CBS’s Katie Couric asks Sarah Palin one simple question: “What magazines or newspapers did you read regularly before being picked for VP?”

And in spite of probing follow-ups, she can’t name one, even though she majored in journalism as an undergraduate in college. Broadcast journalism that is…

She does say, however, that she’s “read most of them.”

What?

There are 1,422 daily newspapers in the US and 6,253 weeklies and who knows how many hundreds of magazines.

She then gets all defensive about how Alaska isn’t a foreign country or something.

Couric kept asking her, OK, but can you just name one that you’ve read?

Palin couldn’t name one, even her local newspaper, the big paper from Anchorage, The Anchorage Daily News? She’s never read Newsweek or TIME?

Transcript:

COURIC: And when it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read, before you were tapped for this, to stay informed and to understand the world?

PALIN: I’ve read most of them again with a great appreciation for the press for the media, I mean…

COURIC: Like what ones specifically? I’m curious that you…

PALIN: Um, all of ‘em, any of ‘em that um have been in front of me over all these years, um…

COURIC: Can you name any of them?

PALIN: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news too. Alaska isn’t a foreign country where it’s kind of suggested it seems like, wow how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, DC may be thinking and doing, when you live up there in Alaska. Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.

[Yeah, let's elect her to fix our economic crisis and solve the global warming problem, right...]

A new “Save the Black Warrior” campaign will kick off in Birmingham, Friday, Oct. 3, and in Tuscaloosa, Thursday, October 16.

The Birmingham kick-off celebration will be at 10 p.m. on Friday, October 3, at Zydeco (205-933-1032). Tickets are $8 in advance at zydecobirmingham.com or $10 at the door (2001 15th Ave S).

The event is headlined by The Dynamites featuring Charles Walker, who got started at the Apollo Theater. The band’s dynamic live show has already gained them opening slots for Galactic and Widespread Panic as well as appearances at Bonnaroo and the Austin City Limits festival.

The campaign’s Tuscaloosa kick-off event will be at 9:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 16, at Jupiter Bar and Grill (205-248-6611). Tickets will be available online for $10 at jupiteronthestrip.com or at the door (1307 University Blvd).

This concert is headlined by Dubconscious. These Athens, Georgia reggae pioneers are longtime supporters of Black Warrior Riverkeeper. Dubconscious brings healthy servings of spirituality, celebration, and social awareness exemplified by reggae legends like Lee Perry, King Tubby, Augustus Pablo, and The Gladiators.

SweetWater Brewing Company is launching a campaign in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa throughout October called Save the Black Warrior to help raise funds and awareness for Black Warrior Riverkeeper.

SweetWater has run a very successful campaign in Atlanta with Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper called “Save the Hooch.” Funding raised through “Save the Black Warrior” will support Black Warrior Riverkeeper’s river patrol and water-quality monitoring programs.

As part of the campaign, participating local bars and businesses in the Birmingham and Tuscaloosa areas will be selling paper fish to their clientele for $1 and $5, as well as special edition t-shirts.

Participating venues include: 5 Points Grill (Birmingham), Bottletree Café (Birmingham), Cosmo’s Pizza (Birmingham), Dave’s Pub (Birmingham), Innisfree (Birmingham), The J. Clyde (Birmingham), Jackson’s Bar and Bistro (Homewood), Jupiter Bar and Grill (Tuscaloosa), Mellow Mushroom (Tuscaloosa, Birmingham, and Hwy 280), Metro Bistro (Birmingham), On Tap Sports Café (Lakeview, Inverness, and Riverchase), Western Supermarkets (Birmingham), Whole Foods Market (Mountain Brook), and Zydeco (Birmingham).

Promotional materials for the campaign will emphasize that the Black Warrior River and its tributaries are threatened by pollution and overuse, and will offer five things individuals can do to protect this important water supply for Birmingham and Tuscaloosa. SweetWater will also be offering incentives for participating retailers to encourage their fundraising efforts through paper fish and shirt sales.

