Is your dad an unemployed loser? Make him watch this immediately. Thanks, Just For Men, for waiting until double-digit unemployment to release this very important PSA.

Beer on Victorino’s head. Tony Danza in our public schools. MICHAEL FREAKING VICK.  What other shenanigans will we be party to this week, Philadelphia? Thank goodness our hometown paper is here to record it all.

Well, which is it?

I am a longtime animal lover (of both furry and barbecued varieties) but I will not be pleased one bit to see PETA protesters out at the Linc. That’s like dropping some Daily Kos folks into a hockey game. Not a good fit.

[Inky]

“Jen Utley, a board member of the Pennsylvania SPCA and the wife of Phillies second baseman Chase Utley, declined to comment last night specifically on the Vick signing….”

And yet…

As long as the Inky insists on searching out attractive ladies to put on its home page (this is not what media pros mean by “relevance,” BTW), can it seriously not throw an African American into the mix every so often? In a city that’s about equal parts black and white? (Beyonce doesn’t count, yoos guys.)

Oh yeah, Jen Jenn Utley debuts in that article at PARAGRAPH 9. JFC.

[UPDATE] Oh jeez, I just noticed the Birds’ thing. Great copy editing, there. And for the record, I lament the state of the Inky because it’s my hometown paper, not because I’m about to start working for the competition. So there.

[UPDATE2] Oh JFC come AWWWWWWWWWN. The Inky also misspelled Jenn Utley’s name. Seriously?? At least make us work for it sometimes…!

[Inky]

Earlier this week I resolved to phone my eldest aunt in Seoul. Been meaning to do this for weeks but work, life, whatever kept getting in the way. (Excuses.) Problem is my Korean is poor, so when I Skype her I do so with the help of a friend whose Korean is much better than mine. Texted her on Tues to see when she could come by and translate, we both decided on Thursday which, Yay, was what I’d been hoping for. Worked best for me, schedule-wise.

The reason I need to phone my aunt is to check in on her. She’s the oldest person standing on my mother’s side, nearly 70 I think though she looks about 50 (Asians). And I worry for her. It’s been a year since my mother, her youngest sibling, passed. Several more years since my other aunt died from a brain tumor. The three of them were thisclose, my eemo having raised my much younger mother since both their parents were dead by the time she (Mom) was 12. My mother’s death was sudden, too soon, and completely avoidable. It was needless and stupid. And my eemo took it extremely hard. Collapsed at the funeral, etc.

So, I worry for my aunt. She considers me more daughter than niece, since Mom was a career lady and Eemo (after years of being a career lady, raising her youngest siblings and whatnot) was wealthy enough to stay home and care for me during the day when I was a baby. She named her adopted daughter after me in the Korean tradition. So, we’re tight, or about as tight as two relatives who can’t communicate can be.

Anyway, Thursday is today. I’ve been in a fog all morning, despite being on a pretty important deadline for an assignment I absolutely cannot fuck up. Haven’t been able to concentrate much. And I’m thinking ahead to what I’m going to say to my aunt tonight, and it occurs to me that I can’t remember the exact date my mother died. I am terrible with dates as a rule, and her death last summer was such a clusterfuck that the ensuing days were a fog of travel arrangements, anger, visitors, paperwork, lawyers, funeral planning, and more anger. Maybe I’m still in the fog a little, I don’t know. So this morning, I can’t remember the date my mother died and I don’t want to admit that to anyone (ie, ask), so I do a search for “cleveland mother died” in my email account.

My mother died on Aug. 6, 2008. That is today. Somewhere, somehow, my body knew this. I am the most anti-superstitious person you will find, but this startles even me a little. How our brains can know things without our, like, knowing them. When I realize all this, Wilco’s “Country Disappeared” is playing very loudly, making for a heavy-kind-of moment. Of course, now I feel like a dick since for my eemo yesterday was The Day. But I have a feeling that she may also be hazy on the exact date. Dates don’t fucking matter, do they, when stupid, pointless shit like this happens to people you are close to.

So yeah. I’ll probably drink a little too much tonight or whatever. The anger clearly is still around in muted form which I probably ought to try to do something about at some point, since I’m unlikely to ever run into the huckster minister who told my mother that he dreamt Jesus would cure her and Oh BTW how about FASTING for a week even though you have The Cancer, thereby expediting her death. It would be sweet if that happened, though. I have never been in a physical altercation before but I would gladly risk jail to get a crack at that walking hemorrhoid. Sigh. Guess I know what I’ll be dreaming about tonight.

