America should belong to her cities

I've certainly posted about it before, but I still doubt most people recognize how big a deal urbanization is, economically and politically, around the world but also in the U.S.

For instance, consider the complexity and difficulty of being the Governor of Nevada (pop. 3 million), Kansas (2.9 million), New Mexico (2 million), Nebraska (1.9 million), Idaho (1.7 million), North and South Dakota (1.7 million, combined), Wyoming (586,000), versus the job of being Mayor of New York City (8.6 million - 24 million in the metro area), Los Angeles (4 million - 18.7 million in the metro area), Chicago (2.7 million - 9.4 million in the metro area), Houston, (2.3 million - 6.5 million in the metro area), Philadelphia (1.6 million - 6 million metro), Phoenix (1.6 million - 4.2 million metro), San Antonio (1.5 million - 2.2 metro), or San Diego (1.4 million - 3.1 million metro).

So any one of these cities is larger than a handful of U.S. states.

The annual GDP of the New York and Los Angeles metro areas is about $1 trillion each! Compare that to VP Mike Pence's home state of Indiana, with a GDP in 2016 of $3.5 billion. There's really no comparison.

On top of that, consider that as many as 800 languages are spoken in New York City. Over 200 languages in Los Angeles.

Consider all the diverse people packed together in cities who have to find a way to get along with one another. Tolerance of multiculturalism in these cities isn't a liberal fetish -- it's a matter of survival, a fact of life.

Moreover, every major U.S. city votes Democratic in national elections. We don't have a Red/Blue state divide; we have an urban/rural divide. Even in the Red state of Texas, Houston, Dallas and San Antonio voted overwhelmingly for Hillary in 2016. It wasn't even close.

The U.S. is becoming two different countries: urban and rural. This is not what our Founding Fathers or the Federalist Papers anticipated. Even in rural/Red states, we have urban centers who vote solidly Democratic. That matters in Presidential and governors races, but not in state or federal congressional races.

Hence, the people representing the fewest and most rural have outsized, un-representative influence over our politics at the state and federal level.

I predict that liberals and Democrats will become the new Federalists, preaching the government closest to the people should have the most power, because cities are where all the people are, and the most diverse, well-educated, innovative and liberal people are. Also the wealthiest. The math and demographics are unassailable. America belongs to her cities. Or ought to.

Letter to Uncle T. on BENGHAZI!

Uncle T.,
How can a lawyer say that incompetence (not negligence) is a crime?  Mind you, I'm not accusing anybody of incompetence.  Hindsight is 20/20.

Another good test of whether it's a kooky conspiracy theory or a real scandal is try to avoid using the pronoun "they."  Can you do that when you explain Benghazi?  

The GOP Congress slashed the State Department's diplomatic security budget by $500 million, i.e. Congress appropriated less money than Obama asked for. Hillary warned Boehner back in 2011 that such cuts would hurt national security.  If you want to find fault, start there.

Regarding threats -- duh!  There's a reason DOS personnel in Libya get danger pay... because it's dangerous!  U.S. personnel were in a conflict zone where al Qaeda affiliates were known to operate.  Then again, why did Congress cut DOS's budget?  We also got threats before 9/11 that Rice and Bush apparently ignored. Criminal incompetence... or nothing concrete enough to act on?  Be fair.

Next, the military commanders on the ground -- you know, those guys that politicians are never supposed to question -- decided not to scramble jets or send in FAST commandos from Spain during those 2 days. Was that the right decision? I don't know. But it was their decision. It wasn't a political decision.  Are you saying that SecDef Panetta, General Ham and General Dempsey at AFRICOM should be held accountable for "criminal" incompetence?  Remember Panetta's words: "the basic principle here… is that you don't deploy forces into harm's way without knowing what's going on; without having some real-time information about what's taking place."  They didn't know so they didn't send in commandos.  

Here's the Benghazi timeline sent by Panetta to the House Armed Services Committee.

Next, what happened after.  Talking points for a Sunday talk show one week after. OMG, that's important.  I mean, that's like testifying under oath.  And that was when we still didn't know who carried out the attack.  We STILL DON'T KNOW.  Yet it was terribly important for the Right to call it a "terrorist" attack by al-Qaeda.  Why?  I don't know.  What difference does it make?  Apparently it makes all the difference, even though those people will still be dead.  (By the way, how many times did Cheney and Rice go on Sunday talk shows saying Saddam had WMD, ignoring all the evidence that he didn't have any? No crime, no incompetence there? Remind yourself here.)  

Next, there was no cover-up about security. The State Dept. did its own investigation.  Congress has read the partly classified report and has not disputed its findings.  The report did not say the video was the cause of the attack; they said most likely some planning had gone into it, but it was an opportunistic strike.  No cover-up there.

