Frank Rich — They sure showed him.

AM I crazy, or wasn’t the Obama presidency pronounced dead just days ago? Obama had “all but lost control of the agenda in Washington,” declared Newsweek on Feb. 4 as it wondered whether he might even get a stimulus package through Congress. “Obama Losing Stimulus Message War” was the headline at Politico a day later. At the mostly liberal MSNBC, the morning host, Joe Scarborough, started preparing the final rites. Obama couldn’t possibly eke out a victory because the stimulus package was “a steaming pile of garbage.”

Less than a month into Obama’s term, we don’t (and can’t) know how he’ll fare as president. The compromised stimulus package, while hardly garbage, may well be inadequate. Timothy Geithner’s uninspiring and opaque stab at a bank rescue is at best a place holder and at worst a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the TARP-Titanic, where he served as Hank Paulson’s first mate.

But we do know this much. Just as in the presidential campaign, Obama has once again outwitted the punditocracy and the opposition. The same crowd that said he was a wimpy hope-monger who could never beat Hillary or get white votes was played for fools again.

[…]

This G.O.P., a largely white Southern male party with talking points instead of ideas and talking heads instead of leaders, is not unlike those “zombie banks” that we’re being asked to bail out. It is in too much denial to acknowledge its own insolvency and toxic assets. Given the mess the country is in, it would be helpful to have an adult opposition that could pull its weight, but that’s not the hand America has been dealt.

As Judd Gregg flakes out and Lindsey Graham throws made-for-YouTube hissy fits on the Senate floor, Obama should stay focused on the big picture in governing as he did in campaigning. That’s the steady course he upheld when much of the political establishment was either second-guessing or ridiculing it, and there’s no reason to change it now. The stimulus victory showed that even as president Obama can ambush Washington’s conventional wisdom as if he were still an insurgent.

But, as he said in Fort Myers last week, he will ultimately be judged by his results. If the economy isn’t turned around, he told the crowd, then “you’ll have a new president.” The stimulus bill is only a first step on that arduous path. The biggest mistake he can make now is to be too timid. This country wants a New Deal, including on energy and health care, not a New Deal lite. Far from depleting Obama’s clout, the stimulus battle instead reaffirmed that he has the political capital to pursue the agenda of change he campaigned on.

Republicans will also be judged by the voters. If they want to obstruct and filibuster while the economy is in free fall, the president should call their bluff and let them go at it. In the first four years after F.D.R. took over from Hoover, the already decimated ranks of Republicans in Congress fell from 36 to 16 in the Senate and from 117 to 88 in the House. The G.O.P. is so insistent that the New Deal was a mirage it may well have convinced itself that its own sorry record back then didn’t happen either.

The New Newt — Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) is setting himself up as the next leader of the GOP insurgency.

The last time Congressional Republicans were this out of power, they turned to a college professor from Georgia, Newt Gingrich, to lead the opposition, first against President Bill Clinton in a budget battle in 1993, and then back into the majority the following year.

As Republicans confronted President Obama in another budget battle last week, their leadership included another new face: Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, who as the party’s chief vote wrangler is as responsible as anyone for the tough line the party has taken in this first legislative standoff with Mr. Obama. This battle has vaulted Mr. Cantor to the front lines of his party as it tries to recover from the losses of November.

As Republican whip, Mr. Cantor succeeded again on Friday in denying the White House the support of a single House Republican on the stimulus bill. That was a calculated challenge to the president, who, in his weekly address on Saturday, hailed the bill as “an ambitious plan at a time we badly need it.”

Mr. Cantor said he had studied Mr. Gingrich’s years in power and had been in regular touch with him as he sought to help his party find the right tone and message. Indeed, one of Mr. Gingrich’s leading victories in unifying his caucus against Mr. Clinton’s package of tax increases to balance the budget in 1993 has been echoed in the events of the last few weeks.

“I talk to Newt on a regular basis because he was in the position that we are in: in the extreme minority,” he said.

The Republicans can certainly count some victories, although symbolic ones. Even White House aides said Mr. Cantor and his team had been successful in seizing on spending items in the stimulus bill to sow doubts about it with the public.

History records that Bill Clinton played Newt Gingrich like a fish on a line, and in the end it was Mr. Gingrich who resigned from the House after being tossed out on his ass by the Republican leadership for his troubles. Mr. Obama is at least as skilled a politician as Mr. Clinton, and while Mr. Cantor may not have the personality quirks or the rank hypocrisy of Mr. Gingrich, he’s going to have to prove that he can match the craft and grace of Mr. Obama. So far, just saying “No” isn’t going to cut it; he’s going to have to come up with viable alternatives to Mr. Obama’s agenda, and so far, the GOP hasn’t got it.

Minnesota Limbo — The unresolved election for the Minnesota senate seat leaves Al Franken and Norm Coleman betwixt and between.

The state’s canvassing board last month declared Franken the winner of a recount by a 225-vote margin, but Coleman has sued to challenge the results, placing the final outcome of November’s election before the courts, in a trial that could last several more weeks.

With no winner declared, Franken spent two days in Washington last week learning about arcane Senate procedures such as the anonymous hold, while his Democratic colleagues shaved billions of dollars from their stimulus proposal in the hope of capturing from Republicans one of the votes that Franken otherwise could have provided. Earlier, as the Senate debated one of the most expensive bills in history, Franken was grounded in his home state watching streaming video of the court proceedings involving the Minnesota seat on http://TheUpTake.org.

Coleman, for his part, worked the phones last week from the Washington offices of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, up the street from the Capitol, and held a fundraiser Wednesday for his legal effort that drew more than a dozen Republican senators, several of whom directed their political action committees to donate the $10,000 maximum to his post-election campaign.

“It’s a little difficult and frustrating,” Coleman said in a phone interview.

That holds true for the residents of Minnesota, as well, who now find that when a Social Security check comes late or they need some other service, there is no one to call but Amy Klobuchar (D), the only senator from the state with a working staff. Klobuchar said she is considering asking the Senate to give her more staffers if the legal battle between Franken and Coleman drags on, because she is getting almost double the requests that she normally does.

Franken smiles but leaves aside his funnyman persona when asked about his plight.

“I’m really eager to get to work,” Franken said last week, as he dragged a black carry-on bag to the offices of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, where he works when he is in town. “Having a 59th vote would have changed the dynamic” on the stimulus, he said, making reference to the 60 Democratic votes needed in the Senate to prevent a filibuster by Republicans.

Coleman said, “These are the most challenging economic times of my life, and I want to be involved in this discussion,” adding: “What I’m left with is the op-ed.”

Meanwhile, the Republicans are doing everything they can to keep Coleman’s hopes alive, including recycling all the arguments Al Gore used in 2000 to make his case for counting all the votes. I am glad to see that the Republicans have not lost their gift of irony.

Leonard Pitts, Jr. — Following up on this post, Mr. Pitts calls out Jackson Memorial Hospital.

Your wife is dying.

One moment everything was fine. You were in your stateroom on the cruise ship — it was to be an anniversary cruise — unpacking your things. The kids were in the adjoining stateroom playing with your wife. Suddenly, they banged on the door crying that mom was hurt.

So now you’re in the hospital — Ryder Trauma Center at Jackson Memorial Hospital — waiting for word, and it’s not coming. They tell you, Joe (we’ll call you Joe), you can’t be with her. You plead with them, to no avail. No, Joe, sorry, Joe, we can’t tell you anything.

One hour turns to two, two to four, four to six. Your wife is dying, and no one she loves is there.

Finally, in the eighth hour, you reach her bedside. You are just in time to stand beside the priest as he administers last rites.

Your wife is dead. Her name was Lisa Marie Pond. She was 39.

It happened, Feb. 18-19, 2007, except that Pond’s spouse was not a man named Joe, but a woman named Janice. And there’s one other detail. Janice Langbehn who, as it happens, is an emergency room social worker from Lacey, Wash., says the first hospital employee she spoke with was an emergency room social worker. She thought, given their professional connection, they might speak a common language.

Instead, she says, he told her, ”I need you to know you are in an anti-gay city and state, and you won’t get to know about Lisa’s condition or see her” — then turned and walked away.

For the record, this is an increasingly anti-gay nation, to judge from all the mean-spirited amendments and legislation that have made scapegoats and boogie men of them in recent years, including Florida’s Marriage Protection Amendment, which passed last November.

The Jonny Quest Quest — Can Hollywood pull off a live-action version of Jonny Quest?

One of the more intriguing popcorn-movie scripts floating around town right now is Dan Mazeau’s rollicking live-action adaptation of “Jonny Quest,” the savvy and sublime 1960s animated adventure series that felt like “Dr. No” for kids or a post-Sputnik version of “Terry and the Pirates.”

The old show was flat-out great and the word is that Mazeau’s script is such a nimble revival effort that little Jonny could end up being a 21st century movie franchise.

The script made it on to the 2008 Black List (not that I’m vouching for purity or ongoing relevance of that particular industry poll) and it also got Mazeau the job writing the screenplay for the planned movie adaptation of Flash, the DC Comics hero.

I, for one, hope Mazeau’s script reaches the screen because as a youngster I was fascinated by “Jonny Quest” reruns and their stylish danger and refreshing tone. I was watching them in the 1970s, but the old shows (which originally aired in 1964 and 1965) had a worldly, engaging spirit that set them apart from cartoons that talked down to their young audience. There was a dash of both Ian Fleming and Rudyard Kipling in sensibility of the series, which many people forget was originally aired in prime-time, following in the footsteps of Hanna-Barbera’s other more iconic series, “The Flintstones.” (The first “Jonny Quest” episode, by the way, premiered on ABC four days before “Goldfinger” opened at U.S. theaters.)

Doonesbury — Legacy.

Flashback — Twenty years ago I was living in Longmont, Colorado. As I noted last week, on February 1, 1989, I broke my ankle and spent the next twelve weeks with my leg in a cast. A friend of mine suggested I write about the experience. Back in those pre-blog days if you wanted to tell the world your points of view, you called up talk radio or wrote a letter to the editor. I wrote the following article for the Longmont Times-Call, and it was published on February 26, 1989. Thanks to modern scanning technology, here is the article.

On Wednesday, Feb. 1, at 7:30 in the morning, I slipped on a patch of ice in my driveway, fell and broke my ankle. With the help of my housemate and his father, I was taken to the emergency room of Longmont United Hospital.

Later that day I had surgery to implant three pins in my leg. The surgeon, Dr. Darrah, told me that my injury was not extraordinary and I have an excellent chance of full recovery. I spent the night in observation and was released the following morning wearing a cast on my left leg and learning how to walk on crutches.

While my injury may be a textbook case to the medical profession, it was a traumatic incident to me. All of my life I’ve been blessed with excellent health and this is the first time I have ever broken a bone or required emergency care. The people at Longmont United Hospital knew this, and that made all the difference.

That morning was the first day of the “Alaska blaster” cold wave and the emergency room was busy; some patients with minor injuries, others with more serious damage than mine. This did not lessen the care and human contact that the nurses, doctors and staff showed to each of their patients.

For the nearly five hours I was in the emergency room – first for my diagnosis and the remainder awaiting surgery, I watched as they went about their business and took care of us in a friendly and caring way. My fears – and they ranged from the panic aroused by the injury to my practical concerns about insurance coverage – were dealt with, and throughout my stay in the hospital I felt that I was in good hands: the care of friends.

To go from an active and busy person to an invalid in one quick slip is a shock, needless to say. The universe changed. My daily routine was destroyed for a few days while I recovered at home. My work schedule must now accommodate my handicap and it will be several weeks before I can return to my regular exercise schedule (which is probably the most frustrating aspect of all).

But the change has also opened my eyes to a world that I either ignored or merely acknowledged without full comprehension. I now have a vivid understanding of what people with disabilities go through all the time. When on crutches, little things like making a bed, or getting a bottle of soda and carrying it to the couch to watch TV require planning and skill, and door-closing devices become your sworn enemy. Having handicapped parking spaces at your disposal is not a luxury but a necessity. My employer has generously set aside a space for my exclusive use and last week when an able-bodied driver “didn’t see the sign,” I felt no sympathy when he returned to see his car being dragged away tail first.

I have also learned something about human nature. I spent a Saturday at the Denver Home and Garden show in a wheelchair and found the experience enlightening. As I expected, there is a limit to what you can do and where you can go in one of those things, but I also discovered that other people treated me quite differently. Some looked at me as if I was a pet and gave me a little smile. One or two looked at me quickly and then looked away, seemingly embarrassed. The ones who noticed the cast and realized I was not permanently disabled had one of two reactions. They either smiled and asked what happened in an overly familiar manner or they looked relieved to see that I was only temporarily crippled.

To some I represented a threat. One gentleman getting off an elevator slammed right into my cast and when I yelped in pain, he turned, looked for an instant, and then went on his way without a word. As always, children had the most honest reactions. They either stared (and I always smiled) or asked what was wrong with me. One solicitous mother jumped in and told the inquiring mind, “He’s hurt,” as if I was incapable of reply or emotionally unstable. I suppose it would have upset her had I demonstrated that I could speak for myself. Perhaps she expected me to loll my head and drool.

The temporary handicap parking permit given to me by the state will expire in May, but I will be back on two feet before then. But I doubt that I will ever forget that for a comparatively short time in my life I have had a unique view of the world.

Those among us who are permanently disabled have always told us that they wish to be treated as normal people. I add my voice to that. And those who are concerned about the high cost of health care might do well to remember that the art of medicine, like any art, translates poorly into dollars and cents. How can we put a price on health? I have no answer to that, except to say that the care, concern and dedication I saw at Longmont United Hospital is worthy of our respect and worth every penny. I wish I could thank each one who helped me … but I think I just did.

Draining the Swamp — Leonard Pitts on the perils of trying to change the ways things work.

”I screwed up.”

— President Barack Obama,

Feb. 3, 2009

Wait a minute. He said that? There were cameras and microphones? Somebody caught it on tape?

Presidents don’t say that. Bill Clinton never said that. George W. Bush would have cut off his tongue with rusty gardening shears before he said that. But you’re telling me Barack Obama actually said it? These are the words that came out of his mouth in a series of interviews with network news anchors?

Oh, my stars and garters. Dylan was right. The times, they are a’changin’.

As a reader told me the other day, ”I was almost unnerved by how refreshing it was to have a president openly make, correct and admit a mistake. What unnerved me is that I almost didn’t care what the mistake was.”

For the record, the mistake had to do with Obama undermining his own ethical standards by nominating former Sen. Tom Daschle as secretary of Health and Human Services and standing by him even after it was revealed he had neglected to pay over $128,000 in federal taxes. Daschle withdrew his name from consideration the same day Obama ‘fessed up.

Two hours later, would-be chief White House performance officer Nancy Killefer also packed it in because she, too, was tainted by tax troubles. All this after Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s nomination was nearly swamped by the revelation that he owed $34,000 in back taxes. And, leave us not forget the administration asking for and receiving a waiver of its own ethics rules restricting lobbyists so that William J. Lynn III, a former lobbyist for Raytheon, could be installed as as deputy secretary of defense.

Taken together, it adds up to a worrisome pattern for an administration that campaigned on a vow to reform Washington’s ethics. As Obama himself put it in one of the interviews, ”. . . it’s important for this administration to send a message that there aren’t two sets of rules.”

Yes, every president arrives in Washington with a promise to drain the swamp. And every president eventually finds the swamp draining him.

Inevitably, there comes a moment when the soap bubbles of campaigning meet the hard macadam of governing. The soap bubbles break, lofty promises and best intentions giving way before pragmatism and the need to get things done. It will happen for Obama, too. But the president must be more thoughtful than he has so far been in choosing when and how those moments come. Do it for healthcare, perhaps. Do it for the economy. But for Tom Daschle and William Lynn? No.

Like it or not, the rules are different for this president.

Don’t believe me? Take a spin around town. Pick up a piece of chocolate sculpted in Obama’s likeness at the candy store. Buy a copy of Spider-Man with Obama on the cover at the comic book shop. Pick up one of the dozens of Obama books at the bookstore. Stand among the people clad in Obama T-shirts and hoodies at the bus stop. Head over to the souvenir stand and load up on Obama calendars, cups, caps and key chains.

When is the last time you saw a president so . . . beloved? This is the source of Obama’s great political power. It is also his political kryptonite.

Not to mix superhero metaphors, but as Obama’s friend Spider-Man could tell him, with great power comes great responsibility. Barack Obama is seen as something new. The worst thing he could do is to act like something old — a politician cutting corners and talking from both sides of his mouth. Should that happen, the heights of the nation’s adulation will be mirrored in the depths of its scorn. So he must be what he said he was.

Last week’s moment of sparkling candor was a timely reminder, then, of the traits that are supposed to make this president different. Some of us needed that reminder.

Maybe he did, too.

Both Sides — Two views of the housing situation in Florida. First, Damien Cave at the New York Times tells of despair as foreclosures mount in the Fort Myers area.

“I knew it was coming,” said Gloria Chilson, 56, the former owner of the house, as she watched strangers pick through her belongings. “You take what you can; you try not to care.”

Welcome to the American dream in high reverse. Lehigh Acres is one of countless sprawling exurbs that the housing boom drastically reshaped, and now the bust is testing whether the experience of shared struggle will pull people together or tear them apart.

The changes in these mostly unincorporated areas outside cities like Charlotte, N.C., Las Vegas and Sacramento have been swift and vivid. Their best economic times have been immediately followed by their worst, as they have generally been the last to crest and the first to crash.

In Lehigh Acres, homes are selling at 80 percent off their peak prices. Only two years after there were more jobs than people to work them, fast-food restaurants are laying people off or closing. Crime is up, school enrollment is down, and one in four residents received food stamps in December, nearly a fourfold increase since 2006.

President Obama is scheduled to visit Fort Myers on Tuesday to promote his economic stimulus plan. But residents here tend to view it as the equivalent of an herbal remedy — it can’t hurt but it probably won’t heal. Instead, in church groups and offices, people call for “industry” and repeat one telling question: “What do we want to be when we grow up?”

“That’s one of the things we struggle with: What is our identity?” said Joseph Whalen, 37, president of the Lehigh Acres Chamber of Commerce. “We don’t want to be the bedroom community of southwest Florida; we don’t want to be the foreclosure capital.”

On the other side of the state, however, Monica Hatcher reports in the Miami Herald that people who could never afford a home are now buying them.

It’s a spacious 2,500-square-foot stone-and-brick-facade home with four bedrooms, a walled-in yard and an efficiency apartment in the back.

Three years ago, someone paid $240,000 for it. But in about 45 days, Carline Jeudy, a single mother of four and a renter until now, expects to close on her purchase of the bank-owned foreclosure in Opa-locka for just $90,000.

For many South Floridians, there is an upside to the otherwise brutal downturn in real estate, with its flurry of foreclosures, personal bankruptcies and spreading economic pain.

Housing is suddenly affordable to those with average income — without risky teaser rates or subprime mortgages or cooking the numbers to qualify.

”I never thought I would be a homeowner because of the money I’m making,” said Jeudy, 33, a buffet attendant at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Miami, whose take-home pay is about $22,000 a year. ”I never thought I could afford it by myself.”

Dirt-cheap foreclosures and a sluggish market have pushed prices down by much as 43 percent since they peaked in 2006 and 2007. For the first time in a long while, thousands of homes are listed for less than $150,000 — even less than $100,000 — putting them snugly within the affordability range of police officers, teachers and others long priced out of the South Florida market.

At the peak of the market, affordable housing was so scarce that companies had difficulty recruiting workers from outside the region.

While the pickings are more plentiful now, borrowing hurdles are daunting, often including demands for 20 percent down payments and stellar credit scores. Buyers are also being held back by fears that housing prices will sink even more and by concerns that they could lose their jobs in the deepening recession.

