May 2008 Archives

HuffPosts Seth Colter Walls interviews some of the organizers of the Hillary Clinton supporters planning to demonstrate outside the hotel where the DNC Rules and Bylaws committee is set to meet and address what the hell to do about Michigan and Florida.

"You're not going to write that we're a bunch of hysterical women trying to create havoc, are you?"

CRY HAVOC! And Unleash The Hounds Of Protesters Pressuring Obscure Parliamentary Procedure Committee Meetings!!!

by Mark Adams

This is just sick.

Copper thieves force shutdown of Ohio soup kitchen

May 30, 2008 07:36 EDT

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- Copper thieves have struck a major soup kitchen in Columbus, forcing it to stop feeding the needy.


The Holy Family Community Kitchen and Pantry says two large
refrigeration compressors were unbolted from their concrete pads and
taken away over Memorial Day weekend, and the thieves also stole copper
piping.

Director Frances Carr says the soup kitchen couldn't
keep the food cold, so it spoiled and had to be thrown out. Carr says
that was tough to do at a time when so many people are in need.

By Wednesday, the facility had to shut down.

Carr hopes to reopen Monday but isn't certain that will be possible.

The news isn't just that they robbed a soup kitchen is Columbus, Ohio, rather There Are Soup Kitchens in Columbus, Ohio!

by Mark Adams

ARVADA, Colo. -- Police are looking for two crooks who tried to disguise their identities by covering their faces with women's thong underwear during a robbery of an Arvada Diamond Shamrock gas station. . . .

The man wearing the green thong over his face is in his early 20s. He's 6 feet tall and weighs between 160 and 180 pounds. He has short black hair and was last seen wearing a dark blue shirt, blue jeans and dark shoes.

The man wearing the blue thong over his face is in his early to mid 20s. He's between 5 feet 8 inches to 5 feet 10 inches tall, 180 to 200 pounds. He has short black hair. He has a 6-inch cross tattoo on his right upper arm and a tribal tattoo on his left upper arm.

. . . and Thongs over their faces!

Am I missing something? Mind you, this is fun, even interesting. I just don't think it'll have much affect on a hardened military Junta.

MONTREAL: Women are being asked to volunteer their undergarments in an international effort to shame Myanmar's ruling junta into giving citizens greater access to humanitarian aid and human rights.

Organisers launched the Canadian edition of the Panties for Peace! campaign this week with a call for women to send underwear to the Myanmar embassy in Ottawa.

Great cause, weird message.

Maybe there's a severe panty shortage in that devastated nation. They seem to need just about everything else, food, water, freedom. Why not?

Could be they might get the message that the women of the world have had it with their repressive ways, and they better put their big girl panties on and deal with it.

(HT to Meteor Blades)

Ever read Before the Storm by Rick Perlstein?

Kos:

It's a brilliant look at how Goldwater founded the modern conservative movement.
The parallels to today are startling, a sort of Dean bizarro world stuck on opposite day -- a Republican Party that was trying to be "Democrat-lite" and an establishment hostile to "outsider" forces. With Goldwater railing against his party's establishment and the special interests that controlled it. Throw in innovative use of tactics and technology (Goldwater pioneered the use of direct mail) and a crushing defeat, and you've got the Dean phenomenon.

Of course, that would mean Ronald Reagan's Bizarro world counterpart would be (wait for it) Barack Obama. Hmmm. The book has been on my Amazon wish list for a while; I guess I'm going to have to actually, you know, read it now.

Henry Farrell:

The intellectual genesis of the netroots analysis lies in a book called Before the Storm by left-liberal historian (and TNR contributor) Rick Perlstein. He argues that the conventional narrative of the '60s pays far too much attention to left-wing activism. After all, he observes, the '60s ended with the left smashed by a rising conservative tide that has continued to this day. The real story is that of the grassroots countermobilization on the right, which took its most public form in the Barry Goldwater campaign. This movement built counterparts to the dominant liberal institutions, slowly took control of the Republican Party from the moderates who had been running it, and jerked the national agenda sharply to the right.

Reading history is now a good news/bad news experience. The good news is that some very sharp writers are providing us with some very enlightening insights. The bad news? Realizing that I'm old enough now that I actually remember these events from 40+ years ago.

For example, I picked up a second-hand copy of The Making of the President 1968 at a used book sale the same day that Hillary assassinated RFK again. I was 15 in 1968 and it was the first presidential campaign that I was emotionally invested in. It's an interesting feeling reading this stuff so much later. On one hand, I experienced those times first hand, so I have my own take on it. And/But it is enlightening to read a more studied take on it too.

I've found that, when scanning the op-ed page of a newspaper, the title is the first thing I respond to. If the title is interesting, then I will read the first sentence of each paragraph of the piece. From that I can decide how deeply into the article I want to go -- and usually it isn't very far. Often, I get bored or the writer blows his/her credibility.

Anyway, this morning I saw two op-eds on the back page of the Baton Rouge Advocate: "Global answer to poverty" by Robert J. Samuelson and "Obama wrong about negotiating with evil" by Cal Thomas.

In Samuelson's piece, he says this (in the lead sentence of the third paragraph):

The solution to being poor is getting rich.

Well, alrighty then. He goes on to say that economic growth (e.g., strong trade, political & economic stability, high savings and investment rates, market allocation of resources) is what moves a people up the scale from poverty to self-sufficiency.

OK, well and good. Nothing startling here. Of course, he touches on the difficulty in persuading some people that material comfort in this world is actually a good thing and not counter to cultural norms that preach about the world to come. You get the picture.

Cal Thomas, on the other hand, attempts to define Obama this way (also in the lead sentence of his third paragraph):

Obama thinks he can negotiate with evil and transform evil into something else.

He complains that Obama's only foreign policy strategy seems to be diplomacy with, not the defeat of, evil. He suggests that a President Obama would negotiate with terrorist killers instead of crushing them.

This is the school of thought that leads to the imposition of democracy (translation: laissez-faire capitalism) at the end of a gun barrel. And we've seen how well that works. Thomas shrugs off Iraq, saying the problems were there before Iraq and will be there afterwards.

Seems to me that if you can grow a generation of children in certain places that see this world for what it is (instead of hoping to live in the world to come) then you are closer to a solution to our problems than if you simply kill them off.

It would seem to me that old-school Republicans would "get" that. You know -- trade, economic development, building a customer base that is eager to consume your products instead of killing you because they believe you defame God's laws.

I know Democrats are moving in that direction. Why not Republicans, too?

It sounds like John McCain is joined at the hip to one of those Disaster Capitalists Naomi Klein warned us about in her book Shock Doctrine. Hilzoy (guesting for Kevin Drum) quotes James Galbraith's discription of former Texas Senator (figures), recent lobbyist, current campaign Co-chair and economic guru for John McCain ...

"Phil Gramm's career was as the most aggressive advocate of every predatory and rapacious element that the financial sector has," Galbraith said. "He's a sorcerer's apprentice of instability and disaster in the financial system."

Hot on the heels of Keith Olbermann's revelation that Gramm, whose deregulatory scemes played a direct role in the Enron scandal, was/is on the payroll of a Swiss bank lobbying Congress (and evidently McCain himself) on how the U.S. should handle the mortgage crisis.

McCain and Gramm have been friends for more than a decade. McCain chaired Gramm’s 1996 presidential run and Gramm says the two men speak every day. McCain reportedly has hinted Gramm might serve as his Treasury secretary.

Last summer, Gramm was widely credited with saving McCain’s presidential campaign.

[snip]

After Gramm passed a law easing regulation of energy-commodity trading, California experienced a sharp run-up in energy costs. The energy-trading company Enron was blamed and soon collapsed.

In 1999, Gramm successfully undid the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, removing the decades-old wall between commercial banking, which was heavily regulated, and investment banking, which was not. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act did not extend significant new regulation to investment banking.

This may be the last gasp of the anti-New Dealers, but they've come leaded for bear. Or was that Bear Sterns? Hilzoy is flabbergasted.

