Philadelphia City Paper :: Slant

Slant: Cash for Catastrophes

While health-care reform dominates the news, the Obama administration continues to escalate our involvement in Afghanistan, under the impression that The Surge Works™ strategy from Iraq can be replicated like a tall glass of synthehol on the Star Trek starship's Ten Forward.

The administration's plan to send 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan has caused barely a peep from a political class obsessed with the solitary outburst of a single Republican legislator. All things being equal, there should be more heckling and less obsequious clapping during presidential addresses — maybe next time someone from either side of the aisle can ask Obama what exactly his Afghanistan exit strategy might be.

The surge — what else to call it? — will bring U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan to 68,000. Even optimistic assessments suggest that this investment might take longer to pay off than the loans Americans have taken out to cash in their clunkers for Hyundai Elantras and Ford Focuses.

The troop escalation is happening as violence in Afghanistan explodes. With 2009 the deadliest year in Afghanistan yet for forces of the occupation, policymakers are starting to look worriedly at the history of Afghanistan on Wikipedia. Old copies of Rambo III (which was dedicated to the brave Mujahadeen of Afghanistan) are being dusted off and studied for counterinsurgency strategies. Liberals are starting to regret all that lazy, self-destructive rhetoric about how we should have been focusing on Afghanistan instead of Iraq, which they never really meant anyway.

For better or worse, Bush's critics got what they wanted — as American troops leave Iraq, it will be all Afghanistan, all the time. Get ready for more lousy film adaptations of Khaled Hosseini novels and more halfhearted concern for Afghan women (to be abandoned at the first opportunity).

America has a considerable obligation to the country, but if Obama isn't careful, the war will drain the vitality from his potentially transformative presidency. And unlike the health-care debate, Obama won't be able to defeat the insurgency with a well-delivere...

Slant: Call in the Crash Cart

Health care reform proponents were scheduled to hold vigils on Wednesday night in Love Park and at Keswick Theatre in Glenside. If you weren't at one of them, and you haven't been writing letters to your Congresscritters or helping the cause in some other way, don't be surprised if you wake up next November with the same inane health care system you voted Obama into office to change, and a Congress full of the same blinkered ideologues who just finished destroying the country.

Liberals need to shake loose from their electoral afterglow and realize that we're losing Obama's presidency not only to the desiccated remains of the bankrupt GOP, but also to the corporate wing of our own party and the self-satisfied collective inaction of the activist base.

America's health care debate, currently dominated by conservatives who seem to have turned over their whole movement to people who can't win an argument with Jon Stewart, must be our dumbest national conversation since Terry Shiavo eye-rolled our collective life to a halt in 2005.

Republicans, who should still be sitting in the corner on a time-out, invent and perpetuate preposterous falsehoods like "death panels." BlueCross/BlueShield Democrats hold the entire reform process hostage to their campaign contributions from insurance companies, while the Right's lunatic fringe (welcome back, guys!) brings weapons to town hall meetings with not-so-subtle undertones of violence.

Everyone should share some blame for this fiasco. The Democrats' big mistake was framing reform around the issues of cost control and the uninsured rather than around the inadequacies of existing coverage. Americans don't care about the uninsured — given the choice between building a baseball stadium and giving health insurance to the poor, your friends and neighbors will happily choose the stadium every single time.

Republican criticisms of the Obama administration's spending practices are amusing as a form of metaphysical punishment. When people like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell rail against pork and say that the government can't create jobs, they should maybe check the employer on their paychecks. The fact that anyone takes these ideologically bankrupt scolds seriously after the last eight years is an enduring mystery of our political culture.

The bigger problem with the stimulus package and Obama's budget is that it comprehensively fails to engage with the galloping catastrophe that threatens to obliterate global prosperity. Left unengaged, it's a problem that will swallow what's left of the global economy whole, making the AIG bonuses fiasco look like a beef-and-beer gone wrong.

This problem is called "peak oil" — the point at which half of all global oil reserves have already been consumed, and the world enters a period of energy inflation, resource competition and endemic violence. Many observers believe we have already reached this point.

The Obama administration appears willing to throw gobs of money at alternative energy projects without questioning the fundamental paradigm that governs American social order. They believe we will find a new technology to enable what the critic James Howard Kunstler calls our "happy motoring utopia" — the organization of American society around highways, suburbs, strip malls and gas stations.

