Report from Chicago, eve of Yearly Kos

Now called Millenium Park, no longer smells like tear gas.

Chicago is such a fine city! O, city of big shoulders, hog-butcher to the world, where I got tear-gassed repeatedly in 1968, and other erotic pleasures. After checking into the hotel today I stashed my car in an underground garage, and rode up in the elevator – only then to realize I was in the lobby of the Prudential Building. Lord, in 1963 I proposed to my true love in the penthouse bar of that very building. She said yes, but, lucky girl, she got away anyway. Must have been the Singapore Slings.

Now, Yearly Kos starts Thursday AM. I hope to be posting daily on what strikes my fancy, so thrills await you. All the good Democrats contending to be the nominee for president will be there, plus our Joe Garcia, Miami-Dade party chairman, who’s a session speaker this weekend, and many Democratic progressives from around Florida, the founders and practitioners of political blogging.

The blog is supposed to be like a diary, so I’m going to whack you with the serendipity that struck me as I drove up I-65 through Indiana this morning. I tuned around the AM dial to find WLS, once my favorite listen. Now, like so many others, it bleats the far-right tune, and Jerry Agar was holding forth when I captured WLS around mid-morning.

Lo, Agar was raving about the Yearly Kos. I was driving and couldn't take notes, but he said we’re all “hard-core leftists,” which equates us to “Communists” in his playbook. Hey, it made me feel like I was back home in South Florida.

Then he and a co-conspirator named Laura, I believe, began ripping into Barack Obama, who’s from Chicago and thus more of a local star/target. They’re still riding the hobbyhorse of his comment about meeting foreign leaders who are on the “axis-of-evil” list, and they were eagerly awaiting the speech he was to give this morning about foreign affairs.

They were going to broadcast it live – at least when it got interesting.

After quite a lot of their prepping with predictions that Obama would put foot in mouth, the senator got into foreign affairs and WLS went live with his voice, just as he described the 9/11 attacks. To my mind, this was not what Jerry Agar had hoped for, since he kept saying Obama was going to declare war on Pakistan; instead, WLS listeners heard at least 10 minutes of Obama’s finely honed and thoroughly logical case condemning the Bush administration for failing to finish the assault on Bin Laden in Afghanistan and launching a disastrous war in Iraq. “What would Barack be willing to pay for all this free airtime on an opposition program?” I wondered. Talk about earned media!

Finally the senator got to what the WLS host was seething for: (I paraphrase Obama’s words) If we have good intelligence on the terrorists and Pakistani President Musharaf refuses to act, I will.

Immediately, Agar said Obama was willing to declare war on Pakistan, to launch an attack on Pakistan. And after he opened the phone lines to callers, he kept saying the same falsity even as the callers said that striking at terrorists in Pakistan wasn’t the same as declaring war on Pakistan.

Well, fellow hard-core lefties, this is what we’re up against. Gross mischaracterization – and shouted as loud and as often as possible.

I took a look at Agar’s bio on the WLS website. Appears he’s done little in life except talk on the radio. Check it out. He has a nice, loud radio voice.

So then, dear friends, I crept through miles and miles of construction sites to reach the hotel in the loop, and I got a copy of the Chicago Sun-Times. Though Rupert Murdoch hasn’t bought that newspaper yet, its Wednesday edition had a wonderful example of what’s known as “fair and balanced” elsewhere in his empire.

Two articles were critical of Obama, and on the other side of the scale, one article slyly praising Fred Thompson for having a young wife. Now I tried to put links up here to the three articles but was unable to find them on the Sun-Times' website. Do computers work differently in the Windy City?

I rest my case for the day. Time to go out and have a look around.

Fred Thompson was Nixon's mole

Here's why those of us of a certain age (I'm talking over 60 here) always get a little memory nudge when the name Fred Thompson comes up. We saw him a lot in 1973, when we were transfixed by Watergate, those televised hearings. Then he fell out of view for a while, and meanwhile his hair fell out, so now he doesn't look like he did back then. The Boston Globe has worked up the story complete with a photo showing our Fred with hair. Remember?

Now would any voter in right mind really want as president someone who in 1973 revealed the existence of the White House taping system but thought it would exonerate Tricky Dick? Wow, there's some bad judgment. It worked out for the best, of course, but this putative presidential candidate of 2007-8 was Nixon's mole.

I ask again: are there a lot of Republicans out there who really want such a background for their candidate?

If he's the Republican nominee, what a gold mine of memories we will have to bring out. It was so long ago that we've mostly forgotten, but still, there is that little memory nudge. What is it about the man? Not his cologne ...

This flood of memories was unleashed by a browse through the blog of Joy-Ann Reid, one of the morning people on Radio 1080, The People's Station in Miami. A bow of thanks to her.

Fred Thompson on Cubans

It seems wet-foot/dry-foot hasn't trickled down to Fred Thompson. What did he say about Cubans? Check it out on YouTube

This item is also rattling around on the Herald's political blog, Naked Politics. Don't see it yet in the main paper online. I guess a Republican newspaper wouldn't want to upset its readers over there on the right wing.

Second Update: Now I see this in the Herald, tucked into this story reporting that Hispanics are unhappy with the way the Republicans killed the immigration bill in the Senate. And that our Republican senator, Mel Martinez, has "no idea what I'm going to say" at the Orlando meeting of Hispanic elected officials from around the U.S.

O frabjous day, Republican disarray.

Update: Thompson's blog runs on about how Ana Belen Montes was a big spy for Cuba and tries to tie her into the problem of the porous border. But I see from a Google search on her she is of Puerto Rican descent and was born on a US Army base in Germany. Not exactly a balsera. I posted a comment to this effect on Naked Politics, link above.