”I need a few more weeks to get to 20 percent,” said Thomas Krusin, a sea-freight broker for an international transportation company. Krusin, 30, has ridden his bike through Surfside, admiring houses that two years ago were selling for twice as much as he hopes to pay — about $350,000. And that’s for a place close enough to the beach that he can walk to it.

Doonesbury — What would it take to get you into this car today?

Move To the Left — Will President Obama appoint liberals to the Supreme Court to stop its rightward tilt?

Justice John Paul Stevens, the leader of the Supreme Court’s liberal wing, likes to say that he has not moved to the left since he was appointed to the court by President Gerald R. Ford in 1975. It is the court, Justice Stevens says, that has moved to the right.

“Every judge who’s been appointed to the court since Lewis Powell” in 1971 “has been more conservative than his or her predecessor,” Justice Stevens said in a 2007 interview. He added that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg might have been the sole exception but included himself as one of those 11 ratchets to the right.

Justice Stevens, who continues to be a keen and lively participant in oral arguments at the court, will turn 89 in April. Actuarial statistics alone suggest that President Obama may end up naming his replacement.

And that will present the new president with a question. Should he appoint someone who by historical standards is a full-throated liberal, a lion like Justice William J. Brennan Jr. or Justice Thurgood Marshall? Or should he follow the lead of President Bill Clinton, whose two appointees, Justice Ginsburg and Justice Stephen G. Breyer, are by those standards relative moderates?

The vacancies that are likely to open up in the early years of the Obama presidency will, if the conventional wisdom holds, arise from the retirements of one or more of the court’s liberals — Justice Stevens, Justice Ginsburg or Justice David H. Souter.

If that is so, Mr. Obama will not be able to put a new liberal vote on the court. But he can, if he wants to, add a big liberal voice.

“A really powerful, articulate, moral, passionate voice on the left,” said Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago, “would really change the dynamic on the court. It would pull the other justices who are inclined to be sympathetic to that voice in that direction. It would shift the center of the discussion — about what’s the middle.”

There is precedent for this. Justice Antonin Scalia, who has been on the court since 1986, was for years a lonely and energetic dissenter on the right. But the seeds he planted in those dissents have over time taken root in majority decisions.

According to a study last year by William M. Landes, who teaches law and economics at the University of Chicago, and Judge Richard A. Posner of the federal appeals court there, four of the five most conservative justices to serve on the court since 1937, of a total of 43, are on the court right now: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. The fifth was Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, whom Chief Justice Roberts replaced in 2005.

The study took into account the votes in divided cases on ideologically charged issues like criminal procedure, civil rights and the First Amendment. Justice Thomas, the most conservative justice in the study, voted for the conservative position in those cases 82 percent of the time. Justice Marshall, the only other African-American to serve on the court, was by this measure the most liberal, voting for the conservative side 21 percent of the time.

The study also reinforced Justice Stevens’s caveat, counting Justice Ginsburg as more liberal than the justice she replaced, Justice Byron R. White. But Justice Ginsburg, whom the study identifies as the most liberal current justice, barely makes the Top 10 in the full tally.

The Roberts court is, then, conservative by the standards of recent history. But is it conservative in some absolute sense?

Frank Rich — Herbert Hoover is alive and well in the Republican Party.

The House stimulus bill is an inevitably imperfect hodgepodge-in-progress. Obama’s next move, a new plan to prevent the collapse of America’s banks, may prove more problematic still, especially given the subpar record of the new Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, in warding off calamity while at the New York Fed. No one should expect the Republicans to give the new president carte blanche, fall blindly into lock step or be “post-partisan.” (Though that’s exactly what the G.O.P. demanded of Democrats with Bush: You were either with him or with the terrorists.)

But you might think that a loyal opposition would want to pitch in and play a serious role at a time of national peril. Not by singing “Kumbaya” but by collaborating on possible solutions and advancing a policy debate that many Americans’ lives depend on. As Raymond Moley, of F.D.R.’s brain trust, said of the cross-party effort at the harrowing start of that presidency in March 1933, Hoover and Roosevelt acolytes “had forgotten to be Republicans or Democrats” as they urgently tried to rescue their country.

The current G.O.P. acts as if it — and we — have all the time in the world. It kept hoping in vain that the fast-waning Blago sideshow would somehow impale Obama or Rahm Emanuel. It has come perilously close to wishing aloud that a terrorist attack will materialize to discredit Obama’s reversals of Bush policy on torture, military tribunals and Gitmo. The party’s sole consistent ambition is to play petty politics to gum up the works.

If anything, the Republican Congressional leadership seems to be emulating John McCain’s September stunt of “suspending” his campaign to “fix” the Wall Street meltdown. For all his bluster, McCain in the end had no fixes to offer and sat like a pet rock at the White House meeting on the crisis before capitulating to the bailout. His imitators likewise posture in public about their determination to take action, then do nothing while more and more Americans cry for help.

The problem is not that House Republicans gave the stimulus bill zero votes last week. That’s transitory political symbolism, and it had no effect on the outcome. Some of the naysayers will vote for the revised final bill anyway (and claim, Kerry-style, that they were against it before they were for it). The more disturbing problem is that the party has zero leaders and zero ideas. It is as AWOL in this disaster as the Bush administration was during Katrina.

If the country wasn’t suffering, the Republicans’ behavior would be a laugh riot. The House minority leader, John Boehner, from the economic wasteland of Ohio, declared on “Meet the Press” last Sunday that the G.O.P. didn’t want to be “the party of ‘No’ ” but “the party of better ideas, better solutions.” And what are those ideas, exactly? He said he’ll get back to us “over the coming months.”

His deputy, the Virginia congressman Eric Cantor, has followed the same script, claiming that the G.O.P. will not be “the party of ‘No’ ” but will someday offer unspecified “solutions and alternatives.” Not to be left out, the party’s great white hope, Sarah Palin, unveiled a new political action committee last week with a Web site also promising “fresh ideas.” But as the liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga observed, the site invites visitors to make donations and read Palin hagiography while offering no links to any ideas, fresh or otherwise.

For its own contribution to this intellectual void, the Republican National Committee convened last week under a new banner, “Republican for a Reason.” Perhaps that unidentified reason will be determined by a panel of judges on a TV reality show. It had better be brilliant given that only five states (with 20 total electoral votes) now lean red in party affiliation, according to Gallup. At this rate the G.O.P. will be in Alf Landon territory by 2012.

The Next Ten Years — Hugo Chávez intends to stay in power in Venezuela and become the focal point of U.S. relations with Latin America.

One-time soldier and failed coup-plotter Hugo Chávez celebrates an extraordinary 10 years as Venezuela’s elected president on Monday. It hasn’t been a dull decade.

A bully, a friend of the poor, a jester, a brilliant political strategist, a showman, a statesman, a charmer, a pragmatist, an egomaniac with grand delusions — he has been all of that and more since he took the oath of office on Feb. 2, 1999.

Chavez, 54, has eclipsed his ailing mentor, Fidel Castro, to become the undisputed leader of a resurgent Latin American left, and he has no desire to yield that role anytime soon.

”El Comandante,” as he is known to his fervent followers, is asking Venezuelans to give him the chance to serve as president for life. On Feb. 15, voters will decide whether to lift term limits that otherwise would force Chávez out of the palace in 2013.

Even if he wins in the referendum — and polls find him with a slight advantage — the challenges won’t end anytime soon.

Indeed, Chávez appears willing to gamble hugely by continuing to spend billions of petrodollars on the poor — in a bid to create what he calls 21st century socialism — even though the collapse in oil prices is likely to cost his government at least half of its export income this year.

Which will come first — a rise in world oil prices that will replenish Chávez’s treasury or the crash of Venezuela’s economy, which could threaten his hold on power?

Don’t bet against Chávez. He’s a survivor. Locked up after a 1992 coup attempt, he gained his release from prison and won an underdog race for president in 1998 by vowing to be an agent for change. As president, he has survived a coup that ousted him for 48 hours, a crippling strike by the country’s all-powerful oil company and a recall election.

All the while, he has outsmarted opponents, befuddled Washington and won headlines from Moscow to Beijing.

Chávez reels off statistics showing that fewer Venezuelans are poor now than before he became president, but is that simply because he had the good fortune to be president when oil prices reached unprecedented heights? Has he created a society and economy that will better the lives of ordinary Venezuelans for years? Appraising his presidency will hinge on the answers to those questions.

The son of schoolteachers from Venezuela’s western plains, Chávez came to power railing against the ”corrupt elites” who he said had squandered ”several Marshall Plans” worth of oil income. Most Venezuelans, he thundered, festered in poverty and squalor.

He promised to root out corruption in politics, business, unions, even the church. He said he would dismantle the cabals of judges and lawyers who bought and sold justice.

As for the economy, ”We can no longer solely depend,” he said, ”on that external variable which is the price of a barrel of oil.” The economy must be diversified, poverty abolished and — above all — democracy extended to the masses, he said.

Ten years on, the results are mixed.

Obligatory Super Bowl Sunday Post — You may not know — or care — what teams are playing (Arizona Cardinals and Pittsburgh Steelers) and you may not know or care how much advertisers are paying for a thirty-second spot — or that Miller Brewing is paying for a one-second spot, but chances are you will be unable to escape The Game. So, like a drum solo at a rock concert, you might as well relax and enjoy it.

Doonesbury — Flame Out.

WWRD? — Former Congressman Mickey Edwards, Republican, assesses his party’s state and says that Ronald Reagan would not recognize what’s being done or said in his name.

In my mind’s eye, I can see Ronald Reagan, wearing wings and a Stetson, perched on a cloud and watching all the goings-on down here in his old earthly home. Laughing, rolling his eyes and whacking his forehead over the absurdities he sees, he’s watching his old political party as it twists itself into ever more complex knots, punctuated only by pauses to invoke the Gipper’s name. It’s been said that God would be amazed by what his followers ascribe to him; believe me, Reagan would be similarly amazed by what his most fervent admirers cite in their desire to be seen as true-blue Reaganites.

On the premise that simple is best, many Republicans have reduced their operating philosophy to two essentials: First, government is bad (it’s “the problem”); second, big government is the worst and small government is better (although because government itself is bad, it may be assumed that small government is only marginally preferable). This is all errant nonsense. It is wrong in every conceivable way and violative of the Constitution, American exceptionalism, freedom, conservatism, Reaganism and common sense.

In America, government is … us. What is “exceptional” about America is the depth of its commitment to the principle of self-government; we elect the government, we replace it or its members when they displease us, and by our threats or support, we help steer what government does.

A shocker: The Constitution, which we love for the limits it places on government power, not only constrains government, it empowers it. Limited government is not no government. And limited government is not “small” government. Simply building roads, maintaining a military, operating courts, delivering the mail and doing other things specifically mandated by the Constitution for America’s 300 million people make it impossible to keep government “small.” It is boundaries that protect freedom. Small governments can be oppressive, and large ones can diminish freedoms. It is the boundaries, not the numbers, that matter.

What would Reagan think of this? Wasn’t it he who warned that government is the problem? Well, permit me. I directed the joint House-Senate policy advisory committees for the Reagan presidential campaign. I was part of his congressional steering committee. I sat with him in his hotel room in Manchester, N.H., the night he won that state’s all-important primary. I knew him before he was governor of California and before I was a member of Congress. Let me introduce you to Ronald Reagan.

Reagan, who spent 16 years in government, actually said this:

“In the present crisis,” referring specifically to the high taxes and high levels of federal spending that had marked the Carter administration, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” He then went on to say: “Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it’s not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work.” Government, he said, “must provide opportunity.” He was not rejecting government, he was calling — as Barack Obama did Tuesday — for better management of government, for wiser decisions.

This is the difference between ideological advocacy and holding public office: Having accepted partial responsibility for the nation’s well-being, one assumes an obligation that goes beyond bumper-sticker slogans. Certitude is the enemy of wisdom, and in office, it is wisdom, not certitude, that is required.

How, for example, should conservatives react to stimulus and bailout proposals in the face of an economic meltdown? The wall between government and the private sector is an essential feature of our democracy. At the same time, if there is a dominant identifier of conservatism — political, social, psychological — it is prudence.

If proposals seem unworkable or unwise (if they do not contain provisions for taxpayers to recoup their investment; if they do not allow for taxpayers, as de facto shareholders, to insist on sound management practices; if they would allow government officials to make production and pricing decisions), conservatives have a responsibility to resist. But they also have an obligation to propose alternative solutions. It is government’s job — Reagan again — to provide opportunity and foster productivity. With the nation in financial collapse, nothing is more imprudent — more antithetical to true conservatism — than to do nothing.

The Republican Party that is in such disrepute today is not the party of Reagan. It is the party of Rush Limbaugh, of Ann Coulter, of Newt Gingrich, of George W. Bush, of Karl Rove. It is not a conservative party, it is a party built on the blind and narrow pursuit of power.

No Time for Poetry — Frank Rich on President Obama’s speech and the rough road that lies ahead.

PRESIDENT Obama did not offer his patented poetry in his Inaugural Address. He did not add to his cache of quotations in Bartlett’s. He did not recreate J.F.K.’s inaugural, or Lincoln’s second, or F.D.R.’s first. The great orator was mainly at his best when taking shots at Bush and Cheney, who, in black hat and wheelchair, looked like the misbegotten spawn of the evil Mr. Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the Wicked Witch of the West.

Such was the judgment of many Washington drama critics. But there’s a reason that this speech was austere, not pretty. Form followed content. Obama wasn’t just rebuking the outgoing administration. He was delicately but unmistakably calling out the rest of us who went along for the ride as America swerved into the dangerous place we find ourselves now.

Feckless as it was for Bush to ask Americans to go shopping after 9/11, we all too enthusiastically followed his lead, whether we were wealthy, working-class or in between. We spent a decade feasting on easy money, don’t-pay-as-you-go consumerism and a metastasizing celebrity culture. We did so while a supposedly cost-free, off-the-books war, usually out of sight and out of mind, helped break the bank along with our nation’s spirit and reputation.

We can’t keep blaming 43 for everything, especially now that we don’t have him to kick around anymore. On Tuesday the new president pointedly widened his indictment beyond the sins of his predecessor. He spoke of those at the economic pinnacle who embraced greed and irresponsibility as well as the rest of us who collaborated in our “collective failure to make hard choices.” He branded as sub-American those who “prefer leisure over work or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.” And he wasn’t just asking Paris Hilton “to set aside childish things.” As Linda Hirshman astutely pointed out on The New Republic’s Web site, even Obama’s opening salutation — “My fellow citizens,” not “fellow Americans” — invoked the civic responsibilities we’ve misplaced en masse.

These themes are not new for Obama. They were there back on Feb. 10, 2007, when, on another frigid day, he announced his presidential candidacy in Springfield, Ill. Citing “our mounting debts” and “hard choices,” he talked of how “each of us, in our own lives, will have to accept responsibility” and “some measure of sacrifice.” His campaign, he said then, “has to be about reclaiming the meaning of citizenship.” But the press, convinced that Obama was a sideshow to the inevitable Clinton-Giuliani presidential standoff, didn’t parse his words all that carefully, and neither did a public still maxing out on its gluttonous holiday from economic history. However inadvertently, Time magazine had captured the self-indulgent tenor of the times when, weeks earlier, it slapped some reflective Mylar on its cover and declared that the 2006 Person of the Year was “You.”

“Here Lies Our Dreams” — Parents take their complaints about underfunded education to Tallahassee via YouTube.

Mothers from Cutler Bay held a funeral for public education — and posted the video on YouTube.

Two others from Doral went on a weeklong hunger strike.

Outraged by statewide cuts in public-school funding, and fearing the loss of clubs, art classes and electives, parents across South Florida and across the state are starting to stir. They are phoning lawmakers, sending out e-mail blasts, assembling at school board meetings and engaging in protests akin to performance art.

Advocates of school funding, including the PTA and lawmakers sympathetic to their cause, hope to harness that anger as they head into a new battle over still more cuts.

”I keep saying: What it’s going to take to change the state of education in Florida is angry moms,” said Colleen Wood, a mother and grass-roots organizer in Central Florida.

It may take more than that. The battle over school funding will define this legislative session the way the hunt for tax relief did last year’s.

Economists predict that the tax revenue that runs the state, generated by everything from home sales to retail goods, will be down by $3.5 billion more this spring. That money is the lifeblood of the state general fund, nearly half of which is used for education.

Unlike the federal government, the state cannot run a deficit. So, unless lawmakers raise revenue — something the Republican-dominated Legislature is actually considering, with talk of increasing the cigarette tax or eliminating corporate-tax loopholes — they have to scale back spending.

And that almost certainly means school spending.

Members of the state PTA hope to send a strong message when the legislative session starts that education cuts are no longer acceptable, and that new revenue, through taxes and fees, must be found.

”We’re insisting that Florida invest in children and invest in public education,” said Florida PTA President Karin Brown, who is helping to organize a rally March 18.

Florida ranks 47th in the nation in education spending per $1,000 of personal income, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2006 figures, the latest available.

That was before schools across the state absorbed unprecedented budget cuts. In the past two years, state lawmakers slashed $3.87 billion from the education budget — a reduction of nearly 16 percent.

The Miami-Dade County district had to reduce its budget by about $300 million in the past year — a 5.5 percent cut. In Broward County, the cuts totaled $150 million.

It’s enough to have riled scores of South Florida parents, said Mindy Gould, president of the Miami-Dade County Council of PTAs/PTSAs.

”For the first time in a very long time, parents feel that together, they can speak with a united voice and actually make things happen,” Gould said.

Take Stephanie Keime and Lisa Richardson, both of whom have children in the Miami-Dade public-school system.

”When we found out that things were going to get slashed, we thought, ‘Gosh, this could be really bad,’ ” Keime said. ”We couldn’t get to Tallahassee, but we had to do something.”

With their children as actors and a $20 budget, the mothers produced a short film called Florida FundingFuneral. It features a group of somber children placing their soccer balls, musical instruments, sketch books and ballet slippers into a coffin.

The headstone at the grave site reads: ”Here lies our dreams.”

In one week, the video tallied 1,300 hits on YouTube — not exactly viral, but a start.

Doonesbury — with a twist.

White Like Me — Frank Rich remembers what it was like to grow up in a city that was segregated and now welcomes the presidency of Barack Obama.

I cannot testify to what black Americans feel as our nation celebrates the inauguration of our first African-American president. But I can speak for myself, as a white American who grew up in the segregated nation’s capital of the 1960s. Barack Obama’s day is one that I never thought would come, and one that I still can’t quite believe is here.

Last week I joined a group of journalists at an off-the-record conversation with the president-elect, a sort of preview of the administration’s coming attractions. But as I walked some desolate downtown blocks to the standard-issue federal office building serving as transition headquarters, ghosts of the past mingled with hopes for the future. The contrast between the unemployed men on Washington’s frigid streets and the buzzing executive-branch bees inside was, for me, as old as time.

My particular historical vantage point is a product of my upbringing as that odd duck, a native Washingtonian whose parents were not in government. The first presidential transition of my sentient lifetime, Kennedy’s, I remember vividly. Even an 11-year-old could see that the sleepy Southern town of the Eisenhower era was waking up, electrified by youth, glamour and the prospect of change.

Continued below the fold.

But some of that change I didn’t then understand. J.F.K.’s arrival coincided with Washington’s emergence as the first American city with a black majority. Many whites responded by fleeing to the suburbs. My parents did the opposite, moving our family from the enclave of Montgomery County, Md., into the city as I was about to enter the fifth grade.

Our new neighborhood included the Sidwell Friends School. My mother, a public school teacher, decreed that her children would instead enroll in the public system that had been desegregated a half-dozen years earlier, after Brown v. Board of Education. In reality de facto segregation remained in place. Though a few African-Americans and embassy Africans provided the window dressing of “integration,” my mostly white elementary, junior high and high schools had roughly the same diversity as, say, today’s G.O.P.