Preserving our way of life in this exact form is as extraordinarily unlikely as it is undesirable. No one has yet figured out a way to safely and efficiently power millions of cars and trucks with anything other than cheap petroleum. Proponents of electric cars seem not to understand that electricity has to come from somewhere, and that if you hooked up every car to the electrical grid our electric bills would blow the walls off our McMansions.

The spike in oil prices last spring did more than endanger an already-threatened economy — it led people to sell their cars, muscle onto trains and trolleys and abandon housing in the once-vaunted "exurbs." And this was with gas at $4 a gallon! ...

Slant: You Workin'?

Late Saturday morning, the sun is long and low and the snow is melting. On Castor Avenue near Napfle Street a pair of painters are finishing the doorway of a new restaurant, this to serve something called Peruvian-Portuguese cuisine. The restaurant is ochre; it glows.

On a cold morning not long before, a skinny man in work clothes, and carrying a box of tools, stands before the open doorway of a row house at 10th and Lombard. He looks up and then climbs the steep and narrow staircase. There's a day of carpentry before him.

A few days later, another man driving a late model pickup, a load of lumber in the bed, pulls up to the corner of Chew and Locust in East Germantown. He jumps out. "You workin'?" a woman calls out from the corner. There is pride, perhaps also wariness and jealousy in her voice. She's not really waiting for an answer.

"Yeah, I'm on a job," the man responds. His voice betrays confidence, status. His movements are careful and he is quick, into the old-school hardware store across the way and back out in minutes. Then he's gone.

These are but disappearing scenes in the nervous city. Contractors, who haven't been without work for a decade, are sitting at home. Some, behind the Tundra's wheel, roam the city. There are bargains at the supply house but there's no reason to buy. There are laborers on the early bus with nowhere to go. There are signs of devolution: a half-bricked wall, a façade of new window openings fitted with plywood, a temporary work light dangling, still illuminated, like a mourner's candle.

According to a January survey of Philadelphians conducted by the Pew Trusts' Philadelphia Research Initiative, city residents are feeling optimistic about the future. The city is getting better, say 68 percent of those polled in January. I wonder how much of that hopefulness is a result of the near constant presence of cranes in the air, of scaffolds and contractor vans, of construction fences and dumpsters, of the whir of the table saw and the snap of the nail gun.

Slant: The Anti-Library of George W. Bush

The architects of George W. Bush's legacy face a daunting challenge in the years ahead: How to build a presidential library for a man who — Karl Rove's absurd claims of Bush's bookishness notwithstanding — doesn't seem to read?

Never having visited a presidential library — the execrable James Buchanan was the only president ever born in Pennsylvania and he still has no library — I have always wondered what goes on in these places. Does Bill Clinton cruise into his library to check out books and use the free Internet to surf for porn? Does anyone have a membership card in the Nixon Library, and what are the late fees like? Is there a special section for Jimmy Carter's books in the Jimmy Carter presidential library?

Bush's library looms as an even larger mystery. It is not just that Bush isn't much of a reader — this is like saying Eliot Spitzer isn't much of a family man.

The larger problem is what exactly Bush will do with the library, slated for construction in Dallas and estimated to cost as much as half a billion dollars. It's like buying a $500 million slide projector for Andrea Bocelli.

Of course, I can do a Google with the best of them, and apparently the libraries are meant to be museums of a sort, as Borat might say, for make benefit of glorious ex-president's historical legacy — but would anyone want to build or visit the Museum of George W. Bush?

The only possible way to approach this vexing problem is to build what Nassim Nicholas Taleb termed an "anti-library" — rooms filled with lacquered bookshelves of unread books. In his treatise on the unpredictability of human affairs, The Black Swan, Taleb argued that "a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool."

And no one on in America needs a research tool more than the current president. Fortunately, the universe of books unopened by President Bush is what they call a "target-rich environment."

The library could be organized according to the greatest cognitive deficits of the nation's 43rd president, which in no particular order are economics, diplomacy and syntax.

Im...

Slant: Death and Resurrection

I was up on a West Philly roof, in a sky filled with ramparts and turrets and phallic chimneys, with roofer Ray Nocella, the king of troubleshooters. He told me he'd been at the poet Steve Berg's Spring Garden house to fix an unfixable leak. "He's not well," said Ray. I told him Berg is a giant of poetry.

