A debate has been raging among Media Matters, Daily Kos, Gawker.com and Tommy Christopher over at Politics Daily over a Jake Tapper piece about President Obama playing the Hussein card as he speaks to the Muslim world. I have to agree with Christopher and come to Tapper’s defense.

For the past 8 years, we’ve done everything we possibly can to inflame American sentiments against Muslims, and to inflame middle-eastern Muslims against the United States.

I knew if we could get through the campaign without the Hussein part of Barack Hussein Obama completely overwhelming the percentage of the electorate with one word attention spans, this would suddenly become a feature as we explain to the peoples of the mideast that we’re not all oil-grabbing Christian Soldiers: we just had the misfortune to elect some of them to lead us.

Every few months the left wing noise machine forgets that it’s politics we’re playing here, and sometimes the shadows turn out larger and more influential than the characters who cast them. When we forget that, unpredictable results can occur. We got our ass handed to us by Lieberman; we made him a bigger monster than he would have been had we left him alone.

This is a damn good thing Obama’s doing, and its good journalism that points it out. We didn’t like the press cowed by the nationalist jingoism of Bush/Cheney, but we seem hell-bent to repeat it by not tearing up the pre-election talking points now that the Hussein card may turn out to be trump.

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If you watched the five-day celebration where Barack Obama became our 44th president, you’ll recall the many parallels that were drawn to Abraham Lincoln, from the train trip that retraced Lincoln’s, to the reading of Lincoln’s words by patriot Tom Hanks at the Saturday celebration at Lincoln’s memorial. Lincoln was looking down on us.

And you also heard Aaron Copland. A lot of Copland, from The Lincoln Portrait which accompanied Hanks’ reading, to strains of Simple Gifts,  one of the themes blended by John Williams for his arrangement for Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma, also used by Copland for his Appalachian Suite, to Fanfare for the Common Man. Our list of American composers of ceremonial music is short, and runs the range of styles from John Philip Sousa to Mr. Williams. But the dean is Aaron Copland whose pioneering styles can still be heard in modern film composers like James Newton Howard.

I couldn’t help thinking how proud Aaron Copland would have been; a proud Socialist during the 30s FDR administration. A man who loved his country not in the “love it or leave it” frame, but “love it and improve it.”  He wrote the soundtrack for monumental progress that would happen long after his death.

Perhaps Copland and Lincoln were both looking down at us in our time of great progress and great peril. Thinking of that, I started experimenting with Copland and Copland-like themes as an arranging project, which I’ve posted here. The middle portion is real Copland, performed at the Obama Lincoln celebration and narrated live by Tom Hanks. These are real instruments playing real Copland music in a fair-use sized chunk. The surrounding music, accompanying Mr. Obama, are my composition and orchestration realized by the East-West Symphony Orchestra sample set being driven by Sonar 7 Producer.

Most browsers should play the files below by clicking the links. Don’t attempt the lossless WMA without a fast connection.

President’s Day Copland Tribute – mp3

President’s Day Copland Tribute – wma (lossless 18meg)

President’s Day Copland tribute – wma (compressed 1.8 meg)

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I spent some time today starting the cleanup from the election. What to do with the local grassroots web site? How about the email addresses tied to the local url? Do we park them all for four years for the re-election, or just let them evaporate when they expire and start over.

In 2000, and again in 2004, we cleaned up after a disaster. Its been so long, since we’ve won one, I don’t quite remember how its done.

We have such a mess of problems, and no doubt we’ll discover there are many more that the Bush/Cheney administration was able to hide or spin hoping the truth wouldn’t emerge until the transition is over. I’ve never seen such problems, but I’ve never had more faith that the new folks in charge are up to the task.

Congratulations to everyone who helped elect Mr. Obama, and I hope those who didn’t will give him a fair chance to be everybody’s president.

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The Republican ticket has devolved into a sad, tired and ugly thing the likes of which I’ve never seen in 55 years.

When you take somebody fresh out of the PTA who can barely handle a promotion to mayor of Wasilla and was clearly over her head as governor, and launch her as high as she’s tried to soar, you’ve got to expect a graceless crash. The part of the Brian WIlliams interview that was aired tonight shows McCain and Palin as buffoonish.

There’s a dog and pony show quality to the pair that makes you realize how well most experienced politicians mask that taint, which must come naturally to most folks.

When they sarcastically called Obama “The One,”I doubt they ever anticipated they would be so disorganized, off-message and downright self-destructive just a few weeks later. Their remedies make their plight worse, its almost like resistance is futile. Maybe some of ‘em on the religion rich-right may be starting to think “The One” without the sarcasm.

In the interview, McCain had this nervous spunkiness that Robert Preston would be great at portraying. He was on a hot griddle, because next to him was a woman who was working without a net and not good at keeping her balance. There were moments that reminded me of the Couric interviews.

You could tell that she was being asked about things that raised questions she’d never even considered before. She was torn between trying to formulate an answer while simultaneously trying to grasp what was to her a new idea. Its cruel. No its fun, no its cruel.

And so sad. It would be fun if Robert Preston and Charo were playing the parts, and Blake Edwards was directing it for the screen. Everybody would get the joke and everybody could laugh. This is cruel because the more we learn about Sarah Palin the more the question becomes how could this woman even be considered for the job of being a heartbeat away.

