Everyone is a sucker for the year-end lists. Beyond re-hashing highlights of hoopla, I propose revisiting the topics herein with hindsight, rather than reflex. It is in the spirit of moving forward in 2009 with wisdom and renewed faith in other Americans that we (impatiently) approach this historic inauguration, and re-examine the issues we previously lost our shit over.

1. Hillary citing RFK’s assassination as a reason to stay in the primaries.
   I admit it, I flipped out over it, even though I remember her first making the comment months before. It just came at a point when her opportunism and goal-post hedging made the race seem like Obama vs. Omarosa. Now she’s, like, Secretary of State to-be, and everyone’s happy.

2. Gas Prices
   Now that gas has abruptly gone from over $4 a gallon to less than $2 a gallon, can we just call out these oil price regulators for their inflated greed and exploitation? Once the economy deflated like a souffle on a Seventies sitcom, they eased the reins at the pump to keep the beast breathing. Invading Iraq was supposed to stabilize the oil market — perhaps it has made it all the more controllable?

3. Rev. Jeremiah Wright
   If it was in a conservative white church…

4. ACORN
   That a community organization with a history of helping poor neighborhoods can be so broadly maligned for non-existent voting crimes by a major political party with a proven history of numerous voting crimes is testament to how far the media will carry water for the conservative agenda. Unlucky winner of The Golden Swift Boat for 2008.

5. Anything on "The View"
   The very premise that this tabloid tea party speaks for women is patently insulting.

6. Rev. Rick Warren’s Invocation at the Inauguration
   The outrage over Rick Warren is not really a real fight over anything real. There are lots of bigots, there always will be. Let’s fight the institutionalization of intolerance in the courts, at the polls, in the streets, and in the press. I myself will fight Rick Warren in the Thunderdome. (Two men enter…one man leaves.)

7. Sarah Palin, the new GOP Spokesmodel
   The alarming percentage of people who alienated us by blindly embracing Sarah Palin despite her inability to complete sentences or describe reality are actually the same percentage who still think Bush is doing a good job. She’ll give that base hope, because she has not personally fucked up everything yet. But she is so not a real threat, even the conservative pundits who sat nodding through the entire Bush Reign of Error had to do a spit-take at her arrival. (And maybe in 2009 we’ll finally see those Palin birth records Andrew Sullivan keeps demanding like he’s Nurse Ratchett.)

8. Miley Cyrus Bareback
   A non-revealing photo of an over-hyped teen star is not a sobering cultural watermark to examine the objectification of underage girls in modern society. American Apparel ads are.

9. Cable Network News
   It might seem that including the corporate media machine that actively over-hypes 24/7 would be redundant in a list of Most Overhyped, but the amount of concern over what these overpaid pinheads say has jumped sharks, whales, and that weird Montauk Monster. It’s tabloid TV, turning political faux-pas into a Brangelina catfight, utterly distracting us from real issues.

10. The 2008 Campaign
    In our desperation for hope at the end of the tunnel, the media and the public utterly abandoned oversight of our Problem Child-in-Chief. While we worried about American flag pins, American flags were adorning more coffins. While the pundits scoured Hillary’s inflated record of sniper fire, inflated prices of homes and Wall Street brokerage houses were about to shoot down our entire economy. In our historic race for the first female or black president, we neglected to check in on our first dyslexic president, except when he made a drunken cameo at the Beijing Olympics worthy of a Cannonball Run outtake.

Let us all make a concerted effort in 2009 to not chase shiny things in the news that distract us from the not-so-easily digested issues that demand attention and action, not outrage.

Ken Blackwell, my personal muse, ex-Facebook friend, and endorsement for RNC Chair, defended rival candidate Chip Saltsman for distributing “Barack the Magic Negro” on his holiday mix CD.

BLACKWELL: “Unfortunately, there is hypersensitivity in the press regarding matters of race. This is in large measure due to President-Elect Obama being the first African-American elected president. I don’t think any of the concerns that have been expressed in the media about any of the other candidates for RNC chairman should disqualify them. When looked at in the proper context, these concerns are minimal. All of my competitors for this leadership post are fine people.”

How offensive is “Barack the Magic Negro”? A year or so ago, a student of mine in my documentary class decided to make his film about that song, playing a recording of Rush Limbaugh’s show to other black people like himself, and capturing their reactions. While many interviewees were speechless, their faces can be best described in three letters: WTF?

The defenses of the song’s context being funny, as if Al Sharpton were singing it, only illustrate the layers of insulting thought that went into it. It’s rudimentary racism, like blackface.

