Atta' boy, Keith!

If you happened to miss Keith Olbermann’s commentary last night, then you lost an opportunity to see what journalism can be, ought to be, but most often, is not. As editors and publishers nationwide continue to wring their hands about circulation losses and news chiefs continue to dumb down their broadcasting, they don’t understand that viewers (and readers) will pay attention to journalists who have something to say, aren’t afraid to take chances (at the risk that they’ll occasionally overreach and fall flat) and work hard at understanding the nuances and variants of a story.

Olbermann’s come a long way from the days when he was a witty, albeit snarky host of ESPN’s Sport Center. I’m sure many predicted his failure when he ended up leaving the world of sports and took his unique skills over to MSNBC. While the transition certainly couldn’t have been easy, it’s obvious to anyone who watches Countdown even occasionally that he’s grown into his role and last night’s commentary on the president’s impending announcement of increased troop levels was Olbermann at the top of his journalistic game.

Drawing on a BBC report that President Bush is planning on unveiling a “new Iraq strategy,” with a speech to the nation, which, according to a quoted senior American official, will be about troop increases and “sacrifice.” This from someone who knows the word “sacrifice” as it is defined in a dictionary, but has little, if any firsthand experience with the realities of that word lived out in real time.

This president, who could have taken the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, a gathering of men, with a combined experience and reputation that would be hard to argue against and by deferring to their recommendations, had an opportunity to not only save face, but change course and begin a gradual phase out in a country and a conflict that can’t be described as anything but a “clusterf#ck” of monumental proportions. Instead, in true Napoleonic fashion, this faux leader, this small-minded megalomaniac, continues to insist on having it his way, like the spoiled brat that he’s never grown up from being.

Speaking to the hubris of the president, Olbermann began last night with, “The president has delayed, dawdled and deferred for the month since the release of the Iraq Study Group. He has seemingly heard out everybody, and listened to none of them.”

Olbermann castigated the president on this idea of sacrifice, which coming from this president seems laughable, if it didn’t portend such dire consequences for the thousands of men and women, as well as their families, who will know the word intimately, in all its reality and heartbreak and misery it will entail for them.

Not content to merely affix his sights on President Bush, Olbermann also trained his laser on John McCain, who amazingly, after what this president did to him in the last presidential race, seems to intent on outflanking Bush on the right—what a man won’t do to attain power, I guess?

Apparently, McCain, at least according to former labor secretary, Robert Reich, told him that the “surge” would help the “morale” of the troops already in Iraq. What the f*ck is McCain smoking?

Olbermann again:

“If Mr. McCain truly said that, and truly believes it, he has either forgotten completely his own experience in Vietnam ... or he is unaware of the recent Military Times poll indicating only 38 percent of our active military want to see more troops sent ... or Mr. McCain has departed from reality.”

In my opinion, I’d say it’s the latter with McCain.

Olbermann was just warming up at that point. Speaking to both McCain and his craven attempt at scoring points with the folks on the right, as well as those, who like McCain, have taken leave from the real world and joined some apparent parallel fantasyland.

“To those Republicans who have not broken free from the slavery of partisanship — those bonded still, to this president and this administration, and now bonded to this “sacrifice” —proceed at your own peril.

John McCain may still hear the applause of small crowds — he has somehow inured himself to the hypocrisy, and the tragedy, of a man who considers himself the ultimate realist, courting the votes of those who support the government telling visitors to the Grand Canyon that it was caused by the Great Flood.

That Mr. McCain is selling himself off to the irrational right, parcel by parcel, like some great landowner facing bankruptcy, seems to be obvious to everybody but himself.
Or, maybe it is obvious to him and he simply no longer cares.”

Olbermann warned those Republicans of the consequences that await them if they continue to put ideology above the best interests of all Americans. He alluded to November’s election results, saying that this was a referendum on Bush’s Iraq policy, which by-and-large has been supported in lockstep by the party faithful.

Lest he be accused of perpetuating his own brand of partisanship, Olbermann didn’t spare the Democrats the ire, or his warning In a nutshell, he is telling them, be courageous, but don’t be duped.

