Ken Ficara

The Lone Star Iconoclast, a weekly based in Crawford, Texas, has endorsed John Kerry for president in a scathing editorial, concluding, “The Iconoclast urges Texans not to rate the candidate by his hometown or even his political party, but instead by where he intends to take the country.”

It’s garnered lots of attention for the paper, but as San Antonio Express columnist Robert Rivard points out,,

Advertisers are disappearing like flushed quail, and the owner of the Crawford Coffee Station, where the president likes to order the cheeseburger, won’t allow Smith to fill his newspaper rack. …

The Iconoclast could very well be the first and only newspaper in U.S. history to fold in the wake of protests over its presidential endorsement. Given the weekly’s short life — it was founded in 2000 — the Iconoclast might be the state’s first one-term newspaper. Come to think of it, the start-up might be the only newspaper ever to spurn a hometown candidate in favor of the challenger.

This morning pointed me to a Daily News story in which Mayor Bloomberg described my birthplace, Staten Island, as “more real America, in many senses, than any other part of this city.” Staten Island was a haven for Tories during the Revolutionary War and has not improved its outlook since. The Island votes consistently Republican in national elections and most Democratic pols in the borough run on the Conservative and Right-To-Life party lines as well. And growing up there in the 1960s and 70s, I lived in a segregated neighborhood and went to segregated schools until I escaped to Brooklyn when I went to college.

This, apparently, is the “real America” to the Mayor, despite the Island’s continual bleats about seceding from New York City. (Apparently, some Islanders think their property taxes are too low and their police and fire services too professional.)

And now Bloomberg is parading around in a cowboy hat celebrating his capture of the Country Music Awards from Nashville. Now, I play a lot of (traditional) country music, and it’s tremendously popular in the city right now, but I think Nashville probably has more of a claim to that music than New York City does. And I think a billionaire who lives on the Upper East Side has no business in a Stetson.

When are Bloomberg and Giuliani going to figure out that no matter how much ludicrous posturing they do, and no matter how many boots they lick in the national Repugnant party, they’ll never get over being ethnically, religiously and politically at odds with the red-meat Christian Taliban types who run the GOP nowadays?

Garrison Keillor has a incendiary column at In These Times. It’s an excerpt from his new book:

Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the town and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and mark up the constitution on behalf of intolerance and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them.

I take issue with his idealization of the Republican Party in the 1950s (American conservativism was hardly benign in those days) but it’s a great piece.