"I know," he said, "I Googled him and your name came up, that's why I'm telling you."

I've only met Berg once and after that lunch last year organized by the publisher Paul Dry, we exchanged e-mails. I had hoped to continue our conversation but he got injured and then, apparently, became ill. In my last e-mail, I told him his questioning poetry had the effect of making my prose more sensitive, more alert. "You're making me a better writer," I told him.

He probably didn't care about that. Since I write about the city, he may have been particularly bothered by me linking my voice to his. The city isn't the object of my work, he told me, that's not it. Surely not. But his questions so often take such delicate form in the city's grime and delirium — in fragments of conversation on the trolley, in the summer's humidity, in a "garbage can erupting with the praise and grace of existence"— that his writing can't be separated from the city where he lives.

Now, part of that city, the city of language, of reading, searching, observing, of writing and listening, is dying. Robin's Bookstore is closing. I bought my copies of Berg's poetry books at Robin's, and there kept an ongoing affair with James Baldwin. At Robin's, I also encountered James Agee and Roberto Bolaño and some six years ago gave my first reading. That great long wall of literature and the round worn table below the poetry books, jammed shelves of political commentary — left-wing favorites like Noam Chomsky and Arundhati Roy and all those who made careers reporting on Iraq and exposing the Bush administration — that great room filled with questions will be no more.

Slant: The Blackest Friday

Is America too big to fail? It's a pertinent question, since corporations and banks keep washing up like beached whales, each day a new dollar-green tide.

Meanwhile the American people appear so concerned about the financial holocaust that they lined up before dawn on Black Friday like good patriots and started trampling store employees to death for discounted toasters and oversized bags of dog food. Woe unto he who steps between Americans and their discount racks.

The killing of a Wal-Mart worker by a mob of demented shoppers signaled a civilization in terminal decline, perhaps to someday be replaced by humans who spend their vacations sharing love with their families instead of murdering for a cheap Blu-ray player.

More than a little desperation was drifting in the air last weekend, and the breathless reporting on Black Friday sales was just confusing. Are we meant to repent by reining in spending and paying off our credit card bills, or are we supposed to scoop bucketfuls of water off the economic Titanic by throwing around money we don't have?

One report estimated that Black Friday sales were up 3 percent over last year, which is funny because according to stock market indices we've hemorrhaged somewhere between one-third and one-half of our national wealth in the past 12 months. Maybe we never needed it?

You'll find no remorse from the I-bankers, financiers and Wall Street dilettantes who led us into this disaster by extending and trading bad credit like NFL draft slots. They helped convince Americans that something can be had for nothing — which is true, but only if you have good lobbyists.

Individuals who believed that housing prices would continue to double for no good reason should have asked themselves questions like "Will salaries be doubling too?" Arrogance about the inevitability of magical wealth-creation was compounded many times over by a government that gleefully gutted sensible regulations designed to avoid precisely these kinds of disasters.

And now the forces of economic conservatism, who for generations railed against mythical welfare queens and leapt at every opportunity to usher m...

Slant: Wither the Media?

For weeks before the presidential election, media addicts were warned: Once a winner is declared, you may experience withdrawal symptoms. Sadly, this warning neglected one key detail: that there would be no opportunity to phase out our journalistic intake. Since Nov. 5, the media has forced us to go cold turkey.

Don't get me wrong: My cable box is still picking up transmission from 24-hour news networks. The morning newspaper is still arriving at my front door. And AM radio news stations still have their signals. But suddenly, these news sources are serving only decaf.

So, I'm forced to wonder: Where are the columnists who once conscientiously commented on President George W. Bush's every malapropism? Where are the nightly news anchors who, not long ago, diligently updated us on Sen. John McCain's up-to-the-nanosecond age? And where are the byliners who so tenaciously tracked down unnamed sources to tally up Gov. Sarah Palin's wardrobe and cosmetics expenditures?

For those who believe that the media failed to challenge the Bush administration sufficiently after 9/11, heads up: You ain't seen nothing yet. In the aftermath of Barack Obama's landslide victory earlier this month, the mainstream media has replaced serious journalism with blind euphoria. Analysis has given way to shameless tributes.