I wish I could say we were all outraged at this apartheid. But we were kids — privileged kids at that — and out of sight was out of mind. Except as household help, black Washington was generally as invisible to us as it was to the tourists who were rigidly segregated from the real Washington while visiting its many ivory marble shrines to democratic ideals.

Gradually we would learn more — from our parents and teachers, from televised incidents of violent racial confrontations far away, and from odd cultural phenomena like the 1961 best seller “Black Like Me.” In that book, a white novelist darkened his skin for undercover travels through deepest Dixie, whose bigotry he then described in morbid firsthand detail to shocked adolescents like me.

Surely such horrific injustices could not occur in our nation’s capital.

[…]

Washington is its own special American case, but only up to a point. For all our huge progress, we are not “post-racial,” whatever that means. The world doesn’t change in a day, and the racial frictions that emerged in both the Democratic primary campaign and the general election didn’t end on Nov. 4. As Obama himself said in his great speech on race, liberals couldn’t “purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap” simply by voting for him. And conservatives? The so-called party of Lincoln has spent much of the past month in spirited debate about whether a white candidate for the party’s chairmanship did the right thing by sending out a “humorous” recording of “Barack the Magic Negro” as a holiday gift.

Next to much of our history, this is small stuff. And yet: Of all the coverage of Obama’s victory, the most accurate take may still be the piquant morning-after summation of the satirical newspaper The Onion. Under the headline “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job,” it reported that our new president will have “to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind.”

Those messes are enormous, bigger than Washington, bigger than race, bigger than anything most of us have ever seen. Nearly three months after Election Day, it remains astonishing that the American people have entrusted the job to a young black man who seemed to come out of nowhere looking for that kind of work just as we most needed him.

“In no other country on earth is my story even possible,” Obama is fond of saying. That is true, and that is what the country celebrates this week. But it is all the tragic American stories that came before him, some of them still playing out in chilly streets just blocks from the White House, that throw both his remarkable triumph and the huge challenge ahead of him into such heart-stopping relief.

Florida’s Wish List — What the Sunshine State wants from the Obama administration.

Environmentalists are hoping for a new ban on offshore oil drilling. Immigration activists would like to see Haitians get a break from deportations. And everyone wants money.

As Barack Obama prepares to take the oath of office as the 44th president of the United States, expectations among Floridians are soaring.

The wish list is daunting — and some suggest impossible: Everglades restoration projects, green jobs, ”kinder” immigration laws. And a host of cities and counties are elbowing one another to get in line for new roads and mass transit in the proposed $825 billion economic stimulus package.

”This isn’t a time to be modest, it’s time to be bold,” said U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor, a Tampa Democrat and early Obama supporter who says she is already reminding the incoming administration that swing state Florida backed Obama in November. ”States like Florida that have been particularly hard hit by the housing crisis, we’ve got to stand up and advocate for our interests.”

Heckuva Job — Hilzoy looks back at George W. Bush’s first inaugural and compares what he promised and what was delivered.

He’s a small, small man, who ought to have spent his life in some honorary position without responsibilities at a firm run by one of his father’s friends. Instead, he ruined our country, and several others besides. He wasted eight years in which we could have been shoring up our economy, laying the groundwork for energy independence, making America a fairer and better country, and truly working to help people around the world become more free. Instead, he debased words that ought to mean something: words like honor, decency, freedom, and compassion.

To this day, I do not think he has the slightest conception of the meaning of the words he took in vain.

Doonesbury — Greatest hits.

A Teflon Governor — Why is Charlie Crist, halfway through his first term as Florida’s governor and with little to show for it, so popular?

Midway through his term, Gov. Charlie Crist finds his sunny optimism tested almost daily. But the Republican governor keeps smiling. And with good reason.

He orchestrated passage of a constitutional amendment mandating the largest property-tax cut in state history. He spent last summer basking in the flattery of rumor as a possible running mate for John McCain, and ended nearly three decades of bachelorhood last month by marrying New York socialite Carole Rome.

And yet, while the public consistently gives him high approval ratings, his policy record after two years on the job is a decidedly mixed bag.

In the past year, Crist promised to send ”a sonic boom” through the economy with the property-tax cut, bring in new revenue with an Indian gambling agreement, cut property insurance rates and create new jobs through accelerated spending on public works programs. In his 2007 inaugural address, he pledged ”secure work with good pay” and ”world-class schools.”

But his promises have gone largely unfulfilled. The national recession converged with Florida’s collapsing housing market to produce the highest unemployment rate in 15 years, the highest job losses of any state, and deep cuts in public education to balance a faltering budget.

The property-tax bonanza has been a dud. The math hasn’t worked as promised on property insurance. The gambling agreement with the Seminole Tribe was ruled unconstitutional. The governor’s pitch to create jobs by accelerating road construction amounted to more show than substance.

It’s because he’s charming, non-confrontational, he avoids speaking out hot-button issues like Amendment 2 until he absolutely has to (and covers himself effectively with moderate talk), and he’s not a Bush. And that sort of politician is becoming very popular now (see Obama, Barack).

Where’s the Outrage? — Frank Rich writes that we have become so used to scandal and fraud that he wonders what it would take to get our attention today.

Not even a good old-fashioned sex scandal could get our outrage going again. Indeed, a juicy one erupted last year in the Interior Department, where the inspector general found that officials “had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.” Two officials tasked with marketing oil on behalf of American taxpayers got so blotto at a daytime golf event sponsored by Shell that they became too incapacitated to drive and had to be put up by the oil company.

Back in the day, an oil-fueled scandal in that one department alone could mesmerize a nation and earn Warren Harding a permanent ranking among our all-time worst presidents. But while the scandals at Bush’s Interior resemble Teapot Dome — and also encompass millions of dollars in lost federal oil and gas royalties — they barely registered beyond the Beltway. Even late-night comics yawned when The Washington Post administered a coup de grâce last week, reporting that Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne spent $235,000 from taxpayers to redo his office bathroom (monogrammed towels included).

It took 110 pages for the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan research organization, to compile the CliffsNotes inventory of the Bush wreckage last month. It found “125 systematic failures across the breadth of the federal government.” That accounting is conservative. There are still too many unanswered questions.

Just a short list is staggering. Who put that bogus “uranium from Africa” into the crucial prewar State of the Union address after the C.I.A. removed it from previous Bush speeches? How high up were the authorities who ordered and condoned torture and then let the “rotten apples” at the bottom of the military heap take the fall? Who orchestrated the Pentagon’s elaborate P.R. efforts to cover up Pat Tillman’s death by “friendly fire” in Afghanistan?

And, for extra credit, whatever did happen to Bush’s records from the Texas Air National Guard?

A Better Sort of Insult — Dick Cavett on getting in a good one.

I haven’t ever found any great writing on that wonderful and often unappreciated art form, the insult.

There are two kinds of insult. “I was bored by your book” is one kind. “Your book? Once I put it down, I couldn’t pick it up,” is the other.

Although both are insults, only one is witty. Or, at least, funny. I suppose we should reserve the accolade “wit” for the very highest practitioners of the art — Parker, Wilde, Shaw, Twain, Kaufman, Levant, Marx et al. Some would include Rickles. (As when Sinatra entered a club while Don was onstage. Rickles: “Make yourself comfortable, Frank, hit somebody.”)

While on the subject, I believe it was writer/critic Clive James who is said to have remarked, when a man punched Sinatra in the face one night outside the stage door, “That’s the first time the fan hit the ….”

If there is a Top Ten list of insults, Churchill’s most famous one would be at least number three. It is, of course, the well-known exchange between Sir Winston and an irate lady MP.

Often botched in the re-telling, the correct version, according to an MP who claimed to have witnessed the notorious exchange, was:

Mr. Churchill, you are drunk.

Madame, you are ugly.

Mr. Churchill, you are extremely drunk!

And you, Madame, are extremely ugly. But tomorrow, I shall be sober.

Somewhere the witless got hold of it and added “..and you’ll still be ugly,” shamelessly spelling it out for the slow to catch on. The underlining of and the verbal stress on “I” needs no further help. The boobish add-on sinks it.

Doonesbury — Hearts and minds.

Exodus — A lot of people are leaving South Florida.

Like sunshine, ocean breezes and the Goodyear blimp, a steadily rising population has long been one of the dependable features of South Florida life.

We complained about congested streets and crowded classrooms but enjoyed the benefits of an economy buoyed by the constant arrival of new people to buy houses, eat in restaurants and pay taxes. But now there’s evidence the region may be facing an accelerating loss of population.

Census data released over the summer found Broward County had 14,251 fewer residents, or .8 percent less than the previous year. Palm Beach County lost 379 people, or .03 percent. New statistics analyzed by the South Florida Sun Sentinel suggest the numbers may be higher. Consider:

School enrollment dropped 6 percent in Broward and 1 percent in Palm Beach since 2005.

Births declined 2 percent in Broward since last year, although Palm Beach showed no change.

Internal Revenue Service filings show 43,371 fewer people in Broward and 11,028 fewer people in Palm Beach County since 2005.

Experts disagree on whether the new numbers show a real population decline or simply indicate shifts in the demographic mix. They aren’t sure whether they’re the start of a long-term decline or are just a temporary response to a bad economy.

But any loss, or simply an end to growth, would have a big impact on an economy that for decades had counted on a continuing influx of people to sustain the construction industry, housing market and retail sales.

That would explain why the Florida Legislature is holding a special session starting tomorrow, and why they are planning to cut even more money from aid to education.

Barred from deficit spending by the state Constitution and firmly opposed to new taxes, the state’s Republican leaders are in a budgetary corner, forced to further constrict spending.

”Times are bad for Floridians,” said Senate Majority Leader Alex Diaz de la Portilla, R-Miami. ”We’re going to have to make decisions here that no one will really like.”

The next series of budget moves is probably only a stopgap measure and a prelude to what is seen as a bleaker regular session in March, when about $4 billion more in budget cuts will be needed to balance next year’s budget. Also due in March is a new revenue estimate that is expected to show continued flat-lining of Florida’s economy.

”Tough times require tough decisions,” House Speaker Ray Sansom, R-Destin, told his colleagues in a memo. ”They are the choices we must make.”

Gov. Charlie Crist has outlined a plan to cover the deficit with a combination of spending cuts and borrowing from state trust funds that are supposed to be reserved for particular programs.

The session is a test for an ideology championed by such Republican icons as Ronald Reagan and Jeb Bush that government is the problem, not the solution.

The state budget of $66.3 billion is about $6 billion less than it was a year ago, the largest year-to-year drop in state history.

But that doesn’t explain why the Republicans somehow feel they’re doing something right by being ideologically pure while they’re screwing over the kids in public education.

Chess Move — Hendrik Hertzberg chimes in on Pastor Rick.

Warren turns out to be somewhat worse than I thought he was back when, a few months ago, I rashly likened him to Henry Ward Beecher. I hadn’t fully appreciated that he contends Jews and atheists are automatically hellbound, for example. Or that he has declared assassination admissible when used against “evildoers,” such as the president of Iran. Or that, while he says gays are welcome to attend services at his Saddleback megachurch, he doesn’t let them (closet cases excepted, presumably) become members. (He doesn’t let heterosexuals who are living together in “sin” join, either.)

Nevertheless, the invitation to Warren looks to me like another of Obama’s brilliant chess moves.

Warren, first of all, is much, much less of a jerk than, say, Pat Robertson or James Dodson [sic]. He is polite and civil to people who are polite and civil to him, even people who (like Obama) disagree with him on subjects like whether or not abortion and same-sex marriage should be illegal. He recognizes that global warming, environmental degradation, gross economic inequality, and poverty are actual problems, not just excuses for godless liberals to impose big government programs. He does not go on television to fleece the faithful with “prayer requests.”

The President-elect is doing what he has said he would do from the beginning: he is reaching across lines of identity and ideology. Remember those wonderful lines from the 2004 keynote? “We worship an awesome God in the blue states… and, yes, we have some gay friends in the red states.” (I don’t worship any gods, whether awesome or lame, but when Obama said this I didn’t feel in the least slighted.) In the case of the Warren invitation, the reaching across is neither more nor less than an expression of inclusion and respect in the context of a ritual of the American civic religion. It is not an offer to surrender or compromise some principle. It is not a preemptive concession in some arcane negotiation. If anything, it suggests that when and if he does negotiate with the Christianist right, he will negotiate from strength, not weakness.

Frank Rich — How can we miss Bush if he won’t go away?

The one indisputable talent of his White House was its ability to create and sell propaganda both to the public and the press. Now that bag of tricks is empty as well. Bush’s first and last photo-ops in Iraq could serve as bookends to his entire tenure. On Thanksgiving weekend 2003, even as the Iraqi insurgency was spiraling, his secret trip to the war zone was a P.R. slam-dunk. The photo of the beaming commander in chief bearing a supersized decorative turkey for the troops was designed to make every front page and newscast in the country, and it did. Five years later, in what was intended as a farewell victory lap to show off Iraq’s improved post-surge security, Bush was reduced to ducking shoes.

He tried to spin the ruckus as another victory for his administration’s program of democracy promotion. “That’s what people do in a free society,” he said. He had made the same claim three years ago after the Palestinian elections, championed by his “freedom agenda” (and almost $500 million of American aid), led to a landslide victory for Hamas. “There is something healthy about a system that does that,” Bush observed at the time, as he congratulated Palestinian voters for rejecting “the old guard.”

The ruins of his administration’s top policy priority can be found not only in Gaza but in the new “democratic” Iraq, where the local journalist who tossed the shoes was jailed without formal charges and may have been tortured. Almost simultaneously, opponents of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki accused him of making politically motivated arrests of rival-party government officials in anticipation of this month’s much-postponed provincial elections.

Condi Rice blamed the press for the image that sullied Bush’s Iraq swan song: “That someone chose to throw a shoe at the president is what gets reported over and over.” We are back where we came in. This was the same line Donald Rumsfeld used to deny the significance of the looting in Baghdad during his famous “Stuff happens!” press conference of April 2003. “Images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over,” he said then, referring to the much-recycled video of a man stealing a vase from the Baghdad museum. “Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?” he asked, playing for laughs.

The joke was on us. Iraq burned, New Orleans flooded, and Bush remained oblivious to each and every pratfall on his watch. Americans essentially stopped listening to him after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, but he still doesn’t grasp the finality of their defection. Lately he’s promised not to steal the spotlight from Barack Obama once he’s in retirement — as if he could do so by any act short of running naked through downtown Dallas. The latest CNN poll finds that only one-third of his fellow citizens want him to play a post-presidency role in public life.

Final Bow — A lot of shows on Broadway are closing.

Live theater has a built-in bittersweetness born of its ephemeral nature. The magic is here and now, and then it’s gone forever — or at least until the next revival. (And remember, enthusiasm for a revival is often met with a cluck-clucking sound and an indulgent smile from those who were around for the first production.) That’s why being present at the moment when a work of achieved art passes into history can be inordinately moving, a reminder that beauty itself is mostly an evanescent thing in life.

But it’s almost always thrilling, too, because the energy level at a final performance is usually roof-raising. Long runs can be wearying to actors — even those who consume only sensible amounts of sushi, unlike that unfortunate, mercury-riddled Jeremy Piven — but the valedictory atmosphere of a show’s last weeks brings out the best in most. (In case you haven’t been up on your theater-world gossip, Mr. Piven recently exited the Broadway revival of “Speed-the-Plow” after a doctor said he had mercury poisoning.)

Sometimes the original stars of acclaimed productions, who have long since moved on to other things, return to close out the run, as both Mr. Fierstein and his co-star Marissa Jaret Winokur — Tony winners both — have done at “Hairspray.” Before I lived here, I recall making a special trip to New York to catch Stockard Channing’s indelible turn in John Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation” after she rejoined the play in its final months. (I had previously seen Kelly Bishop — quite marvelous, too — in the role.)

Among the more extraordinary last performances I’ve caught was the final afternoon at August Wilson’s underappreciated “Gem of the Ocean,” at which the blazing intensity of the acting seemed to catch the entire audience up in its inspiring spell. As I left I overheard Halle Berry express condolences over its closing to the director in a tone of wondering mystery that such a thing could come to pass.

It always comes to pass, of course, for hit and flop alike, just not usually in the collective numbers we’re seeing this month. (Not all the closings can be chalked up exclusively to the gloomy economy; some were limited runs, and some are long-running hits that were approaching their ends anyway.)

The sad superabundance of farewells to choose from obviously places limits on the number of last goodbyes theater lovers will be able to squeeze in this month. On Sunday alone you’ve got nine choices. It is haunting to think that that there could be more shows closing on that day alone than there will be running on Broadway by the time the Tonys roll around in June.

Doonesbury — Settle down, class.

– History in 60 Seconds: The end of the Polaroid era is near.

The demise of Polaroid’s instant film cameras has been coming for years. Digital technology did it in. The decision this year by the company that Edwin Land founded to stop manufacturing the film has left devotees who grew up with Polaroid’s palm-size white-bordered prints bereft. They have signed up in the thousands as members of SavePolaroid.com. Digital cameras that print instant pictures have materialized to fill the void, providing a practical substitute. But as in most affairs of the heart, logic is beside the point.

Cold-blooded blogs during the last year have dished about Polaroid’s leaky developers and the impossibility of making copies from instant film prints or of fiddling with them, which, by the way, was precisely why police photographers long ago cottoned to them for crime scenes and mug shots. A friend the other day also complained about how Polaroids often came out yellow and, when left on the rainy porch or stuck onto the refrigerator door along with the shopping lists and report cards, ended up faded and curled.

All true. One is reminded of the pragmatists’ disdain for long-playing records when compact disks arrived. Then D.J.’s and audiophiles revived LPs, in part precisely for the virtues of its inconvenience.

That is to say, LPs, like Polaroids, entailed certain obligating rituals. Igor Stravinsky near the end of his life spent evenings confined to a chair. He listened often to Beethoven. His assistant, Robert Craft, would cue the records up, then, when one side was finished, rise from his seat, carefully flip the vinyl disk over, place the needle at the beginning, and rejoin the composer, a simple act of devotion required by the limits of LP technology, endlessly repeated until it became a routine binding Stravinsky and Craft like father and son.

I can still picture my own father with his Polaroid camera. “Cheese,” he would actually say, and the machine would whir before expelling a print with the negative still attached, requiring the shutterbug to wait a prescribed time before peeling it off. My father would check his watch, shaking the covered snapshot as if the photograph were a thermometer. Then at the right moment, with a surgeon’s delicate hands, he would separate the negative in a single motion and reveal — well, who knew what.

Because that was part of the beauty of the Polaroid. Mystery clung to each impending image as it took shape, the camera conjuring up pictures of what was right before one’s eyes, right before one’s eyes. The miracle of photography, which Polaroids instantly exposed, never lost its primitive magic. And what resulted, as so many sentimentalists today lament, was a memory coming into focus on a small rectangle of film.

Or maybe not. Digital technology now excuses our mistakes all too easily — the blurry shot of Aunt Ruth fumbling with a 3-wood at the driving range; or the one of Cousin Jeff on graduation day where a flying Frisbee blocked the view of his face; or of Seth in his plaid jacket heading to his first social, the image blanched by the headlight of Burt’s car coming up the driveway; or the pictures of you beside the Christmas tree where your hair is a mess.

Digital cameras let us do away with whatever we decide is not quite right, and so delete the mishaps that not too often but once in a blue moon creep onto film and that we appreciate only later as accidental masterpieces. In fact, the new technology may be not more convenient but less than Polaroid instant film cameras were, considering the printers and wires and other electronic gadgets now required, but at this one thing, the act of destruction, a source of unthinking popularity in our era of forgetfulness and extreme makeovers, digital performs all too well. Polaroids, reflecting our imperfectability, reminded us by contrast of our humanity.

– You’re Likable Enough, Gay People: Frank Rich has his say on the Rick Warren story.

