The News & TeleGraff

My 15 Votes: 34 + 63 (- 5) = Victory?

An addendum to Emily's field reporting on all of the EchoDitto team members out there helping to turn our nation blue on Tuesday: I'm just back from canvassing in the Seventh District of swing state Pennsylvania.

Many "experts" believe the Keystone State--and thus, perhaps, the election--will be won or lost in suburban Philly, and so it was that I found myself spending my last weekend before the election trying to get my 15 votes. The Seventh is one of many hot races in the area: Paul Scoles, the Democratic congressional candidate, is a great Dean-style candidate and deserves to win against the extreme right-wingnut incumbent Curt Weldon.

Canvassing, as always, was educational in many respects. I went in a mixed group of students from PA and DC as well as some community members--all told about 30 people. We met early for donuts and caravanned to the union hall in Chichester, where we ended up stuck in the local Halloween parade for nearly an hour. The Kerry/Edwards staging area was alive with activity, people buzzing all around and staff hurriedly handing out walk lists to the steady stream of volunteers coming in off the street. We were assigned walk lists in two communities, and by the time we were leaving the main staging area at about 11:30 the Kerry/Edwards office had distributed all of its walk lists for the day.

Most of the houses we visited there was little doubt about their support. Pulling into my assigned community of Haverford, we passed a Kerry/Edwards visibility, and at the houses we visited most people had lawn signs up (including a number of Main Line Moms for Kerry signs) and many had bumper stickers on their cars. At one target house (with sign and bumper sticker) a harried mom answered the door: "Do you really need to ask?" Her young son quickly came to the door, shouting "Vote Kerry!" She apologized, saying, "He's really a big supporter." Too bad he looked about 10 years too young to vote. I gave him two stickers anyway.

I were hardly alone on the campaign trail though yesterday. Residents reported that MoveOn.org canvassers moved through the same neighborhood in the morning before we ever arrived on the scene, and Governor Ed Rendell's Kerry/Edwards bus tour rolled through Haverford while we worked nearby. I didn't manage to sign up a single volunteer all day because most people were already volunteering in some way. I met several poll watchers, Election Day GOTVers, local Party officials. When I went back to the union hall at 7 p.m. to turn in the completed walk lists, the whole room had been converted into busy phone banks. Anyway there was a lot of passion and energy out there.

The low point of the day came when we visited a nursing home that contained five of our target voters for the day. We spoke with the nursing supervisor who agreed to allow us to speak with the residents on our list, but when we started to go over the list we were met with pauses at each name. "Um, no, he passed away." "Nope, she must've died two years ago." Turned out none of our five targeted voters was still alive. Hmm.

All told, I talked with 34 people yesterday--all knew where their polling place was and planned on voting for Kerry/Edwards--and had 63 "no answers" (including the five at the nursing home).

Perhaps the most exciting thing for me: We passed a lot of Kerry/Edwards lawn signs at houses that weren't on our list as being strong supporters. Perhaps there's a silent majority out there just waiting for Tuesday to roll around?

15 Votes

In case you needed anymore motivation about why this election is critical, I got this email from a friend in Nevada last night:

We all know that 2000 demonstrated that every vote really does count (or at least they should!). If you needed another reminder, I want to share some Nevada data from this evening....

Nevada began early voting on October 16th. Since that date 267,943 people have early voted, which is more than double those who early voted in 2000. In 2000, a total of 608,970 people cast ballots -- thus today we stand at 44% of the 2000 total voter turnout with early vote alone.

With 267,943 people having cast ballots at early vote locations, the county recorders report how many among those who have voted are registered Republicans and Democrats.

The spread separating the number of votes cast by Republicans and Democrats?

15 votes.

15 fewer Democrats have have cast their ballots out of the 267,943 votes cast. 15 votes is 0.006% of the total votes cast.

If you ever needed a reason to re-evaluate what you are doing over the next 5 days, let this be it. This election will be decided by bodies on the street, by knocking on the doors of people who otherwise won't vote. As a walker, you could easily make contact with 15 people on one route.

Go to the nearest swing state this weekend and for Election Day. You will be making a difference...

So, 15 votes. What are you going to do to get 15 votes?

...

Get out there and make a difference. We won't have another chance.

OMG

[cross-posted]

Tony Knowles, the hard-fought Democratic Senate candidate in Alaska, has released a new ad targeted specifically towards people who don't pay as much attention to regular political advertising--the young voters who will make the difference in this election.

The ad, entitled OMG (second ad down on that page), is a discussion done completely over IM, complete with slang and emoticons and everything.

I think that Tony Knowles' campaign 'gets' it. Let's hope that come next Tuesday, Alaska gets him....

The Greatest Team in Baseball

My team made history tonight. I've sat through games at Fenway where the temperature on the field was below freezing. I've had beer dumped on me by rowdy fans in the cheap bleacher seats. I've given up hope year after year.

But none of that mattered tonight -- a night that saw the first lunar eclipse in the history of the World Series; a night that marked 18 years exactly since the Mets destroyed Beantown's hopes in Game 7; a night that saw history made in Busch Stadium in St. Louis.

Tonight I saw perhaps the greatest baseball team ever win one of the smoothest World Series ever. They played cool and mechanical. They played to win. There was no stopping them. Derek Lowe was rock soldi, as was Pedro before him, and Schilling before them. Boston had the Big Mo and they made it look so easy.