Take, for example, an article in The New York Times last week titled "Chicago Basks in Its Favorite Son's Glow," which surveyed Chicagoans on their post-election exhilaration. Amazingly, the author couldn't find a single Chicagoan just a bit unsure of the incoming president, who was an anonymous state senator voting "present" barely four years ago.

An accompanying photo showed banners of Obama's face hanging from lampposts in Chicago's downtown — without a single statement regarding how unusual this sort of scene is in western democracies. One is forced to wonder whether the Times would have replicated this oversight had Austin, Texas, posted President Bush's face on billboards eight years ago. (It seems far more likely that the word "authoritarian" might have been employed at least once.)

Naturally, the media's...

Slant: Ballots and Stones

Multitudes across the political spectrum are angry, sad and defensive in the wake of the successful passage of California's Proposition 8, which amended the state constitution to define marriage as a union between one man and one woman. It was clearly a step backward for the gay and lesbian community and those of us who support their efforts to legitimize same-sex familial bonds. The temptation has been to find a scapegoat, a bogeyman on whom to lay the blame for the dissolution of a civil right affirmed by the California Supreme Court in May of this year.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — AKA the LDS or Mormon church — has become a convenient target because of its active efforts in urging its members to contribute time and money toward the passage of the proposition; by some estimates, $20 million, or half of the total pro-Prop 8 budget, was donated by Mormons, in a state where they make up 2 percent of the population.

The peaceful-but-ferocious post-election protests in front of LDS churches and temples across the country, the threats and vandalism and suspicious white powder in the mail, the calls for boycotts of Mormon-owned companies: It all seems to have caught church leaders and rank-and-file members by surprise — never an easy trick when you're dealing with the divinely inspired.

"Defense of marriage" amendments have been codified relatively quietly in a majority of other state constitutions in the last few years, after all. But in California's case, the Protect Marriage movement with the LDS church's support has managed for the first time to invalidate a right that had already been exercised by thousands. To the extent that the Mormons are now painfully aware of how upsetting their political activism has been to a sizable vocal populace, the protests have been successful. But it's time to quit laying blame and start working to change hearts and minds.

My own first reaction to Prop 8's passage, colored and complicated by my history as a former devout Mormon, was to circulate to all my friends and peers on various social Web sites instructions on how to petition the IRS to revoke the church's tax-...

Slant: Barack the Machine-Slayer

John the Defeated War Hero and Sarah the Humiliated Geographer can now head back to their redoubts to lick their wounds and accept their trouncing by Barack the Machine-Slayer. With both North Carolina and the seat of the Confederacy in Democratic hands, it is the GOP that is, in Zell Miller's immortal words, a national party no more.

It was deeply satisfying for Pennsylvania to be called by 8:15 — most watchers had barely sipped their first blue martini — and for Obama to win Pennsylvania by the same 11-point margin by which McCain won Texas. It was reportedly the turnout numbers in Philadelphia that caused the networks to swiftly end McCain's delusions of turning the Keystone State red.

As expected, it took barely 24 hours for Gov. Palin to be thrown directly under the wheels of the Straight Talk Express. Fox News apparently throughout the campaign sat on word that Palin didn't know Africa was a continent and couldn't name the countries in the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Thankfully no one asked her about the participants in the Spanish-American War or the timing of the War of 1812. America the Relieved can only thank Obama's 66 million voters (and counting) that such a person was not granted the vice presidency.

The man they call No Drama Obama just dusted two of the most formidable machines in modern political history — first the combined weight of the Clinton juggernaut and the Democratic Party apparatus, and then the full onslaught of the Republican attack machine and what James Wolcott calls its media attack poodles. And in doing so he crushed the mighty McCain maverick brand and left it twitching and gasping for air.

For those looking to read the exit poll tea leaves to divine the electorate's mood, it really was quite simple: The Republicans looted the treasury to pay for things the people do not much care for — wars, kickbacks, pork and useless abstinence-only education programs, just to name a few. The Democrats ran a savvy and charismatic adult who promised to spend money on better things and to restore government's oversight role to the financial sector.

While se...

Slant: Fables of Reconstruction

Lately, I've been lugging around Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (Random House), the definitive new book by Penn historian Tom Sugrue. I've read much of it while crisscrossing the city on SEPTA, through pocked and sullenly eviscerated central North Philadelphia on the R6, and collapsing Strawberry Mansion on the 32, out into West Philly on the El and the 13 and the 34. One doesn't need a book like this to understand the amalgam of failure, disappointment and resilience that the civil rights struggle produced. It's plainly here, in the sometimes disheartening, sometimes exhilarating fact of this great black city.