By the historical standards of presidential hubris, Obama’s disingenuous defense of his tone-deaf invitation to Warren is nonetheless a relatively tiny infraction. It’s no Bay of Pigs. But it does add an asterisk to the joyous inaugural of our first black president. It’s bizarre that Obama, of all people, would allow himself to be on the wrong side of this history.

Since he’s not about to rescind the invitation, what happens next? For perspective, I asked Timothy McCarthy, a historian who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and an unabashed Obama enthusiast who served on his campaign’s National Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Leadership Council. He responded via e-mail on Christmas Eve.

After noting that Warren’s role at the inauguration is, in the end, symbolic, McCarthy concluded that “it’s now time to move from symbol to substance.” This means Warren should “recant his previous statements about gays and lesbians, and start acting like a Christian.”

McCarthy added that it’s also time “for President-elect Obama to start acting on the promises he made to the LGBT community during his campaign so that he doesn’t go down in history as another Bill Clinton, a sweet-talking swindler who would throw us under the bus for the sake of political expediency.” And “for LGBT folks to choose their battles wisely, to judge Obama on the content of his policy-making, not on the character of his ministers.”

Amen. Here’s to humility and equanimity everywhere in America, starting at the top, as we negotiate the fierce rapids of change awaiting us in the New Year.

– Dave Barry’s Year in Review:

How weird a year was it?

Here’s how weird:

• O.J. actually got convicted of something.

• Gasoline hit $4 a gallon — and those were the good times.

• On several occasions, Saturday Night Live was funny.

• There were a few days there in October when you could not completely rule out the possibility that the next Treasury Secretary would be Joe the Plumber.

• Finally, and most weirdly, for the first time in history, the voters elected a president who — despite the skeptics who said such a thing would never happen in the United States — was neither a Bush NOR a Clinton.

Of course not all the events of 2008 were weird. Some were depressing. The only U.S. industries that had a good year were campaign consultants and foreclosure lawyers. Everybody else got financially whacked. Millions of people started out the year with enough money in their 401(k)’s to think about retiring on, and ended up with maybe enough for a medium Slurpee.

So we can be grateful that 2008 is almost over. But before we leave it behind, let’s take a few minutes to look back and see if we can find some small nuggets of amusement. Why not? We paid for it…

– Doonesbury: Elite advice.

– How We Got Here: The New York Times looks into the roots of the current financial crisis.

There are plenty of culprits, like lenders who peddled easy credit, consumers who took on mortgages they could not afford and Wall Street chieftains who loaded up on mortgage-backed securities without regard to the risk.

But the story of how we got here is partly one of Mr. Bush’s own making, according to a review of his tenure that included interviews with dozens of current and former administration officials.

From his earliest days in office, Mr. Bush paired his belief that Americans do best when they own their own home with his conviction that markets do best when let alone.

He pushed hard to expand homeownership, especially among minorities, an initiative that dovetailed with his ambition to expand the Republican tent — and with the business interests of some of his biggest donors. But his housing policies and hands-off approach to regulation encouraged lax lending standards.

Mr. Bush did foresee the danger posed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage finance giants. The president spent years pushing a recalcitrant Congress to toughen regulation of the companies, but was unwilling to compromise when his former Treasury secretary wanted to cut a deal. And the regulator Mr. Bush chose to oversee them — an old prep school buddy — pronounced the companies sound even as they headed toward insolvency.

As early as 2006, top advisers to Mr. Bush dismissed warnings from people inside and outside the White House that housing prices were inflated and that a foreclosure crisis was looming. And when the economy deteriorated, Mr. Bush and his team misdiagnosed the reasons and scope of the downturn; as recently as February, for example, Mr. Bush was still calling it a “rough patch.”

The result was a series of piecemeal policy prescriptions that lagged behind the escalating crisis.

“There is no question we did not recognize the severity of the problems,” said Al Hubbard, Mr. Bush’s former chief economics adviser, who left the White House in December 2007. “Had we, we would have attacked them.”

Looking back, Keith B. Hennessey, Mr. Bush’s current chief economics adviser, says he and his colleagues did the best they could “with the information we had at the time.” But Mr. Hennessey did say he regretted that the administration did not pay more heed to the dangers of easy lending practices. And both Mr. Paulson and his predecessor, John W. Snow, say the housing push went too far.

“The Bush administration took a lot of pride that homeownership had reached historic highs,” Mr. Snow said in an interview. “But what we forgot in the process was that it has to be done in the context of people being able to afford their house. We now realize there was a high cost.”

For much of the Bush presidency, the White House was preoccupied by terrorism and war; on the economic front, its pressing concerns were cutting taxes and privatizing Social Security. The housing market was a bright spot: ever-rising home values kept the economy humming, as owners drew down on their equity to buy consumer goods and pack their children off to college.

Lawrence B. Lindsay, Mr. Bush’s first chief economics adviser, said there was little impetus to raise alarms about the proliferation of easy credit that was helping Mr. Bush meet housing goals.

“No one wanted to stop that bubble,” Mr. Lindsay said. “It would have conflicted with the president’s own policies.”

– The Black Boxes: Frank Rich looks at the aftermath of the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme.

The question in the aftermath of the Madoff calamity is this: Why do we keep ignoring what we learn from the black boxes being retrieved from crash after crash in our economic meltdown? The lesson could not be more elemental. If there’s a mysterious financial model producing miraculous returns, odds are it’s a sham — whether it’s an outright fraud, as it apparently is in Madoff’s case, or nominally legal, as is the case with the Wall Street giants that have fallen this year.

Wall Street’s black boxes contained derivatives created out of whole cloth, deriving their value from often worthless subprime mortgages. The enormity of the gamble went undetected not only by investors but by the big brains at the top of the firms, many of whom either escaped (Merrill Lynch’s E. Stanley O’Neal) or remain in place (Citigroup’s Robert Rubin) after receiving obscene compensation for their illusory short-term profits and long-term ignorance.

There has been no punishment for many of those who failed to heed this repeated lesson. Quite the contrary. The business magazine Portfolio, writing in mid-September about one of the world’s biggest insurance companies, observed that “now that A.I.G is battling to survive, it is its black box that may save it yet.” That box — stuffed with “accounting or investments so complex and arcane that they remain unknown to most investors” — was so huge that Washington might deem it “too big to fail.”

Sure enough — and unlike its immediate predecessor in collapse, Lehman Brothers — A.I.G. was soon bailed out to the tune of $123 billion. Most of that also disappeared by the end of October. But not before A.I.G. executives were caught spending $442,000 on a weeklong retreat to a California beach resort.

There are more black boxes still to be pried open, whether at private outfits like Madoff’s or at publicly traded companies like General Electric, parent of the opaque GE Capital Corporation, the financial services unit that has been the single biggest contributor to the G.E. bottom line in recent years. But have we yet learned anything? Incredibly enough, as we careen into 2009, the very government operation tasked with repairing the damage caused by Wall Street’s black boxes is itself a black box of secrecy and impenetrability.

– Destroying Someone Else’s Life: Hilzoy at Political Animal wonders who the people are who would make it their life’s mission to interfere in the lives of absolute strangers.

Ever since I heard that opponents of Proposition 8 had filed suit to invalidate all the gay marriages that have taken place in California, I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around the fact that someone, somewhere had to actually initiate this process. That means that someone, somewhere must have decided that the best use of his or her time was not to perform some act of kindness or generosity, not to stand up for justice or to comfort the afflicted, not even to try to turn a profit, but to decide to get together a lawsuit in order to break thousands of people’s marriages apart. That person could have gone to the beach, or worked a stint at a food kitchen, or taken up hang-gliding, or done any number of things, but instead he or she thought: why not do my best to tear thousands of people’s lives apart, people who are not bothering them, people who only want to be married and have anniversaries and argue about who has to take out the trash, like anyone else.

It’s a pretty strange way to choose to spend your time, if you ask me.

[…]

If we worry about our morals deteriorating, surely the best place to start addressing that problem is in our own lives. We all have more than enough sins to occupy us. When we have extirpated them all, and learned courage, justice, generosity, and mercy, there will be time enough to worry about other people’s marriages. And I suspect that once we have learned those things, we will not find the fact that some couple in love wants to get married at the top of our list of concerns.

– Winter Solstice: Winter arrived today in the Northern Hemisphere.

– Festival of Lights: Hanukkah begins at sunset tonight.

– Doonesbury: remembering Lacey Davenport.

– The Revolution at 50: The Miami Herald is running a series looking back at the fifty years since Fidel Castro rolled into Havana, and changing two countries — Cuba and the United States.

Fifty years ago, an attorney turned bearded guerrilla marched triumphantly into Havana and declared victory over a departing dictator. Then he became a despot himself.

Fidel Castro forever changed the landscape of both Cuba and Miami. He jailed or executed his enemies, seized private property, divided families, and drove nearly two million Cubans into exile. His nation became a Cold War pawn.

At the same time, Castro launched a massive literacy campaign. The island churned out armies of new doctors. Cuba became an international player, inspiring guerrilla movements and supplying soldiers for ”anti-imperialist” wars around the globe. Castro’s refusal to kowtow to the United States won him praise.

As the Jan. 1 anniversary of the revolution’s triumph approaches, many of the social welfare achievements that were the trophies of the communist regime have rusted. Years of failed economic policy, waves of mass exodus, and Cuba’s inability to recover from the collapse of its patron, the Soviet Union, have dulled Castro’s touted crown jewels — the advances in health and education.

Still, the revolution that ousted Fulgencio Batista and transformed a tropical getaway into a communist state remains one of the Western Hemisphere’s most significant events of the last century.

”The Cuban government is going to celebrate its 50-year anniversary — 50 years of what?” said Andy Gomez, a senior fellow at the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, who left the island in 1960 when he was 6.

”Fifty years of sacrifice and misery?”

In the only communist country in the hemisphere, many would argue that Castro had a single resounding success: staying in power. He built a strong rebel army, never bothered with civic freedoms or presidential elections, and created a vast and powerful state security apparatus that kept watch on literally every block.

His regime reigned over a population that is among the world’s best educated, but many still flee. Every year, about 20,000 are issued permits to resettle in the United States, and each year a nearly equal number risk their lives on dangerous sea voyages.

But if numbers alone could tell this story, Castro met his revolutionary goals — without any meddling from Washington.

Within two years after Castro emerged from the jungle in 1959 to seize control of the island, more than 700,000 Cubans learned how to read, and 25,000 new homes were built. Cuba’s communist revolution would eventually produce so many doctors that last year there was one physician per 155 residents, more than double Florida’s ratio. Before Castro, there was one doctor for every 1,058 people.

But today, almost a quarter of the nation’s doctors are serving ”missions” overseas so the government can collect much-needed hard currency from their work. So many underpaid educators have left classrooms that the school system is relying on teenage interns to teach.

There is no question that Cuba enjoys a low infant mortality rate, high life expectancy, and crime statistics that any Latin American nation would envy. But experts say Castro’s early accomplishments have declined so sharply that only drastic measures can save them.

”They always say the great achievements were healthcare and education, but in Cuba you don’t spend your whole life sick or studying,” said Lizette Fernández, a former banker and dissident who arrived in 2006 and now sells cosmetics in Hialeah. ”If the medical system was an accomplishment, doctors would not be writing prescriptions without any hope that you will find the medicine.”

– Hot Seat: Jeffrey Toobin on Rod Blagojevich.

Otto Kerner, Jr., is usually remembered, if he is at all, as the leader of the Kerner Commission, in 1968, which evaluated the riots and other unrest that was then rocking American cities. He was governor of Illinois at the time, and went on to serve as a federal appeals court judge, but his later claim to fame may be of greater historical note. In 1969, he was charged in a corruption case where he and a subordinate received bribes from a racetrack owner in return for an expanded racing schedule. That particular scandal came to light because the owner tried to deduct the value of the bribes on her taxes. Paying bribes to the governor was, in her view, an ordinary business expense in Illinois in the late nineteen-sixties.

So, it appears, even today. In a breathtaking seventy-six-page complaint filed this morning, the current Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, and his chief of staff are charged with engaging in a pattern of corruption that suggests that the culture of Illinois has only got worse in recent decades. David Mamet is a dewy-eyed idealist compared with the government lawyers and investigators who chronicled the cynicism and depravity of Blagojevich and his staff. (George Ryan, the governor who was elected before Blagojevich, is currently serving a prison sentence for his role in a more prosaic corruption scandal during his tenure. And Dan Walker, the governor from 1973 to 1977, waited until he left office to engage in the criminal conduct that led to his imprisonment.)

The case against the Governor comes in three parts, each more astonishing than the last. The first, the result of a long-running investigation in the state, charges a fairly routine pay-to-play operation. The Governor is said to have demanded campaign contributions in return for highway contracts and the like. (In a bravura touch, Blagojevich appears to have delayed an addition to a children’s hospital because the sponsors had not paid up.)

The surreal aspects of the case begin with the fallout from the bankruptcy of the Tribune company. The company, which owns the Chicago Cubs, was looking to raise money by selling the team’s home, Wrigley Field, and seeking the assistance of state government in the process. Blagojevich had a condition for giving the help: the newspaper had to fire a group of editorial writers and editors who had been critical of him. In these troubled times for newspapers, it’s cheering, in a way, that the Governor thought that a mere editorial page mattered so much, but his manner of showing his respect seems to owe too much to local custom.

Most attention, of course, will focus on the third aspect of Blagojevich’s scheme: his apparent effort to sell President-elect Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat, which the Governor had the sole right to fill. It is Obama’s good fortune that the Governor seems to be pretty irritated with Obama’s lack of attention to Blagojevich’s needs. In a soon-to-be famous observation on the tapes, the Governor on Obama’s team: “They’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation. Fuck them.”

– The Perfect Gift: Frank Rich says Gov. Blagojevich is the symbol of all the greed and corruption we’ve become accustomed to.

The Republican partisans cheering Fitzgerald’s prosecution of a Democrat have forgotten his other red-letter case in this decade, his conviction of Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. Libby was far bigger prey. He was part of the White House Iraq Group, the task force of propagandists that sold an entire war to America on false pretenses. Because Libby was caught lying to a grand jury and federal prosecutors as well as to the public, he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. But President Bush commuted the sentence before he served a day.

Fitzgerald was not pleased. “It is fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar of justice as equals,” he said at the time.

Not in the Bush era, man. Though the president had earlier vowed to fire anyone involved in leaking the classified identity of a C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame Wilson — the act Libby tried to cover up by committing perjury — both Libby and his collaborator in leaking, Karl Rove, remained in place.

Accountability wasn’t remotely on Bush’s mind. If anything, he was more likely to reward malfeasance and incompetence, as exemplified by his gifting of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Tenet, L. Paul Bremer and Gen. Tommy Franks, three of the most culpable stooges of the Iraq fiasco.

Bush had arrived in Washington vowing to inaugurate a new, post-Clinton era of “personal responsibility” in which “people are accountable for their actions.” Eight years later he holds himself accountable for nothing. In his recent exit interview with Charles Gibson, he presented himself as a passive witness to disastrous events, the Forrest Gump of his own White House. He wishes “the intelligence had been different” about W.M.D. in Iraq — as if his administration hadn’t hyped and manipulated that intelligence. As for the economic meltdown, he had this to say: “I’m sorry it’s happening, of course.”

If you want to trace the bipartisan roots of the morally bankrupt culture that has now found its culmination in our financial apocalypse, a good place to start is late 2001 and 2002, just as the White House contemplated inflating Saddam’s W.M.D. That’s when we learned about another scandal with cooked books, Enron. This was a supreme embarrassment for Bush, whose political career had been bankrolled by the Enron titan Kenneth Lay, or, as Bush nicknamed him back in Texas, “Kenny Boy.”

– Blizzard Warnings:The upper Midwest is looking at some savage winter weather with Bismarck, North Dakota headed for -36 F today and a blizzard warning.

Blizzard Warnings extend from Western Wisconsin into Montana. Winter Storm watches and warnings abound from the West coast to the Plains/Midwest.

The worst conditions, however, will be across the northern Plains as high wind and snow develop eastward from Montana across the Dakotas into northern Minnesota by Sunday morning. Travel is or will become difficult or impossible at times as visibilites drop to near zero in blowing and drifting snow.

Wind chills will plunge to dangerously low levels as actual temperatures spiral down to well below zero across Montana and northwest North Dakota by Sunday morning.

In the Far West, the Portland, Ore., metro area and Willamette Valley are under a winter storm watch with several inches of snow expected for tonight through Sunday.

Salt Lake City is under a winter storm warning. Three to 6 inches of snow are forecast there through tomorrow with substantially more in nearby mountains.

That photo is from the Blizzard of 1978 that struck Toledo and the Northeast, but a blizzard is a blizzard. Meanwhile, it’s going to be sunny and 77 here in Miami, and the hibiscus in the backyard is blooming.

One of the many reasons I like living here.

– Doonesbury: Change is coming!

The End of the End of the Revolution: Roger Cohen visits Cuba and surveys the future of the island and its relationship with the United States.

There is something about this proximate island, so beautiful yet so remote, so failed yet so stubborn, that militates against the exercise of U.S. reason.

It’s not just the humiliation of the botched 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, when 1,500 C.I.A.-backed Cuban exiles tried to overthrow the nascent Castro regime. It’s not just the memory of the Soviet introduction in 1962 of missiles to the island that almost brought nuclear Armageddon. It’s not just the traded accusations of terrorism, the surrogate conflicts of the cold war from Angola to the Americas, the downed planes, the waves of immigrants, the human rights confrontations, the espionage imbroglios or the custody battles. It’s something deeper, and that something has its epicenter in Miami.

Just before the Obama victory, I lunched in the city’s Little Havana district with Alfredo Durán, a former president of the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association. Inevitably, we ate at the kitschy Versailles Restaurant, long a social hub of the Cuban-American community. Durán, who was imprisoned in Cuba for 18 months after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, is a man mellowed by age. Furious with Kennedy and the Democrats in the invasion’s aftermath — “there was a feeling we were sacrificed, left to eat possum in the swamps around the bay” — he decided after the cold war that anti-Fidel vitriol was a blind alley and the trade embargo counterproductive. Fellow veterans were furious; they stripped his photo from the premises of the veterans’ association.

“I say, ‘Lift the embargo unilaterally, put the onus on Cuba,’ ” Durán told me. “If we negotiate, what do we want from them? They have very little to give.”

As he spoke, a little ruckus erupted outside between Republicans and Democrats. Durán smiled: “You know, the only place Cuba still arouses passions is right outside this restaurant. Yet U.S. policy toward Cuba is stuck with old issues in Florida rather than logical strategy.”

The old Florida issues boil down to this: It’s a critical swing state with a significant Cuban-American vote, and a hard line toward Fidel has been a sure-fire political proposition. Once again this year, Miami’s three Cuban-American Congressional Republicans won re-election. And yet: their victory margins narrowed. Some 35 percent of the Cuban-American vote in Miami-Dade County went to Obama, a big bounce, 10 points better than John Kerry’s showing in 2004. Fifty-five percent of those under 29 voted for Obama.

Obama’s victory is particularly significant because he bucked conventional wisdom on Cuba during the campaign. He lambasted Bush’s “tough talk that never yields results.” He called for “a new strategy” centered on two immediate changes: the lifting of all travel restrictions for family visits (limited by Bush to one every three years) and the freeing up of family remittances (now no more than $300 a quarter for the receiving household). Obama also called for “direct diplomacy,” saying he would be prepared to lead it himself “at a time and place of my choosing,” provided U.S. interests and the “cause of freedom for the Cuban people” were advanced. He said his message to Fidel and Raúl would be: “If you take significant steps toward democracy, beginning with the freeing of all political prisoners, we will take steps to begin normalizing relations.”

Three generations on from the revolution, being a Democrat is no longer equated by Cuban-Americans with being a Communist. The fixation on removing Fidel, the dreams of return and the raw anger of loss have faded. “We have gone from the politics of passion to the politics of reality,” Andy Gómez, an assistant provost at the University of Miami who left Cuba in 1961 at the age of 6, told me. “We are here for the long haul. We worry about the economy, health care. Next Christmas in Havana — that’s over.”

