We've got a new "Think Again" column called "It's a Bird. It's a Plane. It's...Cable News," and it's here.

My Nation column, about Obama and Fox News and the rest of the media, is called "Just Don't Call It Journalism," and that's here.

I did another piece on J Street for the IHT. It's called "Voices From the Wilderness" and that's here and then Le Monde Diplomatique asked me to do a podcast and that's here: Living on J Street.

Philly gets everything!

A bit over ten years ago, during the reunion tour, I had tickets to Philly and we had like the biggest snowstorm ever. (That morning, I ran into the amazing sight of one Victor S. Navasky braving these amazing elements to make it to, I kid you not, a Nation editorial meeting.) The show was cancelled, which was good, because an ex-friend, who had been an incredible dick about giving me (and Eli) a ride there, drove back and forth in the storm for nothing, thereby ever–so-slightly increasing my belief in a personal God who takes an interest in justice, however capriciously. But the show was rescheduled, not only for Bruce's 50th birthday, but also for the night I had terrific tickets for Tom Waits, who almost never tours, at the Beacon, which in those days, was literally a half a block from my apartment. And I had already seen about seven of these reunion shows.

What to do?

What would you do?

I went to Philly (got lost, per usual). Got there just in time to hear Bruce play "Fever" my favorite song, and the only one that has remained on my funeral list, throughout the decades. It's the only time I've heard it since maybe 1978, so that story has a happy ending. This year's decision not to go Philly does not have as happy an ending, but it's my own fault (and David Rudd's).

Anyway, this is really great: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DytO5K0rPu8&feature=channel

Not bad either: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5H081gJWI6A&feature=channel

For moms, everywhere: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y08SB-YnQg0&feature=channel.

Now this from my friends at World Hunger Year:

A Once-In-A Lifetime Opportunity to Meet Bruce Springsteen and support charity! You can help support WHY's fight against hunger in the U.S. and meet The Boss on Saturday, November 7th @ Madison Square Garden in NYC. Take your pick of seats in the Pit or First Tier Loge section and enjoy VIP access to the E Street Lounge and best of all, personally meet and spend time one-on-one with Bruce Springsteen. All inquiries should be submitted to lcolacurcio@charityfolks.com. Minimum bids start at $10,000 and will be accepted until 6pm EST on Wednesday, October 28th. Experience is for two people. Donations are tax deductible above the face value of the tickets. Winner must be from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut or Pennsylvania.

Alter-correction. The great Joe South wrote "I never Promised You a Rosegarden." But Chip Taylor wrote "Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)" and "I Can't Let Go," for the Hollies. Also, an anonymous friend informs me: "Chip Taylor is one talented and strange guy. If you haven't heard his 2005 disc with Carrie Rodriguez titled "Red Dog Tracks," I urge you to do so. Bluesy folky country (or some other order of those genres and maybe some others) with some mind-stopping lyrics, great tight spare arrangements, the languid country-honey voice of Ms. Rodriguez, and some duets that grab my heart. Their Hank Wms cover of "I Can't Help It" is one cut I find myself listening to over and over. They pour a lot of emotion into a simple song and harmonize exquisitely. This disc has convinced several reluctant friends that they do like country music after all."

I bought it.

Here's the man:

CHARLES PIERCE
NEWTON, MA.

Hey Doc:

"Now it's hail Mary full of gin and sweet boneless Jesus / Our happy home might never be the same."

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Dixie" (Mike West)--I'll go on any network to talk at length about how much I love New Orleans.

Short Takes:

Part The First: As Interim Altercation Papist Correspondent, I, for one, would like to thank il Papa and the red-beanie Romanita crowd for this latest bit of theological hooey. What a deal. We get a bunch of homophobic wingnut Anglican clerics, and out goes the rule on celibacy. Which the previous pope, dubbed "John Paul The Great" by Ms. Peggy Noonan (aka Origen Without The Effort), insisted was necessary to maintain the Christ-like nature of the priesthood. (Yeah, yeah, I know.) However, when Holy Mother Church gets to strike a political and cultural blow against laymen who do bad things with their pee-pees--to say nothing of kicking back against Henry VIII again--the importance of "the undivided heart" and that of the "fruitful ministry" go right down the drain. Of course, His Eminence Nutsy Fagen here might disagree.

Postscript--There no longer can be any question. The Washington Post is trying to outflank The Onion as a news source. Of whom does this loon have cheap-motel-and-a-goat pictures, anyway? If it's Parson Meacham, I don't want to see them, and if it's Sister Sally Of The Blessed Sacraments Exposed, I probably already have.

Part The Second: Neither the Edwards, nor the Palin stuff should surprise anyone. But I am intrigued by the rest of the list of historic Gallup plunges. What, for example, did Pope John Paul II do in a single month in 1998 that caused his numbers to tank 17 points? And, a decade ago, did I miss the moment in which Lamar Alexander knocked over an orphanage?

Part The Third: This is just not good. On the other hand, this is immeasurably worse. Get the blood off your hands, Ace, before you start lecturing your betters. (You did your damnedest to enable the "disaster" through the aftermath of which you now say Obama is governing the nation. Foof.) And, even if this mess hadn't emanated from one of "liberal" America's most inexcusable chickenhawks , this line--"As for journalists, you can hardly blame them for trying to inject some volatility into the Obama storyline."--would be proof enough that he should find another line of work. I can blame them. It's not their job to "inject" anything into a "storyline." Jesus, this stuff used to be obvious.

Part The Fourth: Little Lord pissant has a lot of goddamn gall going near this at all. And Slightly Larger Lord Pissant here should know that those cutesy-poo quote marks around the word caregivers are prima facie evidence that you're pretty much a dick. One day in a chemo chair, Ace, and you'd be weeping and screaming for a spiff the size of a Louisville Slugger.

Part The Penultimate: I'm sorry, but I don't think believing these people are dangerous, gun-toting fantasts "depends on (my) perspective" at all. I mean, get a load of this stuff. Detention camps? Foreign troops on American soil? "I refuse to cooperate with any order from the government that I must cooperate with giant metal lizards from space." And that's before you get to the end, which seems to be a discreet incitement to mutiny. But, of course, they do have a fan who regularly plays the role of the Avuncular Old Fart Neighbor on Mr. Squinty's neighborhood, the morning kiddie show on liberal cable network MSNBC. In a related story, alas for Pat, this old bastard is still dead.

Part The Ultimate: I have studiously avoided commenting at length on the ongoing social, political, and cultural ball of snakes that is the Israeli-Palestinian situation. This is largely because everything I read makes it seem increasingly intractable--Belfast with sand and several more millenia worth of tribal savagery and archaic religious enmity. Mechanized warfare against suicide bombers. The redoubtable Padraig O'Malley--who did so much good work prying various fingers off various throats in the north of Ireland--has waded into it, and good luck to him. But this latest development is so frustratingly, damnably stupid that it is enough to make anyone throw up their hands. Demanding to be handed, and to be recognized as, a modern nation-state while simultaneously allowing barbaric monotheists to run amuck? How in the name of Odin (to employ here, for rhetorical purposes, a relatively neutral Deity) does this advance any legitimate interest of a people currently living under the circumstances of occupation? And, yes, I know what the effect of conservative religion in Israel has been, thanks. What this place needs is for every damned cleric living there to get on a boat and sail over the far horizon for about 200 years.

Name: Michael Green
Hometown: Las Vegas, NV

Our parable on Balloon Boy is that 32 years ago, on August 16, 1977, the lead story on the CBS Evening News (with Roger Mudd substituting for Walter Cronkite) was the Panama Canal treaty. The lead was not that Elvis Presley had died that day.

I am inclined to think that was not good news judgment, because Presley was an important part of our cultural history. And that is the question the CBS News producers should have asked themselves that day. Instead, they asked themselves what was most important to the American people--not what mattered to them.

Whatever we say of the lunatics and slanderers on Fox News, their opinion shows do focus on what they actually consider important. That their viewers think what they are saying has even a modicum of truth to it is because the rest of broadcast news--not just Fox--has no sense of history, ethics, or journalism. In fact, I should delete part of the previous sentence. The rest of broadcast news has no sense. Period.

Name: Merrill R. Frank
Hometown: Jackson Heights, NYC

Dr. Apparently the wretched spawn of the Nixon, Atwater and Rove "Southern Strategy" rears its ugly head again.

This brings to mind the 1978 South Carolina Gubernatorial race between Carroll Campbell and Max Heller. You summed it up well twenty years ago.

