From Nick Denton’s LA gossip blog, Defamer:

Uh-oh. Barbra Streisand—referred to among the elite Democratic core as the Black Buttah Widow for the way her endorsements mean the certain kiss of death—will perform at an Obama fundraiser at the ballroom of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel on September 16. This is a room that holds only 700 people, so attendees will be expected to pony up for the privilege. From Variety.com:

Obama will start the evening with a 5 p.m. dinner event for about 250 people at Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, the historic estate once owned by the legendary Doheny family. Tickets for the event are $28,500.

Later, he will attend a reception at the Beverly Wilshire, followed by Streisand’s special performance. Tickets for the event are $2,500 per person.

Co-hosts for event include the DreamWorks team of Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, as well as political consultant Andy Spahn. It’s also being organized with Obama’s Southern California finance team.

Spielberg, Katzenberg and Geffen, too? Why don’t they just wheel out a coffin that says “OBAMA 08” and drive a symbolic last nail into it with one of Sarah Palin’s spare seal clubs? And speaking of the VP candidate, Streisand has weighed in on her website with an essay on the Brooke Hogan-radar-evader, entitled, “McCain Doesn’t Get It: Women are not that stupid.” It’s a lot more enjoyable a read if you set it to the tune of “The Way We Were.”

Here in Los Angeles, the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) has been going through some challenges, as the LA Times did what it sometimes does well, and launched an investigation into self-dealing and – in a word, corruption – among the local leadership.

The national union responded by placing the locals in trusteeship, and retaining former California AG John Van de Kamp (disclaimer: a friend of my wife’s) in charge of an investigation.

Good for the Times and good for SEIU.

Here’s an oped in today’s Times from Andy Stern, president of the SEIU:

Recent reports in The Times have raised serious questions about how money from a local chapter may have been misused. The stories accuse Tyrone Freeman, president of Local 6434, of steering payments and contracts to companies owned by his relatives and other financial improprieties.

The SEIU, deeply troubled by these allegations, immediately launched its own investigation, and, within two weeks, Freeman and his field director had gone on leave and the SEIU had taken over running the local union.

At the SEIU, we understand that reform, like charity, must begin at home.

Our unions represent some of the hardest-working men and women in America, workers who sweep floors and empty bedpans for a living wage. The first responsibility of every union official is to do what is right by those who pay dues out of their paychecks every week. When we fail in that obligation, our union loses its moral center and its soul.

Any misuse of member dues calls into question the hard work and reputations of thousands of honest and committed rank-and-file members, stewards, local union leaders and staff. What’s more, it hands anti-worker corporations and reform opponents the ammunition they need to defeat workers trying to organize and win fair contracts.

I’m at the head of the line when it comes to kicking the Times for its failings, let me be similarly aggressive about cheering them for a success.

From the NY Times:

MSNBC tried a bold experiment this year by putting two politically incendiary hosts, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, in the anchor chair to lead the cable news channel’s coverage of the election.

That experiment appears to be over.

After months of accusations of political bias and simmering animosity between MSNBC and its parent network NBC, the channel decided over the weekend that the NBC News correspondent and MSNBC host David Gregory would anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews will remain as analysts during the coverage.

The change – which comes in the home stretch of the long election cycle – is a direct result of tensions associated with the channel’s perceived shift to the political left.

“The most disappointing shift is to see the partisan attitude move from prime time into what’s supposed to be straight news programming,” said Davidson Goldin, formerly the editorial director of MSNBC and a co-founder of the reputation management firm DolceGoldin.

As Rasmussen notes, the media is getting hammered by the public because of the perception that they are in the tank politically.

Willie Brown is probably the smartest politician I’ve ever personally met. I’d pay good money to see him and Karl Rove sit down and chew the fat on the mechanics of politics – there’s an Internet TV show idea for someone for free – and today, in the SF Chronicle, he’s got his take on Sarah Palin.

Palin’s speech to the GOP National Convention on Wednesday has set it up so that the Republicans are now on offense and Democrats are on defense. And we don’t do well on defense.

Suddenly, Palin and John McCain are the mavericks and Barack Obama and Joe Biden are the status quo, in a year when you don’t want to be seen as defending the status quo.

From taxes to oil drilling, Democrats are now going to have to start explaining their positions.

Whenever you start having to explain things, you’re on defense.

I used to go watch him at the Alameda County Labor Council’s BBQ, where he once finished his speech by exhorting the whole crowd to put their hands up in the air. Then he told them to reach down and take out their wallets. Then to told them to take the wallet from the person on the right, take out a bill, and pass it out to be collected.

I thought it was a brilliant piece of stagecraft. My GOP friends thought it perfectly summed up Democratic political philosophy.

BTW, in his column today, he slags my old town, Oakland:

By the way, there’s a new dining tip for people going out in Oakland.

Be sure to order soup.

That way when the robbery starts, you can slip off your jewelry and drop it into soup so the robbers won’t see it.

…zzzzzinnnngggg….

In my work life, I follow a lot of blogs about social media; one of them is ‘The Network Thinker‘ (in my Bloglines feeds to the right over in the blogroll).

There was a post there today by blog author Valdis Krebs on ‘bundlers’.

I downloaded data of the top bundlers of donations for the 2000 and 2004 Bush campaigns and the 2008 McCain campaign. What’s the overlap of donors between the Bush and McCain campaigns? Will the same people influence both campaigns/administrations? Or will it be starkly different groups? Or something in between?

Below is a map of those who donated to BOTH Bush and McCain. The campaigns are shown as the two red nodes on the left of the map. The green links show donations coming into the McCain 2008 campaign. The blue lines show donations coming into the Bush campaigns of 2000 and 2004. The 128 bundlers, who have contributed to both McCain and Bush, are shown in the arc on the right.