– Remembering Pearl Harbor: A survivor gives students a lesson on “the day that will live in infamy.”

Retired New York City Police Officer Bill Merz recalled the sound of machine gun fire, the whine of Japanese fighter planes, the black smoke of ships aflame rising over Pearl Harbor.

“The first sergeant came in and said, ‘We’re at war,'” Merz, of Davie, said about that Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1941, in Hawaii.

Sharing a lunch with Merz on Saturday in Fort Lauderdale Is your Fort Lauderdale restaurant clean? – Click Here., middle school students John Pace and Aarron Wheeler paused over plates of pasta and meatballs. “Sounds scary,” said Pace, 12.

“Scary, but courageous too,” added Wheeler, 13, as Merz described how he and fellow soldiers scrambled for safety and their weapons.

Today, on the 67th anniversary of the surprise attack that drew the United States into World War II, Merz and other members of the Gold Coast Chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association will take part in a 10 a.m. ceremony at the Coast Guard station in Dania Beach.

“Remember Pearl Harbor. Keep America alert,” association President Jerry Mintz said Saturday, repeating the motto of the survivors group, now down to fewer than 10 members in South Florida. Mintz spoke Saturday at the luncheon, sponsored by District 15 Veterans of Foreign Wars posts and auxiliaries in the Fort Lauderdale Firefighter’s Benevolent Hall.

“You can’t just rely on intelligence reports,” Mintz, a Plantation resident, told the audience of some 150 people, including about 40 students from St. Jerome Catholic School. “You have to be alert at all times.”

Eighth-grade teacher Wendy Lockard said her own visit to Pearl Harbor last summer has helped her bring home to her students the history and lessons of the attack, in which almost 2,400 Americans were killed.

But so, too, did the memories carried by the veterans. Anthony Mozzott, 11, looked through a scrapbook brought to the lunch by former Army Air Corps member Edward Bloch, 86, a retired television engineer who lives in Bal Harbour.

“I saw pictures of him and his friends,” Mozzatt said. “They were bombed and shot at. It sounds scary and very confusing.”

At a ceremony today, survivors, including Mintz, James Lobozzo of Pembroke Pines and John Guarino of Boca Raton Click here for restaurant inspection reports, are expected to hear the watchword of alert sounded by Cary Krause, commander of the USS Cole, the Navy warship attacked in October 2000 in the harbor of Aden, Yemen, by al-Qaida terrorists. The Cole is docked at Port Everglades and sails Monday morning after a four-day visit.

Frank Rich is reminded of The Best and The Brightest, recalling the team that lead us into Vietnam, and wonders if there will be a replay, this time with the economy.

In the Obama transition, our Clinton-fixated political culture has been hyperventilating mainly over the national security team, but that’s not what gives me pause. Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates were both wrong about the Iraq invasion, but neither of them were architects of that folly and both are far better known in recent years for consensus-building caution (at times to a fault in Clinton’s case) than arrogance. Those who fear an outbreak of Clintonian drama in the administration keep warning that Obama has hired a secretary of state he can’t fire. But why not take him at his word when he says “the buck will stop with me”? If Truman could cashier Gen. Douglas MacArthur, then surely Obama could fire a brand-name cabinet member in the (unlikely) event she goes rogue.

No, it’s the economic team that evokes trace memories of our dark best-and-brightest past. Lawrence Summers, the new top economic adviser, was the youngest tenured professor in Harvard’s history and is famous for never letting anyone forget his brilliance. It was his highhanded disregard for his own colleagues, not his impolitic remarks about gender and science, that forced him out of Harvard’s presidency in four years. Timothy Geithner, the nominee for Treasury secretary, is the boy wonder president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He comes with none of Summers’s personal baggage, but his sparkling résumé is missing one crucial asset: experience outside academe and government, in the real world of business and finance. Postgraduate finishing school at Kissinger & Associates doesn’t count.

Summers and Geithner are both protégés of another master of the universe, Robert Rubin. His appearance in the photo op for Obama-transition economic advisers three days after the election was, to put it mildly, disconcerting. Ever since his acclaimed service as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, Rubin has labored as a senior adviser and director at Citigroup, now being bailed out by taxpayers to the potential tune of some $300 billion. Somehow the all-seeing Rubin didn’t notice the toxic mortgage-derivatives on Citi’s books until it was too late. The Citi may never sleep, but he snored.

[…]

In our current financial quagmire, there have also been those who had the wisdom to sound alarms before Rubin, Summers or Geithner did. Among them were not just economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Nouriel Roubini but also Doris Dungey, a 47-year-old financial blogger known as Tanta, who died of cancer in Upper Marlboro, Md., last Sunday. As the Times obituary observed, “her first post, in December 2006, took issue with an optimistic Citigroup report that maintained that the mortgage industry would ‘rationalize’ in 2007, to the benefit of larger players like, well, Citigroup.” It was months before the others publicly echoed her judgment.

For some of J.F.K.’s best and brightest, Halberstam wrote, wisdom came “after Vietnam.” We have to hope that wisdom is coming to Summers and Geithner as they struggle with our financial Tet. Clearly it has not come to Rubin. Asked by The Times in April if he’d made any mistakes at Citigroup, he sounded as self-deluded as McNamara in retirement.

“I honestly don’t know,” Rubin answered. “In hindsight, there are a lot of things we’d do differently. But in the context of the facts as I knew them and my role, I’m inclined to think probably not.” Since that interview, 52,000 Citigroup employees have been laid off but not Rubin, who remains remorseless, collecting a salary that has totaled in excess of $115 million since 1999. You may be touched to hear that he is voluntarily relinquishing his bonus this Christmas.

Rubin hasn’t been seen in a transition photo op since Nov. 7, and in the end Obama chose Paul Volcker as chairman of his Economic Recovery Advisory Board. This was a presidential decision not only bright but wise.

– Doonesbury: The secrets of a successful president.

– It’s Over. Just as one season — the holidays — begins, another ends: the hurricane season. South Florida dodged the bullets; we haven’t had a major hit in three years.

Despite a few close calls and a drenching from Tropical Storm Fay, Florida escaped the season mostly unscathed. Our Caribbean neighbors were less fortunate, with Cuba and Haiti getting pounded by a succession of major hurricanes.

”This will probably go down as a nonmemorable year for Florida and a catastrophic year for Haiti and Cuba,” National Hurricane Center Director Bill Read said. ”But we came very close here a couple of times. Any small change in steering currents could have brought us a direct hit.”

As it turned out, Florida’s only direct hit came from Fay, a meandering, wet mess that flooded parts of Central and North Florida during its mid-August trek across the state.

Fay made history for being the first Atlantic tropical storm to make four separate landfalls in Florida: on Aug. 18 in Key West, Aug. 19 in Cape Romano, Aug. 21 in Flagler Beach and Aug. 23 in Carrabelle.

A major hurricane hasn’t struck Florida since Hurricane Wilma in 2005, but Read said he isn’t worried that the state has let its guard down. He pointed to Hurricane Ike, which had South Florida squarely in its cross hairs in early September before veering away on a more southerly path through Cuba.

This isn’t to say that we haven’t had tropical events between December and June, but at least the only big one we can count on is the influx of snowbirds from the north for the winter. Or can we?

– Losing It. The economy of Florida is slowing, which means less income for everyone.

For the dozen state economists huddled around a table this month to fine-tune Florida’s annual revenue forecast, something was different and disturbing.

Their projections from just a year ago were way off. Their new math: In the next four years, the state will take in $31.4 billion less in taxes than expected. That’s more than four times the size of the annual Miami-Dade County budget, the equivalent of building about 61 retractable-roof stadiums for the Florida Marlins, and almost half of this year’s state budget.

The free fall in revenue that the economists saw Nov. 21 was not as shocking as what caused it: For the first time in decades, fewer people were moving to the state. Florida’s legendary growth machine had ground to a halt, compounding the troubles brought on by the global recession.

For years, governors and legislators relied on population growth to create jobs, avoid tax increases and shield the state from recession. They saw Florida’s population swell by 2 to 3 percent a year, enough to add a city the size of Miami or Tampa each year. By marketing itself as a low-tax, low-cost retirement haven, Florida literally bet its future on growth.

Every few years, an event would expose weaknesses in Florida’s economic system: a recession in 1991, a school overcrowding crisis in 1997, a steep drop in tourism after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But the growth machine always roared back to life — until now.

With the mortgage crisis, credit crunch and flat-lining of population, the twin industries that buffered Florida through two previous recessions — real estate and construction — are weighing down Florida’s economy, complicating a recovery and making it likely that Florida will be among the last to bounce back.

”This recession is not only going to be bad for us. It’s going to be worse than the nation’s,” said David Denslow, a University of Florida economist. The primary reason: Florida’s residential construction boom grew at twice its normal rate and ”we got overbuilt.”

The backlog of unsold homes nationwide, coupled with the credit crisis, makes it almost impossible for Florida to lure people from other states when they can’t sell their homes, Denslow said. At the same time, cuts in property taxes and a deepening state budget shortfall squeeze basic public services, making the state less appealing to retirees.

State economists predicted this month that the recession will linger throughout next year, with a gradual return to very slow growth in employment and population in 2010.

The pessimism of the revenue experts, however, stands in stark contrast to the optimism of Gov. Charlie Crist, who said, after economists completed their latest forecast: ”Florida will probably come out of it first. I mean, the sun always comes up in Florida first.”

You know what the Legislature wants to do, don’t you? Cut more taxes.

– No Case. Fred Grimm says the anti-gay adoption folks have no case.

None of the ignominious arguments mounted by the Florida attorney general’s office circumvents the cold reality of 3,535.

At last count, 3,535 children languished in state custody in need of adoptive parents. Yet the attorney general’s office defended a law prohibiting gay adoption as if Florida faced a stark choice between ”homosexual behaving” parents and households of the Ozzie and Harriet kind.

In Florida, 3,535 foster kids wonder what the hell happened to Ozzie and the Mrs.

The attorney general’s lawyers know Ozzie’s a no show. But they’d rather consign foster kids to the perpetual custody of an overwhelmed, underfunded, scandal-racked bureaucracy than admit to the underlying fallacies of the anti-gay adoption law.

They’re not only defending unfounded discrimination against gays. They’re perpetuating an unconscionable transgression toward foster children.

Florida law doesn’t bar gays from providing foster homes for cast off kids. They just can’t adopt those same children.

Miami Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman found that 30 years of research has undercut the premise of the 1977 law. In her summary of facts, Lederman said, “Based on the evidence presented from experts from all over this country and abroad, it is clear that sexual orientation is not a predictor of a person’s ability to parent. Sexual orientation no more leads to psychiatric disorders, alcohol and substance abuse, relationship instability, a lower life expectancy or sexual disorders than race, gender, socio-economic class or any other demographic characteristic.”

Judge Lederman cited ”studies and hundreds of reports” in journals such as the Journal of Child Development, the Journal of Family Psychology, the Journal of Child Psychology and the Journal of Child Psychiatry that have ”withstood the rigorous peer review process and were tested statistically, rationally and methodologically by seasoned professionals prior to publication.”

But her decision Tuesday finding the law unconstitutional wasn’t about gay rights. It was about the rights of foster children to ”permanently and legally share the emotional, psychological and familial bonds of parentage.”

Lederman did it for the kids.

The state’s lawyers, appealing the decision, find themselves in the awkward position of attacking the findings of a judge called the ”leading light” in children’s law by Bernard Perlmutter, director of the Children & Youth Law Clinic at the University of Miami. Perlmutter talked about her national reputation and heroic stature among child advocates as the nation’s “preeminent activist judge.”

He said, ”She’s known far and wide, not just in Florida, for putting children first.”

No one in state government can match Lederman’s gravitas as a champion of children’s rights. Yet, the state’s lawyers must now pretend that this same judge has undermined the welfare of children.

During the trial, the state’s lawyers, desperate for scientific testimony to support an unscientific argument, brought in a retired professor armed with Bible-based theories and disreputable studies who, in a bizarre aside, mentioned that he would not only prohibit gays from adopting, but American Indians too.

The state paid for an academic homophobe and got itself a racist in the bargain.

– The Old Red Car That’s Not Really Green. East Germany’s venture into the automobile business left us with a reminder that your old Pinto rusting in the backyard wasn’t really all that bad.

Ostensibly, there’s not a whole lot to love about a car that creaks like an out-of-warranty pirate ship and spews more smoke than a Winston Churchill-Fidel Castro summit could have produced. Yet, somehow, the Trabant I drove here recently has a primitive charm — along with an aroma of burning oil and smoldering brakes.

There are several ways to tour Germany’s capital city: by foot, tour bus, taxi, bicycle or the U-Bahn subway system. But, for those who want to steep themselves in cold war history, a Trabant transports you to the 1960s.

While Saabs were “born from jets” and Jaguars were “born to perform,” Trabants were born out of desperation. From 1957 to 1991, as West Germany made BMWs, Porsches and Mercedes-Benzes, East Germany took the road less traveled.

Because the economy was so bereft, the communist government decided to convert a plant that made motorcycles and tractors into a car factory. Thus was born the Trabant, a symbol for the failings of state-supervised industry. The body was made of plastic and the car plodded along with a 26-horsepower 500-cubic-centimeter 2-stroke 2-cylinder engine.

By East German standards of the time, the price, about $3,000, was not cheap. And although the car cost about a year’s salary, it still was not easy to obtain — after placing the order, an owner could wait 15 years for delivery.

Demand for the Trabant (and for the Wartburg, another woeful East German car) ended once the Berlin Wall came down and East and West were reunified. Easterners were then free to buy Western vehicles, and Trabant sales collapsed.

Today, there are collector rallies and Trabi clubs in Europe and North America, but I did not see any Trabants in the German cities I visited this fall. Which is what makes my driving one through Berlin so special.

The good news is that the Trabant is twice as powerful as a Sears Craftsman two-stage snow blower; the bad news is that it’s twice as loud. It is also not easy to shift.

In fact, not much is easy on a Trabant. The wheel wells could hide pregnant bulldogs. Two knobs the size of Captain Kangaroo’s buttons control the heat and the windshield wipers, which are slower than a stretching class on a senior citizens’ cruise. The tachometer is a series of green and yellow lights with no numbers. The needle on the speedometer (which optimistically goes to 75 m.p.h.) bounces as if it’s auditioning for the Richter scale.

The column-mounted manual shift is a puzzle. It is moved down for first and up for second, then a return to neutral to push in the lever and then down again for third and up for fourth. For reverse, it’s a return-to-neutral-and-push-all-the-way-in-and-down maneuver.

There is no fuel gauge.

The interior of my car had tan and rose-colored vinyl and cloth, and the exterior paint was what Trabant called Frog Green; an appropriate name would have been Gulag Green.

– Doonesbury: Watch out for the bus.

– The New Bully Pulpit: How the internet is changing how we interact with our government and our leaders.

ROUGHLY 10 million of Barack Obama’s closest friends and supporters began opening their e-mail in-boxes last Tuesday to find a message from his campaign manager, David Plouffe, labeled “Where we go from here.” In it, Mr. Plouffe asked backers to “help shape the future of this movement” by clicking to an online survey, which in turn asked them to rank four priorities in order of importance.

First on the list: “Helping Barack’s administration pass legislation through grassroots efforts.”

After a campaign that Facebooked, Twittered, texted and YouTubed its way to victory, the message was no surprise. It is now fashionable in Washington to talk about how Mr. Obama will transfer his technological tricks from the campaign trail to the White House, and use his impressive social networking skills to rally support for an ambitious agenda.

Not since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats, the theory goes, will the presidential platform — the “bully pulpit,” as another Roosevelt, Theodore, called it — have such power.

“Since the days that Teddy Roosevelt created the bully pulpit, our most memorable presidents have been those who mastered these new forms of communication: Roosevelt himself with modern newspapers; Franklin Roosevelt with the radio; Kennedy and Reagan with television,” said David Gergen, a longtime communications strategist who has worked for several presidents, including Mr. Reagan. “Now Barack Obama has the potential of being the first Internet president, in all of its full glory.”

The question is whether that “full glory” is necessarily a better bully pulpit.

It is one thing to run a movement, filled with passion and an army of true believers set on a single goal, and another to run a country, where competing agendas are often fueled by deep divisions. And while the communications stars do seem to be aligned for Mr. Obama, historians, political scientists and strategists say that being the first Internet president poses its own challenges. The Internet, after all, is a two-way medium, and the bully pulpit is inherently one-way.

– All In the Family: Candace Gingrich writes a letter to her brother Newt.

Dear Newt,

I recently had the displeasure of watching you bash the protestors of the Prop 8 marriage ban to Bill O’Reilly on FOX News. I must say, after years of watching you build your career by stirring up the fears and prejudices of the far right, I feel compelled to use the words of your idol, Ronald Reagan, “There you go, again.”

However, I realize that you may have been a little preoccupied lately with planning your resurrection as the savior of your party, so I thought I would fill you in on a few important developments you might have overlooked.

The truth is that you’re living in a world that no longer exists. I, along with millions of Americans, clearly see the world the way it as — and we embrace what it can be. You, on the other hand, seem incapable of looking for new ideas or moving beyond what worked in the past.

Welcome to the 21st century, big bro. I can understand why you’re so afraid of the energy that has been unleashed after gay and lesbian couples had their rights stripped away from them by a hateful campaign. I can see why you’re sounding the alarm against the activists who use all the latest tech tools to build these rallies from the ground up in cities across the country.

This unstoppable progress has at its core a group we at HRC call Generation Equality. They are the most supportive of full LGBT equality than any American generation ever — and when it comes to the politics of division, well, they don’t roll that way. 18-24 year olds voted overwhelmingly against Prop 8 and overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. And the numbers of young progressive voters will only continue to grow. According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning, about 23 million 18-29 year olds voted on Nov. 4, 2008 — the most young voters ever to cast a ballot in a presidential election. That’s an increase of 3 million more voters compared to 2004.

These are the same people who helped elect Barack Obama and sent a decisive message to your party. These young people are the future and their energy will continue to drive our country forward. Even older Americans are turning their backs on the politics of fear and demagoguery that you and your cronies have perfected over the years.

This is a movement of the people that you most fear. It’s a movement of progress — and your words on FOX News only show how truly desperate you are to maintain control of a world that is changing before your very eyes.

Then again, we’ve seen these tactics before. We know how much the right likes to play political and cultural hardball, and then turn around and accuse us of lashing out first. You give a pass to a religious group — one that looks down upon minorities and women — when they use their money and membership roles to roll back the rights of others, and then you label us “fascists” when we fight back. You belittle the relationships of gay and lesbian couples, and yet somehow neglect to explain who anointed you the protector of “traditional” marriage. And, of course, you’ve also mastered taking the foolish actions of a few people and then indicting an entire population based on those mistakes. I fail to see how any of these patterns coincide with the values of “historic Christianity” you claim to champion.

Again, nothing new here. This is just more of the blatant hypocrisy we’re used to hearing.

What really worries me is that you are always willing to use LGBT Americans as political weapons to further your ambitions. That’s really so ’90s, Newt. In this day and age, it’s embarrassing to watch you talk like that. You should be more afraid of the new political climate in America, because, there is no place for you in it.

In other words, stop being a hater, big bro.

– Dave Barry’s Holiday Shopping Guide.

Why do we give gifts during the holiday season?

We do it for a reason that is as timeless as humanity itself: women. Women have an overpowering biological need to mark pretty much every occasion, including sunset, by wrapping a gift and giving it to somebody, along with a card.

Why do women do this? We put that question to some leading psychologists, who responded: ”We think maybe they’re insane.”

We would not go as far as leading psychologists. But it is a fact that as the holiday season approaches, women are overpowered by the biological urge to buy bulk quantities of gifts, often without any clear idea whom a specific gift is for.