“And to the Democrats now yoked to the helm of this sinking ship, you proceed at your own peril, as well.

President Bush may not be very good at reality, but he and Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rove are still gifted at letting American troops be killed, and then turning their deaths to their own political advantage.

The equation is simple. This country does not want more troops in Iraq. It wants fewer.

Go and make it happen, or go and look for other work.

Yet you Democrats must assume that even if you take the most obvious of courses, and cut off funding for the war, Mr. Bush will ignore you as long as possible, or will find the money elsewhere, or will spend the money meant to protect the troops, and re-purpose it to keep as many troops there as long as he can keep them there.

Because that’s what this is all about, is it not, Mr. Bush?

That is what this “sacrifice” has been for.

To continue this senseless, endless war.”

An immediate pullout would be welcome by many, including Olbermann. But even if we were to leave Iraq tomorrow, the damage has been done by this president, his administration and by those who’ve enabled them by their support.

You can say what you want about Olbermann, but you can’t fault him for his passion, his willingness to engage his audience by being provocative and his obvious desire to instill some professionalism to a profession that has lacked much of that quotient of late.

While many hail the John Stewarts and Stephen Colberts for supposedly engaging our nation’s younger set, irony and humor won’t get it done. 3,000 dead American soldiers, tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilian deaths and billions and billions of U.S. dollars squandered to destroy a culture and destabilize a region is not the fodder of jokes and witticisms. It’s a pox that will haunt us for decades, if we have any shred of decency and integrity remaining in our national psyche.

The ratings of Olbermann’s program continues to trend upward, as does MSNBC’s overall returns, validating the idea that you can still do hard news, on TV and attract audience share.

All I can say is keep it up Keith—some of us are paying attention and appreciate your courage and journalistic panache.

Maine humah, Marley-style

I got my first live exposure to Maine humor god, Bob Marley, last night, at Merrill Auditorium. Marley, back in his home state for the fifth year in a row, headlining over the holidays, sold out all seven of his shows. Showcasing his Maine-derived humor, which relies heavily on nods to a certain caricature of Mainers and their idiosyncratic way of life, Marley had the audience in the palm in his hand for his hour-long performance. George Hamm, a talented performer in his own right, warmed up the audience, but it was clearly Marley they came to see.

That Marley is able to sell out the Merrill’s 2,000 seats, not once, not twice, but for four nights, including both performances New Year’s Eve, is truly amazing. I don’t know if there is another Maine performer who could pull this off. Even more incredulous is that Maine has never been a place known for comedy and where you’d be hard-pressed to name more than a handful of venues that book comedy of any type.

Lest you think that Marley is just a local yokel, or regional phenomenom, think again. He’s performed on Letterman, Leno, as well as Late Night with Conan O’Brien. In addition, he regularly performs at comedy meccas like Hollywood’s Laugh Factory, Caesar’s Palace in Vegas, as well as other clubs of national renown, such as The Improve in Washington, DC. Not bad for a guy from Portland who believed in himself, when many others surely encouraged him to get a “real job.” I mean, he’s got his own kiosk, at the Maine Mall, for Chrissakes.

Some of his routine relies on physical comedy, particular mannerisms and facial contortions that can best be called Maine hick chic. While Marley now resides in LA (that’s Los Angeles, not Lewiston-Auburn, for the locals) where he’s lived since ’95, he hasn’t lost his knack to know what people, places and Pine State reference points to mine, such as the Cumblin' Faya (that’s Cumberland Fair, to you flatlanders), bean suppers and restaurants like the Village Café and Captain Newicks. The Merrill shows were the fifth year in a row that he’s come back to Maine and headlined over the holidays.

It appears that Marley has become a Maine treasure, much like Stephen King. I’m sure he’ll be selling out shows in Maine as long as he cares to come back to his home state.

A New Year's Dawning

With the dawn of a new year, many Americans traditionally resolve to make changes in their lives, whether it be losing weight and getting in shape, vowing to complete that novel sitting in their desk drawer, or to live a life infused with more meaning.