Next, this deputy mission chief Hicks says he is being mistreated for "blowing the whistle," although he still has a job at the same level of pay.  The State Dept. is not allowed to comment on his employment status since it's a personal matter.  So the lawyer in you should wonder what the other side of the story is.  By law, we cannot hear it.  

So, in all the above, tell me who did what wrong and how it rises to the level of a cover-up or even a criminal act. Be specific, counselor!

Here is a liberal take on what the State Dept. & White House did wrong.  

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[ I have cleaned up Uncle T's spelling and grammar a bit. - J ] 

My how you play word games. Since when is it not a cover up if only incompetence is involved and not a crime. (The little Democratic soldier marches on, with blinders always in place, no matter what the facts are).

The facts are that there was a specific warning given to the State Dept. (and possibly Secy. of State Hillary Clinton) of increased activity indicating the real possibility of a planned terrorist attack. The State Dept./ Clinton's response was to ignore the warning.

The Benghazi embassy then specifically requested increased security due to the known warnings and known increased terrorist activity.  The State Dept./ Clinton's response was to deny same.

It is overwhelming evidence that you NEVER let the facts get in the way of your opinion when you declare the you "don't get it" because the State Dept. sure "got it " and realized that it's incompetence costs American lives. The Dept's response was to  just plain lie and declare that the attack was an isolated unplanned uprising due to a video. That's a cover up by anyone's but your definition.

Obama sure "got it" as he tried to protect Clinton and his administration and continued the unplanned isolated uprising lie.

Lying about the warning and lying about the denial of requested additional security and then making up non-existent facts in an attempt to deny culpability are facts for which you should be outraged.


UPDATE (05.16.2013): McClatchy is doing some tough reporting on Benghazi that gives the lie to the GOP's insistence on some kind of scandal or cover-up.  Check out these two articles:  "Benghazi emails show CIA deputy did most of editing on talking points," and "Ambassador Stevens twice said no to military offers for more security, U.S. officials say."  

No forgiveness for liberal Iraq hawks

No Forgiveness for Bush’s 'Useful Idiots,' the Liberal Hawks Who Led Us into War

By Michael Ratner

March 19, 2013 | AlterNet

Ten years ago, between January and April 2003, it is estimated that an unprecedented 36 million people around the world took to the streets in protest against the Iraq War. They believed the war unjust, the evidence of a threat flimsy, and the costs, in terms of lives and otherwise, potentially astronomical. Worldwide protests, from Rome to Manhattan, brought together hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions to collectively voice opposition.

In any just government, these astounding numbers would give pause to the war-wagers in power. In a truly democratic America, these sentiments should have been represented in Washington. And surely this moment should have been the cue for our “liberal media” to echo the cautionary cries of our protesters to deafening levels. Instead, our reliably bellicose Republican congressmen were joined in support by an overwhelming majority of our so-called liberal representatives, and war went ahead as planned.

Even more alarmingly, in the months preceding the start of the war, the pages of the  New York Times would greet us with more banging of the drums: a demand by Thomas Friedman that France be kicked out of the Security Council for its refusal to join up, or a startling piece of war propaganda by then soon-to-be executive editor Bill Keller, fantasizing about the impact of a one-kiloton nuke detonated in Manhattan – 20,000 incinerated, many more dying a “gruesome death from radiation sickness.” But make no mistake: although the New York Times has a shameless history of supporting war after war, other prominent mainstream journalists and intellectuals were eager to ride the bandwagon. These names include George Packer of the  New Yorker, Newsday’s Jeffery Goldberg, the Atlantic’s Peter Beinart, Fareed Zakaria, Andrew Sullivan, Christopher Hitchens, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Paul Berman to name a few.

The late Tony Judt sized up this whole lot most aptly with the label “Bush’s Useful Idiots.” The “useful idiots,” he said, were those from within the liberal establishment who, either through a misguided attempt to project strength, willfully played along with preposterous WMD claims, or simply allowed themselves to get carried away with the imperialistic fervor surrounding a new call to war, abdicating the responsibilities upon which liberal ideology is based. Instead, they aligned their positions with the neo-conservative architects of the Iraq War.

Since then, of course, we have seen one devastating report after another about the impact of the war: the allegedly misguided estimations of scope, length, Iraqi public opinion, and cost. We have also seen reports of a monumental death toll of Iraqis as a result of the war: 600,000 Iraqis have suffered violent deaths from the war, according to estimates by the Lancet. The number, as predicted, is staggering.

As the reports worsened, each of the “useful idiots” began issuing a mea culpa, asking passively for forgiveness. To this, we have to call out the stunning insincerity of these apologies, and reply with a “hell no” that embodies the ignored cries of the millions on the streets in 2003. We cannot be asked to believe that the elite of our liberal establishment could not see what millions of us screamed until our voices were hoarse.

