Garance Franke-Ruta

When Russian Machine Never Breaks isn't rocking the red for the Washington Capitals, it keeps a close eye on skaters in places like meteorite-struck Chelyabinsk.

If you were on Twitter last night your first English-language news of the Russian meteor hit -- the largest to come to Earth since the 1908 Tunguska explosion in Siberia -- likely came from a website with a passel of the most amazing Russian dashboard cam videos and a name guaranteed to raise suspicions about its veracity. That is, of course, unless you are a Caps fan, in which case you know that Russian Machine Never Breaks is a great source of news and information about some of the Washington region's most outsized sports figures on one of its best teams -- and not a site given to elaborately staged pranks and hoaxes.

It was the Russian players who put the Washington Capitals on the map in the National Hockey League, and who've since made the team a surefire bet for D.C. residents who like to cheer for winners. And Caps fans are looking forward to more of them coming to the city, too -- players like Evgeny Kuznetsov, a forward who plays for Traktor Chelyabinsk and was drafted 26th overall by the Washington Capitals in 2010. His arrival in Washington has been much-anticipated and closely followed by the men at Russian Machine, a site that describes itself as "A cheerfully demented Washington Capitals site with a healthy fixation on Alex Ovechkin and his Russian bros."

It was the site's Moscow correspondent -- hey, you can't have a top Caps blog without one -- who broke the news to the D.C. crew.

"Fedor Fedin heard about the explosion (we didn't know the cause) through social media and radio around 11:00 PM ET. He relayed it to us," said Russian Machine editor Peter Hassett of Frederick, Md., in an email.

"I scoured Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube using the Cyrillic version of Chelyabinsk and its nickname 'Chelly'. Fedor translated tweets from the only reliable source we could find (@plushev, host of a news radio program in Moscow).

"I was skeptical at first, but once I saw multiple videos from multiple users showing the same contrails and sonic boom in addition to a Russian-language reporter repeating official news releases and a first-person tweet from a North American goalie known to be playing in the region, I bought the story."

Yes, you heard that right -- a Canadian former Atlanta Thrashers goalie now playing for Traktor Chelyabinsk helped break the news online on Twitter, because that's how media works today. You can read Michael Garnett's whole story of being awakened by the crash here.

"There were also tons of unconfirmed eyewitness reports (e.g. rockets, military planes, toxic zinc leaks), but I left those out because I read Twelve Angry Men and I know how reliable those can be," continued Hassett.

"We published the article a little after 11 PM ET and kept on researching. I was a bit surprised there were no reports on the wire until after midnight actually. There had been by the point a few short, Russian-language government announcements that could have been translated and verified."

The Associated Press tweeted out its breaking news alert, which verified with Russian authorities that a meteorite had hit, at 12:21 a.m. EST Friday.

"It's been our biggest story so far," said Hassett. "It would have been a lot more exciting for us had a whole bunch of people not been hurt."

Hassett posted some traffic figures on his Tumblr Friday showing the, ahem, meteoric traffic spike.

What Obama's really proposing is a massive ramp-up in programs to help the children of the poor and lower-middle class, not something for everyone.

So far unmentioned in the nascent debate over the president's State of the Union call to provide universal pre-kindergarten to low- and moderate-income children is that such programs, should they come into existence, would be a huge boon to poor mothers -- especially single moms. It would be a giant economic relief to such women to have access to a high-quality, free educational system for their kids "beginning at birth and continuing to age 5," as the White House described the programs in a memo Thursday. And it would also be great for their kids to have thoughtfully-constructed places to go while their mothers work -- environments designed to help them overcome the deficits their strapped families might otherwise leave them with, making it harder for them to compete when they enter elementary school.

That said, the fine print shows that despite Obama's call "to make high-quality preschool available to every child in America," what he's proposing is not really a universal program as much as a slate of initiatives to expand early options for children of the poor and lower middle class.

Here's the meat of what the proposed programs would actually do, according to the White House memo (emphasis added below, and throughout):

Expand access to pre-school for low- and moderate-income kids.

The President's proposal will improve quality and expand access to preschool, through a cost sharing partnership with all 50 states, to extend federal funds to expand high-quality public preschool to reach all low- and moderate-income four-year olds from families at or below 200% of poverty. The U.S. Department of Education will allocate dollars to states based their share of four-year olds from low- and moderate-income families and funds would be distributed to local school districts and other partner providers to implement the program. The proposal would include an incentive for states to broaden participation in their public preschool program for additional middle-class families, which states may choose to reach and serve in a variety of ways, such as a sliding-scale arrangement.

In D.C. and the lower 48, the federal poverty guideline for a family of four in 2012 was $23,050; 200 percent of that is $46,100 -- a figure that's solidly middle class in some parts of the country, but not particularly well-to-do in many, many others.

Expand Head Start -- a program for low-income kids first launched in 1965 as part of the War on Poverty.

The President will also launch a new Early Head Start-Child Care Partnership program, to support states and communities that expand the availability of Early Head Start and child care providers that can meet the highest standards of quality for infants and toddlers, serving children from birth through age 3. Funds will be awarded through Early Head Start on a competitive basis to enhance and support early learning settings; provide new, full-day, comprehensive services that meet the needs of working families; and prepare children for the transition into preschool. This strategy -- combined with an expansion of publicly funded preschool education for four-year olds -- will ensure a cohesive and well-aligned system of early learning for children from birth to age five.

According to the 2009-2010 Head Start Program Information Report data presented in the report "Head Start Today: A Look at Demographics and Culture and Linguistic Responsiveness," 36 percent were of "Hispanic or Latino" background and 29 percent were "Black or African-American." Another 8 percent were biracial or multi-racial.

Create a home visits system for at-risk families (a.k.a. poor, young, single moms).

The President is proposing to expand the Administration's evidence-based home visiting initiative, through which states are implementing voluntary programs that provide nurses, social workers, and other professionals to meet with at-risk families in their homes and connect them to assistance that impacts a child's health, development, and ability to learn. These programs have been critical in improving maternal and child health outcomes in the early years, leaving long-lasting, positive impacts on parenting skills; children's cognitive, language, and social-emotional development; and school readiness. This will help ensure that our most vulnerable Americans are on track from birth, and that later educational investments rest upon a strong foundation.

Yes, it has come to this. A Washington Examiner round-up of other moments the senator from Florida has casually rehydrated on camera proves Marco Rubio's post-State of the Union swig wasn't the only awkward moment he's had with the wet stuff -- you know, water.

"I think I just drank Clinton Eastwood's water," he says in a Republican National Convention aside featured in the clip.

O tempora, o mores!

I'm still of the school that after everyone has had their fun at Rubio's expense, his remarks on the minimum wage and his vote against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act will be much more consequential for his political prospects than one viral moment from last night. But who knows -- maybe our politics really are that trivial.

There's no clear path to a minimum-wage hike in today's Congress. So why did the president surprise members of his own party and bring it up in the State of the Union?

In 2008, the Obama-Biden transition effort promised, as part of the new president's poverty agenda, that "Obama will ... raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011" and "index it to inflation."

That didn't happen, and when Obama in his 2013 State of the Union address once again brought up the question of raising the minimum wage -- though to a slightly lower amount -- it took some members of his party by surprise. A minimum-wage hike is a perennial progressive Democratic favorite, but it wasn't on the radar to emerge as a top priority for the president and his party in the year ahead.

"[T]oday, a full-time worker making the minimum wage earns $14,500 a year. Even with the tax relief we've put in place, a family with two kids that earns the minimum wage still lives below the poverty line. That's wrong. That's why, since the last time this Congress raised the minimum wage, 19 states have chosen to bump theirs even higher," Obama said Tuesday night. "Tonight, let's declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty, and raise the federal minimum wage to $9.00 an hour."

He tried to make the idea sound bipartisan: "Working folks shouldn't have to wait year after year for the minimum wage to go up while CEO pay has never been higher. So here's an idea that Governor Romney and I actually agreed on last year: let's tie the minimum wage to the cost of living, so that it finally becomes a wage you can live on." (You can see Romney calling for the minimum wage to be indexed to the CPI or another inflation index here.)

