Glenn W. Smith has spent the past 30 years in journalism and politics, where he’s made a name for himself as a writer, campaign manager, activist, think tank analyst and, as Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas says, a “legendary political consultant and all-around good guy.” “There’s no one like him,” says author George Lakoff. CNN commentator Paul Begala says, “He has unmatched experience, a graceful pen (or pixel nowadays) and deep insight into the best and worst of us.” Novelist Sarah Bird speaks of his “lucid and lyrical” prose. And, she says, he’s fun. Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington says Glenn writes with “grace and abundant humor” and “uses his colorful experiences in Texas to enlighten us all.”
Smith led Ann Richards’ successful 1990 campaign for Governor of Texas. He worked for former Texas Lt. Gov. Bill Hobby and U.S. Senator Lloyd Bentsen. Earlier, Smith was a political reporter for the Houston Chronicle and the Houston Post. He’s coordinated national campaigns for groups such as MoveOn.org. In 2004, he authored the highly acclaimed book, The Politics of Deceit: Saving Freedom and Democracy from Extinction. He also wrote Unfit Commander, a book that detailed George W. Bush’s mysterious disappearance from military service.
In 2004, Smith was featured in the film, Bush’s Brain, a documentary about Karl Rove. Smith provided commentary on Rove’s role as then-President Bush’s senior advisor. He has made numerous media appearances with Chris Mathews on Hardball, Joe Scarborough, Brit Hume, and many others. He writes a regularly for top national web sites, including FireDogLake and Huffington Post.
As a senior fellow at George Lakoff’s prestigious Rockridge Institute in Berkeley he studied, wrote and taught on the power of metaphor and narrative in political communications. He also lectured on religion and politics at the Starr King School for Ministry in Berkeley. As a sponsor and organizer, he has pulled together numerous national events with progressive religious leaders. He also organized a celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King at Riverside Church in New York City as well as “Freedom and Faith” bus tours, which was a nationwide campaign for social justice and progressive values.
Smith’s play, Double Play, which explored American Western myths and legends, was held over to sold-out audiences. He’s even written and performed songs in the Americana tradition, such as his best-known song, “Helping Marty Robbins,” a tribute to his hometown, Houston.
Most recently, Smith is the creator of DogCanyon, a political and cultural web site covering state, national and global issues from a Texas perspective. DogCanyon is an exhilarating and unique site that gets the connections between politics and culture and explores both the personal side of politics and the ups, down, craziness and beauty of “life its ownself,” as humorist Dan Jenkins would say. DogCanyon offers heartfelt personal essays, hard-hitting political analysis, and, most importantly, laughs.
As Paul Begala said, Smith writes in “the finest, firmest, fearless tradition of Texas essayists like Molly Ivins.”
2010Jul 26
When our sideshow news cablists, the White House, the NAACP and others began their carnival barking outside Andrew Breitbart’s tent once again – this time echoing Brietbart’s slander of Shirley Sherrod – the predictable puerility followed. The White House apologized and blamed the media culture, Fox News denied its role, pundits claimed the high ground and called for Sherrod’s reinstatement. The NAACP’s quick admission – “we were snookered” – was the only adult behavior around.
It’s a rare [...]
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2010Jul 21
The graph below charts the relative intensity of media scare stories on everything from the Millennium Bug to violent video games to the swine flue to killer wasps. Wonder why we’re anxious? Here’s part of the reason. The graph is from informationisbeautiful.net. The vertical bars show the number of scare stories per plague.
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2010Jul 20
If ever a town earned the right to perpetual panic, New Orleans is it. The people of New Orleans face the economic and environmental consequences of the BP oil spill before they’ve fully recovered from Katrina. I’ve been spending a good amount of time in New Orleans lately, and panic is the last thing on the minds of New Orleanians.
On Frenchmen Street, a two-block circus of music and bars not far from the Quarter, a young street poet bangs away [...]
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2010Jul 12
Rachel Farris and Friend
Our friend Rachel Farris, otherwise known as blogger Mean Rachel, visits DogCanyon with a great post. We’re proud to welcome her to the Canyon, and recommend everyone read this, visit her blog regularly. You’ll wanna send her presents.
By Rachel Farris
BP’s wells aren’t the only things failing around Texas these days.
Education is quickly draining out of Texas classrooms, and as the oil spill made its way onto [...]