But it just defies belief that McCain would have, as his main economic advisor and one of the people responsible for his plan to deal with the mortgage crisis, someone who was a paid lobbyist for a bank that was heavily involved in that crisis, a firm that has just advised some of its employees not to travel to the US for legal reasons, and that stands to gain or lose a lot depending on what the federal government decides to do about it. What's next: the revelation that McCain's policy on Iran is being written by a lobbyist for the makers of cruise missiles? Or that he has outsourced his health care policy to a lobbyist for the National Funeral Directors Association?

Without a trace of irony, John McCain's spokesman the GOP nominee "preferred to focus on homeowners "truly in need" and opposed bailouts for affected banks." However, instead of supporting legislation that would have allowed bankruptcy judges the authority to modify loan terms to help home owners stay on their property, he in effect said on March 25th, "The mess you are in is your own fault. Don’t expect any bailouts from me."

Interesting that this is exactly what the banking industry, and Phil Gramm, wanted. The legislation died.

The sooner we are rid of the cancer these "compassionate conservatives" have foisted on us, the better. Let's just hop the rumors that Bush will start bombing Iran to help keep his buddies in power is just that, a rumor.

by Mark Adams

I remember it almost like it was yesterday, trying to outdo other bloggers with cute little names for the guy I called Scotty McManequin: Scott-bot 3000, McClellatron, Scottie McLiar, McClerrator -- good times.

Today, Politico's Mike Allen bypassed the embargoed publication of McClellan's tell-all book by (get this) buying it in a Washington DC bookstore a week before its scheduled release date and documents the atrocities Scotty lays bare in "whacking" Bush, Cheney, Rove, Libby and the whole merry band of criminal conspirators who "propagandized" us into war, lied about outing Valerie Plame, and twiddled their thumbs "in shock" for a week during the Katrina mess (much like Bush did upon learning the news of planes crashing into building as he sat stupidly in that classroom).

McClellan also skewers the mainstream press.

"If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.

"The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served."

Next thing you know, Scottie will be referring to the Beltway establishment as Villagers. Funny how some decidedly non-mainstream media folks, my favorite rhetorical bomb throwers The Young Turks, were on this story six months ago, as was Shakes and a few other easily dismissed libs.

I love these guys. Figures that they're not even on Air America anymore. What a shame.

In one of his more twistier pieces of pseudo-logic, George Will pronounces, quite cynically, that Americans are not cynics -- merely too idealistic.

Feh!

No surprise that he manages to lay the phenomenon of unrealistic expectations we Americans "suffer" from at the feet of that bogeyman of the right for generations, Franklin Roosevelt. I guess I'm too much of an idealistic naif, a product of a nation founded on ideals that we could form a More Perfect Union, that we were endowed with Inalienable Rights.

How is it possible to trace back the history of Presidential Rhetoric elevating the office to something more than the mere head of an ungainly bureaucracy and ignore the trust we put in Presidents since at least Lincoln to ensure that a "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Ya just don't get such banalities and pragmatism like that anymore, do you. Nearly as pedestrian as "give me liberty or give me death." (No wonder Patrick Henry never became president when he would utter such nonsense.)

At least Will is one of the few (very few) voices on the right who sums up the last administration as an exercise in Presidential overreach:

Today's president has claimed the power to be the "decider," deciding on his own to start preventive wars, order torture prohibited by treaty and statute, and arrest American terrorist suspects on American soil and hold them indefinitely without legal process.

However he misses entirely the idea that elevating the Presidency to cult-like status is a product of right-wing authoritarianism in practice as he dissects Cato Institute's Gene Healy's analysis of America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power.

Liberals think boundless government is beneficent. Conservatives practice situational constitutionalism, favoring what Healy calls "Caesaropapism" as long as the Caesar-cum-Pope wields his anti constitutional powers in the service of things these faux conservatives favor.

How perfectly droll.

As usual, Will has no desire to truly understand how liberals think or what we think about. At least he is more generous than most. He gives us credit for at least thinking at all.

The same tired meme of "big government liberals" is uncritically lobbed out today by Tom Coburn at the WSJ. They spew this as if it actually has any meaning when the Reagan and Bush astronomical deficits, juxtaposed against the Clinton era surplus, should prove for all time what a lie such notions as fiscally responsible Republicans are. It's truly absurd.

Yet Coburn, like Will, dances around the simple-minded follow-the-leader mentality of right-wing authoritarians. they acknowledge it in passing without understanding it for the disease it is.

Many Republicans are waiting for a consultant or party elder to come down from the mountain and, in Moses-like fashion, deliver an agenda and talking points on stone tablets. But the burning bush, so to speak, is delivering a blindingly simple message: Behave like Republicans.

The authoritarian mentality is not a side-effect, a mere symptom. It's is the root cause of the disease whose exploitation has metastasized in the body politic to the current cancer of Bush/Cheney. The "cure" is not returning to fictional glory days of Republican administrations that guarded the purse and wisely administered competent, honest government. they don't exist except in the romanticized minds of deluded pontificators like Will and John McCain.

Please tell me the last time such could be said to describe a GOP administration? Reagan and Bush's myth of responsible spending is a joke since no previous presidents could come close to their deficit spending. Nixon left paying for Vietnam to Carter, and his followers blame Carter for the wrecked economy to this day. Ike? 90% tax rate on the wealthiest? Puhleeze. Before that you've got Hoover, the Nero of the Great Depression and Harding selling off the country to the highest bidder (Teapot Dome still being at the top of corruption scandals despite the intervening history of Watergate, Iran/Contra, and the litany of GWB's criminal excesses).

Are these guys harkening back to the era of Teddy Roosevelt, maybe? No way. That guy was way too liberal of a tree hugger.

The cure for the disintegration of the Conservative Movement is a strong dose of reality. Quit deluding yourselves by foregoing inconveniently accurate truths in favor of revisionist history and spin. Take the halo off Saint Reagan for one, and recognize him for the nice, yet dottering fool he was -- who for all his good intent allowed a secret, illegal war to be run right out of his house -- and didn't have a clue. A guy who raised taxes as much as he cut them, and nearly bankrupted us all while spending the money on crooks and crap.

Next, understand that Conservatives have institutionalized the nurturing of sheeple, lemmings that are valued more for their loyalty than competence without which the modern Republican Party would have ceased to exist long ago. That a monolithic, top-down power structure may be very effective in the short term by sheer force of it's efficiency -- it is decidedly un-(small-"d")-democratic, un-American even. The power-structure of the modern Republican party is hardly a model of even "republican" principles, violating the very spirit of representative government. When they not only campaign, but govern through these crony-capitalist structures, their effect is more fascist than free.

Seriously, if all they truly want to stand for as conservatives is responsible economic policy, who would say that's a bad thing? Clearly there is much more, and most of it bad, to Replublicanism.

But no. They will give prominent media pedestals to liars like the ever Stupidest Guy on the Planet to try and spin us on how the first draft of the history of the the Iraq War should be re-written, again. My oh my how fun to watch the neocon intelligencia blame their idiot salesman for their shitty product.

Dick Martin was, I think, underestimated as a comedy talent. His shtick (with Dan Rowan) seems dated now, being remembered as second-tier Rat Pack wannabes. This ignores the ground-breaking nature of their Laugh-In Show. Where the Smother Brothers are remembered for their messy battles with network censors, Laugh-In got away with far more subversive material, both social and political.

And Dick Martin smirked, mugged and smugged his way through all of it, both in the background and foreground.

Like all straight men, Rowan provided the voice of reason, striving to correct his partner's absurdities. Martin, meanwhile, was full of bogus, often risque theories about life, which he appeared to hold with unwavering certainty.

Most of the catch-phrases from that show -- "Sock it to me," "You bet your sweet bippy" and "Look that up in your Funk and Wagnall's" -- were first (and most entertainingly) uttered by Martin.

He also had a flair for physical comedy. Check out his reactions to Tiny Tim which, if I recall correctly, was TT's first appearance on network television. Martin is genuinely hilarious. (P.S. that's a very young Goldie Hawn who hustles Tim off-stage at the end of his performance).

Say goodnight, Dick.

by Mark Adams

First of, I'm not trying to be cocky. So if this sounds cocky, well ... that's just me.

