New poem THE BALLAD OF CORY BOOKER

New poem about Newark NJ mayor Cory Booker's promotion of Cory Booker on MEET THE PRESS: There's no such thing as nuance On the Presidential campaign trail. Surrogates can't go off-script Any more than corporate employees Or even some of us who produce  Commerce-flavored Art. You can't say you don't agree with 100 % Of what your party's candidate says. Otherwise you invite party officials And cable news pundits To transform into CGI werewolves That will bite and claw you to political death If you don't walk back your heresy By reading the exact talking point script You should have done One news cycle ago.

Running for re-election: Mel Gibson and Barack Obama.

Let's start with the man once known as Mad Max and Martin Riggs: I wish Alan Nierob or someone in Mel Gibson's agency/management/PR camp had begged Mel not to go on Jay Leno's THE TONIGHT SHOW.  The kerfluffle over Joe Eszterhas' self-serving reveal of Mel-in-anger-again had quieted, and it did Gibson no good to go out and spin his version of the Eszterhas problems (mainly Eszterhas' alleged underwork on a screenplay).  It just made Mel look churlish and smug, even with Jay doing his best to kiss Mel's posterior by whining about Eszterhas' violation of Mel's "privacy" by going public.  Then, there was the sad spectacle of Mel Gibson plugging what's now his first film to completely bypass U.S. theatrical release for a combination satellite TV/DVD unveiling (complete with underwhelming clip of Mel doing a Clint Eastwood imitation-by-phone to fellow actor Bob Gunton).  Since Jay has lowered the bar for plugs-by-guests, perhaps Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal can now promote direct-to-video movies on THE TONIGHT SHOW.

Now, our President (Barack Obama) is again cynically treating his re-election as a chess game of checkmate-the-GOP by touting the killing of Osama bin Laden in an unseemly manner.  It's one thing to show some solemn gravitas when the death of a (or, one might say, THE) major terrorist leader is announced--but it's quite another when bin Laden's death is turned into another campaign talking point (remembering that the Davis Guggenheim-directed, Tom Hanks-narrated re-election featurette film kicked off this effort a little while back).  To be honest, this seems to be only two steps away from releasing photos of bin Laden's corpse--something that, thankfully, never happened.  And it doesn't reflect well on Obama, Joe Biden, David Axelrod and Jim Messina (the re-election leader, not the former musical partner of Kenny Loggins) to keep up this distasteful effort to win "swing" voters by showing "toughness."

A lot of us voted for Obama the first time around because he was/is smart--and in 2008 gave the illusion of being a JFK/RFK for our times.

Most likely, the 2012 election will be a replay of Bill Clinton's slam-dunk 1996 re-election--though there will be a great deal of coordinated dog-whistle racism, classism, and you're-a-Commie mudslings from certain high-level Republicans, their financial providers and their media propaganda arms.

But it must be pointed out that at his core Obama is the same kind of moderate Republican as Mitt Romney--and blind-faith supporters of Obama must be prepared for more of the same just-mild-at-best social programs along with more bloodless decision-making (drone warfare and its collateral-damage deaths won't go away) and let-them-off-easy treatment of Wall Street thievery/greed (not to mention pandering to pro-fracking and oil-sands interests regardless of long-term environmental damage).

Safe to guess, though, that four more years of an unwilling-to-change-and-be-who-he-sold-himself-as-in-2008 Obama will be more appealing to many than watching Mitt Romney pretend to be Ronald Reagan on the outside and governing like George H.W. Bush on the inside.

Homeowners get a tiny wishbone thrown to them--and banks get off easy today.

The other day, David Axelrod on MSNBC delivered what's unfortunately the mission statement of the Obama administration with some mutterings about "living in the real world" instead of trying to affect real change.  This had to do with a likely capitulation to the GOP on the issue of religious-based orgagnizations offering contraception coverage to its employees.  And it applies also to today's $25 billion Big Banks settlement with mortgage-troubled homeowners;
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/09/national-mortgage-settlement_n_1265292.html?1328800097&ref=business&icid=maing-grid10%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl11%7Csec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D134135
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-gongloff/national-mortgage-settlem_b_1265778.html
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/why-the-foreclosure-deal-may-not-be-so-hot-after-all-20120209

More great political commentary from Matt Taibbi

From the October 22nd entry ("Elizabeth Warren For President") on Matt Taibbi's blog http://taibbi.rssoundingboard.com, here's an excerpt (the boldface is provided by me):
I’m personally of the opinion that our main problem lay with the fact that the Democratic Party as currently constituted is more afraid of losing the financial support of Wall Street and the health insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry than it is of losing progressive voters. In fact, I think I’ve put that wrong, because it implies that the Democratic Party pushes the agenda of industry insiders out of fear. That is a misread of the situation, I think.

I think they prefer those people to their voters. I think they feel more comfortable with them. I heard a story recently from a Democratic Party operative who tells me that certain members of one of the president’s cabinet departments only got wind of how hard it is out there for ordinary people to pay their bills when they invited in a major corporation to give them a presentation about their financial outlook for the holiday season — and through that report found out that this company’s prospective customers were spending less because large numbers of them had been laid off, or had huge medical bills, or had maxed out their credit, and so on.

Letters from customers, survey answers and such, were read to the cabinet group. And they were shocked. This is how they find out about the economic reality of this country — accidentally, from a major campaign contributor! That’s how out of touch these people are.

Watching Bruce Weber short films and getting depressed.

I just watched a quintet of shorts from filmmaker Bruce Weber [his recurring motifs include Hollywood glamour and an abiding love of dogs] currently airing on the Sundance Channel.

One short was dedicated to River Phoenix. And it's fascinating how Phoenix has been near-completely forgotten in the fifteen-plus years since his death. No definitive biography. No retrospectives. Not even a remote comparison to the attention paid to Heath Ledger since Ledger's passing (Ledger's final film, Terry Gilliam's THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS, is likely to have a decent-enough opening weekend due to the curiosity factor).

The final short, LIBERTY CITY IS LIKE PARIS TO ME, is now spectacularly poignant and depressing. The viewer gets to watch African-American citizens of Liberty City, Florida celebrating the inauguration of Barack Obama--plus a dance number (set to a soundtrack recording of Sammy Davis, Jr. singing a PORGY AND BESS song) that, in a good way, resembles the song-and-dance interlude in Spike Lee's SHE'S GOTTA HAVE IT.

But it's now clear that Obama's not the President and Leader of the Free World that the citizens of Liberty City (and other American towns and cities) hoped for. Instead, he's in the Oval Office to make sure corporate trains run on time and business interests aren't too disturbed by calls for the kind of oversight that decreases profits. And Obama, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod are willing to rope-a-dope liberals (or that antiseptic synonym "progressives") on health care and likely any other key issues until the folks on the Left are worn down from fruitless battle and are willing to accept toothless "compromise" because it's "something to build on."

Sort of like what businesses do when union members go on strike.