To whom are these leaders really apologizing, and for what exactly? Not one of these apologies has been delivered to any of the millions of families in Iraq which have been destroyed forever. Not one of the apologies is for supporting the idea of a war that senselessly puts Iraqi lives on the line. Nor is there an apology for promoting a war founded on torture: when Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi finally gave Bush administration officials the claims they were looking for, an obviously manufactured link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, we did not hear the outcry against his torture that we hear in torture debates today. Nor were there serious inquiries into the reliability of the information even though it was clear, and as al-Libi himself later admitted, that he would have said anything to end the torture.

No: the apologies we hear are for the war’s lack of success; for the impact on their own brands and political capital.

What’s even more frightening is that nothing has happened to the political capital of these leaders. Hillary Clinton has issued her cursory apologies, and now finds herself as the front-runner candidate for the 2016 elections. Her apology is for making the wrong calculation in 2003, which likely cost her the presidency in 2008. 

But here is the real problem: the liberal establishment still has not learned its lessons. Those who opposed the Iraq War 10 years ago are exposed today, not as having some kind of stronger moral fortitude, but simply having made the right political calculation.  President Barack Obama will take his credit for ending the unpopular Iraq War, which he opposed as a senator. He will do so while dropping bombs in residential neighborhoods in Libya, and expanding the drone program, which kills scores of civilians, in Pakistan and now extending it into Yemen, Somalia, and soon, possibly, into Syria.

And just as 10 years ago, the media fails us today in carrying a real debate. Not one of the prominent thinkers and actors in our liberal establishment has reflected on the true costs of war, or made any changes to their decision-making priorities.

So today, as we look back on a criminal war, and a human rights catastrophe, we may as well be looking forward as well, because it looks exactly the same. Unless we truly hold those who betrayed their oath of office to account for the devastation they’ve caused, the useful idiots of our next war will be us.

Peaceful Mideast change a blow to Al Qaeda

Very interesting analysis. Sometimes what doesn't happen is more significant than what does. Al Qaeda's deafening silence in the wake of the peaceful revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt is a great example.

Yet as this piece warns, the gains of peaceful demonstrators could be rolled back; and if they fail; or the military cracks down; and if we don't give peaceful democrats all the support we can, then al Qaeda's silence could be replaced by deadly gloating. They could cite the impotence of peaceful protests as more reason to support violent jihad to overthrow intractable Mideast autocrats.

That's why I was heartened by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's announcement Thursday that the U.S. is committing $150 million (still a drop in the bucket -- about one month's worth of Mubarak-era U.S. aid to Egypt -- and pennies compared to what America is spending in Iraq and Afghanistan) to support democracy and civil society in Egypt.

We can't take our eye of the ball!

Egypt's Peaceful Revolution A Blow To Al-Qaida

By Mike Shuster

February 16, 2011 | NPR

URL: http://www.npr.org/133816008

Obama's envoy to Mubarak lobbied USG for Mubarak ?!

This is deliberate:

"Frank Wisner, President Barack Obama's envoy to Cairo who infuriated the White House this weekend by urging Hosni Mubarak to remain President of Egypt, works for a New York and Washington law firm which works for the dictator's own Egyptian government."

As one critic asked rhetorically, "Do the US lack diplomats" or what?

I would like to blame this on Obama's advisors, and certainly Hillary knew, but it's still Obama's fault. This is the kind of thing that drives people of the Mideast nuts. They're not as dumb as those in power think. They get it.

The question is: Do we?

US envoy's business link to Egypt

Obama scrambles to limit damage after Frank Wisner makes robust call for Mubarak to remain in place as leader.

By Robert Fisk
February 7, 2011 | The Independent

URL: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-envoys-business-link-to-egypt-2206329.html

Uthman: Palin reveals McCain campaign's cynicism

OK, even if you hate this op-ed, you gotta check out the Chappelle show clip referenced herein!  I promise you'll laugh.


Palin-Drones
By Allan Uthman
The Beast

A few months ago, a friend asked me who I though McCain would or should pick to be his vice presidential candidate. "I think if I were working for McCain," I said, "I'd wait until Obama makes his choice, and if he picks a man, pick a woman, or if he picks a woman, pick a man." You know, work the difference. So it was no surprise to me that McCain picked a woman. But, just like everyone else, I was dumbfounded that woman was Sarah Palin, one-year governor of a state over twice the size of Texas with the population of El Paso (there is one person per square mile in Alaska).

It seemed at first that McCain may have thrown the election by choosing an unknown, unready running mate with a BS in communications from Idaho University and a hard-right Christianist ideology, in a ploy to woo disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters. "We're not that stupid," came the cry from insulted feminists, and they were right to recognize that Palin did not in any way represent their ambitions.