All would agree that there's been a steady trickle of sentiment towards a more liberal mood in America for some years now. You could almost track it with the inexorable downward slide in our approval of the Bush regime.

There have been signposts along the way, the rejection of Harriet Miers and John Bolton's nominations, collective disgust at the political exploitation of Terri Schaivo, the 2006 election was a sobering moment for everyone.

But the clearest indication I was on to something was the nomination of John McCain. His promotion to standard bearer of the Republican Party, to me, indicated a clear rejection of the neoconservative agenda by the folks who gave it breath: the Republican Party's rank and file.

Interestingly enough folks far more clever than I, and not especially noted as flaming batshit crazy liberals susceptible to wishful thinking that probably taints my take on the situation are coming to the same conclusion -- but from a completely different perspective.

See I tend to agree with George Packer's The Fall of Conservativism at The New Yorker (via: Cho at ePluribus Media) opinion that:

"The fact that the least conservative, least divisive Republican in the
2008 race is the last one standing—despite being despised by
significant voices on the right—shows how little life is left in the
movement that Goldwater began, Nixon brought into power, Ronald Reagan
gave mass appeal, Newt Gingrich radicalized, Tom DeLay criminalized,
and Bush allowed to break into pieces."

You've seen the disgust throughout Right Wing Blogistan with McCain, running the full sequence from outright rebellion, defection to plugging their noses. I believe an appropriate concluding clause to the above quote would read ... "Bush allowed to break into pieces ... and McCain buried."

They broke their own back, much the way the Soviets fell apart largely due to ignoring the economics of their predicament while ignoring the internal inconsistencies of a faulty and poorly executed ideology. Ironic that a movement whose nadir saw the death throws of communist imperialism believed it's own hype that they defeated the "Evil Empire" as opposed to simply watching it die has succumbed to a similar fate -- hubris leading self-immolation.

No doubt there will be Democrats who will spin this as "their" (ok, our) victory, but one only need glance at the record of Congressional Democrats since losing Congress in 1996, and Bill and Hillary Clinton's rejection of the progressive agenda since then to expose the lie that any Democrat brought about the end of the extreme right wing any more than Reagn somehow "Destroyed" the Iron Curtain. They just happened to be the folks in opposition when the nutbags lost it.

Bob Burnnet's HuffPost piece takes a different view on what McCain represents, however. To him, John McCain is the epitome of conservative orthodoxy, and he makes a very persuasive case. McCain indeed advocates the traditional pillars of conservativism: "gargantuan military ... small (innefectual) government ... tax reduction ... incompetent (corporate run) management." All of it combining into the unwieldy and corrupt industrial/military complex warned against by Ike.

So which is it? What does McCain represent? The death knell of ideologically driven right wing extremism, or more of McSame? I ask this more as an intellectual exercise since the prospect of a true empirical analysis of the question would require study of a McCain administration -- which I find to be not only a remote possibility but a horror to even contemplate.

Back when the GOP was parading their fractured coalition on nationally televised debates, they entertained us all as each out-of-touch representative of various splinter groups vied for the affections of the Republican voters: the robber barons represented by Romney, the evangelicals following Huckabee, the xenophobes cheering for Hunter and Tancredo, the media wing pushing Grandpa Fred, the libertarian insurrection led by Ron Paul, the Christianist favorite Brownback, the one-percent of the party's black supporters shaking their head each time Alan Keyes opened his mouth, and the neocons's darling of course was Giuliani -- but the military wing held on and allowed McCain to survive. Even then it was clear the days of the GOP presenting a unified front were long gone.

McCain himself may represent the blandest version of Republicanism, and therefore his orthodoxy is to be expected. However, the fact that one really must describe his status as their "presumptive nominee" because he survived, he's the "last man standing" says a lot. He didn't "win" so much as he didn't lose. By no means can he be described as the "Party Favorite." He isn't. He certainly didn't overwhelm his rivals through irresistible popular support. There's no "movement" behind him propelling him to the White House.

It's just his turn. It's his time and he's been set up to be a sacrificial lamb by people who haven't had an original idea since 1968, and are still fighting those same culture wars.

The Clintons too are veterans of the Baby Boomers' battle of attrition between the hard-hats and the hippies. Hillary's failure to hold back the tide of a movement that is sweeping Obama forward is not a signal that the hippies won, but that we are declaring the war is over and moving on.

The winning move here is not to play the same old game.

That means we must not simply replace Republicans with Democrats, enact liberal policies to fix the things conservatism has broken. We must (as an Obama Administration promises to do) completely transform the culsture of Washington D.C. The people are demanding, and the country desperately requires not only new people at the helm, better managers, more responsible financial stewardship, a smaller and more flexible military, a restoration of diplomatic respect, and an end to corrupt corporate cronyism; but also a change of attitude.

We need to hope again. We need to listen to our better angels, both here and abroad. We need to remember that America is the land that helps the rest of the world rise up and improve their lot in life, not exploit the rest of the planet's people and steal their resources.

We need to actually BE the people we are so proud of being.

If we do that, everybody wins.

Is Barack Obama a Muslim?

(H.T.: Oliver)

by Mark Adams

by Mark Adams

Survey USA:

HT: Steve Soto

by Mark Adams

No doubt Senator Clinton is sorry for invoking the tragic memory of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination as a reason to stay in the race. No doubt she was not thinking like some Wise Guys making a not so subtle threat. That's not what happened.

Senator Clinton said she had been attempting to point out that previous campaigns had also continued into June.

Democrat Robert Kennedy was running for his party's presidential nomination when he was shot dead in June 1968.

A spokesman for rival Democrat hopeful, Barack Obama said Mrs Clinton's comment "has no place in this campaign".

She was not making Obama on offer he can't refuse. Not really.

"My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June... We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don't understand it."

Observers say the remarks could be damaging if people were to interpret them as an indication that Mrs Clinton believes the assassination of her rival would benefit her campaign.

Throughout this campaign, the memories of JFK, RFK and MLK have been invoked to describe the inspiration and agendas of Barack Obama and John Edwards, but not Hillary Clinton. Maybe she was feeling left out.

Unfortunately, Hillary did not talk about Robert Kennedy today as an icon of the progressive movement, a man whose leadership stands as a cornerstone of what it means to be a Democrat to a generation. She spoke of him as just another politician doing what it takes to win, and she didn't even get that right.

Here's a hint. Don't use seminal historical figures to justify your hacktakularness. Say that you want to be like them, not that your sorry-ass behavior wasn't anything worse than they did -- unless of course you're a Republican making your own icons look bad by association with you.

Just leave our heroes alone.

by Mark Adams

It looks like MyDD's Todd Beeton has gotten on board the Kum-By-Yah '08 bus tour for the Obama/Clinton Dream Ticket. There's a lot of rethinking going on right now, at least among the saner parts of the reality based community.

Mind you, signals couldn't be more mixed right now with Clinton insisting that that the reports of her asking for, and Obama refusing her the VP slot, are unfounded, but still being reported on as accurate rumors -- because for all we know there might actually be rumors out there (ya think?) which may or may not make some self-important whiny-assed cry babies act more mature? so they stop their incessant Obama bashing, (or Clinton bashing). (HT: S.No!)

You almost have to ask yourself the question: Is it better to have Hillary's supporters out there doing McCain/Lieberman '08's job for them, questioning the very legitimacy of Obama's all but sure nomination from now until 2012? Or, despite going out of her way to just piss everybody off, and as much as it would suck to give in to what amounts to blackmail due to the poisoned atmosphere, should we learn to live with Hillary on the ticket just to avoid fighting this thing on two fronts?

Frankly, even if Hillary whole-heartedly supports and campaigns for Barack, many of her die-hards will never give it up unless they get what they think they deserve. I just can't help thinking that all this would have been just that more easier on my developing ulcer had Hillary's name been Bill and (s)he had been running against some nice Irish guy named Barry O'Banyon.

by Mark Adams

As more and more of us begin to appreciate the ramifications of "Peak Oil," or at least its artificially growing myth on our current state of affairs from the gas pump to the how and why the lid has been kept on Iraq's sea of crude since at least 1928, even proven skeptics are joining the throng who upon seeing storm clouds on the horizon pronounce in grave tones that the sky is falling, the end is near, and that you're gonna look fondly on the good old days of $4.00 gas.

