Bush’s suit bulge reappeared. But it looked less like the rumored earphone antenna wire and more like a Secret Service-mandated flak jacket, which he probably wears when he’s in public anyway. (Of course, there might still be a wire under that. Just might, I must say.)

And it was mighty disconcerting to see and hear Charles Gibson moderating the proceedings. I don’t want to be reminded on Friday night of Monday morning.

As for the candidates’ performances, Bush improved to the point that he could give off a few complete sentences, some of them even coherent. Yet he still fumbled and sputtered frustratingly, such as when he avoided answering a citizen who asked if he could admit to having ever made a mistake.

Kerry, meanwhile, remained unflappable. And he warmed up in the face of civilian questioners, or made a good act of warming up. He was the smooth, in-the-groove Road Runner to Bush’s awkward, desperate Coyote.

I told this last comparison to an acquaintance, who thought it insufficiently harsh. He felt Bush shouldn’t be interpreted as a cartoon character, even a humorously malevolent one, but as an out-and-out villain. I say, if you can’t have fun with your enemies, you’re letting them psych you out. Which is just ilke “letting the terrorists win.”

…with which to respectfully remember Rodney Dangerfield, who rode the ups and downs of professional comedy for almost half a century; and who, unlike so many Ed Sullivan Show regulars from the ’60s, remained big into the ’90s, thanks largely to a little movie with a puppet gopher.

…I’m currently watching the first Presidential debate. I’m watching it on C-SPAN (and, with a Net connection, so can you). They’ve got a split-screen shot of both candidates on at all times, with no annoying cutaways to the questioners.

Kerry and Bush are giving off the respective auras of my favorite Cartoon Network duo, I. M. Weasel and I.R. Baboon. Kerry’s articulate, level-headed, and cool. Bush is muffing his lines, darting his eyes about nervously, and turning every response into a lead-in to some pre-scripted talking point.

Of course, the op-ed pundits have warned us for the past week not to judge the debates on body language but on message content. There, too, Kerry’s mopping up Bush like just about every baseball team’s mopped up the Mariners this year.

Kerry’s giving solid responses, short and tart but packed with action proposals (or phrases that sound like action proposals). Bush reiterates past buzzwords and demographically-tested catch phrases.

Of course, the cable channels will declare Bush the “winner” of the debate, no matter what.

…and uploaded John Kerry’s Letterman spot in its entirety.

This is the traditional day for celebrating the change of seasons, the harvest, the end of toiling in the fields, the bounty of the Earth, and the enjoyment of work’s happy result.

We can only hope it’s a change of seasons in the sociopolitical sphere as well.

As one potential sign, John Kerry’s come out swingin’, and not just for the mythical “swing voter.”

And on Monday night, Kerry followed his Jon Stewart gig with a 23-minute spot on Letterman. He made a few stinging gags about Halliburton, Ashcroft, Bush’s tax plans, and his own perfect hair. He flung an index card back behind him like Dave used to do. And he gave some serious barbs about the Iraqi puppet regime’s impending collapse, and about how the neocons’ hubris has left the US more isolated and the terrorists more powerful.

He gave a more entertaining performance, and a politically heavier one, than Clinton gave Arsenio Hall in ’92.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN SUPER-MESS-O’-POTAMIA: It might not be true that, as Kerry alleged, the Bushies had “no plan to win the peace.” Canada’s own anti-corporate essayist Naomi Klein claims they’ve had a plan all along—a deliberately brutal scheme of “shock treatment,” intended to impose the purest example of pro-corporate ideology yet seen on the planet. The IMF/World Bank “adjustments” in Latin America and Africa would be just read-through rehearsals, compared to what would be done to (but not necessarily for) Iraq.

As Klein interprets the scheme, the entire Iraqi economy would be sold off to the multinationals, using whatever legal tricks the neocons could write into the puppet regime’s constitution. The alleged site of the ol’ Garden of Eden would become a paradise for investors. As for the Iraqi people: Well, they’d already endured decades of hardship and repression, so a little more wouldn’t stir ’em to revolt.

The problem, as it usually is with attempts to ideologically purify real societies, is that real life refuses to work out according to plan. In this case, the US/UK occupation army never fully pacified all the disparate tribes and sects that wanted a piece of the post-Saddam governance. And few of them were fond of the neocons’ plans for privatizations and mass layoffs. All hell ensued, and continues to do so.

Harper’s still has a wimpy web presence, so I have to link to part of Klein’s essay as retyped by a reader and posted to a political discussion-board site.

…getting relevant again. Witness its piece on “The Bush Campaign’s TV Commercial If He Was Running Against Jesus.”

…offers tips for the aspiring journalist on how to televise yourself in a hurricane.