Whole Foods Market is donating five percent of the sales on October 21st at its Mountain Brook location (3100 Cahaba Village Plaza, 8am-10pm, 205-912-8400). REI and Alabama Small Boats are also supporting the campaign.

Black Warrior Riverkeeper is a non-profit organization whose mission is to protect and restore the Black Warrior River. Alabama Environmental Council’s 2007 Conservation Organization of the Year, Black Warrior Riverkeeper is an autonomous local chapter of Waterkeeper Alliance.

For more information, go to the group’s Website or the Website of SweetWater Brewing Company.

Sarah Palin’s nude portrait

There’s been no shortage of takeoffs on Sarah Palin lately, from television skits to action figures, but Bruce Elliott has gone one step further than most. He’s taken off her clothes, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Elliott’s wife, Tobin Mitchen, owns the Old Town Ale House on Chicago’s North Side. He painted a nude portrait of the Republican vice presidential nominee and hung it above the bar, where it’s become a huge draw.

Elliott doesn’t like her politics, but finds something about her very interesting to the point of holding a crush on her, he said.

“I’ve been following her religiously,” he told the reporter. “I had never heard of her before, like everyone else. I find her bizarrely fascinating, even though I pretty much despise everything she stands for.”

Elliott’s daughter, who looks a little like Palin and does a “great” impression of her, served as model for the governor’s body. He began painting Palin’s smile and trademark Tina Fey glasses, then filled the details, her red high heels and a serious gun with the Alaska landscape in the background, along with a polar-bear rug and a scared moose.

The bar is a popular spot for Second City comedians for beer and pinball after shows. Now the place is apparently packed all the time, since the image hit the Web on Monday.

Maybe we should take a short break and revisit this. It’s Black Monday on Wall Street and in D.C.

White House Officials Implicated in Politically Motivated Cases

Karl Rove Accused of Crafting Messages

by Glynn Wilson

A special prosecutor has been appointed to investigate Bush administration officials for turning the Justice Department into a political arm of the White House, according to a press release and a report issued Monday by United States Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

While the press release focuses on the political motivated firing of nine U.S. attorneys across the country, a voluminous report from the Inspector General and the Office of Professional Responsibility takes White House officials and members of Congress to task for the undue influence of politics in the administration of justice.

While a quick scan of the 356-page report indicates it does not deal directly with the related political prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, the report describes potential crimes to be looked into in the political firings of nine U.S. attorneys, including lies told to investigators, obstruction of justice, and wire fraud.

In a Washington press conference, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine and Office of Professional Responsibility director Marshall Jarrett said that a special prosecutor was needed because “serious allegations involving potential criminal conduct have not been fully investigated or resolved.”

Justice Department officials said they do not have the complete story of the firing of U.S. Attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico, one of the most blatant cases, but blamed his firing on the actions of Sen. Pete Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson, who had complained about his handling of voter fraud and public corruption cases. Their issue with Iglesias was that he did not use his office fast enough or hard enough to prosecute Democrats.

The Bush administration wanted Democrats investigated and prosecuted to keep them from winning elections, as they did to Siegelman in 2005 after he announced his intention to run for governor again in 2006.

The report’s most scathing criticism is reserved for Bush’s former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, although former White House political adviser Karl Rove, former White House counsel Harriet Miers, and former Justice Department official Monica Goodling, and other key witnesses are taken to task. The report says Gonzales “bears primary responsibility” for the process of firing of the prosecutors and the turmoil that followed, since he “abdicated” his leadership role and was “remarkably unengaged.”

The report concludes that his chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, was the person most responsible for coming up with the plan to fire the prosecutors and indicates that his comments to Congress, the White House, and others were at least “misleading” if not outright perjury and obstruction of justice.

According to Mukasey, the Report makes plain that, “at a minimum, the process by which nine U.S. Attorneys were removed in 2006 was haphazard, arbitrary, and unprofessional, and that the way in which the Justice Department handled those removals and the resulting public controversy was profoundly lacking.”

“The leaders of the department owed it to those who served the country in those capacities to treat their careers and reputations with appropriate care and dignity. And the leaders of the Department owed it to the American people they served to conduct the public’s business in a deliberate and professional manner,” Mukasey says. “The Department failed on both scores.”

