I didn't attend the League of Women Voters' fix-is-in-non-debate, and here's why.

Speaking personally, I'm appreciative that so many of you took the time yesterday to ask whether I'd be attending last evening's pompous South Central League of Women Voters' fix-is-in-non-debate at Deaf Gahan's palatial Silver Street Pleasure Dome.

The way I phrased the preceding paragraph just might clue you in as to why I had no intention of attending. I value my health more than that. 

Amid the League's characteristically vacuous blathering as to why softball questions are a better format for incumbent influence peddlers than something approximating a genuine debate -- and reminding all and sundry of the League's abject failure to stage something approximating a genuine debate back in 2015, when I experienced first-hand just how fawning this organization can be when it comes to peer groups and existing power structures -- kindly allow me to repeat a link from last week.

Editorial: Why political debates still matter (LA Times Editorial Board)

But voters have a lot to gain too. In the era of multimillion-dollar campaigns and slick political messaging, nothing beats the potential of old-school debates to reveal and humanize the men and women behind the glossy ads and focus-group-approved slogans.

They still matter, just not here in the News and Tribune's readership area, although by all rights the newspaper should be leading the way by joining with entities like the League to insist that candidates participate in a real, honest, and impartial debates, and publicly shaming them if they won't.

But the newspaper can't muster the minimum integrity necessary to afflict the comfortable, apparently because the comfortable underwrite the newspaper, so we must watch yet again as myriad opportunities are lost even as those chiefly responsible for squandering them beam happily for the camera, inadvertently taking full credit for their joyful roles in cheapening discourse.

A pox on them all, I say.

The problem with 95% of those posturing hereabouts as community "leaders" is that they never bother leading, and probably couldn't define the term if asked. Pretend as you will; I'm always satisfied to be speaking truth, not wishful thinking.

Here's your Bill Hanson nothingness link for Friday, September 13.

Local political forum features New Albany candidates, by Brooke McAfee (Tom May Content Coagulator)

It isn't fascism if we do it.

She’s coming to Jeffersonville on Wednesday, and if that sort of kink appeals to you, make plans to attend the rally. The beer will be light, the oratory bitter, and jackboots are optional.

Campaign donations? Probably mandatory.

I can’t go, because I have a date to read the phonebook. Meanwhile …

Palin: 'I Don't Know' If Abortion Clinic Bombers Are Terrorists, from the Daily Kos, as relayed by www.alternet.org.

The buffoonish nature of Sarah Palin's vice presidential candidacy has mostly been a disaster for the McCain-Palin campaign, but it is has delivered at least one benefit: her foibles have helped obscure the true nature of her right-wing extremism.

But now, Sarah Palin's self-destructive behavior is threatening to expose even that. In an interview broadcast yesterday on NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams asked Palin whether she felt abortion clinic bombers were terrorists.

Amazingly, she said that she didn't know. MSNBC reports (emphasis added):

Palin resisted the suggestion that if Ayers was a "domestic terrorist" -- a standard line in her campaign addresses -- then so were conservative religious activists who bombed abortion clinics.

"I don't know if you're going to use the word 'terrorist' there," she said.