Quote of the Day - by Saint Robert Downey Jr.

"I'm between two phases right now, pre-Iron Man and post-Iron Man, and the transition can be tricky," he says, shifting and smoking. "It used to be, I'd drive onto a studio lot, and the guard was like, 'Less Than Zero dude, I loved Chaplin!' Now it's, 'Iron Man!' It's not an algorithm anymore. It's a fixed number. Things have been zeroed out; it's the beginning of something. But right now, it's still a void, and we tend to think of the void as an abyss or a vacuum with nothing there. In fact, it's a new road, and what you should do on this new road is close for repairs — close right away, because that old vehicle is not going to work on that new road. I mean, if the cosmos is a loving, healing thing that also spins real fast and erupts and does violent stuff, and if there really is some kind of order to the whole thing, then everything that's led up to this moment has to be part of it, or the math doesn't work. But in this transition phase, I really am trying to live as much like a lizard as I can. Hot, rock, sun, fly, tongue."

Keith Olbermann and Robert Klein on McCain's McMansions

Barack in Chester, Virginia: "The answer is John McCain has seven homes"

McCain Has Too Many Houses Already ...

Olbermann to McCain: 'Grow up Senator!'

When Paris Hilton Becomes a Voice of Reason

With her brilliant critique, Lisa Van Dusen continues to reveal the ineptitude of most U.S. political reporting and analysis. - zjm




By LISA VAN DUSEN

You know a presidential campaign has veered too far into the sludge when an intervention from Paris Hilton comes off like the voice of reason.

Somehow, last week, when the Bible-toting jailbird socialite said, in a video ad announcing her energy policy, "I want America to know that I'm, like, totally ready to lead," she was the only one around who really seemed to mean it.

After early assurances from both Barack Obama and John McCain that this would be a campaign of civilized respectability and Marquess of Queensberry rules, what had promised to be an epic battle is looking more and more like a John Hughes cafeteria food fight between a smartass, cynical outcast and a cool, detached principal, only with the old white guy playing the smartass and the young black guy playing the principal.

McCain, the candidate who coasted leisurely through June and early July like he was on an Elderhostel tour, is now running as though someone spiked his Ovaltine with crystal meth -- using drive-by attack ads, snarky put-downs and party favours to make Barack Obama's strengths seem ridiculous and his own weaknesses beside the point.

The point, according to the McCain campaign, is that nobody knows Obama and too many people are enamoured of him despite that fact for all the wrong reasons.

This is a line of attack that resonates with the same white, working-class voters who are suspicious of Obama's "otherness" based on his name, his skin colour and his exotic background, and who, the McCain campaign hopes, will now count "celebutante" as one more strike against him.

If there is anyone the economically-imperiled, mortgage crisis-besieged, health care-deficient, blue-collar workers of the rust belt have a hard time identifying with, it's Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

By including Barack Obama in the same ad as two women, whose lives are as alien to the daily reality of a Wal-Mart clerk as the lives of actual aliens would be, McCain is saying: "He's not like you, either." Because they already know Obama isn't the same colour as they are, it's more a reminder than a revelation.

More than halfway through a summer of shockingly drive-able Interstates left eerily unclogged by four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline, the two campaigns have spent the past week going at each other on energy policy.

Where the candidates have clashed, and therefore where the sound bites have surfaced, the sniping has been not so much about the crisis itself, as about whether inflating your tires properly, as Obama has suggested, is a silly idea or not (McCain started out saying it was silly, then said it wasn't) and whether there is a square inch of American soil, turf or broadloom, off-shore or on, safe from Drillbit McCain.

McCain is taking heat from pundits and, in some cases, from his own former staffers, for going decidedly downscale with the Paris Hilton ad, as well as one mocking Obama's messiah thing (comparing him to Charlton Heston's Moses might backfire among the McCain-queasy fundamentalists).

He also took fire for playing the reverse-race card by accusing Obama of playing a real race card when he predicted that his opponents would try to scare people by pointing out that he doesn't look like all those other presidents in their wallets, which he doesn't.

In the longer term (and there is a longer term between now and November -- there's a longer
term between now and Labour Day, in campaign weeks), some Republicans fear McCain is swapping his considerable integrity stock for a fleeting return in the polls and that it won''t be there when he suddenly needs it between now and election day.