On Wednesday, House Speaker John Boehner quickly -- and predictably -- shot the idea down, as Republicans have with so much minimum-wage-increase talk in the past. "Listen, when people are asking the question 'Where are the jobs?' why would we want to make it harder for small employers to hire people? I've got 11 brothers and sisters on every rung of the economic ladder. I know about this issue as much as anybody in this town," Boehner said. The speaker in 2006 opposed raising the federal minimum wage to its current $7.25 an hour from $5.15; the last national minimum-wage hike through legislation came in 2007, when Democrats still controlled the House.

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who delivered the GOP rebuttal to the State of the Union and has emerged as a prominent new face for the party, also dismissed the proposal. "I don't think a minimum-wage law works," he said on CBS's This Morning.

So why did Obama bring the issue up, knowing it would be a hard sell in the GOP-controlled House -- and even in the narrowly Democratic Senate, which is already grappling with the hot-button issues of immigration, gun control, and climate change?

The answer is that it's good politics for Obama and the Democrats to put the GOP in the position of opposing a popular economic measure that has particular appeal to Hispanics and women ("nearly two-thirds of minimum wage workers," according to the National Women's Law Center), two groups the GOP is increasingly trying to woo. And it's good politics to do so just as Republicans are struggling to make some long-deferred compromises on immigration, in part in hopes of helping a future national Republican candidate perform better with Hispanics than did Romney in November. And also: It will give Democrats something to run on in 2014.

As Obama and the Democrats meet with more success in Congress -- especially if there's a real immigration deal -- and as Republicans increasingly highlight a small but diverse group of next-generation GOP leaders from modest circumstances, such as Rubio, Democrats are going to need a fresh wedge issue on which to cast the GOP as the party of the rich, the already-established, and the intransigent. The minimum-wage fight will be clarifying, even if it's not one Democrats can expect to win any time soon.

Human moments from the ridiculous to the heart-rending lept from the boilerplate at the State of the Union address and the GOP response to it.

Marco Rubio's mid-speech lunge for an awkwardly placed bottle of water during his Republican Party response to the State of the Union immediately became the break-out moment of his remarks Tuesday night.

Before the clock struck midnight, there was already a #ThirstyRubio hashtag, at least four different fake Twitter feeds (such as @Water4Rubio, "Drinking water awkwardly on national Television since 1969."), a basic meme ("Stay Thirsty My Friends"), gifs (and more GIFs), a deconstruction, and even, from Deadspin, a slow-motion version of the Rubio reach set to the indie music tune "Danger of the Water," by the Futureheads.

Rubio (or his social media team) responded in kind -- which was pretty much the only thing they could do once Rubio's otherwise perfectly passable performance (unusual for a SOTU response) was eclipsed by the bad advance work that left him with a long speech, a dry mouth, and no TV-ready glass of water within easy reach.

#GOPResponse #SOTU #gop #tcot twitter.com/marcorubio/sta...

-- Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 13, 2013

Shortly after 10 p.m., "Rubio water" massively outnumbered Twitter mentions of Obama's "they deserve a vote" riff at the end of his speech.

It's too bad, because the other most powerful form of human emotion on display Tuesday night also involved questions of the wet and the dry -- in this case, the dry eyes of Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton and Nathaniel A. Pendleton, parents of slain Chicago 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton. The couple somehow managed to go on national television as guests in the first lady's viewing box just weeks after losing their daughter, who was murdered on January 29, without completely losing their own composure as the president spoke of their child and used the example of their loss to urge members of Congress to allow gun control legislation to come up for a vote.

Said Obama:

Hadiya's parents, Nate and Cleo, are in this chamber tonight, along with more than two dozen Americans whose lives have been torn apart by gun violence. They deserve a vote.

Gabby Giffords deserves a vote.

The families of Newtown deserve a vote.

The families of Aurora deserve a vote.

The families of Oak Creek, and Tucson, and Blacksburg, and the countless other communities ripped open by gun violence -- they deserve a simple vote.

Our actions will not prevent every senseless act of violence in this country. Indeed, no laws, no initiatives, no administrative acts will perfectly solve all the challenges I've outlined tonight. But we were never sent here to be perfect. We were sent here to make what difference we can, to secure this nation, expand opportunity, and uphold our ideals through the hard, often frustrating, but absolutely necessary work of self-government.

It may seem a stretch to yoke these two moments together, yet the gun-control passage was the emotional crescendo of Obama's speech for the same reason the Rubio reach became an instant viral sensation. They were deeply human moments plonked amid the formal language and staging of the highly-manufactured evening, reminders that for all the ideology and political calculations -- and Obama's invocation of the Pendletons was nothing if not pointedly seeking a political outcome -- politics is about people. People want politicians who seem real at the same time they are shocked when they act it. And politics is at its most powerful when it addresses not just the sweeping themes of impending and contested legislation, but the individuals who most need to see major changes in the communities in which they live.

Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida will be delivering his party's rebuttal to the president's State of the Union address tonight. Advance speech excerpts released by Rubio situate him as a descendent of Cuban-American immigrants -- one who still lives where he's from, and one who carries his community's commitment to the American free enterprise system close to heart. That makes sense, as his is a community he often brings up in remarks in a way that makes him sound both more regional and more grounded than the average U.S. Senator bursting onto the national stage. The excerpts:

This opportunity - to make it to the middle class or beyond no matter where you start out in life - it isn't bestowed on us from Washington. It comes from a vibrant free economy where people can risk their own money to open a business. And when they succeed, they hire more people, who in turn invest or spend the money they make, helping others start a business and create jobs. Presidents in both parties - from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan - have known that our free enterprise economy is the source of our middle class prosperity. But President Obama? He believes it's the cause of our problems.

***

Mr. President, I still live in the same working class neighborhood I grew up in. My neighbors aren't millionaires. They're retirees who depend on Social Security and Medicare. They're workers who have to get up early tomorrow morning and go to work to pay the bills. They're immigrants, who came here because they were stuck in poverty in countries where the government dominated the economy. The tax increases and the deficit spending you propose will hurt middle class families. It will cost them their raises. It will cost them their benefits. It may even cost some of them their jobs. And it will hurt seniors because it does nothing to save Medicare and Social Security. So Mr. President, I don't oppose your plans because I want to protect the rich. I oppose your plans because I want to protect my neighbors.

***

Economic growth is the best way to help the middle class. Unfortunately, our economy actually shrank during the last three months of 2012. But if we can get the economy to grow at just 4 percent a year, it would create millions of middle class jobs. And it could reduce our deficits by almost $4 trillion dollars over the next decade. Tax increases can't do this.Raising taxes won't create private sector jobs. And there's no realistic tax increase that could lower our deficits by almost $4 trillion. That's why I hope the President will abandon his obsession with raising taxes and instead work with us to achieve real growth in our economy.

***

The real cause of our debt is that our government has been spending 1 trillion dollars more than it takes in every year. That's why we need a balanced budget amendment. The biggest obstacles to balancing the budget are programs where spending is already locked in. One of these programs, Medicare, is especially important to me. It provided my father the care he needed to battle cancer and ultimately die with dignity. And it pays for the care my mother receives now. I would never support any changes to Medicare that would hurt seniors like my mother. But anyone who is in favor of leaving Medicare exactly the way it is right now, is in favor of bankrupting it.

***

Despite our differences, I know that both Republicans and Democrats love America. I pray we can come together to solve our problems, because the choices before us could not be more important. If we can get our economy healthy again, our children will be the most prosperous Americans ever. And if we do not, we will forever be known as the generation responsible for America's decline.

From the prepared for delivery version of Obama's speech:

It is our generation's task, then, to reignite the true engine of America's economic growth - a rising, thriving middle class.

It is our unfinished task to restore the basic bargain that built this country - the idea that if you work hard and meet your responsibilities, you can get ahead, no matter where you come from, what you look like, or who you love.

It is our unfinished task to make sure that this government works on behalf of the many, and not just the few; that it encourages free enterprise, rewards individual initiative, and opens the doors of opportunity to every child across this great nation of ours.

A growing economy that creates good, middle-class jobs - that must be the North Star that guides our efforts. Every day, we should ask ourselves three questions as a nation: How do we attract more jobs to our shores? How do we equip our people with the skills needed to do those jobs? And how do we make sure that hard work leads to a decent living?