While it would be great if all of us who are still seeking self-actualization could muster the momentum to move forward and maintain it say, on July 1st, the New Year makes for a laudable line of demarcation.

Taking stock of where we are and where we’d like to go isn’t a bad thing. Granted, there’s an entire industry that makes a living on this one day, but that doesn’t denigrate the value of using today to make small, positive changes heading into 2007.

While I have my own small changes I hope to make and yes, one of them is to lose some weight, via my new exercise program, here are some New Year’s resolutions I’d like to see Americans adopt, nationally. Granted, I can’t force these on anyone, as substantive change must be driven by personal motivations, rather than guilt. However, each one of my suggestions has solid evidence to support their consideration.

Getting the hell out of Iraq

The U.S. death toll sits precariously close to 3,000, with December being the deadliest month yet, for U.S. troops. After significant discussion, from a cross-section of U.S. leaders, with a combined experience that demands attention, George W. Bush still seems intent on doing things his own way. With his dubious track record and history of failure, “staying the course” seems like a ready made disaster for the U.S. military.

Americans need to muster the national will to demand we bring our troops home, now—rather than later! Our nation mobilized the political will in the past, forcing leaders, against their failed judgements, to leave Vietnam. We need that same effort now, as our current delusional president seems to lack the ability to read the writing—he’s now talking about a “sustained surge,” whatever the hell that oxymoron means.

A National Alternative Energy Policy

All one has to do is look at our December record temperatures, here in the Northeast, to know we’ve done some serious damage environmentally. As a nation, we had an opportunity, back in the 1970s, with oil embargoes and gas lines, to make substantive changes in the way we travel, heat our homes and produce electricity. Instead, like the proverbial ostrich, we placed our heads in the sands of denial and now, 30 years later, we have our backs against the wall.

With Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvient Truth, showing us where we need to go in formulating a national energy policy, the time is now to push for alternative energy, while there is still a smidgen of hope that we might be able to halt this march towards energy perdition. A call for a Manhatten Project for alternative energy should be the perogative of every one of the candidates running for office in 2008. For an idea of what this might look like, check out this site for Edwin Black's latest book, Internal Combustion.

A Government of the People, By the People and For the People

While most of my Democratic friends will continue to deny it, the Democrats are not the answer for America. We need a true third party in this country in the worst possible way. Both parties currently represent the interests of the elite one percent, to the peril of the remaining 99 percent of us. I know that it won’t happen in 2008, leaving us saddled with the sorriest of choices, if the current field of candidates is an indication—I’m frightened to see what other candidates throw their hats into the ring in the next 18 months, or so. Americans need to begin thinking about true political reform, if we have any hopes of truly turning things around.

With the recent passing of former president Ford, I’ve been reminded that America has faced other periods of weak and scandalous behavior at the highest levels and men have come along to restore dignity to the Office of President. While Ford wasn’t charismatic, or possessing a Hollywood persona, he did have a quiet humility and resolve that America needed in the post-Nixon era of the 1970s. Better yet, wouldn’t it be refreshing to have a real, live, breathing first lady again? Not some drugged-out zombie, like the current one, Laura Bush. Seeing some of the old news footage of Betty Ford’s speeches, particularly in light of the historical context, only highlights what a breath of fresh air (as well as controversial figure) she was, back in 1974.

Instant Runoff Voting is my hope for the future. It probably won’t make any headway this year, or even next, but possibly, by 2012, we could have some meaningful voting reform that would energize and make viable, third party participation in the electoral process.

Well, those are a few of my national prescriptions for 2007. Here’s wishing all my readers a healthy, prosperous and personally fulfilling New Year!

Ford: A model worth reconsidering

In death, life tends to get sanitized and ordinary people suddenly become heroic. When famous people die, lives get airbrushed and calling cards get hijacked by flights of exaggeration.

Once more, a former president has passed on to wherever it is we go, when we die. I never thought of President Ford as a historically significant president, although in fact, when he succeeded Spiro Agnew, who had resigned due to allegations of tax evasion and money laundering, he became the first Vice President appointed under the provisions of the 25th amendment. Less than one year later, on August 9, 1974, Ford became the first person to assume the office, having not been elected to the position.

