Now the LA Times tells us “reality” shows are fake. I’m bummed.

This is a huge week for TV goodbyes—Dakota-twanged aging anchorstud Tom Brokaw on Wednesday, preceded by quiz whiz kid Ken Jennings on Tuesday (or perhaps Wednesday; I haven’t kept up with how KOMO schedules Jeopardy! during Monday Night Football season).

We’ll all miss Dan Rather, who’s gonna retire from the CBS Evening News shortly after archrival Tom Brokaw leaves NBC.

I bet even the right wingnuts will miss not having him to kick around anymore. Conservatives hate Rather because, while he and his show often cowered to Republican White Houses (remember the show’s Reagan-era slogan “We keep America on top of the world”?), he didn’t cower passive-aggressively enough, or consistently enough. It was Rather who got the blame and invective when a 60 Minutes story about Bush’s draft-dodging included some maybe-faked-maybe-real evidence. (The evidence wasn’t all that vital; Bush could still be proven a dodger without it.)

In recent years, Rather’s magazine-show segments (and his election-night scripted homilies) have outshone and out-rated the Evening News, the distant third of the increasingly irrelevant old-network newscasts. In Rather’s early years, the newscast was a tightly-paced headline service, packed with 22 minutes of solid information and infotainment. Today, it’s down to 18 minutes of stories you’ve already heard on cable or online, punctuated by long promos for stories coming up later on in today’s show, on tomorrow’s show, or on tomorrow morning’s Early Show, or on tomorrow night’s 48 Hours Investigates. Rather seems to spend more time telling us what he’s going to tell us than he spends actually telling us. Even the show’s remaining “news” content is usually padded out with relatively timeless filler features about, say, how the recession’s affecting heartland construction workers.

Rather’s departure will give the network the opportunity to re-invent the newscast. It needs to turn it into something that will play off CBS’s higher rated magazine shows, while drawing viewers toward its affiliates’ local newscasts, and preferably while keeping CBS News differentiated from the likes of Fox. Can it be done? Stay tuned.

It’s not strange that Seattle would host singles’ nights for “plus size” people. It’s slightly strange that an Indianapolis paper considered it a story worth reprinting.

Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark, Media Matters for America, Black Box Voting, The Black Commentator.

Every now and then, my ex-colleagues at the Stranger put out some decent writing. The most recent example: The Urban Archipelago—It’s the Cities, Stupid. Credited only to “the Editors,” it’s a 6,000-word manifesto praising the intelligence, progressivism, and open-mindedness of city dwellers (i.e., the target audiences of papers such as the Stranger). It asks us to see the Great National Divide not as one between regions or states, but between city folk (including college-town folk) and country folk (including exurban folk), between the enlightened Us in coffeehouse-land and the ignorant Them in Wal-Mart-land.

It’s self-servin’, of course. But it’s passionately written, and it’s got a practical point.

On election night, the Democrats held their party at the Westin downtown. The Republicans held theirs in Bellevue. The Big Two parties have market-segmented themselves to the point where there are few true “swing” districts. Dems are the City Mice—the ol’ ward-heelers and union organizers, the immigrants, the intellectuals, the scientists, the culture vultures, the free thinkers, the internationalists. Repos are the Country Mice—the oil and mining and highway lobbies, the back-country bigots, the “Real America” zealots.

One of the big historical differences between the US and Europe has been the former’s rural socio-political power. Henry Ford, when he wasn’t out funding proto-Nazi books, used to vocally promote the automobile as the machine that would free “real” Americans from the tyranny of decadent “urban” culture (which then was a code word for Jews, not blacks) and preserve the US as a wholesome, Protestant, Caucasian place. Cleaned-up versions of this ideology were cited in the ’50s to support the then-new suburban sprawl phenomenon.

But it hasn’t just been right-wingers citing the alleged purity of country life. Commune hippies, nature poets, earth mamas, NPR essayists, radical ecologists, tree-huggers, and the occasional indie filmmaker have, over the years, bought into the “city bad/country good” line.

I grew up in what was the country at the time (it’s now total McManison sprawl, just down the road from that proposed NASCAR race track site). I got myself to a real town as soon as I could, and never looked back. I believe in cities. I believe in urban culture, in urban diversity, in urban leadership, and in urban innovation.

Yet I also know there can be open-minded people in small places and closed-minded people in large places. (Cf. racial antagonisms in Boston, Chicago, Philly, L.A., etc.) But in cities there’s hope for coexistence. There’s hope for a better tomorrow in all sorts of aspects. In the exurbs, there are only gates and fences and big moats of parking and dreams of retreating to an idealized, never-was past.