But a couple of throw-away statements running 'round Blogtopia (Y!Sctp!) that the price of gold was going up against the weak dollar, yet nobody talks about "peak gold" -- and coincidently we are faced with a housing bust that will most likely suck dry a good deal of pension fund capital right into the Big Shitpile, got me shining up the old tin-foil hat.

It stands to reason that if the folks in big oil (who consider George Bush some kind of savant for getting that MBA from Harvard) can figure out a way to rig the system for maximum profits by exploiting and prolonging the peak oil syndrome where production capacity is maxed while demand keeps growing by keeping the world's 2nd largest proven oil reserves locked up in war or embargo or artificially low quotas for generations; then really smart guys like corporate raider Carl Icahn specializing in real estate and stocks & bonds would find a way to tap into the last great untapped sources of wealth in this country: pension funds and family homesteads.

All that potential liquidity just sitting there, doing nothing. It might as well be rotting for all the good it's doing. If assets aren't trickling up or down or at least somewhere, what good are they.

But there's another source of wealth in America those smarty-pants Wall Street types overlooked. All that dirty, old, gold jewelry in your dresser drawer! What use is it just laying there? Don't you know there are nice gentlemen who will even send you a pretty envelope so you can mail back that tarnished junk and they'll send you a nice, new, big, fat check in exchange! Doesn't that sound great?

So, here's the plan:

First, I'll send you a nice envelope, see, and you send me all of your gold you aren't using right now. Any precious metal will do. That old class ring, the extra-backs and orphaned earrings whose mate was lost who-knows-where. You might as well face facts and get rid of that extra wedding ring since s/he ain't coming back.

Chains? Really? That's so 80's. Junk 'em.

But instead of sending you back a check any pawn shop owner could give you, I'll be sending you a stock certificate in my new venture capital investment plan, see. They've got all these audio-cassets (real cheap now since they're from 2006) on how these guys called hedge-fund managers can make oodles of dollars investing other people's pension money and refinacing their second mortgages. I'm going to listen to most of them and get cracking.

It's easy money and you can be part of this exciting opportunity just by sending me all of your precious metals and I'll give you ... something really neat my daughter designed using her certificate-maker module from iWork's Pages.

That's right. I'm asking you to give me something of value for absolutely nothing in return. But what the heck? It might make you feel better squandering your wealth on someone who's at least honest about stealing from you instead of the swindlers picking your pocket at the gas station, bank and whatever arm of government that put out its hand this week. And it sure as hell will make me fell better.

Cuz Obama ain't buying me no Jet Ski, and I can't afford one without your help.

Play this very loud.

Crank up your speakers.

I am an Obama man through and through but I have to ask the question: Is it better for Barack to have Hillary outside the tent pissing in, or inside the tent pissing out?

Before you pop a blood vessel, follow me over to Camera Three and let's talk about it...

First there was this:

Whoopi Goldberg asked her co-hosts on "The View" how they would describe Mrs. Clinton’s historic battle for the Democratic nomination.

"A man took it away from a woman," Joy Behar replied. "Then they yelled at her for complaining about it."

Oh my. If you think that the zeitgeist has a lot to do with who wins the presidency (and I do), then none of this is good. Obama has Oprah, true. But The View is also a cultural icon.

Then there's this, by way of Chris Matthews quoting Chris Rock (or so he suggested):

We never heard of "superdelegates" until a brother got the nomination.

Not good. Not good if you want to get past this and get on with squashing McCain ASAP.

If that isn't enough, there's this from Chuck Todd:

We do wonder if Obama does end up in a no man's land where he's taken enough delegates off the table to prevent Clinton from getting the magic number, but there are enough undeclared supers sitting out to prevent Obama from claiming victory, which would give these supers the opportunity to become brokers. Perhaps Obama-Clinton ticket brokers?

Fair? Fair is for children.

Probable? Perhaps not.

But possible? Anything is possible. And if you've ever done politics, or any kind of negotiating, you know you must have a Plan B just in case.

So here's my question: if you're Obama, is it better to have Hillary outside the tent pissing in? Or inside the tent, pissing out?

On one hand, Hillary stands for everything Barack is against: the old way of doing politics, the failed establishment that got us into Iraq, lobbyists, talking out of both sides of your mouth just to win the election, the whole thing -- and more. Plus she's shown she only cares about herself, that she's basically running a protection racket: Clinton, Inc.

On the other hand, she will not go quietly. Her restless shade will stalk the land for the rest of the campaign -- and for the next four years.

So here's a thought: what better way to neutralize her than making her Vice President? Think about it: two-thirds of all vice presidents never ascended to the presidency. It is just as dead-end a position as Secretary of Transportation. It's "not worth a pitcher of warm piss," in the immortal words of "Cactus Jack" Garner, who was FDR's VP for eight years.

And so it could be -- if President Obama makes it so.

And another thing -- while it's good to keep your friends close, you should know by now that what you really need to do is keep your enemies closer.

On the other hand, you can say she brings nothing to the ticket. New York is in the bag, Illinois is in the bag, and the Appalachian states will not vote for the Democratic ticket just because Hillary is #2. (Or, I suspect, #1 but that's a discussion for another day.)

On the first hand, there's Arkansas.

And there's also this: too many Hillary supporters are on the record saying they will sit this one out if she doesn't get the nomination.

Can you be sure that, in fact, they'll "get over it?"

The very formulation of the question makes me wince. But it's worse than that: I don't even want to ask the question because I do NOT know the answer. And if you're honest, you'll admit that you don't know the answer either, do you?

So that brings me to the final question (and our poll): if Obama picks Hillary, will you sit this one out -- or work your ass off to get the ticket elected in November?

by Mark Adams

When did the Stalkerazzi replace Britany, Lindsay and Paris with Ted Kennedy?

Helicopters outside the guy's home? Really?

The great question of the day being, "Can he go sailing?"

Ugh!

If you're not reading MSNBC's Chuck Todd every day, you're missing a lot:

• The calendar’s influence: Would Clinton have won California, Florida and Michigan by the margins she did had those primaries been held after Super Tuesday (February 5)? Same for South Carolina: would Obama's blowout have captured everyone's imagination the same way if that primary had happened on the same day as all the other primaries of Super Tuesday?
• Veepstakes: Dems pick Chuck Hagel; GOP picks Joe Lieberman? Stranger things have happened.
• The magic numbers: Speaking of VPs, is it possible that the last vital chunk of superdelegates that Obama needs will delay endorsing until they receive his assurance that he'll pick Hillary as his VP? [see Update, below.]
• That Kennedy brand: First Edwards was the new Bobby Kennedy. Then Obama was the new Jack Kennedy. Is it now possible that Hillary will be the new Ted Kennedy?
• A tale of two states: Obama doesn’t have a problem with white working-class voters (e.g., Oregon). Instead, he has a problem with white-working class voters in Appalachian states...like Kentucky.

And this was all just this morning. Seriously, you have to read this guy. He's very good.

UPDATE: Going back to that third bullet point above about Hillary and the superdelegates...I have no idea whether there are enough supers that can block Obama and shill for Hillary, but let's (for a moment) say there were. If you were Obama, and you had a choice between having Hillary on the outside of the tent, um, spitting in or Hillary on the inside spitting out, which one would you choose? Remember: two-thirds of all vice presidents never ascended to the presidency. In other words, what better way to neutralize her ambition than by putting her on the ticket? And another thing -- while it's good to keep your friends close, what you really need to do is keep your enemies closer.

Food for thought.

What do you think?

• According to the NY Times, the Obama campaign raised over $31 million in April -- and has $37 million in cash on hand.
• According to the LA Times, the Clinton campaign is nearly $20 million in debt even after raising $22 million in April, one of her best months.
• According to MSNBC, McCain ($22 million) plus the RNC ($40 million) has more cash on hand than Obama ($37 million) plus the DNC ($4.5 million) has.
• No word from the Republicans on how bad it sucks to be the NRCC and the NRSC.
• Hillary wins Kentucky in a blowout, now needs only 104% of all remaining unpledged delegates to secure the nomination. Terry McAuliffe is optimistic.
• In other news, the price of oil topped $130/barrel for the first time on Wednesday.