But Sugrue asks us to confront the brutal reality of it. In these 500-plus pages are the countless hours of organizing, filing lawsuits, marching, boycotting and putting up with derision and scorn that came to define the lives of most black Americans in the North. Here is Anna Arnold Hedgeman, who in the 1930s worked to put a stop to a Bronx "slave market," where rich white women could pluck black domestics of their liking. Here is A. Philip Randolph, a socialist who kept organizing mass protests through the 1940s in an attempt to open defense employment to blacks during World War II. Here is Whitney Young and Philadelphia's Leon Sullivan. Here, in 1950, is Martin Luther King Jr. and three white friends, Penn students, trying to eat at a restaurant in Maple Shade only to be chased into the parking lot by the owner, who fired a shot into the air. Here are the members of the leftist National Negro Congress, the NAACP, the incrementalist Union League and the Ghandi-inspired Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

Here, in sum, is so much overcoming, so much tireless and seemingly endless struggle that as I read I couldn't help but imagine a much different scenario. What if, in 1865, Reconstruction had granted African-Americans full political and economic rights? That year, in reversing the restriction against blacks riding the streetcar, a Philadelphia judge declared, "The logic of the past four years has in many respects cleared our vision and corrected our judgment ... that the men who have been...

Slant: A Man for our Season

The Democratic Party is on the verge of a truly historic, sweeping victory, the kind of obliteration that partisans spend their lives dreaming about over lagers at the pub but don't expect to ever actually happen. While the race could tighten, the public appears poised to grant a landslide to Barack Obama, as much as a 100-seat majority in the House of Representatives, and a Senate margin approaching a filibuster-proof 60 seats.

At this moment of maximum national peril and demoralization, the Republican Party deserves a large-scale repudiation. George Bush, John McCain and congressional Republicans have overseen perhaps the greatest bonfire of wealth, reputation and power in recorded history. The GOP's best and brightest started an expensive, bloody war and based it on a tottering pyramid of half-truths, and with their reckless fiscal policies drove the country to the brink of a financial apocalypse.

Their regressive tax policies have brought us frightening levels of inequality that threaten the very existence of continued democracy. Space hardly permits a full rundown of the last eight year's crimes and misdemeanors, but the country has been managed with all the care and foresight of the Kotite-era Eagles, by people who detest government and who are unsurprisingly incompetent at managing it.

Back in 2000, Republicans liked to argue that the Democrats "had their chance," and they had the gall to make this argument at a time of unprecedented prosperity. Remember that the biggest dispute of the Bush-Gore campaign was what to do with the gigantic fiscal surplus after eight years of competent government. Those were the days, weren't they?

After eight years of Bush-led mismanagement, the arguments are much different, and involve how to avoid impending calamity. Yet John McCain, a man who could once lay claim to a centrist record on certain issues, inexplicably tacked hard right with the selection of the pathological liar and divisive know-nothing Sarah Palin as his running mate.

His shameless crusade of fear against Barack Obama — preposterously painting as "socialist" the tax policies of the Clinton administration, hysterically ...

Slant: Drill in Philly, Baby!

Drill, baby, drill.

I have to admit, it has a nice ring to it. And it's fun to say. Drill, baby, drill.

But is this Republican policy a good one? I support green and clean energy policies. I don't think we can drill our way out of our current energy crunch. But what do I know?

A 2007 U.S. Energy Information Administration report requested by indicted Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens stated that "access to the Pacific, Atlantic and eastern Gulf of Mexico regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030. Leasing would begin no sooner than 2012, and production would not be expected to start before 2017. ... Because oil prices are determined on the international market, however, any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant."

But hey, that report is based on drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf.

What about drilling, baby, drilling, right here in Philadelphia, in my Old City condominium courtyard? I can help solve the nation's energy crisis and make a few bucks selling my crude on the open market. And if I'm going to go Republican, I want to go all the way.

Don't laugh.

According to the Paleontological Research Institution Web site, Pennsylvania was responsible for half the world's production of oil until the East Texas oil boom of 1901. (I don't know why the Paleontological Research Institution has a section devoted to the "World of Oil." Did dinosaurs drink oil?)

