Good Morning, City Desk Readers!  It’s the first day of July and the forecast doesn’t call for 90 degree temperatures so it’s already looking like a good one.  On the news front, the nation’s capital is expecting some new residents that are already getting attention before moving in.

• Minnesota has finally come to its senses and decided that Al Franken will be its second senator.  It only took the ballot counters and lawyers eight months to figure that out.  The former Saturday Night Live writer will take his seat following the July 4th recess.  Franken will be the 60th Democrat in the Senate, making it possible for the party to break a Republican filibuster but he wants everyone to know that he’s not looking to block legislation on a regular basis.

Read More “Our Morning Roundup: New Neighbors Edition” »

As he was heading off the air, I’m pretty sure I heard Dave Feldman at Fox-5 report last night that the Wizards are going to work out Stephon Marbury today.

Did anybody tell Abe Pollin?

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Lebron’s come and gone. But we only have to wait a week for the next celeb sports doc extravaganza: Luis Tiant will be at the E Street Cinema downtown on June 22 for red-carpet screening of “The Lost Son of Havana,” a film about the ex-Indian- Twin-Red Sock-Yankee-Pirate-Angel’s trip back to the Cuban capital, which is his Akron.

After the screening the movie’s producers will throw a bash across the street from the theater at the ESPN Zone. But don’t expect much. In the invitation the party’s organizers just sent out, they’re promising that: “Light refreshments will be served in accordance with House Ethics rules.”

House ethics used to lead to the wildest parties in town. Jack Abramoff mussed up everything.

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Sign of the times or the Times? Despite a big write-up in Sunday’s Washington Times, the Hoop Dreams Scholarship fund had to cancel its next big fundraising event for lack of interest.

Read More “Cheap Seats Daily: Marbury a Wizard? Can You Party AND Maintain House Ethics? Wake Up Call for Hoop Dreams? Letterman Loses Pride, Battle With Palinites?” »

I have been trying to figure out Michael Steele for the last week or so. Every since he won the RNC’s top job that has meant more TV chat show appearances where he talks up tax cuts and talks down Obama. He just doesn’t sound that smart. Yesterday, Steele told a Politico reporter that Obama’s stimulus package “is just a wish list from a lot of people who have been on the sidelines for years.. to get a little bling, bling.”

Read More “Michael Steele Is Our New Sarah Palin” »

Call it 2 Turkeys 1 Former Veep Nominee. No this is not a secret PETA video. This is the latest installment of Sarah Palin: The Swan Song.

Maybe this is the end of the media blitz. Maybe we will never see this clown again. Maybe we will never get to hear her whine about waving-the-white-flag-of-surrender, hear that bridge-to-nowhere lie, and watch her incite hatred at rallies, etc. I hope this is it.

Yesterday Palin appeared in Wasilla (I miss you Wasilla!) to pardon a turkey. After issuing her pardon, she did an interview with a local TV station (so long Greta). And, well, things go very wrong. Warning: this video is disgusting.

Via Huffington Post.

In a thoroughly predictable turn of events, Hillary Clinton and Ron Paul were the write-in champions of 2008 (by all accounts a banner year for write-ins). That makes plenty of sense, given that both Clinton and Paul boasted die-hard adherents with a bit of a disenfranchisement complex.

To paraphrase President-elect Obama: “When people get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward candidates who actually have a hope in hell.”

But to assume these two were the only major write-in players would be to underestimate the imagination and pluck of the American people. As Matt Dunn of the New Jersey Star-Ledger sagely observes:

Voters in Cumberland County unsatisfied with the choices given to them on Election Day chose to vote on their own terms in this year’s election. The write-in candidates stood little chance of defeating those candidates whose names were listed on the ballot, but that didn’t stop voters from exercising their right to vote for whomever they saw fit.

Below the jump, some of my favorite write-ins from Ohio, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Florida, and D.C.

Read More “Election 2008 Write-Ins: Newt Gingrich, Paris Hilton, and Other People Who Are Not President” »

In which we speak with ANC 1C-03 Commissioner Bryan Weaver about Michael Brown’s basketball skills, David Schwartzman’s uncanny resemblance to Walt Whitman, and the Sarah Palin Disney Movie.

