The first Obama-McCain debate is on Friday, 9.26, at 9 pm eastern — eight days hence. A foreign policy focus, I’m hearing, because the Obama team didn’t want to get into domestic-cultural stuff at a debate held in Mississippi. Twitter.com and current.com are trying to get everyone to post twitters during the debate. Current is promising to “broadcast as many of your debate tweets as possible right over Obama & McCain, in real time, on our live broadcast.”

“The McCain camp has decided that its candidate can’t win honorably, on the issues, so it has resorted to transparent and phony diversions,” writes Time‘s Joe Klein. The resultant lies “have ranged from the annoying to the sleazy, and the problem is in both degree and kind. His campaign has been a ceaseless assault on his opponent’s character and policies, featuring a consistent — and witting — disdain for the truth.
The McCain team’s “persistence in repeating demonstrably false charges is something new in presidential politics.
“Ever since [Obama’s Iraq-European tour], McCain’s campaign has been a series of snide and demeaning ads accompanied by the daily gush of untruths that have now been widely documented and exposed. The strategy is an obvious attempt to camouflage the current unpopularity of his Republican brand, the insubstantiality of his vice-presidential choice, and his agreement on most issues — especially economic matters — with an exceedingly unpopular President.
“The good news is that the vile times may be ending. The coming debates will decide this race, and it isn’t easy to tell lies when your opponent is standing right next to you. The Wall Street collapse demands a more sober campaign as well. But these dreadful weeks should not be forgotten.
“John McCain has raised serious questions about whether he has the character to lead the nation. He has defaced his beloved military code of honor. He has run a dirty campaign.”

At Ted.com, psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains “the five moral values that form the basis of our political choices, whether we’re left, right or center. In this eye-opening talk, he pinpoints the moral values that liberals and conservatives tend to honor most.”
Boiled down, Haidt’s ultimate assessment — i.e., liberals and conservatives balance each other out and that we should try and respect this scheme — pushes aside the fact that most conservatives, to go by almost all appearances and allegiances, are heathens in the sense that many if not most of them are against conserving and preserving the sanctity of the planet earth. And that this can’t be tolerated because the survival of the planet is on a clock.
We can’t indulge ourselves to the hilt and then…whatever, let our grandchildren get around to finally preserving the planet 30 or 50 years from now. Procrastination is no longer an option. The tipping point is here and now.
The heavily moneyed conservatives I’ve observed, considered and listened to believe in dominion over the earth — in swaggering around in Hummers and shooting wolves from helicopters and doing what they want whatever and whenever, and that means they need to ignore and deny the irrefutable facts that tell us global warming is real and growing. They don’t believe in nurturing what we have — they stand for unbridled consumption and satisfying every lavish whim and appetite because it’s their right because they have the economic power, and who in this country is going to tell them different?
I think abortion is vile, and that traditional moral values must be respected at all times as long as everybody understands what Catholic priests seem to be about these days and as long as nobody frowns at the idea of sex on the first date. But global warming has changed everything. Which is why the selfishness that conservatives are so good at needs to be exterminated. The Cheneys of the world have to be pushed over a cliff.

Things are shifting in Obama’s favor, poll-wise. As MSNBC’s “First Read” noted this morning, “After the news of the crisis on Wall Street, McCain’s ‘the fundamentals of our economy are strong’ stumble on Monday, the slip-ups yesterday by McCain’s two biggest economic surrogates and four days of sustained TV ad and email blasts by the Obama campaign and the DNC, the political worm seems to have turned a tad since the Palin bounce.”
And yet the results of recent battleground polls are mixed, and the fivethirtyeight.com state-by-state count is favoring McCain.
“A tight race?,” fivethirtyeight’s Nate Silver wrote this morning. “It certainly is a tight race, and has been all year. But this, of course, is not really the lead story. The story is that there has been a rather dramatic shift in the national polling toward Barack Obama in the past 2-4 days, coinciding with the Wall Street financial crisis.
“Some pundits will love this, since it gives them something fresh to talk about. But others, like those cynical beat writers in the Wrigley Field press box, will be annoyed, because it means that the the story they were telling us just a few days ago — that the Obama campaign was in trouble, that Sarah Palin was the greatest thing since sliced bread — has now been more or less invalidated.”