Accolades and superlatives come easily these days. Rhetoric doesn't mean much (Can you name the horse that this spring was supposed to be the greatest horse in decades?). But, tonight, oh, tonight.

Tonight, 24 guys wearing red stockings did what no team had done in 86 years; they got there by doing what no team in the history of the sport had done; and the pitcher on the mound became the first pitcher ever to clinch all three rounds of a post-season. This is historic. This is what we've waited for all these many years. This my friends, was baseball. This is why it will forever be the greatest sport in America.

Beware, all those who dare to cross our path, there are some powerful cosmic karma forces at work this year. This wasn't just vindication -- this was pre-ordained destiny from on-high. You may be faith-based, but this year our faith is stronger.

The Sox broke the curse. The New England Patriots are on a record winning streak. What's the next major event involving a Boston-area favorite? What will the next historic acheivement be?

2004 is Boston's house.

Please.

Just please. Tonight was good. One more. By us. Please.

Endorsements That Matter

[cross-posted]

There's been a lot of talk over the past couple of weeks about newspapers endorsements in the presidential race:

Sen. John Kerry now holds a fairly narrow lead in the number of endorsements, but he has gained many more of the larger papers, holding about a 17 million to 12 million edge by circulation. Most telling, however, is that at least 35 papers that backed Bush in 2000 have now switched to Kerry, and another nine that supported Bush before have declared their neutrality this year. Only five so far have gone from Gore to Bush.

Twice, though, in recent days, I've come across blogs endorsing candidates. Yesterday, I saw that the insightful Micro Persuasion, run by Steve Rubel, endorsed Kerry:

I have shied away from any significant discussion of politics on this weblog, but after seeing Fahrenheit 911 over the weekend, watching the debates and thinking about it a lot, I now feel compelled to officially endorse John Kerry for President.

And today BoingBoing.net endorsed Kerry as well:

For us, the choice for Kerry involves simple things. Justice, liberty, privacy, transparency. Freedom of speech, thought, and technological expression. A woman's right to choose. Equal access to health care, education, and economic opportunity for all. The rule of law, at home and abroad. Peace. The enduring value of the American Constitution.

These are wonderful things. The Bush administration has proven both inability and unwillingness to protect them. In 2004, Kerry is the one.

Note that neither of these are political blogs. These are "ordinary" people who have a primarily tangential interest in politics, but they're using the printing presses available to them to express their political preference.

To me, this is really another break in the wall between citizens and journalists. In some ways, these blog endorsements are just as "real" as newspaper endorsements. As Dan Gillmor would say, we [are] the media.

Crossfire Crosstalk

The Stewart-Crossfire entry is still bubbling out there. The Washington Post reports on the latest developments yesterday.

What really bothered me about the Stewart's appearance on Friday was how Tucker Carlson kept interrupting him and not letting him finish a sentence. It seems that that happens how on too many debate shows. It was sort of funny when it was just the McLaughlin Group, but now its basically every political/current events show out there.

Anyway, I wanted to see whether I was right that there's not much room for reasoned debate on "Crossfire"—regardless of the hosts' claims to Stewart. I pulled the last 20 transcripts of Crossfire and counted up the number of the times that the transcript noted [Crosstalk].

"Crosstalk," in case you're not familiar with it, is a term that describes in transcripts spots where more than one person is talking at once, and, thus, the conversation is unintelligible.

Perhaps not surprisingly, crosstalk is a major part of Crossfire. In fact, during the last 20 shows, it occurred an average of 34 times per show—rather astounding given that the show is only 30 minutes long, which minus commercials, intros and news breaks, probably means its running time is closer to 21 or 22 minutes.

That's roughly one distinct interruption of crosstalk every 45 seconds. Not much room for dialogue there.

What was more interesting, though, is that there are significant differences between how the shows run based on which of the four hosts is present. James Carville and Tucker Carlson, Stewart's adversary on Friday, are the two worst hosts in terms of "interruption-ness." Shows with them on it have roughly twenty percent more interruptions than other hosts.

Some other fun stats for you:

# of the 5 shows with the most interruptions that involved Tucker Carlson: 4

# of the 5 shows with the least interruptions that involved Tucker Carlson: 0

Most number of [crosstalk] references in a single show: 76 (Oct. 12, 2004)

Average number of seconds between interruptions on Oct. 12th show: 19

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that perhaps Jon Stewart was saying that he thought America might be better served by a political conversation and debate-style that didn't involve inte[rruptions more than twice a minute.

[Full crosstalk and host-by-host results after the jump.]

Overall Crossfire Crosstalk Quotient: 33.9
Begala Crosstalk Quotient: 31.8
Carville Crosstalk Quotient: 43.0
Novak Crosstalk Quotient: 29.5
Carlson Crosstalk Quotient: 41.3
Right Guest Crosstalk Quotient: 21.0
Left Guest Crosstalk Quotient: 40.0