Obviously, different people have different reactions, and there can be no steadfast line in racial politics. Blackwell has been affectionately called “Buckwheat” by a Cincinnati blogger he knows, is that offensive? Or is it part of how someone like Blackwell ingratiates himself with far right whites, fitting in like no other black person they know?

Consider this thoughtful statement from Yvonne Davis, an African-American Republican, which she wrote here on the Huffington Post in response to Blackwell’s statement on the “Magic Negro” flap:

The truth is Blackwell or any black running for this post can’t have it both ways - on one hand support racist stupidity by being silent or playing it down, and on another hand try to leverage the fact that a Black man going into the White House is an opportunity for a black man to lead the Republican Party.

I respectfully, but vehemently, disagree with Ms. Davis. Trying to have it both ways is exactly what Blackwell intends to do.

In The Washington Times, Blackwell just wrote about how dated the 1965 Voting Rights Act is, which he calls “draconian” :

This country has clearly progressed beyond yesterday’s racism. And the law should not give one party an overwhelming advantage to invoke the mistakes of the past for partisan advantage.

When it comes to suppressing black voters, Blackwell’s career of abusing laws for partisan advantage rivals the record of any Southern Sheriff named Jim Crow. I made a feature documentary about Ken Blackwell’s election, FREE FOR ALL!, and still couldn’t fit in all of his outrageous illegal behavior. Ken Blackwell has been sued more times than Don King. Just some of Blackwell’s greatest hits on his African-American constituents while he was Secretary of State:

• Purging a quarter of Cleveland voters, one of the biggest Democratic counties in the country.

• Under-equipping African-American neighborhood voting precincts.

• Re-arranging voting locations and not making the information publicly available.

• Going to court to prevent people who voted in their old location from being counted provisionally.

• Pushing voter ID laws through Ohio, which overwhelmingly affect poor minorities access to vote.

• Allowing coordinated racial profiling voter misinformation to flourish: Fliers in black neighborhoods providing the wrong election day, phone calls threatening arrest if people voted.

• Threatened U.N. election monitors with arrest if they tried to observe the polls.

The Voting Rights Act is the only defense some people have. Without it, many would not be able to vote, with no recourse. Race is still very much an issue in elections, and Blackwell knows it. Voter disenfranchisement of minorities was widely documented throughout the country in 2008 by Video the Vote among other groups.

Blackwell is eager to get to be the guy who gets to declare, “If I say it’s not racist, it’s not.” The Republican Party is eager to have that plausible deniability, as they continue to target Democratic-voting minorities with unfounded attacks like the 2008 Swift Boat, ACORN.

The only other thing clear from Blackwell’s Op-Ed piece is that he is telling the conservative readers of The Washing Times that what he offers is not how he will win the party more supporters, but how he will preemptively control the vote-counting to edge out more minorities.

To further buttress his case for RNC Chairmanship, Blackwell just released a list of “conservative luminaries” who endorse him as RNC Chair. It reads like a list of guest-stars from The Love Boat, and their ideas were most relevant back when Gavin MacLeod was a pinup. Phyllis Schafly? Ed Meese? Is this the re-branding and forward thinking the GOP is looking for right now after losing Congress and the White House to a generation that doesn’t need landlines?

Of course Ken Blackwell will jump up when the old right is looking for a new shill. His opportunistic drive has driven him from activist to a chameleon politician to a multi-millionaire. He has changed positions like a porno queen.

Others have vied for that insider status that seems to require possessing, among other qualities, a white penis. And beyond the conventional qualifications, these people have gone to incredible, illegal lengths to help the Republican Party realize its power grabs without having to win “votes.” And these power plays come at the expense of other non-white-penis-having persons.

Where would the RNC be without Katherine Harris, the brazen Bush partisan who stretched the limits of her authority as Secretary of State to swipe Florida’s electoral votes? Back in 1999, she and Gov. Jeb had worked closely with Choice Point/Data Base Technology to kick off black voter registrations under the felon laws, knowing they were disenfranchising tens of thousands of legal voters. She stopped the Florida Recount when W. was up by a handful, and turned it over to the Bush Daddy’s court. And yet, when she sought to be Senator in 2006, she was openly rebuked by her old boss and fellow theocrat Jeb Bush. Poor Katherine Harris was so hard up in the waning months of her doomed campaign, she announced plans to tap into several million from her family’s trust fund.

