With the mainstream press focusing on Obama’s recent gains and McCain’s criticisms against him, you might want a dose of something different, like the Wall Street Journal interview that ran over the weekend with Ralph Nader.

I listened to Nader recently at a rally held for his 2008 bid and he sounded funny, smart, inspiring and determined as ever. Here’s an excerpt from the WSJ interview, in which he talks about Obama, corporate power and being called a ‘spoiler’:

“The Democrats,” Nader says in the interview, “hadn’t been challenged from my side of the political spectrum since Henry Wallace,” FDR’s vice-president, who ran for president in 1948 as the nominee of the Progressive Party. “They’re not used to third-party challenges, while the Republicans are challenged by the Libertarians all the time. So they still scapegoat the Green Party, instead of looking in the mirror and asking, ‘Why didn’t we landslide this bumbling governor from Texas?’ And that’s what they’ve been doing for eight years!

“Some of them even tried to ascribe Kerry’s loss in 2004 to me, and I say, ‘Wait a minute, Kerry lost by three million votes’ . . . And he lost Ohio without my help, because the Democrats sued us: they got us off the ballot in Ohio, as they did in other states.”

Nader on the difference between he and Barack Obama:

“I think the central issue in politics in this country is the domination of corporations over our government, and over our elections, and over so many things where commercial values used to be verboten . . . I mean, they’re commercializing childhood, they’re commercializing universities. What’s happened in the last 25 years is an overwhelming swarm of commercial supremacy, and he, Obama, has bought into that.”

The reporter points out Obama’s opposition to Nafta; “that he’s chastised the Big Three in Detroit for opposing higher CAFE standards”; “and that he emphasizes at every opportunity that he takes no money from lobbyists.”

Nader:

“You see, that’s all permissible populist rhetoric that the corporations understand and wink at. …

“Obama’s taking large money from the securities industry, the health insurance industry . . . I’ve gotten used to this ritual where the companies give Democrats this leeway, and say, ‘Well, Obama’s gotta say that stuff, but he’ll come around. There’s no way he’ll touch Nafta or touch the WTO.’”

For more on Nader, check out the excellent documentary “An Unreasonable Man.”

photo: Monica Gumm for the International Herald Tribune

Another distressing article on global warming. This time focusing on the creeping “Africanization” of southern Spain. In short, it’s turning into a desert.

“The battles of yesterday,” the reporter writes, “were fought over land, … Those of the present center on oil. But those of the future — a future made hotter and drier by climate change in much of the world — seem likely to focus on water…”

M. Night Shylamalan’s latest film, “The Happening,” is coming out soon [see the trailer].

“His career,” the Times writes in an article today, “illustrates one of the stubborn paradoxes of Hollywood: the film industry loves the myth of the auteur, the rugged individual filmmaker who plays by his own rules, until faced with the reality. Around the time that “The Sixth Sense” was released, this was a particularly potent idea, as studios tried to build brands around star directors like Quentin Tarantino and the Wachowski brothers (who made “The Matrix”), hoping their names would sell movies the way Hitchcock’s once did.”

The reporter follows that summation with a doozy: “But the studios also need to heed the brutal realities of the movie business.”

But aren’t the studios themselves “the brutal realities of the movie business”?

The article reminded me of Larry Mcurtry’s take on Hollywood from a few years ago in his review of “The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood” by Edward Jay Epstein.

Here’s an excerpt from “The Grand Acquisitors” in The New York Review of Books.

“Of more relevance to today’s Hollywood,” McMurtry writes, “are the legions who pursue what Mr. Epstein rather grandly calls “The Learning Imperative”:

Studios are finely tuned learning networks. Faced with a constant stream of reports on how relevant audiences in different markets are reacting to their films and other products, they analyze the various elements—including marketing, stars, and music—and, along this learning curve, adjust their subsequent decisions accordingly.

Which is to say that, like sorcerers of old, they read entrails, with mixed results of course. The cruel truth is that only the public knows what it loves, and then not until it sees it. Giant, hugely expensive flops continue to thud into the theaters season after season; why they were made no man can explain.”

Jim Webb, Democratic VP candidate?

His tendency to withhold a handshake (see below) leaves me wondering, but it’s hard to think of a better running mate for Barack Obama to pick, should he end up with the nomination. I like the guy simply for taking down George Allen in my former home state.

Elizabeth Drew makes a terrific case for his VP cred in this article.

“The sense in Washington that [Webb] was—well—different,” Drew writes, “was enhanced by his famous first encounter with President Bush after [Webb's] election, when at a November White House reception for newly elected members of Congress, Webb refused to shake Bush’s hand. Bush then sought Webb out and asked him about his son, who was serving in Iraq, “How’s your boy?” and Webb replied, “I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President.” “That isn’t what I asked,” Bush snapped. “How’s your boy?” Webb responded, “That’s between me and my son, Mr. President.”

Cartoon by Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Of course it is Frank Rich of the NY Times who ends the week with the best perspective on Scott McClellan’s new book about being the White House stooge:

“There is no news in his book,” Rich writes, “hardly the first to charge that the White House used propaganda to sell its war and that the so-called liberal media were “complicit enablers” of the con job. The blowback by the last Bush defenders is also déjà vu. The claims that Mr. McClellan was “disgruntled,” “out of the loop,” two-faced, and a “sad” head case are identical to those leveled by Bush operatives (including Mr. McClellan) at past administration deserters like Paul O’Neill, Richard Clarke, John DiIulio and Matthew Dowd.

“So why the fuss?”

The answer is here.

Doesn’t it look awfully familiar?

A quick Google search brought up another blogger post from about a week ago, and more information about the Clinton/Obama poster connection.

For more on the Hillaryites cries for fairness in Florida and Michigan, see this week-old New Yorker article. The point, that Clinton accepted the exclusion of Florida and Michigan many months ago when she thought herself the inevitable nominee, is apparantly lost on some very uninformed and/or dense people.