Men do not do this. A man buys a gift only when he sees a clear and present need, such as he remembers that his wedding anniversary was last week. Otherwise, when a man is in a store, he is looking for practical items. If he happens to pass by, say, a little ceramic statuette of two little smiley-face turtles with ”BEST” painted on one shell and ”FRIENDS” painted on the other, he is not going to give it a second glance, because he can’t imagine anybody having any use for such a thing except as an emergency substitute for a clay pigeon.

No, a man is going to keep right on walking past the friendship turtles. If he buys something for somebody — his wife, for example — it is going to be something he believes she actually needs, such as an extension cord. Maybe, if he is feeling especially romantic, he will get her the 20-footer.

Read on and be amazed, guys.

– Viewers Guide: Who’s on the Sunday morning talk shows.

ABC’s ”This Week” — David Axelrod, senior adviser to President-elect Barack Obama; Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Richard Shelby, R-Ala.

——

CBS’ ”Face the Nation” — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.; Austan Goolsbee, economic adviser to Obama.

——

NBC’s ”Meet the Press” — Former Secretary of State James Baker; former Commerce Secretary William Daley; Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn.

——

CNN’s ”Late Edition” — Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas; Gov. Jennifer Granholm, D-Mich.; former Gov. Mitt Romney, R-Mass.; Forbes Inc. CEO Steve Forbes; former Labor Secretary Robert Reich.

——

”Fox News Sunday” — Reps. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., and John Boehner, R-Ohio; Axelrod.

– Doonesbury: Advice from the master.

– Standing Up for Equality: A lot of people in South Florida made their voices heard in support of gay rights.

More than 1,500 people in Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale joined voices across the nation in protest, declaring the fight for same-sex marriage was not over.

”Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Homophobia’s got to go!” an enthusiastic crowd of 500 chanted at Miami Beach City Hall while passing cars behind them honked in solidarity.

Meanwhile, more than 1,000 people attended a rally at Fort Lauderdale City Hall, reciting ”Gay, straight, black, white, marriage is a civil right!”

The protests were part of the Join the Impact campaign, organized just this week through social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace. The goal was to have a synchronized reaction of outrage across the country to the passage of laws in Arizona, California and Florida defining marriage as an institution between a man and a woman only.

More than one million people across the world were expected to participate in similar protests.

For many in the crowd at Miami Beach, the names of those laws — Proposition 8 in California, Amendment 2 in Florida — have become a symbol of the struggle for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights. They also argue the laws will restrict rights to heterosexuals who are domestic partners and not married.

HIV advocate Priscilla Reyes, who attended the Fort Lauderdale rally, worried the law will restrict partners from having access to the medication and healthcare they need. A vote shouldn’t affect anyone’s ability to afford treatment, she said.

”I don’t think the majority of people should decide on the minorities’ rights,” she said.

Fort Lauderdale mayoral candidate Dean Trantalis, who is openly gay, spoke of the alienation of the gay community. ”This is a slap in the face for everyone seeking equal rights, especially because [the ban] came at a time for change in our country,” said Trantalis, speaking of the presidential election of Barack Obama.

In both places, crowds of all ages and races championed similar philosophies. They also questioned what the next move for local gay rights activists and supporters should be.

”It’s hard to say now, honestly,” said Jim Jennings, a 43-year-old real estate agent from Miami. ”But I think every little bit helps. And protesting may be what’s necessary for people to really understand just what’s going on and what’s being taken away.”

Jennings stood amid a colorful array of signs that read, ”Marriage is a right for all, not a privilege for some,” ”Straight Christian for Gay Rights,” and ”Get Your Church Out of My State.”

The protests had particular meaning in Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale — two cities known for having large gay populations. More than 300 couples are registered as domestic partners on Miami Beach, which has some of the broadest domestic partnership laws in the country.

”South Florida can be the example,” said Babak Movahedi, chairman of Miami Beach’s gay business development committee. “Dare I say it, if marriage rights were up to cities and not the state, I think we would have gay marriage here.”

Speaking to the crowd, Movahedi told them to look at Nov. 4 as a day of inspiration, not disappointment.

”Let’s not place blame on each other about the passage of Amendment 2,” Movahedi said. “Let’s move forward . . . We can change things through the power of numbers. That’s how Barack Obama won, and that’s how we plan to win.”

In response, the crowd began to chant, ”Yes we can! Yes we can!”

More pictures from the marches can be seen here, here, and here at Steve Rothaus’s blog Gay South Florida.

– Off Line: Barack Obama will have to give up his BlackBerry once he’s sworn in.

Sorry, Mr. President. Please surrender your BlackBerry.

Those are seven words President-elect Barack Obama is dreading but expecting to hear, friends and advisers say, when he takes office in 65 days.

For years, like legions of other professionals, Mr. Obama has been all but addicted to his BlackBerry. The device has rarely been far from his side — on most days, it was fastened to his belt — to provide a singular conduit to the outside world as the bubble around him grew tighter and tighter throughout his campaign.

“How about that?” Mr. Obama replied to a friend’s congratulatory e-mail message on the night of his victory.

But before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.

For all the perquisites and power afforded the president, the chief executive of the United States is essentially deprived by law and by culture of some of the very tools that other chief executives depend on to survive and to thrive. Mr. Obama, however, seems intent on pulling the office at least partly into the 21st century on that score; aides said he hopes to have a laptop computer on his desk in the Oval Office, making him the first American president to do so.

[…]

Diana Owen, who leads the American Studies program at Georgetown University, said presidents were not advised to use e-mail because of security risks and fear that messages could be intercepted.

“They could come up with some bulletproof way of protecting his e-mail and digital correspondence, but anything can be hacked,” said Ms. Owen, who has studied how presidents communicate in the Internet era. “The nature of the president’s job is that others can use e-mail for him.”

She added: “It’s a time burner. It might be easier for him to say, ‘I can’t be on e-mail.’ ”

Should Mr. Obama want to break ground and become the first president to fire off e-mail messages from the West Wing and wherever he travels, he could turn to Al Gore as a model. In the later years of his vice presidency, Democrats said, Mr. Gore used a government e-mail address and a campaign address in his race against Mr. Bush.

The president, though, faces far greater public scrutiny. And even if he does not wear a BlackBerry on his belt or carry a cellphone in his pocket, he almost certainly will not lack from a variety of new communication.

On Saturday, as Mr. Obama broadcast the weekly Democratic radio address, it came with a twist. For the first time, it was also videotaped and will be archived on YouTube.

– Frank Rich: The Moose Stops Here.

ELECTION junkies in acute withdrawal need suffer no longer. Though the exciting Obama-McCain race is over, the cockfight among the losers has only just begun. The conservative crackup may be ugly, but as entertainment, it’s two thumbs up!

Over at Fox News, Greta Van Susteren has been trashing the credibility of her own network’s chief political correspondent, Carl Cameron, for his report on Sarah Palin’s inability to identify Africa as a continent, while Bill O’Reilly valiantly defends Cameron’s honor. At Slate, a post-mortem of conservative intellectuals descended into name-calling, with the writer Ross Douthat of The Atlantic labeling the legal scholar Douglas Kmiec a “useful idiot.”

In an exuberant class by himself is Michael Barone, a ubiquitous conservative commentator who last week said that journalists who trash Palin (more than a few of them conservatives) do so because “she did not abort her Down syndrome baby.” He was being “humorous,” he subsequently explained to Politico, though the joke may be on him. Barone writes for U.S. News & World Report, where his 2008 analyses included keepers like “Just Call Her Sarah ‘Delano’ Palin.” Just call it coincidence, but on Election Day, word spread that the once-weekly U.S. News was downsizing to a monthly — a step closer to the fate of Literary Digest, the weekly magazine that vanished two years after its straw poll predicted an Alf Landon landslide over Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936.

Will the 2008 G.O.P. go the way of the 1936 G.O.P., which didn’t reclaim the White House until 1952? Even factoring in the Democrats’ time-honored propensity for self-immolation, it’s not beyond reason. The Republicans are in serious denial. A few heretics excepted, they hope to blame all their woes on their unpopular president, the inept McCain campaign and their party’s latent greed for budget-busting earmarks.

The trouble is far more fundamental than that. The G.O.P. ran out of steam and ideas well before George W. Bush took office and Tom DeLay ran amok, and it is now more representative of 20th-century South Africa during apartheid than 21st-century America. The proof is in the vanilla pudding. When David Letterman said that the 10 G.O.P. presidential candidates at an early debate looked like “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club,” he was the first to correctly call the election.

[…]

The good news for Democrats is a post-election Gallup poll finding that while only 45 percent of Americans want to see Palin have a national political future (and 52 percent of Americans do not), 76 percent of Republicans say bring her on. The bad news for Democrats is that these are the exact circumstances that can make Obama cocky and Democrats sloppy. The worse news for the country is that at a time of genuine national peril we actually do need an opposition party that is not brain-dead.

– What Were They Thinking? Looking back thirty years to the colossal disaster that was The Star Wars Holiday Special.

On Nov. 17, 1978, the “Star Wars” universe was rocked by a disturbance in the Force more calamitous than the destruction of Alderon, more catastrophic than the Clone Wars, and more devastating than the introduction of Jar Jar Binks. It was “The Star Wars Holiday Special” (or “TSWHS”), a two-hour prime-time special on CBS, in which two worlds collided: “Star Wars” and the traditional television variety show. If you have a bad feeling about this, you aren’t alone.

“TSWHS” was broadcast only once, but that was enough to secure its place as both “Star Wars’ ” and television’s guiltiest of pleasures. George Lucas (who declined to be interviewed for this story) has disavowed it. David Hofstede ranked it No. 1 in his book “What Were They Thinking: The 100 Dumbest Events in Television History.” A seemingly mortified Harrison Ford, appearing last February on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” tried to evade his host’s questions about “TSWHS” by stating he had no recollection of it. Then, to freshen up the aging action star’s memory, O’Brien played the clip in which Ford’s Han Solo tells Chewbacca’s clan, “You’re like family to me.”

Even “TSWHS” co-producer Gary Smith, whose more than 40-year Emmy-winning career includes some of television’s most acclaimed variety specials, concedes “TSWHS” was not one (or two) of his finest hours. Never released on home video, “TSWHS” does survive on bootleg videocassettes and on the Internet. A special five-minute version posted on YouTube has received more than 580,400 hits.

The plot of “TSWHS” plays like a demented “SCTV” sketch: A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Han Solo and Chewbacca are racing to Kashyyyk, Chewie’s home planet, in time for them to be with Chewie’s family for the annual Life Day celebration. Chewie’s wife, Malla, his son, Lumpy, and his father, Itchy, anxiously await his arrival, while Imperial Stormtroopers, under direction from Darth Vader, exhibit very un-Life Day behavior, ransacking homes, imposing curfews and shutting down the cantina.

But here’s where it gets weird. Mixed in with all the principals from the original “Star Wars” movie are Bea Arthur singing a Brechtian tune in the cantina; Diahann Carroll entrancing Lumpy as his virtual reality fantasy; and Harvey Korman cooking up an alien Julia Child impersonation.

This is what OMG looked like in 1978.

– Doonesbury: Focus…

– Young Man with a Gift: Connor Gifford is a unique historian.

What happens when a 26-year-old man with Down syndrome meets a soon-to-be grandmother close to four decades older than him? In the case of Nantucket residents Connor Gifford and Victoria Harris, a beautiful friendship was born that ultimately changed both their life paths and led to the publication of a book about our nation’s history, “America According to Connor Gifford.”

In the prologue to the book, Gifford thanks God for giving him the gift of Down syndrome, and he explains that after he was born doctors diagnosed him with mosaic Down syndrome.

“I was so blessed, and that’s why I thank God for my gift,” Gifford says. “I am sensitive to things like you don’t mistreat somebody who is, let’s say, black, or Indian, or Mexican. We all have something in ourselves that we can say to the world, ‘Look out world, here I come.'”

That sentiment is certainly coming true for Gifford. “The World According to Connor Gifford” [sic] was released on Nantucket in June and is making its New England debut on this Fourth of July weekend. It already is selling well and getting attention from the national news media. Tim Russert wrote an endorsement of the book and planned to have Gifford on “Meet the Press” before his untimely death. Chris Matthews (a part-time Nantucket resident) of MSNBC’s “Hardball With Chris Matthews” met Gifford and loved the book.

Gifford is a native of Perrysburg, Ohio, where he graduated from high school in 2002. His parents pushed to have him take mainstream classes, and he fell in love with history in the eighth grade. He now lives year-round on Nantucket.

Harris’ background is in documentary filmmaking, and she’s the founder of the Harris Group, which creates Fortune 500 branding campaigns. She was working on a first novel when she met Gifford.

In a telephone interview, Harris and Gifford, each on a different extension, explained how the book came to be.

The two met at Harris’ daughter’s house on Nantucket in January of 2007.

“Connor and I just really liked each other right off the bat,” Harris says. “We got talking about history, and I realized there was this very profound sense of the essence of who we are as a nation in this young man’s mind.”

Harris went home to Rochester, N.Y., but she could not stop thinking about the conversation. By summer, she knew she wanted Gifford to write a book, and she created the concept of “America According to Connor Gifford.” She didn’t have any idea what the book would look like, or even be about, but she called his parents, Julie and Chuck Gifford, and asked if she could interview their son about his thoughts on history.

“I felt deeply that the knowledge that was in Connor’s mind, that he couldn’t necessarily express in the traditional way that somebody sits down and writes a book, could be released if I could interview him,” Harris says.

The interviews continued through the fall, and as Harris transcribed hundreds of hours of interviews she began to see patterns in Connor’s thinking. What emerged was a profound sense of civil rights. She also realized that Connor could express history best through people and events that he thought we all should know, such as Anne Hutchinson, Benjamin Franklin, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, our westward expansion and Jim Crow laws. It was a natural development of Gifford’s personal feelings about history.

“My love for history started in eighth grade,” Gifford says, “and as I went through history, I realized that what these people were doing was touching my heart.”

Since that article was published in July, Connor’s book has taken off and he’s on a book tour, including a trip back to his hometown of Perrysburg. (See video here.) Full disclosure: I’ve known Connor’s father, Chuck Gifford, since I was five years old, and his family lived next door to me as I was growing up. I see that Connor has inherited his dad’s sense of humor and love of history, and I admire him for his accomplishment. What a great story.

– How Barack Obama Won Florida: The Miami Herald has the inside story of the strategy that won the state for Mr. Obama.

TAMPA — Inside a converted cigar factory in the heart of Ybor City, a group of Barack Obama staffers hunch over laptops in intense, nearly silent concentration. This is the nerve center of Obama’s Florida operation, and the election is four days away.

Steve Schale, 34, Obama’s state director and the brain behind the state campaign, glances across rows of lawyers, researchers, communications staffers and field directors working on the campaign’s final-hours effort to get out the vote.

”It’s my job now to just get out of the way,” he says.

He has scratched out a prediction on a piece of paper: Obama takes Florida, 50 percent to 46 percent. But the crumpled scrap he carries belies his greatest fear — that the Illinois senator loses Florida, and in doing so, the White House.

In the preceding four months, the campaign registered 200,000 new voters in Florida, opened 50 state field offices, recruited 600,000 volunteers, and allocated $40 million to fight John McCain. Under Schale’s direction, it built a grass-roots organization so far-reaching that even Republican strategists say it will change the way politics is practiced in Florida.

”They’ve done everything right and very few things wrong,” said Sally Bradshaw, former campaign manager for Republican Gov. Jeb Bush and now a political consultant.

(The Miami Herald requested behind-the-scenes access to both camps in the final days of the Florida campaign, in hopes of telling the inside story from whichever side was victorious. The McCain campaign declined. The Obama campaign agreed, as long as it was understood the story wouldn’t appear until after the election.)

For Schale, the waning days of the campaign have come down to this: ”We have tried to anticipate anything and everything, and we don’t take a damn thing for granted.”

Obama’s Florida strategy was thorough and simple: Ask every supporter to help, give every volunteer a job, register every eligible voter, get ”sporadic” voters to the polls, and reach every pocket of the state.

The campaign divided the state into five regions, or ”pods,” each with its own staff and message geared to regional concerns. It harnessed social networking on the Internet and cellphones to allow grass-roots organizers to set up voter registration drives, home-grown phone banks and text-messaging chains.

”If this works, it’s hard to think this isn’t the academic model of the future,” Schale muses on the Saturday before Election Day. ”We started out with the premise that, with our volunteer numbers, there was no reason we couldn’t organize anywhere in Florida.”

Schale’s view of the state is shaped by two years as political director for House Democrats, during which he helped reverse the party’s decline by wresting nine legislative seats from Republican control.

Now Schale, who grew up in St. Augustine, wants to exorcise the demons of Florida’s troubled election history, including the 2000 recount debacle that gave George W. Bush the White House. He says he never again wants Florida to become ”the punching bag of the nation.”

– Frank Rich: It Still Feels Good.

ON the morning after a black man won the White House, America’s tears of catharsis gave way to unadulterated joy.

Our nation was still in the same ditch it had been the day before, but the atmosphere was giddy. We felt good not only because we had breached a racial barrier as old as the Republic. Dawn also brought the realization that we were at last emerging from an abusive relationship with our country’s 21st-century leaders. The festive scenes of liberation that Dick Cheney had once imagined for Iraq were finally taking place — in cities all over America.

For eight years, we’ve been told by those in power that we are small, bigoted and stupid — easily divided and easily frightened. This was the toxic catechism of Bush-Rove politics. It was the soiled banner picked up by the sad McCain campaign, and it was often abetted by an amen corner in the dominant news media. We heard this slander of America so often that we all started to believe it, liberals most certainly included. If I had a dollar for every Democrat who told me there was no way that Americans would ever turn against the war in Iraq or definitively reject Bush governance or elect a black man named Barack Hussein Obama president, I could almost start to recoup my 401(k). Few wanted to take yes for an answer.

So let’s be blunt. Almost every assumption about America that was taken as a given by our political culture on Tuesday morning was proved wrong by Tuesday night.

[…]

The actual real America is everywhere. It is the America that has been in shell shock since the aftermath of 9/11, when our government wielded a brutal attack by terrorists as a club to ratchet up our fears, betray our deepest constitutional values and turn Americans against one another in the name of “patriotism.” What we started to remember the morning after Election Day was what we had forgotten over the past eight years, as our abusive relationship with the Bush administration and its press enablers dragged on: That’s not who we are.

So even as we celebrated our first black president, we looked around and rediscovered the nation that had elected him. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Obama said in February, and indeed millions of such Americans were here all along, waiting for a leader. This was the week that they reclaimed their country.

– Off-off-off-off Broadway: Charles Isherwood profiles director David Cromer.

IS David Cromer the most talented theater director that Americans have never heard of?

Er, silly question, I know. Most Americans could not name a single theater director, talented or not, Tony-laureled or obscure, unless a nephew, daughter or second cousin happens to be one. But Mr. Cromer has a low profile even among the theater cognoscenti in New York, because he has worked for the last two decades in Chicago, mostly at the kind of small, funky spaces that seem to take root in almost every neighborhood in this theater-rich city.

As the first fingers of a chilly Midwestern winter began to tickle noses, Mr. Cromer was seemingly omnipresent on the small-theater scene here. By night he was playing the Stage Manager in his freshly reimagined production of “Our Town,” a smash for the Hypocrites theater troupe last season, which returned for an encore run this fall at the enchantingly funky Chopin Theater in the Wicker Park neighborhood. During the day Mr. Cromer was in rehearsals directing a new play, “Celebrity Row” by Itamar Moses, at the American Theater Company.

And out in the suburb of Glencoe, north of Chicago, at the Writers’ Theater, Mr. Cromer’s evocative staging of William Inge’s “Picnic” was earning rapturous notices. “It is one of the best performances of anything — and I mean anything, not just plays — that I’ve seen in my life,” Terry Teachout wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “This is a destination show, worth traveling any distance to see.”