A nice graphic follows, and then the conclusion:

Most of McCain’s 534 large bundled donations [76%] came from donors who did not donate to either of the Bush campaigns. Yet, this kernel of 128 bundlers keeps consistency across all three Republican campaigns in the 21st century.

The Gang of 128 may not allow McCain to wander too far from the current philosophy and approach. If elected, McCain may be different than Bush, but he might not be that different.

Even smart people can be stupid sometimes, and even people who do social network data representation and analysis for a living can be misleading.

So, instead of showing the complete network of bundlers, and highlighting the overlap, Valdis shows only the overlaps – strengthening the conclusion that McCain’s campaign is ‘more of the same’.

Instead of looking at the amounts, and giving some idea of how much money the overlap represents – we get nothing.

And, finally, it would be useful to see how many of the bundlers were also bundling for the other side – as a not-insignificant number of them do.

I love this kind of data analysis, and get pissed off when it’s been done badly. As in this case.

If I get some time this week, I’ll play with this – in fact, let’s make it a group project. Can some of you help out by downloading the bundler database from, say Public Citizen into a csv table and sending it my way?

I’d love to get data from this cycle and ’04, for McCain, Bush, Obama, and Kerry…we can look at the overlaps and relative amounts. Any other analysis ideas?

So, increasingly deranged (see here and then her) Sully and many of the Netroots crowd are bitterly clinging to the “when will McCain drop Palin” tagline.

Seriously – and I mean this seriously, as someone who wants Obama to win – how do we get him to drop Biden for Hillary?

Commenter metrico suggests that I’m setting up for a public switch from Obama to McCain in the hopes of an Instalanche (dude, I’m not nearly that cheap…). I kind of liked my reply, so thought I’d promote it:

hey, metrico – bite me. That’s all the answer your insult deserves.

It’s kinda funny – I get about a dozen emails a week from R’s who push me to come over to their side – they make arguments, suggestions, and at worst gently mock me. I get about as many from the D side – who want me to get the hell out of their party and make that desire really really clear.

I’m kind of reminded of the line from ‘High Fidelity’:

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was classified information. I mean, I know we don’t have any customers, but I thought that was a bad thing, not like, a business strategy.”

I always thought the goal was to grow the party and win elections by big margins, not purify it in the cleansing fire of our righteousness.

Obviously, metrico, we ought to belong to different parties. I suggest you leave.

A.L.

Josh Marshall, approvingly quoting the Boston Globe:

One of the most enduring taboos in American politics, the airing of graphic images from the September 11 attacks in a partisan context, died today. It was nearly seven years old.

The informal prohibition, which had been occasionally threatened by political ads in recent years, was pronounced dead at approximately 7:40 CST, when a video aired before delegates at the Republican National Convention included slow-motion footage of a plane striking the World Trade Center, the towers’ subsequent collapse, and smoke emerging from the Pentagon.

The September 11 precedent was one of the few surviving campaign-season taboos. It is survived by direct comparisons of one’s opponents to Hitler.

Josh Marshall, 2004…

Now, I have a degree of ambivalence about this question of media coverage of the fallen soldiers coming back to Dover. For many opponents of the war there is an unmistakable interest in getting these photographs before the public in order to weaken support for the war. There’s no getting around that. I don’t mean to imply that most who want these pictures out believe that, or even that that’s an illegitimate goal. And there’s a long record of governments managing bad news during wartime to keep up civilian morale.

But one needn’t oppose the war to find something morally unseemly about the strict enforcement of the regulations barring any images of the reality behind these numbers we keep hearing on TV. There is some problem of accountability here, of putting on airs of national sacrifice and not having the courage to risk the real thing, some dark echo of the Rumsfeldian penchant for 4th generation, high-tech warfare where data transfers and throw weights replace bodies at every level.

I’ve never understood how one thing could be OK and the other not…but maybe I’m dense that way.

Just rewatched Palin’s speech from last night, and yes, it was a great speech. But you know, it could have been a Great Speech – one that didn’t just change the game in terms of the election this year (which I think she has done) but to really have changed the dynamic of politics in this cycle.She’s obviously smart, funny, and a damn good speaker (admit it – you all had glimpses of ‘Fargo’ there for a minute or two, didn’t you?).

But she had a chance to both lock down the base and change the game and she didn’t pick it up. How?

But appealing more specifically to the moderate/populist group who don’t agree with her deeply conservative views. How?

Make the point about her beliefs, and ask the rest of us to join her in breaking the iron rice bowl that has made the government in Washington ‘their government’ and not ‘our government’. She could have stood up for her conservativism and at the same time welcomed everyone who thinks that we need to move the dials in Washington. She could be a conservative reformer, not a reform-minded conservative.

There are groups out there that could be tapped like North Shore oil…they aren’t all conservative, but they are all pretty disgusted. From what I see of her resume, she could have claimed them as her primary tribe. She didn’t.

If there’s one thing that will decisively push me away from voting for Obama (even after Palin’s great speech last night about which more later), it’s the thought that Obama and Biden have their sights set on criminal prosecutions of Bush Administration figures. Althouse blogged it today, and I’d tagged it this morning. Here’s the Guardian:

Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden said earlier this week that he and running mate Barack Obama could pursue criminal charges against the Bush administration if they are elected in November.

Biden’s comments, first reported by ABC news, attracted little notice on a day dominated by the drama surrounding his Republican counterpart, Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

But his statements represent the Democrats’ strongest vow so far this year to investigate alleged misdeeds committed during the Bush years.

That’s absolutely banana republic territory. Play to the Kossaks if you will, but I’ll be walking out the door right behind Ann.