But is there oil in Philadelphia?

Sadly, the likelihood of there being oil in Philadelphia is "slim to none," according to Alain Plante, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania. "Pennsylvania is not really an oil magnet, especially in Old City. Based on what we understand, the rocks below us are not oil-bearing rocks."

OK. But if the Republicans can forge ahead in the face of reason and all available evidence, why shouldn't I?

Rich Thom, longtime chair of the Developments Committee of the Old City Civic Association, thought I might get the committee's approval, but, "...

Slant: What about Broad Street?

If you listen to the presidential candidates talk long enough, you'd figure all Americans live on Wall Street and Main Street. Either you're a caviar-slurping day trader or you're one of Sarah Palin's chirpy neighbors, hunting moose in the morning before buying dinner supplies at some impossibly rustic corner store.

The absence of urban America from this political discourse is no accident — year after year most cities are reliably delivered into Democratic hands in federal elections, with margins of victory that would have made Khrushchev proud. Yet no one ever talks about the GOP's problems with cities.

What would there be to say? Republicans offer nothing to city dwellers other than to gut public transit, starve schools, strip-mine their tax bases and belittle their values.

While there is a Main Street in Manayunk, Philadelphia's symbolic thoroughfare is Broad Street, which runs from the row homes of South Philadelphia, through the glittering pomposity of post-renaissance Center City, to the hardened poverty of North Philadelphia. From Front Street to 90th Street, Philadelphia is both the enduring economic and cultural center of the Mid-Atlantic, and a crumbling, impoverished shadow.

Different corners tell different stories. Eighth Street and Ellsworth was the scene earlier this year of one of the city's more notorious killings. Twenty-three-year-old Beau Zabel, who had moved from Minnesota to Philadelphia to be a teacher, was brutally murdered for his iPod. Unfolding a few miles away though, is an important experiment in urban greening at 15th and Cherry, where the Friends Center drills into the earth to power itself through geothermal energy.

At 48th and Baltimore, the trolleys fall silent at night during the week as SEPTA undertakes repairs to a particularly obsolete component of its creaky transportation network. But in nearby Clark Park, a bustling farmer's market blends Amish and African, anarchist and economist, and offers a hopeful glimpse at the new urbanism.

On 58th and Walnut, a friend toils in a school without a teacher for freshman math. He jokes, darkly, that "my cousin got shot" is the school's e...

Slant: Say It Ain't So

Last night Sarah Palin successfully spoke the English language in her debate with Joe Biden, surpassing the 1st-grader standard she set with her Katie Couric interviews.

This is not to say that Palin performed ably. If this had been a job interview, head hunters would be searching for suitable alternatives. Palin sounds like George Costanza trying to pass himself off as an architect or a marine biologist — it's almost like she's never served in government or even thought about the issues she's being asked about.

In a question about the causes of climate change, Palin answered, "But there are real changes going on in our climate. And I don't want to argue about the causes. What I want to argue about is, how are we going to get there to positively affect the impacts?" She hit everything on a checklist of Palinisms — garbled syntax, misdirection, and a maddening inability to actually answer the question posed to her.

Throughout the debate she seemed weirdly chipper with her deliveries of things like "Darn right!" and "Drill baby drill!" and was obviously trying too hard to be adorable, channeling both Ronald Reagan and an apocryphal Black Sox fan when she began a response with "Say it ain't so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again." Her responses were also consistently and depressingly mangled by Comp 101 clutter like "With regard to" and "In order to." It's now clear why she went to five schools in six years.

So while her debate performance against Biden may not have been the total disaster we'd all been hoping for, it reinforced the catastrophic choice by the McCain campaign to have Palin play hide-and-go-f&*k-yourself with the media for the past month. We haven't seen a public figure behave so petulantly with the press since Hall-of-Fame lefty Steve Carlton. Palin must have agreed with Lefty when he said, "And the irony is that they wrote better without access to my quotes."

Unfortunately, her refusal to speak with the media gave the only interviews she agreed to a High Noon quality, when if she had just been doing it every day, she could have overcome the missteps. Now people can't decide which was funnier — her actual interviews or the Tina Fey send-ups on Saturday Night Live.

The implosion of the McCain campaign since Black Monday actually has more to do w...

