BACK FROM D.C. My medical vacation passed without incident, though a surly phlebotomist did give me a nice ugly bruise on my arm. Too bad I'm not sufficiently thin to carry off the junkie chic thing. I also have a wicked farmer tan from marching around the Mall, taking in the greatest hits. I hadn't seen the FDR, WWII, and Korean War memorials before, and while there were things about each that I liked (particularly the statues of the Korea soldiers), I don't like this trend toward shoving ten tons of iconography into a five-ton bag. Also caught some art -- liked the Whistler, Mann, and Brown v. Board of Education shows most. Favorite moment: five Mennonite women in traditional garb, waiting in line for the Race Car Simulation ride. America is still my favorite country.

Anyway, now I have the RNC madness to look forward to. I imagine I'll take in a few protests and tell you what I see. I expect all will be peaceful if the cops can contain the outside agitators among us. (Thanks for the tip, Chuck, and did you notice that these guys are staying at Sun Myung Moon's hotel?)

SLUMMING WITH THE CRAZY JESUS LADY. You may recall Peggy Noonan went freelance a little while back. She gave the impression that she would be heading into the shit, so to speak, because while she had worked in the White House (insert modest cough here), "There are others, however, lower down on the power pole, who might benefit from another hand on deck. I've called a few this week and they've been welcoming and I'll see if I can add to their fortunes. If I can't I'll at least try not to sink them." Bravely laughing off her unpaid leave from the Wall Street Journal, she added, "This will take a bite out of my finances but I can do it. Actually most of us, when we die, wind up with a few thousand dollars in the bank. We should have spent it! I am going to spend mine now..."

Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Visions of Peggy painting signs and churning the mimeograph in a bedraggled storefront danced in my head.

But look where I found Crazy Jesus Lady will be in a couple of weeks:

...U.S. Department of Treasury Secretary John Snow will address more than 700 restaurateurs from across the country at the 19th Annual National Restaurant Association Public Affairs Conference. During the conference, held September 13-14, 2004 at the Grand Hyatt in downtown Washington, D.C., restaurateurs will meet with members of Congress to discuss legislative issues and their impact on the restaurant industry, as well as listen to high-ranking opinion leaders, members of Congress and administration officials...

Other guests will include: Rep. Ric Keller (R-FL); Peggy Noonan, political commentator and writer...

A ticket to this conference costs $145. Oh, and there's a story on her in Time this week.

That "few thousand" in her bank account must be looking pretty damn secure right now.

SERVICE ADVISORY. Over the next four days I will be in Washington, D.C. and Bethesda, Maryland, on one of my regular medical vacations, as part of my participation in a study at the National Institutes of Health. Since I don't have one of those newfangled portable electronic devices, posting will be infrequent. Government agents may find me at the Morrison-Clark Inn (tell them to ring the bar) or at the National Archives, gazing again through tears upon the Founders' majestic plans for this Republic.

INQUISITION DRILLS. NRO's Tim Graham goes off on a bat about the TV series Nip/Tuck. A correspondent defends the show on the grounds that some of its themes could be construed as conservative. This apostasy is too much for Witchfinder Graham, who thunders:

Is there anything more tiresome than finding something "a conservative could love" in the middle of a very sordid show? I haven't seen the show's every episode (I have a low sleaze tolerance), but the characters will act like regular human beings every few weeks or so. If they were really changed, the producers would think they had no show any more.

Bernard Shaw had a great line about giving power to feckless millionaires -- that it was like "giving a torpedo to a badly-brought-up child to play at earthquakes with." Graham makes me think of that. He seems the very prototype of the would-be censor: someone with feverishly strong opinions about the morally right and morally wrong aspects of soap operas, cartoons, etc; someone willing to track Nip/Tuck over the course of weeks, not because it gives him pleasure, but to better qualify his ravings.

Can you imagine if this deranged obsessive had any real power?

Stranger things have happened. Which is partly why I like to keep an eye on these guys.

COUNT EVERY VOTE! Two days of audits and an OAS thumbs-up has not appeased critics of "Landslide Hugo" Chavez' apparent victory in Venezuela. They may have a point. I hope their Supreme Court serves them better than ours did.

I do find it interesting that many folks who profess concern for the will of the Venezuelan people today were much less devoted to the electoral process when it looked as if Chavez would be overthrown in the 2002 coup.