The report is an important step toward acknowledging what happened, and “holding the responsible officials to proper account,” Mukasey’s statement continues. “I hope the report provides a measure of relief to those U.S. Attorneys whose reputations were unfairly tainted by the removals and their aftermath. They did not deserve the treatment they received.”

In the normal course of events, a report recommending further investigation would not be released until after the investigation and any resulting prosecution had been completed, for fear that disclosing publicly relevant facts and witness statements would hinder the investigation or prosecution, the press release says, but…

“In this instance, the Offices of Inspector General and Professional Responsibility have made the judgment that the circumstances warrant a departure from this usual practice,” Mukasey says. “The Justice Department has an obligation to the American people to pursue this case wherever the facts and the law require.”

Mukasey appointed attorney Nora Dannehy of Connecticut as the special prosecutor, who he calls a “well-respected and experienced career prosecutor who has conducted or supervised a wide range of investigations and prosecutions during her lengthy career.”

Some critics say she is too closely tied to Mukasey and his second in command at Justice to be an effective prosecutor, and that the appointment shows the investigation is going to be pushed out the side door of Justice while the financial crisis and the election take most of the public heat over the next month.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and a former U.S. attorney himself, questioned the effectiveness of the investigation to be led by federal prosecutor Nora Dannehy.

He indicated in a press conference that it’s unclear whether Dannehy will have the power to subpoena White House officials and whether her probe would focus narrowly on the question of whether a crime was committed by Gonzales and his deputies, or rather if she had the mandate to look at a possible cover-up by the Bush administration.

“There is a cover-up,” Whitehouse said. “And it continues.”

He also singled out Mukasey for blame, noting that the DOJ’s own Office of Legal Counsel has not cooperated with the report.

“If he’s willing to accept a White House cover-up, if he’s willing to accept the inspector general being hindered, then we, I think, should have further questions of the attorney general,” Whitehouse said.

New York attorney Scott Horton, who has followed the cases closely, writing for Harpers.org said Mukasey’s pick “sends a clear signal that Mukasey does not appreciate the gravity and importance of the issues raised.”

“Moreover, it seems reasonably clear at this point that Mukasey’s prime objective in this maneuver is to ensure that the matter is swept under the rug until after the November 4 election, so that those responsible for trashing the traditions and integrity of the Department of Justice will suffer no political damage for their misdeeds,” he said. “This is a disappointing, but at this point hardly surprising, development that favors White House stonewalling. Michael Mukasey has emerged as just the sort of Attorney General George W. Bush was hoping for.”

According to the report, and in contrast to what Karl Rove has said in public while defying a Congressional subpoena to testify under oath, he and other White House officials were involved with the Justice Department investigations and played an active role in crafting the release of information on the firings to the public.

In a March 2007 meeting mentioned on page 84 of the report, called by Deputy White House Counsel William Kelley and attended by Karl Rove, Sampson, Paul McNulty, and others:

According to several witnesses, Rove came in to the meeting for only a few minutes and then left. Battle said Rove spoke at the meeting but he could not recall what he said. McNulty said that he could not specifically recall either, but thought Rove said something to the effect that Moschella’s testimony should explain why the U.S. Attorneys were removed. None of the witnesses said they could recall specifically what Rove said at the meeting, although all agree that the discussion generally centered on what Moschella should say about the reasons for each U.S. Attorney’s removal.

This clearly shows involvement by Rove in crafting public relations messages at the Justice Department in direct contradiction to what he has said in public for the past year since he abruptly resigned his White House position last August.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, the Michigan Democrat, responded to the report by repeating a warning he has been making publicly since last summer.

“Since last summer, my committee has warned that the Bush administration fired U.S. attorneys for political reasons and tried to cover it up by misleading Congress, and today’s report confirms our very worst suspicions,” Conyers said. “This scheme — which the report makes clear was hatched in the White House — was a fundamental betrayal of the American people and the men and women of the Department of Justice and it will be a long time before we can fully repair the damage.”