That embarasses not just one woman, but a whole campaign, a whole party, and a whole nation. We should all be totally ashamed of ourselves.

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One of the real sadnesses of the last 8 years was to see Karl Rove lead the ignorant around on short leashes fashioned from thirty-second-soundbytes. I thought the nuanced answer was dead and gone.

But I have new faith today in the polls that the economic crisis has focused the public’s attention enough that they might actually see the pattern in McCain (and anti-regulatory conservative economic theory in general) and realize voting for him is doing the same thing expecting different results.

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably an unrepentant lefty and already know about the great 13-minute video that tells the story of McCain’s repeated failures from trying to deregulate the financial sector. But if you don’t, please take 13 minutes to watch it. That’s only 26 30-second soundbytes, and your country depends upon it.

“Our people, merely for want of intelligence which they may rely on, are become lethargic and insensible of the state they are in.” –Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1777. ME 4:288, Papers 2:19

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A few days ago, I resurrected an old CD that had come out of Hurricane Frances with the paper CD cover insert adhered to the CD itself. Some glass cleaner and hard work brought it to life again.

It was Simply Red’s debut album Picture Book, and I was amazed in revisiting the lyrics in Red’s version of “Money’s Too Tight to Mention,” how everything old is new again.

“I been laid off from work my rent is due
My kids all need brand new shoes
So I went to the bank to see what they could do
They said son looks like bad luck got a hold on you”

Simply Red’s awesome version of the Valentine Brothers’ original composition came at a time when the US economy was slowly taking away from the middle class and giving to the rich, in a frenzy that ultimately wound up in bank failures:

“Were talking bout Reaganomics
Oh lord down in the Congress
They’re passing all kinds of bills
From up there on Capitol hill, we’ve tried it”

Yes, everything old is new again, right down the age of the Republican candidate who would continue the legacy of Ronald Reagan.

“Were talking bout the dollar bill
And that old man who’s over the hill”

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Sarah Palin is today being trotted through the United Nations in a sort of live-flash-card attempt to give her some foreign-policy gravitas. But the McCain campaign should save its time; Sarah Palin doesn’t grasp global concepts easily, even when she sees hints of the macro concepts in micro examples.

Some of these micro-examples have resulted in complaints from her apologists about the way we have learned about the micro-events. They were personal, they say, and should be kept private.

Her unwed pregnant daughter, for instance should be off-limits, even though her soldier-son can be worked as press fodder. Maybe if she’d learned a public policy lesson from her family’s personal problems her daughter’s delicate condition wouldn’t be so attractive to the pundits. Abstinence pledges, purity rings and promise-keeping don’t prevent pregnancy, they certainly don’t prevent sexually transmitted diseases. Abstinence education doesn’t work, and because we know she’s seen it up close, it suggests that she isn’t adept at learning from experience.

Could Sarah Palin find Alaska on the polar-projection world map on this flag?

When her Yahoo account was hacked it raised a larger question: Sarah Palin’s competence to understand even fundamental computer security, even if that means knowing her limitations and using sites paid for by the State of Alaska, learning and following their guidelines.

Since the mid-70s we’ve known that pursuing an energy policy that consists merely of finding more fossil-fuels to keep them as cheap as possible only results in mushrooming inefficient consumption, not only for us but for the rapidly industrializing world. Though the Republican admnistration has denied it for nearly 8 years, greenhouse gasses are choking our planet. Its even more noticible up there in Alaska, and drilling and mining more carbon-based fuel isn’t the answer because it doesn’t work, and if she were wiser, she’d know that.

We’re learning more every day about the nature of our universe, thanks to some very clever unmanned space missions, and some even more clever earth-bound monitoring systems. These are telling us that the world is a lot older than claimed by just about any Christian creation theory you can find. Trying to harmonize the Old Testament with cosmology by aging the universe at a few thousand doesn’t work. If she knew any Medieval church history, she’d see the pitfalls for public figures and ditch the dogma, because it doesn’t work.

But in her running mate, she has an understanding friend. If anyone should know that torture doesn’t work, it would be a man tortured to the breaking point who signed false documents and repudiated them later. Yet John McCain capitulated to the demands of the Bush Administrtaion to approve torture.

No one should be more aware of the pitfalls of financial deregulation than one of the two members of the Keating Five re-elected after deregulation of financial institutions resulted in bank failures and a government bailout. Yet he embraced Phil Gramm and again supported deregulation resulting in an even more spectacular set of financial failures. “Because It Doesn’t Work” doesn’t stand in John McCain’s way, so perhaps that trait in Sarah Palin is just one more reason he picked her for the ticket.

Today, we have one more example of Sarah’s church life slamming hard against her political one. John McCain’s chief of staff has been outed as gay. No doubt we’ll hear the Redstaters and the Palin apologists wailing that somebody’s personal life has been sacrificed, but its another example of Sarah Palin wrapping herself in beliefs that are inconsistent with the real world. She’s not only out of touch with the macro, she can’t even see what’s wrong in the micro: the dissonance of her beliefs vs. the private lives of her own immediate circle.

McCain and Palin’s theories aren’t new, radical, or maverick. They’ve been tried and tested in administrations from Reagan to Bush, through 4 decades of public policy and social doctrine, from Hanoi to Gitmo, and each one has come up wanting because it just doesn’t work. The fact she can’t see this when we know she’s seen so much of it up close should scare us to death.

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