But it turns out that they are that stupid, or at least some of them are. While it seems unfathomable that women who supported Hillary Clinton could flip to the GOP ticket for a woman who is pro-life, pro-assault rifle and pro-Bush just because she's a woman, McCain's numbers among white women have shot up with Palin's stunt nomination. This is incredibly disappointing.

Palin is so obviously not equipped to be president that her own surrogates are not willing to discuss the possibility that McCain could die or become incapacitated in office. "She's not running for president," is the refrain. But of course, the only relevant issue when considering a VP choice, according to both presidential candidates (at least before Palin was picked), is whether they are ready to become president. John McCain will be 73 by January, used to smoke, loves to eat barbecued meat, and has had multiple bouts with serious cancer. If any president was ever likely to die in office, it's McCain. The guy could go any minute, really.  And yet his campaign thinks it's okay to select a nominee based entirely on demographic appeal, after a single interview.  And then they withhold her from the press, an obvious sign that they know she is not knowledgeable enough to survive under the spotlight. She gives one speech—a single goddamn speech—over and over again, repeating the same, already debunked, self-flattering lies about her fabricated image as a reform-minded maverick, and the press stands up and cheers, just for the novelty of her. This is a step backwards for gender equality, because if Palin were a man, the press would have murdered him by now. Special dispensation is not equality.

What this selection says about John McCain is simple: He doesn't give a damn what happens to this country when he's dead. McCain's personal favorite choices, Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge, are much closer to him in terms of politics and experience. These are guys who McCain would have selected if he were a real maverick, bucking party orthodoxy for the good of the country. McCain would probably have won anyway, impressing independents by risking GOP mutiny to stay true to himself, although he would never have closed the fundraising gap. Of course, there's a good chance that all McCain ever had to do to win this thing was talk about Vietnam and stay white.

One of the most infuriating things to see on TV news—the only news that matters, when it comes to shaping public opinion—is when they do one of those "fact-check" segments while omitting relevant facts. A good example is the squashing of Palin's attempted book-banning episode when she was mayor of Wasilla, a town of 7,000 which Palin left $20 million in debt.

This is from The New York Times:

"[I]n 1995, Ms. Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues that she had noticed the book 'Daddy's Roommate' on the shelves and that it did not belong there, according to [future Palin campaign director Laura] Chase and [former Wasilla mayor John] Stein. Ms. Chase read the book, which helps children understand homosexuality, and said it was inoffensive; she suggested that Ms. Palin read it.

" 'Sarah said she didn't need to read that stuff,' Ms. Chase said. ''It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from the library and she didn't even read it.'

As mayor, Palin asked the town's library director, Mary Ellen Emmons, three times, how she'd feel about book-banning, the last time asking if she'd change her mind if people were picketing the library. Emmons was staunchly opposed. Palin fired Emmons for "not fully supporting her efforts to govern," only rehiring her when there was an outpouring of public protest against the move.

To me, this is a really big deal. But the story has been "debunked" repeatedly in the press, relying on a factcheck.org report dismissing a hoax e-mail that provided a bogus list of books "banned" by Palin. So the story is "Palin never banned any books," which is true, but she sure as hell would have if she could have. The abortive firing episode gets nary a mention, giving the impression that the very idea Palin wanted to ban books is false, when it clearly is not.

And, since Obama's church is such a hot topic, it would seem strange that Palin's church, which preaches end-times theology and glossolalia, has received little mainstream scrutiny. You want crazy pastor quotes? Check out Palin's pastor, Ed Kalnins:

On John Kerry: "I'm not going tell you who to vote for, but if you vote for this particular person, I question your salvation. I'm sorry."

On Bush: "I hate criticisms towards the president, because it's like criticisms towards the pastor – it's almost like, it's not going to get you anywhere, you know, except for hell. That's what it'll get you."

On Iraq: "What you see in Iraq, basically, is a manifestation of what's going on in this unseen world called the spirit world. ... We need to think like Jesus thinks. We are in a time and a season of war, and we need to think like that. ... Jesus called us to die. You're worried about getting hurt? He's called us to die. ... I believe that Jesus himself operated from that position of war mode. Everyone say 'war mode.' "

Yeah. That's where Palin learned about morality. And she was in attendance at the church just weeks ago, as a guest speaker from Jews for Jesus described Palestinian terrorism as a manifestation of God's "judgment of unbelief" against Jews for rejecting Christ. It's not surprising that evangelical Christians are fired up by Palin, but again, I can't fathom the idea that Hillary Clinton supporters are excited about her.

And then there's this little tidbit, from her RNC speech:

"A writer observed, 'We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.' And I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman."

That unnamed "writer" was unnamed for a reason. It was Westbrook Pegler, an openly racist columnist who wrote of wishing for the assassinations of FDR—and Robert Kennedy. Pegler's xenophobic, red-baiting politics were so extreme (he described Jews as "instinctively sympathetic to Communism, however outwardly respectable they appeared") that he was booted from the John Birch Society. In 1963, Pegler wrote that it was "clearly the bounden duty of all intelligent Americans to proclaim and practice bigotry." And, by the way, Pegler described Truman as a "hater," and Truman called Pegler a "guttersnipe." High praise, indeed.