And how far would the Republican Party and the Bush Administration have gotten if they did not have Alberto Gonzales as both Bush’s personal lawyer, then Attorney General? Who else was on hand to write torture memos, lie to Congress, and play “plausible deniability” as Federal Prosecutors under him were sacked for not bringing bogus voter fraud cases? Who got the job of justifying the treatment of foreigners and illegal immigrants as terrorists, while acknowledging that his own grandparents were probably illegal? His recent claim, “I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror,” indicates how well he feels he’s been taken care of since he helped buy time for the Bush Regime. Is he worse a casualty than David Iglesias?

Maybe Blackwell thinks he’s “magic” and is different. Blackwell magically reaped tens of millions from an investment he made as Ohio State Treasurer, through a loan he received from banks he was already conducting state business with. Maybe Blackwell thinks his sincere repetition of “family” issues, as if the term suggests policy in itself, will magically not seem like hackneyed bloviating considering his son was caught cheating on the bar exam two separate times and arrested for weed.

But since the untimely plane crash of Mike Connell, the GOP tech guru who appeared at suspect elections like Zelig, Blackwell might not be as “magic” anymore. Mike Connell built Blackwell’s campaign websites as well as secretary of state site, and in ways we may never know, Blackwell might not be as technically effective without his go-to guy.

If the RNC chooses Ken Blackwell as its Chair to lead the party forward, it will be a brazen acknowledgment that they have no ideas or policy to peddle other than the canned politics of an opportunistic reactionary as the Party’s face. And it will announce a cynical embrace of tired Republican strategy for exploiting voters along racial lines.

I told myself I would hold back on this one. But everyone from Harvey Fierstein to Frank Rich have flogged the Rick Warren Inaugural Invocation Horse so bad, it makes the decapitated horse head in the Godfather look humane.

Getting outraged over Rick Warren speaking at the inauguration is like throwing down over the typesetting on the invitations. Rick Warren? This is nothing. It is so small, in such a long day of pageantry, on the first day of some long years of the fight ahead. In terms of the fish-frying before us, Rick Warren is a scallop, and Moby Dick, the elusive wedding-white whale, is circling us.

We’ll be facing much greater forces of homophobia as old-school baller ‘Man in the Middle Barry’ races to stay centered like a lumberjack in a log-rolling contest. In those slippery times, Obama will really need support to stand up to chest-beating theocrats proclaiming their inflated importance.

Before the back-lashers skip the rest of this column and just start posting irate comments below, let me air my record on gay rights: I’m a member of HRC. My wedding vows opened with Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall’s first lines in the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage. Our wedding ceremony was performed by my wife’s lesbian sister, who got ordained specifically to marry other gay friends. My gay brother was my groomsman. Hell, ten years ago at the Gay Pride Parade in New York, I performed gay marriages in the street at the intersection of Christopher St. and Gay St. and broadcast it on Manhattan public access.

Obama unwittingly created a culture clash at a prestigious event between traditional Christian symbolism and the Oscars audience. Personally, I presume any anti-gay demagogue, Christian or Republican, to be one tweeker-turning-tricks-away from being the next Ted Haggard. (I mean, doesn’t “Saddleback Ranch” sound a little Brokeback Mountain?) I could give a crap about Rick Warren, although I guess he actually has helped people in Africa, so props for that.

As such, the only thing I would even know of Rick Warren was that he was somehow empowered to host a debate between two presidential candidates, thereby legitimizing him more than Katie Couric. Asking Rick Warren to invocate or whatever was probably the most apolitical gesture in Obama’s mind that would help stop the religious right from shitting themselves when he finally says, “I, Barack Hussein Obama….” That Reverend Wright thing that jumped the shark back in March, it really scared a lot of white people.

While I have a hair-trigger to call out pandering, I really don’t see this as a cynical play for evangelicals or a ‘you’re likeable enough, gays’ diss like Frank Rich dishes about. (Note to Frank: When you’re so flip about how the state of New Hampshire votes, you make it easier for inexplicable polling results to go unchallenged.)

Rick Warren is going to talk for, what, five minutes? Is he going to gay bash in those highly anticipated couple of minutes? Is he instituting policy or swearing himself onto the Supreme Court? Rick was just around the corner from me, trying to smooth things over, at the West Hollywood Out of the Closet, all open arms at the gay charity. (Though if he’s checking out any of the clothes I just donated there, I have a hunch if they don’t fit me anymore, they won’t fit him either.)

I’d suggest those at the Inauguration that can’t tolerate his intolerance turn their backs while he talks. Or blow whistles. Or fully break into a Queen song, like “We Are the Champions” or “We Will Rock You.”

We don’t have to ruin the party because we don’t like one of the guests, especially when literally the entire country is invited. Inauguration Day will be a great day for celebration, though I am not sure if it will be more for the first black president or the official end of the Bush Reign of Error. One thing it won’t be like is this scene from Bush’s 2004 Inauguration. (However classic)

Remember that dreadful day of a disputed election credited to stoking anti-gay prejudice proficiently.