• And last, but not least, the Detroit Pistons claimed victory last night in the first game of the Eastern Conference Finals when they outscored the Boston Celtics in the fourth quarter, 22-19. Unfortunately, the referees insisted on counting the scores of the other three quarters as well and the Celtics got the nomination...erm, won the game.

Joe Klein (inadvertantly?) exposes McCain's stubborn ignorance about Iran:

KLEIN: The Supreme, you know, according to most diplomatic experts, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is the guy who's in charge of Iranian foreign policy and also in charge of the nuclear program, but you never mention him. Do you, you know, um, why do you always keep talking about Ahmadinejad since he doesn't have power in that, in that realm?


MCCAIN: Oh I thin-Again, I respectfully disagree. When he's the person that comes to the United Nations and declares his country's policy is the extermination of the state of Israel, quote, in his words, wipe them off of the map, then I know that he is speaking for the Iranian government and articulating their policy and he was elected and is running for reelection as the leader of that country. Yes sir, go ahead.


KLEIN: One more quest-


MCCAIN: I mean, the fact is he's the acknowledged leader of that country and you may disagree, but that's a uh, that's your right to do so, but I think if you asked any average American who the leader of Iran is, I think they'd know...

Ask 'em ... and if they gave that answer, they'd be wrong. And it would be up to a John McCain, someone "experienced in foreign policy," to correct them. If he could. Which he apparently cannot.

I don't know what's worse: McCain's pandering flip-flops or his sheer, seemingly willful, ignorance. Too bad he didn't have Joe Lieberman standing next to him to whisper the correct answer into his ear.

• So McCain's campaign is being run by agents of a foreign government -- including the Saudis. No, I'm not making this up.
• Hillary Clinton wants you to know that Karl Rove thinks she'd be the toughest candidate vs. McCain in November. No, I'm not making this up.
• No, seriously: Karl Rove said it and Hillary believed it.
• Apparently the White House is mad that NBC somehow edited their interview with Bush in a way that made them unhappy. NBC responded that the unedited version has been available on the MSNBC website. Bush counsel Ed Gillespie responds: "It's simply absurd for people to have to log onto the Internet and stream video to get accurate information from NBC News." Yes! And I think everyone should receive a brand new TV remote from the government too. Those old ones that you and I own have waaaaay too many buttons.
• Pistons vs. Celtics tonight, baby! And the Red Wings playing for the Stanley Cup again! How cool is that?
• And, lastly, I've tweaked my blog's layout to eliminate some ads. It (may or) may not reduce the ad revenues and/but will make the blog easier to read. I've also increased the number of posts on the front page. Lastly, I'll be adding a "Favorite Videos" sidebar. If you have some suggestions please post them in the comments section. Thanks!

I have a pet theory about electability that holds true for all presidential elections reaching back to 1900: whoever wins a majority of the 10 states bordering the Mississippi River wins the election.

Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi.

Will it hold true this year? I have no idea. So many of these traditional rules no longer apply -- e.g., to win the presidency you have to win the New Hampshire primary. This year we're hearing a lot about the importance of West Virginia to Democratic nominees for president. In prior years we've heard a similar admonition about the importance of Ohio to Republican nominees.

Recently I read Kevin Hayden's "electability analysis" that considered the most recent polls in each state. Let's use that yardstick to analyze the Mississippi River basin states. Caution: we're so far out from November (or even August) that the polls today might be meaningless.

That said...

• Of those 10 states, Obama is ahead by double digits in two: Illinois and Minnesota.
• McCain is ahead by double digits in five: Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Kentucky and Tennessee.
• Obama is ahead by single digits in one: Iowa


• McCain is ahead by single digits in two: Missouri and Wisconsin

So, as it stands now, the region breaks for McCain, 7-3. Clearly, Obama has his work cut out for him.

Which states can Obama pick off to at least get to 6-4?

• Well, Missouri and Wisconsin are the obvious targets. And how about them Razorbacks? Can Arkansas be convinced to vote for Obama (with or without Hillary on the ticket?)
• Kentucky is probably a lost cause but Tennessee is doable -- and Gov. Phil Bredesen has been my stealth pick for VP from the get-go.
• Louisiana and Mississippi have been in the news recently (with the election of Childers and my new Congressman, Cazayoux) but I seriously doubt either state votes for Obama in the end.

In summary: Obama needs three of the following four states -- AR, TN, MO, WI -- to make it to the White House. Can Obama pull it off? Or is this, at least, the year when the region breaks for the loser?

What's your take on it?

UPDATE: The notion of Bill Clinton tooling around the back roads of Arkansas making speeches off the bed of a pickup truck, begging for absolution, appeals to me at this point. How about you? Think he'd do it? Nah. Me neither.

by Mark Adams

... to fight for Obama and to make my dream come true of appointing John Edwards as Attorney General ... it would drive Jonah Goldberg off the edge.

... the suggestion that John Edwards would be even considered for Attorney General is horrifying. I really can't think of any mainstream political figure more inappropriate for that job than Edwards.

See, since the day Edwards bowed out of the race, I couldn't think of anyone MORE appropriate for the AG job -- and now I know my instincts were spot-on.

Seriously, can you think of someone who has been more stupid, more wrong about more things than the guy who made the absurd notion that fascism is a phenomenon of the Left the running joke of Blogtopia? [Y!Sctp!]

If this is what it will take to keep the Doughy Pantload awake at night, quaking in his pee-stained footie PJ's, I'm all the more for it.

In fact, I can think of a fairly long list of bed-wetters who should lose sleep with John Edwards in charge of the Justice Department, starting with this fool.

I just took The Bush-McCain Challenge -- an online quiz to see if you can tell the difference between George W. Bush and John McCain. I got 2 out of 5 questions right. Check it out, and see if you can do any better than I did.

Then watch the video as a scientist examines the phenomenon of McCain's indistinguishability from Bush:

One of the arguments I often get into with my Republican friends (and also with my friends who are backing Hillary) is that Obama is all about...well, here's how one of them put it (I'll let you guess if it was a Republican or a Hillary Democrat):

Obama's campaign is just a gauzy message about change and a new politics. What the hell is THAT, exactly? Sounds like a marketing message.

Well, funny you should mention that.

Successful marketing messages are designed to trigger emotions in people. And that idea is so ingrained in our culture that I hardly think it necessary to elaborate further on it. Similarly, arguing pro or con on this is a discussion better left for another day.

Instead, let's stipulate that all presidential campaigns, starting with the very first presidential campaign ever, have always been about triggering emotions. This is simply because emotions move people. Whether that emotion is fear ... or hope... a campaign lives and dies on emotions.

So it should not be a surprise that marketing and politics have gone hand in hand since the beginning of the republic.

Now, don't get me wrong: policies and ideas are crucially important. But this isn't a zero-sum game. Too many candidates think in terms of either-or.

I'm sure you can think of many examples of the candidate who looks down their nose at an opponent who is "nothing but words and speeches." Similarly, we can think of plenty of candidates who deride their opponent for relying on "fuzzy math."

As in all things, moderation is in order. You need a balance of inspiration and ideas. You can't fall into the trap of thinking one is better than the other.

What you MUST recognize, however, is that inspiration comes first -- then intellect. Policies matter, but only insofar as they trigger emotional associations for (or against) a candidate or his/her party.

In other words, a candidate cannot expect a series of whitepapers or policy positions to motivate their followers to vote for them. A campaign must first make an emotional connection with its followers to be successful.

So let's take stock in where we are at this stage of the campaign:

Hillary failed because she discovered (too late) that her substantial policy positions weren't enough to ignite an intense and lasting emotional connection with the electorate. And her (unstated?) assertion of entitlement to the office didn't move enough voters in her direction either.

And if McCain fails to win the White House, it will be because he is neither an idea man nor an inspirational figure at all. He is simply a follower -- a follower of Reagan, a follower of Bush, a follower of party othodoxy, a follower of whatever he thinks it will take to win him the nomination and the election.