It's hard to imagine why Palin or her speechwriter would include a phoned in quotation about how much better small-town people are than the rest of us from such a toxic source, when so many similar folksy platitudes could be pilfered from more benign writers, even ones whose names could be mentioned in public. I can only conclude that this was a coded message to the fascist right, the worst element in American politics, the very people we were all hoping were waning in significance this election cycle, that it was game on once again. I suppose there are plenty of white women who are anti-labor, pro-life, evangelical Christians. It's just that I can't imagine any of them were planning to vote for Obama, or Clinton, before the Palin selection.

Before anyone starts claiming that black Obama voters are equally shallow, consider whether they'd have voted for Alan Keyes. Because that's the nearest analogy I can think of for Palin's politics. Black people wouldn't vote for Alan Keyes, even if he were running against Robert Byrd. They're just not that stupid. So what the hell is wrong with white women? Are they really so aggrieved that Hillary got edged out of the Democratic nomination by Obama that they're willing to ruin the country just for spite?

The tragedy here is that, for all McCain's groundwork in building an image of himself as a man of character, the McCain/Palin campaign is the most cynical in modern American history. No longer feeling the need to even find a fact to hang their hat on, they have broken through the limits of distortion into the realm of utter fabrication, revealing their total contempt for the voting public. They don't twist the truth; the truth's got nothing to do with their strategy. It's much easier to just lie. And it's working. For their lies about their opponents and about themselves, they have been rewarded by substantial gains in key demographics, especially white women. Palin's selection has also enabled them to deflect criticism by crying sexism whenever Palin's obvious deficiencies as a candidate are raised.

And about that: It was the Clinton campaign that opened the door on claiming gender victimization as an electoral tactic. As her chances in the Democratic primary waned, Clinton and her surrogates went hog wild on the sexism charges, lashing out at anyone who dared criticize her. Admittedly, there were some ignorant comments here and there, albeit never from the Obama campaign. But when things got hairy, the Clinton campaign and its supporters leaned on sexism as an all-purpose excuse for losing, and it was a big steaming pile of horseshit.  The fact is that Clinton's gender was pretty much the only thing that distinguished her from a field rife with old, white, compromised senators. If Hillary Clinton were a man, there would have been no telling her apart from Dodd, Biden, or John Kerry for that matter. But Obama, even if you made him white, would still have been young, eloquent, and charismatic. In other words, as weird as this sounds, if you made Clinton and Obama into white men, Obama would have kicked her ass—it wouldn't have been close.

But Hillary's dead-enders insist that their expected primary victories were robbed from them by the "rampant misogyny" of Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, and somehow Obama himself. And as Hillary's defeat drew ever closer, she herself ratcheted up the faux feminist rhetoric, leaving Obama with hordes of angry, inconsolable women blaming him for their imagined oppression, and somehow admiring Sean Hannity at the same time. And now, the Republicans have picked up the tactic and run with it, accusing Obama of calling Palin "a pig" (willful ignorance of cliché metaphors is a symptom of this condition) and labeling anyone who dares scrutinize Palin a sexist, including Tina Fey. These allegations hold about as much water as calling condemnations of Michael Vick racist.

There's a great sketch from the Dave Chapelle show, wherein Chappelle and crew are dressed up as classic movie monsters. Charlie Murphy is Frankenstein's monster, and when he gets fired from his office job, he accuses his boss of racism. A black coworker looks at him and exclaims, "nigga, you a Frankenstein!"

Nobody is after Sarah Palin because she's a woman. The fact is, she's a Frankenstein. And if women are so angry about losing a primary fight that they're willing to elect a Frankenstein, even a female Frankenstein, then they really are gullible, emotional, weak-minded fools, and they really do deserve all the derision they've gotten and more.

Steinem: Palin 'unqualified' female token

I almost feel sorry for Palin.  Seems like the poor thing had no idea what she was getting into.  Lots of facts in here about her I hadn't heard before. 

At any rate, the VP choices prove Obama's point: judgment trumps experience.  Obama chose his VP based on substance; McCain chose his VP based on a gimmick, a ploy.  Obama's choice showed sound judgment; McCain's choice showed cynical (and faulty) calculation.

(BTW, thank Dubya for yet another sad turn in U.S. politics: ever since Cheney, "the most powerful Vice President in U.S. history," now we've got to worry about the Veeps, too.  Oh, whither bygone halcyon days of Quayle and Ford!...)


Palin: Wrong woman, wrong message
By Gloria Steinem

September 4, 2008  |  LA Times

Here's the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing -- the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party -- are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president. We owe this to women -- and to many men too -- who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can vote. We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took the "white-male-only" sign off the White House, and to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hung in there through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million votes.