Tonight, I'll lay out additional proposals that are fully paid for and fully consistent with the budget framework both parties agreed to just 18 months ago. Let me repeat - nothing I'm proposing tonight should increase our deficit by a single dime. It's not a bigger government we need, but a smarter government that sets priorities and invests in broad-based growth.

Nobody loves workmanlike laundry lists, but four former presidential speechwriters say there's little hope for shorter speeches any time soon.

Four former presidential speechwriters on Tuesday discussed their efforts to reign in recent State of the Union addresses, which have become some of the longest and most unwieldy speeches presidents give, as well as the most widely-watched. But structural forces within the White House, they predicted, will most likely continue to conspire to turn the annual laying out of presidential priorities into mammoth, workmanlike laundry lists, no matter who resides in the Oval Office.

Just ask Jeff Shesol, now a partner at the West Wing Writers Group. When he came to the White House in 1998, he had an idea about streamlining the speeches, which had already grown to gargantuan new lengths under President Clinton.

"When I had just gotten there, to the White House, and I was really full of what I thought were fresh ideas, I wrote a memo arguing for a tightly thematic approach to the State of the Union and to finally reject the laundry list, make an argument for something, and let a lot of other stuff fall by the wayside," he recalled at a panel Tuesday morning organized by the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington and moderated by the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart.

"I made my case in a couple page memo and I was told, essentially: 'You're adorable.'" Shesol said.

"I got to work like everybody else on filling out the laundry list."

The net result: One of the two State of the Unions he worked on wound up being the longest ever given, breaking Clinton's previous record-setting performance.

But even when they are not Clintonesque, State of the Unions have been getting longer over the past three decades. Obama's have been, on average, longer than George W. Bush's, which were longer than his father's, which were longer then those of Ronald Reagan. (Wonkblog lays out the details in a nice graphic here.)

State of the Unions are baggy in part because they have to sync up with the president's budget priorities, and partly because they are not so much written as organized, Shesol said. Observed Don Baer, worldwide chair and CEO of Burson-Marsteller and Clinton's former top speechwriter, speechwriters are "at best, stewards for a process" when it comes to the State of the Union -- which is "a mission statement and the setting out of an agenda for the entire presidency, and entire government, at least for a year ahead, and sometimes more than that." They don't decide what's in and what's out and they are lobbied constantly by Cabinet secretaries, interest groups, and constituencies within the government to add a reference to pet programs or name-check specific plans, the speechwriters agreed. The helpful phrase to remember, said former George W. Bush speechwriter John McConnell, is the truthful, "I promise this will receive consideration."

But the final decisions about what goes into a State of the Union are often made by the chief of staff, the communications director, a chief counselor, or the president himself -- and not by the speechwriter.

That kind of massive group process militates against short speeches. "Everyone starts out thinking it's going to be really short and they're going to change the tradition of these things running on and on," said Adam Frankel, a former speechwriter for President Obama, now executive director of Digital Promise. "And then inevitably, over the course of the process, they tend to be a certain length."

And then there's the unpredictable factor of a president who likes to riff.

"In 1995, which was the first year I when was chief speechwriter and I had to manage this process -- it was an unusual year," Baer said. "You remember, Newt Gingrich and the Republicans had taken Congress, there was a fair amount of uncertainty within the White House and among the Democrats about what President Clinton's message and sort of themes were going to be. That uncertainty held right up through the day of the speech."

The 89-minute speech that resulted was never supposed to be that long. "It was written at 5,800 words and, based on the pace that we knew President Clinton delivered his speeches, including applause, that meant it would have ended at 58 minutes. But when he got up to give the speech, because it was going so well, he added enough words for the full text to be 9,200 words, which means it came in -- he was speaking speaking faster toward the end -- it came in at 89 minutes," Baer said.

"I thought that was a little bit of an ignominious mark on my record. It was the longest presidential State of the Union in history -- until the year 2000, when I was only marginally involved, and he went 92 minutes. So I felt better about that."

Added Shesol: "We hold together this pair of records -- that Don's was the longest in words, and one I participated in, one of the ones of the I participated in, was the longest in minutes -- [Clinton] slowed down and enjoyed it."

He's posed as a pirate and toiled on the funerals beat. Now he's taking over the task of writing the president's major addresses.

Cody Keenan may not have a famous doppleganger in Hollywood like his colleague Jon Favreau, but when Favreau leaves the White House on March 1 to pursue a career as a screenwriter, Keenan's visibility is sure to spike in his new role as chief speechwriter at the White House. His first big reveal will be tonight, as he has been working with President Obama to pen the 2013 State of the Union address.

That speech will have been "a collaborative process between the president and his speechwriter," White House spokesman Jay Carney noted last week during a press briefing, "in this case, Cody Keenan." He was "taking the lead on the speechwriting team for this and will be getting a higher profile in the weeks to come -- internally, anyway," Carney said. "But these are speeches that the president takes very seriously. He's a writer himself, so he engages at a very deep level on the framing of a speech, on the writing of it and the editing of it and the shaping of it. So that process continues."

Here are some facts about Keenan:

* He worked with Obama to craft his 2011 Tucson remarks after Gabby Giffords was shot.

That speech was hailed by many as a pitch-perfect call for unity in the wake of a national tragedy, and with guns back in the news and Keenan's history of grappling with the issue -- and also of toiling away on what a friend of his once called the "eulogy and commencement beat" in the White House speechwriting shop -- get ready for an elegiac turn tonight.

The January 2011 speech was the first time Keenan, who was raised in suburban Chicago and Connecticut, popped up on the national press register. A Chicago Tribune story recounted at the time:

... After the much-applauded speech in Arizona, his anonymity is a thing of the past.

Flying back to Washington aboard Air Force One, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters late Wednesday that Keenan had been the speechwriter.

"It's C-O-D-Y K-E-E-N-A-N," Gibbs said. "And I'll double-check that, but I'm almost positive."

"A proud Northwestern fan," he added.

Gibbs said Obama probably had his "first conversations" with Keenan about the speech on Monday. "And what they usually do is the president will -- they'll bring a laptop in and the president will download a little bit on what he'd like to say," Gibbs said.

Obama sent changes back to Keenan about 1 a.m. Wednesday, Gibbs said, and work on the speech continued through the day. "They made edits even after we landed in Arizona," Gibbs said.

Of course, every speech by the president is the president's -- lest anyone forget.

By Thursday morning, Gibbs emphasized that Obama had wielded the heavier pen.

"I think last night was a speech that was very much the president's, and he spent a great deal of time going through his thoughts on this and spent a lot of time working on what he wanted to say," Gibbs said.

* He used to work for Ted Kennedy.

Keenan, a former high-school quarterback who flirted with the idea of becoming a doctor before turning to political science in college, arrived in Washington at the urging of a Sigma Chi fraternity brother and got his first break as an aide in the mailroom of Senator Ted Kennedy. He would go on to work for him for three and a half years, rising to the level of legislative aide, before heading to the Harvard Kennedy School for a masters.

According to a Kennedy School release:

Keenan's past and present collided on April 21, 2009, when President Obama signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act with Kennedy in attendance. Keenan drafted President Obama's speech for the event. Kennedy later sent him a handwritten note that read: "Seems like the Kennedy office and the Kennedy School have served you very well!"

Four months after that, Keenan helped the President craft his eulogy for Kennedy. Each time, he found himself deeply moved by the opportunity to write about the man who had shaped his notion of what public service could be. "It really brought things full circle," he said.

Keenan found his way into Obamaland in the summer of 2007, when he interned in the speechwriting shop of the then Democratic presidential primary contender, before returning to school and finishing his graduate degree in 2008 -- just in time to return to the campaign, this time as a full-time speechwriter, for the general election.

* He's compared speechwriting to being a perpetual grad student.

"Our jobs are remarkably like graduate school. You get a paper assignment, you might pull an all-nighter or come in really early to finish, and you hand it in and then you get his marks back and find out whether he likes it or not," he told a Kennedy School interviewer in 2010. "The good thing is he'll make detailed edits when he gets the speech, and he's generous with his time -- he'll walk us through the edits and explain why he made them. That makes us better writers."

* He's game to be the punchline in a sight gag.

