15
03
2008
hey, remember us? we’re iowa.
where’ve you been, democratic primary process? you never call anymore, you never write. seems like just a few weeks ago you were all over us. what happened?
well, while you were busy obsessing over obama’s crazy preacher and spitzer’s whoring, we just saved the day, again. y’know how hillary clinton’s campaign was resurrected by her dramatic victories in ohio and texas last week? (okay, so texas wasn’t really a victory. but she won ohio, right?)
yeah. about that.
see, john edwards’ iowa delegates refshuffled today — edwards came in second here, remember? — and, well, barack obama just picked up another seven cornfed hawkeye delegates. and another five in california. how many did clinton pick up in her big-shit ohio victory last week? nine, was it?
so clinton’s vaunted comeback — and i never quite understood how you pull off a “comeback” and still lag miles behind in the delegate count — has been negated, with interest. we’re right back to where we were two weeks ago, which is where we’ll be in july: it’s all but mathematically impossible for hillary clinton to win the delegates she needs to become the nominee.
we’re doing our bit here in the cornbelt. now if we could just do something about florida…
12
03
2008
i’ll admit, i didn’t think much of the wire when it premiered in 2002. at first glance it was just another retread of a hopelessly played-out genre — the gritty urban cop show — and worse, a staging of the war-on-drugs melodrama that seemed to affirm and reinforce predictable roles of good-guy cops and bad-guy dealers. pure ideological anathema to me at the time.
while, at a superficial level, that initial assessment wasn’t too far off, it took me until the second or third season to realize there was a lot more going on than that. i’ll leave it to more eloquent critics to explain exactly what — suffice to say, i can’t think of a single TV show that has changed my thinking more on matters of crime, justice, poverty, bureaucracy, corruption, and the whole notion of public service (not to mention cop shows themselves).
but on to today’s entry from the more-meta-than-meta department. if you saw any of the wire’s fifth and final season, which concluded this week, you know that it took a swing at the newspaper business through plotlines dealing with a fictionalized baltimore sun. some of the most interesting — and weirdly self-referential — coverage of the series has been from the real-life sun, where series creator david simon once worked, and which was the origin of a personal grudge that season five was, apparently, largely devoted to thrashing out. the sun’s columnists and reviewers couldn’t get enough wire for the first four seasons, but notice how the love affair cools when simon turns his cameras on their own newsroom.
10
03
2008
My grandma used to say this all the time. Anyone else feeling politico burnout with the final contests still weeks away?
Three thoughts I had with my first cup of coffee, paranoia and all:
Obama needs a female VEEP (to further the identity politics, perhaps a caucasian grandmother of ten, or so).
Clinton will fight to the bitter, bloody end, but really, Florida will be the source of our pain again as another Republican Florida Gov hands the national to his party.
Should things go poorly in Florida and Michigan, the current Democratic electorate in these large states (4th, and 8th largest) becomes massively disenfranchised with the entire two party system. If nothing else, this could be the basis for Cynthia McKinney to get a ton of tv time in nearby FL.
2
03
2008
We’ll see how long this holds up.
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