This week Kellie and I discuss John McCain’s decision to suspend (*COUGH*) his campaign, the absence of Barack Obama in recent political theater, and whether this is the new real game-changing moment in a season full of them.

Listen to this week’s roundtable here.

Nevermind the debate tomorrow — will anyone finally explain where that $700 billion figure came from? Probably not until lawmakers push this bill through. I have a baaaaaad feeling about all of this, and the NYT’s Gretchen Morgenson isn’t making me feel better. Not even checking on my investments these days, too scared. And as for my money market accounts…. argh. I always used to joke that my late, great father hid his money in kimchee jars buried in the back yard. That’s looking like a brilliant idea. If only I had a back yard…

It seems the public smells a stunt when it comes to John McCain, which is a relief. I like to believe that American voters are smarter than Washington (or Hollywood or the media) gives them credit for.

Unfortunately, because of McCain adopting the financial crisis as his own personal 9/11 (Giuliani’s a friend — why should WALNUTS! miss out?) and this bailout business, there isn’t oxygen left for much else. The WaPo’s Ruth Marcus and the LAT’s James Rainey took a look at distortions coming from Barack Obama’s campaign, including this particularly unsavory Spanish-language ad he’s released on TV and radio.

First of all, what is with Obama’s face at the beginning? Is he praying? In a car??? Oh, right, because all the Hispanics love Hay-zeus. Panderer.

And then there’s this ad in Michigan criticizing McCain for owning foreign cars. Is it the ’80s again? Democrats are cowards when it comes to Big Labor, and Big Labor is a big reason why U.S. automakers are flailing.

“Buy American” is a good soundbite, but when it comes to cars the Japanese have won. I can’t think of why anyone on the market wouldn’t go with a Honda over a Chevy. To make a political statement? Oh… OK. Bottom line is there are so many better ways to attack McCain on the economy and health care (totally relevant to Detroit).

[UPDATE 7:01. I take the part about this maybe being a good idea back. An "economic 9/11" is still not 9/11. Plus everyone needs to quit pretending that any of this is a surprise.]

[UPDATE 3:10. McCain is "suspending" his campaign in order to come back to Washington and do his day job. That means "working with" the Obama campaign and possibly postponing their scheduled Friday-night debate. Is this McCain 1.0 or McCain 2.0? It seems like a good idea, but it's hard not to feel a little cynical about Shakey McMaverick these days.]

Why, that’s just so… so… adorable.

From Moon Rising Over Kilimanjaro

President Bush is going to interrupt TV broadcasts at 9 p.m. tonight to assure Americans that the economy will be OK and scold lawmakers for not passing the $700 billion federal bailout package the second he asked them to. (The nerve.) AP reports: ”Press secretary Dana Perino said the president wants to tell the American people how the crisis affects them and help them understand the depth of the problem.”

Yeah… only the American people have been fretting about the sky falling for at least a couple of years.

In 2006, when the Dow was breaking records, Americans had a mostly negative outlook on the economy even while many expressed confidence in their personal financial situations. Now they’re down about everything. Meanwhile, the White House seemed only interested in boosterism until very recently. Bush now acknowledging the economic realities non-wealthy Americans are facing, which they blame him for, sort of makes him the Ike Turner of presidents.

The question is if the American public is 1970s Tina Turner or 1980s Tina Turner. (Yeah, I know. I’d rethink this if I had time.) Bush had high negatives and low credibility, but so does Congress. I’m inclined to believe most Americans appreciate the gravity of the current fiscal crisis and would prefer lawmakers pass a well-thought-out solution later rather than what Bush wants today. But good luck on getting a reasonably intelligent deal done during an election year. From AP again: “Some Democrats expressed concern that they would side with an unpopular President Bush, only to have Republican presidential candidate John McCain oppose the measure and try to ride his opposition to victory over Barack Obama. So far, neither McCain nor Obama has indicated how they would vote on the measure.”