The report also makes clear, he said, that a number of central questions remain unanswered, “largely because of White House stonewalling.”

“So it is all the more important that we continue our effort to obtain White House documents and testimony,” he said.

Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee Chairwoman Linda Sánchez of California said she was disturbed by the findings “that improper political considerations were an important factor in the removal of several of the fired U.S. Attorneys.”

“The report’s conclusion that Attorney General Gonzales and Deputy Attorney General McNulty’s lack of supervision and general lack of knowledge of the removal process demonstrates that the top ranks of the Justice Department were asleep at the switch,” Sánchez said.

She also was troubled by “the White House’s brazen snub of its own Justice Department.”

“Because of the White House’s refusal to cooperate with the Inspector General’s investigation, we still do not know why the nine U.S. Attorneys were fired,” she said.

Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Pat Leahy, the Vermont Democrat, said in a statement that the report might have told us even more if the investigation had not been impeded by the refusal of Bush administration officials to cooperate and provide documents and witnesses, just as they remain in contempt of Congress for failing to cooperate with the Judiciary Committee’s investigation.

“In this debacle as in others, the Bush administration’s self-serving secrecy has shrouded many of their most controversial policies — from torture, to investigating the causes of 9/11, to wiretapping,” Leahy said.

He indicated the committee will be looking into former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ testimony to Congress about the firings for evidence of possible perjury. And he warned that if President Bush chose to pardon anyone ultimately convicted of a crime in connection with the firings, such a move would be seen by the nation as an admission of wrongdoing.

Sen. Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican and ranking minority member on the committee, said there’s no indication the White House is planning pardons. But he indicated a willingness to “push back” if that were found to be the case.

Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., who received an anonymous tip in January 2007 that led to the investigation, issued a press release saying the report “confirms our worst fears, and makes it clear that this was a scandal that went to the highest levels of the Department of the Justice, and that the role of the White House was in fact prominent.”

Mukasey admits that the report “describes a disappointing episode in the history of the Department.”

Mukasey’s statement and the full report can be accessed on the Department of Justice Website here.

The House Judiciary Committee reaction is here

AP: Special Prosecutor Named to Probe US Attorney Firings

Surprise, surprise, surprise…

by Glynn Wilson

Perhaps you are too young, blog fans, to remember the Gomer Pyle Show and the Marine private’s routine refrain to Sergeant Carter.

But that’s what’s ringing in my ears this Monday morning as we wait to find out if what is being reported by the TPMMuckraker and The New York Times is true.

After offering what the Times calls “a blistering critique” of the political motivations that led to the firings of a group of United States attorneys in late 2006, the report to be released later today supposedly stops short of recommending criminal charges against former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales or others in the affair, including former Bush political guru Karl Rove.

While the first reaction on the part of anyone who has been watching this case closely for the past year might be outrage, since yes, we all want Gonzales and Rove — who were forced out of their jobs in Washington last August — to be prosecuted too.

But did anyone really expect the Bush Justice Department to recommend prosecuting the former head of the Bush Justice Department? That would have been the real surprise.

And yes, while we all want the House Judiciary Committee to lock Karl Rove up for contempt and for defying a Congressional subpoena to testify under oath — apparently the first person in American history to get away with that dastardly deed — perhaps it would be better to wait until the financial crisis is solved and the election is over and Bush is gone from the White House in January. Otherwise, Bush will just pardon them.

Once Obama takes charge of the Justice Department as the new president, with an even larger majority of Democrats in both houses of Congress, then Rove and the others can be brought up on criminal charges and prosecuted.

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

I must create a system, or be enslav’d by another man’s. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.
–Jerusalem

In 1957, the year I was born, this quotation was erected in Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey in London as a memorial to the poet William Blake and his wife.

One of the poets now associated with writing about change in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, Blake was among the literati of London’s intellectual circle though he was often labeled an eccentric or worse–insane or demented. His works did not gain much acclaim or commercial success until long after his death, an all-too-familiar story with poets and writers who are ahead of their time, including America’s own Henry David Thoreau.