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2010Jul 11
In a newly discovered essay, Mark Twain takes down interviewers of all stripes. Take that O overpaid interrogators of contemporary American media. When the guy who quipped that Wagner’s music is better than it sounds takes you down, you feel it. Here’s Twain:
The Interview was not a happy invention. It is perhaps the poorest of all ways of getting at what is in a man. In the first place, the interviewer is [...]
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2010Jul 7
Why would Texas Green Party leaders make a deal with Republican Gov. Rick Perry to help beat Democrats? Perry and other GOP allies of the Greens are their bitter enemies on every single policy issue they care about. The sleazy deal, if successful, will help the GOP continue its poisonous environmental record, its crony capitalism, its pro-big insurance agenda. The deal is twisted and dishonorable.
Gov. Rick Perry’s lackies and cronies are all over scandal. Read More
2010Jul 5
America’s greatest promise lies in the bold idea that each citizen in every generation is Founder of the country. Though the promise remains unachieved, the idea is worth celebrating this Fourth of July.
Authors of the U.S. Constitution, which arrived some years after the day we celebrate as our nation’s birthday, considered their document a living one, one that would safeguard freedom while providing plenty of room for change in future circumstances.
In other words, the citizens of every [...]
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2010Jun 22
This world is rich, but it is not mine.
Where I live, hungry children are crying
I am not angry, at my own condition
I just want people to know my position.
Procol Harum, from a statement by South African Stephen Maboe
Congressman Joe Barton says he doesn’t want to live in a country in which those in authority are held accountable.
Okay, I’m paraphrasing, but I’m getting the spirit of his comments – and his beliefs – just right. [...]
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2010Jun 14
Evangeline, by George Rodrigue
I was 18, skinny, out of money and in New Orleans for the first time after some Appalachian adventures and a visit to Nixon’s D.C. I faked a cocky walk into a French Quarter piano bar and stayed until closing time when the brunette singer in a sequined costume gown took pity on me. We went to an all-night place to eat. She picked up the tab and sent me gently on my [...]
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2010Jun 13
America — and the rest of the world, really — is living with this political equation: Our collective spending, guided by government, is needed to create jobs and stimulate a global economy still in recession. But political rhetoric is turning to spending cuts and deficit reduction. Such steps will plunge those who can least afford it into yet more joblessness and poverty. But the worse it gets — the more joblessness, bankruptcies, health crises, repossessions — the [...]
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2010Jun 11
So, a British company all but destroys the U.S. Gulf Coast, threatening the lives and livelihoods of many and killing ocean wildlife, and the Brits are worried about their dividends? You might call it the British Callous Upper Lip.
Here’s how some Brits put it in the New York Times:
Investors in Britain were particularly furious about the suggestions that BP should not pay a dividend until it cleaned up the oil spill. BP’s [...]
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2010Jun 7
George W. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 and was appointed president by the conservative U.S. Supreme Court. A sanctimonious pundit class tells us it is crabby, unpatriotic and uncivil to dwell upon that bit of history. But questions of legitimacy (“does he really belong here?”) have dogged Barack Obama since he won the Iowa caucuses. Where have the “get over it” arguments gone? Long time passing.
There is an ugly pattern in coverage and conversation about Obama. The media’s [...]
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2010Jun 6
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour is saying the Gulf oil spill is overblown and that sensational reporting is destroying Gulf Coast tourism. Who does this remind us of? Maybe the best parallel is Amity Island Mayor Larry Vaughn, played by Murray Hamilton in the movie, Jaws.
“The truth is,” he said, “we have had virtually no oil. If you were on the Mississippi Gulf coast anytime in the last 48 days you [...]
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2010Jun 5
Bill Maher’s piece on the stubborn idiots who continue to deny dangerous climate change brought to mind this clip from The Family Guy. That it’s Texas that inspires the “stubborn as a mule” routine is just a special bonus. Also, I hear Japan movie theaters are refusing to show the devastating documentary, The Cove. This goes out to them, to the climate-deniers, to the Texas State Board of Education, and, well, please add your own list of [...]
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2010Jun 4
I read the news today oh boy, and I can report it’s a long and winding road downhill for Republicans like John Boehner, who has now demanded that former Beatle Paul McCartney apologize for remarks he made at the White House. Here’s what McCartney said:
It’s a fantastic honor (for) the Gershwin family to give me this incredible award and for me to be awarded it by the Library of Congress. And, in fact, after [...]
