America's royal family, the Kennedys. But Caroline Kennedy for the Senate? First we had to put off with Hillary Clinton, the nouveau riche of politics, suddenly becoming senator in the nation's second most populous state.

The wife of a president landed her magic carpet and Vuitton bags in a fancy suburb north of the city and was practically appointed to the Senate — when Rudy Giuliani dropped out, she got to face a candidate who was so weak that you've already forgotten his name.

Sitting somewhat obediently in our civics classes, we were told that people invented this country, at least in part, because they were tired of monarchies. Doesn't look as if we're that tired of kings and queens and princesses.

So now we're going to replace Hillary Clinton with Caroline Kennedy? And we're not even going to elect Kennedy; we're going to appoint her? At least Hillary Clinton went through the electoral process. However, don't tell me about Hillary's brains and savvy. She's been a mediocre senator, far less skilled at both arm-twisting and hard-won-consensus politics than the likes of Chuck Schumer, Chuck Hegel, and Chuck Grassley or battle-worthy non-Chucks like Dick Lugar, Barbara Boxer, Bob Dole (not his wife, Libby), even that schmuck Joe Lieberman — you name 'em.

Excepting a few celeb pols like Ted Kennedy (who's been busy and serious for three decades since Chappaquidick drowned his chances for the presidency), look past the Clintons and Kennedys and you'll see a better breed of American political family entering the Senate, a family whose bent comes closer to "public service" and "common good" than practically all others. (Notwithstanding Jackie Kennedy Onassis's truly noble and lasting achievement: She used her celebrity to lead the successful fight to save wondrous Grand Central Station from destruction.)

You want a political family that deserves royal-like admiration without fawning? Try the Udalls, whom I wrote about yesterday. After Stew and Mo worked their asses off in the House and Interior Department, now we have their sons Mark and Tom, who traded on more than their last names during their climb up Capitol Hill to claim Senate seats next month.

Now don't turn the Udalls into celebrities. Read about your usual celebs — including the Kennedys and Clintons — worship them and envy them if you want, be amused and/or disgusted by them, but don't elect them or appoint them to run your lives because they're celebrities. Camelot? I'll take Spamalot — without Clay Aiken, thanks. No more American idols, please.

Other items on a (relatively) slow (so far) news day ...

NO PARTICULAR ORDER:

N.Y. Daily News: 'Ticketed while giving out gifts'

N.Y. Post: 'FIRETRUCK HIT HURTS 30'

N.Y. Daily News: 'Caroline Kennedy can lock in Senate seat by saying she'll run in 2010'

N.Y. Post: 'BARBIE'S FOR THE BIRDS'

Times (U.K.): 'Fed stuns the world with rate cut to "virtually zero"'

Wall Street Journal: 'Fairfield Group Forced to Confront Its Madoff Ties'

N.Y. Post: 'SICK WORLD OF "BABY HITLER": NAZI-NAMING PARENTS IN NJ'

N.Y. Daily News: 'N.Y. sounds off on iTax plans'

N.Y. Times: 'Bush Prepares Crisis Briefings to Aid Obama'

International Herald Tribune: 'Prison for nuke engineer who took software to Iran'

Reuters: 'Madoff fraud could burn early pullouts'

Reuters: 'Iraq shoe-thrower inspires Bush-bashing Web game'

AP: 'NY gov proposes tax on drinks, downloaded music'

N.Y. Times: 'Fixing Interior'

N.Y. Daily News: 'SEC: We blew it'

Chicago Sun-Times: 'Who's next for Obama's basketball dream team?'

N.Y. Times: 'Obama Team Has Forged Another Link With Clintons'

Washington Post: 'A Longer Race to Run'

The crusade against BrickArms's tiny terror toy is all the rage in the Brit tabloids. Naturally, one of Rupert Murdoch's papers, the Sun, has the best headline: "Osama bin Lego."

But no news outlet is as consistently droll as the Brit techie Register, which for this story blares:

The Register story adds:

Everything is "disgusting" to Shaffiq. Remember those Danish cartoons? "Disgusting," Shaffiq said in March 2007. Or The Jewel of Medina? "I am disgusted at the novel," Shaffiq said in November 2008.

Meanwhile, BrickArms, a family business in Redmond, Washington, is molding plastic and young minds. Check out Will Chapman's charming history of his small company.

If the presidential election next Tuesday results in a fairly close call, expect battalions of lawyers to sweep across the country to lob thousands of court challenges and counter-challenges — particularly if McCain is the loser.