Slant: Drawn to Blood

Thirteen unlucky years ago, villagers across Puerto Rico reported a series of mysterious cases in which they found their livestock dead, their blood sucked dry by some unknown creature. As fear swept the island, the culprit was given a name: the chupacabra — literally, goat-sucker. As word of the chupacabra spread, so did reports of its villainy: The monster struck Mexico, then Texas (eventually it made an appearance on The X Files).

I thought it was all a bunch of hooey — until I saw the chupacabra myself this past week. At least, I think I did. But it wasn't creeping around the barn or fleeing through the bushes, no — it was hiding in the pages of the Daily News.

Maybe I'm seeing things. Daily News contributor Christine Flowers isn't actually the chupacabra. She looks human enough, after all. But still, there are similarities.

Like the chupacabra, Flowers thrives on blood — although she prefers the human kind.

Following the murder of Philadelphia Police Officer Patrick McDonald, Flowers penned a column last Friday titled "It's Time to Bury the Excuses," in which she sunk her fangs not just into his killer, Daniel Giddings — but into the black North Philadelphia community in which both Giddings and McDonald lay dead last Tuesday afternoon.

Relying, apparently, on a single article written in the Daily News that week, Flowers snatched up quotes from neighbors and started sucking them dry.

"They made excuses," Flowers writes of neighborhood residents who spoke to Daily News reporters that day. "Worse, they eulogized Giddings."

She blasted the "lame excuses offered by those at 18th and Dauphin" — as if it were their job to answer for the shooting. "Here were people," she concluded, "who could justify the murder of a police officer by playing the race card."

Essentially, Flowers took Giddings' sin and dispersed it on the entire neighborhood.

But in fact, not one of the neighbors quoted in the article defended the killing. They did voice anger over the violence they see every day living in one of the high...

Slant: How Special are Your Needs?

Imagine two infant children, somewhere in America. One has a severe cognitive disability, while the other is born into extreme poverty.

Which one deserves government assistance? In my mind, they both do. The disabled infant needs early speech therapy and a host of other services. But so does the poor child, who enters life with huge disadvantages in health, education and more.

So why do so many Americans deem the first child more worthy of public support?

Look no further than the Republican National Convention. "To the families of special-needs children all across this country, I have a message," declared vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, the proud mother of an infant with Down syndrome. "I pledge to you that if we are elected, you will have a friend and advocate in the White House."

Television cameras panned to the adorable 4-month-old Trig Palin, while the crowd cheered. We should all applaud Sarah Palin for bringing attention to the plight of disabled children, who often don't receive the services promised them under federal law.

But here's the larger point: There is a law, and we're all bound by it. Since 1975, the federal government has required schools to provide disabled children a "free, appropriate public education" in the "least restrictive setting." And the law was signed by a Republican president, Gerald R. Ford.

That's important, too. As the cheers for Trig Palin revealed, we now have a strong bipartisan consensus on a simple principle: Children with special needs deserve special help. Through no fault of their own, they begin life with a set challenges. So it's the duty of all of us — through our government — to lend them a hand.

Somehow, though, poor kids don't elicit the same sympathy. Remember that 8.1 million children in our country still lack health insurance. But Republican lawmakers — including Sen. John McCain, Sarah Palin's running mate — blocked last year's reauthorization of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, which would halve the number of uninsured children by 2013.

Think about it: The same people who cheered for Trig Palin R...

Slant: Time to McPanic?

Being a Democrat and a Philly sports fan has been equally traumatic since the re-election of Ronald Reagan. Watching John McCain and Sarah Palin close Obama's lead over the past week has made Democrats collectively feel like it's Toronto, 1993, and Jim Fregosi just brought in Mitch Williams to protect a lead. Is that Joe Carter coming to bat?

John McCain barreled into this week brandishing that creepy smile and an expanding lead in some national tracking polls, while nervous Democrats have already started their quadrennial flirtation with Canada. Our northern neighbors, however, must feel like the mistress whose lover keeps saying he'll leave his wife and then never does. At some point Canada's going to refuse to meet us at the hotel and stop taking our phone calls.