The weekend’s near-certain winner, according to Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason, will be Neil LaBute‘s Lakeview Terrace (Sony). Given the obviously sour and malignant vibe coming off this film, interest levels can probably be attributed to the drawing power of Samuel L. Jackson‘s attitude schtick.
What else could it be? What could this movie seem to bring to the table that anyone would want to savor?
In the view of N.Y. Press critic Armond White, Lakeview Terrace “is tiresome largely because Jackson’s Belligerent Black Man antics are so predictable. He’s dug a lowdown niche; and movie after movie he keeps shoveling crap over himself. It also raises the leprous itch of director Neil LaBute, whose own predictable shtick is to scratch at society’s sore spots. LaBute is not the credited screenwriter of Lakeview Terrace; yet it carries his stench.
“LaBute isn’t skilled enough to direct an action-thriller that evokes real-world politics. Unable to create tension, he just exacerbates our uneasy social pacts — a stunt that could only be tolerated in a nihilistic age. It’s important to clearly state that Jackson and LaBute’s cynical routines in Lakeview Terrace offend human decency, but I’m brushing their dirt off my shoulder.”

“Because no one has the right to deny another their life even though they disagree with it, because everyone has the right to live the life they so desire if it doesn’t harm another and because discrimination has no place in America, my vote will be for equality and against Proposition 8” — Brad Pitt in a statement explaining his $100,000 contribution to the campaign to defeat Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that would ban same-sex marriage.

Is this music for this lyric-free in this Coke Zero ad the basic track for the Quantum of Solace main-title song? More to the point, what’s the last hummable James Bond theme song anyone remembers? Nobody cares.

You think this is funny? Beverly Hills Chihuahua (Disney, 10.3), which I believe without benefit of hard data will be primarily be seen by McCain supporters and their families, is just around the corner, and it’s no joke.

Sunset Strip just west of Alta Loma — Wednesday, 9.18.08, 6:35 pm

Ditto and ditto — 8:15 pm

Time‘s Michael Grunwald wrote on Monday that “race is the elephant in the room of the 2008 campaign.” Which led CNN‘s Jack Cafferty to write the following day that “race is arguably the biggest issue in this election, and it’s one that nobody’s talking about. The differences between Barack Obama and John McCain couldn’t be more well-defined. Obama wants to change Washington. McCain is a part of Washington and a part of the Bush legacy. Yet the polls remain close. Doesn’t make sense…unless it’s race.”
Put these together with my “Soul of Ugly Whitey” item-and-subsequent discussion yesterday, which was initially inspired by Tim Wise‘s Your Nation on White Privilege 7.13 posting, and you have four people making the same point. Five if you add Gov. Kathleen Sebelius‘s reported remark yesterday about the Republians’s “racial code language,” i.e.: “Have any of you noticed that Barack Obama is part African-American?”
Wait…six if you count David Gergen‘s response to the McCain campaign’s “The One” ad.

“But it’s time to bring out the white man you’ve all been waiting for. This man is so white, he makes y’all look Mexican. (laughter) He spent five long years locked up in a POW camp, and returned a national hero. (applause) And fucked every white woman in America. (sustained applause) ‘Cause five years–that makes you horny. And women, they luhhv to fuck war heroes. Basically, if you were white and female in 1973, you were fucked by John McCain.
“And then he married a fine rich white girl whose daddy owned a beer company (laughter, applause) And he wants to be president? Sheeyitt, you already got money, beer and pussy! What the fuck you want with the presidency? Quit while you’re ahead! You’re 72 years old — just drink, fuck, and play golf, you dumb white motherfucker!” — from an six-day-old N.Y. Observer piece called “Black Comic Introduces McCain,” by Jonathan Bines.

“Just a few years ago, the coming attractions were a safe haven for cinematic prudes. But this year, R-rated trailers — known as ‘red bands’ on account of the red, “Restricted Audiences Only” warning that precedes them — have become omnipresent. According to the Motion Picture Association of America, nearly 30 restricted-audience trailers have been approved so far in 2008, already matching the number accepted between 2000 and 2006.

“In surveying the recent crop of restricted trailers, it’s apparent that the studios are still adjusting to the red-band universe: The aesthetics of the R-rated trailer remain up for debate. Which naughty bits should be thrown on the screen as an enticement, and which should be held in reserve for paying customers?” — from Josh Levin 9.17 Slate piece called “In A World Where YOu Can Smoke Weed in a Movie Trailer.”

I’ve been caught up in some issues today. Lots of research, lots of calls. I just wrote a piece about how it’s impossible to accurately assess the restored Godfather discs without a full-boat Blu-ray and 50″ high-def system, which I still don’t have…and then I hit the wrong button and lost the whole article. On top of which the software gremlins at Apple/iPhone came up with a iPhone update that I was stupid enough to download and try to install. The data stopped loading at the 85% mark and now the phone is unusable. I have no choice but to see a genius at the Grove Apple store at 4 pm — it’s unfixable at this end.

I was also going to get into Jonathan Demme‘s Rachel Getting Married, which I saw for the second time last night at the Arclight, but this is one of those rare days when I just don’t give a damn. I think I had an empty day sometime last year, and here we go with another. I don’t take weekends off, I don’t take nights off, I rarely do lunches…and this is how it goes once in a blue moon.