Keenan also took a leading role in drafting Obama's 2009 White House Correspondents' Dinner remarks -- and dressed up as a pirate for one of the humorous speech's sight gags.

"We can't just talk to our friends, we've got to talk to our enemies too and I've begun to do exactly that," Obama said, as a picture of him talking to a hook-handed Keenan appeared on screen.

* He keeps a low profile.

At least, he has so far. His mantra for public life comes from President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Brownlow Committee Report of 1937, he told a Northwestern alumni publication in the spring of 2011. The ideal presidential aide, it said, "should be possessed of high competence ... and a passion for anonymity."

An impressive array of movement leaders rallies to defend Brent Bozell after Crossroads GPS spokesman Jonathan Collegio called him a "hater."

A spokesman for Karl Rove's American Crossroads got a very public thumping Wednesday when some of the most prominent Tea Party leaders and movement conservative activists in the country signed onto a letter calling for him to be fired. Jonathan Collegio's offense: He dipped into hip-hop slag and called movement-conservative writer L. Brent Bozell III a "hater" during a talk-radio interview that morning. 

"An apology is not acceptable," the signatories wrote, and would in no way make up for the "unjust, personal broadside" against the president of the 25-year-old Media Research Council. Signatories included Richard Viguerie, Morton Blackwell, Phyllis Schlafly, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, and Ginni Thomas, a conservative consultant who is also the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. 

Bozell "is not a hater. He's a patriot and someone who loves this country," said Jenny Beth Martin, also a signatory and co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots.

Collegio apologized, saying: "Bozell called us 'fake conservatives' -- which is language that perniciously and unfairly judges the motives of others, and fails to acknowledge that there might be honest differences on strategy within the conservative movement... I regret contributing to the vitriol, and I apologize to Mr. Bozell if it offended him. Believe it or not, I'm a big fan of both him and MRC."

It's just the latest outbreak in an ongoing series of skirmishes over the future of a Republican Party. The GOP is caught between a grassroots that's willing to roll the dice and risk some high-profile electoral losses in order to win other races with out-of-the-box candidates, and an establishment up in arms over the loss of what should have been safe Republican seats -- including some held by incumbents -- thanks to the new grassroots powers. Against that backdrop, a New York Times story about a Rove-backed super PAC's plans for a new project to help incumbents fend off primary challenges raised major hackles among movement conservatives, who felt it was tantamount to declaring war on some of their most cherished members while diminishing their role in the last election cycle that saw substantial GOP gains, 2010. 

"The biggest donors in the Republican Party are financing a new group to recruit seasoned candidates and protect Senate incumbents from challenges by far-right conservatives and Tea Party enthusiasts who Republican leaders worry could complicate the party's efforts to win control of the Senate," the Times reported on Tuesday. The effort is being led by Steven J. Law, president of Rove's American Crossroads group. That evening Rove appeared on Hannity to try to undo some of the damage from the Times piece.

But that didn't stop Bozell, who wrote critically of Rove's decision to give the New York Times, which Bozell considers a biased bastion of liberalism, the story in the first place:

If I were launching a new conservative venture, the last venue I'd choose for the announcement would be the New York Times. Karl Rove has gone to the Times to announce that he has created a new "conservative" entity "to recruit seasoned candidates and protect Senate incumbents from challenges by far-right conservatives and Tea Party enthusiasts."...

In the end, this is not a fight between Democrats and Republicans. This is between the Reaganites and the same old moderate Republicans who insisted Ronald Reagan was far too extreme to be elected in 1976 and then in 1980, when Rove worked for George H. W. Bush. They thought the Doles and McCains were always the smart money against the Democrats. It's a fight between Republicans who want to not only run as conservatives, but govern as conservatives, versus the Bush-Boehner-McConnell never-mind approach.

Rove's groups already had a "horrific" reception among conservatives, according to the American Spectator's Jeffrey Lord, on account of their dismal track record in 2012 and Rove's frank public criticism of conservative and Tea Party candidates he believed had gone off the electability rails dating to 2010.

Collegio's comments came in response to questioning during an interview on a Washington talk-radio show, WMAL's Mornings on the Mall with Brian Wilson & Larry O'Connor.

Collegio was pretty clear that American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS did not see themselves as the ones declaring intra-party war. "Look," he said, "American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS ... spent more than $30 million over the past two years supporting Tea Party candidates .... We need better candidates across the board."

"We want to elect the most conservative candidates possible," he said, adding later, "The headline on the Breitbart website that we're declaring war -- that's absolutely false."

Collegio contrasted Rove's support for Marco Rubio with his concerns about Christine O'Donnell and Todd Akin as the sorts of distinctions the group would make.

"I don't know why that headline came up," Collegio said. "This is not a war on the Tea Party. Brent Bozell is a hater. He has a long personal history of hating Karl Rove, too -- he has like weird personal axes to grind."

Collegio declined to comment for this story.

The full letter is below.

 

February 6, 2013

 

 

Mr. Steven Law

President & Chief Executive Officer

American Crossroads
P.O. Box 34413
Washington, DC 20043

 

Dear Mr. Law,

 

We, the free men and women of this great nation, affirm everyone's natural right to speak their mind, but we cannot and will not abide the unjust, personal broadside your aide Jonathan Collegio leveled against a man whose family has dedicated itself to advancing the cause of liberty for over half a century. 

This morning Mr. Collegio attacked L. Brent Bozell, III and labeled him as a "hater" twice in an interview.  His attack was not grounded in reason or principle; its justification was nothing more than disagreement with your newly formed organization. 

Mr. Bozell is what we call in our movement a "legacy." He has devoted his life to the cause of American conservatism as did his father, Brent Bozell II, who wrote "Conscience of a Conservative" for Barry Goldwater.

Maybe you've heard of Brent's uncle, Bill Buckley, whose words you misquote and twist as the basis for your organization enough to falsely suggest you know something about him.   

You may have heard of his other uncle, Jim Buckley, a former U.S. Senator, or Brent's mother, Patricia Buckley Bozell--both important figures and writers in our conservative movement. 

Ronald Reagan often saluted the contributions of the Bozell and Buckley families to the cause of American conservatism.

Mr. Collegio calling Mr. Bozell a "hater" publicly on WMAL radio this morning reflects the language of the establishment Republicans. It is the divisive language of the Left. 

Rather than engaging in an intellectual debate, you, Mr. Collegio, Mr. Rove, and others in the consultant class attack good conservatives and Tea Party leaders and members.

On behalf of the conservative movement, we are demanding you terminate Mr. Collegio.  An apology is not acceptable. 

American Crossroads and the so-called Conservative Victory Project have already been severely marginalized.  The sheer audacity of political consultants maligning a beloved and critically important player in American history is simply a bridge too far.

You obviously mean to have a war with conservatives and the Tea Party. 

Let it start here.

 

Sincerely,

 

 

Craig Shirley                                                                       Diana Banister

Reagan Biographer                                                            Director

                                                                                            Citizens for the Republic

 

 

Mark Levin                                                                          Jenny Beth Martin

Author                                                                                  Co-Founder and National   Coordinator Tea Party Patriots

                                                                                               

 

Morton Blackwell                                                             Mathew D. Staver

Chairman                                                                         Founder and Chairman

The Weyrich Lunch                                                          Liberty Counsel

 

 

Tony Perkins                                                                      Austin Ruse

President                                                                            President

Family Research Council                                                   Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute

 

Richard Viguerie                                                               Manuel Miranda

Chairman                                                                           Third Branch Conference

ConservativeHQ.com                                                    

 

Phyllis Schlafly

President

Eagle Forum

 

 

Robert Fischer                                                                   Mark Fitzgibbons

President                                                                            President of Corporate Affairs

Fischer Furniture, Inc.                                                       American Target Advertising

 

David N. Bossie                                                                 Troy Newman

President                                                                            Pro-Life Nation

Citizens United

 

 

Richard F. Norman                                                           Tricia Erickson

Founder and President                                                    President

The Richard Norman Company                                       Crisis Management, Inc.

