I’ve met Mike Hendrix, I kinda know Mike Hendrix, I like Mike Hendrix, and when Mike Hendrix asks for the blog audience to give him a hand and toss a few bucks his way – I’m in.

You should be as well. You didn’t need that fattening lunch today. How about tossing him a $20 instead?

“Always Be Closing” as Mamet tells us. I’ve voiced my support for Obama for some time, both for strategic reasons – I’d like to get the Democrats engaged in our foreign policy problems, rather than making them a one-party issues (“the GOP war, etc.) – and for personal ones – I believe my values are fundamentally progressive (i.e. I believe that government exists in no small part to counterbalance the powerful and wealthy) and I think Obama better represents those values.

But I’m tetchy. I keep digging into his biography, and finding places where what he says doesn’t line up with what he did. That’s not striking – welcome to politics – but since he’s selling us in no small part his own beliefs rather than his accomplishments, it would be nice to see those beliefs more deeply in the context of his biography.

I’ve suggested – and will keep suggesting – things he could do to make me more comfortable. Now I guess that makes me a “concern troll”, and means that no one on the Democratic side of the house should give a rip what I say.

Then again, maybe not.

Last weekend, we went to the Bay Area, and spent Friday night with college friends and others. The conversation, shockingly, turned to politics.

My friends – graduates of UC Santa Cruz, and residents of Santa Cruz and Silicon Valley – are reliable Democrats (except for one or two!!), people who volunteer for campaigns put bumper stickers on their cars, sometimes hand out leaflets in front of the local grocery store.

Their temperature on this election – tepid. For the women, the animosity over Hillary is not at the top, but simmers somewhere underneath. For the men, a feeling that Obama is a brilliant man, but a distrust – of what, no one could completely say.

Anecdote is not data, to be sure, but I was shocked enough to make it my project for the next week to talk to anyone handy about the election and see what they say.

I was shocked.

Among the strongest Obama supporters, the feeling was best summed up by a liberal retired high school teacher I sat with at lunch today – a woman wearing peace symbol earrings who grimly said “I really don’t think he’s going to win.”

A large number of mainstream Democrats simply confess a disquiet. The Howard Wolfson story – that Hillary would have won Iowa and hence the election if Edwards’ affair had come out – has been repeated enough that it got my attention. I can only call it buyer’s remorse.

I’m feeling it as well. I’m still a solid vote for Obama, but when I sit down and write checks, somehow I just never bring myself to write one for him.

Why? Why aren’t I solidly on his side? If I’m a doubter, why aren’t I alone in doubting him?

I’ve spent a little time online today, going through the comments at TalkLeft, Firedoglake, MyDD – the bastions of the Netroots and of support for him. Or not.

What’s the deal? And what should the Democrats do?

What should Obama do?

I’ll have to do my own campaign memo…

I wrote about him almost exactly six months ago.

We just walked out to take some boxes of stuff to Goodwill before we go out to a dinner tonight. My neighbor’s daughter was in the driveway, crying. Sam had just passed, at home, in his own bed.

We talked with her, and with her sister and brother who came out to wait for the mortuary van. We stood and talked about him, and when we left, they were laughing about things he’d said and done.

I know it was his time, but damn, I’m sad.

Jerry Wexler, who coined the term ‘rhythm & blues’ died yesterday.

I’m commenting on this because he was one of my dad’s great friends from his youth – back in New York City in the 1930’s where they worked at a ‘race music’ record store together along with a third buddy, a guy named Ralph Gleason.

Wexler went on to work at Billboard after the war, and along with Ahmet Ertegun, founded Atlantic Records. Gleason went on to found a jazz club with my dad after the war in San Francisco, and then became the music columnist for the SF Chronicle and then cofounded Rolling Stone. My dad went on to become an executive at a construction company, a job he had no love for but did very well at.

The lesson? Do what you love and success will come. I have told this story to my sons about a million times, and now, triggered by Wexler’s death, I’m sharing it with you.

So I went to the LA Library last night to sit and listen to a panel discussion on “Los Angeles Without The Los Angeles Times.” It was a panel discussion with these panelists:

George Kieffer, of Manatt, Phelps (a politically powerful law firm)
Robin M. Kramer, Mayor Villaragosa’s chief deputy
Geneva Overholser, of the USC-Annenberg School of Journalism
Kevin Roderick, of LA Observed (and a former LAT reporter)
Joel Sappell, Special projects Deputy to Supervisor Yaroslavsky, and a former LAT editor and reporter)
Brady Westwater, LA Cowboy blogger
David Lauter, LA Times Editor
Kit Rachlis, moderator, editor of Los Angeles magazine

My first reaction, on seeing this white, well-bred and well-educated group on the dais (even Brady looks like what he is – a smart and successful guy who doesn’t give a damn what he looks like or how he dresses – when TG and I met him she asked me if he was homeless) could be a panel from the Yale class of ’74 at a reunion.