You can see it in the way he flip-flops so much. He was for negotiating with Hamas before he was against it, etc. etc.

In summary: if a candidate fails to ignite those emotional fires, people will be apathetic and the candidate will fail because apathetic people do not organize, they do not give money -- and they certainly do not vote.

by Mark Adams

by Mark Adams

Avendon reminded me of one of the Raisons d'Entre for the continuation of Hillary Clinton's campaign:

"I think she's running all the bases," I said. "She's the first woman in history to win a state primary, and she's won a lot more. She's running pretty close to the front-runner. It's a major historic moment." And the more I think about it, the more I think it has to be part of what's driving her. There's a bit of climbing the mountain because it's there, and wanting to be able to stand up in the end and say something like, "Never let it be said that a woman can't go the distance." It doesn't matter if someone else breaks the tape, just as long as she finishes the race. (And think how she'd feel if something did happen before Denver to tank Obama and she hadn't.) I've been unhappy with a lot of things about Hillary, but there's a part of me that kind of admires that. Because she wouldn't just be doing that for herself - she's doing it for every little girl who was ever told she can't.

Now that reminded me of something awkwardly pointed out by her husband -- Barack Obama wasn't the first black man to win a State's presidential primary; and this historical situation was elaborated upon by an even blunter instrument in the form of Chris Matthews -- black men we granted the vote via the 15th Amendment fully 50 years before women were enfranchised via the 19th Amendment.

From an historical perspective, Hillary has already accomplished more politically than any woman before her. There will be more, a lot more who follow the trail she's blazed. Obama has done more than any black man who came before him, but only marginally unless and until he accepts the nomination at the Democratic Convention. At that point, it can be said that both reached threshholds of truly historic proportions.

And that's saying something folks.

And we're going to do a lot better than that with the assclowns the GOP has put up for the sacrifice.

by Mark Adams

Not quite, but this is certainly movement in the right direction.

Today, about 100 House Republicans refused to vote for more war funding, voting 'present'. They are trying to hand off the war to the Democrats, but even Democrats were able to increase their 'no' vote number on funding from 141 to 149; the bill failed. In a separate bill, Republicans also voted against timelines, for torture, and accountability for military contractors, including various elements of a Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq. This bill passed with 227 votes; last year, it passed with only 218 votes, for a gain of 9.

Finally the GI bill passed with overwhelming margin of 256 votes in the House, including 32 Republicans. It included a war surtax of one half of one percent on people making over $500k a year to pay for the GI bill, at the behest of Blue Dogs. This might actually be the most remarkable piece of the votes today; conservative Democrats agreeing to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for educational benefits for veterans.

It's nice to know that Congress has finally discovered it controls the purse-strings, even if it hasn't figured out how they're supposed to use them.

We've been assured by Matt Stoller that the Senate will put money for Baghdad bullets back in the bill and give the C+ Augustus enough cash to pay for more mayhem in Mesopotamia. I'm not sure how that works since the Constitution states that all revenue bills must originate in the House, not the Senate. But who pays attention to that quaint old document anymore.

All of this is begging another veto by the time it gets to the White House. And of course, that's all part of the game I guess. The sad reality is that this game costs lives every single day it plays out.

I found this item from Greg Sargent to be very interesting and perhaps with very large consequences down the line: ...

A few weeks ago, Media Matters' David Brock announced to great fanfare that he was taking over Progressive Media USA, a third-party group that would, he vowed, raise $40 million for ads to soften up John McCain in advance of the general election.

Now the group is quietly shuttering those efforts with barely a whimper.

Barack Obama's fundraising team has been quietly putting out word to major donors that they didn't want any money to go to such third-party groups. Instead, they wanted the cash to go to the Obama campaign, so Obama advisers could be in sole control of the campaign's message.

It's a bold move on the part of the Obama campaign. No guarantee that it'll work to his benefit. On the face of it seems counter-intuitive. But I appreciate the risk he's taking -- it could pay off big.

• It basically reinforces his message that he's not part of the same old politics, e.g., smearing your opponent by standing by the side of the road while someone else does it.
• Also, by giving his campaign all the money to control, it makes his megaphone that much bigger.
• Lastly, it highlights the difference between him and St. John McCain on campaign finance reform. Essentially it highlights the fact that McCain skirting the law that has his own name on it.

P.S. David Brock is probably the closest thing our generation has to producing our own Whittaker Chambers. Look it up and tell me if I'm not right.

UPDATE: Biden calls BULLSHIT!

I don't recall Barack Obama offering Osama bin Laden the Sudetenland (or a slice of the Afghan/Pakistan border). Did anyone catch Obama offering Hamas any Israeli territory in exchange for peace, or Hezbollah their own section of Lebanon to call their own?

No.

The fact is, Obama has said exactly the opposite:

"Obama and McCain have the same position on Hamas —no talks, no recognition, no outreach."

But mere facts have never, ever prevented George Bush and his crime family from creating a myth out of whole cloth and fighting the strawman with every ounce of venom their being.

It's not just that George Bush implied the Democrats are no better than Nazi appeasers with this bit of nonsense (via) before the Israeli Knesset ...

Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided." We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

Some people suggest that if the United States would just break ties with Israel, all our problems in the Middle East would go away. This is a tired argument that buys into the propaganda of our enemies, and America rejects it utterly. Israel's population may be just over 7 million. But when you confront terror and evil, you are 307 million strong, because America stands with you.

... it is an outright lie!

Unless the Dickhead in Chief is talking about Ron Paul, no legitimate office seeker in this country wants to break ties with Israel. No one is trying to appease, or psychoanalyze, or give aid and comfort to extremists and terrorists -- unless you count John McCain sucking up to homophobic, bigoted preachers ... or listening to Don Rumsfeld's solution for using terror to increase GOP loyalty.

Jacki Schechner nails it:

Why is it we can't just call it like it is? White, uneducated, poor voters in West Virginia don't identify with the suburban-raised, Wellesley and Yale Law educated former First Lady and Senator from "the big city." A majority voted for Clinton because she's white. Or to be even more blunt, because she's not black.

I know anchors, reporters, and pundits can't come right out and say it - as Stewart spent 5 minutes pointing out [see below] - but I don't know why. Racism is shameful and the behavior of ignorant, close-minded people. We may be hesitant to label someone a racist, but if someone won't vote for a black man because he's black, then guess what? Here's your nametag, Princess Bigot.

Yours too, K-Whitey.

I actually think pretending otherwise is a problem. Maybe if people didn't think it was acceptable to hate based on race, we'd spread a little good. Ignoring the issue isn't going to make it disappear.

Euphemisms only perpetuate the myth that we're somehow past the ugly, naked truth. And the results from Tuesday's primary - where many poor, uneducated, white folks voted for the millionaire white woman because they saw no viable alternative - prove we are buried deeper in the racist muck than anyone in the media cares - or dares - to admit.

Here's The Daily Show video Schechner is talking about. Watch it now -- it's the most honest (and funniest) 8 minutes of campaign coverage you're bound to see on any news channel, fake or otherwise.

This blog has rarely, if ever, been plagued by trolls -- rude commenters who hang around insulting people. Honestly, I don't get that much traffic here (or comments) which is OK. I cross-post elsewhere in blogville where the traffic is higher and that works for me.

Anyway, I recently came across a good solution that stops rude people from spouting off in the comments section. It's a procedure called "disemvoweling:"

In the fields of Internet discussion and forum moderation, disemvoweling (also spelled disemvowelling), which appears to model the word disemboweling, is the removal of vowels from text either as a method of self-censorship, or as a technique by forum moderators to censor unwanted posting, such as spam, internet trolling or rudeness. The net effect of disemvoweling text is to render it illegible or legible only through significant cognitive effort, thus suppressing unwanted comments and discouraging such comments from being made in future.

Regarding the use of disemvoweling to police internet blog comment sections, Xeni Jardin, co-editor of Boing Boing, says of the practice, "the dialogue stays, but the misanthrope looks ridiculous, and the emotional sting is neutralized." Also, Boing Boing producers claim that disemvoweling sends a clear message to internet forums as to what behavior is unacceptable.

"...legible only through significant cognitive effort...A clear message...the misanthrope looks ridiculous...behavior is unacceptable." I like it.