My week-long political-news boycott’s done. I’m feeling a little better now. I’m not gonna let some stupid election get in the way of my future, and the future of the land I love.

Yeah, there were voting irregularities again. A few political bloggers have suggested a wholesale, multi-state sabotage of the election process. Greg Palast claims another stolen election. These allegations have little tangible backing evidence; but, of course, that just causes the allegers to say it proves what slick operators the alleged fixers are.

I once wrote that if “our side” lost the 2004 election, there might not be a 2008 election. I now realize that was foolish. We’ll still have elections, all right. They might be as fair and open as those in PRI-era Mexico, but we’ll have ’em.

Mexico’s progressive/reform movement broke through its country’s corrupt one-party system, working from without. So can we.

For as long as I can remember, US liberals dreamed of a strong and paternalistic federal government that would be the font of all social progress. (There’s a possibly apocryphal story of an early-’70s NOW manifesto, two thirds of whose items began with the phrase “The federal government should….”) These days, we’ll have to “route around” the feds and their corporate sponsors, just as the Internet was designed to “route around” regional outages.

…Markos Moulitsas sees a Kerry win as inspired by Dean, and by bloggers:

“While originally planning a healthcare-based campaign, the Democratic party’s feeble respond to Bush’s war lust gave Dean an issue that resonated with the party faithful, and a new movement – fuelled by the blogs – was born.Dean ultimately faltered in the Iowa cornfields, but not before the good doctor had fused a new backbone into the Democratic party. Opposing the president – once viewed as political suicide – was suddenly en vogue. The strategy of “Republican lite”, wielded by Democrats to disastrous consequences in the 2002 midterm election, was finally dead….

Kerry faced $200m in negative attack ads, a hostile mainstream media, an administration that uses “terror” as a political tool and the combined might of the Rightwing Noise Machine. Yet Kerry entered election day in a strong position to win, both in the final round of polls and in early voting results in battlegrounds like Iowa and Florida. That alone is a major accomplishment, and one that hopefully bodes well for Kerry tonight.”

…another fun source for polling BS: The Nation‘s “Ground War 2004.”

Legendary New York Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin gives some reasons “Why Kerry will beat Bush.”

Mark Crispin Miller insists, “Bush/Cheney have to lose, as all such crackpot movements must. In fact, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to call them losers – as that is clearly how, deep down, they see themselves, for all their would-be macho swagger.”

I’m listening to Air America Radio in stretches as long as I can take. From time to time, I turn it off and listen to happy, upbeat music. (Arling and Cameron, Pink Martini, the Shins, and, of course, the Presidents of the United States of America).

And I’ve found something to keep my eyes away from political blogs, at least for periods of time. I’ve enrolled in National Novel Writing Month again this year. I don’t know if the resulting story will be saleable, but it’s a great exercise. I’ll tell y’all more about it later.

…this time from the WashPost.

…says the days are running short for the regime: “The White House has spent four years creating a fantasy world around Bush. Win or lose on Tuesday, the mistakes Bush has made in Iraq have caught up with him.”

The SeaTimes reports a national GOP-affiliated group just might have massively cheated its own constituency, by running fund-raising mass mailings whose proceeds almost all went to the direct-marketing contractors that sent the letters. Some of the donors were old-age pensioners who sent in most everything they had.

This sort of junk has long occurred throughout the fundraising sphere, not just in political solicitation. Sometimes the supposed recipients are overseas child-feeding programs, or domestic environmental groups. The perpetators sometimes try to get away with it by claiming the solicitation letters contained “voter education” or “public awareness” content, and were hence legitimate beneficiaries of their donors’ money.

One of the most famous direct-mail copywriters is Herschell Gordon Lewis, better known to us in the pop-cult community as a former B-movie director of classic carnival-showman sensibility and sometimes gory storylines. When the big studios muscled in on the splatter-film genre, Lewis took his gift for carny-style theatrics and applied it to direct-response selling.

Lewis was apparently not involved in this particular set of mailings, but it’d be appropriate if he were. With no one left to cheat and lie to, the right has turned to cannibalizing its own base.

…thinks Kerry has the “coolness” it takes to win.

…the current Stranger cover story, depicting
“2004’s Scariest Halloween Costumes” modeled by real children, is getting linked to from approximately coast to coast.