----------------

Date	Crosstalks	On the Left:	On the Right:	Show Title
20-Sep	32	Begala	Carlson	Bush and Kerry at War Over Iraq
21-Sep	28	Begala	Carlson	President Bush Delivers Message to United Nations
23-Sep	38	Begala	Carlson	Will Democracy Succeed in Iraq?
24-Sep	37	Carville	Novak	War of Words Over Terror
27-Sep	49	Carville	Carlson	Debate Expectations
28-Sep	18	Begala	Novak	Campaigns Talk Tough
29-Sep	38	Begala	Carlson	Matchup in Miami
30-Sep	20	Begala	Novak	Bush and Kerry Debate Iraq
1-Oct	25	Begala	Carlson	Who Won First Presidential Debate?
4-Oct	0 (!)	Begala	Guest	Gearing up for V.P. Debate: Stem Cell Research, Taxes, WMDs
5-Oct	49	Begala	Guest	Vice Presidential Showdown
6-Oct	23	Begala	Carlson	Vice Presidential Candidates Trade Punches
7-Oct	52	Begala	Carlson	Candidates Prepare For Showdown in Missouri
8-Oct	8	Begala	Guest	Presidential Candidates Face Off in Missouri
11-Oct	0 (!)	Begala	Guest	Who's Right in the War on Terror?
12-Oct	76	Begala	Carlson	Knockout Blow Likely in Third Presidential Debate?
13-Oct	48	Begala	Guest	Presidential Showdown in Arizona
14-Oct	40	Guest	Carlson	Final Presidential Push Begins
15-Oct	53	Begala	Carlson	Jon Stewart's America
18-Oct	43	Carville	Novak	Campaign Countdown

Terrorists and the Fourth Estate

Lest any of you are confused, I am not actually a political consultant. I'm a journalist at heart, through-and-through. My father and my grandfather were journalists their entire careers, and it's been bred in me from my earliest days. I'm hoping eventually to move back into something more writing or journalism-related. It's what makes me happiest because I've long believed that good journalism is one of the most noble professions and public services out there.

The ink in my blood is what made me stand up and cheer last week when Jon Stewart took the established media to task for their lousy fulfillment of their public charge. His reasoned tirade on "Crossfire" last Friday, and all that it represented was perhaps the greatest 20 minutes of television news I've seen since Peter Jennings reported from the falling of the Berlin Wall. I feel that in recent days the cogent and righteous media criticism has reached a new level. People are sick and tired of grasping at the sand that passes for journalism in America today.

I had dinner two weeks ago with two esteemed national political reporters and we spent much of the dinner discussing how the level of political discourse has fallen and-relatedly-the sorry state of media-public relations. The bitter partisan debate in this country is second only perhaps to the utter causticness of the war going on right now between the public and the media. Letters to the editors allege outright conspiracies, and blogs attack journalists as if they were the real terrorists (more on that later).

It's this level of personal animosity that I think is so confusing to so many practicing journalists. There's a massive disconnect between the readers and the writers. Following in the "proud" tradition of The Daily Howler, sites like the bitter Wilgoren Watch and the hilarious AdamNagourney.com have made hunting reporters a personal sport. While these reporters see themselves following in the footsteps of some of the greatest political journalists-men like Walter Cronkite, Walter Mears, and David Broder (in his younger, less CW-y days), who all set the political agenda with careful analysis during a once-a-day news cycle-too much of the public sees them as lazy hacks at best and apologists for the powerful at worst.

So much has changed. The top reporters of the Murrow-Cronkite-Chancellor-era were players, yes, but not in a public sense. They were bylines on the page, not regular faces on so-called "debate" shows that offer few complete sentences and logic. The Associated Press, for instance, has always prided itself on a certain level of anonymity for its writers, and so I can hardly imagine how Donna Cassada (the AP's National Political Editor) is dealing with the fact that one of her top reporters, Nedra Pickler, is so infamous for "bad" reporting that the blogs have coined a special term for her hacksterism: Nit Picklerings.

Surely, some of this acidity is just a sign of the times. As anyone observing this cycle knows, this election isn't normal. It's personal. The primaries were personal-Dean versus Kerry in a death match, followed by an intensely personal general election that has pitted a flip-flopping caricature against a smirking chimp and Darth Vader. That poison has spilled over into the press criticism, for sure, but I feel that it goes much deeper than that.

People are tired of the professional punditry and conventional wisdom offered on shows like Inside Politics or Crossfire. They're tired of the fact that the falafel-infested "No Spin Zone" is, in fact, nothing but spin, and that Chris Matthews' Hardball is nothing more than not-altogether-accurate talking points strung together by partisan hacks. Tom Tomorrow's cartoon today eviscerated the media for how it inflates and distorts our political discourse.

It's a long-parried indictment that journalists get lost in process because it's easier to cover than issues. Does anyone really think that the Mary Cheney comment in the debate is a bigger deal than the war on terror, the war in Iraq, the economy, jobs, and health care? I have friends who can't afford health care coverage they badly need; I have friends serving in Iraq; I have friends who have lost their jobs as the economy as teetered over the past four years. None of them care about Mary Cheney's sexuality, her parents' imparted shame, or Kerry's alleged malicousness. IT DOESN'T MATTER, FOLKS! Everyone recognizes that it's not a real debate, but the media still covers it as if it's the second coming of the Dean Scream (and don't get me started on things that didn't matter about real issues).

It's this whole anger-at-an-establishment-that-provides-window-dressing-in-place-of-answers mindset that Dean tapped by pointing out that Congress passed a Patient's Bill of Rights that failed to extend health care to a SINGLE American. That's not leadership, and we deserve better than that from the 535 men and women we've chosen to determine the future of the country. Likewise, Mary Cheney is not a real debate or a meaningful issue, but the press loves it because it's easy and makes for good talk and idle banter-which is what fills hours of the day on cable news, and thus, in turn, drives the print coverage.