Obama, meanwhile, is still spending too many moments looking like a guy way too surprised that running for president of the United States could possibly get this ridiculous. He should be hitting instead of just hitting back, no matter how many times in the course of a long campaign hop he longs for what must now seem like the halcyon days of the bloody Pennsylvania primary.

Luckily for Obama, the Clintons have been agitating upstage just loudly enough to remind him of all they taught him about how badly he wants to be president. That should liven up the battleground some.

Campaign Funnies This Week

The Act of Remembering

From last year ...

zjm




"Even to those who managed to survive, it was hell where they envied the dead," Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba told the crowd of thousands gathered at Peace Memorial Park to remember the 62nd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by the UnitedStates, which ultimately killed more than 250,00 people. Mayor Akiba went on to describe the horrific scenes etched into the bodies and memories of those who survived. After his speech, 1,000 white doves were released into the sky above Hiroshima.

"The Japanese government, which has the duty to work for the abolition of nuclear weapons through international law," Mr. Akiba admonished, "should protect its pacifist constitution which it should be proud of, and clearly say 'no' to antiquated and wrong U.S. policies."

The crowd of survivors and mourners bowed their heads for a moment of silence when two children rang the Peace Bell at 8:15 in the morning, the exact time the Enola Gay B-29 bomber dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.

Six days later, it was the southern city of Nagasaki that was sacrificed for the cause of freedom.

Today, it is the men, women, and children of Iraq.

Bush: Worse Than Watergate

First Lady Miss Buffalo Chip

McCain Meltdown

Paris Responds to the Wrinkly White Guy

A Kennedyesque Future May Await Obama

He could do for black Americans what JFK did for Irish Catholics

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Caleah Cain has already booked off Jan. 20, 2009, from her job in a call centre here. Cain, 32, who is African-American, never paid much attention to the cyclical pomp that comes with living in the same town as the president of the United States, but next inauguration day may be different.

"I think it's incredible that this might happen," Cain said, standing two blocks from the White House with her husband, Aaron, and one-year-old daughter, Jade.

"I want to be here to see every minute of that day."

If Barack Obama is elected president of the United States, inauguration day will be the beginning of a scrapbook of historic firsts that will represent a significant change in the local landscape for the 65 per cent majority of the District of Columbia who are black.

"We've been telling our three daughters they can be anything they want to be since they were old enough to hear it," Cain said. "And this would make it more than just talk."

D.C., like most government towns, is divided between the postcard monuments to power and the "real" city that subsists in different measures on the care and feeding of that power.

But this government town is also divided by race, with downtown D.C. integrated from nine to five and people retreating after work to their socially segregated corners of Northwest for whites, Southeast for blacks and various equally divided suburbs. There are mixed areas both urban and suburban that defy the divisions, but they're still so notable for being mixed that you can easily name them.

For all the predominantly black institutions that have thrived in what was once called Washington's "Secret City" for the past 40 years, the prospect of a black president presiding over not just the leadership of the free world, as the cliche goes, but playing the role that links the White House to the "real D.C." -- lighting the national Christmas tree, hosting the White House Easter egg roll and tying up traffic with his 40-car motorcade -- holds huge cultural significance here.

"It'll give the African-American population here motivation and inspiration," said Cain's husband, Aaron, a network engineer, also 32. "It will help bridge the gap that has always existed between the two D.C.s."

If the Obama family moving into what so many black Washington comedians have dubbed the whitest house in America were the premise for a sequel to The West Wing, the challenge for the writers would be not to get too mawkish. Obama would be the first black president, and the first black family, to move into a White House built by slaves, to which Booker T. Washington was the first African American ever invited, in 1901 on the success of his book, Up from Slavery.

McGill University history professor and presidential historian Gil Troy, who is spending the summer as a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, compares the cultural impact for African-Americans of Obama occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to what John F. Kennedy's arrival in the White House did for America's Irish Catholics.

"The Kennedys' moving into the White House in 1961 was a cultural bombshell. You had this beautiful, glamourous young couple with small adorable children plus the Kennedy mythology behind it. For Irish Catholics, it meant, 'we made it.' "

For Obama, Troy says, that pride may be tempered by the weight of enormous expectations.

"There will be, as there always is, a downturn after the initial honeymoon, and it will be a test of the African-American community as to whether they can deal with him being treated like anybody else."

At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, across the Anacostia River, on one of those blindingly sunny days that make Washington feel like L.A. with brains, Yanne Givens is waiting for her summer daycampers to board a school bus. Givens, 24, a substitute teacher in the D.C. public school system, says the second graders she teaches idolize Obama.

"They talk about him the same way they talk about major sports figures," she laughs.

"And they need someone to look up to -- there's a lot of poverty in this city and a lot of hopelessness that goes with it. He's going to have a lot to live up to."

"These now, are the walls we must tear down"

I've never been so proud to be a member of the human family as I was today when I listened to citizen Barack Obama deliver his vision for a new world in Berlin -

zjm

A Fresh Vision for the World: Citizen Obama Speaks to over 200,000 in Berlin

"The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand," Obama said, speaking not far from where the Berlin Wall once divided the city.

"The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand."

Obama in Jordan

Starbucks tanking; walk an extra block

by Lisa Van Dusen

NEW YORK CITY - Not only am I not an economist, I've never even been a business reporter, not withstanding many long, deep-vein-thrombosis-inducing hours covering International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization meetings.

But I am a Starbucks junkie, which has gotta count for something in the world of coffee punditry.

The recent announcement of 600 closures by the loved and hated Seattle-based java-monger has been lumped in with the death of the Chrysler minivan, the Fannie and Freddie crisis and all the other signs of economic apocalypse that have made "It's the f---ing economy, stupid" this U.S. election's revamped slogan.

But Starbucks was headed for trouble long before it started madly whipping pushpins out of its worldwide coffee domination map.

Anyone who's walked into a Starbucks in the past couple of years and felt -- instead of reassuring familiarity and anticipation at the thought of the same skinny venti half-caf caramel macchiato or whatever your poison is -- an inner groan at the Groundhog Day predictability of it all, knows there was a flaw in the business plan.

Starbucks, like Barnes & Noble, Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel and other U.S. store chains that specialize in drawing customers who first go to Starbucks to get a $5 coffee to nurse while trolling their wares, all sell a certain lifestyle.

They deal in a cultural cachet based on the aspirational appeal of fitting a certain profile: Highly educated, smart, hip, politically aware, esthetically refined, internationalist, sensualist, sophisticated . . . a mix of attributes absolutely un-achievable for any human with a full-time job.

That's why it's aspirational.

Inherent in that appeal were both a sense of exclusivity and a pretence to cool, two things that have, by definition, a limited shelf-life in a world where there's always the next find and, it seems, all trends are global.

The idea that people spend money to enhance their social standing has been around at least since Thorstein Veblen coined the term "conspicuous consumption" a century ago and is still the operating premise behind any business plan based on cool and exclusivity.

But unless it includes a cyclical Madonna-like reinvention, the plan has to foresee its own demise.

Veblen also came up with the scarcity theory of value, a.k.a. the Tickle Me Elmo effect, or the economics version of the old why-buy-the-cow-if-you-can-get-the-milk-for-free bugaboo about premarital sex: The less available something is, the greater its value.

Starbucks had a problem long before the U.S. economy started tanking because it was caught at the crossroads of squandered exclusivity based on overexpansion and expired cool based on the lack of a plan B when the concept got stale.

In February, 2007, CEO Howard Schultz admitted as much in a leaked memo, regretting the "watering down of the Starbucks experience" and "commoditization of our brand," saying one of the results was "stores that no longer have the soul of the past and reflect a chain of stores versus the warm feeling of a neighbourhood store."

Schultz telegraphed the current closings by more than a year.

In a world in which the focus of those same customers is increasingly on authenticity as a commodity and on local rather than global, it might be hard for Starbucks to reinvent itself in the image of the very neighbourhood stores it replaced.

Having said that, I walked out of my hotel yesterday morning to my old Starbucks on Columbus Avenue and was pretty peeved when it was closed for renovations.

It was a five-block walk to the next one.

Obama: New Leadership for a Changing World

John McCain IS a Lapse in Judgement

FISA: Obama's Challenge - Will He Lead, or Seek to Placate?