Who has to show IDs? Who doesn't? What kind of IDs? Photo IDs?

How many of the newfangled vote-tally computers will crash? How many blue screens of death will pop up in red states?

How many white males will actually click "ENTER" for a black man?

How many Negroes will the GOP allow to vote?

How successful will the GOP be in assuring that long lines of would-be voters will be even longer so that some of them will give up in frustration because it's a workday and they have to get to their jobs (or find new ones) or go home to take care of their kids because the U.S. foolishly schedules its votes on weekdays instead of weekends, as many other supposedly less-democratic countries do?

How many challenges will there be to the unprecedented flood of mail-in votes in the nation's most populous state? See the Sacramento Bee's report this morning, "Flood of absentees may delay election night results":

How many mail-in votes will be tossed into dumpsters?

Reports of voter woes are already flooding in from all parts of the U.S. — including right here in the nation's most populous city ("VOTE CHAOS: MELTDOWN LOOMS AT CITY'S POLLS," New York Post).

The more confusion, the more opportunities for tricksters like Karl Rove and Hans von Spakovsky (and probably Dick Cheney, as he did in 2000) to do some more monkey-wrenching. They've set the stage by already complaining loudly about "voter fraud."

Don't dismiss that. Yes, Richard Daley's Democratic machine fixed elections years ago in Chicago, but these days top GOP officials are the experts on the subject of voter fraud.

Actually, the GOP was quite active in voter fraud back in the day. You don't even have to go back to the blatant abrogation of Southern blacks' voting rights half a century ago.

Before Arizona lawyer and Republican operative William Rehnquist became Chief Justice of the United States, he personally blocked blacks and Latinos from voting in South Phoenix. That was in 1964, the year of the historic Voting Rights Act, which was supposed to halt that sort of thing.

For details on Rehnquist's supreme insult to democracy, see "Just our Bill," a December 2000 column by Dennis Roddy of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Roddy's piece is a must-read every four years. Here's an excerpt:

You think the disputes in 2000 over chads in Florida were frustrating? Wait till you see the fights in '08 over results tallied by the shaky, largely untested computerized vote-tally machinery. And instead of infamous obstacles like the poll tax, we have a poisonous mix of mystifying, widely different voter-ID rules state-by-state, county-by-county to sort through.

Even if the presidential election isn't close, many of the Congressional contests will be, with powerful Republicans like Kentucky's Mitch McConnell in danger of being tossed down Capitol Hill — and lawyers trying to regurgitate them back up.

Is there a lawyer in the House? Oh, there will be plenty for that chamber's ousted incumbents.

The only hope for the GOP is to immediately pay off all our mortgages. Doubtful.

Meanwhile . . .

NO PARTICULAR ORDER:

Scotsman: 'How will US vote? Much of it has.'

Daily Star (Beirut): 'Public losing confidence in Afghanistan's future -- survey'
"Afghans are increasingly pessimistic about their country, with security, unemployment and high prices dominating concerns, according to an annual mood survey released Tuesday. The proportion of people who said they were more prosperous today than under the 1996-2001 Taliban government had also 'decreased significantly,' said the Asia Foundation poll."

AP: 'Authors, publishers settle suit against Google'

Global Network Initiative: 'Diverse Coalition Launches New Effort to Respond to Government Censorship and Threats to Privacy'

CircleID: 'The Global Network Initiative'

Dallas Morning News: 'Early voters report obstacles at polls'

Herald (Scotland): 'Financial crisis: Parents in Scotland struggling to pay bills'
"Almost three-quarters of parents are finding it harder to pay their bills than a year ago, a survey today revealed."

Herald (Scotland): 'Oil giant BP reveals massive 150 percent rise in profits'

ReliefWeb: 'Haiti: Tropical Storm Hanna, Gustav, Ike OCHA Situation Report No. 26'
"Urgent action is required to respond to the 'worst disaster in the last 100 years' to strike Haiti, said the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, John Holmes, warning that aid agencies remain far short of the millions they need to help the country recover from four hurricanes.
"Mr. Holmes described the situation in Gonaives as 'dramatic and grim' Water had receded from most of the city, but people still had to deal with large amounts of mud. The main streets had been cleared, but thousands of people were still in shelters, mainly schools. The conditions in those shelters were not good. People were returning to the city, but could not live in their houses."

The Age (Australia): 'Barack's a BMW, McCain's a Ford'
"If presidential candidate Barack Obama was a car he would be a BMW while John McCain would be a Ford, a survey of American voters has found.
"Vice-presidential hopeful Sarah Palin would be a Budweiser, while her opponent Joe Biden would be a Samuel Adams."