But here is even better news: It won't work. This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.

Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters. Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for -- and that Barack Obama's still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, "Somebody stole my shoes, so I'll amputate my legs."

This is not to beat up on Palin. I defend her right to be wrong, even on issues that matter most to me. I regret that people say she can't do the job because she has children in need of care, especially if they wouldn't say the same about a father. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden's 37 years' experience.

Palin has been honest about what she doesn't know. When asked last month about the vice presidency, she said, "I still can't answer that question until someone answers for me: What is it exactly that the VP does every day?" When asked about Iraq, she said, "I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq."

She was elected governor largely because the incumbent was unpopular, and she's won over Alaskans mostly by using unprecedented oil wealth to give a $1,200 rebate to every resident. Now she is being praised by McCain's campaign as a tax cutter, despite the fact that Alaska has no state income or sales tax.  Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn't know it's about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them. Or perhaps McCain is following the Bush administration habit, as in the Justice Department, of putting a job candidate's views on "God, guns and gays" ahead of competence. The difference is that McCain is filling a job one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency.

So let's be clear: The culprit is John McCain. He may have chosen Palin out of change-envy, or a belief that women can't tell the difference between form and content, but the main motive was to please right-wing ideologues; the same ones who nixed anyone who is now or ever has been a supporter of reproductive freedom. If that were not the case, McCain could have chosen a woman who knows what a vice president does and who has thought about Iraq; someone like Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison or Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. McCain could have taken a baby step away from right-wing patriarchs who determine his actions, right down to opposing the Violence Against Women Act.

Palin's value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women's wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves "abstinence-only" programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers' millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn't spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation; she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500 million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.

I don't doubt her sincerity. As a lifetime member of the National Rifle Assn., she doesn't just support killing animals from helicopters, she does it herself. She doesn't just talk about increasing the use of fossil fuels but puts a coal-burning power plant in her own small town. She doesn't just echo McCain's pledge to criminalize abortion by overturning Roe vs. Wade, she says that if one of her daughters were impregnated by rape or incest, she should bear the child. She not only opposes reproductive freedom as a human right but implies that it dictates abortion, without saying that it also protects the right to have a child.

So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, for Dobson, "women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership," so he may be voting for Palin's husband.

Being a hope-a-holic, however, I can see two long-term bipartisan gains from this contest.

Republicans may learn they can't appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time. A loss in November could cause the centrist majority of Republicans to take back their party, which was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and should be the last to want to invite government into the wombs of women.

And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time jobs than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a national stage from male leaders who know that women can't be equal outside the home until men are equal in it. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are campaigning on their belief that men should be, can be and want to be at home for their children.

This could be huge.

Gloria Steinem is an author, feminist organizer and co-founder of the Women's Media Center. She supported Hillary Clinton and is now supporting Barack Obama.

Taibbi: "Hillary's flabby" = I want my mom?

"I mean, wow," this is a great compendium by Taibbi of his own physical taunts of people who, having chosen to prostitute themselves in the public domain, don't deserve any of our usual pity. Can't believe I missed it in April.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-taibbi/erica-jong-thinks-i-want_b_96169.html?page=4

Taibbi on Hillary: Pork Queen

The Queen of Pork

By Matt Taibbi
May 1, 2008 | Rolling Stone

One Sunday about three months ago — on the day before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, in fact — I got out of bed very late and lazily switched on CNN. On the TV screen, Sen. Hillary Clinton was smiling broadly and wearing a black jacket over some strange Oriental get-up. She was standing next to influential black pastor Calvin Butts, in front of the latter's famous Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. 

Camera bulbs were flashing. An important announcement was about to be made.

Butts, it turns out, was endorsing Hillary over Barack Obama in the upcoming New York primary. I raised an eyebrow. It's not that I expected Butts — perhaps the most prominent black minister in New York — to automatically endorse Obama simply because he is black. But I certainly didn't expect to see Butts go on national television and make swipe after thinly veiled swipe at Obama, sounding like he was reading a script prepared for him by Hillary's campaign team.

"This is no time for waiting or hoping for solutions," quipped Butts, making an obvious reference to The Audacity of Hope author Obama and echoing the hope-ain't-shit theme that had been pounded on the campaign trail by the Clinton camp over and over again.

The predominantly black crowd barely had time to scratch its collective head and ask what the hell was going on before the endorsement party abruptly ended, leaving the stunned audience to break out in scattered boos and dueling chants of "Harlem for Obama!" and "Hillary! Hillary!" The strange scene left some in the audience wondering what exactly they'd just seen. "What's frustrating about ministers endorsing candidates," an Obama supporter named Rafael Mason wondered to a reporter, "is it makes you question if their decision is representative of the church or if there's a backroom discussion going on."