Obama may not be the first homosexual president, but he is the first metro-sexual president, and that itself is a significant step forward. Obama did not brave the establishment’s uproar over arugula for nothing. He’s as cut as the steam room at the West Hollywood 24 Hour Fitness. And in throwing 10 Inaugural Balls — almost assuredly in the hands of the top gay talent in DC–Barry has already proven he has more balls than Bush.

It sucks, but as we know well, America is a homophobic place. Actually, almost everywhere else is, too. Homophobia seems to blossom on its own, independently in every culture around the world, just like homosexuality does. I don’t get it either. There is a long history of religions condemning homosexuality (or people using religion to condemn homosexuality), but then, religions have been used to burn witches, too. Homophobia–as fundamental a defiance of basic human rights as it is–it just is.

The slippery slope, I believe, is in debating the oppression of gays and lesbians in a secular vs. religious context. The true believers will feel their beliefs are under attack, and there are some biases that only die with the people that cling to them. If anyone has proven adept at gracing taboo prejudices that defy reason, Hawaiian-born American native Barack H. Obama has been a spokesmodel of keeping cool.

You want to talk about being offended by outdated ideas persisting in this Inauguration? May I ask, as an apatheist, why the HELL we have religious leaders blessing or invoking or praying or chanting anything at a formal political ceremony? Why is touching the Bible required to finally be President? That there are so many religious trappings in a country founded on a separation of Church and State, endlessly prioritized in the ‘War on Christmas’ Media, that feels like a gut punch.

I know where this rage is coming from. Prop 8 here in California appears to have become the national rallying call of “ENOUGH.” It’s sad that it had come to this, but it’s a good time to show up. Make no mistake: This is the time to fight for gay marriage. So let’s get on it, instead of letting this rankle in the press for weeks on end like this really was Obama’s ‘first big blunder.’ (We’ll know when that happens, believe me.)

I am fortunate to have worked as a Director/Producer on a reality series alongside Dustin Lance Black, the critic’s darling who wrote Milk from scratch. The show was Faking It, wherein someone crammed for 30 days to pass themselves off as a professional. Lance happened to be documenting a sheep-shearer from the countryside studying to be a hairdresser. This hick kid did not like gays, a career hazard in that field. Lance smartly set up interactive counseling dialogues that would address this prejudice and open up the mind of this boy.

In Milk, a similar strategy is embraced when Harvey Milk stresses that the fight against homophobia comes from every gay person letting those around them know that gay people are not foreign deviants, but the people in your community, in your family. The new fight will be in the courts, at the polls, in the press, and on the streets. (Not so much at the bars anymore.)

You want to undo the damage wrought by Prop 8? Why don’t we take the time to actually confirm the legitimacy of the vote for Prop 8 in light of dubious exit polls, instead of assuming the best of our beleaguered electoral system here in California?

Why don’t we talk about the rampant misleading ads for Prop 8, which claimed that not passing it would allow homosexuality to be taught in school, and how we can stop false advertising in campaigns, especially fright tactics? Or investigate the millions from a religious group to wage the Prop 8 campaign?

It’s just possible that the majority of Californians do not actually want to amend our state constitution with bigotry. This poses the more specific challenge to gay activists to focus on campaign financing and election reform as gay issues.

Rick Warren seems like a wedding toast compared to all that. Accordingly, people have grumbled about his poor choice in the wedding party, but everybody will be too drunk and distracted to care whatever he said anyway. Not only does the drawn-out Rick Warren flap distract from the much bigger issues down the line, it provides fresh fodder for the divisive opportunists who literally have no other card to play except the Phantom Gay Menace card, feeding tabloid news a faux controversy at a slow time of year. Moreover, we have to get ready to party, and I haven’t even shopped yet.

After my last column endorsing him for the RNC Chair, I was abruptly de-friend-ed/dumped from his Facebook profile — proof that he is in fact getting tech savvy.  He also took down the embarrassingly lame YouTube videos from his 2006 gubernatorial campaign, which still only had a couple hundred views after all this time.  His super-fast, Internet-like response to my endorsement might have been tipped off when I posted a Tinyurl link on his Facebook wall to my piece here on Huffington Post.

And there on his Facebook profile I happened to notice the only film Ken Blackwell had put down as his favorite: The Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? This struck me that: A) He shares one of my favorite films by my favorite filmmakers, and B) What did he like so much about it to list it as his only favorite?