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2010Jun 1
Behind the public’s impatience with President Obama and the Gulf Oil spill lie dangerous fantasies of technological American angels that can fly in an fix everything and anything. The same kind of fantasies, of course, lead a company like British Petroleum that they can overcome the unexpected with a combination of public relations savvy and technical know-how.
It’s not optimism. Optimism is reality based and healthy. It’s reality-defying denial. The New York Times had a [...]
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2010May 31
Fare you well, fare you well, I love you more than words can tell.
Listen to the river sing sweet songs to rock my soul.
Grateful Dead, Brokedown Palace
The late author and Merry Prankster Ken Kesey told a story about a West Coast Grateful Dead gig when, after the tragic 1984 death of Kesey’s son, the whole band turned to him and sang “Brokedown Palace.”
Kesey recounted with tears in his eyes that it wasn’t until that [...]
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2010May 24
The history of the ancient trade routes now known as “The Silk Road” is a tale of profound cross-cultural influence among peoples – Chinese, Turks, Persians, Indians, Koreans, Japanese, Europeans, Malays, Tibetans, Egyptians, East Africans. It was multicultural before there was anything labeled multicultural.
Of course, it was a silk road long before it was the Silk Road, a name given to multiple East-West trade routes by a European geographer in the 1870s. The Silk [...]
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2010May 18
Paul Krugman asks a good question. Why did the media treat America’s extreme right-wing so gingerly, as benign as a corner ice cream shop, as nothing unusual? It’s not a new phenomenon. The extremists have had control of the GOP stage for a long time. The media just refused to acknowledge it.
Somehow…the radicalism of Texas Republicans wasn’t a story in 2000, an election year in which George W. Bush of Texas, soon to [...]
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2010May 17
Autocrats, plutocrats, authoritarian ideologues and elitists of all stripes speak often of the people’s inability to govern themselves in a complex world that requires expertise – namely, the self-justifying expertise of the elite themselves. With surprising frankness, federal appeals court Judge Richard A. Posner summed up the elite’s paternalistic rationale:
Few citizens have the formidable intellectual and moral capacities (let alone the time) required for the role that [popular democracy] assigns to the citizenry…
The anti-democratic sentiment is hard [...]
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2010May 14
“As American as apple pie.” Really? What do we do when we discover the first apple pie recipe was published by Geoffrey Chaucer in 1381, more than a hundred years before Columbus brought the “we’re number one” meme to these shores? “As American as Chaucer.” Now there’s a Miller’s Tale.
I came across this fun fact in an Atlantic Monthly article that also punctures the fairy tale that cocktails were invented here. [...]
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2010May 10
Dr. James A. Forbes, the retired senior pastor of New York’s Riverside Church, is preaching today at the National Cathedral in Washington. (the full sermon can be found here.) He’s a friend, and he asked me to look over an early draft. I haven’t been the same since, and I told him so. “That’s a sign of a good sermon,” he said.
Forbes can preach. Newsweek named him one of the twelve best preachers in the English-speaking [...]
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2010May 5
The debate surrounding the tragic British Petroleum Gulf rig explosion and economy-wrecking oil spill has already spun off into an ideological wrestling match that’s got nothing to do with protecting us and everything to do with protecting wealth and the will-to-power.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry suggests the explosion was an act of God. He means that no one at British Petroleum should be held accountable and that no additional safety measures with regard to offshore drilling are needed. [...]
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2010May 3
Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchins, Sam Harris and their clubby ilk love to ramble on about destructive, unreasoned religious beliefs that enchain humanity in a continued dark age. It’s a mistake to blame human wonder at the mystery of it all rather than the blowhards of institutional religion who turn our wonder and worry to their own earthbound ends.
But as long as we’re going to examine the folly of unwarranted belief, let’s take on an unjustified faith too little challenged: [...]
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2010May 2
Ah, story. I told someone the other day that the Tale Wags the DogCanyon. We humans love our stories. Lapham Quarterly has given us the evolution of four tales, handily represented on a map. Click here for enlarged version.
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2010Apr 27
When ESPN did the empty-net story that Barack Obama planned to ban fishing, America reached a new level of ignorant media bloviating (pardon the redundancy).
Not even Matthew Continetti, author of the ridiculous book, The Persecution of Sarah Palin, can match the fish story pound for pound on the preposterous scale. Palin, like Wanda in A Fish Called Wanda, has double and triple-crossed her way to all the diamonds. As Dwight Eisenhower’s [...]