Months later, while researching pork-barrel spending by the presidential candidates, I came across three federal budgetary awards requested by Hillary Clinton in this fiscal year:

•$446,500 Abyssinian Development Corporation, New York, to support and expand youth and young-adult after-school and summer programs (Discretionary Grants — Juvenile Justice Programs) COM 08 D Rangel Schumer Clinton

•$893,000 Abyssinian Development Corporation programs for at-risk youth, New York (Discretionary Grants — Juvenile Justice Programs) COM 08 D Rangel Clinton Schumer

•$146,000 Abyssinian Development Corporation, to support and expand youth- and family-displacement prevention programs (Social Services — Department of Health and Human Services) LABHHS 08 D Clinton Schumer

If you haven't already guessed, Calvin Butts is the chairman of the Abyssinian Development Corporation. The above-mentioned $1.5 million in federal funds that Hillary requested on behalf of Butts' organization had been approved by Congress a month before she received the minister's timely endorsement. Maybe the minister was following his conscience in endorsing Hillary — but then, it never hurts to have a little financial incentive when it comes to difficult decisions like these, does it?

All politicians buy and sell favors, and presidential candidates are worse than most. In this race, none of the three remaining candidates are exactly squeaky clean when it comes to the doling out of federal budgetary largess. Even John McCain, who boasts that he doesn't request "earmarks," as pork-barrel spending is known on the Hill, actually has at least one to his name. And Barack Obama has not been shy about steering taxpayer dollars to people who might be able to help his presidential bid.

But of the three candidates, no one can touch Hillary Clinton for her expertise in dispensing federal pork. She is fast becoming a sort of Heavyweight Earmark Champion of the Beltway — one think-tank analyst has even dubbed her the "Queen of Pork" — who excels as a favor trader not only in sheer quantity but in brazenness as well. A recent examination of this year's earmark requests shows her solidifying her champion status more and more with each passing year, even under the ostensibly bright lights of a presidential campaign.

Here's how earmarks work: Each year, Congress allocates trillions of dollars, with most of it doled out to federal agencies, which in turn spend their budgets according to their own established — and usually competitive and merit-based — criteria. But in a small percentage of cases, members of Congress can direct the agencies in question to award their monies to specific organizations or companies, which are almost always located in that member's home state. In an unsurprisingly high number of cases, the money is given to a company whose executives just happen to have donated heavily to the member of Congress in question. That's what an earmark is. Some are legit and go to worthy causes, but on the whole they are sleazy enough to have moved the Democrats to pass earmark-reform legislation after they took control of Congress in 2006. The reform forced members of Congress to attach their names to the earmarks in question, and Democrats pledged to cut the number and cost of earmarks in half.

They blew it. This past year, in fact, members of Congress jammed more than $17 billion of earmarks into the budget — a thirty percent increase from the previous year. In March, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi abandoned plans to impose a one-year moratorium on earmarks — a reform that was also rejected by the Democrat-controlled Senate.

"The Democrats studiously refuse to do anything serious about pork — for the simple reason that they are every bit as addicted to it as the Republicans and have no intention whatsoever of lessening a system of self-aggrandizement that they believe gives them political success, nay permanence," says Winslow Wheeler, a former Senate aide who worked on defense earmarks before being forced into retirement for complaining about it publicly. "They will find — hopefully sooner than they think — that the permanence they crave is undermined by their self-directed behavior."

Hillary's $1.5 million gift to Calvin Butts came from three of her earmarks in the fiscal year 2008. She had a lot of them. In fact, between 2002 and 2006, Clinton secured more than $2.2 billion in earmarks, many of them attached to defense-spending bills, where she has unusual influence as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Hillary succeeded in securing twenty-six earmarks to the 2008 defense bill worth a total of $148 million — a number that dwarfed that of any Democrat except committee chairman Carl Levin. Barack Obama, by contrast, had only one request attached to the defense bill.

Hillary's defense earmarks benefited some of the world's largest weapons producers, many of which have factories in New York. Among the most prominent include Northrop Grumman, which Hillary singled out for $6 million to develop a new radar system; Plug Power, for whom Hillary secured $3 million for a backup power system for Pentagon operations; and Telephonics, which Hillary gave $5 million for an intercom system for Black Hawk helicopters.

Her biggest coup of all was a multi-billion-dollar contract she helped to secure for Lockheed Martin to build the Marine One presidential helicopter — a project derided by insiders as a typical example of Pentagon waste. "Oh, the presidential-helicopter thing is a classic boondoggle," says one congressional source. "They could have taken any old Black Hawk helicopter, put a nice interior in it and a decal on it, and it would've been OK. Instead, we got this thing that costs four times as much. It's nuts."

