Stateside With Rosalea: Rosalea's Mailbag

Seeing as how you can't turn on the TV or pick up a paper or go to a news website without seeing yet more reasons for genetically engineering the xy chromosome out of existence, I'm left with the radio and my most constant penpal, the Direct Marketing Association, as a source of entertainment.

The radio, as always, is a lot of fun, especially the advertising. In what can only be described as a preemptive strike at undermining the doomsayers, a cellphone company ran an elaborate ad about how a bloke on the other side of the Sierra Nevada got sick of California so he got all his mates around and they pushed California out to sea. But still got free calls!

This was in the weeks leading up to a TV miniseries called 10.5, which was about a West Coast earthquake that... well, I don't really know what it did, because I didn't watch. It all sounded too much like wishful thinking on the part of the current administration.

Then there's Martha Stewart, who has been writing to me, the dear thing, saying she's living in her car. Not only that but she'd like to send me a gift of some nice striped outfit that she's fond of wearing. Displaying a terrible prescience, methinks, for things in the news lately, this little number features an adjustable neck strap. She's going a bit far, though, when she continues "so it works for every member of your family". We're not all Baghdad Hillbillies, Martha!

Oops. I've misread her little note. She actually says "I often feel like I live in my car." So perhaps she doesn't really. Although she does say "I have more than one home, and really more than one job." I suppose the second job is the one down at the penitentiary making striped pinnies with adjustable neck straps.

Ever the cagey businesswoman, her offer of "two free gifts enclosed" turns out to be two recipes from the cookbook she's peddling. Since both recipes are printed on one sheet of paper, I don't quite see how they qualify as two gifts, but then I'm not a multimillionaire so I have a more traditional view of numbers.

And what do you know if ACT hasn't started writing to me! No, they don't want me to enter their primary, because it's not that ACT - the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers. This one is America Coming Together, one of those dreaded political action committees that raise millions of dollars without being authorized by any candidate's committee.

In fact, their mailout does not mention even one candidate by name. The cover letter is written by Ellen R. Malcolm, who helped found Emily's List, the PAC that spent $14.7 million supporting pro-choice female candidates in 1999-2000, second only to the National Rifle Association's $16.8 million supporting pro-gun candidates.

I lie. The ACT material repeatedly refers to one candidate - and that's GWB. But nowhere - absolutely nowhere - in Malcolm's cover letter is the word "Democrat" used, and in the enclosed leaflet "A Bold Action Plan Essential to Victory in 2004" the only appearance of the word is twice in relation to Emily's List, and the two times in the following two sentences:

"As the 2004 elections approach, Democrats have a firm grasp on 168 electoral votes. They're in the states that the Democratic candidate is almost guaranteed to win." That paragraph goes on to say that Bush seems to have 190 electoral votes sewn up, which leaves the 17 states with 180 electoral votes as the competitive battleground in this election.

Like I've said before, a party that can only define itself in terms of its opponent and can't even speak its own name is not a party that's going to win anything any time soon. And as if that's not enough, they haven't learned a damned thing from the Howard Dean losses in the Midwest and threaten to have their canvassers go door-to-door "with hand-held computer devices, allowing them to keep a detailed record of every contact and to help shape the content of future communications with a voter based upon what that voter has told us he cares about the most."

Big Grassroots Brother aside, Ms. Malcolm, what's with the "*he* cares about the most"?

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