The roaring Broadway success of “August: Osage County,” which began life here at the Steppenwolf Theater Company and opens at the National Theater in London this month, has rekindled the Chicago-New York theater connection. Coincidentally the Chicago Shakespeare Theater picked up the regional Tony Award this year. (This is the only city that is home to four companies that have been given that laurel; the Steppenwolf, the Goodman Theater and the Victory Gardens Theater are the others.) But the city really is most notable for the health and variety of its smaller theaters, making it possible for directors like Mr. Cromer, and scads of talented actors, to forge careers — perhaps more artistically rewarding than financially remunerative — without leaving town.

– Doonesbury: overthinking it?

– Looking Back: In January 2007, word got out that Barack Obama was forming an exploratory committee for his run for the presidency. This is what I wrote at the time.

It’s not a big surprise that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) has decided to form an exploratory committee to consider running for president in 2008. (Keith Olbermann said last night that using the term “exploratory” is ridiculous; of course he’s going to run.)

The pundits are making a big deal out of this; not because Mr. Obama is a dynamic and commanding speaker, charismatic to the point of stellar, and has the refreshing pedigree that is as old as America but never before seen as a serious contender for the nomination. No, they’re painting it as a tabloid-level battle between him and Sen. Hillary Clinton; CNN even went so far as to put up a caption of “Hillary vs. Obama,” being slightly un-PC by referring to Ms. Clinton by her first name and Mr. Obama by his last. The way Wolf Blitzer discussed it on “The Situation Room” made me think I was watching an episode of “Access: Hollywood.”

The right-wingers will have a tough time trashing Mr. Obama without coming across as racists, although that hasn’t stopped nutballs like Debbie Schlussel from attacking him for something he has no control over such as his name and his father’s ancestry. They will go after his lack of experience in government and foreign policy, although they will have a little trouble doing it with a straight face given the current occupant of the Oval Office. (Mr. Obama has said he will address that issue immediately by launching his campaign in Springfield, Illinois, the home and burial site of Abraham Lincoln, who served all of two years in Congress before becoming president.) They will dig up the fact that he once used cocaine, but Mr. Obama already brought up that issue several years ago in his own book and actually uses it as a talking point for showing how a young man on the road to ruin can turn himself around. Again, he’s inoculated himself against attacks by the likes of well-known vice admirals like Rush Limbaugh (although rank hypocrisy and self-inflicted irony has never stopped him before) and Bill Bennett.

Then they will play their last card and do a big build-up to ask the most irrelevant yet brow-furrowing question of all: Is America Ready for a President Obama? Ah, the open-ended question; leaving it up to the responder to define what being “ready” means: are we ready for a black man in the White House? Are we ready for a president whose middle name is Hussein and whose last name ends with a vowel?

The answer is that it’s a bullshit question and the only reason they ask it is because they can’t come up with anything else that doesn’t sound racist, trivial or just plain stupid. The questions about whether or not Sen. Obama should become the next president should be based on his leadership and the ability to use his skills and intelligence to guide the country and balance the politics with his vision. He has to rely on other people to tell him what to do and surround himself with smart people who may disagree with him, and he has to be able to listen to them. He has to be able to perform the job recognizing the fact that a president is both a partisan politician and the leader of the whole country, including the people who voted for someone else. It’s a delicate balance, so throwing in trivialities such as his ancestry or the origins of his cognomen do nothing but skew the scale, and we might as well throw aside all pretense of considered debate and elect the next president using the same technique as they do on American Idol. If we’d asked those questions of several candidates in the past (and at least one that I can think of right now) and assuming that the electorate had paid attention to the answers, we might have gotten far different results.

– Overcoming in Ohio: In bellwether Perry County, the Ku Klux Klan once thrived. Now, Republican truckers and coal miners are backing Barack Obama.

NEW STRAITSVILLE, Ohio — The Saturday afternoon scene seemed ripped out of a Republican playbook. A campaign canvasser wearing a black cowboy hat stood on the threshold of a mobile home in a hardscrabble, virtually all-white rural county talking about God’s will and the White House with a retiree who once was a fundamentalist Baptist preacher.

“I think God had it all planned out for Barack-o to be our man,” said Tom Morris, 73, a lifelong Republican whose career was mostly as a self-employed truck driver and electrician. Eighty-two-year-old retired coal miner Rufus Fultz, one of the most active Obama volunteers in Perry County, chimed in, “I believe it too.” Morris and his wife, Ernestine, who also crossed party lines to vote early for Obama, live in a trailer in their backyard because they lack the money to repair their ramshackle house. Morris confessed, “I pray every night that Barack and his wife will be elected to the White House unanimously.”

There is nothing unanimous about politics in Perry County, located about 60 miles southeast of Columbus at the point where Midwestern Ohio gives way to Appalachia. With only 15,000 voters in 2004 (New Lexington, its largest town, has fewer than 5,000 residents), Perry County appears to be a fly speck in a swing state where turnout is expected to exceed 6.5 million.

But Perry County has an uncanny knack for being a political soothsayer. In both the 1988 and 2000 presidential elections — the prior two contests without an incumbent on the ballot — Perry came closest among Ohio’s 88 counties of mirroring the presidential vote. In 2004, Perry County came within 1 percent of matching the George Bush and John Kerry vote margins. The Political Research Center at Suffolk University, which identified the county as a bellwether for its Ohio polls, found that Obama led John McCain by a 45-to-41-percent margin in Perry County in mid-October, relatively close to the survey’s statewide result. “There is a chance that the bellwether model will not work this year because of heavy urban registration in Ohio,” said David Paleologos, the polling director at Suffolk University. “But it has worked in the past.”

Even though the minority population of Perry County is little more than a few guys who checked the “Hispanic” box on the Census form as a joke, Obama appears to be holding his own in a place where the Ku Klux Klan thrived through the 1920s. Typical of today’s Obama voters is Rick Barnette, a beefy school bus driver with a goatee, who said, “I can’t see myself 10 years ago voting for an African-American like Obama. It was how I was brung up. I’ve seen the Ku Klux Klan pictures.” But now Barnette’s major objection to Obama is that he did not choose Hillary Clinton as his running mate.

Shortly after noon Saturday, Barnette was sitting in the unused keno room at Fiore’s restaurant and bowling alley in New Lexington helping devise schedules for the high-school bowling league. His companion and fellow Obama supporter Mike Shiplett, whose daughter is in the Air Force in Guam, tried to explain the transition in Perry County. “It’s generational,” said Shiplett, who is a self-employed truck driver and the operator of a cleaning service. “People our age are different from our parents. My daughter dated a black guy and he was a hell of a nice guy. Things are changing.”

– Frank Rich: Remembering Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

AND so: just how far have we come?

As a rough gauge last week, I watched a movie I hadn’t seen since it came out when I was a teenager in 1967. Back then “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” was Hollywood’s idea of a stirring call for racial justice. The premise: A young white woman falls madly in love with a black man while visiting the University of Hawaii and brings him home to San Francisco to get her parents’ blessing. Dad, a crusading newspaper publisher, and Mom, a modern art dealer, are wealthy white liberals — Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, no less — so surely there can be no problem. Complications ensue before everyone does the right thing.

Though the film was a box-office smash and received 10 Oscar nominations, even four decades ago it was widely ridiculed as dated by liberal critics. The hero, played by the first black Hollywood superstar, Sidney Poitier, was seen as too perfect and too “white” — an impossibly handsome doctor with Johns Hopkins and Yale on his résumé and a Nobel-worthy career fighting tropical diseases in Africa for the World Health Organization. What couple would not want him as a son-in-law? “He’s so calm and sure of everything,” says his fiancée. “He doesn’t have any tensions in him.” She is confident that every single one of their biracial children will grow up to “be president of the United States and they’ll all have colorful administrations.”

What a strange movie to confront in 2008. As the world knows, Barack Obama’s own white mother and African father met at the University of Hawaii. In “Dreams From My Father,” he even imagines the awkward dinner where his mother introduced her liberal-ish parents to her intended in 1959. But what’s most startling about this archaic film is the sole element in it that proves inadvertently contemporary. Faced with a black man in the mold of the Poitier character — one who appears “so calm” and without “tensions” — white liberals can make utter fools of themselves. When Joe Biden spoke of Obama being “clean” and “articulate,” he might have been recycling Spencer Tracy’s lines of 41 years ago.

Biden’s gaffe, though particularly naked, prefigured a larger pattern in the extraordinary election campaign that has brought an African-American to the brink of the presidency. Our political and news media establishments — fixated for months on tracking down every unreconstructed bigot in blue-collar America — have their own conspicuous racial myopia, with its own set of stereotypes and clichés. They consistently underestimated Obama’s candidacy because they often saw him as a stand-in for the two-dimensional character Poitier had to shoulder in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” It’s why so many got this election wrong so often.

[…]

Obama’s message and genealogy alike embody what has changed in the decades since. When he speaks of red and blue America being seamlessly woven into the United States of America, it is always shorthand for the reconciliation of black and white and brown and yellow America as well. Demographically, that’s where America is heading in the new century, and that will be its destiny no matter who wins the election this year.

Still, the country isn’t there yet, and should Obama be elected, America will not be cleansed of its racial history or conflicts. It will still have a virtually all-white party as one of its two most powerful political organizations. There will still be white liberals who look at Obama and can’t quite figure out what to make of his complex mixture of idealism and hard-knuckled political cunning, of his twin identities of international sojourner and conventional middle-class overachiever.

After some 20 months, we’re all still getting used to Obama and still, for that matter, trying to read his sometimes ambiguous takes on both economic and foreign affairs. What we have learned definitively about him so far — and what may most account for his victory, should he achieve it — is that he had both the brains and the muscle to outsmart, outmaneuver and outlast some of the smartest people in the country, starting with the Clintons. We know that he ran a brilliant campaign that remained sane and kept to its initial plan even when his Republican opponent and his own allies were panicking all around him. We know that that plan was based on the premise that Americans actually are sick of the divisive wedge issues that have defined the past couple of decades, of which race is the most divisive of all.

Obama doesn’t transcend race. He isn’t post-race. He is the latest chapter in the ever-unfurling American racial saga. It is an astonishing chapter. For most Americans, it seems as if Obama first came to dinner only yesterday. Should he win the White House on Tuesday, many will cheer and more than a few will cry as history moves inexorably forward.

But we are a people as practical as we are dreamy. We’ll soon remember that the country is in a deep ditch, and that we turned to the black guy not only because we hoped he would lift us up but because he looked like the strongest leader to dig us out.

– Doonesbury: Where’s George?

– Goodnight, Opus. (The last panel is here.)

– Enshrining Bigotry: Florida’s Amendment 2 would not only ban same-sex marriage in Florida — and be redundant with existing state law — it would threaten domestic partnerships for straight couples who live together for financial reasons.

Although gay marriage is already illegal in Florida, Amendment 2 would enshrine the prohibition in the Florida Constitution, making it nearly impossible for a judge to overturn.

Supporters, primarily conservative and Christian groups, say their goal is straightforward and deserving of constitutional shelter: to ”protect” marriage by defining it exclusively as a union between a man and a woman. Doing so, they say, would benefit children by promoting a traditional family with a mother and father — not two moms or two dads.

”Children always fare better when they have a mother and father,” said John Stemberger, president and general counsel of the Florida Family Policy Council, which is promoting the Yes On 2 campaign. ”We should not, as a matter of law and public policy, create inherently motherless and fatherless homes.”

But opponents say the Florida Marriage Protection Amendment isn’t a gay issue, but rather a measure that could negatively affect many heterosexual couples as well.

They point to particular wording in the amendment that they say could lead to unmarried couples — gay and straight — losing hospital visitation rights, the ability to make emergency medical decisions, and domestic partner health benefits provided by employers.

The proof, they say, is what has happened in other states where similar amendments have passed.

Since Michigan voters approved a ”marriage protection” amendment in 2004, the state Supreme Court has struck down domestic partner benefits, including health insurance and pensions. A battle is also under way in Kentucky to eliminate domestic partner benefits for employees of state universities because of similar legislation.

”This amendment says that because marriage is between a man and a woman, nothing else counts,” said Derek Newton, campaign manager for Florida Red & Blue, the bipartisan organization running the SayNo2 campaign to defeat the amendment. ”It could take away existing rights and benefits of Floridians.”

For the record, I voted against it.

– How Low They Will Actually Go: The Pennsylvania GOP compares voting for Obama to “underestimating” what the Germans did in the 1930’s.

There are things you should not say unless you really, really mean them, and events you should not invoke lightly. Saying that voting for Obama, or for McCain, or for any of the major party candidates in my adult lifetime, would be a mistake that is in any way “similar” to underestimating the horror of the Nazis is one of them.

We should never forget what the Nazis actually did, or what the Pennsylvania Republican Party has seen fit to invoke so lightly; and we should not dishonor those who were murdered by using them to score cheap political points.

– David Brooks: McCain Gave Up the Center. Subbing for Frank Rich, Mr. Brooks bemoans John McCain’s inability to be Alexander Hamilton and Teddy Roosevelt.

The Hamiltonian-Bull Moose tendency is the great, moderate strain in American politics. In some sense this whole campaign was a contest to see which party could reach out from its base and occupy that centrist ground. The Democratic Party did that. Senior Democrats like Robert Rubin, Larry Summers and Jason Furman actually created something called The Hamilton Project to lay out a Hamiltonian approach for our day.

McCain and Republicans stayed within their lines. There was a lot of talk about earmarks. There was a good health care plan that was never fully explained. And there was Sarah Palin, who represents the old resentments and the narrow appeal of conventional Republicanism.

As a result, Democrats now control the middle. Self-declared moderates now favor Obama by 59 to 30, according to the New York Times/CBS News poll. Suburban voters favor Obama 50 to 39. Voters over all give him a 21 point lead when it comes to better handling the economy and a 14 point lead on tax policy, according to the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

McCain would be an outstanding president. In government, he has almost always had an instinct for the right cause. He has become an experienced legislative craftsman. He is stalwart against the country’s foes and cooperative with its friends. But he never escaped the straightjacket [sic] of a party that is ailing and a conservatism that is behind the times. And that’s what makes the final weeks of this campaign so unspeakably sad.

– Backgrounder: an inside look at Joe Biden.

Though known to much of the public as a gabby, gaffe-prone, backslapping Irish boyo from Scranton, Pa., in private councils and in the corridors of the Senate he is known as an ambitious, astute, calculating politician always looking at the next step.

Mr. Biden’s life and career have been marked by repeated episodes of wreckage and recovery, some dealt by fate, others by his own flaws. His aim this year, at age 65 and with 35 years in the Senate behind him, was to put himself in a position to make one last move. With the White House foreclosed to him after two humbling defeats, Mr. Biden was eyeing the two most appealing alternatives, the vice president’s mansion on the grounds of the Naval Observatory and the executive suite on the seventh floor of the State Department.

Few people in American politics set the vice presidency as their final goal. But the office has been gaining in stature and influence for three decades and Mr. Biden came to believe, aides said, that he could influence American policy more by serving at the side of the president than he could as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. He signaled his eagerness for the job in a June appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” saying “of course” he would accept if it were offered.

Two months later, Mr. Obama did just that. Mr. Biden quickly agreed after being assured that Mr. Obama wanted him as a close-in adviser.

It is unclear how Mr. Biden will perform in the job if the Obama-Biden ticket wins in November. He has said that he has never had a boss and is not used to playing second fiddle, having been elected to the Senate 36 years ago at the age of 29.

Since becoming Mr. Obama’s running mate, Mr. Biden has been campaigning day to day in out-of-the-way places, followed by a tiny press corps and a handful of aides, selling the virtues of the man he would serve. His every move is dictated by Obama aides in Chicago. Mr. Biden at times bristles at the close supervision, but he seems to need it — he has gone off message enough times in enough ways to induce some heartburn among the Obama high command, as when he suggested last week that Mr. Obama, a 47-year-old first-term senator, would be tested as president by an international crisis during his first six months in office, unhelpfully injecting the question of experience into the daily back and forth with the Republicans.

– Whatever Happened To…? Sally Struthers hits the stage in Nunsense.

Although it’s been 30 years since Struthers left All in the Family, she is still remembered for playing Archie Bunker’s daughter, but she hasn’t been resting on those memories.

“I’m still standing. Didn’t I retire? No I didn’t retire,” she said semi-indignantly. “I’ve just been on TV for the last seven years for Gilmore Girls.” And while she was appearing in a recurring role — she played neighbor Babette Dell — on the WB/CW series, she was also appearing in a recurring role in CBS’ Still Standing, playing the manipulative mother of series star Mark Addy.

She’s been in Grease, The Odd Couple, and Annie on Broadway, and has appeared in several movies and on the stages of regional theaters, playing Dolly Levi in Hello Dolly, Miss Mona in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and Jeanette Burmeister in The Full Monty.

Now she’s in Nunsense and is loving it.

The plot revolves around the Little Sisters of Hoboken, whose cook accidentally poisons most of the order (five of them didn’t eat the vichyssoise; they were off playing bingo). The survivors’ coffers are pretty low, so, led by Rev. Mother Regina (Struthers) they decide to put on a variety show in the school auditorium to supplement the burial fund. Among the acts are tap and ballet dancing, comic routines, and some funny surprises.

“You know, it’s not about being a Catholic nun, this show. This show’s about being an entertainer. The nuns … happen to be wearing habits and veils and wimples and scapulas, but we’re showgirls,” Struthers said.

Nunsense made its off-Broadway debut in 1985 and ran for more than 3,600 performances, becoming the second-longest-running off-Broadway show, behind The Fantasticks. It’s been translated into 26 languages with more than 6,000 productions worldwide.

And it finally made it to Toledo.

– Doonesbury: plumber’s cracks.

– Opus: the cliffhanger…

– The Insiders: Jane Mayer at The New Yorker on how Gov. Sarah Palin has been courting the Washington insiders to climb the GOP ladder all along.

From the start of her political career, Palin has positioned herself as an insurgent intent on dislodging entrenched interests. In 1996, a campaign pamphlet for her first mayoral run—recently obtained by The New Republic—strikes the same note of populist resentment that Palin did at the Convention: “I’m tired of ‘business as usual’ in this town, and of the ‘Good Ol’ Boys’ network that runs the show here.” Yet Palin has routinely turned to members of Washington’s Old Guard for help. After she became the mayor of Wasilla, Palin oversaw the hiring of a law firm to represent the town’s interests in Washington, D.C. The Wasilla account was handled by Steven Silver, a Washington-area lobbyist who had been the chief of staff to Alaska’s long-serving Republican senator Ted Stevens, who was indicted in July on charges of accepting illegal gifts and is now standing trial. (Silver declined to discuss his ties to Palin.) As the Washington Post reported, Silver’s efforts in the capital helped Wasilla, a town of sixty-seven hundred residents, secure twenty-seven million dollars in federal earmarks. During this election season, however, Palin has presented herself as more abstemious, saying, “I’ve championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress.”

In February, 2007, Adam Brickley gave himself a mission: he began searching for a running mate for McCain who could halt the momentum of the Democrats. Brickley, a self-described “obsessive” political junkie who recently graduated from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, told me that he began by “randomly searching Wikipedia and election sites for Republican women.” Though he generally opposes affirmative action, gender drove his choice. “People were talking about Hillary at the time,” he recalled. Brickley said that he “puzzled over every Republican female politician I knew.” Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, of Texas, “waffled on social issues”; Senator Olympia Snowe, of Maine, was too moderate. He was running out of options, he recalled, when he said to himself, “What about that lady who just got elected in Alaska?” Online research revealed that she had a strong grassroots following; as Brickley put it, “I hate to use the words ‘cult of personality,’ but she reminded me of Obama.”

– Frank Rich: The lingering scent of W.