GHOST OF WMDs YET TO COME. Like we didn't know, seeing as we've been hearing it from every bobblehead on television for weeks:

Mr. Bush's advisers said they were girding for the most extensive street demonstrations at any political convention since the Democrats nominated Hubert H. Humphrey in Chicago in 1968. But in contrast to that convention, which was severely undermined by televised displays of street rioting, Republicans said they would seek to turn any disruptions to their advantage, by portraying protests by even independent activists as Democratic-sanctioned displays of disrespect for a sitting president.

Still, I have to ask: how does that work? If citizens gather en masse outside the Republican Convention to express disapproval, how is that good for Republicans? (I am consciously dismissing the whole "disruption" angle, largely out of respect for the NYPD's crowd-control skills, and partly because anyone with a gram of sense will know that any photogenic unpleasantness that occurs will probably be an inside job.)

More interesting is this soundbyte from Dr. Mabuse:

"This speech has to lay out a forward-looking, positive prospective agenda," said Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's senior political adviser. "It has to show -- and to defend in a way the American people want to hear -- his policies on the war on terror."

I'm getting a premonition: Iraq's over (I mean in the Entertainment Tonight sense, not the mayhem and the ever-increasing casualties), terror alerts are losing their mojo -- could this be the moment for Bush's big Iran speech? Stay tuned for the September Surprise!

THE DUMB IDEA FACTORY WORKS OVERTIME. Lord, the things we do to amuse ourselves. A couple of guys (one of them a "recent graduate of Yale Law School") at OpinionJournal propose this:

What would you say if we told you we have a way to add as many as eight new Republican senators to Congress? We could also add eight right-leaning votes to the Electoral College. It's simple, it's fun, and it's perfectly constitutional: Texas should divide itself into five states...

This fancy, the authors say, is enabled by an unexpired proviso in the original Annexation Resolution: "New States, of convenient size, not exceeding four in number, in addition to said State of Texas, and having sufficient population, may hereafter, by the consent of said State, be formed out of the territory thereof, which shall be entitled to admission under the provisions of the federal constitution."

Tee fucking hee. OK, let's all play. The authors assure us that quinfuracted Texas would add "as many as eight new Republican senators to Congress" and "eight right-leaning votes to the Electoral College." Behold a map of Texas shaded in the accepted red/blue manner to indicate Congressional representation by party:



I don't see as how the GOP, even considering their substantial gerrymandering skills in this region, can do better than three out of five here. That could give them a few new Senators, but that Electoral College powerhouse of 32 votes will be scattered to the winds.

Also, if we take the "sufficient population" part of the gag into account and consider the liberalizing effect of large urban centers in states like Illinois and Michigan (which the new Texasettes will closely resemble), it could be that over time our side gets four out of five, at least.

I know it's the weekend, but have they run out of Swift Boat Veterans already? This is lame even by their standards.

UPDATE. Texas blogger Amanda of Mouse Words has an excellent post about this, pointing out that "Conservatives in Texas have always been in love with Texas's 'special'' right to divvy itself up... Most people who think it's a nifty idea think so because it would mean that they could move to one of the 'whiter' states that would be formed. Great glee is expressed particularly in the idea of just slicing El Paso and the whole Rio Grande Valley area from the rest of the state."

WE ALSO EAT BABIES. This Andrew Stuttaford post bears repeating in full:

One of the more bizarre aspects of the Left these days is the way that it has aligned itself with defenders of hard-line Islam. The motives for this vary -- from sheer political devilry, to reflexive hatred of the West, to blind faith in multiculturalism.

Well, this disgusting piece of legislation is a reminder of the company in which today’s ‘progressives’ find themselves:

“A law banning gay sex has come into effect in Zanzibar, with homosexual men threatened with 25-year jail terms and lesbians facing seven-year sentences. "This is what we have been aspiring for. If the government takes such steps, the country will really move ahead," said Sheikh Muhammed Said, a local Islamic leader. The law was brought into effect by President Amani Karume's signature last week, the attorney general's office said. Parliament passed the bill in April. The islands, a semi-autonomous part of Tanzania, are largely Muslim.”

Did I miss a memo? I don't recall endorsing "defenders of hard-line Islam" -- I'm guessing that means the Taliban and those guys -- and I'm certainly not keen on jail terms for homosexuality. Maybe I'm a moderate or something.

Oh, wait, I forgot: election in progress.