Does Blackwell really, really like Bluegrass?  The film is arguably a Bluegrass musical, and its soundtrack sold millions.  It stands out to me that the film centers on a governor’s race between two corrupt hacks only decided by the incumbent’s last-minute shameless play unlike anything before, and the other guy being a racist.  Maybe he’s got a thing for Clooney–but who doesn’t?

Maybe something in him knows he belongs singing along, on a chain gang, for any of the number of electoral crimes that I could only begin to cover in my film FREE FOR ALL!

Blackwell will assuredly becoming more tech-savvy now that his loyal IT tech guru, Mike Connell (featured in this clip from my film) has died inexplicably in a solo plane explosion miles from his landing strip.

Mike Connell was a GOP PC Platform in himself.  He made literally every major Republican campaign website, including for Ken Blackwell and the Ohio GOP, and then would get the government jobs and access from them in office under a different company name.  Mike Connell made the website for the Swift Boat Vets for Truth.

Mike Connell (as you can read in-depth on Epluribusmedia.org, BradBlog, Velvet Revolution, Free Press, and HuffPo) was also at the scene of every election heist between 2000 and 2006 like Woody Allen’s chameleon-like character in Zelig.  And Mike Connell was instrumental, crucial to Ken Blackwell on election night in 2004.

The already suspect details of this plane crash will continue to develop.  It is significant in its untimely tragedy, in that Mike Connell had finally just been deposed under court order in an ongoing lawsuit charging Ken Blackwell with election theft in 2004. His deposition, by relentless attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis, was the Monday before this past Election Day.  Some have credited this intense focus at the last minute as the reason Rove and his cabal did not make the power grab they might have.

Mike Connell had received death threats since the summer telling him to take the fall for the 2004 election crimes, and despite a formal request to provide him with federal protection, the Attorney General did not grant it.

To compare this to another TV series that I bet Ken Blackwell enjoys like I do, 24, Mike Connell is like the bad guy that Jack Bauer catches up with at the climax in an 8-episode arc, who we’ve been seeing all these schemes through—from the lost White House emails to god-knows-what he accessed while operating behind the Congressional firewall for the entire Bush term—and then his plane blows up, incinerating his secrets with him.

Usually at this point, Jack Bauer gets a clue to the next bad guy up the chain, rather conveniently, like hitting re-dial on the dead guy’s cell phone.  While Arnebeck’s case King Lincoln v. Blackwell is still open, with another RICO case against Blackwell in the works, there will no doubt be new revelations, but I don’t know that many other conspirators will feel like playing whistleblower at this time.

I was shocked today to learn about Mike Connell’s sudden death — yet not surprised.  Many loose ends from the Bush era will be cut off altogether.  Mike Connell goes so far back with the Bushes, he was doing campaign computer infrastructure for Bush Sr. when he was running against Reagan.

To put this in terms of yet another of my favorite movies that I’m sure Ken Blackwell also reveres: The offing of Mike Connell in such dramatic and convenient fashion after decades as a dedicated insider is like something out of the final assassination montages of the Godfather movies.

And then it struck me—another aspect Blackwell perhaps relates to in O Brother, Where Art Thou: Being constantly on the run from the crimes you’ve committed and the people trying to kill you.  Talk about a man of constant sorrow.

Among the many revelations from Stephen Spoonamore—the former colleague of Mike Connell’s whose deposition on their election hacking was the basis of Connell’s subpoena—Connell disclosed to Spoonamore that his motivation for subverting these elections were to protect the unborn.  He was that ardent in his Catholic beliefs.

While Blackwell loves to sell himself as the strictest pro-life go-to guy, I am not sure that it’s his driving reason in his long battle to suppress voters.  To cite another YouTube video he probably doesn’t like, Ken Blackwell takes more positions than a porn queen.

Maybe Ken Blackwell will go see Mike Connell’s widow, Heather, whose life has also been threatened.  Blackwell himself signed the incorporation papers for Heather’s company, GovTech.  By setting up GovTech in Heather’s name, this allowed Connell to juggle IT responsibilities for the GOP either as a government contractor, or work on campaigns under his other company New Media, without a “technical” conflict of interest.

Maybe Ken can spend the holiday with their four children, who will be having the worst Christmas of their lives, and tell them stories about how he and their daddy worked hard to empower the kind of terrible people who might do such a thing as steal elections and kill to cover it up.

Or, they could just watch movies.  Any suggestions?

It’s not often that you will see the same endorsement on Townhall.com as on the Huffington Post, so let’s savor this in the newfound era of post-partisanship.