The reason I bring it up this Sunday, as usual, is because it’s on my mind for a reason.

In spite of how random Web publishing must seem to people who are used to reading newspapers and getting their news from TV, I don’t do much of anything simply to fill the space between the ads on the ever-pressing arbitrary deadline that drives the traditional, establishment news media. I do things for a reason.

Yes, I feel the need to publish regularly, but there are no corporate management or printing press and delivery-truck-imposed deadlines. I write a column on Sunday because I feel like it. I can take in the Sunday papers online to some extent and then reflect on something going on in the world. And I often have a specific audience in mind as well as a specific set of issues.

As the U.S. Congress grapples with trying to save the American economy from the collapse of capitalism, and the activists on both sides try to maximize or minimize this crucial moment in our history for political purposes, I would much rather grapple with a larger point.

Today that point has to do with change and the need to deal with the ever-increasing speed of change.

I don’t know if it will do any good or not. But since I have done much in my life and times to show how democracy doesn’t work without an aggressive, thinking press, my quest is to create something new and do things differently.

The reason I am thinking about it now is because of a long conversation I had last night with an old friend who now lives in Orange Beach, Alabama, who works on a large recreational fishing boat. I won’t name him to protect the innocent.

For lack of a better way to characterize him, he is a conservative redneck who has no idea how to use a computer. Believe it or not, he has never seen a Website or conducted a Google search.

Yet he and many of his colleagues are desperate for someone to come down to the coast and get the real story on what’s going on in the Gulf of Mexico. It is not being covered by the newspapers or on TV.

On one side he sees federal scientists who are missing a lot of information about the fishing community when they write regulations governing his industry. That feeds his conservatism, since it fits into the stereotypical notion about the world fed by years of Southern propaganda. It feeds the notion that “the federal government is bad.”

That’s how George Wallace got elected governor four times in Alabama and how he almost got himself elected president. The irony now is that George W. Bush, whom the Wallace conservatives love, has almost proven it to be true.

In other words, to use a Bushism, under Bush, the federal government ain’t worth a shit. Nothing works.

On the other side, my friend is appalled by what he sees coming in this political argument we are having in the presidential campaign about oil drilling along the nation’s coasts.

The oil companies are now exploiting our fears about high gas prices to suggest drilling in ecologically sensitive inshore waters. And they are hoping to exploit the situation to convince the government to allow them to build floating refineries just off our public beaches.

His vehement opposition to those ideas is not only fed by his economic self-interest. It offends his native sense of conservation.

He knows, perhaps better than anyone around, how devastating that would be to the habitat where fish breed and spawn.

I know the issue pretty well myself since I spent a few years on the Gulf Coast in the early days when Florida fought off the oil companies at huge public hearings in Pensacola. In those days, the fight over oil drilling in the Gulf pitted the oil and gas industry against the industries involved in tourism and commercial and recreational fishing.

And no one, not one single news organization or political candidate, is giving the American people a sense of that fight in the current debate.

To Sara Palin and her conservative fans, the mantra “drill, baby, drill” becomes a one-dimensional image that seems to say it all. I mean, why dig any deeper?

All loyal Republicans will surely support it, since they believe in Bush’s black and white world and most drive gas-guzzling SUVs and some of them can’t even afford $4 a gallon gas.

But the political point and the economic story is not all that interests me. And $4 a gallon gas and the fear that the ATM machines won’t work next week when the banks collapse is not all that is driving our anxiety as a society.

If only we could stop for a few minutes and reflect on what it must have been like to live 200 years ago, when the industrial revolution began, or 100 years ago when it came to full-fruition in the early 20th century.

When I was trying to explain to my friend how stories are published on the Web and how blog advertising works and so forth, his reaction made me think of what it must have been like for those early Americans who were driving a horse and buggy rig down a dirt road when they first encountered a car. Or when someone first tried to explain to them how the internal combustion engines work. Or to those Americans who, upon their first encounter with a telephone, said, “This will never catch on.”