JOURNALISM 000. It's been a while since anyone brought up irony, but get a load of this from the Metro Section of today's New York Times (registration required):

New York neighborhoods do not announce their sea changes. There is no news release or banner draped across the street. Sometimes there is just a certain guy, and a thing that guy does, and before you know it the neighborhood has made one of those subtle shifts, the sort that keep New York City fascinating.

The neighborhood is Williamsburg and the guy is one Todd Fatjo, a former record store clerk who is moving to the Bronx to live with his girlfriend. That's really all there is to it, but the story goes on for a thousand words, these among them:

[Fatjo and his roommates] held five parties during their tenancy that Mr. Fatjo would later describe as major, defined as involving three separate sound systems blaring away in different parts of the apartment. "It was just insane," Mr. Fatjo said...

He wrote with a simple yet passionate eloquence, speaking directly to his peers in a parlance that showed him to be of the place and moment. "If you've ever been to my duplex loft you know how truly dope it is," Mr. Fatjo began...

If you have to ask why proximity to multiple 99-cent stores might be an advantage, you will never know. Mr. Fatjo's truly dope duplex loft is not in the gentrified Williamsburg of investment bankers and corporate media types. Those 24-hour bodegas he mentioned have bulletproof glass...

Love is a funny thing. It can spin a cynical hipster around like a record (baby, right round, round, round), and it has done a number on Mr. Fatjo, who is 28. He quit the music store this year and took a job showing apartments in Manhattan. He is working toward a broker's license, and this month he had the Afro shorn to a nice, respectable wave...

The fate of the truly dope duplex loft may be a sign that the hipster scene is fading in Williamsburg, or who knows? Some new generation could reinvigorate the neighborhood with its own brand of cool. As for Mr. Fatjo, who is fast becoming just some guy who has a job, the end of the party is bittersweet...

Here's my question, and I ask it in all sincerity: is there any way to tell if the reporter is kidding? The hipster-exodus story is a staple of metro sections, and one can get a lot of resonance out of some schlub's life changes if there is any trend or home truth with which to hook it up. But this guy just got a new apartment and a new job. Williamsburg has been gentrified for years, and from what I can see, from my vantage point a few blocks from Mr. Fatjo's dope duplex, kids are still shoving dollar bills through bulletproof glass. So what's the story? People move? Williamsburg has condos?

I wouldn't bring it up if I could be sure the reporter was just filling a news hole with a lazy-ass story -- hell, I've done that plenty of times. But I have this nagging suspicion that I'm hoping you can allay. I worry that this is actually news. I worry that, if the Olympics weren't on hand with its many color photo opportunities, Todd Fatjo would be on the front page. (Bad enough that today's actual front page had a story about the political significance of Bush hugging John McCain.) I worry that I've had my nose buried in the editorial, sports, and comics sections so much in recent months that, without my noticing it, all absolute values were completely overturned and I am now living in a Bizarro World where Todd Fatjo is copy!

Or maybe it's just a joke. I'm not ruling that out.

LIFE AMONG THE LIBERALS. For some time I've been a connoisseur of right-wing "life among the liberals" narratives. These wish-fulfillment pieces, typically showing a stalwart conservative (always the author) easily rebutting a bunch of liberal hippies out of old Mannix episodes, are as formally distinctive as Roman colloquys or medieval morality plays: neither the godlike central figures nor their moronic interlocutors have any discernible character traits, and all the pleasure comes from childlike caricatures of opposing thought.

I do what I can to spread awareness of these lulus, so that some future archaeologist may have a less cold trail to follow to these clear indicators of this parlous phase of our once-great civilization. "Behold!" he will say, "They had a highly developed dramaturgy, yet millions preferred these crude Punch-and-Judy shows -- and all for politics! No wonder the assholes got wiped out."

A few months back I discovered one Alan Bromley at OpinionJournal, and recognized him as a master of the form. Well, he's back at it again, and his latest, "No Holiday from Hate," is a peach. One day I expect I will teach a class on propaganda techniques, and "No Holiday from Hate" will be one of the seminal texts.

Bromley is on holiday, sitting on a porch with his family in Cape May, N.J. (Though his characters are mere cyphers, Bromley is always very specific with town names, perhaps from awareness that localities cannot sue for slander.)