J. Kenneth Blackwell, the former Secretary of State of Ohio whose administration of the 2004 election made Katherine Harris look like Mary Tyler Moore, is aggressively pushing to become the next chair of the Republican National Committee when its 168 members convene in 2009 to figure out how to pull their party out of the deep, dank hole they have dug themselves into. And I for one support his selection wholeheartedly.

I have spent a tremendous amount of time studying Ken Blackwell. I made a feature length documentary, FREE FOR ALL!, which examines his corrupt stewardship of Ohio elections. Just a few of Ken’s greatest hits:

• Purging a quarter of Cleveland’s register voters, one of the most Democratic counties in the country.
• Rewarding no-bid contracts to Diebold for its voting machines, while owning stock in the company, your basic illegal conflict of interest.
• Going to court numerous times to make voting even more difficult.
• And when questioned about such anti-democratic maneuvers, the belicose Blackwell emerges, disrespecting the late, beloved U.S. Rep Stephanie Tubbs Jones.

But I’m not here to focus on Ken Blackwell’s tireless war against democracy.

You see, in covering Ken Blackwell during his hapless bid for Ohio governor in 2006, I eventually realized that he requires another documentary to do justice to what a poor politician he is the rest of the time when he is not trying to subvert the electorate. (Coming in 2009!)

Here are some qualities the new RNC Chair should have, and how Ken Blackwell measures up to them.

The RNC Chair should be able to navigate past the party’s previous losses and expand the brand appeal.

Since the election, many Republicans have stressed that the divisive platform of extreme conservatism not only drives away the expanding electorate, it limits the party’s ability to talk about far more relevant issues. (Like the economy, stupid.)

Cut to Blackwell, stressing himself as a “full-portfolio conservative.” His very word choice belies how he has amassed conservative credits like a starving actor on IMDB. His titles from the Family Research Council, the NRA, and more help to bury his opportunistic ascension through Cincinnati politics, starting as an African-American activist in college, on to the city council as a Democrat, to Independent, to fiscal conservative, to far right today.

His greatest conservative achievement is championing the amendment that banned same sex marriage in Ohio, even though two other laws previously existed against gay marriage. Blackwell has closely tied himself to the evangelical right wing base, and ratcheted up the heretic talk like he’s the Spanish Inquisition.

The RNC Chair should have the respect of his party’s leaders.

On page 347 of his book, State of Denial, Bob Woodward describes W.’s apparent fondness for Blackwell during election night, 2004, as he sat in the White House waiting for the election forecasts to swing his way:

At 2:43 a.m., someone noted that Bush was ahead in the popular vote nationwide, prompting the President to sneer, “If the popular vote made it, I wouldn’t be here.”

The campaign was left to anxiously wait for a statement from Kenneth Blackwell, a former black power student leader who had morphed into Ohio’s gadfly Republican secretary of state.

“I’m the President of the United States,” Bush fumed, “waiting on a secretary of state who is a nut.”And that was when Blackwell was delivering Ohio at all costs. Does Ken still think he’s in the club?

The RNC Chair should know how to get votes.

Ken Blackwell lost his bid for governor by 24 points. His unpopularity dragged down the rest of the Republican ticket in 2006, sealing a takeover by the Democrats and ending the GOP’s one party rule that had lasted 16 years. There arguably isn’t a Democrat who could affect such a swing.

The RNC Chair should know how to wage an effective campaign.

Blackwell’s strategy was simple: All negative, all the time. In the Republican primary for governor, Blackwell savaged his fellow cabinet member Jim Petro with ads that linked him with the Tom Noe pay-to-play scandal Coingate that had ruined the Ohio GOP. Lost in these ads were that Blackwell is also in the Ohio GOP, having also received money from the same Tom Noe, now serving 18 years in prison.

Bob Bennett, the Ohio GOP Chairman not normally known for prescience, had this to sayw about Blackwell: “A man who models himself after Ronald Reagan should have a little more respect for winning on ideas and vision. He knows the accusations in these ads are politically motivated, and this kind of gutteral politics doesn’t win votes. If we can’t win with substantive ideas for leading Ohio, we don’t belong in the race.”

In the general gubernatorial race against the Democrat, U.S. Rep. Ted Strickland, Blackwell lagged in the polls the entire race. His strategy for a turnaround? In the final debate, Blackwell dramatically–however illogically–sought to tie his opponent to NAMBLA. The lowest of the low in scare tactics, it appalled Ohioans, and only cemented Blackwell’s defeat.

The RNC Chair should know how to speak.

I am no Peggy Noonan (cough!) but I suspect that in debating an Obama administration, there will be a priority on eloquence.