So, for example, this...

It appears you didn't know what Dean did. So the correction was needed. As to the rest...I'm here talking to you while you fled with your tail between your legs. You can't take it, I can.

...becomes this:

t pprs y ddn't knw wht Dn dd. S th crrctn ws ndd. s t th rst...'m hr tlkng t y whl y fld wth yr tl btwn yr lgs. Y cn't tk t, cn.

Disemvoweling is attractive to me because nothing is hidden and everything is transparent -- no wholesale re-writing of comment content, no hidden hanky panky, etc. -- and no comments are deleted nor are any commenters banned.

There's even a simple web app that automates the process. Anyway, I'm seriously considering instituting this as a policy.

What do you think?

JET SKIES BITCHES!

Rosemary Watson does a better Hillary than Amy Poehler!

by Mark Adams

The Queen is feeling oppressed, upset about a wingnut welfare program for conservative scholars (an oxy-moron if ever there was one) and calls it "Affirmative Action".

Affirmative Action is something that should slowly lessen as the struggle for equality among minorities and women increases. We should not be looking to create more "oppressed" people.

I really thought she was a better writer than that. But then again I don't think her head is completely in the game.

See, if the struggle increases, that means it's more difficult, not less, for women and minorities to achieve parity with their white-male overlords. Get it?

I know, we all understand what she thinks she means. But words mean things.

As for blaming liberals for oppression of conservatives ... you only have yourselves to blame. If you feel oppressed now, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Get used to it.

by Mark Adams

Nothing to see here, nothing at all.

Just remember two things. The Catholic League's pompous leader, the homophobic Bill Donohue (last seen running bloggers off of John Edwards' campaign) is a partisan hack who will forgive anything if it gets more Republicans in office, or more face-time for him on Teh TeeVee. But he doesn't speak for anyone but himself.

Second ... IOKIYAR.

by Mark Adams

3 out of 4 House seats are now in the Democratic Party's hands!

With 89% of the precincts reporting Democrat Travis Childers won Mississippi's 1st District 52% to 48% in this traditional GOP stronghold. This is the third Republican district to embrace the Democrats in as many months, Robo-calls by the President and Laura Bush or John McCain couldn't save it, a surprise appearance by Dick Cheney couldn't save it.

Not even race baiting comparisons to Barack Obama worked there, unlike what seems to have happened in West By God -- which evidently still prides itself on it's bigotry despite owing its very existence to a rejection of the break-away slave-owning Confederacy.

If I were an aid to a Republican politician, one thing I'd set aside time to do this summer is updating my resume.  It's going to be bleak for these folks.

by Mark Adams

It's one thing to argue politics, but dealing with an unrepentant racist has it's limits. Racism is not an ideology, it is not a phenomenon of the right or left in this country. It's born of ignorance, hate and loathing.

I really thought we'd seen the last of the crap on Her Majesty's blog since her boyfriend hadn't poked out his ugly head in a while. Much to my chagrin, the same day I check back after a week of being too busy to hang out there, this insufferable pig is back with his top ten reasons everyone with a sense of decency should merely avoid and shun him as well that blog he's ruined unless and until his sickness is treated -- preferably by amputation.

Anyway, that's how I see it. I know a couple of folks already have exiled themselves, and this seems to be the place to be.

So sound off fellow exiles. This time it's not us that got banned, but we banned the SPoDEish blog itself.

[Sorry Ara, but the peoiple have spoken and we like you better! --> IWH]

• Playing out the string: Chuck Todd has it right when he says, "Perhaps the best way to think of today’s West Virginia primary is like the final football game of the regular season, which really won’t impact the teams headed to the playoffs."
• Clinton backers raise the bar, predicting an 80-20 margin or even 90-10. So...anything less is a disappointment, or what?
• Over the past week, Obama has gained nearly enough superdelegates to nearly equal the number of delegates at stake in West Virginia.
• McCain's recent speech on climate change (Monday in Oregon) was well-received but his proposals are pretty flaccid. His cap-and-trade specs are weaker than Obama/Clinton and even weaker than Lieberman/Warner. Then there's the historical fact that candidate Bush proposed limiting CO2 emissions in 2000 then dropped it as soon as he got elected.
• Is it only a matter of time before the Republicans Photoshop Barack Obama and disgraced and indicted Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick into a negative YouTube video -- whether he's still a superdelegate or not?
• And last but not least, our buddy Renee is freaking out with only four days to go before she hauls herself and her entire family to France and Finland for six weeks. If you've got any suggestions for "how to pack light," head over and leave a comment. She's open to just about any idea you've got.

• For those of you curious about how exactly Obama could help pay off Hillary's $20 million debt without breaking the law and/or draining his own treasury, it works like this (HT to Walter Shapiro): he asks his own maxed-out, high-rolling contributors (those who have given the maximum-allowable $2300) to contribute the same amount to Hillary's campaign. No muss, no fuss.
• Speaking of ways to end a campaign: Ben Smith comes up with 6 different exit strategies for Hillary Clinton. Number two is my favorite:

Extract a job: Clinton still has leverage. Every day she’s in the race, she reminds the media of Obama’s weaknesses with some voters and drives what threatens to become a self-fulfilling narrative about his inability to connect to working-class white voters. Bill Clinton, meanwhile, is roaming rural America, stoking the same resentments Republicans hope to use against Obama in the fall. It’s a kind of political protection racket, and she can try to force Obama to offer her something to make it stop...

• Another special election happens tomorrow in MS-01 when Democrat Travis Childers and Republican Greg Davis square off on the ballot Tuesday. Childers narrowly missed winning the election outright on April 22 when he got 49.4% of the vote in a southern congressional district that is about as Republican as you can get. All eyes are on Mississippi to see if the Dems can pull off the same sort of upset they got in LA-06 (my home district) when Democrat Don Cazayoux beat Republican Woody JenKKKins.
• Bad news for Republicans: Obama and Clinton are beating McCain in the latest LA Times/Bloomberg poll. And as bad as that is for McCain, the internals show something far worse:

• More than three-quarters of voters said they believed the economy was in a recession... [A]mong the 78% of voters who said they believe the economy has slid into a recession, 52% would vote for Obama, compared with 32% for McCain.

• And in a related story, Rasmussen shows that North Carolina and Virginia would be a jump ball between Obama and McCain if the general election were held today.
• That said, West Virginia will not be going for Barack Obama on Tuesday...or in November.
• I have a feeling this video of Bill O'Reilly melting down (Warning: language NSFW) will turn up on Olbermann's 'cast. It's from his "Inside Edition" days...when he had hair. Boo-yah!

• Most intriguing solution to the Michigan and Florida mess: whatever else you do with the delegates, you make sure the stupid superdelegates who screwed this up do not get a vote at the convention. Yes, that's right Debbie Dingell -- no soup for you.

I think I told you about one of my favorite political cartoons from Tom Toles. It's somewhat dated, but only in the sense that the chickens have already come home to roost:

First panel: India, where people are sitting in cubicles designing software
Second panel: China, where people are in a factory manufacturing cars
Third panel: US, where a really fat guy is sitting before a bank loan officer saying, "I want refinance my mortgage so I can buy more stuff."

Now this:

The Iraq war, says economist Joseph Stiglitz, is “the first U.S. war financed entirely on credit.” When the war started, the Bush administration said it would cost no more than $60 billion. But the U.S. budget was already in deficit, so the administration had to borrow money to finance the invasion. About 40 percent of the money was borrowed from China and other international investors—the first time since the Revolutionary War that foreigners financed a U.S. war.

At the same time, the administration and Congress lowered taxes instead of raising them, as is customary in wartime The Federal Reserve kept interest rates low, which encouraged middle-class Americans to go on a consumption binge financed by credit cards and home-equity loans. Today, say Stiglitz and other economists, the bills for the country’s spending spree are starting to come due, in the form of higher prices, a weakened dollar, and lower living standards. “There’s no such thing as a free war,” Stiglitz said. “The U.S.—and the world—will be paying the price for decades to come.”