Meanwhile Sarah Palin hides out in Alaskan summer school cramming for the issues before her debate with Joe Biden. The McCain campaign is unapologetically shielding her from the non-Charlie Gibson media as if she's the 17-year-old with the baby and Meet the Press is the National Enquirer. The idea that candidates for the second-highest office in the land should be able to answer simple questions has been successfully redefined as a central plank in the vast left-wing conspiracy against the heartland.

Never underestimate the speed with which the Republicans distribute their talking points. During the completely justified media frenzy over Palin's record of earmark-loving, bridge-to-nowhere supporting, book-banning and power-abusing, Republican talking heads settled on the idea that the vice presidency is nothing but a kind of medieval apprenticeship. Or as McCain campaign adviser Charlie Black put it, "She's going to learn national security at the foot of the master." At this point these guys aren't even pretending that she's qualified.

Americans apparently welcomed the excellent news that Palin is running for assistant to the regional manager by throwing their support to the McCain-Palin ticket in droves. Obama's eight-point Gallup lead had cratered into a five-point deficit by Monday. Millions of liberals took their Monday morning coffee with cream, sugar and despai...

Slant: The Rowengartner Gambit

Before Obama picked six-term Delaware Sen. Joe Biden to be his running mate, GOP talking heads sternly recommended a seasoned Washington veteran to balance Obama's inexperience. New York Times columnist David Brooks even wrote a column practically begging for Biden himself.

If Democrats could have done the same thing for John McCain, they would have told the 72-year-old cancer survivor to pick someone who is inarguably qualified to assume the duties of president. Whatever you think of the contemporary GOP, this is not exactly a short list. Instead, McCain made the single worst casting decision since Hayden Christensen ruined the new Star Wars franchise.

The immediate benefits of Palin were obvious. She's appealing and likeable, and resembles no one more than the kick-ass Frances McDormand character in Fargo. Her selection was a jaw-dropper that totally obliterated coverage of Obama's magnificent convention speech. And as a full-blown, all-your-uterus-are-belong-to-us creationist fundamentalist, she mollifies the Spanish Inquisition wing of the Republican Party.

But the more you think about it, the less sense Palin makes. For purely tactical reasons, her selection removes the single plausible, non-ideological argument against Obama — the lack of experience. Two years ago Palin was a small-town mayor, and she has less than two years on the job as governor of Seward's Backwater. Whatever you think of Obama's résumé, he has almost four years of immersion in Washington politics and boasts a long record of intellectual engagement with the major domestic and international issues of the day.

By the standards of this pick, Michael Nutter would be qualified to be Obama's vice president. Nutter is actually vastly more qualified for higher office than Palin. Nutter was a member of the Philadelphia City Council — a legislative decision-making body for 1.4 million people — for 15 years, and has been the leader of the sixth-largest city in the U.S. for nine months. And as Republicans pedantically point out about Palin, he has "executive experience."

Countl...

Slant: Xu Sixpack?

Many politicians who have supported free trade with China have argued that China's exposure to new products and ideas through contact with the rest of the world will result in a more open society. Grassroots pressure from China's "newly aware" populace will force drastic change in a government that suppresses basic human rights like freedom of the press, the argument goes. A more enlightened leadership in China won't deal with rogue states like Sudan and Iran or oppress Tibetan culture.

These assumptions overlook one significant factor that figures to play a huge role in the call for change, or lack thereof, among China's citizens — the quieting effect that economic prosperity has on a society's natural impulse towards revolutionary change.

For example, the secret to the stability of America's economic and political systems has always been the large middle class that it has produced. As long as Joe Sixpack can afford to pay for a DVD, a car, a house, a family vacation once a year and iPods and Game Boys as Christmas presents for his kids, he will always be too complacent to cast a vote for drastic structural changes.

And why would he want to? You don't change something that's working for your benefit. Multiply Joe Sixpack by a hundred million people or so, and you have a voting block that significantly outweighs America's economic underclass, and the small segment of America's middle and upper class who are angry over corporate and political corruption and a lack of progress on issues like global warming and energy independence.

This state of affairs in the U.S. correlates neatly with what is currently happening in China. Even though China is run by an autocratic society, the current and future economic prosperity that the leadership is bringing to its citizens is likely to have a dampening effect on any grassroots effort to change the government drastically. In other words, the world should expect to deal with an autocratic government running China well into the foreseeable future, regardless of its economic openness to the rest of the world. Or, at the very least, the world should not expect the pressure to change to come from with...