous” tagline.

Dear NFL Network,

Are these really the (approximate, ganked from the web) lyrics you want to use to promote your sport?

Trudging slowly over wet sand
Back to the bench where your clothes were stolen
This is the coastal town
That they forgot to close down
Armageddon - come Armageddon!
Come, Armageddon! Come!

Everyday is like Sunday
Everyday is silent and grey

Hide on the promenade
Etch a postcard :
“How I Dearly Wish I Was Not Here”
In the seaside town
…that they forgot to bomb
Come, Come, Come - nuclear bomb

Everyday is like Sunday
Everyday is silent and grey

Trudging back over pebbles and sand
And a strange dust lands on your hands
(And on your face…)
(On your face …)
(On your face …)
(On your face …)

Everyday is like Sunday
“Win Yourself A Cheap Tray”
Share some greased tea with me
Everyday is silent and grey

There’s a beautiful irony to it, sure. Though I am quite a football fan, I would have to say that irony is not your strong suit, NFL Network, nor is it the strong suit of most of your fans.

Love,

Policywank

I am not a big fan of what Chris Matthews has become in the last dozen years. He went down a crazy path during the Clinton administration, particularly during their second term that never went away. I got a great reminder of what brought Matthews to prominence, though, today. He gave a grilling to the GOP spinmeister today about this “lipstick on a pig” crap that would have done any fictional TV prosecutor proud. It was focused, it was relentless. It was completely on point. He’s used clips and quotes of other politicians (and used more Republicans than Democrats) using the same phrase. McCain’s former press secretary wrote a book by that title and McCain himself used the phrase to attack Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign proposal on healthcare. He’s played the commercial three times to refute claims that the ad isn’t trying to say that Obama called Palin a pig.

Let me say this about the ad itself. If you think that Barack Obama was in any way calling Palin a pig, or in any way being sexist in this remark then YOU ARE A MORON. You are too stupid to vote. You’re probably too stupid to tie your own shoes. If you don’t believe that he’s calling her a pig, but are willing to put forth this story as part of a campaign to win the whitehouse, then you are what is wrong with American politics. You are the reason that most people don’t vote. You suck.

I just watched Chris Matthews introduce “Republican congresswoman Adam Putnam”. Putnam’s body language at that point is just hilarious. He clearly looks angry and defensive, but doesn’t, um, have the balls to correct Matthews. I rewatched it twice. The first time was just to confirm that I’d heard correctly. The second was to just enjoy watching Putnam’s body language.