If it's all about the ratings....

...then tell me why the candidates chose to hold their debate during the ALCS? They could have maybe held the debate as a pre-game warm-up - they certainly would have had a lot more eyeballs on them if they had.

So what we're left with this morning are the soundbites of the name-calling, and all the micro-analysis and spin that go with them. Just a little mental math here: If John Kerry is out of the mainstream, and John Kerry is a liberal, that means that liberals are out of the mainstream. This is the kind of rhetorical algebra that the Republicans have excelled at from the dawn of time. Sorry to tell you, boys - there are liberals everywhere. Maybe even half the country could be considered either 'liberal' or 'a security threat' based on their voting preferences. So where is the mainstream? For that matter, what is the mainstream?

Hmmm. Maybe John Fogarty is right: "It ain't me....."

Back from the brink of extinction.

Call it dead heat fatigue. Call it what you will. Maybe it's the start of the school year, and my early morning exertions are now focused around getting the teenager out of bed and into the car. Anyway, please forgive my absence.

I did get a twitchy feeling the other morning while listening to Nina Totenberg on NPR. She was describing the treatment normal U.S. Citizens were getting at the hands of the Secret Service, should they be imprudent enough to show up at an event where the President is speaking in anything less than Bush-supportive garb. The most chilling soundbite was the father of a kid who, upon pulling his wallet to show his ID to get in to the Bush Safe Zone showed the remnants of a Kerry sticker still adhering to the wallet. The kid was denied access, and the father "by association" was deemed a "security threat".

Now the only threat this gentleman posed was the threat to think his own thoughts and speak his own mind. We've come a long way since Richard Nixon decided to dress his White House staff up in comic-opera uniforms. It seems George W. thinks the Secret Service is his own personal Gestapo. I ask you, America - do you think this is right? Is this Constitutionally mandated? Which law on the books tells us that the candidate we endorse may or may not make us a security threat?

And this sitting President thinks he is trying to export Democracy. He doesn't begin to know the meaning of the word.