I am still struggling to get some of my friends to go beyond the telephone and embrace e-mail. There are many in our society who just can’t begin to grasp what’s going on. Change is coming too fast. Faster than it was 100 years ago and way faster than it was 200 years ago.

Yet for a certain crowd, I still have to deliver the news about what I’m covering on the telephone. These are people who do not read a newspaper and get most of their news from CNN, who only recently even found out that there was an alternative news network called MSNBC. I kid you not, Web fans.

So try explaining the Web Press to a Gulf fisherman. He probably still gets most of his information from radio. Conservative talk radio.

His frustration is that no one on talk radio knows anything about the fishing industry or the oil industry, beyond what kind of fish they like to eat and what the price of gas is today.

He understands how fish breed and spawn in the wetlands and why that is important. Most people only know what they like to order on the menu at the seafood restaurant when they are on vacation at the beach.

And he knows that an inshore oil refinery will not only pollute the water terribly. It will warm the water up and run off all the fish. And there goes the fishing industry and a good chunk of the tourism industry on Alabama’s Gulf Coast.

When I related my story this week about the fish kill in Roebuck Springs, he started telling me a story about a guy he knows who makes a living blowing up beaver dams with dynamite for private landowners, who want to be able to develop their property without having to deal with federal regulators.

“It’s just wrong, what he does, man,” my friend said. “And he doesn’t even know why.”

So there are several levels of intelligence to deal with here, and all of them are affected by what I like to call the “rapidity of change.”

It’s scary. It’s hard to understand. Our natural instinct is to fear what we don’t understand and to fight against change.

But there is a growing majority in America who know we have to change. And they know that the 72-year-old John McCain, who has spent the past 30 years inside Washington and who does not even know how to use a computer, hardly represents change.

He and his less-than-educated running mate are just not going to be able to think outside the box in a way that has a chance to get this country going in the right direction again.

We need almost revolutionary changes now just to keep up after the past eight years of Bush-Cheney.

We were on the cutting edge at the turn of the 21st century with a budget surplus. Now we are on the verge of being owned by China.

All of this happened while Bush rode his mountain bike and McCain hugged him and believed, wrongly we now know, that the “foundation of our economy is sound.”

They believed you could just go for a bike ride and put out a press release telling the American people to go shopping and the economy would take care of itself, because they believed that “greed works.”

I think it’s safe to say, now, we know unbridled greed doesn’t work.

Why do I bring up William Blake? According to historians, the poet had several patrons over the course of his life (something us bloggers could use a little more of). And Blake produced voluminous works in his time, yet he often lived in abject poverty (something else we know a little about).

Though it is hard to classify Blake’s body of work in one genre (us too), he heavily influenced the Romantic poets with recurring themes of good and evil, heaven and hell, knowledge and innocence, and external reality versus inner knowledge. (We have already influenced the mainstream media and public opinion and continue to do so.) He was ahead of his time because he went against the common conventions of the time (you get my drift by now).

Blake believed in sexual and racial equality and justice for all, for example, and rejected the Old Testament’s teachings in favor of the New. In the days when slavery was still legal, he abhorred oppression in all its forms.

We too will continue to fight the same battles today on this new platform called a blog, no matter what the critics say behind our back or on their blogs — or on talk radio.

For we also believe this, as Blake once wrote: “In that no man can think, write or speak from his heart, but he must intend truth.”

That is our mission. Whether you consider this art, jibber jabber, or journalism, it has to be honest and it has to be about an attempt to get at the truth.

Everything else is just PR for profit. It’s just a waste of ink and paper and bandwidth for nothing but greed.

by Glynn Wilson

The Palin bump has all but disappeared from the polls and Barack Obama is back out front of John McCain in the race for president with only six weeks to go before election day Nov. 4.

According to the aggregated polling at Pollster.com, the Democrats have a solid lock on 229 electoral votes. The Republicans have a virtual lock on only 174, with 135 up for grabs in the swing states.

McCain’s choice of the inexperienced redneck Christian-right weirdo from Alaska, Sarah Palin, may still be helping McCain in some swing states in the West, such as Montana, but will probably cost him just as many votes in the Northeast.