People are, as Jon Stewart alluded to, hungry for something better. Perhaps even real leadership, real debate, and real answers:

STEWART: Here's just what I wanted to tell you guys.

CARLSON: Yes.

STEWART: Stop.

[LAUGHTER]

STEWART: Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America.... And come work for us, because we, as the people...

CARLSON: How do you pay?

STEWART: The people -- not well.

[LAUGHTER]

BEGALA: Better than CNN, I'm sure.

STEWART: But you can sleep at night.

[LAUGHTER]

STEWART: See, the thing is, we need your help. Right now, you're helping the politicians and the corporations. And we're left out there to mow our lawns.

....

BEGALA: Let me get this straight. If the indictment is -- if the indictment is -- and I have seen you say this -- that...

STEWART: Yes.

BEGALA: And that CROSSFIRE reduces everything, as I said in the intro, to left, right, black, white.

STEWART: Yes.

BEGALA: Well, it's because, see, we're a debate show.

STEWART: No, no, no, no, that would be great.

BEGALA: It's like saying The Weather Channel reduces everything to a storm front.

STEWART: I would love to see a debate show.

There was twenty minutes of them bantering back and forth. Stewart barely was able to finish a sentence, and Carlson and Begala both made his point for him better than he could have himself: There was no civilized discourse or debate on the show. They came at him with nonsense, and he came back at them with attempts at reason. His bottom line:

STEWART: You have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you fail miserably.

Washington Post Media Critic Howard Kurtz (himself no favorite of the blogs) touched on this issue in one sense today, by examining the common media phenomenon of giving both sides equal criticism without trying to impose any sense of moral judgment:

"Your instinct is that if we say bad things about one side you have to say bad things about the other side," says Adam Nagourney, the New York Times's chief political reporter. .... At issue is how far reporters should go in analyzing the candidates' attacks and ads, especially if one side is using a howitzer and the other a popgun.

We did this all the time in my college newspaper. You cover a speech, you find one person who liked it, one person who didn't, and you called it a day. That's lazy journalism. But that's exactly what we're seeing from our media today. Bush says that there's no WMD in Iraq, and the press feels obligated to say that Kerry is saying the war has cost less than he says it has. Those are not equivalent lies or deceptions. But in its attempts to impose "balance," the press feels like it should treat both the same. We expect more.

What we're seeing isn't honest journalism from our nation's scribes, but instead what they think could perhaps pass as honest journalism. It's the difference between a diamond ring and cubic zirconia. They may look the same, but you know one is worthwhile, and one's just pretty. Readers are cluing into this. They're demanding more. We want a higher standard in journalism. We want believable information, and we want people held accountable for what they say. For instance, in one of his few worthwhile endeavors this year, Daniel Okrent and others have made a point this year of trying to hone in on the cheap use of anonymous sources in political stories.

We're asking journalists to be less lazy-both intellectually and professionally. Considering how journalists write for a living, they can be remarkably casual with phrasing, writing almost in short-hand that makes sense to them. Words matter. Phrasing matters. Language is the most potent weapon available, and journalists-especially political journalists and commentators-swing it too carelessly. I carry around a beautiful pen, given as a present by Nicco, that says "The Pen is Mightier Than the Sword." It always has been, and it always will be.

We realize that the Protector of the Pen in today's society has lost sight of the public trust they've been given. What the established media doesn't understand is that it's precisely that same frustration that has given rise to blogs, and caused so many people to drop out of the established media world-turning online in the hopes of seeing real issues and real debates.

In a way, perhaps the blogs are right to go after journalists as if they were terrorists.

Lazy journalism will ultimately do more damage to America than Islamist terrorists could ever do. The Freedom of the Press is perhaps the greatest freedom America has to offer. It is, simply put, the engine that ensures the protection of all the others. It is up to articulate, thoughtful, and industrious journalists to hold our nation's power brokers accountable and to tell us when our government is failing us. We count on the media to hold in check corporate conglomerates and deceitful politicians, and to defend us against foes working against American ideals from the inside. Being a good journalist is about fighting for the little guy. Look at Upton Sinclair, Jacob Riis, or any of the other muckrakers, or go watch a Frank Capra movie. If you can't fight for the little guy anymore-the American people, that is-get the hell out of the way.

This is our demand of every journalist from Bill Keller at the New York Times to the editor of the smallest small-town weekly. You have an obligation to our country to defend our way of life. And you are failing it miserably.

So here's Jon Stewart's charge to Begala/Carlson and everyone else in that establishment media: If you can't stand the heat, if you can't come work for the people, please stand aside so we can find someone who will. Your jobs are too important to take lightly. Reporting on politics isn't a game for the best rejoinder.

We need a Fourth Estate worthy of that illustrious name. Please.

Bumper Sticker Sighting

I'm Proud To Be An American.
(then, in small print,) It's this administration that I'm ashamed of.

'Till It's Over Over There

I've spent a lot of time this week thinking and talking about the state of our military. Last weekend, while I was attending a conference in Colonial Williamsburg, I sat at dinner next to an Army officer who had returned this summer from over a year in Iraq and Kuwait, including the invasion itself. Her stories of how poorly equipped our troops were (and are) were astounding (How could you send convoys out across Iraq and through cities without road maps????), and her frustration with the current administration who sent her over there was palpable.