As the G.O.P.’s long night of the long knives begins, myths are already setting in among the right’s storm troops and the punditocracy alike as to what went wrong. And chief among them are the twin curses of Bush and the “headwinds” of the economy. No Republican can win if the party’s incumbent president is less popular than dirt, we keep being told, or if a looming Great Depression 2 is Issue No. 1.

This is an excuse, not an explanation. It absolves McCain of much of the blame and denies Obama much of the credit for their campaigns. It arouses pity for McCain when he deserves none. It rewrites history.

Bush’s impact on the next Republican presidential candidate did not have to be so devastating. McCain isn’t, as he and his defenders keep protesting, a passive martyr to a catastrophic administration. He could have made separating himself from Bush the brave, central and even conservative focus of his campaign. Far from doing that, he embraced the Bush ethos — if not the incredible shrinking man himself — more tightly than ever. The candidate who believes in “country first” decided to put himself first and sell out his principles. That ignoble decision is what accounts for both the McCain campaign’s failures and its sleaze. It’s a decision McCain made on his own and for which he has yet to assume responsibility.

Though it seems a distant memory now, McCain was a maverick once. He did defy Bush on serious matters including torture, climate change and the over-the-top tax cuts that bankrupted a government at war and led to the largest income inequality in America since the 1930s. But it isn’t just his flip-flopping on some of these and other issues that turned him into a Bush acolyte. The full measure of McCain’s betrayal of his own integrity cannot even be found in that Senate voting record — 90 percent in lockstep with the president — that Obama keeps throwing in his face.

The Bushian ethos that McCain embraced, as codified by Karl Rove, is larger than any particular vote or policy. Indeed, by definition that ethos is opposed to the entire idea of policy. The whole point of the Bush-Rove way of doing business is that principles, coherent governance and even ideology must always be sacrificed for political expediency, no matter the cost to the public good.

[…]

At least McCain had half a point on Wednesday night when he said, “I am not President Bush.” What he has offered his country this year is an older, crankier, more unsteady version of Bush. Tragically, he can no sooner escape our despised president than he can escape himself.

– Hope for a Loss: Amendment 2 — the ban on same-sex marriage in Florida — is polling below 60%, the threshold needed to pass.

The poll of 600 likely voters shows support for Amendment 2 at 53 percent, less than the 60 percent approval rate required to change the constitution.

The gay-marriage question is one of six statewide referendums on this year’s lengthy ballot. The poll found uncertainty high on all of the rest, which range from tax breaks for homeowners who install hurricane protection to elimination of racist language from the state constitution.

Backers of the gay-marriage ban say the poll should be a wakeup call to conservatives to vote. Opponents say the poll shows they have made progress in explaining that the proposal could jeopardize domestic partnership benefits that many governments and companies offer straight and gay employees.

Gay marriage has been prohibited under state law for more than a decade, but supporters say a constitutional amendment would protect the law from court challenges.

The amendment would define marriage as between a man and a woman and would say that no “substantial equivalent” is legal either. Opponents fear that if the amendment passes, conservatives will raise legal challenges to domestic partnership benefits, from health insurance to hospital visitation rights.

Voters are split over the use of the term “marriage,” said Del Ali, whose firm conducted the poll. The poll found strong sentiment for same-sex couples’ having the same legal rights as married heterosexual couples. Seventy-seven percent of those polled favored equal rights for same-sex couples, while 15 percent were opposed and 8 percent were undecided.

Support for Amendment 2 was weakest among women and Democrats and strongest among men and Republicans. Just over half of the independents surveyed opposed the amendment, almost as high as the Democratic opposition.

– The Miami Herald endorses Barack Obama:

In other elections, voters have complained of having to make a choice between two bad candidates. That is not the case this time. The nation is fortunate to have good candidates and a clear choice. Sen. Obama represents the best chance for America to make a clean break with the culture wars and failed policies of the past, and begin to restore the hope and promise of America as the world’s greatest democracy.

Following the trend of some other papers, the Herald lists the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin as one of Mr. McCain’s liabilities.

– Doonesbury: Blogging for dignity and dollars.

– Opus: Steve’s exposure.

– Holy Toledo! The University of Toledo Rockets beat the University of Michigan 13-10. In football.

ANN ARBOR – This one cost Michigan much more than the $500,000 it paid Toledo to visit the Big House.

And for the Rockets, well, they can’t even put a value on it.

UT shocked the Wolverines, the oddsmakers and all of college football yesterday with a 13-10 triumph in front of 107,267 stunned fans at Michigan Stadium. The Rockets, playing a varsity game against traditional national power UM for the first time in school history, were 16 1/2-point underdogs.

“As a team we came in confident, and we knew that we had a chance to win this game,” said UT safety Tyrrell Herbert, who keyed the Rockets’ victory with two interceptions – including one he returned 100 yards for a touchdown in the first quarter.

“We knew that we were the underdogs, but to get a play like that – it just fueled the fire,” Herbert continued. “We knew that we could win in this stadium and we knew that we could beat these guys.”

Arguably the most surprising – if not biggest – win in UT history was sealed when Wolverines kicker K.C. Lopata’s 26-yard field-goal attempt sailed wide left with four seconds left.

The Rockets defeated Penn State 24-6 on Sept. 2, 2000, but that UT team went on to win 10 games. The bunch who took the field against the Wolverines yesterday had just one win in five games, were losers of their last three contests (all at home) and hadn’t scored a point in six quarters.

– Sharpening the Knives: The election is still three weeks away, but already the GOP is showing signs of discord and recriminations for the losses they anticipate here in Florida.

For the first time in more than a decade, Florida Republicans are considering the almost unthinkable: Their presidential nominee could lose the state.

The economy, an unpopular president, a strong opponent, and the inability of John McCain to reverse poll numbers despite repeatedly revising his strategy has top state Republicans looking for someone to blame.

”There are a lot of folks who have never been in a foxhole before and are clearly nervous,” said Brian Ballard, a major McCain fundraiser. ”There is some finger-pointing going on a little bit too soon.”

Even Gov. Charlie Crist, who helped deliver Florida for McCain during the primary, said he will spend the final weeks before Election Day minding the state’s weak economy rather than campaigning for the Arizona senator.

”When I have time to help, I’ll try to do that,” Crist said last week, after he flew around the state with McCain running mate Sarah Palin. Saturday, he skipped a McCain football rally and instead went to Disney World.

Once considered a potential running mate, Crist had pledged to do all he could for McCain and spent several days this summer campaigning for the Republican nominee in and outside Florida. He faults the tough economic times for McCain’s difficult time in Florida, where he trails rival Barack Obama by about 5 percentage points in the polls.

No Republican has won the White House in modern times without carrying Florida. The last to lose the state was McCain’s former colleague, Sen. Bob Dole, in 1996. Some Republicans say the state party hasn’t done enough, while others blame McCain’s national campaign.

Roger Stone, a longtime McCain supporter, said the state party and the national campaign bear almost equal blame.

”This effort lacks coordination and a cooperative spirit and it’s showing,” Stone said. ”But it’s more than mechanics. The campaign has no consistent message.”

Over the summer, the Obama camp spent at least $10 million on Florida television ads — 4,000 of the spots attacking McCain — while McCain spent nothing.

The failure by the party and McCain’s campaign to respond to an Obama radio ad in Florida that bashed McCain over embryonic stem-cell research was ”a perfect example of them not being on the ball in Florida,” Stone said, echoing numerous Florida Republicans. But national campaign officials said McCain is within striking distance of Obama in the polls, has ample time to turn things around, and had a winning strategy until Wall Street’s crash.

– Troy, Ohio with FiveThirtyEight: The poll site is doing its own version of On the Road as it looks at the people who will be voting in November.

The first thing that stands out about the Troy, Ohio Obama field office is its placement. It’s right in the heart of town. It catches everyone’s attention — you can’t miss it.

The next thing that caught our attention was that, since the office had first opened, 800 different people from Miami County had come through the office’s doors to volunteer. There were only 51,760 voters in the entire county in 2004, and a mere 17,606 were Kerry voters.

4.5% of the entire Miami County Kerry vote has already walked in the doors to volunteer.

This is a brand new development. Ed White, a first-time volunteer who spoke to us in the Troy office, said he’d lived here 24 years and had long “felt the stultifying effect of speaking up in a community so Republican.” Miami County went for Bush by 32 points in 2004. After that election, there were bitter feelings in an tight-knit area woven together by approximately 33 community organizations and dinner clubs. National issues had split ordinarily more connected people apart, and without Democratic organization, folks like Ed felt isolated.

This year, Ed is volunteering along with everyone else.

How did he get started? I asked. A friend named Margaret Begg had talked to him a handful of times, and soon enough Ed was in the office. “Everybody assumes everybody else is a Republican here,” he said. The office location opened things up.

For her part, Begg has helped ignite a Democratic grassroots awakening in Miami County. Jake Schlachter, a Troy native who returned to Ohio to help out in this year’s election and who was there for that first meeting, told us he’s been amazed to observe his hometown’s transformation. Starting from the spring with a group of five around Begg’s kitchen table, the grassroots effort grew to 16, then 41, then 85, then over 200. The most inspiring thing Schlachter says he’s seen this year is now that Begg and her husband have led this grassroots shift, they’re indefinitely suspending plans they’d had to move away. The Beggs want to stay and build the infrastructure.

– Frank Rich: Stoking the fire.

All’s fair in politics. John McCain and Sarah Palin have every right to bring up William Ayers, even if his connection to Obama is minor, even if Ayers’s Weather Underground history dates back to Obama’s childhood, even if establishment Republicans and Democrats alike have collaborated with the present-day Ayers in educational reform. But it’s not just the old Joe McCarthyesque guilt-by-association game, however spurious, that’s going on here. Don’t for an instant believe the many mindlessly “even-handed” journalists who keep saying that the McCain campaign’s use of Ayers is the moral or political equivalent of the Obama campaign’s hammering on Charles Keating.

What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.

By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.

That’s a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. “Barack Obama’s friend tried to kill my family” was how a McCain press release last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident from 1970 — when Obama was 8.

We all know what punishment fits the crime of murder, or even potential murder, if the security of post-9/11 America is at stake. We all know how self-appointed “patriotic” martyrs always justify taking the law into their own hands.

Obama can hardly be held accountable for Ayers’s behavior 40 years ago, but at least McCain and Palin can try to take some responsibility for the behavior of their own supporters in 2008. What’s troubling here is not only the candidates’ loose inflammatory talk but also their refusal to step in promptly and strongly when someone responds to it with bloodthirsty threats in a crowded arena. Joe Biden had it exactly right when he expressed concern last week that “a leading American politician who might be vice president of the United States would not just stop midsentence and turn and condemn that.” To stay silent is to pour gas on the fires.

– Doonesbury: Family values.

– Opus: Where will Opus end up?

– The Pulpit is For Preaching: The Blade on political endorsements as a part of a sermon.

NEARLY three dozen pastors in churches in 22 states stuck their toes across the line separating issue advocacy from endorsement of specific candidates a week ago today. Fortunately, their attempt to spark a court battle in hopes of overturning rules prohibiting political endorsements by tax-exempt houses of worship likely will fail.

They took part in “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” at the urging of the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative legal group based in Arizona that believes the 1954 law that made it illegal for tax-exempt organizations to publicly support or oppose political candidates is unconstitutional.

Why, indeed, should not ministers, priests, rabbis, mullahs, and other religious leaders speak from their pulpits to urge their flocks to support specific candidates? Doesn’t the First Amendment protect speech absolutely?

As a matter of fact, the First Amendment does prohibit Congress from making any law “abridging the freedom of speech.” But it has also long been recognized that government can treat political and nonpolitical speech differently, limiting the former in ways that it cannot the latter.

Pastors are not being denied the right to endorse candidates. They can take part in whatever political activity they wish outside their churches. They’re not even being denied the right to endorse from the pulpit. Instead, limits on politicking from the pulpit are a precondition for maintaining tax-exempt status. Donations to religious organizations are tax deductible, political donations are not.

The purpose of the 1954 law was to prevent religious donors from deducting political donations from their taxes. If they give up their tax-exempt status, religious leaders can use their sermons to endorse anyone they choose, but they are not inclined to do that.

The current restrictions are hardly odious. Pastors can make plain their religious positions on social and moral issues; but they must stop short of naming names.

That is what groups such as ADF want at least Christian churches to be able to do. ADF believes congregants are both stupid and easily influenced by authority figures. It’s less clear whether they’d want mullahs and rabbis doing the same thing.

[…]

U.S. religious leaders have a long, positive history of political activism. They also serve the vital functions of promoting voter registration and providing voter information. They can do so, in part, precisely because they honor the line that separates issue advocacy and partisan politics.

As the Rev. Eric Williams, a United Church of Christ minister in Ohio wrote, according to the Washington Post, “The role of the church … and of its religious leaders is to stand apart from government, to prophetically speak truth to power, and to encourage a national dialogue that transcends the divisiveness of electoral politics and preserves for every citizen our ‘first liberty.'”

Amen to that.

It’s also ironic that these pastors, who demand equal rights to speak out about political matters and say that the tax laws restrict their rights as citizens, have no problem whatsoever in supporting laws and Constitutional amendments that restrict the rights of members of their own congregation who happen to be gay or lesbian.

– Gay Families: Michael Mayo notes in the Sun-Sentinel that no matter what the law says, gay families are here.

Adelle Barsky-Moore is 5, and she doesn’t know about wedge politics and the Culture War. All she knows is that she loves her two dads and they love her.

Her parents, Allan Barsky and Greg Moore, have been together 10 years. They were married in Canada, Barsky’s native country, in 2003. They wear wedding bands, are registered domestic partners in Broward and live in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea.

Barsky, a professor at Florida Atlantic University, is opposed to Amendment 2 on the November ballot. It would constitutionally define marriage in Florida as between a man and woman. It states, “No other legal union that is treated as marriage or the substantial equivalent thereof shall be valid or recognized.”

A few weeks ago, Adelle tagged along as her parents campaigned against the amendment.

“Why are you telling people not to vote?” she asked.

Barsky explained they want people to vote, but were telling them to vote no on the amendment. He explained it wouldn’t allow two moms or two dads to get married.

“She got really upset and started crying,” Barsky said. “She said, ‘If it passes, does that mean you and daddy have to break up?'”

Barsky told me this story last weekend, during a group picnic at Holiday Park in Fort Lauderdale. Adelle and other kids romped on the playground while parents kept an eye on them. There was fried chicken, macaroni salad and brownies on the pavilion tables.

“Just like anyone else on a Sunday afternoon,” Barsky said.

The crowd of 60 had female couples with children from artificial insemination and previous heterosexual marriages, male couples with children from international adoptions and surrogate births.

The group, South Florida Family Pride, has been getting together for the last six years. It sprouted from a Yahoo! forum board and now has more than 250 registered families. They have picnics and holiday parties, celebrate new arrivals and share frustrations.

“The first time we came, I started to cry,” said Thea Sommer, of Weston, who has two children from a previous marriage and a partner of five years, Maria DiPietro-Sommer. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, we’re not alone.'”

Said Michael Gallacher, a group co-founder who has two children: “It means so much for these kids to see they’re not the only ones with two moms or two dads.”

More than anything I could say, this scene showed why Amendment 2 is irrelevant, misguided and just plain wrong.

Same-sex couples exist, and they’re raising loving families.

In that respect it doesn’t matter what state law, which bans gay marriage and gay adoption, or the Florida Constitution says.

Except it does matter. For these families, life would be easier, less stressful and more just if the state gave them the same rights as heterosexuals.

For now, they’ll consider it victory enough if an amendment that codifies inequality doesn’t get the 60 percent needed for approval.

“People should have 100 more important things to worry about these days than whether or not we can get married,” said Karen Lynskey-Lake, of Weston. “It’s beyond ridiculous.”

– The I-4 Election: The battleground in the battleground state of Florida is the corridor of Interstate 4 from Tampa to Daytona.

Margel Zukunft, 81 years old, pulled weeds from around a for-sale sign on a recent evening outside her three-bedroom home in the Sun City retirement community near Tampa.

Alone for the past decade, she longs to move to a condominium offering dinner companions and lawn care. But in this panic-stricken economy, Zukunft has no offers — and shaky confidence in both Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain.

”I can almost remember in 1929 when people went to the bank and took their money out, and I can’t help but wonder if I should do that,” she said. ”I wonder if either candidate is capable of getting this mess straightened out.”

Zukunft’s anxiety about the economy is a strong current that runs through the disparate communities clustered along Interstate 4, the Central Florida highway considered a gateway to one-tenth of the electoral votes needed to win the White House.

Nearly one out of five of the state’s unaffiliated voters live in this swath between Tampa and Daytona Beach, and an even higher percentage are considered ”persuadable” Democrats and Republicans. No wonder the area is seeing a flurry of candidate visits, with Republican vice presidential contender Sarah Palin slated to campaign Monday in Clearwater and Fort Myers.

”Someone suggested to me that the whole thing could come down to a couple square blocks in downtown Tampa, and that’s not out of the question,” said Richard Scher, a University of Florida professor, who calculated that the 12 counties hugging I-4 host 38 percent of the state’s independent voters.

The latest statewide polls tell a familiar story, with the Republican nominee dominating the northern part of the state and the Democrat carrying the more liberal southern end, leaving the state’s heterogeneous midsection up for grabs.

Most polls give Sen. Obama a slight lead in Florida.

– Frank Rich: John McCain’s worst enemy could be Sarah Palin.

After the debate, Republicans who had been bailing on Palin rushed back to the fold. They know her relentless ambition is the only hope for saving a ticket headed by a warrior who is out of juice and out of ideas. So what if she is preposterously unprepared to run the country in the midst of its greatest economic crisis in 70 years? She looks and sounds like a winner.

You can understand why they believe that. She has more testosterone than anyone else at the top of her party. McCain and his surrogates are forever blaming their travails on others, wailing about supposed sexist and journalistic biases around the clock. McCain even canceled an interview with Larry King, for heaven’s sake, in a fit of pique at a CNN anchor, Campbell Brown.

We are not a nation of whiners, as Phil Gramm would have it, but the G.O.P. is now the party of whiners. That rebranding became official when Republican House leaders moaned that a routine partisan speech by Nancy Pelosi had turned their members against the bailout bill. As the stock market fell nearly 778 points, Barney Frank taunted his G.O.P. peers with pitch-perfect mockery: “Somebody hurt my feelings, so I will punish the country!”

Talk about the world coming full circle. This is the same Democrat who had been slurred as “Barney Fag” in the mid-1990s by Dick Armey, a House leader of the government-bashing Gingrich revolution that helped lower us into this debacle. Now Frank was ridiculing the House G.O.P. as a bunch of sulking teenage girls. His wisecrack stung — and stuck.

Palin is an antidote to the whiny Republican image that Frank nailed. Alaska’s self-styled embodiment of Joe Sixpack is not a sulker, but a pistol-packing fighter. That’s why she draws the crowds and (as she puts it) “energy” that otherwise elude the angry McCain. But she is still the candidate for vice president, not president. Americans do not vote for vice president.

So how can a desperate G.O.P. save itself? As McCain continues to fade into incoherence and irrelevance, the last hope is that he’ll come up with some new game-changing stunt to match his initial pick of Palin or his ill-fated campaign “suspension.” Until Thursday night, more than a few Republicans were fantasizing that his final Hail Mary pass would be to ditch Palin so she can “spend more time” with her ever-growing family. But the debate reminded Republicans once again that it’s Palin, not McCain, who is their last hope for victory.

You have to wonder how long it will be before they plead with him to think of his health, get out of the way and pull the ultimate stunt of flipping the ticket. Palin, we can be certain, wouldn’t even blink.

– Sports News: The Dodgers eliminate the Cubs, so it will be 101 years since they last won a Series.

– Doonesbury: Winning it this time.

– Opus: the love chronicles.