One day, sitting next to a couple from Philadelphia, I was asked what I thought about the Democratic Convention and who would win the election. Being in a state between relaxation and boredom, I wasn't sure if I wanted to enter this discussion, so I replied by asking them what they thought the biggest issue was.

Note that Bromley, like other classic heroes of the LATL Narrative, never provokes the argument, and always has some dandy Socratic way of undermining his adversaries' clearly malevolent intent.

"Restoring trust to government," the wife replied, sounding like a Kerry bumper sticker. Her husband, munching a cracker with cheese, nodded in agreement.

"Munching a cracker with cheese" is very good (well, by the standards of the form); no one looks good munching a cracker with cheese.

I sensed my 17-year-old daughter's ears perk beneath her black hair and my wife's spine straighten, both sensing a political storm brewing.

The tension suggested here is merely a vestigial literary device; as in the novels of Horatio Alger, there is so little real danger to the hero that even his loved ones seem to be play-acting their symptoms of concern.

"You don't mean the legend on our currency, 'In God we trust,' do you?" I teased.

"No!" the husband, who had swallowed his snack, sharply responded. "We're in favor of separation of church and state, and would prefer that those words not appear on our dollar bills, just as we want 'under God' removed from our pledge of allegiance. And you know what we mean," he continued, ratcheting-up the tone. "Bush lied to us about the war in Iraq!" The chairs rocked faster.

Bromley's remark would, in company of even normal intelligence, draw perhaps a polite chuckle and a return volley of badinage, but the liberals in LATL narratives always explode upon contact with conservative wit.

Bromley thereafter delivers to his audience of seaside vacationers a long, long Republican speech ("We had Ted Kennedy, who lied about trying to save Mary Jo Kopechne. We had Hillary Clinton, who lied about her billing records..."), and the liberals' only responses are literally these: "Screw you!" "Speaking for myself, any news that helps defeat Bush makes me happy" (this referring to unemployment), and "You're a fascist! We're leaving!"

There is some passing resemblance to versimilitude here -- if I were taking the sun on a porch in Jersey, and some asshole suddenly started raving about Mary Jo Kopechne, I might leave, too, just as I might leave a subway car occupied by a bum who smelled strongly of human excrement. But as portrayed by Bromley, the liberals' retreat is a rout, his tendentious speeches are a blow for liberty, and his family is deeply proud of the spectacle he has made at the beach house (whereas the real-life version suggests a thought-balloon reading, "Another vacation ruined.")

Isn't this what cultural studies are all about -- trying to understand people whose ways of life are otherwise incomprehensible to us? My understanding of conservatives has been greatly enhanced by my study of their culture. And through my close attention to their LATL narratives, I have even developed some sympathy toward them. That is to say, if they need crap like this to make themselves feel smart, they're even more fucked than I thought.

WHY IS REDSTATE DOWN? POSSIBLE REASONS:#5: Refused to pay ISP portion of fee that would go to unconstitutional federal taxes. #4: Still looking for all-heterosexual web design team. #3: Decided to eschew web, will use mind power to beam messages directly into the brains of constituents. #2: Alan Keyes took a baseball bat to their servers -- claims he thought he was in the offices of National Review. And the number one reason Redstate is offline is: Rope-a-dope! (cue music)

UPDATE. They're back! Never mind.

MORE GOOD NEWS. The butched-up Kerry campaign seems to be working. Evidence: it has inspired Deep Thoughts on manhood from the Ole Perfesser. First, apparently after doing bong hits all night with his much smarter father, the Perfesser hallucinates Kerry morphing into LBJ: "The constant photos of Kerry with Harleys, guitars, guns, and soldiers... it's, like, blowing my mind." OK, he didn't say the last clause, but he did say,

Lyndon Baines Johnson was another President with a silver star and a short combat career who seemed to feel that he had a lot to prove. Might Kerry's rather clear desire to be seen as a tough guy make him a surprisingly resilient warrior? Or might it backfire, as it most likely did with LBJ?

He does answer himself, convincingly, "I don't know," but all hope of drug-induced revelation and the attendant humility before God are dashed when he tells Oliver Willis, understandably confused by the tenured radical's pipe dream, to "read it again," as if Willis were a slow freshman and Reynolds' gibberish A Theory of Justice.

Today Reynolds gets back on the horse at his mainstream media gig."The party that gave us Al Gore's earth tones is now the party of swaggering machismo," chortles the Perfesser. "But it rings kind of hollow." Hollow why? Because Reynolds and his pals say so, that's why -- with references to commedia dell'arte, yet!