As a 12-year-old at the time, and beginning to pay as much attention to politics as a politically precocious pre-teenager might, I recall the mid-70s as a time when the country seemed to be in a state of upheaval.

Three years before (I was in third grade), I remember Nixon imposing wage and price controls, a move that was extraordinary during peacetime. With inflation raging at the time, my father’s uncharacteristically patient explanation of Nixon’s actions stuck with me. With a paper route at the time and a nine-year-old’s understanding of the relation between prices and wages, the significance of inflation was easier to understand than one might imagine to a youngster.

While my parents weren’t huge Nixon supporters, his resignation took on an air of significance in 1974, as we learned the news from our nightly guest, Walter Cronkite. None of my family and for that matter, most Americans, knew much about Gerald Ford.

We knew he’d been a football player. Like most men his age, he’d served during WWII. As a member of the Congress, from a blue-collar state like Michigan, Ford had the kind of credentials that got you respected in a working-class home like mine and a mill town like Lisbon Falls.

One of Ford’s traits is that he was a likeable person and didn’t have a lot of enemies. Surprisingly, Lyndon Johnson didn’t like Ford, primarily because the practical Midwesterner didn’t like Johnson’s Great Society policies and was openly critical of them, as unneeded, or wasteful.

Apparently, Johnson, known for his salty speech, said that Ford “…couldn’t fart and chew gum at the same time.” The press, in an effort to sanitize the expression changed it to “chew gum and walk..,” which stuck.

During his tenure as president, this former college football star, who played for two undefeated Michigan Wolverine teams, in 1932 and 1933 and was voted team MVP in 1934, became known as a klutz. Ford actually was offered an opportunity to play professional football, but turned it down. [During this time in the U.S., playing professional sports was far from the lucrative, “sure-thing” that it’s become today] Instead, he went to Yale, to coach football and for the opportunity to attend law school.

As for the klutz part, there were several examples that later got amplified. On a visit to Austria, Ford tripped down the steps of Air Force One — to the chuckles and clicks of a press corps. Some posit that, in the aftermath of Watergate, the press was no longer interested in protecting the image of the president. The media seemed to compensate for its prior restraint by going overboard in their relentless spotlighting of each one of Ford’s subsequent missteps. He fell down on skis. He bumped his head while getting off a helicopter. His stray golf balls became the stuff of legend.

"It's not hard to find Jerry Ford on a golf course," quipped Bob Hope. "You just follow the wounded."

Chevy Chase, at the time, a member of SNL’s cast, lampooned Ford as the president who couldn't stay on his feet. In Time Magazine, Chase explained his technique:

"Ford is so inept that the quickest laugh is the cheapest laugh, and the cheapest is the physical joke." Part of the problem may have been that Ford really did stumble more than most people do: A nagging knee injury, acquired during his football years, possibly contributed to his imbalance.

Looking back, given the perspective of history and time, Ford being seen as a bungler is rather ironic, given that he may have been the most athletic of any recent president and jabs at his intelligence seem unwarranted, given our current intellectually-challenged inhabitant of the oval office. The shots at him over his supposed clumsiness apparently bothered him. In his memoir, “A Time to Heal,” he had this to say about the constant scrutiny his gaffes received.

“Every time I stumbled or bumped my head or fell in the snow, reporters zeroed in on that to the exclusion of everything else," he complained. "The news coverage was harmful, but even more damaging was the fact that Johnny Carson and Chevy Chase used my missteps for their jobs. Their antics — and I'll admit that I laughed at them myself — helped create the public perception of me as a stumbler. And that wasn't funny.”

As they say, hindsight is 50-50 and in retrospect, Ford would be a welcome change in this time of ratcheted rhetoric and hyperbolic huffing and puffing.

At the time, I wasn’t aware of how unkind the media can be to public figures. The same press that took great pleasure in amplifying each and every misstep of Ford, during his presidential tenure, now lionizes him, in typical post-mortem fashion. How ironic.

Ford’s presidency was an important one, for a country torn by the war in Vietnam, buffeted by an economy ravaged by inflation and reeling from political scandal (back before that sort of thing became Washington’s modus operandi).