"But of all the things of which he has been accused, he says, the one that makes him the maddest concerns the charge of anti-Semitism in the 1978 Congressional victory by the current Governor of South Carolina, Carroll A. Campbell Jr., over Max Heller, the former Mayor of Greenville and a Jewish refugee from Austria who had fled the Nazis. Atwater's accusers claim that as an informal adviser to Campbell, he passed secret polling information to Don Sprouse, a third- party candidate, who then used the information to undermine Heller's campaign. Political analyst Alan Baron has revealed that Campbell's pollster in 1978, Arthur J. Finkelstein, of Irvington, N.Y., told him that his data showed South Carolina voters would reject ''a foreign- born Jew who did not believe in Jesus Christ as the savior.'' Marvin Chernoff, a Democratic consultant in Columbia, claims that Atwater specifically told him of passing Finkelstein's secret poll to Sprouse. Atwater denies all of it. Finkelstein and all of the Campbell campaign staffers contacted also deny the accusations. But Campbell's campaign manager has since admitted to a late-night meeting with Sprouse representatives in a Greenville parking lot before the election, and the Finkelstein poll released by Campbell did ask voters to compare how they would feel about a race between a "Jewish immigrant" and a "native South Carolinian."

You figure the younger generation in South Carolina politics would get over this idiocy but I guess they just get a pass by stating their "Unequivocal support for Israel", how funny Seinfeld is and how much they donated to Hadassah.

BTW: Limbaugh buying a share in a NFL franchise is akin to Father Coughlin wanting to buy a share of the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940's.

Name: Hulka
Hometown: San Francisco, CA

(1) Chip Taylor didn't write "I Never Promised You A Rose Garden"; Joe South did.

(2) James Ellroy has historically gone out of his way to describe himself as a conservative authoritarian, but one wonders whether the events of the last few years haven't pulled him a bit leftward. The new novel certainly points in that direction.

Name: Ed Tracey
Hometown: Lebanon, New Hampshire

Professor, I cannot locate a photo of this on-line...but the October 12 issue of Sports Illustrated recounted how the previously-integrated NFL became an all-white league in the 1930's until after WWII (with Kenny Washington playing the role as the first re-integrator).

The one holdout was the Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall who kept his team all-white until the early 1960s (when the Kennedy administration told him he could not play in a publicly-supported stadium and discriminate).

Author Alexander Wolff included a photo with the caption "American Nazi Party members, with no evident sense of irony, demonstrated in DC with placards reading KEEP REDSKINS WHITE".

Name: Bill Miller
Hometown" Mill Valley, Calif.

All right, if there's to be no debate on who did the best Nobel story, then we'll just say this was a pretty good one, too.

Name: Dave Richie
Hometown: Birmingham, AL

Dr. A,

This is for Pierce if you so choose-a few comments only a pope catholic could love.

Pierce,

re: Penultimate: Very much in agreement. Ever since they gave this "thing" to 3 of the most notorious terrorists of the twentieth century my interest has been very low. I believe there was a hand shaking ceremony only accomplished because they simply could not take any more of carter's platitudes.

But the comments posted below the linked post are, alone, worth the price of admission.

As for Yeats, I am old enough to remember the list. It was not read to us but referred to often by Sister Mary Discipline, lest we stray into a heathen movie house, followed by an admonishment to pray for the Irish (catholic kid growing up in Indiana) and that sweet Terry Brennan for next weekend's game.

Ultimate:

In giving up on the death penalty several years back, I remarked to some of my full moon conservative drinking buddies that it won't be long until the releases of innocent men in Illinois will pale in comparison to the list of executed innocent men and women. I cannot believe it has taken this long to prove/find the first. Still, the prosecutors and the the guv insist they were right. I guess you would have to find a way to get to sleep at night. God knows the jurors cannot. The good sisters were right all along. "Boys and girls the days of an eye for an eye need to end."

Pax Vobiscum,
Dave Richie

Name: JP
Hometown: SC

From the good Mr. Pierce, re: the death penalty.

"It's about killing people to make yourself feel strong, or safe, and about bravely hiring people to do the killing for you."

Replace the phrase "hiring people" with "sending others" and this sentence very adeptly describes war as well.

Name: Stephen Carver
Hometown: Los Angeles

Loved the Think Again and Nation pieces which brought a question to mind: is there enough news in America to actually support a 24 hour "news" network? So much of what we are given as "news," as evidenced in the Michael Jackson and Balloon Boy stories, is dreck. Then we get several hours of talking heads spouting about politics; no news there.

Even in local news, I find that most of it is either about guns (and the death they bring), gangs (and the violence they bring), new ways for women to lose weight and what's gotten to me lately: advertisements for a network's prime time line up thinly disguised as "news stories."

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