Trouble viewing? Try the YouTube version.

A MUST-WATCH in which Erik lampoons the Informer and the Express for their mind-numbing election stories and shows off his command of la langue française while questioning the “global view” of Regina Belle.

Hope y’all brought mittens.

Trouble viewing? Try the YouTube version.

At all. From a radio interview this morning:

“If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations,” Palin told host Chris Plante, “then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.”

What’s wrong with this statement? Let me count the ways.

Read More “Sarah Palin Doesn’t get the First Amendment” »

Marbury has been one of my great pleasures this electoral season. Written by Ian Leslie, the blog aims to explain United States politics to Leslie’s fellow Britons. That so few U.K. commentators do so successfully is one of the perversities of the Special Relationship.

Take, for example, this piece in the Guardian, conservatively titled “How these gibbering numbskulls came to dominate Washington.” It’s by George Monbiot, who despite stating in his second graf “I have for many years been mystified by American politics,” goes on to explain American politics. The answer? Quoting heavily from a Book He Just Read, Monbiot determines: It’s cuz we like God ‘n’ stuff! “Teaching in the southern states was dominated by the views of an ignorant aristocracy of planters,” he explains, “and a great educational gulf opened up,” he writes. Planters!

By contrast, here’s Leslie on Sarah Palin.

Does that mean I think she’s a towering intellect, the next Reagan/Thatcher etc? No. A combination of the moribund state of her party, and her premature ascent to the national stage, means that she’s not being forced to use that brain to do any real thinking. She’s interesting as a figure, but she really has nothing interesting to say. Anyway, I suspect she relies too heavily and lazily on her ‘instincts’ to do the hard thinking required to develop a distinctive political vision. But I do think she’ll emerge as very strong contender for the GOP nomination in 2012 and that she’ll come back as an improved, more substantial version of her 2008 self.

I’m not saying we don’t make it easy for people like Monbiot, but single-sourced, empirically researched twaddle like his article isn’t a far cry from the fuzzy education he blames for Americans’ inherent stupidity. And he’s not alone in his belief. Half my family is British, and whenever I’m over, I’m always struck by how firmly most folks there accept as gospel that Americans are idiots. If it weren’t for our movies, music, clothes, technology, food, cars, money, and amusement parks (single-sourced, empirically researched fact of my own: nine times out of 10, if a British person has been to a U.S. city other than New York, it’s Orlando), we’d have nothing to offer at all!

But Leslie has lived here, and it’s clear from his writing that not only does he have great affection for the place, he’s taken the time to try to actually understand it, something rare to British writers (and I’m counting Gary Younge here). As such, his perspective on our batshit-craziness is worth reading. And he mentions Moistworks as a favorite blog, so that’s in his plus column, too.

A funny-’cause-it’s-true riff from the Lakeview Terrace star about how Barack Obama needs to keep his cool no matter how apoplectic John McCain acts.

Funny, that is, until the very end, when Jackson straight-talks about “the elephant in the room.”

“That’s what we fear most as black people who want him to…be elected: Win, and somebody’s gonna try to kill him.”

Ben Westhoff, a New York freelance writer and occasional contributor to City Paper’s arts pages, recently signed on with the Examiner’s new blogger-generated-content model, where writers proclaim themselves experts in some discipline and get paid based on pageviews. It didn’t work out so well for Westhoff, who had a brief stint as a “music examiner,” because, well—he was trying to get pageviews:

In the beginning I took my column pretty seriously, shouting out stories I’d written for other publications, and including some original content. It quickly became a slog. My hits were 200 or 300 a day, not terrible, but translating to pennies (or perhaps quarters) per day. Then, around the time of the Republican convention it occurred to me that the idiots who dial up Examiner don’t want to read about Jamie Lidell or whatever, they want to read about Sarah fucking Palin. And so I began posting about her, every day. My hits went way up, well over 1000 for this Sarah Palin drinking game.

I was immediately told by an editor — a different one — that this was unacceptable, that I had to write about music only. I pushed back, noting my agreement with the first guy. But he couldn’t be swayed, and since I was near a payment threshold I capitulated. I silently vowed to get over the threshold as quickly as possible, and to entertain myself in the process. And so I began to blog about nothing but Lil Wayne and boobs — Katy Perry’s, mostly — in as absurd a manner as possible. Oh, and I still talked about Sarah Palin via ridiculous musical tie-ins. “Katy Perry and Sarah Palin to wrestle in Jello?” one was titled.