Blackwell’s call to arms in 2006 for civic involvement: “Whether or not we will choose to be thermometers that just take the temperature of our culture, or whether or not we will be thermostats to turn up the heat and define and shape and influence the morays of our culture.”

Besides being uninspiring rhetoric (not to mention an incomplete sentence), this oft-repeated meme really just reminded Ohioans how expensive home heating had become. One camera crew I worked with in Ohio had just put in a wood-burning stove to fight their heating bills.

The RNC Chair should have a clue about using New Media to further the party.

Ken Blackwell is proud that he has a Facebook page, and that it even got coverage. What a techie! You’d think with such cutting edge technology such as “spell check,” (like on my pirated Microsoft Word 97) he’d be able to spell his own name correctly as he lamely tries to tie Obama to Blago, which even most of the anonymous hotheads at Free Republic could do with more conviction.

Look at this cutting edge video from 2006 to see how he pre-dates Obama’s Internet youth army. Just make a mock up of the MTV logo circa 1981, and those whippersnappers will be dying to go door to door for you!

In conclusion, I think that most readers of Huffington Post will join me in supporting Ken Blackwell to lead the Republican Party to a dismal future. Indeed, his penchant for election fraud may be their only chance left.

President-Elect “Motherfucker,” as you so fondly referred to him on federal wires, stands clearly out of the loop of your own pompous power grab.  Your “fuck him” disdain for this historical politician who ascended from your home state not only keeps Obama the good guy, but your drooling over the Senate seat he left behind makes you look far less the leader of the Land of Lincoln, and more like a spoiled rich kid who inherited a prestigious family heirloom and ran to put it on Craigslist.

I am sorry you felt “stuck” as Governor of my home state, a job you rolled into fairly easily considering the outgoing Republican Gov. Ryan was going to jail for 6 years for corruption charges, and the Republican candidate to succeed him happened to also have the last name Ryan.  (You just might be able to have too many Irish in politics after all.)  Throw in your Polish-sounding last name to an electorate in Chicago where there are more Polish people than in Warsaw, and you, sir, just drew the lucky bingo card into Springfield.

So it might have been annoying to you that your name was so quickly despised by most Illinois Democrats so quickly, as you freely helped yourself to what was rightly yours as far as power, respect, deference, ass-kissing, money, favors, the like.  So what if it was reported your own father-in-law wouldn’t allow you in his home?  

Meanwhile, that pesky do-gooder Senator South Side, everybody LOVED him, they were already speculating about him “someday” as a presidential candidate.  Everybody knows Governors have better odds at the White House, and you’d have to wait and plot your chance to 2012 for that gimme.

Beyond giving the incoming administration that precious “plausible deniability” that Republican White Houses have shred countless careers for (paging Patrick Fitzgerald, care to comment?), Blago got to demonstrate Lesson Number One of how this new and improved White House will work.  

Allowing Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel to bare his newly-empowered knuckles by tipping off Feds to a fellow Illinois Democrat is like picking a fight the first day in the prison yard.  Let this be a lesson to you, ANY of you, who want to throw down.

Beyond Blago’s blinding brilliance, he has further left behind a case that Two Party Politics Proliferates Pay to Play.  Without public financing of elections, only two (2) political parties get to make the rules for potential backers.  And this happens in any state, at any level.  While party-specific patterns emerge over corruption between Democrats and Republicans — Democrats tend to go down over shameless shakedowns and sorry sex scandals, while Republicans go down over big-time cash crimes and gay sex scandals — these are two flavors of the same canned goods.

And when one party just temporarily looks slightly better than the other, it empowers that popular choice to make all the rules.  Until hubris hits them hard, and then suddenly the eager business interests dart in the other direction like a school of fish.

As an Obama staffer just wrote on HuffPo, this new President is for everyone, not just you Progressives.  We’ll see if politics as usual breeds business as usual, or if our new leader can lead us all above petulant indulgence.

But we don’t have to wait for that.  We must get involved in our own local races, we have to take control of how our elections are funded, and we have to not let oafs like Rod Blagojevich believe they are the rule makers, when they are actually inheritors of the rules.

For the next week, this modest third world country was paralyzed as hundreds of thousands of travelers and tons of cargo could not get in or out of Bangkok, costing this struggling economy over $85 million a day.  Over 1 million Thais face losing their jobs because of this enduring blow to their thriving tourism industry.

The Peoples Alliance for Democracy (PAD) was fully aware of how devastating the protests would be.  Yet they steadfastly believed that the demand for the Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat to resign was more urgent, and after staging protests outside the Parliament building since September, this was, as several banners read, the “Final Stand.” 