With his unassuming manner and simple Midwestern humility, he helped restore some dignity to the office he held, ever so briefly.

Ford was a moderate Republican in the truest sense, back when such a designation didn’t seem like an oxymoron—a man given more to compromise, bipartisanship and the spirit of cooperation that seems archaic, only 30 years later.

Interestingly, in a 2004 interview with the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, whose details had been embargoed, Ford stated that he disagreed with the justifications for the Iraq War and indicated that he would not have gone to war had he been president.
In 2001, Ford broke with conservative members of the Republican party by stating that gay couples “ought to be treated equally. Period.”

He became the highest ranking Republican to embrace full equality for gay couples. Certainly a far cry from the dominant ideology of most ranking Republicans, today.
In reflecting back on his life and his presidency, one wonders just what kind of role Ford would be allowed today, in a party of ideological hacks, kool-aid drinkers and moral miscreants.

A Good Dose of Disinfectant

I was in a meeting a couple of weeks ago with a cross-section of the local business community. The topic pertained to a function of state government that was experiencing issues with funding, as well as effectiveness. With frankness and forthright conviction rarely uttered by politicians, this business leader said, “why don’t we just blow it up and start over.” With nods from around the room, it was obvious that this fellow had scored some points with his clarity.

In my opinion, part of government’s inefficiency stems from organizational dynamics and energies that aren’t readily manipulated. While much lip service gets paid to reform and redesigning bureaucratic structures, the size of the behemoth grows larger, as does the funding needed to perpetuate inefficiency. How is it that we define insanity?

Lately, I find myself coming face-to-face with information and inefficiencies that cry out for investigation, but there seems to be very little, if any of that being done in Maine at this time.

Last Wednesday, Lance Dutson of Maine Impact had an excellent opinion piece published at MaineToday.com, about media in Maine. He was addressing a previous column written by Jeannine Guttman, editor of Maine’s largest newspaper, about her column trumpeting her paper’s march forward into the land of blogging and social media. As happens regularly, Guttman missed the forest for the trees.

While many of Maine’s newspapers race to embrace the latest technological fad to stem the bleeding caused by tanking readership, the problem seems obvious to me. At the risk of being overly simplistic, here’s my prescription for Maine’s newspapers—give people something to read and they’ll read it. Better yet, get back to the practice of journalism and reporting on the news and some of the real issues in our state and stop pandering to the lowest common denominator (or the state’s power brokers).

As Dutson recognizes, the growth of new media has been driven by the clamor for journalism that seeks to hold leaders accountable, at all levels—local, state and national. Guttman thinks that merely assigning her staff the task of blogging will ultimately bridge the chasm caused by the public’s perception that newspapers no longer have any credibility. She couldn’t be any further from the truth.

As Dutson writes, “A legion of Press Herald bloggers will ultimately fail to produce results until the policies that cause the print media to come up so short are changed. A digital version of a sanitized press leaves the public in the exact same position as before, except for less paper to use in the fireplace.

There is a troubling diminution in Maine's traditional press for actual inquisitive reporting. Across the nation, blogs are filling this void. Maine's press corps seems to have abandoned the idea of probing into the subjects they cover, as if the concept of impartiality has paralyzed them.

The media, more so than government, sets the dialogue in a community. They provide the ultimate check and balance between the citizenry and its elected officials. When improprieties are ignored, the press becomes complicit.

The near-manic concern for decorum among Maine's traditional press has resulted in a disenfranchised public, cheated out of a thorough understanding of a reality the press has a responsibility to reveal.”

The issue couldn’t be clearer. We need at least one newspaper, or media source in this state that is willing to report the news and hold our elected officials accountable. I don’t see anything remotely close to that happening, other than at isolated outposts on the web.

With that being said, blogging remains the post-modern equivalent to the pamphleteers of the past, like Tom Paine, Voltaire and others, who were willing to shine the light of truth on the so-called leaders of their day.

As the late Louis Brandeis so concisely put it, “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Maine (and many other places across our land) needs some disinfecting done in the worst possible way.