The only Western swing state still in play for Obama is Colorado, where the Democrats held their national convention in August, and where Obama has a well-organized ground campaign in place.

Obama is still leading by small margins in Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania, but McCain has the advantage in Florida and Ohio, while the margin in Virginia and North Carolina is a virtual tie.

Most commentators say the first major debate in the race in Oxford, Mississippi, Friday night was also a tie and there were no decisive moments where either candidate scored major points over the other.

As for the general national public opinion poll, The Washington Post is reporting that the financial troubles of the past week have favored the Democrat.

Turmoil in the financial industry and growing pessimism about the economy have altered the shape of the presidential race, giving Democratic nominee Barack Obama the first clear lead of the general-election campaign over Republican John McCain, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News national poll.

Just 9 percent of those surveyed rated the economy as good or excellent, the first time that number has been in single digits since the days just before the 1992 election. Just 14 percent said the country is heading in the right direction, equaling the record low on that question in polls dating back to 1973.

More voters trust Obama to deal with the economy, and he currently has a big edge as the candidate who is more in tune with the economic problems Americans now face. He also has a double-digit advantage on handling the current problems on Wall Street, and as a result, there has been a rise in his overall support.

The poll found that, among likely voters, Obama now leads McCain by 52 percent to 43 percent. Two weeks ago, in the days immediately following the Republican National Convention, the race was essentially even, with McCain at 49 percent and Obama at 47 percent.

Economic Fears Give Obama Clear Lead Over McCain in Poll

So as they say, sometimes good news follows bad, the old silver-lining argument. It is just hard to imagine how four more years of ANY Republican in the White House could be good for this country’s future standing in the world, and certainly not another dimwit like George W. Bush.

Sarah Palin seems to be even dumber and less curious and qualified, as we are pointing out in some detail in this continuing discussion calling into question U.S. capitalism. It’s not too late to add your two-cents.

If you saw Bush’s address to the nation the other night about the economic situation, and if you listened closely, you would have heard him use the words democracy and capitalism interchangeably.

“Despite corrections in the marketplace and instances of abuse, democratic capitalism is the best system ever devised,” Bush said. Maybe. But not any more…

If you do some reading and think about it, when Bush says democracy, he means capitalism. And the indisputable, intellectual fact is, they are not one and the same. Democracy is a method of governing. Capitalism is an economic theory about how to run markets.

And as we learned all too painfully in the aftermath of the Great Depression in 1929, so-called free-market capitalism, or alternatively run-amok or unfettered capitalism, does not work by itself.

As the people in every industrialized democracy in the world know — except the people in the United States — it takes social programs and public policies to regulate businesses to prevent exactly what is happening now in the U.S. economy.

If you let the managers of big business do anything they want, they will gladly run the system into the ground and walk away with all the money. They don’t care one whit what happens to workers or governments.

As I have been writing for the past six years, Bush’s mandate from the insurance industry and big oil and the rest was to show once and for all that government doesn’t work, to set the stage for privatizing everything in this country, including the military.

Well, now that he’s pretty much accomplished that, we see the results. Does this somehow promote your idea of the pursuit of happiness? Not mine. I would love to hear from someone, anyone, who actually likes where we are right now.

Isn’t it strange that the right-wing attack machine is quite silent on these points about now? They are just playing a diversion game trying to fool enough of the people between now and Nov. 4. Don’t be fooled.

Time Out
by Dan Rutledge

To paraphrase an old song or, more correctly, an old song title, “This Magic Season” should be the theme song for the Southeastern Conference and for the Alabama Crimson Tide in particular. The league hit a historical high note last week by hogging half of the AP Top 10 poll.

This week, only four teams remain in the Top 10 – but the SEC has half its membership among the top 25 (Georgia No. 3, Florida 4, LSU 5, Alabama 8, Auburn 15, Vanderbilt 21). No other league has half its members in that select group.

And as far as Bama goes, it has indeed been a magical season so far, and don’t look for the sorcery to end anytime soon … that’s right, not this weekend. The old saying “three’s a charm” has been rewritten to read “two’s a charm” as far as SEC football goes.