The PAD built barricades around the airport, established their own security forces, fed stranded travelers, and even fought off police forces when they tried to retake the airport on Sunday.  As the Prime Minister refused to step down, crowds of yellow shirts worn by the PAD only grew on TV screens and newspapers around the world, which were reporting no end in sight for stranded travelers and struggling Thais.

How did it come to this?  This is where this Third World crisis started to sound a little familiar to me.

The PAD sought the resignation of the Prime Minister insisting that he was a proxy for the previously ousted PM, a billionaire media tycoon convicted of corruption and election fraud and living in exile.  His name is Thaskin (pronounced like “Texan”).  Besides the fact that the Prime Minister is also on trial for election fraud, he had even more in common with Thaksin: he is Thaksin’s brother-in-law. 

Wealthy families with puppets in power, election fraud, refusal to compromise in the face of mass dissent from your own people?  Yet, the similarities to the last eight years in America end there.

The PM, while buoyed by red-shirted pro-government demonstrators, did not seem to get the same support from his military.  The military chief refused to unleash his firepower on the demonstrators, nor stage a military coup, acknowledging that neither would solve the deep divisions and problems in Thailand.  Huh?  The police here have a no-force policy, which allowed their outnumbered forces to be easily overrun.  It probably has to do with the Buddhist religion that 95% of Thailand observes, which urges compassion for all life, hence the stray dogs sleeping everywhere you go here.

And just as grenades and violent skirmishes between red shirts and yellow shirts were starting to evoke the Bloods and the Crips, a ruling came from the Constitutional Court: the PM, and his People Powered Party, were convicted of election fraud and vote rigging.  The PM immediately had to step down, his political party was dissolved, and he and 59 other party members were banned from politics for five years.  Elections were to be called by a new Parliament within a week, with a new party forming from the PPP’s remains.

Just close your eyes and imagine seeing this on our TV screens across America: 

• George W. Bush thrown out of the White House by a court case proving election fraud in Ohio. (There is such a case open, King Lincoln vs. Blackwell in Ohio, led by the relentless Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis.) 
• The Republican Party ordered to dissolve over its well-documented history of illegally purging voters, which it previously admitted to in a 1981 consent decree to cease such efforts, only to continue such tactics.
• Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and 57 other GOP All-Stars humiliated under court order to cease any political activity and find a new line of work.

Are we to look to Thailand for pointers on democracy?  A country that deeply reveres its King, featuring billboard sized photos of him with shrines on every block, honoring his birthday on December 5th as one of its highest holidays?  This 80 year-old King who kept quiet throughout this national crisis, at a time when such powerful leadership could have calmed the masses?

Since the Constitutional Court’s ruling, the PAD protesters have cleared out of the Bangkok International Airport in high spirits, though weary of the next PM’s ties to Thaksin.  This dreadful standoff, peaceful though it was, has already scared away half of the 14 million visitors scheduled to visit this tourist season.

I urge everyone to come to Thailand and visit this beautiful country, with its warm people, wondrous natural scenery, and stunning temples.  If that is not enough, come for the cheap great food, cheap great beer, and cheap great massages.  Two more words: ELEPHANT RIDES. 

And while you’re here, you can bring back some of the basic outrage that could be well used in places like the state of Georgia, where a ruthlessly partisan Secretary of State has helped her fellow Republican Senator Chambliss back into office on the same electronic voting machines that drove out triple amputee Max Cleland in 2002. 

In Chiang Mai, I saw such wisdom in a Buddhist temple’s garden that read: “Better to speak unpopular truths than share popular lies.”

This has been an amazing experience since starting FREE FOR ALL! two years ago.  In that time, I have lost my faith in democracy and regained it.  I know well that this historic moment will overshadow the many thousands of voter problems experienced across the country yesterday.  At videothevote.org, we have received over 700 videos and counting from across the country.  The vigilance of Americans everywhere leading up to this election was a key component to Obama’s success.  I hope there will still be a sense of outrage in spite of complacency.

In Ohio, I literally met people who came here to Video the Vote because they saw my movie on line and wanted to do something because of it.  That is staggering.  I am grateful to every volunteer and supporter.

I am grateful to my producer Holly and editor Vivian for realizing FREE FOR ALL! with me.

I am grateful to anyone who was inspired by this film, every small screening across the country to a few fascinated faces, every anonymous digit on a traffic counter.

I feel the enormous freshness of letting myself off the hook to do something after 2004.  Now I feel like I can do this comfortably, not desperately.

Let’s get to work!

John Wellington Ennis
Cleveland, Ohio - November 5th, 2008