 

 

Ginni Thomas                                                                    Angelo M. Codevilla                                       

Liberty Consulting                                                            Professor emeritus

                                                                                        Claremont Institute

 

 

William Wilson                                                                   Rick Scarborough

Americans for Limited Government                                   Vision America

 

 

Peter J. Thomas                                                                Colin Hanna

Chairman                                                                           Let Freedom Ring

The Conservative Caucus Inc.

 

Andrea Lafferty                                                                Frank Gaffney

President                                                                         President

Traditional Values Coalition                                             Center for Security Policy

A Super Bowl advertisement for Ram Trucks featuring excerpts from a Carter-era address to the Future Farmers of America Convention struck a chord with its religious imagery.

A decades-old speech from a conservative radio broadcaster who passed away in 2009 became a major topic of chatter when it was condensed and delivered as the audio backdrop for a Ram Trucks ad during the second half of the Super Bowl Sunday.

The speech was originally delivered in 1978, smack dab in the middle of the Carter era, and with its folksy timbre and talk of God, Paul Harvey's words stood out amid the stream of ads that ranged from salacious to ridiculous to sentimental on 21st-century CBS.

This New York Times obituary well-situates Harvey politically, and describes the role he played in American life:

In his heyday, which lasted from the 1950s through the 1990s, Mr. Harvey's twice-daily soapbox-on-the-air was one of the most popular programs on radio. Audiences of as many as 22 million people tuned in on 1,300 stations to a voice that had been an American institution for as long as most of them could remember.

Like Walter Winchell and Gabriel Heatter before him, he personalized the radio news with his right-wing opinions, but laced them with his own trademarks: a hypnotic timbre, extended pauses for effect, heart-warming tales of average Americans and folksy observations that evoked the heartland, family values and the old-fashioned plain talk one heard around the dinner table on Sunday.

"Hello, Americans," he barked. "This is Paul Harvey! Stand byyy for Newwws!"

He railed against welfare cheats and defended the death penalty. He worried about the national debt, big government, bureaucrats who lacked common sense, permissive parents, leftist radicals and America succumbing to moral decay. He championed rugged individualism, love of God and country, and the fundamental decency of ordinary people.

Here's the text of his speech, made newly famous during the Super Bowl:

And on the 8th day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, "I need a caretaker." So God made a farmer.

God said, "I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board." So God made a farmer.

"I need somebody with arms strong enough to rustle a calf and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild. Somebody to call hogs, tame cantankerous machinery, come home hungry, have to wait lunch until his wife's done feeding visiting ladies and tell the ladies to be sure and come back real soon -- and mean it." So God made a farmer.

God said, "I need somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt. And watch it die. Then dry his eyes and say, 'Maybe next year.' I need somebody who can shape an ax handle from a persimmon sprout, shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire, who can make harness out of haywire, feed sacks and shoe scraps. And who, planting time and harvest season, will finish his forty-hour week by Tuesday noon, then, pain'n from 'tractor back,' put in another seventy-two hours." So God made a farmer.

God had to have somebody willing to ride the ruts at double speed to get the hay in ahead of the rain clouds and yet stop in mid-field and race to help when he sees the first smoke from a neighbor's place. So God made a farmer.

God said, "I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bails, yet gentle enough to tame lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink-combed pullets, who will stop his mower for an hour to splint the broken leg of a meadow lark. It had to be somebody who'd plow deep and straight and not cut corners. Somebody to seed, weed, feed, breed and rake and disc and plow and plant and tie the fleece and strain the milk and replenish the self-feeder and finish a hard week's work with a five-mile drive to church.

"Somebody who'd bale a family together with the soft strong bonds of sharing, who would laugh and then sigh, and then reply, with smiling eyes, when his son says he wants to spend his life 'doing what dad does.'" So God made a farmer.

His full delivery of those remarks against a backdrop of images honoring farmers:

And the Ram Trucks ad:

The same day The New York Times published a big take-out on growing questions around whether Obama actually shot skeet, the White House released an August photo of the president shooting clay targets on the range at Camp David.

The photo was released with mocking Twitter commentary by one current and one former White House senior adviser, both of whom sounded resigned almost to the idea that release of the photo will inflame rather than stanch the conspiracy theories that have already sprung up around the Obama's remark in a New Republic interview that "up at Camp David, we do skeet shooting all the time."

For all the "skeeters": POTUS shoots clay targets on the range at Camp David on Aug. 4, 2012. bit.ly/WlDMYG

-- Dan Pfeiffer (@pfeiffer44) February 2, 2013

Attn skeet birthers. Make our day - let the photoshop conspiracies begin! m.flickr.com/photos/whiteho...

-- David Plouffe (@davidplouffe) February 2, 2013

From The Warriors to Wall Street and No Wave to new money, the film-buff mayor oversaw a city transformed.

Ed Koch's New York is the New York City of my youth. I arrived in Manhattan from Southern Mexico in 1978, his first year at City Hall, and ping-ponged between that central borough and other parts of the country until my family finally resettled full-time in the city in 1988. You can read about the city Koch inherited and tried to bully into shape in an array of wonderfully detailed obituaries on the occasion of his passing. But his New York belonged to millions of others, too, and it's worth seeing also how the people of the city that never sleeps saw it and sought to represent it themselves during his three terms in office. One way to do that is to look at the movies by and about New Yorkers made when he was mayor, something the cinemaphile Koch -- a onetime Atlantic movie reviewer -- might have appreciated.

"New Yorkers were particularly proud of Mayor Koch because he was so proud of New York. Every atom in his body lived, breathed, spoke, and exuded the city. He helped save the city and, perhaps most important of all, gave it confidence when it was beginning to doubt itself, which helped pave the way for the growth and prosperity we're still experiencing today," Senator Chuck Schumer said in a statement Friday. "Every New Yorker will miss Ed Koch, and his towering presence."

Well, probably not every New Yorker. But there's no question that the narrative arc of the city was one of transformation under Mayor Koch, and that that arc is reflected in the cinema of his day. The great themes of movies about New York in the Koch era were power and the underground, art and finance, poverty and the new prosperity.

The New York of the 1970s that Koch sought to manage after his 1977 victory is the subject of some extraordinary and extraordinarily weird films, all gritty as the city itself in the era of bankruptcy, racial strife, and economic decline. If you want to know why he was hailed, you need to know what the city looked like before him. It is the subject and the backdrop of all these films -- fictions, to be sure, but not fantasies -- in which crime and corruption and the breakdown of the social order are all on display.

* 1972: Across 110th Street, a thriller about a corrupt cop and his honest deputy in drug-infested Harlem, starring a young Yaphet Kotto. Shocking to a contemporary viewer for its casual racism, the film is an of-its-era sketch of a neighborhood and its myths, which were revisited in 2008 in American Gangster.
* 1973: Serpico -- one of the great Al Pacino films, about whistle-blowing cop Frank Serpico.
* 1974: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, about a hostage crisis aboard a New York City subway train hijacked by four madmen.
* 1975: Dog Day Afternoon, another Al Pacino classic, about a failed bank heist and how a stand-off between the would-be robber and the police turned into a media sensation.
* 1976: Taxi Driver, featuring Robert DeNiro as a vigilante cab driver disgusted by crime and sleaze and a star turn by a very young Jodie Foster.

New York being New York, its fictions took many forms, some of them more experimental and less commercial than others. The best recent film I saw on the city in this period was the documentary Blank City, about No Wave film and the Cinema of Transgression in the East Village and Tribeca in the late 1970s and early 1980s -- the front-end of the Koch era. The trailer gives you a sense of the urban backdrop of the day, as well as some marvelous images of Blondie before she was a singer. It's very much worth seeing:

Koch's first term also saw The Warriors (1979), a fantasia about a gang from Coney Island trying to make it home from the Bronx after a gangland convention went awry and the rest of the city's thugs -- and police -- went on a manhunt for them.

The famous "come out to play-aay" fight scene set-up gives perhaps a better sense of the film than its own historic trailer.

Uptown, the same year, we got Woody Allen's more genteel Manhattan, with Diane Keaton. From the voice-over in the trailer: "Chapter One: He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion. No, make that, he, he romanticized it all out of proportion. (Better.) ....Let me start this over. Chapter One: He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat. (I love this.) New York was his town, and it always would be."