The latest news, today, came that a college acquaintance and a Marine lance corporal, has been activated immediately for Iraq. He had been on deck for early next year, and now he's been told he's leaving sooner. I covered Ruben in the days after September 11th when the specter of war first loomed. We never could have imagined then that the destination was Iraq.

He'll be, I believe, the fifth person I personally know to go into combat in Iraq; that doesn't count, of course, the journalists I know or have worked with who have covered the war (including Michael Kelly of the Atlantic who was killed last spring outside Baghdad). I would wager that not many of our nation's leaders have talked—I mean really talked, not shaken their hand while handing out plastic turkeys—with five grunts who have been on the ground in Iraq.

I've also been working at EchoDitto this week on a variety of stuff related to the draft. The draft is an issue that came out of nowhere (except that Alliance for Security was thinking about this a long time ago), and now has all sorts of attention. AFS and Rock the Vote launched their (our) "draft card" campaign, and now Democracy for America is doing a petition, along with Campaign for America's Future, and there are lots of reports and news articles coming out. It's even come up twice in the presidential debates.

Americans are concerned about the state of our military. Too many people are dying or being wounded in Iraq, and there's no clear plan for when it will stop. The violence is getting more personal and striking more close to home. We need to do something to change all of this. We need a change in leadership at the top for starters, and we need some mature, thoughtful non-ideologues making the decisions over there.

Not least of all, though, is what we said on This Is Rumor Control yesterday:

Let's continue the lively and thoughtful debate that has been going on here for weeks about how to relieve the strain on the military so that no one faces the choice of reporting for duty or burning a draft card.

This is getting more and more urgent. It's just impossible for me to comprehend how, in less than a generation, we're again asking ourselves, how do you ask a man (or woman) to be the last one to die for a mistake? I just hope and pray it's not someone I know.

9/11 Report Rightly Rewarded

I thought that it showed great creativity and thoughtgfulness for the 9/11 Commission Report to be nominated for a National Book Award. (more here)

The Report, which I read over the summer, was superbly written and both highly engaging and highly educational. We should commend the Commission for its work. I can only imagine how government would be changed by having more people read governmental reports that are critical to our nation's future.

Remember the debate and conversation that the 9/11 Report fostered and imagine we had the same level of public dialogue over health care, social security, tax policy, science policy, or education? Our country would be much better off.

Yes, Virginia, it appears there is a way to make government interesting to the governed.

Fear Not Hope

There's been a bunch of disturbing news recently about terrorism which has got me a little bit on edge, and wondering what affect fear will have on the looming election.

Senator Mark Dayton closed his Capitol Hill office yesterday due to security concerns and blogs are talking about a report of a secret nationwide conference call by John Ashcroft warning of an imminent attack (via BoingBoing). Dayton explained his reasoning based on classified information provided recently to congressional officials, saying:

"I feel compelled to [close the office], because I will not be here in Washington to share in what I consider to be an unacceptably greater risk to [my staff's] safety....

"I would not bring my two sons to the Capitol between now and the election."

In this environment, I had some unnerving moments this morning in the Metro, as what appeared to be heightened security was in place. There appeared to be a bioterrorism detection device running in the Woodley Park Metro today, as well as a highly visible police presence on my train. At least one Metro employee today in Metro Center also appeared to have a gas mask bag (similar to those carried by the Capitol Police) on his waist.

I asked around when I got to the office today whether anyone else who commuted in today noticed anything, and our sys admin reported that on his commuter train from Virginia there was an unannounced bomb dog search (which previously were announced in advance) as well as an appearance of added security on board.

I might be grasping at straws but all of this is making me wary of public transportation over the coming weeks.

Of course, through this all, the government is emphasizing that there's nothing at all for us to be concerned about:

"We're unaware of any credible threat information indicating al Qaeda is targeting a specific location in Washington or the United States," said Brian Roehrkasse, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security.

The sad truth of the matter, though, is that my gut reaction here is that my government is lying to me. The terrorism threats have been so politicized—both in terms of having them and not having them—that I no longer trust that this administration would tell me IF there was a real threat if it conflicted with their political agenda. On the other hand, if it helped their agenda, then I have little doubt they'd create one where one didn't exist. How can we know what's real?

Something about all of this just rings a little too true for me. Dayton seems obviously concerned. U.S. Senators just don't act that irrationally (at least those who still posess their mental faculties), and the security I saw today was definitely the tightest I've seen since the financial district here was put on Orange Alert. As a former crime reporter, I notice these things and pay attention to them.

Maybe I'll just walk for the next three weeks and stay off the Metro. It'll be good for my heart, and good for my mind.

(Oh, and if the terrorism wasn't enough, it appears that there's some renewed activity in volcano-land.)

Back in the Square

As I mentioned earlier in the week, my good friend and Dean's former campaign manager Joe Trippi invited Michael Silberman and I up to Harvard's Institute of Politics (IOP) at the Kennedy School of Government. Joe is a fellow there this fall (along with fellow Vermonter Jeff Amestoy and one of my journalism heroes Ben Bradlee), which is a program that brings in incredible people from government, politics, and media for a semester where they get to take classes at the University and be generally involved in return for teaching a weekly study group.

Trippi's is on campaigning in the 21st century, and he invited us to speak about what it was like being young campaign workers with major responsibilities, as well as to talk more broadly about the changing role of the internet in politics. Thus, until it can be proven otherwise, I became the first member of the Harvard Class of 2004 invited back to campus as a speaker.