What I am actually enjoying here is the sound heard throughout the land of the Right blowing a gasket, because The Big Stiff seems to be putting it over. This drives them nuts for the usual reasons, but what twists the knife is that Kerry's doing it with a schtick they thought they had patented -- oh, they would have included more homosexual panic, of course, but that flag thing, that butch thing, that's got © GOP all over it!

So don't you fret, my children; when the frothers tell you that the Democratic candidate is too manly, that ain't nothin' but good.

IT COULDN'T HAPPEN TO A NICER GUY. The Mayor has been playing cagey with the UPJ protestors and their demand for a Central Park demo during the RNC, but his game with the cops is about to run down, I should think:

Weeks away from thousands of anti-Bush protesters converging on the Republican convention, police union members employed to control the crowds on Thursday stepped up their own threats to disrupt the meeting.

"No contract, No convention!" about 20 off-duty officers chanted before Mayor Michael Bloomberg arrived to open an HIV/AIDS services center -- the latest protest by police and firefighters who have publicly hounded the mayor for weeks over a contract dispute on wage increases.

They've been working without a contract for two years.

For most of us citizens, it has been a little unnerving, having a rich mayor who can do whatever the hell he feels like doing -- apeshit smoking and noise bans; on-again, off-again property tax increases -- knowing that if we finally get up on our hind legs and kick him out, he can always buy an island someplace and rule that; but his well-unionized opponents know they've got him now. Rudy may be whispering in the shadows, Fuck 'em! Show 'em the back of your hand, like I did! That's all they respect! But Bloomberg must be worrying, insofar as worry ever penetrates his dense skull, that the last-minute cop comity in his old home town, Boston, will make him look bad -- what will his friends at the Club say?

Now the officers are keeping him up nights, which is very bright -- a man accustomed to getting himself and his friends around by private jet may be driven mad by even the mildest inconvenience.

Whatever happens, he looks like an asshole. Which is only just.

The massive number of energized local Democrats, plus the cops -- it's a nice little coalition. And the words "Mayor Ferrer" -- what a nice ring they have.

I'm starting to like this Convention.

YOUR CHOICE. You can go to OpinionJournal today and read Brendan Miniter's piece on how Kerry was wrong not to go to post-hurricane Florida, or you can wait until Miniter is dead and go view his private papers at Bob Jones University, where you can compare the published column with the one he almost certainly wrote at the same time, in case Kerry did go to Florida, calling him an opportunist, French, etc.

I would not be making such charges were Miniter's scribblings not so consistently content-free that their only imaginable use is as the rankest sort of propaganda.

ERA OF GOOD FEELING. In a day of tactical evasions, John Kerry talked down a MoveOn.org anti-Bush ad, apparently in solidarity with John McCain, who had talked down the Other Swift Boat Guys' anti-Kerry ad. I see the political usefulness of this for the Big Stiff, and invite him to denounce my own ravings as well if it will help him defeat the fascist scumbag space-alien freak Illuminatus Bush.

Meanwhile the Mayor has invited RNC demonstrators to don "Peaceful Political Activist" buttons for discounts on hotels, Broadway shows, and other tourist attractions. Well, if it'll get me 10% off at Applebee's, I guess I can behave myself. But if the wings aren't hot, all bets are off.

RATHER WELL PUT. In case some of you were wondering why New Yorkers are hatin' on the RNC*: here. (Thanx Ezra.)

* "A recent survey by a Manhattan public relations firm found 83 percent of those polled do not want the Republican convention in town. When asked why, more than half, 53 percent, were worried about traffic, street closures, and security hassles." -- WABC-TV. (Found by Margaret.)

WE KEEP TELLING THEM CONSERVATISM IS COOL, DAMMIT. WHY WON'T THEY LISTEN? Michele Catalano:

I'm not a huge moralist and I don't think there is no place for sex - or sexuality - in our society. But there is a big difference between promoting sexuality and promoting sex.

I forget, which is the good one -- sex or sexuality?

I see this blitz of breasts on even network television every day and it saddens me to think that my daughter is growing up in a media-crazed society that rewards most the women -- and girls -- who show the most. Maybe I've become a bit of a prude in my old age, but I cringe when I see women parading around in next to nothing because I know that teenage girls are impressionable and will emulate these women...

