The morning’s mail brought this missive from my buddy Russ (channeling H. S. Thompson):

This campaign season is going to get really ugly.
Special Interest groups are going to run with this like crap thru a goose!
“buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, ’cause Kansas is going bye-bye.”
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2007/03/the_nuclear_mus.html#posts

He has a point here. This election cycle has already brought us an almost unprecedented level of “civilian” involvement in campaign material production. I saw this coming a few years ago when, during the 2004 primary season, my friend Geri produced a 10 minute promotional video to distribute in support of the Howard Dean campaign. You can find an account of that effort here.
Further exploits from that campaign season may be found here.

Rudy Giuliani has been facing one after another embarrassing exposures of late. His son won’t campaign on his behalf, fallout from Rudy’s nasty second divorce. His previous positions on such hot-button issues as public funding for abortions or gays in the military have come back to haunt him, YouTube style. His law firm’s lobbying on behalf of Hugo Chavez connected Citgo hasn’t helped, billing $5,000 a month for well over a year while Rudy refers to Chavez as “not a friend to the US”.

And now Tim O’Brien, the campaign’s director of rapid response, suddenly quit.

After serving years in the House from Massachusetts, Martin Meehan will be leaving Congress to take over as Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. One of the most powerful members of Massachusetts’ congressional delegation, as chairman of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Meehan has led the way on issues such as the Walter Reed scandal, elimination of the folly known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and a string of liberal causes.

He will be missed.

Already 8 challengers have lined up to vie for his seat.

From The New York Times

Lender Faces Credit Crisis With Banks
Wall Street lenders cut their credit lines to New Century Financial, forcing it ever closer to bankruptcy.

We have been hearing for years now that a mortgage crash might happen. So many people had rushed into the housing market without adequate capital, opting in many cases for ARMs, sub-primes, interest-only and other questionable lending instruments. Banks were only too happy to float the paper and mortgage lenders were only too happy to write it. Now, tick-tock…tick-tock…

Epilog: On April 2, 2007, New Century (the lender mentioned above) filed for bankruptcy, reported The New York Times

According to CNN:

Mayan Indian leaders have vowed to “spiritually cleanse” an ancient site in Guatemala after U.S. President George W. Bush visits during his seven-day, five-nation tour of Latin America.

Bush’s visit to the ruins at Iximche, a one-time capital of a Mayan group, is part of an effort to show the administration is interested in all its neighbors in the hemisphere.

But many Mayans are angry that Bush is visiting Iximche, founded as the capital of the Kaqchiqueles kingdom before the Spanish conquest in 1524.

Mayan priests say they will purify the sacred archaeological site to rid it of any “bad spirits” after Bush is there.

“That a person like (Bush) with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked is going to walk in our sacred lands is an offense for the Mayan people and their culture,” Juan Tiney, director of a Mayan non-governmental organization with close ties to Mayan religious and political leaders, told The Associated Press.

Why can’t we American’s get up a head of steam about this joker like our brothers and sisters to the south can?

What a bad week it has been for the Bush Whitehouse. What a shame that I cannot cry a tear over that. Let’s see… Fired federal prosecutors, blown up Iraq negotiations, Dick CheneyScooter Libby convicted, FBI overreaching… Oh yeah, and a Democratic Congress ready to investigate it all. A “Perfect Storm” of bad fortune.

Giuliani: Why Didn’t I Think of That?
English exchange student: I like New York, but it has just been so cold!
Local student: This is nothing. Where I’m from in Minnesota it’s been 15 below.
English exchange student: Wow! You must not have much of a homeless problem there — they all just die!

–Downtown M4 bus
via Overheard in New York, Mar 5, 2007

Pawn remembers a winter visit to Minneapolis/Saint Paul back during the Reagan era, when the homeless problem first got so bad as institutions across the country were emptying their wards. Local leaders were very proud of themselves for coming up with a solution to the problem of the homeless living on the streets, who had taken to busting up park benches to use for firewood. They were replacing park benches with new metal models.

This was oddly similar to Ronald Reagan’s idea of solving the problem of urban blight by putting cardboard cutouts of of people into the windows of vacant buildings to make them look inhabited. Now if he had thought of putting homeless people into these buildings to make them really lived in, that would have been something!

As I write this Congressman Martin Meehan (D-MA) is presenting a bill to repeal the infamous “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” legislation. Those of us around at the time may remember that as an object lesson to a newly ascendant Democratic President that even when you control all the levers of power you can’t always get your way. What Clinton did with his efforts to repeal the military’s ban on gays, however, was to show us that it is possible for a new president, with only a plurality of the vote, to try to pass controversial legislation. He failed, but in doing so made believers out of many of us who hadn’t trusted him previously.
A rude surprise came eight years later when W took Clinton’s lesson to heart and shoved his far-right wing tax-cut-and-spend budget through a compliant congress even though he, too, had only a plurality of the vote.
Jake Tapper over at ABC News blogs about the appearance today of Staff Sgt. Eric Alva along side Meehan and a bipartisan group of legislators pushing for repeal of the ban. Alva was the first US Marine seriously wounded in our current adventure in Iraq, and is now openly gay.

For a refresher on this issue, check out Wikiality.

My favorite Middle East sage, Robert Fisk of The Independent has written another spectacular column. “Accurate information in Iraq is like water in the desert: precious, rare, often polluted.”
Here is an excerpt which brings home a particularly startling aspect of the current situation in Iraq:

The reality is that Iraq’s war now exists in a fog through which we can see only vague figures. They may be insurgents or they may be soldiers. Or they may, for all the Iraqis know, be units from the 120,000 – yes, 120,000 – Western mercenaries now believed to be operating in Iraq for any number of legal and quasi-legal organisations. These hired gunmen constitute a force almost equal to the entire US contingent in Iraq. Who do they work for? What are their rules? The answer to the first may be “everyone”. The answer to the second question? None.

Besides these great mysteries, what did the lives of 18 teenagers matter to the world yesterday, let alone who killed them?