China Digital Times: 'Who Owns Tibet?'

Caijing (China): 'Advice for the Next U.S. President'

China Digital Times: 'Chinese Media Censorship'
"Ying Chan, director of Hong Kong University’s journalism program, presents a recently published collection of fifteen essays from some of China’s top journalists. The essays touch on many issues ranging from classic censorship to the rise of blogs."

Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, Mississippi): 'Details unclear on voter ID rules'

N.Y. Times: 'Consumers Feel the Next Crisis: It’s Credit Cards'

Washington Post: 'U.S. Markets Surge As Credit Starts to Thaw'

L.A. Times: 'Hollywood may not be recession-proof this time'

Washington Post: 'Accuracy Of Polls a Question In Itself'

L.A. Times: 'Iraq's blast walls become canvases'

N.Y. Daily News: 'Big meltdown in N.Y. pension funds'

N.Y. Review of Books: 'The Glories of Yiddish' (Harold Bloom)

Dawn (Pakistan): 'Islamabad and Kabul agree on contacts with militants'

Publishers Weekly: 'Authors, Publishers, Google Embrace Settlement'

After feasting on Wall Street's collapse, hedge hog John Paulson scurries to London for more.

The early worm kills the birds — excuse me, we're talking of the financial world, so the birds are actually vultures.

And the worm is New Yorker John Paulson (left), the hedge-fund manipulator so admired in his circles.

Not as well-known as he should be to the rest of us, Paulson has fortunately surfaced into the news.

Hedge hog or worm — like a Fox, we report, you decide.

He's a different animal to those who worship short-sellers. Paulson's so admired that after Alan Greenspan sold us short, Wall Street's Rasputin went to work for Paulson. As the Financial Times noted last January:

Let's let Bloomberg — the news service owned by Mayor Mike Bloomberg — tell this latest story of Paulson's maneuvers after some counsel from his aging bitch Greenspan (as if Paulson really needed help).

The mayor, of course, has only indirectly helped people like John Paulson. Mayor Mike did nothing with his vast business knowledge to stop the damaging Wall Street derailments even though his company's sophisticated financial-data products that gave the mayor his fortune enabled Wall Street to figure out how to profit from subprime mortgages, credit arbitrage, and the like (as I pointed out yesterday).

Anyway, in "Paulson Shorts 4 of 5 Largest U.K. Finance Companies," the news wire Bloomberg reports:

Everybody's talking these days about Hank Paulson, whom Jon Stewart refers to as the Frankensteinish figure who's spending your money to bail out Wall Street's reckless financiers — who crapped out after playing with the billions you had already handed over to them.

Hank Paulson worked as Nixon flunky John Ehrlichman's assistant during the Watergate era and then made his money at Goldman Sachs, eventually becoming its CEO before his appointment as Dick Cheney's Treasury Secretary. (Paulson's official bio notes that not only is he an "avid nature lover" but that Goldman Sachs is "one of the world's largest and most successful investment banks." Make that "former investment bank.")

John Paulson, on the other hand, never worked for Nixon and he hasn't yet made enough money; he's straight out of Dune or Tremors: the giant worm too greedy to ever get his fill after making sneak attacks on his prey.

But John Paulson's not such a bad thing, if you believe his press releases. The final chapters of the Mike Bloomberg story — bailout czar? president? — have yet to be written, but the mayor's Bloomberg L.P. news service continues the story of John Paulson:

Don't decide whether you believe the bit about Paulson's "empathy" until you see this June 25 Wall Street Journal item, "Subprime Billionaire John Paulson: ‘Not a Credible Witness,' Court Says":

He wound up in the Canadian court after some complex maneuvering in the arbitrage bidness:

You don't have to go to Canada to learn more about Paulson. Just drive out to the Hamptons. That's what Vanity Fair's Michael Shnayerson did for his story last month, "Hamptons Overdrive":

I guess that means I should try to hang onto my house and just hope that John Paulson doesn't get his hands on my mortgage contract.

Who's the ventriloquist behind dummy Palin? You'll Quayle at the answer.

As we speak, one of George W. Bush's former speechwriters, Matt Scully, is writing supposed veep candidate Sarah Palin's supposedly all-important speech to the Republican delegates in St. Paul.

Isn't there any escape from Matt Scully? As a young right-wing zealot, he and cohorts Len Munsil and Jay Heiler captured the Arizona State University student newspaper. Scully in particular harassed ASU poly sci prof Mark Reader. The three students went on to bigger and badder things.