The discussion was great fun and very interesting (to us, at least), and Michael has reported on the meat of the matter. The Official Joe Trippi at Harvard website has posted some photos of Michael and my talk there on Tuesday; alas, there's only one photo that looks decent.

It felt so wonderful to back in Cambridge and wandering around the Square. It was my first time there in four months—the longest period I've been away since graduating—and it's getting a little harder to go back. The stores are changing (the flagship Abercrombie & Fitch is now a Citizens Bank), and I know fewer and fewer people there. I didn't stop inside the Crimson because I doubted whether anyone I knew would be there.

(Harvard's changing in other ways too. News this week that "blogs," which didn't exist while I was there, are making a strong push on campus.)

All that said, though, I still feel very much at home among the old buildings, brick sidewalks, and human mess of the Square. I've actually had a lot of Harvard time recently, and it has made me quite nostalgic.

Being able to speak at the IOP this week was my second time in two weeks that I was reminded of the proud tradition in which I'm following as a Harvard alum. Last week, at the D.C. premiere of the movie "Going Upriver," about John Kerry's time in Vietnam, I ran into an elderly man wearing the club tie of the Harvard Crimson, black with thin red stripes. I went up to him and asked if he was a Crimed and introduced myself as executive editor of the 129th Guard. He said that he was Class of '45. We chatted a bit about Harvard and the Crimson during the war, but never covered who he was or what I was doing. We both wandered away as several other couples joined our table.

Well, after the movie, the same guy walked up on stage and sat down as part of the panel. Huh. As the moderator introduced him and summarized his resume, a little lightbulb went off in my head. Oh. That guy. You mean the Pulitzer Prize winning Time correspondent Stanley Karnow whose photo hangs in the front entry of the Crimson building in Cambridge as one of the paper's 17 recipients of journalism's highest honor. Yes, that guy. The Time reporter who covered Nixon's trip to China. He's the one wearing the Crimson tie.

Writing my final column last year for Harvard Magazine, I reminisced about how my experience there had impacted me, "It has had a profound impact shaping who I am, made me lifelong friends, and opened countless doors for me":

Perhaps most central to my well-developed fondness for Harvard Yard, though, is how—as someone who loves history and seeks it out wherever I go—Harvard's history has been indelibly pressed upon me over the last four years. From the towering Memorial Hall to the breathtaking wall of names inside Memorial Church, to the Revolutionary War barracks of Massachusetts Hall, one cannot escape the College without being keenly aware of the many Harvard lives that have walked along these cow paths before....

Someday, I definitely want to walk Cambridge's cow paths again.

For now, though, I'm becoming part of the process of choosing the next generation of Harvardians. On Wednesday night, I went to a training put on by the admissions office for new alumni interviewers. Sitting there, I was once again grateful for being lucky enough to attend one of the greatest centers of learning in the world's history.

At the session, after presentations by the local Harvard Club and the admissions office, we divided up into groups and were given real admissions cases to judge. In four out of the five groups, we were able to correctly guess the admissions office's decision (which said something to me about the ability to Harvard students to identify the traits of other Harvard students). At some point in the next couple of months, an impressionable young senior will sit down with me as an official representative of Harvard. We'll see how that goes...

The Bloody Cornfield

I spent yesterday with a friend from the Crimson visiting the Civil War battlefield at Antietam. The battlefield, which centers around Antietam Creek, but is actually in the town of Sharpsburg, was the bloodiest day on American soil. In the single day of fighting, out of about 130,000 troops, 23,000 men were killed, wounded, or missing by day's end.

The scale of the devastation was incredible.

The National Park Service tells the story of the battle:

On September 16, Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan confronted Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at Sharpsburg, Maryland. At dawn September 17, Hooker’s corps mounted a powerful assault on Lee’s left flank that began the single bloodiest day in American military history. Attacks and counterattacks swept across Miller’s cornfield and fighting swirled around the Dunker Church. Union assaults against the Sunken Road eventually pierced the Confederate center, but the Federal advantage was not followed up.

Late in the day, Burnside’s corps finally got into action, crossing the stone bridge over Antietam Creek and rolling up the Confederate right. At a crucial moment, A.P. Hill’s division arrived from Harpers Ferry and counterattacked, driving back Burnside and saving the day. Although outnumbered two-to-one, Lee committed his entire force, while McClellan sent in less than three-quarters of his army, enabling Lee to fight the Federals to a standstill....

Another longer summary is here, if you're interested.

The battle was critical for the North because it marked the end of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia's first foray into the foray. Lee's army limped back across the Potomac following the battle. Antietam was important, too, because Lincoln used the "victory" as a chance to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. He had been waiting to do so until the North won a battle, hoping that it would not look like a desperate attempt from a losing side.

Yesterday, the Antietam battlefield was almost eerily quiet. Under a brillant blue sky and an intense fall sun, Andrew and I wandered the withering cornfields and fields (My complete set of photos is here). There were perhaps a total of six other people there, and the dominant sound through the day were the deafening crickets.

We walked through the cornfields where thousands of soldiers were cut down, traveled the sunken road which was filled with bodies by the end of the day, and then stood at the tranquil Burnside Bridge, where 500 Georgian soldiers on the hill above held off an entire corps of the Union Army for nearly the entire day. The saddest part of visiting the bridge was that no soldier bothered to check the depth of the creek. Had they wanted to ford it, it was only waist deep; but, instead, the Union lost hundreds of soldiers fighting to cross the bridge.