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2010Apr 25
Bet Against the American Dream from Alexander Hotz on Vimeo.
Ira Glass and his radio show, This American Life, teamed up with the investigative journalists of ProPublica to do a smashing take-out on the financial crisis and some Wall Street thieves who, well, made millions betting against our American Dream.
A hedge fund named Magnetar comes up with an elaborate plan to make money. It sponsors the creation [...]
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2010Apr 23
It shouldn’t surprise us that there was a spike in sunset pictures posted to flikr.com when the ash from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano began drifting over Europe. By the way, the name — Eyjafjallajokull – is the sound an Icelander makes when falling into a volcano.
Anyway, according to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Open Space blog, there were half again as many hits on flikr — the image posting site — on April 15th and 16th, [...]
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2010Apr 20
I got an email from the conservative website, Texas Insider, pointing me to a blog by one Bernie Quigley. It’s all about how the Tea Party movement is all about the restoration of the power of individual states and the illegitimate power of the federal government. So much for interstate highways, the Post Office, and the military the secures all 50 states, not one or two. Whatever became of the National Anthem? Or the Pledge of Allegiance [...]
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2010Apr 19
It’s a happy coincidence that HBO premiered its new series set in post-Katrina New Orleans, Treme, at a time I was traveling to that city three times in ten days. I’m there on business, and my get-around time is limited. But you don’t have to get around much to recognize the spirit of the people of New Orleans. Collectively, they’ve dealt with tragedy and hope with a depth the rest of us might hope never to have [...]
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2010Apr 13
It’s hard to ignore the irony. The wannabe Republican heirs of George W. Bush gather in New Orleans, the city Bush’s callousness and ineptitude all but destroyed, to advance a movement best called the New Confederacy.
At the Southern Republican Leadership Conference here, Texas Gov. Rick Perry invoked his love for the Tenth Amendment, the New Confederacy’s code term for “get the black man out of the White House.”
Touting his states’ rights bona fides, [Perry] said, “I believe [...]
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2010Apr 4
Let’s take the very, very long view of America’s decision to make health care available to eight million or more vulnerable and uninsured children. The crude political compromises that led to passage of imperfect health care reform might have obscured a grand achievement: an end to the sacrifice of American children on the altar of insurance industry greed and a moral setback for the bankrupt ideology that justified it.
So, let’s [...]
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2010Apr 2
Health insurance companies can’t deny you care based on pre-existing conditions. Millions of children once denied quality health care can now receive it. Coverage and benefits can’t be turned down by insurance industry death panels (yes, that’s where the real “death panels” are). And you can’t be tossed off your insurance plan when you get sick, a twisted insurance industry practice that means you sent them money for nothing.
Let me mention what is maybe the greatest moral victory of health [...]
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2010Mar 30
In Luc Besson’s campy movie, The Fifth Element, the villainous Zorg wants to rule the world. Like many a villain before him, Zorg (Gary Oldman) makes chaos his philosophical and tactical ally. As Zorg puts it:
Life…comes from disorder, destruction and chaos…You see Father, by creating a little destruction, I am in fact encouraging life.
Uh-huh. But in the aftermath of the passage of health care reform, Republicans are learning a downside of melodrama. They are [...]
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2010Mar 26
Headlines ’round the world are warning us that 40,000 prostitutes are headed for South Africa and soccer’s premier event, the World Cup. (Just google “South Africa 40,000 prostitutes”.) The story is a total fabrication. It’s a repeat of an alarmist story that was told before the 2006 World Cup in Germany. The figure was put at 10,000 trafficked sex slaves before the Sydney Olympics in 2000. It was doubled to 20,000 before the 2004 Olympics in Athens, [...]
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2010Mar 25
Gov. Rick Perry and other GOP leaders around the country have whipped the kooky Right into such a frenzy over health care reform that they are spitting on congressmen, threatening violence and even home invasions of Democratic representatives. It’s cynical and ugly, and just when you think it can’t get worse….
…You discover that the GOP proposed the very thing it now calls (in Glenn Beck’s confused vocabulary) communist-fascist-socialist-totalitarian tyranny. Perry threatens to secede from the Union over [...]