But the fears of the 1970s didn't dissipate easily, leading to 1981's Escape from New York, a dystopian fantasy about what the city would be like in 1997 -- "the high adventure of the future" imagined New York as a maximum security prison surrounded by mined bridges. In reality, it was the year Giuliani was re-elected to office, defeating Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger.

By 1984, the public image of the New York City was coming around, leading to films centered around dreams of making it in the city, such as The Pope of Greenwich Village:

But the city repaired itself unevenly. Across town we had 1984's Alphabet City -- which had a darker, 1970s feel.

Toward the end of Reagan's second term, 1987's Wall Street examined the pathologies of the new money culture through the character of Gordon Gekko, who famously said, "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good."

Based on brat pack writer Jay McInerney's 1984 novel of the same name, Bright Lights, Big City took a look at young love -- and loss -- in the city in 1988:

Working Girl, with Melanie Griffith, Harrison Ford, Sigourney Weaver, and about a million giant shoulderpads and pussy-bow blouses, in 1988 looked at a new kind of female character in town:

And brat pack writer Tama Janowitz saw her 1986 collection of short stories Slaves of New York adapted into an 1989 Hollywood tale of love, art and real estate in the East Village and Lower East Side. (Apparently bed bugs have replaced fleas since then, but New Yorkers have always been at war with the vermin.)

The East Village bohemia of Slaves of New York is a world better represented in Maripol's Downtown 81 (you can watch the whole thing on YouTube), starring a 19-year-old Jean Michel Basquiat, which was only recently released despite being filmed decades ago. It's very documentary about the scene, even if only loosely organized about a narrative.

The Bonfire of the Vanities was very much a part of the story of Koch's New York and the conflict between new money and settled-in decline, though released in 1990:

The opening shot is celebrated for being an amazing tracking shot, but it's also notable to a contemporary viewer for its extravagant celebration of a writer as a personality -- something which now seems as antique as the mutton-sleeve arms on those '80s dresses.

Metropolitan, released in 1990 about the fading world of Upper East Side debutantes, was also part of Ed Koch's New York. I know because one of the big dinner scenes was filmed in City Hall after hours, I'm pretty sure in the late fall or winter of 1989. (I was assistant wardrobe mistress on the film and recently discovered in my archives a giant stack of black and white photos of that night's scenes, at any rate. No idea why I have them -- I suspect they were unused promotional stills.)

But perhaps the last word should go to the mayor. He died on the same day a documentary of his life is set to open in New York. Titled, simply, Koch, Neil Barsky's documentary is something I now can't wait to see.

Update: Obviously, this is not an exhaustive list, so please do add your own favorites and recommendations in the comments.

Sometimes art and life collide in ways that make your head spin, as in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's tweeting of the final episode of 30 Rock, in which she guest-starred Thursday night.

Jack Donaghy is an economic war criminal. #30Rock twitter.com/NancyPelosi/st...

— Nancy Pelosi (@NancyPelosi) February 1, 2013

"I would do almost anything Tina Fey asks me to do," Pelosi told The Washington Post of her star-turn, which was filmed in early December.

Decades after the left and Democrats went through wrenching debates about language and respect, the Republican Party is struggling to rein in its sharper tongues.

In 2004, William S. Lind of the Free Congress Foundation wrote a short intellectual history of the term "politically correct" that well encapsulates the long-standing conservative defense of speech -- and ideas -- that run contrary to those espoused by the new social movements that have been transforming America since the 1960s.

"[W]hat happens today to Americans who suggest that there are differences among ethnic groups, or that the traditional social roles of men and women reflect their different natures, or that homosexuality is morally wrong?" he asked. "If they are public figures, they must grovel in the dirt in endless, canting apologies...What was their crime? Contradicting America's new state ideology of 'Political Correctness.'"

Or as Geoffrey Hughes put it in his 2009 book Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture, "Political correctness inculcates a sense of obligation or conformity in areas which should be (or are) matters of choice."

But now the decades-long conservative opposition to political correctness is finally breaking down. In the wake of Mitt Romney's solid defeat by Barack Obama, the Republican Party has been forced into a series of wrenching internal debates about how to appeal to a wider array of voters, especially the women and minorities who elevated the president to a second term. It's an effort being led by some of the party's own most prominent minority voices, as well as some of its more urbane strategists, with the goal of reining in the most offensive GOP speakers and squashing their provoking uses of language.

The latest instance of intra-party pushback came from Nevada Republican Party on Thursday, which warned in a statement of principles and strategy: "All are entitled to their opinions, but today's priorities not those of the past must prevail if the Republican Party is to regain the trust of Nevada's voters. As Congressman Mark Amodei (and Dr. Einstein) noted, 'insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.' We must change if we are to survive."

In particular, the party noted: "The GOP has increasingly found itself in positions that do not meet the demographic realities of the State's electorate. These positions also conflict with our party's historic commitment to civil rights. To that end, Republicans must become more inclusive, reflecting our desire to secure a better life for all Americans, and equally important, for our children."

The net result: "We support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants." No longer is the conversation about "illegal immigrants," as the Las Vegas Review-Journal calls them -- but about "undocumented" ones. As with Lind's essay, the connection is clear -- language and policy are inextricably bound together, for the use of language describes not just the subject of speech but the stance of the speaker toward the subject. And both those are bound up with the demographic changes the Democratic Party has been absorbing since the 1980s.

The Hispanic Leadership Network urged attentiveness to language in the immigration debate in a memo released earlier in the week, as well. Those engaged in the debate must be more cautious with their buzzwords, they warned. "Do use 'undocumented immigrant' when referring to those here without documentation," they said. "Don't use the word 'illegals' or 'aliens.' Don't use the term 'anchor baby.'"

Further, the group said, it would be wise for Republicans to avoid "phrases like 'send them all back', 'electric fence', 'build a wall along the entire border'."

Earlier in January, Politico ran a piece after Georgia Rep. Phil Gingrey sought to sympathetically interpret what he thought failed Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin had been saying about "legitimate rape." Their headline: "GOP looks for ways to stop the rape comments."

"This is actually pretty simple. If you're about to talk about rape as anything other than a brutal and horrible crime, stop," former Romney senior adviser Kevin Madden told the paper.

That followed on the heels of Bobby Jindal's remarks in November. "It is no secret we had a number of Republicans damage our brand this year with offensive, bizarre comments -- enough of that," the Louisiana governor said, also to Politico. "It's not going to be the last time anyone says something stupid within our party, but it can't be tolerated within our party. We've also had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism. We need to stop being simplistic, we need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters."

Republicans needed to "stop being the stupid party," he warned, echoing the exact phrase used by MSNBC host and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough over the summer. "I'm just tired of the Republican Party being the 'Stupid Party!'" Scarborough had said, "Stupid people saying stupid things and scaring off independent voters and swing voters!"

Republicans are quite familiar with tweaking their language to sell conservative policies by making them appear more palatable, and inventing new terms to oppose Democratic ones by heightening the contradictions (think "death tax" or "death panels").

But the new voices of Republican linguistic caution are as much about not alienating voters as about selling anything fresh, policywise. Anyone who went through the PC wars of the 1980s or 1990s in the academy, or followed them from a distance, will recognize the dynamic. In the end, the demand for dignity always wins out. It's just a matter of how long it takes people to realize that speaking in way that's respectful of difference makes it easier for people to hear what the speaker has to say on other matters.

A group founded in 1998 to promote women in politics and help one win the presidency quietly folds, citing the fundraising environment.

Updated 1:10 p.m. "We are sorry to inform you that due to the challenging economic climate The White House Project has had to close its doors," the message on the White House Project website read. And with that, a group that since 1998 has been a prominent voice on behalf of the goal of putting a woman in highest office in the land, as well as many of the lower ones, came to a quiet end on Monday.

"What happened is what's happening around other women's organizations and and other nonprofits.... The math doesn't work after a while," explained White House Project founder Marie Wilson, who gave up the presidency of her group two years ago and is currently working on a book project about "how we need to shift our structures and strategies to keep up with the times."

"I didn't exactly expect to start with my own," she observed. During its 14 years, the group changed how other organizations did business, how women in politics were represented in the popular culture and media, and the number of women who got trained in how to run for office, she said. "We did launch a conversation about the presidency that was unheard of," she added.