All-in-all, it was a very moving moment—underscoring the supreme sacrifice of battle and also the utter waste of war. Some units at Antietam suffered 50 percent casualties in under 20 minutes. I couldn't help but think of Iraq and our troops there while standing at Antietam. Somehow, I doubt that any of their sacrifice will be honored with statues in Fallujah or Najaf.

We Got Ed

Note: I’m writing this today on the US Airways Shuttle to Boston where Michael Silberman and I are going to speak to Joe Trippi’s Study Group at Harvard’s Institute of Politics. It should be a lot of fun, and certainly a neat little honor for me—having been tangentially involved in the IOP during my senior spring last year. More on this later.

Last night, Carey and I attended a Democracy Radio reception on Capitol Hill, celebrating the release of Ed Schultz’s new book, Straight Talk from the Heartland. Up until just about a year ago, Ed was one of the most powerful talk radio hosts in the upper west—broadcasting everyday from Fargo, North Dakota. I first became aware of his show last summer while booking Governor Dean on major regional talk radio shows. (I still have a bottle of Idaho Reisling given to me by a Dean staffer as thanks for getting the gov on Schultz’s show.) I’ve been a fan ever since.

“Big Ed,” as he’s aptly nicknamed, has a great life story, especially about how he came to be America’s biggest progressive talk radio host. He was a life-long Republican until a visit with his wife to a local homeless shelter began to change his mind about the direction of the country under GOP rule. He’s no softie, dovish, pansy ass liberal either. He describes himself as a radio host for the guys who take a shower after work, and his hunting trips are a frequent topic on his show. His appeal to working Americans, particularly those in rural areas, is evident. Standing last night with a senior official from a major construction union, I heard him mutter, “Amen,” as Ed gave his spiel. Ed’s like some of the soft-spoken but fiery farmers I knew in the Legislature back in Vermont.

Ed was Democracy Radio’s first project—and he’s been a rocking success. This week, he tied Rush Limbaugh’s first year record of being syndicated on 57 stations—and Ed has three months more to go in the first year. The reason is simple: Radio is all about ratings, and Ed’s show is kicking conservative talk radio butt in nearly every market where they compete. Specifically, and proudly for Ed, he’s the top show not just in his hometown of Fargo, but also in Portland, Oregon—beating out Rush, Hannity, Coulter and all the other hate mongers. Now, Ed Schultz pointed out that Limbaugh appeals mostly to the same audience: “meat-eating, gun-toting, drug-free liberals”—well, except Limbaugh can’t really speak to the last two.

Most exciting for us, perhaps, other than the chance to meet one of the men who will play an influential role in shaping the progressive agenda over coming years, Ed and the Democracy Radio Executive Director Tom Athans also announced the launch of one of our latest projects, www.RadioForTheTroops.com, a petition drive to force Armed Forces Radio to carry a more balanced political talk radio program. They certainly deserve better than they’re currently getting: right now, soldiers overseas can only listen to Rush.

You Forgot Poland!

After Howdy-Dubya-Doody chided John Kerry for belittling the contributions of Poland, Poland this week said "forget you."

Where did all our allies go?

Breaking News: A 'veritable witch's brew'

Volcano activity in Washington state.

Little known scientific fact: Magma is made up primarily of old eggs, at least according to CNN.

Magma or Magma Not

Quote from those monitoring the imminent disaster at Mount St. Helens today today:

Scientists said they do not expect anything close to the devastation of the explosion in May 18, 1980, that killed 57 people and coated much of the Northwest with ash.

''Of course, the volcano reserves the right to change its mind," said monument scientist Peter Frenzen with the US Forest Service, which operates the park.

Nice.

America on Alert

Feeling both my anarchal and police reporter roots today, I wandered deep into the secured area around the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund here in D.C. this weekend.

After years of disruptive protests and near riots, the World Bank/IMF weekend has become a big to-do here in D.C. It had become a running joke at the nearby GW campus that students could count on a day or two off each fall when the bankers and the protesters came to town.

This year, the situation was escalated even further because the World Bank and IMF are still technically at Orange Alert following the Bush administration's raising of the terror alert level based on three-year-old intelligence. Security officials closed several square blocks between Farragut West and Foggy Bottom this weekend, throughout the weekend, I've been passed by police motorcades escorting tour buses of delegates and bankers around the city. The city's big hotels, where the delegates are staying, have full complements of D.C.'s finest around them as well.

Walking down to the World Bank this afternoon, the preparations are indeed impressive. Blocks of jersey barriers with portable lowerable vehicle barriers keep unwanted vehicles away—and municipal dump trucks are parked behind the barriers as a back-up measure. Scores of police—Capitol, Transit, Secret Service, and DCPD—stood watch and K-9 teams sniffed around vehicles attempting to enter the secure areas.

I walked right down to the front of the World Bank, where anti-protester fences for riot police kept potential troublemakers a good distance from the building. To say, though, that the preparations—obviously hundreds of thousands of dollars in overtime, barriers, and security measures—were a little out-of-scale would be an underestimate.