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2010Mar 23
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has joined other states in a federal lawsuit against health insurance reform, a hypocritical and cynical attempt to take away health care from hard-working Texas families. The lawsuit has no merit, of course. It is based upon unconstitutional arguments long ago rejected by American courts.
Beyond Abbott’s foolishness is his and Gov. Rick Perry’s hypocrisy. In 2009 Abbot himself persuaded the Texas Legislature to pass a mandatory insurance requirement, the very thing he now claims is [...]
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2010Mar 22
A century-long effort to bring some compassionate sanity to America’s health care system was passed by Congress last night. Lo and behold, the hammer and sickle is not flying from capitols across the land. Instead, it’s care and security for millions of our neighbors who have been locked out of doctors’ offices by yesterday’s rogue insurance industry.
Insurance companies can no longer deny you coverage because of a pre-existing condition. You won’t pay premiums for years only to be kicked off [...]
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2010Mar 21
Human kindness is overflowing,
And I think it’s going to rain today.
–Randy Newman
There is no better accompaniment to the vote on health care reform than Randy Newman’s “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today,” a song that mourns our lack of compassionate action while musically acknowledging a little hope.
The hope is slim and fragile. But so is the brief and heartening new volume, Made for Goodness, by Desmond Tutu and his daughter, Mpho Tutu. It takes just a [...]
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2010Mar 16
To my libertarian-minded friends,
I put the loose and awkward alliance among libertarian-minded voters and Republicans in the strange bedfellow category. The Republican right is dominated by authoritarians who take a very dim view of individual liberty. Witness the Texas State Board of Education’s recent decision to strike the word democracy from social studies textbooks and replace it with “constitutional republic.”
The [state textbook] standards were once littered with references to the U.S. as a democracy. No [...]
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2010Mar 15
You could see it coming in the eyes of Walker Evans’ Depression-era tenant farmer, Allie Mae Burroughs, and it’ll make you cry, that razor’s edge of a sad smile about her that says, “You, too.”
You could see it coming. Somewhere, a young boy in a dinosaur t-shirt holds his dying mother’s hand and remembers that the distant voice on the phone, the Insurance Voice, said simply, “No.” He could be forgiven for fearing he’d [...]
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2010Mar 13
The Texas State Board of Education has adopted textbook standards that deny the separation of church and state, seek to rehabilitate Joseph McCarthy, raise Phyllis Schlafly to new levels of historical importance, and exalt the extremist economic philosophy of Friedrich von Hayek. It’s indoctrination, and it smacks of the old Vietnamese ideological re-education camps.
Since Schlafly’s son, Andrew, is also re-writing the Bible, replacing Jesus’ teachings with those of Milton Friedman, we shouldn’t be surprised [...]
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2010Mar 11
The Civil Rights Movement created “unrealistic expectations of equal outcomes” among minorities, according to Texas conservatives trying to rewrite American history textbooks. They want students to learn that bit of undemocratic, phony history.
Imagine Thomas Jefferson opening the Declaration of Independence with, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, no one should have unrealistic expectations of human equality…”
The Texas State Board of Education, dominated by anti-evolution, authoritarian ideologues, has made news around the world for trying to rewrite [...]
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Mar 11
Marcelas with his Grandmom and Sisters
I called a committed right-wing activist the other day and asked, “Do you support taxpayer-funded fire departments?” Angrily, he said, “No. Why should I pay to put out a fire of someone else’s home?” Well, I asked, how about police departments. “Hey, if people want protection they ought to hire a security firm. Blackwater, for instance. I’m tired of the leeches living off my money.”
Okay, I made the conversation up. But doesn’t it sound [...]
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2010Mar 10
Let me get this straight. The U.S. Supreme Court can choose a president it wants (Bush in 2000) or hand powerful corporations the legal tool they need to silence the voices of average Americans in elections, but no one should publicly criticize them? That seems to be Chief Justice John Roberts’ message to the White House.
Mr. Roberts told a University of Alabama audience that the setting at [...]
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2010Mar 9
Here’s a video of global air traffic. We get around. Now if we could just get along.
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2010Mar 8
Sarah Palin admitted in a Canadian interview that her family used to go to Canada to receive health care. That would be Canada’s single-payer health care system.
The vocal opponent of health-care reform in the U.S. steered largely clear of the topic except to reveal a tidbit about her life growing up not far from Whitehorse.
“We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada,” she said. “And I think now, isn’t that ironic?”
Isn’t that twisted, [...]
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