Heiler became an operative in Arizona behind-the-scenes GOP politics, Munsil became an obsessive anti-porn crusader (is there any other kind?), and Scully wound up working for Dan Quayle, penning the doofus veep's "culture" speech that infuriated libs.

The three boys were — and are — nothing but lib-haters. Think of them as Rush Limbaughs but with brains. Strip away their intellectual pretensions and you reach their hard-core profession: liberal-hating. They're just the obverse of those equally knee-jerk jerks on the left. Ho-hum.

For a sound round-up of Scully and crew (which you'll need if you want to understand Palin's speech), consult veteran Arizona reporter Amy Silverman, especially her November 1993 piece, "The Righteous Stuff."

To think that Scully is one of the rescuers of the McCain ticket. And that Palin will mouth Scully's words tonight or tomorrow night — assuming she's still the nominee.

While you're at it, see a full history of John McCain's journey to being mislabeled as a "maverick" (Arizonans have to laugh at that). Check out "Postmodern John McCain: the presidential candidate some Arizonans know — and loathe," Silverman's long, longer, and longest reminiscence published in early August in New Times, the Phoenix alt-weekly where I worked in the '80s.

You may learn more than you want to know about Silverman herself, but it's worth it for the deep backgrounding you'll get about McCain, whom she has dogged for years and years.

Times of London: "Republican John McCain Leads Election Poll"

We prefer the British account to the American variants because it communicates a believable bewilderment: "Why is this 71-year-old Republican in such a 'change' election year doing so well?"

We could say, "Because he's white" and be done with it. But let's give America some credit. As the Times notes, McCain has unleashed a "barrage of negative advertisements" against Obama, of the sort to which Americans are trained to respond: that is, they not only imply that the opposing candidate is a numbskull, they imply that anyone who would vote for such a man must be a numbskull. This hits Americans right in their insecurities, and may be an even more powerful force for McCain than racism.

We must also remember that the "liberal media" is also helpful to McCain's cause. For example, in yesterday's New York Times -- heart of the lib conspiracy! -- we had David Brooks explaining that John McCain's people didn't want to go negative on Obama (he "started with grand ideas about breaking the mold of modern politics") but was forced to it by the "hostile environment around them." That's the media environment Brooks is talking about, the very environment in which Brooks is one of a handful of major players -- and he's far from the only one of them who does what he can to give Maverick a hand.

Face it: if a powerful consortium of American media companies had its heart set on electing Obama, you would already have been implanted with the impression that John McCain is a lovable but hopelessly senile candidate, like the coach on "Cheers." You would be allowed to like him, but you would certainly be discouraged from voting for him. But a lot of Americans think that they know how great McCain is despite the media's treatment of him. Ignorance this profound is neither natural nor an accident.

New report on talk video spells doom for talk radio's influence.

Video's killing the rock-ribbed-conservative stars, if a new survey on the Internet and politics is true.

YouTube, in other words, is sending Rush Limbaugh down the tubes.

Right-wingers dominated the air waves for decades and were the early users of the Internet, compared with lefties, as I noted nearly a decade ago in the Voice in "Left Behind".

Now the left has overtaken the right. Also endangered are the establishment's talking-head TV shows, like the one Tim Russert hosted.

Talking head is a lot funnier than talking heads. (See the footage by TomSongs of a White House protest — this scene didn't make the network news, as far as I know.)

His "Impeach" music video argues that it's "time to clean the White House out" because the Bush regime's crimes are "so much bigger than the stain on an intern's dress."

Might as well scrub Limbaugh and other cretins. The new survey doesn't even talk about the eventual demise of talk radio's influence, but that's the implication.

Click on this Wired story, "Record Percentage Of Americans Use Internet For Politics, Survey Finds" for details:

The results of this latest report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project will ultimately be a fatal blow to the geezer-based right-wing talk radio troops, not to mention those dinosaur newspapers that are slow in hopping aboard the Internet.

And speaking of the presidential election:

More from the survey:

A tiny percentage of people are actually posting campaign videos, but the flood of primary-source politically related material now available online (amid the flood of bullshit) also spells danger for — gulp! — newspaper reporters:

It's probably the same with reports from other sources, many of which are no longer being filtered by traditional journalism organizations but are freely available from the ACLU and the Heritage Foundation and all the organizations in between.

That's what I always hungered for as a reporter, and now it's a dream come true. The Abu Ghraib documents, campaign-finance records — all kinds of wonderful material — is online. Who needs CNN or the network news? I don't. And neither do you.