Yesterday's protests were quiet and today, in front of the World Bank, I found three dozen police, a K-9 unit, one dump truck, ten squad cars, and three motorcades standing guard over a deserted plaza occupied only by myself and a family of tourists playing football in the closed off street. Walking through the entire area, I spotted a grand total of two protesters: one woman, approximately five-foot four inches tall, aged 60, carrying a "IMF: Stop Enslaving the World" sign and one woman, aged 45, carrying a sign reading pleading with the world's banker to remember the poor.

Definitely orange alert-worthy.

A Centenary Note

Today marks the hundredth birthday of one of my all-time favorite authors: the illustrious British novelist, notorious philanderer, and enigmatic spy Graham Greene. I’ve come to him late—I read my first novel just this year, and have since plowed through several. His writing has a unique lyrical quality to it, and his characters a depth and personality that strikes close to me. I marked his birthday today at my favorite used bookstore in Washington, Riverby Books on Capitol Hill, where I found a first edition of his novel “The Captain and the Enemy.”

As today’s Writer’s Almanac explains,

[Greene] was the son a school headmaster, and was a very shy child who often tried to run away from home. After several suicide attempts in his teens, his therapist encouraged him to start writing and introduced him to several of his literary friends. Greene got a job as a journalist for the Times in London. He met his future wife when she wrote in to correct a mistake in one of his articles.

Greene’s life of adventure began when in World War II, where his infidelity saved his life during the Blitz—his house was bombed while he was at his lover’s house. During the war, he began a life-long association with British intelligence, working in Sierra Leone. Over the next half-century, he traveled frequently, writing prolifically along the way. When Norman Sherry began his three-volume biography of the literary great, Greene sent him a map demarking all of the places he had lived and visited. Sherry set out to recreate the routes, learning about Greene’s writing along the way. It took him 20 years to follow in Greene’s footsteps.

What attracts me most of all though is his obvious depth of feeling and association with his characters. Every good author feels a certain sense of attachment and joie de vivre through his or her characters, and Greene took this to the extreme. He had calling cards printed with the names of some of his more famous characters, and would hand them out in bars and other places soaked in anonymity. For brief moments, when no one was looking, he became his own writing.

As one critic noted:

Graham Greene was a great novelist of a special kind. Unlike many literary practitioners in this century, he did not experiment with language, subvert traditional narrative, or choose exotic subjects. He simply used the powerful imagination that led him to speak of his work as a 'guided dream.' That imagination—fired, at least during the great middle years, by intense moral and religious perception—made Greene's fiction the best-realized portrayal in its time of the drama of the human soul.

Most recently I read his colonialist classic “The Quiet American.” In my latest travels with Graham Greene, I saw myself in both Fowler—the cynical embittered foreign correspondent—and Aldon Pyle—the Harvard-educated do-gooder dead-set on reforming the Vietnamese government. As Fowler remarks about Pyle, “I never knew a man who had better motives for al the trouble he caused.” Sadly, I can’t help but see a bit of Pyle in some of our nation’s more recent forays onto the world stage.

“We’ll never see his like again,” Greene’s longtime biographer said, on NPR's great remembrance of Greene today.

That’s a shame, but I’m glad we did get to see him.

Update: Apocalypse Watch

Mount St. Helens, which let off some steam yesterday, has taken a turn for the worse—it appears that magma might be involved in the next eruption, and so the nearby observatory has been evacuated.

From CNN.com:

Scientists warn Saturday that Mount St. Helens could erupt within 24 hours, and with more force than previously expected.. "There is a 50 percent chance or greater that there is going to be an eruption and a good chance that it will involve magma," said the U.S. Geological Survey's Tom Pierson. "We're watching very closely."

Repent sinners! Repent!

Volcanoes

I got the breaking news alert from ABCNews.com today at 3:28 p.m.: Steam Seen Erupting From Mount St. Helens.

I’ve been watching the impending signs of eruption carefully all week, particularly given my four-month odyssey through Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” which has convinced me that we’ll all die soon in a spectacular explosion of one kind or another.

In fact, I’ve watched several gathering signs of the apocalypse closely this week, including the earthquakes in California, the asteroid narrowly missing Earth, and then—my peak fascination right now—volcanoes. Bryson’s book is excellent for the way that it boils down science to a scale that non-scientists can understand and remember (For instance, plate tectonics are pushing North America and Europe apart at roughly the same speed as a fingernail grows).

Over the past two weeks, as I’ve wound through the end of the book, I’ve learned all about the geology beneath us that at some point will wipe out life in North America as we know it. Mount St. Helens is a tiny volcano as those go. Yellowstone, on the other hand, is one of about 30 giant supervolcanoes on Earth—and about the only one on land. Scientists long knew it was volcanic—hence all the geysers and hot springs—but had been puzzled because they couldn’t find the caldera anywhere in the Park. It wasn’t until satellite photographs did they realize that the entire park was a giant caldera, dwarfing all previous known land volcanoes. Yellowstone explodes regularly about every 600,000 years, and when it erupts it does so with the power of a pile of TNT the size of Rhode Island eight miles high. The last eruption buried Nebraska (which, as you might notice, isn’t particularly close to Yellowstone) in 67 FEET of ash.

It was 620,000 years since the last eruption, meaning that we’re long overdue for one. Could Mount St. Helens be a harbinger of what’s to come?

You better go have a good meal or steal a fanny glance while you still can.

The Faces of Frustration

Hilarious.

Kerry Won

Who Won the Debate?