In this league, the sophomore jinx has been turned on its head. Some seven current SEC head men won at least 10 games during their second seasons and four — including Bama’s Nick Saban, Georgia’s Mark Richt, Auburn’s Tommy Tuberville, and Florida’s Urban Meyer — won their respective divisions and landed their teams in the SEC championship game in their second seasons.

Don’t look now, but this is Saban’s second year at the helm in Tuscaloosa. That means that he will get to be the first coach to do it — win their division in their second year — twice! That’s right, the feeling here is that Bama will be back on the front of Sports Illustrated once again next week after the Tide has pulled off the upset of the season — again (remember Clemson?). As then, this one, even though it’s being played in Athens and beating the Dogs between the hedges is a tough row to hoe, is an upset ready to happen (Line: Georgia by 7).

The Dogs’ Richt knows. That’s why he is calling for a “blackout” this Saturday, calling for all the Georgia fans to come dressed in black. “Blackouts” are used by Richt to pump up his fans and teams for big games in which he feels he needs a little extra motivation and excitement.

The individual matchup to watch this week is A.J. Green and Julio Jones. Both true freshmen and both highly touted coming out of high school, the two have so far lived up to their billing. Jones leads Alabama in pass receptions. The same goes for Green at Georgia.

This week’s game could come down to which of the two has the best game. The passing game could be the difference since both teams have shown success in stopping the run. Bama’s offense has relied mainly on the ground game in winning the first four games. But look for more passing in the game plan this week.

The rest of the Week 5 menu has three league games and three non-conference contests. Two matchups — one in each group — are interesting. League-wise, the other big game of the week will be played down on The Plains, where No. 18 Auburn will host Tennessee (Line: Auburn by 6).

The Tigers, coming off a tough loss to LSU at home, will be hungry and ready to roar — the home crowd likewise. It is an important game for both teams and the loser will have a hard time bouncing back. For Auburn, coming in at 3-1 overall and 1-1 in league play, losing would mean back-to-back home losses and dropping to 1-2 in the SEC West.

For Tennessee, losing would be even worse. The Vols come in 0-1 in league play and 1-2 overall. A defeat would drop them to 1-3 and with their schedule, put them firmly on the road to a losing season. They would also be 0-2 in league play and out of the championship picture.

Other league games on tap this week include Ole Miss (0-1, 2-2) at Florida (1-0, 3-0) (Line: Florida by 23) and Mississippi State at LSU (Line: LSU by 24). It should be easy home games for both the Gators and Tigers.

The interesting non-conference contest is actually a throwback to an old-SWC rivalry. Arkansas and Texas (Line: Texas by 27) vied for the SWC title many times over the years and this game was always underlined on both teams’ schedules. It doesn’t mean as much now, but the Hogs still hate to lose to the Longhorns, and vice versa. Also on tap Saturday: Western Kentucky (2-2) at Kentucky (3-0) (Line: Kentucky by 21) and UAB (1-3) at South Carolina (2-2) (Line: SC by 23).

WEEKEND TV LINEUP

Saturday:

11 a.m.
Maryland at Clemson (CW), Michigan St. at Indiana (ESPN), North Carolina at Miami (ESPN2), Northwestern at Iowa (ESPN Classic), Virginia at Duke (ESPNU)
11:30 a.m.
Ole Miss at Florida (Raycom Sports), Army at Texas (Versus)
2:30 p.m.
Fla. A&M at Tennessee St. (FSNS), Colorado at FSU (ABC), Tennessee at Auburn (CBS), Purdue at Notre Dame (NBC), Chattanooga at Furman (CSS), Wisconsin at Michigan (ESPN)
2:45 p.m.
Navy at Wake Forest (ESPNU)
6 p.m.
Wofford at Ga. Southern (CSS), TCU at Oklahoma (FSNS)
6:30 p.m.
Miss. St. at LSU (ESPN2)
6:45 p.m.
Alabama at Georgia (ESPN)
7 p.m.
Illinois at Penn. St. (ABC)