That reminds me: I don't have a TV Guide -- anyone know when women's floor exercises are back on?

IF IT WEREN'T FOR CHEAP IRONY, WE'D HAVE NO IRONY AT ALL. The only two entities I have found that responded favorably to the victory (such as it is) of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela are The Islamic Republic of Iran and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It's an ill wind, I guess, that blows no one some good.

More ominous still: John Derbyshire will no longer buy American cars.

Ah, big deal. Everyone knows the real threat to our Republic is insolent teens and wide-band watches in the Marshall Field's catalogue.

A CITIZEN RESPONDS. The Mighty Mighty Reason Man has chewed out the Kerry campaign for its lame responses to the Republican spin machine. "There's a lot of dirt gonna be thrown your way in the next few months, and the time to pattycake with this bullshit is over... what your crew needs to do," he advises, "is set up a resource, a central repository of factual bitchslaps across the jaw of all this character assasination."

Who am I to argue with Reason? But allow me to add a nuance. The GOP is not dishing out truth, it's dishing out, as MMRM correctly calls it, bullshit -- smears, deliberate misreadings, and mountainized molehills. In the feral playground that is current American politics, one looks weak even trying to counter much of it logically. Edwards can point out very reasonably that Cheney is quoting Kerry "out of context" and a thousand operatives will react as if he were the kid with asthma challenging the assertion of bullies that he caught asthma by being gay -- that is to say, with more abuse.

So if the Kerry operatives are going to get talking points, maybe they should go more like this:

On Cambodia: "Aw, hell, man, you know how it is. Guys get together at the VFW Hall, have a coupla drinks, they say all kinds of shit. It was spooky back in 'Nam, man, and Kerry was smoking a lot of the good weed, so maybe in his mind he was in Cambodia. Hey, hit me in the stomach, hard's you can."

On Kerry's "sensitive" remark: "When he said 'sensitive,' he meant sensitive like an ultra-thin Trojan condom. I mean, when you get in there, you want to feel it, know what I'm saying? We think Bush's approach is more like a ribbed condom, betraying a deep insecurity that he can produce the desired effect. Plus which it's probably loose and he only has a piss-on."

On gay marriage: "Dude, why you care so much about it? Got troubles in the bedroom? Jesus Christ."

On a varieties of other issues: "Oh, no you didn't. Oh, no you didn't. Pundit, please."

Alternately, the Kerry people can simply repeat the interrogator's questions in a high-pitched voice.

It's worth a try, and if it doesn't work everyone will have forgotten about it in a week.

WHATTAYA WANT ME TO DO, DRAW YOU A PICTURE? SPELL IT OUT FOR YOU? AS LONG AS YOU LIVE, DON'T EVER ASK ME MORE! Pretending to be mentally retarded, Daniel Henninger marvels at a Democratic fundraiser with rich Hollywood stars. "Isn't it becoming harder by the day to take the Democrats seriously as the party of the common man and the left-out?" cried the faux dumbass.

Sigh. Here's the top ten list of contributors, from OpenSecrets:

1. Goldman Sachs -- $3,910,296. 51% to Democrats; 49% to Republicans.
2. National Assn of Realtors -- $2,062,839. 51% to Democrats; 49% to Republicans.
3. Morgan Stanley -- $1,882,535. 33% to Democrats; 67% to Republicans.
4. Microsoft Corp -- $1,768,446. 64% to Democrats; 36% to Republicans.
5. Time Warner -- $1,730,995. 75% to Democrats; 25% to Republicans.
6. Citigroup Inc. -- $1,659,287. 50% to Democrats; 50% to Republicans.
7. SBC Communications -- $1,632,381. 32% to Democrats; 67% to Republicans.
8. Wal-Mart Stores -- $1,585,410. 19% to Democrats; 81% to Republicans.
9. UBS Americas -- $1,584,828. 37% to Democrats; 62% to Republicans.
10. Intl Brotherhood of Electrical Workers -- $1,556,630. 97% to Democrats; 4% to Republicans.

If the Dems are not "the party of the common man and the left-out," that sure doesn't mean the Republicans are. All us po' folk are fighting for an ever-shrinking slice of the American pie. If you trust Bush, Cheney, et alia to give you a bigger one, God go with you. But let's not make believe that the presence of Bruce Springsteen at a Donkey fundraiser means that the GOP, of all entities, has become the party of the little guy.