Our pal and real estate agent Marlow Harris appears next week on What You Get For The Money, a series on the Fine Living cable channel (channel 204 on Comcast Seattle).

…has hewed to the old Holiday Inn slogan, “The best surprise is no surprise.” It’s been a safe, demographically-targeted program thus far.

The only oddities in the spectacle: The relative lack of suburban “country” singers (just about the only celebrity performers at Bush pere‘s conventions), and the prominence of show tunes and disco music at a convention whose official platform endorses homophobia.

The verbal gaffes thus far have been predictable ones. Laura Bush deliberately mistook the Iraqi puppet state for a “democracy.” And Schwarzenneger tried to rehabilitate the spirit and tactics of Richard Nixon.

Meanwhile, the protests in the Manhattan streets may have topped 0.75 million participants, but attract almost no corporate-media attention.

We’ll all watch to see if the broadcast and cable networks will pay kinder attention to the Republican convention than they did to the Democratic convention. You may recall that Fox News and “the networks of NBC” barely acknowledged the Dems’ speakers, preferring to spend time with their own staff pundits’ insult-filled blather.

We’ll also see if and how the Bushies will try to sell themelves to what used to be known as the “mainstream audience.”

This gang of cynical manipulators has worked hard to divide America, then to seek approval from only two castes—billionaires and fundamentalists. How will they re-interpret their hatred and bigotries into a “uniting” positive image?

I know we’ll get a few things:

1) Suburban “country” singers.2) Insult comedians.

3) Arnold Schwarzenegger.

4) John McCain.

5) Slick infomercial segments about the sanctity of (hetero) marriage, the nuclear family, and stem cells.

6) Sappy, insincere promises to help senior citizens.

7) 9/11 references up the wazoo.

8) Flags everywhere.

9) Jesus references everywhere.

10) A Bush speech that’s well-rehearsed, free of flubs, and utterly content-free.

11) Spin-meisters and pundits uniformly lauding Bush’s adequate, content-free speech as one of the great orations in world history.

12) Immediate resumption of the most vile attack ads as soon as the convention’s over (if they’re even paused during it).

Remember: There is no level of sleaze to which the Republicans will not stoop. If they win (or re-steal) this election, I don’t know if there will even be a Presidential election in 2008. There could be some trumped up “terrorist crisis” used as an excuse to indefinitely suspend the Constitution and instill martial law. That’s how serious this is, folks.

The original Olympic Games were performed naked. The current Athens incarnation of the event has come as close to that as the world’s more conservative broadcasters (i.e., NBC) would allow.

It seems as if Nike and Adidas decreed that all the players they outfitted for the Games, in any sport, would look more like beach volleyball players.

Even the track-and-field women this year are wearing midriff-bearing tops and dorsal-cleavage bottoms. Only the fencing, sailing, equestrian, baseball/softball, and indoor volleyball competitions still involve full attire, and they’re not getting much prime-time air in this country.

The guys are showing off more, too; especially in bicycling and weightlifting, not to mention swimming and diving. Where the men wear longer duds, they’re still tighter duds. Even the men’s basketball uniforms, at least from some countries, are significantly less baggy than the “long shorts” look of today’s NBA.

I happen to like half-naked women, and I don’t mind half-naked men. As I wrote about Seattle Storm player Lauren Jackson, who posed nude for an Australian art-photo mag to promote her appearance with the Aussie women’s basketball squad, athletic nudity represents a wholesome sexiness, a sexiness based on strength and achievement.

(By the way, just how did Australia become the new East Germany, winning medals far out of proportion to its scant population?)

Anyhoo, I’ve been watching with the sound turned to MUTE, switching between NBC, the various NBC-owned cable channels, and CBC. I’ve not followed any particular sports or athletes, but have enjoyed the whole spectacle of the thing. If I had cared about any one particular sport, NBC’s coverage would’ve disappointed me greatly.

The whole shtick about Olympics TV coverage in this country, ever since Roone Arledge formulated it for ABC in the ’60s, has been based on one big contradiction: Try to get the whole country interested in the Games, but assume your viewers don’t necessarily like sports and aren’t particularly interested in any of these esoteric competitions.

So, every four years (then, when the Winter and Summer games were biennially split, every two years), we got hours of human-interest profiles sandwiching minutes of athletic footage. When we were allowed to see the action (tape-delayed and selectively edited), what we saw almost always focused on US players, with the rest of the world pretty darned much ignored.

This time around, NBC seems to be finally starting to get it right, at least in its daytime and cable incarnations. The prime-time shows are still disjointed mish-moshes of whatever somebody’s decided will generate the hottest storylines that day. But the rest of it, scattered around the clock and the cable dial, we’ve gotten to see individual events more or less from start to end (though not in real time). Many of these events have even starred champions from other lands.