I've often said that the entire Republican orthodoxy has led us to a point in time where they want to reduce taxes to zero and borrow the entire cost of running the government -- from China. If we can hire private contractors to do it (e.g., Newt's proposal to hand it over to Fedex) so much the better -- then shareholders (the elites of The Ownership Society) will finally call all the shots. Never mind "one person, one vote." In The Ownership Society, it's "ten thousand dollars, ten thouand votes.

That's what I think this election should be about.

• Last night's results illustrate exactly why I find it not advisable to make predictions about margins of victory. The CW was that Hillary would win big in Indiana and win (or lose) a squeaker in North Carolina. So much for that.
• Winners and losers: Kos recaps the various polls and pollsters' projections.
• Bill from Portland Maine nails it: "The race is over. For the sake of unity, Hillary and Barack will be co-presidents. Blueprints for a second White House will be revealed shortly and we'll need another Air Force One plus a backup. Cheney insists he'll remain vice president because he now transcends the reach of the United States government."
• Speaking of right-wing nutjobs, was Rush Limbaugh the one person most responsible for Hillary's victory in Indiana?
• And speaking of Hillary, she has loaned her campaign over $11 million so far. That equals the sum total of all her royalties from the books she has written. And is it true that (as a condition of her dropping out) she is negotiating with Obama's campaign to pay off that debt?

UPDATE: Sorry -- couldn't resist one last sod:

• Ana Marie: [O]n this morning's HRC conference call, Geoff Garin had this spin regarding the campaign's North Carolina 14 point loss: "We lost the white electorate in Virginia, started even in North Carolina among the white electorate just two weeks ago, and ended [with] a very significant win of 24 points among those voters." He called this shift -- you know, the white people deciding to vote for the white person -- "progress." Right. Now, if only there was a way to make white votes count for more than the black ones...

Ouch.

I have no desire to predict what will happen in Indiana and North Carolina today. Pollsters (and political minds greater than my own) have ventured their opinions and predictions. Kos, who at least admits that he pulls his predictions out of his you-know-what, has consolidated a bunch of predictions in this diary. It's worth a read. Bottom line: CW says each candidate gets a win and the delegates are split more or less 50-50.

MSNBC's Chuck Todd, whose numbers-crunching skills someone likened to Data the android on Star Trek, rightfully points out that tonight's returns will be the last ones where the voters decide how the majority of delegates left on the table will be divvied up. After this, says Todd, most of the delegates will be apportioned via backroom deals (e.g., super-delegates) and/or trench warfare (e.g., fights over how to seat Florida/Michigan).

Meanwhile, on the Republican side, Newt Gingrich predicts disaster for Congressional Republicans unless they abandon hopes of sinking the Democratic Congressional candidates by tying Obama or Clinton around their necks. His suggestion? Why nothing short of a new bullet-point list of initiatives -- a contract, if you will, with the American people. What a concept!

This document (which needs a catchy title -- I propose "A Dog's Breakfast for America") would include the following initiatives:

1. Repeal the gas tax for the summer
2. Redirect the oil being put into the national petroleum reserve onto the open market.
3. Introduce a "more energy at lower cost with less environmental damage and greater national security" bill
4. Establish an earmark moratorium for one year
5. Overhaul the census and cut its budget radically
6. Implement a space-based, GPS-style air traffic control system
7. Declare English the official language of government
8. Protect the workers' right to a secret ballot
9. Remind Americans that judges matter

My favorite? GPS-style air traffic control system: now there's a proposal that will capture a lot of votes -- from people who want their own personal jet-pack. The whole thing reminds me of the time Bush announced in his SOTU that we were going to ... Mars!

And of course, I love that part about reminding the American people that "judges matter," although I suspect that won't include FISA Court judges.

And WTF is up with the Census Bureau proposal? Turns out, it's part of this meme that says we should just turn the whole Federal bureaucracy over to ... Fedex! I heard McCain say the same thing about giving the contract to Fedex to track population migration after the next major hurricane or forest fire. Sounds good, but you just KNOW that Fedex will probably outsource it or -- worse yet -- double the price and cut their expenses to the point where the only happy people would be Fedex shareholders.

No thanks -- at least when the government does it, you can throw their asses out of office if they screw it up by voting against them. On the other hand, Fedex is simply not accountable. For example, you can't vote against Fedex unless you own shares in the company. And then if you have 100 shares you're simply not as powerful as the guy who owns 10,000 shares.

That's what I call Republican Values: One Dollar, One Vote.

Recently I asked a question that needs to be answered in the context of our health care debate: Given that the majority of health care dollars are spent on people in the last stages of their lives, shouldn't we be talking about who gets to decide whether or not Grandpa gets "life-saving" treatment?

We'll be reading more about this as time goes, but now, this question has come up in the context of disaster planning in the event of an influenza pandemic:

Doctors know some patients needing lifesaving care won't get it in a flu pandemic or other disaster. The gut-wrenching dilemma will be deciding who to let die.

Now, an influential group of physicians has drafted a grimly specific list of recommendations for which patients wouldn't be treated. They include the very elderly, seriously hurt trauma victims, severely burned patients and those with severe dementia.

The wealthiest among us will always have access to what they want and need -- nothing new there. But in order to create a safety net for the rest of us, this is a question that will not have any easy answers.

So let's frame the question before someone does it for us. It comes down to this, IMHO:

Which do you want?

A) A for-profit corporation (answerable to its shareholders) deciding who lives and dies?

B) A not-for-profit government entity (answerable to the voters) deciding who lives and dies?

Anyone want to take a crack at this?

There's a Saturday election today in my home district -- Louisiana's 6th. Dems are very confident they can pick off another GOP-held seat, that formerly won by Richard Baker who abandoned the district to become a million dollar lobbyist.

Republicans are using this special election as a way of gaging how (if) they should use Obama as a negative against Democrats. I can tell you that the last 72 hours has seen virtual carpet-bombing of political ads from both candidates -- Democrat Don Cazayoux and Republican Woody JenKKKins. And, no, that wasn't a typo in JenKKKins' name -- he's widely recognized as a buddy of David Duke.

This is the third election to fill the seat. The first one was the (closed) primary in which Miss Julie and I worked for our friend Andy Kopplin. Then there was the run-off between Cazayoux and state representative Michael Jackson. And now the special election itself. I can tell you that we've voted for three different candidates to get to this point. And there is another set of elections come November. Louisiana loves them some elections!

Speaking of Rep. Jackson, there is some talk that he will urge his black constituency to stay home today and come out for him when (if) he runs as an independent in November. By running as an independent, he can avoid the Democratic primary and just show up on the ballot without the extra election. If they follow his lead, Cazayoux might very well lose today -- and the Democrats could lose a primo opportunity to flip the district.

Adding to the interest is the fact that if Cazayoux loses, the Clinton campaign will use this as proof that Obama can't help down-ticket candidates in the general election come November.

UPDATE: Cazayoux wins!

Is there a housecat alive that, considering the alternatives, didn't feel like s/he hit the Lotto?

I mean, does it get any better than this?

Once the campaign begins and the Dems have a candidate, the hot lights of scrutiny will move over to include McCain -- and he'll be peeled open like a soft peanut.

His weak point -- among many -- will be that he (and somehow the American people) are OK if we're in Iraq for 100 years, or 1,000 years or 10,000 years.

Go ahead and argue the point, Sen. McSame -- nuance is such an effective campaign strategy.

The latest poll from NBC/WSJ bears out the fundamental weakness of McCain's campaign: people see him as Bush III -- and they don't like it one bit:

In the survey, 43 percent of registered voters say they have major concerns that McCain is too closely aligned with the current administration.

By comparison:

• 36 percent have major concerns that Clinton seems to change her position on some issues (like driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants and the North American Free Trade Agreement, which her husband signed but which she now opposes)
• 34 percent say they’re bothered by Obama’s "bitter" remarks
• 32 percent have a major problem with the Illinois senator’s past associations with Wright and the 1960s radical William Ayers
• 27 percent have serious concerns that Bill Clinton would have too much influence on U.S. policy decisions if his wife is elected

This ad from the DNC is already running in swing states (and even Louisiana -- I saw it the other night):

...and it joins this one, being run by MoveOn: