A LOVER, NOT A BOWLER

Sen. Barack Obama's new brand of politics is now stuck in the old brand of reality. Witness his weekend humiliation at a bowling alley in Altonna, Pa. Not quite Mike Dukakis in a tank, but memorably bad.

Obama bowled a 37 and looked prissy while doing it. According to the Detroit Free Press:

"My economic plan is better than my bowling," Obama told fellow bowlers Saturday.

"It has to be," a man called out.

Pennsylvania holds its primary on April 22. Tip o' the pinhead to Mayor Dan.

DITH PRAN, 65

Coined the memorable phrase "killing fields" to describe the horrors he saw in Cambodia. Three months ago he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Sunday, he died.

From The Associated Press:

Dith spoke of his illness in a March interview with The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., saying he was determined to fight against the odds and urging others to get tested for cancer.

"I want to save lives, including my own, but Cambodians believe we just rent this body," he said. "It is just a house for the spirit, and if the house is full of termites, it is time to leave."

11-YEAR-OLD TASERED

In Florida, in an elementary school classroom. Incredible. A deputy in Orange County says she had to do it, especially after taking a punch to the nose.

WFTV reports:

The girl at Moss Park Elementary punched the deputy in the nose so hard the deputy went to the hospital. While an 11-year-old shocked by a Taser sounds extreme to some parents, other parents told Eyewitness News the girl deserved it. ...

According to the arrest report, before school Thursday morning, another student told teachers at Moss Park that Thaliamar [Jimenez] pushed a boy into the street. When teachers tried to talk to the girl she became combative, started pushing her desk and chair and even spit at the teachers.

The school resource officer, Orange County Deputy Donna Hudepohl, tried to take Thaliamar to the principal's office and that's when the child started swinging, hitting the officer in the nose. Hudepohl was transported to Florida East Hospital. She sustained severe bruising to the nasal cavity as a result of the injury. ...

Jimenez was transported to Florida East Hospital to have the Taser prongs removed, but she had no other injuries. She was arrested and charged with battery on a law enforcement officer, disrupting a school function as well as resisting with violence.

Mom says the girl has a learning disability. The Taser probably won't help.

MISSED IT BY THAT MUCH

Mayor Dan -- superb politician, even better friend -- tipped us to this one.

Modern Mechanix has a copy of a November 1968 story about life in 2008. A bit of the lede:

The car accelerates to 150 mph in the city’s suburbs, then hits 250 mph in less built-up areas, gliding over the smooth plastic road. You whizz past a string of cities, many of them covered by the new domes that keep them evenly climatized year round. Traffic is heavy, typically, but there’s no need to worry. The traffic computer, which feeds and receives signals to and from all cars in transit between cities, keeps vehicles at least 50 yds. apart. There hasn’t been an accident since the system was inaugurated.

They got this part right:

Money has all but disappeared. Employers deposit salary checks directly into their employees’ accounts. Credit cards are used for paying all bills. Each time you buy something, the card’s number is fed into the store’s computer station. A master computer then deducts the charge from your bank balance.

But this prediction is woefully wrong:

People have more time for leisure activities in the year 2008. The average work day is about four hours. But the extra time isn’t totally free. The pace of technological advance is such that a certain amount of a jobholder’s spare time is used in keeping up with the new developments —- on the average, about two hours of home study a day.

Perhaps by 2048, if the balloon hasn't gone up by then.

ANTHONY MINGHELLA, 54

Film director. Enormous talent. The Associated Press reports:

Oscar-winning director Anthony Minghella, who turned such literary works as "The English Patient," "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and "Cold Mountain" into acclaimed movies, has died. He was 54.

Minghella's death was confirmed Tuesday by his agent, Judy Daish. No other details were immediately available.

"The English Patient," the 1996 World War II drama, won nine Academy Awards, including best director for Minghella, best picture and best supporting actress for Juliette Binoche.

Great vision, now gone.

BORN FOR POLITICS

The two-faced baby, of course -- the one born in India, where God knows what's in the water (a couple years ago, a baby was born in Bihar with four arms and four legs).

As the Telegraph reports:

The four-day old baby girl, born to Vinod Singh and his partner Sushma, is already being hailed as a reincarnation of the Indian God Ganesha.

Sushma gave birth to the 'miracle' child in the Gautam Buddha Nagar district of Uttar Pradesh, 50 kilometres north east of New Dehli.

As news of her birth spread through the secluded rural village where her family reside, local residents began singing and dancing and asking for her blessings.

According to the doctor at the hospital, the baby girl and her mother are both in good health.

If one overlooks the baby's two faces.

OBAMA REV'S RHETORIC

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright led the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago for decades, and during that time he befriended plenty of the flock, including Barack and Michelle Obama.

He married the Obamas and baptized their two daughters. Obama used Wright's turn of the phrase "the audacity of hope" and turned it into a book title.

Wright is now radioactive. ABC News reports:

In a campaign appearance earlier this month, Sen. Obama said, "I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial." He said Rev. Wright "is like an old uncle who says things I don't always agree with," telling a Jewish group that everyone has someone like that in their family. ...

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," [Wright] said in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."

Dayum. Sen. John McCain was skewered for his embrace of John Hagee. Is this political parity?

WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will probably never be friends. That's why they're perfect for each other.

Clinton and her supporters have been pressing the idea of a unity ticket with Obama -- with her as No. 1, of course -- and the brazen notion has political junkies abuzz.

The New York Times reports that Obama is publicly frosty about the idea of being Clinton's No. 2:

“I don’t know how somebody who’s in second place can offer the vice presidency to someone who’s in first place,” Mr. Obama told a town meeting at the Mississippi University for Women here, alluding to his lead in delegates. As the crowd cheered, he said: “If I’m not ready, how is it that you think I should be such a great vice president? Do you understand that?”

Quantity over quality is Obama's argument now, but his bounty isn't that much bigger than Clinton's, and he's lost the big prizes that matter in a general election -- Ohio and Florida, to name two.

(Obama's advisers say Florida shouldn't count because that state broke party rules by holding an early primary on Jan. 29. Neither candidate campaigned there, and Clinton won by more than 16 points.)

The real sticking point for Obama supporters is how much they loath Clinton. When a policy adviser is tossed overboard for telling a reporter that Clinton is a "monster," you know it's just the public mask slipping a nick, exposing the foamed-flecked hate that exists within the Obama camp. No one should be surprised. The rules of the game demand a Duk Koo Kim mentality. Your opponent is out to kill you. Live or die.

One expects such pragmatism from Clinton. People may not like it -- her biggest liability is her unlikability -- but they know it's the only way to do business when you're running with crime-minded punks or high-minded politicians. Only suckers bring soliloquies to a knife fight.

Too much talk this cycle about liking the people running for president. We heard this in 2000 and the nation wound up with a man described as the fella we wanted to drink beer with at the bar. Woe to us that he was a non-practicing alcoholic.

We like John McCain, but mostly because he's nuts. This unfortunately disqualifies him from the White House, but he'd be a hoot in a game of rummy.

We like Obama, but he's wispy. A woman who'd been a state senator less than four years ago would never be taken seriously as a candidate for president.

We don't like Hillary, but we wouldn't mess with her. She's got the biggest blade. Handy in a fight against an ex-POW who was tortured out of his gourd.

So what if Obama doesn't like her? Al Gore wasn't nuts about Bill Clinton. Lyndon Johnson hated John Kennedy. Both of those arraigned marriages worked out pretty well, save for the Florida vote in 2000 and the head-exploding thing in Dallas.

WYATT RUNS OFF ANOTHER ONE

News-Leader editor Don Wyatt is looking for an editorial-page editor. Tony Messenger currently holds the job.

WTF?

STROKING IN THE BOYS ROOM

Yes, indeed. And a whole lot more. Kids in Anderson, S.C. are doing the nasty in a middle-school restroom. WYFF reports:

Police said that the boy and girl, who are both 12 years old, admitted to having sex at McCants Middle School in Anderson between Feb. 25 and March 5.

Investigators said that both students had asked to go to the restroom on Friday, and when an unusually long time had passed, a teacher went to check on them and said they were found involved in a sex act in the boys' restroom.

Investigators said the students admitted to at least three sex acts committed while in the school building, including intercourse.

Both kids are suspended and could be expelled, giving them that much more time for intercourse.

FOOLS ON PARADE

Fool No. 1: Tim Couch, a Kentucky lawmaker who wants to make anonymous online posting illegal. As WTVQ reports:

The bill would require anyone who contributes to a website to register their real name, address and e-mail address with that site. Their full name would be used anytime a comment is posted.

If the bill becomes law, the website operator would have to pay if someone was allowed to post anonymously on their site. The fine would be five-hundred dollars for a first offense and one-thousand dollars for each offense after that.

Representative Couch says he filed the bill in hopes of cutting down on online bullying. He says that has especially been a problem in his Eastern Kentucky district.

Fool No. 2: Microsoft. Vista is now $130, down 30 bucks from its release price -- because so few people "upgraded" from Windows XP. As The New York Times notes:

XP users have heard too many chilling stories from relatives and friends about Vista upgrades that have gone badly. The graphics chip that couldn’t handle Vista’s whizzy special effects. The long delays as it loaded. The applications that ran at slower speeds. The printers, scanners and other hardware peripherals, which work dandily with XP, that lacked the necessary software, the drivers, to work well with Vista.

Microsoft faces a class-action lawsuit for claiming many computers were "Vista Capable" when they weren't.

Fool No. 3: Matt Gonzalez, vice presidential candidate. He's running with Ralph Nader. The Monitor reports on a Gonzalez riff during a student forum in Texas:

"Don't vote for us if you don't want to. Vote for Barack Obama, vote for Hillary Clinton, vote for John McCain, vote for who you're comfortable voting for," [Gonzalez] said. "(Change is) not going to happen, because they represent the same. They are the same."

Nader peddled this lie in 2000, claiming Al Gore and George W. Bush were the same. Anyone still believe it?

MOMS BRAWL AT CHUCK E. CHEESE

As the Boston Herald reports:

The fight allegedly broke out at the Natick pizza-and-play eatery during a child’s birthday party, police said.

Natick police said the mom of the 9-year-old birthday boy apparently became enraged because the other woman’s son was "hogging" an arcade game Saturday night.

Sgt. Paul Thompson said 38-year-old Catherine Aliaga and 33-year-old Tarsha Williams, both of Boston, would be summoned into court to answer charges of simple assault and battery stemming from the scuffle. ...

A [Chuck E. Cheese] spokesman tells the Herald the two moms "exchanged words" Saturday night at 6:45 while two children were playing an arcade game and then "punches were thrown."

Can't wait to see how those kids turn out.

RITALIN, KID CRIME LINKED

Kids who take Ritalin for a long time may be more likely to turn into punks on dope. According to this Daily Telegraph report:

An American study -- published in the Medical Observer -- has found that while drugs such as Ritalin can initially help sufferers, the benefit of prolonged use is in doubt. Some children stay on medication until they reach 18, but researchers believe it may not protect them from all the symptoms.

The US Multimodal Treatment Study of Children revealed the more days of prescribed medication, the more serious delinquency became.

In a cohort of 500 children with ADHD -- followed for 36 months until they were 12 -- researchers found 27 per cent were at a greater risk of committing crime, compared with 7 per cent among "normative" children. Substance use also increased to 17 per cent in ADHD children -- almost double the normal rate.

More substance abuse among kids who've been told they must take drugs to feel better. Couldn't see that one coming.

NOT-SO-SUPER DELEGATES

Racial politics at play, revealed by a Missouri congressman.

According to the KC Star's Prime Buzz blog:

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri said Thursday that black Democratic superdelegates who support Sen. Hillary Clinton have been “bludgeoned verbally” to prod them to switch to Sen. Barack Obama.

Cleaver, who is African-American and a superdelegate, has backed Clinton since last summer and this week re-emphasized that support. He said that he himself has not been pressured, but that black superdelegates from all over the country have been subjected to harassment, threatened with primary opponents and called “Uncle Tom.”

He said they have been told, “You’re not black if you’re not supporting Barack Obama. ... It is ugly.”

Cleaver thinks he's gotten a pass from the arm twisters because Obama won Missouri narrowly, and only thanks to GOP crossovers and independents.

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, 82

One of the great thinkers of the last century. From The New York Times obit:

Buckley, with his winningly capricious personality, his use of ten-dollar words and a darting tongue writers loved to compare to an anteater’s, was the popular host of one of television’s longest-running programs, “Firing Line,” and founded and shepherded the influential conservative magazine “National Review.”

He also found time to write more than 50 books, ranging from sailing odysseys to spy novels to dissertations on harpsichord fingering to celebrations of his own dashing daily life. He edited at least five more.

Bus Plunge gets the point.

REMINDER: BLOGGERS MEET FEB. 28

Time: 7:30 p.m.

Date: Thursday, Feb. 28, 2008

Place: Panera Bread, National & Elm

The Springfield Bloggers meet, greet, eat, fete. Sweet. See you there.

SNOWBALLS MUST BE BANNED

Tavin Rutledge Wilson celebrated his 16th birthday with a snowball fight. And then someone brought a gun.

CBS 3 in Philadelphia reports:

A friend of Tavin's, who was also involved in the playful snowball fight, said the shooting happened after a wayward snowball accidentally struck a nearby neighbor.

Police said the adult male became enraged and left the scene, returning moments later with a gun.

Witnesses say Tavin's effort to apologize to the man went unnoticed and the man pulled out a gun and began firing.

Family and friends celebrating Tavin's birthday heard gunshots and found him bleeding on the front porch.

"We ran outside and saw Tavin laying on the step," said the victim's friend Mercedes Lebron. "When I picked him up, smoke stared coming out of his head … He still was breathing and we told him keep breathing, calm down."

Tavin was rushed to Temple University hospital where he was taken off life-support. At 11:30 a.m. Monday, with his family by his side, Tavin passed away.

The shooter wasn't immediately found.

EXCUSE MEME?

Meme: Wikipedia defines it as:

any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.

The information doesn't have to be true, especially in politics -- it's even better when the meme is a sharp lie that cuts the enemy a thousand times and leaves him gasping, frustrated and dying from blood loss. Slowly.

The GOP machine operated by Karl Rove and George W. Bush has been astonishingly expert at churning out durable memes. One of the earliest examples involved alleged vandalism of the White House by fleeing Clintonistas. Trough-side reporters gorged themselves silly with tasty tidbits -- phone lines cut! locks glued shut! obscenities scrawled on walls! Months later, the government issued a report saying "the condition of the real property was consistent with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy." No vandalism. No obscene graffiti.

No matter. The machine was creating new memes that made reporters forget about the previous lies. Like dogs, the media panted when they saw and heard something new. Fresh scraps of flesh on a new bone is the best way to make watchdogs forget about old, buried bones.

Saddam loves Osama. Mushroom cloud. Weapons of mass destruction. Iraq will be a cakewalk. No domestic spying. Terror alerts. Heckuva job, Brownie. Lies and bilge water, all, but no matter because new memes are deployed to defend and dismiss any fallout. Everyone thought so. It's not illegal. You are in grave danger from terrorists. Even in their waning days, Bush and Rove are masters of the twist. Reality is putty in their practiced hands.

But the meme machine's new operators work for Sen. John McCain, and they are rancid amateurs compared to Team Bush, confident but not clever, with clumsy chunks of ham in place of hands.

They laid their mitts on the flywheel and gave it a mighty spin in response to a New York Times piece on McCain's ties to a lobbyist who happens to be a glam woman much younger than the senator, and whose omnipresence forced McCain's people to chase her into the shadows.

A lighter touch would have done it. Dismiss the Times report as picayune, ancient history. Toss off a few jokes about the NYT being the toilet paper of choice for Vice President Dick Cheney. Exit stage right into the waiting arms of Brit Hume, the man to see when you're a Republican in trouble. The story would have died with a murmur.

But McCain and his mechanics went ape with the machine, grinding gears as they cranked it up to extreme scream meme level. Even Rove was never so foolish or twisted, and that's saying a lot, given his history of using memes to peddle lies for political gain.

McCain issued an unequivocal denial of everything in the Times report:

"It’s not true ... At no time have I ever done anything that would betray the public trust or make a decision which in any way would not be in the public interest or would favor anyone or organization.”

Not true. At no time. Ever. In any way. Big and bold words that made McCain a temporary hero with conservatives who otherwise hate him with a deep purity. But they -- the words and the conservatives -- will bite McCain in the ass before this one's done.

Because now people will start to come forward and contradict McCain -- people like Lowell "Bud" Paxson, a broadcaster who wanted McCain to use his muscle in Paxson's tussle with the FCC.

Paxson had a lobbyist -- Vicki Iseman, the woman linked to McCain in the Times' report. McCain's no-wiggle denial was that "no representative" of Paxson (or his lobbyist's firm) personally asked him to send a letter to the FCC.

Paxson says McCain is wrong; we met, the broadcaster says. He also says Iseman, the lobbyist, was probably at the meeting. A few weeks later, McCain wrote the FCC on Paxson's behalf.

McCain's lawyer, Bob Bennett, has joined McCain in the dark land of insanity and denial:

"We understood that he [McCain] did not speak directly with him [Paxson]. Now it appears he did speak to him. What is the difference?"

To be fair, McCain is not the only one to blame for Bennett's madness; Bennett had Bill Clinton as a client in the squalid Paula Jones case, and having to read about your client's alleged fondness for whipping out Lil Bill would be enough to drive most men to tequila and peyote.

There is great danger ahead for John McCain and he knows it. He cannot spin his way into the sunlight. The media love scandals driven by absolutes. Party labels don't matter -- those crying "liberal media" at the Times report have convenient amnesia when it comes to the newspaper's starring role in trying to inflate Whitewater into Watergate. Ideology doesn't matter when there's blood mist in the nostrils and a politician says he can't smell a thing.

TO CRIB, OR NOT TO CRIB?

You don't pass off someone else's words as your own. You attribute the source.

Just the way it is.

Original writing is rare and an art. Rewrites are common. Nut grafs almost always outlive the original story.

Just the way it is.

So when Sen. Barack Obama was hit with a charge of plagiarism for using a passage from a 2006 speech by Deval Patrick, the current Massachusetts governor (and longtime pol bud of Obama), we saw it as a dicey call.

What Patrick said in 2006:

"'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.' Just words. Just words. 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself.' Just words. 'Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.' Just words. 'I have a dream.' Just words."

What Obama said this month:

"'I have a dream.' Just words. 'We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.' Just words. 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself.' Just words."

No, Obama didn't plagiarize, because this is a rewrite, a tumble-dry of previous facts already in common use. A sloppy copy, not a firing offense.

Yes, Obama did plagiarize, because all three "famous words" cites are exact copies of the ones Patrick used. Most suspicious is Obama's lift of a misquote from that famous Franklin D. Roosevelt address. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. So sayeth FDR, so say we all. Except for copycats.

No, Obama didn't plagiarize, because his remarks in Wisconsin were off-the-cuff and might be nothing more than a recall of a conversation he'd had with Patrick. Smart politicians often share riffs and slogans, especially when they're friends.

Dicey, but benefit of the doubt to Obama, mostly because he was off the beaten text when he said what he did. Cadence and anaphora rule the land of memorable hooks and ad-libs.

But now Politico reports on another instance where Obama used a Patrick passage -- this one scripted, not ad-libbed. In June 2006, Patrick said:

"I am not asking anybody to take a chance on me. I'm asking you to take a chance on your own aspirations."

Obama read the same lines from the text of a speech he gave last November in South Carolina. The Republican National Committee is peddling the new evidence. So much for the line that Obama would bridge the bitter divide. Forget Hillary Clinton. Did anyone sane ever believe the GOP would give up the White House without a nasty fight?

Spring, soon. All sorts of buried muck will rise with the tulips.

HELLO, TEACHER

Another teacher allegedly having sex with a student, this time in Benton County, Ark. The Benton County Daily Record reports:

Melissa G. Monroe, 32 of Bella Vista, was arrested Tuesday for sexual assault in the second degree and knowingly furnishing alcohol to a minor.

Bentonville police began investigating after receiving information that Monroe had been involved in a sexual relationship with a male student, a police news release states.

Monroe teaches math at Bentonville High School. Here's her school profile. You make the call.

YOU CAN NEVER LOOK BACK

The little voice inside your head? Maybe it's not all your imagination, or a Don Henley riff. The Pentagon has spent at least the last decade sussing out ways to put voices inside your noggin.

A report recently released by the Pentagon under a Freedom Of Information Act request shows us the way. PhysOrg reports:

"The phenomenon is tunable in that the characteristic sounds and intensities of those sounds depend on the characteristics of the RF energy as delivered," the report explains. "Because the frequency of the sound heard is dependent on the pulse characteristics of the RF energy, it seems possible that this technology could be developed to the point where words could be transmitted to be heard like the spoken word, except that it could only be heard within a person´s head. In one experiment, communication of the words from one to ten using ´speech modulated´ microwave energy was successfully demonstrated. Microphones next to the person experiencing the voice could not pick up these sounds. Additional development of this would open up a wide range of possibilities."

The report predicts that communicating at longer distances would be possible with larger equipment, while shorter range signals could be generated with portable equipment. Putting voices in people´s heads could cause what the report calls "psychologically devastating" effects.

Here's a link to the report, via Wired. Enjoy. Don't listen.

SPY SATELLITE SHOOTDOWN THURSDAY

So claims a report on CNN's blog:

The U.S. Navy will likely attempt to shoot down a faulty spy satellite on Thursday, the day after the space shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to land, two officials familiar with the planning told CNN Monday.

The officials — who spoke on condition of anonymity because much of the planning remains classified — said the idea is to leave as much time as possible so that a second attempt could be made in the event of a failure.

Does anyone believe the government's cover story that this whole shootdown is because of worries over rocket fuel, and its risk to humans on the ground?

BLOGGERS MEETING FEB. 28

The word comes to us from Fat Jack and goes a little something like this:

We are having a meeting of the Springfield Blogger's Association. That's right kids, it is back on!

The Blogaronis -- Springfield's answer to the Academy Awards, only with more beautiful people -- will be part of the festivities.

So mark the calendar -- 7:30 p.m. Feb. 28 -- and plan to be at Panera Bread at National & Elm. Special guest appearance by famous celebrities are possible.

HD DVD, 5

Adopted by the DVD Forum in 2003 to compete against the Blu-ray Disc. With Microsoft behind it, HD DVD seemed a cinch.

But that's all dust. According to the Hollywood Reporter:

Toshiba is widely expected to pull the plug on its HD DVD format sometime in the coming weeks, reliable industry sources say, after a rash of retail defections that followed Warner Home Video's announcement in early January that it would support only the rival Blu-ray Disc format after May. ...

Immediately after the Warner announcement, the HD DVD North American Promotional Group canceled its Consumer Electronics Show presentation. The following week, data collected by the NPD Group revealed Blu-ray took in 93% of all hardware sales for that week.

Toshiba subsequently fired back, drastically cutting its HD DVD player prices by as much as half, effective Jan. 15. But a hoped-for consumer sales surge never materialized; retail point-of-sale data collected by the NPD Group for the week ending Jan. 26 still showed Blu-ray Disc players ahead by a wide margin, 65% to 28%.

Best Buy and Netflix announced this week that they would go exclusively with Blu-ray. The format war is over.

PISSD

The ice storm of 2007 left many Ozarkers with deep anxiety -- what happens if the power goes out? where to stay? what to do?

This week, another round of ice slid into southwest Missouri. Not as bad as last year's edition, but still enough to shut down schools -- and to plunge thousands of people into the dark.

The calls to work today came from people who sounded more worried than usual. They all brought up the 2007 ice storm and wondered aloud: Will this one be as bad? Those who called with power failures were tense and angry.

We think they're suffering from Post Ice Storm Stress Disorder. The acronym certainly fits.