"[O]ur work will continue as it transitions to other organizations," the group's outgoing president, Tiffany Dufu, said in an online statement pointing to the Levo League and noting that "Vote Run Lead is being launched as a new organization to continue the political leadership training" previously provided by the White House Project.

The Levo League is a "startup designed to elevate young women in the workforce by providing the career resources needed to achieve personal and professional success," mainly focused on Gen Y women and those just starting their careers. Vote Run Lead describes itself as "the country's largest nonpartisan civic and political training program," and worked in close partnership with the White House Project for the past decade to train women considering in pursuing political careers.

This city is full of flies. Sometimes Obama can knock one off with his bare hands. Sometimes a fly wins.

Remember that time President Obama swatted a fly with his bare hand during an interview with CNBC at the White House and everyone called him a fly ninja?

Well, today the flies had their revenge during presidential remarks at the White House, when one, uh, flew around his head and for a brief, glorious moment -- captured, above, by Reuters photographer Larry Downing -- landed smack in the middle of the presidential forehead.

"This guy is bothering me here," the president said, swatting at the creature.

Despite progress, the circumstances that gave rise to the rebellion that began the contemporary gay rights movement haven't changed as much as we might think.

When President Obama briefly mentioned Stonewall during his Inaugural address, it prompted a lot of chatter about of the Stonewall riot and his historic adoption of the gay rights cause as his own.

But what happened at the Stonewall Inn, really? New York papers tend to call it the Stonewall uprising, not the Stonewall riot, because it played out as six days of skirmishes between young gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals and the New York Police Department in the wake of a police raid of the Christopher Street bar in Manhattan's West Village. The raid came amid a broader police crackdown on gay bars for operating without N. Y. State Liquor Authority licenses, which was something they did only because the SLA refused to grant bars that served gays licenses, forcing them to operate as illegal saloons. Into that void stepped opportunists and Mafia affiliates, who ran the unlicensed establishments and reputedly had deals with the police to stay in business. But on the night of June 27, 1969, a police raid on the Stonewall involving the arrests of 13 people inside the bar met unexpected resistance when a crowd gathered and one of those arrested, a woman, cried out to the assembled bystanders as she was shoved into a paddy wagon, "Why don't you guys do something!"

The conflict over the next six days played out as a very gay variant of a classic New York street rebellion. It would see: fire hoses turned on people in the street, thrown barricades, gay cheerleaders chanting bawdy variants of New York City schoolgirl songs, Rockette-style kick lines in front of the police, the throwing of a firebomb into the bar, a police officer throwing his gun at the mob, cries of "occupy -- take over, take over," "Fag power," "Liberate the bar!", and "We're the pink panthers!", smashed windows, uprooted parking meters, thrown pennies, frightened policemen, angry policemen, arrested mafiosi, thrown cobblestones, thrown bottles, the singing of "We Shall Overcome" in high camp fashion, and a drag queen hitting a police officer on the head with her purse.

The New York Post reported on June 28, 1969, that hundreds outside the bar had been observed chanting "Gay Power" and "We Want Freedom."

David Carter, a historian and author of Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution has compiled "An Analytical Collation of Accounts and Documents Recorded in the Year 1969 Concerning the Stonewall Riots," from which the above anecdotes are drawn.

Also included in the document roundup is this account by Dick Leitsch, then the executive director of the Mattachine Society of New York, the first gay group to ever hold a picket in the city in the early 1960s. He was also the first gay journalist to describe what happened at Stonewall, dropping his packing for a planned trip to London to spend time on the scene.

Coming on the heels of the raids of the Snake Pit and the Sewer, and the closing of the Checkerboard, the Tele-Star and other clubs, the Stonewall raid looked to many like part of an effort to close all gay bars and clubs in the Village. It may be true that the Checkerboard and Tele-Star died without police assistance. (It is said that the woman who managed the Checkerboard came in one night, ordered all the customers out of the place, cleaned out the cash register and called the police to get rid of those customers who stayed around.) It is very likely that the Sewer and the Snake Pit were raided because they had no licenses, as the police said.

But how are people in the street and the customers of the places to know that? The police don't bother to explain or send press releases to the papers (and when they do, the papers make it seem that the bar was raided because it was gay.)...

Since 1965 the homosexual community of New York has been treated quite well by the City Administration and the police have either reformed or been kept in line by Lindsay and Leary....

Now we've walked in the open and know how pleasant it is to have self-respect and to be treated as citizens and human beings.

...We want to stay in the sunlight from now on. Efforts to force us back in the closet could be disastrous for all concerned.

The above, while a true evaluation of the situation does not explain why the raid on the Stonewall caused such a strong reaction. Why the Stonewall, and not the Sewer or the Snake Pit? The answer lies, we believe, in the unique nature of the Stonewall. This club was more than a dance bar, more than just a gay gathering place. It catered largely to a group of people who are not welcome in, or cannot afford, other places of homosexual social gathering.

The "drags" and the "queens", two groups which would find a chilly reception or a barred door at most of the other gay bars and clubs, formed the "regulars" at the Stonewall. To a large extent, the club was for them.... Apart from the Goldbug and the One Two Three, "drags" and "queens" had no place but the Stonewall....

Another group was even more dependent on the Stonewall: the very young homosexuals and those with no other homes. You've got to be 18 to buy a drink in a bar, and gay life revolved around bars. Where do you go if you are 17 or 16 and gay? The "legitimate" bars won't let you in the place, and gay restaurants and the streets aren't very sociable.

Then too, there are hundreds of young homosexuals in New York who literally have no home. Most of them are between 16 and 25, and came here from other places without jobs, money or contacts. Many of them are running away from unhappy homes (one boy told us, "My father called me 'cocksucker so many times, I thought it was my name."). Another said his parents fought so much over which of them "made" him a homosexual that he left so they could learn to live together.

Some got thrown out of school or the service for being gay and couldn't face going home. Some were even thrown out of their homes with only the clothes on their backs by ignorant, intolerant parents who'd rather see their kid dead than homosexual.

They came to New York with the clothes on their backs. Some of them hustled, or had skills enough to get a job. Others weren't attractive enough to hustle, and didn't manage to fall in with people who could help them. Some of them, giddy at the openness of gay life in New York, got caught up in it and some are on pills and drugs. Some are still wearing the clothes in which they came here a year or more ago.

Jobless and without skills--without decent clothes to wear to a job interview--they live in the streets, panhandling or shoplifting for the price of admission to the Stonewall. That was the one advantage to the place--for $3.00 admission, one could stay inside, out of the winter's cold or the summer heat, all night long. Not only was the Stonewall better climatically, but it also saved the kids from spending the night in a doorway or from getting arrested as vagrants.

Three dollars isn't too hard to get panhandling, and nobody hustled drinks in the Stonewall. Once the admission price was paid, one could drink or not, as he chose. The Stonewall became "home" to these kids. When it was raided, they fought for it. That, and the fact that they had nothing to lose other than the most tolerant and broadminded gay place in town, explains why the Stonewall riots were begun, led and spearheaded by "queens".

In short, in this account, the Stonewall operated as a sort of de facto community center for gay youth rendered homeless by familial and institutional rejection, who had taken refuge in New York City in hopes of finding a place where they could be in the world. This continues, decades later, to be a major problem, according to a study by the Williams Institute, which found in 2012 that about 40 percent of clients served by 354 youth service agencies were gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, and that the top reasons they were homeless were that they ran away in the face of family rejection or were kicked out by parents who could not accept their sexual orientation or gender identities.

As Obama's comments showed, there's been a lot of progress on the acceptance of sexual minorities since the Stonewall era. But there's still a long way to go until the background of ill-treatment of young LGBT people that helped give rise to the Stonewall rebellion ceases to be a problem.

A grayer, grimmer, more experienced Obama kicks off his second term by bringing back the Hope.

Just hours before a group of well-heeled Obama supporters with silver tickets trooped across the spot, a crew from the Masonry Division of the Architect of the Capitol was wiggling a loose paver back even with grade above the stairs of the West Front of the building.

Down below, a skein of wires flowed around the scaffolding that held aloft the still and video cameras of the visual press; on the other side of the door at the bottom of the construction was the platform area for the seated press, spouses of members of Congress, staffers and honored guests. Among them: a group of aged Tuskegee airmen, snug under khaki blankets in their wheelchairs, wearing the kind of glasses I've seen on my dad and come to think of as Veteran's Administration dispensary-style.