Great. There is something obviously wacky (not to mention possibly unconstitutional) about putting an unelected political appointee — Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson — in near-absolute control of that $700 billion. Hammering out the details and reaching compromise will take time — time partisan lawmakers feel they don’t have. It’s times like these when nonpartisans (of which I, as an equal-opportunity hater, count myself) become acutely aware of the insanity of American politics. Clearly I’d rather be here than, say, North Korea. But asking lawmakers to be intelligent and cautious when handling such a gigantic disbursement of taxpayer money isn’t unreasonable, either.

Here’s one reason to be grateful for the Wall Street apocalypse: If not for this story, we’d all be forced to contend with the AP-Yahoo News poll on racial attitudes released on Saturday.

According to Wonkette’s awesome deconstruction of the AP writeup, Politico’s lede was this: “In a report sure to spark a national conversation on race, an AP-Yahoo News study reported Saturday morning that white prejudice could be a significant enough factor to sunder Barack Obama’s bid to be the first black president of the United States.”

Spark? Haven’t we been talking about this for, like, a million years already?

Said a Stanford political scientist to AP, “There are a lot fewer bigots than there were 50 years ago, but that doesn’t mean there’s only a few bigots.” You don’t say. This is what media talking heads have been trying to SOS to the public by blinking their peepers in Morse code: When we say Barack Obama “transcends” race, we really mean he escapes the negative associations white Americans have about black Americans. Like “complaining” (29 percent). And “violent” (20 percent). And “lazy” (13 percent).

Middle class, less educated whites have been seen as Obama’s Achilles heel this election, mainly because of how soundly Hillary Clinton whupped him among those voters during the primary campaign (by 57 points in Ohio, eg). But a vote for her wasn’t necessarily a vote against him — results were often partly attributable to voters’ greater familiarity with her and the One Of Us factor, which still unbelievably holds despite overwhelming disapproval of President Bush.

Because the media and consequently many Americans don’t assign those negative views about blacks to Obama, even whites who admit to holding negative views about blacks make an exception for him. According to the poll, a third of white Democrats associated a negative adjective to blacks, yet 58 percent of that bloc said they planned to vote for Obama.

“Statistical models derived from the poll suggest that Obama’s support would be as much as 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racial prejudice,” the AP observes. Well, duh. This poll doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know, begging the question of why anyone would need it to begin with. It might feed into a sense of buyer’s remorse some Democrats have about their nominee, but what’s the lesson there? That the parties should wait until there’s a more negligible percentage of racial bias before fronting a nominee of color?

The reality of politics is that many voters, especially the coveted undecideds, vote for candidates based on favorable associations rather than policy specifics. Rick Davis, John McCain’s campaign manager, was probably right when he said “this election is not about issues” and is instead “about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” McCain’s camp is betting that observation is true (literally, in the case of their veep pick) because McCain has no shot otherwise. One Of Us-ness is a problem for both McCain and Obama, but in a race that will be won on the backs of white undecideds is probably worse for Obama.

Unless he starts hitting his opponent harder on that “composite view” (age, Sarah Palin’s vacuity, enormous wealth, rampant lying), Obama risks allowing the election to turn on something he doesn’t have much control over: image. He’s tried to do the working-class thing, like his awful bowling in Pennsylvania, and it just doesn’t work. He has trouble regurgitating sound bites because it’s not where he lives; meanwhile, his opponents are riding a bubble built on them (“shake things up,” etc.) He still feels the need to tell Americans that he loves his country, which only reminds them of suspicions that he really doesn’t. His absence of temper feeds the impression that he couldn’t care less if he wins so long as he gets to wake up every morning and kiss his pretty reflection.

Maureen Dowd’s Sunday column was libtard-condescending as usual but there was a very good point in it: Obama needs take back control of the conversation. There isn’t much he can do about white Americans’ racial biases. But as that poll hinted, non-racial associations may be the bigger problem. That’s something he can control, and he’d better get on it soon.

The AP-Yahoo survey methodology is based on the Implicit Association Test, a newish frontier in polling. According to the University of Washington-based researchers, nearly 80 percent of whites and 30 percent of blacks have more favorable impressions of whites. (Even blacks are racists — someone alert AP.) NPR’s “On The Media” interviewed the IAT’s creator, pysch prof Anthony Greenwald, in late August. (Listen here.) To find out how much of a racist you are, take the IAT here. The results will not be what you expected.

This week Kellie and I review how the chaos on Wall Street has forced Barack Obama and John McCain to recalibrate their campaigns.

Listen to this week’s roundtable here.