On the whole, though, I still prefer CBC’s barer-bones, more direct approach. Of course, CBC covers Olympic-component sports year round, unlike NBC, making its crews and its viewers more familiar with them.

(It’s a shame North American viewers are blocked from viewing the BBC’s streaming online video coverage.)

…it’s frustrating to know so much of the world’s televisual history’s been lost, especially from the pre-videotape era. But one guy in London successfully made hundreds of thousands of quality still photographs of programs from that era. Alas, most of those “Tele-Snaps” are also missing, presumed scrapped.

…opening ceremony live on CBC (one more reason Canada’s a cooler place). The thing’s a big, gaudy, lovely performance-art spectacle (think Cirque du Soleil) with gods, lovers, classical art, philosophy, history, and huge nude male sculptures.

The celebration of Greek history within the show, like most accounts of that proud nation, lingered on the ancient/classical days and rushed through everything since. As the ceremony’s parade of live tableaux depicted it, the fall of Greek creativity didn’t stem from the Romans’ conquest but from the rise of that late-Roman religion, Christianity.

PS: Yeah, the original Olympic athletes were all male and naked. But there were even more differences between then and now; some of which involved the eternal contradiction between democratic ideals and slavery.

ABC News Now, channel 114 on Seattle Comcast digital cable.

It’s cable news version 4.0. It’s not trying (yet) to compete for ratings against CNN, Fox, or CNBC/MSNBC. It’s there to give ABC an outlet for long-form coverage of live events without breaking into the main network’s entertainment schedule, and to repurpose the network’s vast archive of interviews and magazine-show segments.

It launched last month with the Democratic convention. Now we get to see its regular schedule. It’s a simple, almost-no-nonsense format. A few original shows throughout the day (such as Inside the Newsroom, where reporters in their shirtsleeves discuss the day’s ongoing events). News briefs at the top of the hour. Clips from recent editions of World News Tonight, Good Morning America, Nightline, 20/20, PrimeTime, and This Week. Simple graphics with no headline “tickers.”

And unfiltered, unedited speeches and testimony by political figures. Some of these are similar to C-SPAN events, covered by the same camera pools. But they can still be quite fascinating.

Today I saw Kerry at a Las Vegas middle school, deftly handling questions about educational funding, public transportation, and the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste dump. He behaved as a thorough professional, shaking hands firmly and giving solid eye contact.

Last night I saw Bush at a Virginia community college, mumbling something about schooling as being vital to the growth in American jobs. His incoherence without a script and his nervous body language made him look like he wanted nothing more than to get the heck outta there and back making deals with big contributors.

ABC only promises to keep ABC News Now going through Election Day. I hope it becomes a permanent fixture. Like a less-snide version of its overnight show World News Now, it’s the work of a bigtime news organization getting to play with a low-budget, low-profile outlet.

YEP, IT’S TIME for our annual “In Praise of the Hydros” piece.

Since many of you have read some, if not all, of our previous installments on this topic, this year’s version will be short. Essentially, the hydroplane race is perhaps the most “unique” (to use an overrated LA term) cultural institution Seattle’s still got. Over a quarter-million people gathered on Sunday to watch a sport that exists one week a year here, and is barely noticed anywhere else. KIRO-TV paid a big rights fee to telecast the event, in a seven-hour marathon broadcast utilizing all the hi-tech tricks available to the industry. Advertisers ranging from GM to Mike’s Hard Lemonade commissioned special commercials for the telecast.

Yet, for all its enduring popularity, this may have been the last hydro race as we know it.

To explain why takes a little back-story.

Since the ’80s, the hydro racing circuit was dominated by the Miss Budweiser team, owned by Bernie Little. Anheuser-Busch poured healthy portions of its national ad budget into Little’s operation, as a thank-you for Little’s success as a Bud regional wholesaler. The sport became less and less competitive, especially after other big sponsors (Atlas Van Lines, Procter & Gamble, Kellogg’s) bugged out. As the circuit deteriorated in popularity everywhere except Seattle, Little bought out the whole operation under the name Hydro-Prop.

Little passed away last year. His son took over the Miss Bud team. But soon thereafter, Anheuser-Busch announced it would stop sponsoring the boat after this season.

Hydro-Prop is now in organizational shambles. Little’s heirs haven’t found a new sponsor. Some observers are suggesting the sport physically rebuild itself from scratch, replacing the surplus airplane engines it’s always used with more modern automobile-based engines. And the better-organized Unlimited Lights organization threatens to build its own set of bigger boats, rivaling the “unlimiteds” of Hydro-Prop.

But no matter what happens in the coming years, the 54-year heritage of the hydros will remain an integral (and fun) part of Seattle’s civic psyche.