There was a lengthy and well-mannered discussion (sadly, Brady seems to have been tamed a bit by his rising proximity to real power – he had the most intelligent and pointed things to say, but they were muffled under politeness and the moderator – who should have featured him, instead only occasionally reached out to him) which centered on the given truth that the LA TImes is wonderful, but it’s business model is changing because of that pesky Internet and the fickle nature of advertisers. The suggestion was made – repeatedly (by Kramer, echoed by Kieffer, and repeatedly by members of the NPR-loving (more on that later) audience – that “some philanthropists ought to step up and buy the Times as a community resource.” I turned to my seatmate and whispered “and then they can rename it ‘Pravda’.”

Overall, there was some intelligent discussion, but Brady’s core points – stop hiring young graduates of good journalism schools and start hiring people with roots in, and knowledge of, the communities that make up Los Angeles – remains the best single point that could be made.

There’s more, and if I get a chance, I’ll expand on it. But as I walked out, I suggested to TG that if the audiences’ desires for the paper were met, they should probably just rename the paper ‘The Brentwood Times’

Update: Moderator Kit Rachlis is having his own issues, according to LA Biz Observed (offshoot blog of Kevin Roderick’s):

Emmis Communications, which owns Los Angeles magazine, Orange Coast and Texas Monthly, is cutting salaries across the board by 2 percent, another sign of the times in the publishing biz. Also, about 40 jobs from the company’s publishing division are being cut – that’s a 4.5 percent workforce reduction. Two folks from LAM were let go (other trims will be through attrition).

…my suggestion is that Zell needs to go down to the beach near his place in Malibu with a whip and demonstrate that tides come in whether billionaires will them not to or not…

Resident whiz evariste fixed the broken free ice-cream machine, and explained the problem (we’re having two: malformed comments from spammers seemed to shut down PHP, and akismet keeps going down) in language even I could understand.

Apologies all around…

The RSS excerpt on this incoherent New York Times editorial caught my attention:

Then the F.D.A. should move as quickly as possible to determine the effects of menthol and what should be done to regulate or ban it.

You know, this whole research and factfinding thing is kind of tiresome. We’re pretty sure it might be a problem – therefore let’s regulate or ban it. Because you can never have enough regulation, and you can never ban enough things to make people truly safe and healthy.

I’m becoming a Libertarian, I swear…the more I read this drivel, the more tempting a subscription to Reason looks.

*…I’ll leave the provenance of the quote to the crowd. No fair using Google.

In a story in the local Santa Rosa paper, it is suggested that the outburst by Sen Pat Wiggins I linked to below may be part of an emerging pattern of behavior, rather than simple rudeness:

The outburst did not come as a shock to a half-dozen past and current elected leaders, public officials and supporters who said they have become alarmed about what they see as the senator’s increasingly erratic behavior over the past few months.

The incidents include inappropriate comments, displays of temper and the need to speak from prepared scripts.

“It’s bad news. Clearly, something is wrong,” said a longtime supporter, who, along with others interviewed for this story, requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the issue.

I hope she’s just having a bad spell…and it does appear that my suggestion that this was the product of an elected official’s arrogance may have been misplaced.

(…who only occasionally knows what I’m talking about).

Down in the comments on Georgia, I suggested sending in a hospital plane and unarmed troops.

Austin Bay has an interesting piece on his proposed response to a Georgia-type event…and kind of agrees with me (in a more knowledgeable way):

The fictional reply: Insert a Peacekeeping Brigade (PKB). Call it a Peacekeeping Organization (PKO) if you want to give it an extra diplomatic smudge.

A peacekeeping brigade comprises at least two engineer battalions with attached military police, medical, Civil Affairs, signal units and lots of media connectivity. Cameras matter. Add State Department personnel. Add Special Forces with their linguistic talents and a light infantry battalion for local security. Embed non-governmental organizations with the guts to participate and promise support to NGOs who choose to operate on their own but would accept clean water and blankets. Why, Mr. President, you can help the human shields. Aren’t they heading for Georgia to stop a super-power invasion? Tell the human shields our peacekeeping outfit will give them MREs and bandaids while they chain themselves to Georgian churches to protect them from Russian bombs.

Insert the PKB in a Russo-Georgia type situation and the emerging democracy gets on-the-ground support. The PKB is not an offensive military force, but an airborne brigade at the end of a long logistical tether isn’t either. The PKB serves as a military-diplomatic “transition signal” – Texas Hold’em and the emerging democracy get some of the value of a combat speed bump, while reducing though not eliminating the risks of inserting combat forces.

There’s more, as well as a really good analysis of the problem we face…

I did a podcast interview with Skewz editor Vipul Vyas this morning; it was a little unfocused, but a fun conversation. It’ll be up in a day or so and I’ll link to it here.

But I wanted to take a second and point you at their site – it’s one of a new breed of interesting news aggregators that potentially go a step beyond Digg or reddit by allowing useful user annotation of the stories that get promoted. I’ll comment more on these new critters as well as on my podcast when it comes up.