Read the report, if you don't believe me. And that's the point: You can read the report yourself.

Take the long view — read between the lines of the Pew report — and you'll realize that the days of influence are over for such nattering-nabob self-parodies as Limbaugh. Unless he contributes his own fart videos to YouTube.

Not just for kids: a parody of the self-parody administration

Fight off your recession and read this requiem for a lightweight: Goodnight Bush, a parody to end all self-parody presidencies.

It's almost time to say "good night" to George W. Bush, and Erich Origen and Gan Golan pronounce the laugh rites over the administration.

Bush's favorite kiddie book in times of crisis may be The Pet Goat, but mine is now Origen and Golan's Goodnight Bush, which sends the regime up to the moon in the same way that Ralph Kramden was always threatening to do to wife Alice.

This is a very funny book, even if it may induce nightmares instead of sweet dreams. Cute illustrations abound: a refinery plume, piggy war profiteers, a spilt glass of water with Katrina victims floating in it.

The text is warm and fuzzy — not as fuzzy as Bush's brain but warmer than Cheney's heart:

See Dick run. See Dick run away. See Dick run away finally.

And see the book's website here.

Great news for the war profiteers of Cheney's Halliburton

While you're financing the trillion-dollar Iraq debacle, the execs at Halliburton got some good news today from the United Arab Emirates: The UAE's airline, Emirates, is now offering nonstop service to Houston, Dubai's news service reports.

New York already has three flights daily to Dubai. But why now Houston? Halliburton is moving its headquarters to Dubai. And with that move, huge bundles of taxpayer cash are exiting the U.S.

Now it will be easier for Halliburton's execs to shuttle their money to Dubai.

This great news for Halliburton comes on the heels of its championship performance in the Center for Public Integrity's "Windfalls of War" series. The CPI's Bill Buzenberg compiled a list of the top 100 private contractors in the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles.

KBR, which Halliburton is in the process of spinning off for a huge profit, is by far No. 1 with a bullet. Tallying U.S. government contracts for fiscal years 2004 to 2006, Buzenberg reveals that KBR got $16 billion in contracts.

DynCorp was a rich second at $1.8 billion. Shoot, Blackwater was only 12th, garnering a meager $495 million.

Dick Cheney was getting a salary from Halliburton until last year, and he did well by his company. Halliburton's financial picture was shaky until after 9/11, when the Iraq debacle infused it with these huge bundles of taxpayer money. KBR's success helped its parent finance other operations, and spinning off KBR will profit Halliburton as it sells off its shares of the former subsidiary.

Meanwhile, Halliburton has now planted its big feet where the action is.

And Dubai is just the kind of place that Cheney would like. As I wrote in June, our own State Department has catalogued the UAE's notoriously repressive laws, noting:

Lettuce have your huddled masses: Work force becomes truly globalized.

Beset by an immigration war on one front and just plain war on another front, government officials in the U.S. are frantically seeking more illegals for necessary farm work here and longer stays in Baghdad for shanghaied foreigners to build the unnecessary supermax American embassy.

As Nicole Gaouette of the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday,

Meanwhile in Baghdad, workers from the Philippines and other countries who were shanghaied by U.S.-hired contractors to build the supermax U.S. embassy will probably be roped into staying longer as that project falls behind and its cost soars toward $1 billion. Check out the testimony at intrepid California congressman Henry Waxman's July hearing for details on the shanghai gestures.

Without addressing the issue of the original trickery that landed many of those foreign workers in Baghdad against their will, Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post reported yesterday:

As I wrote on August 8:

That story was broken by others, including David Phinney of Inter Press Service in June, who noted that contractor First Kuwaiti has reaped $2 billion from U.S. taxpayers for construction of military camps and the embassy. Phinney wrote:

Wait a sec. As Phinney also notes, Filipino laborers at the new embassy are making much more than that:

Pay is marginally better in our fields. Gaouette's Times story mentions almost by the way that "almost three-quarters of farmworkers are thought to be illegal immigrants."

The percentage of people who mow our lawns is probably even higher, but anyway, Gaouette notes that the White House is extremely concerned about this aspect of the free-market economy:

These are truly salad days for government officials in the U.S. as they quietly chew on these labor-force problems. Gaouette noted:

Pursued not for the sake of the workers but of the corporate farms that depend on cheap labor.

Slave work in Baghdad or California — take your pick. Farmworkers don't get health benefits, and the embassy is going to have a full-time psychiatrist for counseling and drugs, so Iraq seems the better bet: At least your boss in Iraq will be medicated.