My hits stayed high, probably because nearly every post included a picture of Katy Perry with her tits hanging out, which were splashed across the site’s front page next to headlines like “Katy Perry voted biggest boobs in music.” (The first line of that particular post was, “By my friend Darryl”). After about a week of this they cut me off. My page is still up, but as of Saturday I can’t post to it anymore. This annoyed me at first, but this morning I got paid so I’m over it.

Westhoff’s post includes links to his Examiner posts, but they’re all dead now.

Valleywag points to a Time magazine widget listing the results of a poll asking folks who will win tonight’s watch-it-through-your-fingers-like-it’s-The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Vice Presidential debate. The rest of the world gives it to Joe Biden, 83 percent to Sarah Palin’s 17 percent. Even Alaska is on the same train as everybody else (78 to 22). Delaware goes to Biden, unsurprisingly—but at a full 100 percent. When’s the last time an election poll went 100 percent in one candidate’s direction? Even Alan Keyes got a few points against Barack Obama in the 2004 Senate race.

Yet another story detailing Bill Clinton’s preference for talking up John McCain over campaigning for Barack Obama:

Former President Bill Clinton was hesitant to characterize Barack Obama as a “great man” Sunday, a phrase he had no qualms using last week to describe Obama’s rival John McCain.

Clinton told NBC’s Tom Brokaw that it was only earlier this month in Harlem that he and Obama had their “first conversation.” He said he had spoken with Obama before, but only in passing.

Clinton then explained what he meant in characterizing McCain as a “great man.”

“I think his greatness is that he keeps trying to come back to service without ever asking people to cut him any slack or feel sorry for him or any of that stuff because he was a POW,” Clinton said of the Republican presidential nominee.

What is the matter with this guy? It’s like he’s a pathological self-saboteur. And then some obvious possibilities reared their jaded heads: If Obama wins in November and has an effective presidency, he’ll seek re-election, which would put eight years between Hillary and the White House. If Obama wins in November but taxes us into a recession, Republicans will have an easier time in 2012. But! If McCain wins in November and implements his disastrous defense policies (or OD’s on Viagra–either way, he’s a one-term guy), Hillary will be poised for a comeback in 2012. (Sarah Palin has about as much chance of going from VP to just “P” in 2012 as Dan Quayle did in 2000–er, ‘94.)

I’m sure this type of conjecture is/has been floating around the InterTubez, I’m just waiting for an MSM person to hit Clinton with it straight up.

Also, thinking like a pollster pickles my innards.

Via TPM, it’s Palin doing a pretty good impression of Bush. Slate offers some tips for Palin so she can ace her next interview (whenever that might be). In the meantime:

As anybody with eyes and ears knows by now, Sarah Palin isn’t so great at articulating what it means to be Russia’s neighbor. But if having an veep candidate who knows Russia-Alaska relations is important—and after all, “as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where—where do they go? It’s Alaska.”—there’s an easy replacement. Lynne Cox.

I first learned about Cox back in 2002, when I was reporting a story about a distance swimmer in San Francisco. In that particular world, Cox is Derek Jeter, the Williams sisters, Tiger Woods, and the ‘85 Bears rolled all into one: She swam the English Channel in 1972, at 15, then took on increasingly ambitious (and bone-chilling) swims, efforts culminating in a 1987 trip across the Bering Strait. For that, she swam the two and a half miles between Little Diomede Island (U.S.) and Big Diomede Island (Russia). The next year, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev referenced Cox’s effort as an example of how two countries can come together. A uniter, you see, not a divider.

Cox was a fun interview—performing these sort of feats makes you admirably zen, it seems—and she’s a hell of a writer, too. A few years back she published a beautifully written memoir, Swimming to Antarctica, describing her feats in vivid, disarming detail. (Don’t agree to a competition in the Nile River. Dog carcasses.) I know nothing of her politics. But somebody so strong, so articulate, so capable of using Alaska to inspire peace agreements could be nothing but a boon for the Republican ticket. Just a suggestion.