Though I arrived in D.C. in Clinton's first term, this was the first Inauguration I've attended. I'll have more to say later about the speeches -- not only the first time a president has used the word "gay" in an inaugural address, but likely the first time the word "namaste" was spoken from the inaugural stage (by poet Richard Blanco).

But first a word about the ceremony itself.

Television makes everything look more glamorous. It is a trick of the light.

There's a lot of talk on a day like today of the pomp and ceremony of state. But there was something charmingly plain about the inaugural ceremony itself. The fanciest thing about it was the heavy paper stock for the tickets (for those who had tickets), with their high-tech security hologram, and the enormously complex identifications badges required for Capitol access. (To get one, you had to go to the Government Printing Office for a fingerprint scan, then sit there until the F.B.I. ran your prints through their databases back in West Virginia, clearing the agent in Washington to sign off on your credentialing form.) The security perimeters that have turned downtown Washington, D.C., into a semblance of Tampa or Charlotte during the national political conventions may be complicated affairs to staff and build, but the American security state when it descends upon a town also has all the majesty of a T.S.A. screening station, perhaps in unconscious honor of our Puritan ancestors' rebellion against finery and design.

At the inauguration, those who had seats all sat in the same black plastic "Eventwares" chairs ("as low as $10.95" online). Many stood near the stage, as well as above it, and in standing-room only throngs that stretched back to the Washington Monument and beyond. They'd begun their day early, then stood or sat in the cold for hours (though the day began promisingly bright, the temperature dipped and the crowd started shivering by noon) to catch a direct or jumbotron glimpse of a ceremony that itself lasted less time than the wait for it. Cellphone signals crashed, and thousands of Twitpics and texts were doubtless left unsent.

Reporters compared notes about Inaugurations past -- that time it was 10 degrees colder, or that time it rained and the ground below the high-dollar donors turned to mud -- and complained of the challenges of finding a story on a day designed for, as one put it, "Savannah and Norah and Matt Lauer."

Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the ranking Republican on the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, gave the tradition affirmation of America's peaceful transfer of power. "How remarkable that this has survived for so long in such a complex country with so much power at stake -- this freedom to vote for our leaders and the restraint to respect the results," he said.

Power of a different sort was all around in the personalities near the stage, from former president Clinton to the Supreme Court justices and members of Congress to Cyndi Lauper and Eva Longoria. Beyonce, the internationally famous singer, belted out "The Star-Spangled Banner" that closed a ceremony that opened with an invocation by Myrlie Evers-Williams, whose life stands as testament to a different sort of power -- that of citizens.

Obama invoked the power of those citizens, and while it is usually an unoriginal political trope to do so, the fact that his election and re-election were so dependent on turnout by those less connected to the political system made his phrases seem more authentic. "You and I, as citizens, have the power to set this country's course," Obama said. "You and I, as citizens, have the obligation to shape the debates of our time -- not only with the votes we cast, but with the voices we lift in defense of our most ancient values and enduring ideals."

Most importantly, though, his speech signaled openly what's been clear for some time now -- Obama's second term will show him being a more progressive force than did his first, and will see him continue to press the kind of bolder (but also politically astute) cultural stances he began to advocate during the campaign with his support for gay marriage and undocumented youngsters.

The speech's key passage invoked the spirit of activism, social change and the unending fight for human dignity that each generation renews:

peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes:  tolerance and opportunity, human dignity and justice. 

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths -- that all of us are created equal -- is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.  (Applause.) It is now our generation's task to carry on what those pioneers began.  For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts.  (Applause.)  Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law  -- (applause) -- for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.  (Applause.)  Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote.  (Applause.)  Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity -- (applause) -- until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country.  (Applause.)   Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia, to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for and cherished and always safe from harm. 

 

That is our generation's task -- to make these words, these rights, these values of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness real for every American.

He may have mentioned the word only a few times, and without rhetorical flourish, but it was still clear: the grayer, grimmer, more experienced Obama of the second term wanted to kick it off by bringing back the Hope.

Legendary political journalist Richard Ben Cramer has passed away. In July 1992, at the age of 42, he sat down with Brian Lamb of C-SPAN for Booknotes to discuss how he wrote his then just-published masterwork, What It Takes: The Way to the White House.

Below, he discusses his method:

LAMB: How did you get a publisher to put out that size book?

CRAMER: The size of the book wasn't really a problem once you got them involved with the idea. It was my idea from the first to try to write a real human story about these guys and try to let people connect with them in a visceral way so that they felt with them and exulted with them and felt their tragedy and their triumph. By the time I started feeding manuscript into the publisher, everybody was on board and they really weren't too worried about the length. The hard part was in the beginning, trying to sell a book like this. As I'm sure your viewers know, most books are signed up and contracted for before they are written. In this case, I had to go to a publisher, Random House, and tell them, "Well, look, I don't have Chapter One yet and I don't have an outline for you. I can't tell you who the characters will be yet. I can't tell you what the story will be, but you just give me all this money and I'll see you in four or five years. Don't worry. It'll be great." So once you sell a book like that, after that convincing them about the length is just a walk in the park.

LAMB: This book costs $28 to buy if you don't buy it in a discount store.

CRAMER: That's right, although it is being discounted, a practice of which I approve.

LAMB: Is it true that you got a half million dollar advance?

CRAMER: I can't contractually tell you exactly what the advance is, but you're not far wrong.

LAMB: I read that you'd spent it all, too, over that six years.

CRAMER: Oh, yes. Well, you know how it is. If you're following candidates in a campaign, you get on their plane, and what they're generally doing is they're dividing the cost of that charter flight by the number of reporters they're carrying aboard. In effect, the press is buying them that campaign flight. This doesn't seem to matter when it's Kay Graham's money or Otis Chandler's money, but when it's cash out of your own pocket, you begin to feel it. So you could say, in the immortal words of Jerry Lee Lewis, "I spent the hell out of it."

LAMB: Are you happy with this book?

CRAMER: I am. I'm happy with the way it came out because I've been able to see in the few weeks that it's been out that people are connecting with it, and they're getting a fresh look at these guys. They're finding out that they really didn't know them as they thought they did and that they really hadn't seen them as human beings in the same way that they do now that they've read the book, so that's very pleasing to me.

....

LAMB: It's unfair to somebody who hasn't read this thing, why I would ask that question. Anybody who reads this book will have, I'm positive, the same reaction. How did you get the access?

CRAMER: You cannot overestimate my ignorance at the start of this process. I started out doing it as I thought Washington big-time political reporters do these kind of things -- calling up important people in Washington whom I had seen quoted in the papers or seen as talking heads on TV. I wanted to ask them about these candidates because I didn't really care that much about the campaign -- how did they win and how did they lose, etc. I really wanted to know these men, and I wanted to know what kind of life brought them to the point where they could be candidates. When I finally did force my way into a few of the offices of these important Washington figures and I started asking about the candidates, I found that they really didn't know these guys. They knew them in a kind of Washington way. They'd been in a couple of meetings with them or they'd been at a dinner party where this guy was the speaker or they had seen them on the floor of the House or Senate a few times, but they didn't know what made the guy tick. They didn't know why he was in politics. They didn't know what was driving him onward or what was the real reason that he was climbing to the top of the pyramid.

Eventually, after a period of months, I pretty much abandoned Washington. I went to the hometowns, and then I started talking to their schoolmates and their sisters and brothers and their mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and cousins and their first employers and their Cub Scout leaders and their teachers and their law school buddies and college roommates. By the time I got back to the candidates on the campaign trail, I wasn't asking them how many points did they need in Iowa. I was asking them about their Aunt Lucy or their Aunt Gladys. She said they never would wake up in the morning when they spent a summer with her. Now they start their campaign days at 5:30 a.m. What got into these guys? So I was talking to them about life, not politics, and that started us on a different relationship.

If you haven't read his book on the 1988 presidential campaign, here are two good entry points to his oeuvre:

* "What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?" -- Esquire, 1986

* "Can the Best Mayor Win?" -- Esquire, 1984