Indeed, the Pentagon confirmed in March that the helicopter Hillary made sure would be built at Lockheed's plant in Owego, New York, would, in fact, cost $400 million per unit — more than the modified Boeing 747 used as Air Force One. You heard right: $400 million for a single fucking helicopter.

With most of her earmarks, Clinton makes sure to get a return on her investment of taxpayer money. Lockheed donated $10,000 to Hillary's Senate campaign in 2006 and provided her with plenty of free rides on its planes. Plug Power officials have reportedly donated some $7,100 to her campaigns since 2003, and several Northrop executives gave the max to her presidential campaign. In that light it seems odd that Hillary was critical of a deal to award a refueling tanker project to Northrop — except that she has also received maximum contributions from executives at the rival bidder, Boeing. Meanwhile, employees from Corning, for whom Hillary secured a $1 million earmark, donated $133,000 to her presidential campaign. The list goes on and on.

But Hillary's most brazen earmark this presidential-election season had nothing to do with defense. It had to do, oddly enough, with rock music. Back in June 2007, Hillary attempted to write a $1 million earmark for a museum commemorating the Woodstock festival in Bethel, New York. Not that anyone should have anything against Woodstock, but it seems weird to ask taxpayers to pay for it — especially when the project is principally funded by one of America's richest men, a media mogul named Alan Gerry.

Listed as number 297 on the annual Forbes list of wealthy Americans, Gerry reportedly has a net worth of $1.6 billion. Beyond the fact that he hardly needs the money, there is this to consider: On June 30th of last year, exactly three days after the earmark was officially inserted into an appropriations bill, Gerry and his wife both made maximum donations to Hillary's presidential campaign, totaling $9,200.

The deal stank, even by congressional standards. When Republican opponents introduced an amendment to kill the earmark, the measure passed easily. "Most of our amendments fail by fifty or sixty votes," says John Hart, a spokesman for Sen. Tom Coburn, an anti-earmark crusader who introduced the amendment to kill the handout. "But this one passed with no problem. It was so over-the-top."

The thing that's really vile about earmarks is how cheaply we all get sold out. Two million of your taxpayer bucks in exchange for a $5,000 donation? Greenlighting a billion-dollar Pentagon boondoggle for a couple of free flights? Hey, if you're going to sell us out, at least fucking bargain. But it's not their money, and they never do.

Hillary isn't alone among the candidates in selling us down the river for a few campaign contributions. Unlike Clinton, who has only disclosed the pork she actually succeeded in doling out, Barack Obama has supplied reporters with a list of every earmark he requested. But the list only served to highlight Obama's own pork, including $8 million for a "High Explosive Air Burst Technology Program" that would have been overseen by General Dynamics. Obama's Illinois finance chairman, James Crown, not only sits on the board of General Dynamics, he and his wife are both Obama bundlers who have raised more than $200,000 for Obama's campaign. Obama was also alone among the remaining candidates last year in using his leadership PAC to hand out money to politicians whose support he sought in his presidential run.

McCain, meanwhile, has run a finger-wagging, holier-than-thou campaign. He insists he doesn't request any earmarks, even though he has: In 2003, he doled out $14.3 million to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona. He also insists that he is "the only one the special interests don't give any money to," even though he has lapped the field when it comes to surrounding himself with lobbyists. Public Citizen, the nonprofit watchdog group, has identified sixty-six current or former lobbyists who are either major fundraisers or bundlers for McCain, a number that far exceeds either Clinton or Obama.

Like Hillary, McCain has not been shy about doing favors for his lobbyist friends while milking their companies for campaign contributions. As chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, McCain obliged several firms, including Paxson Communications and Glencairn, by proposing an amendment that would have enabled them to own multiple TV stations in the same market. Though the measure was never adopted, Paxson rewarded McCain with a flight on its private jet, and a Glencairn executive made donations to McCain's campaign a month after he held the hearing.

But neither McCain nor Obama have been able to match Clinton when it comes to playing on their connections for campaign contributions. Last fall, while Obama was answering questions about using his leadership PAC to give $10,000 donations to politicians who supported him in key campaign-trail states, no one blinked when former senator Bob Kerrey showed up in Iowa to campaign for Hillary. Kerrey these days is president of the New School in Manhattan, which, like Butts' Abyssinian Development Corporation, scored more than $1.5 million in federal earmarks this year courtesy of Hillary. The school also boasts three trustees who are "Hillraisers" or Hillary bundlers — meaning they've raised $100,000 apiece for her presidential run. The notorious scam artist Norman Hsu, who raised $850,000 for Clinton before being indicted for fraud last December, was another New School trustee.

Nor is Hillary shy about funneling earmarks to big donors who don't even need the money. Real estate developer Robert Congel, another Hillary earmark recipient who has graced the Forbes list, scored $10 million in pork courtesy of Hillary for use in developing, of all things, a megamall. Why the hell we need to pay taxes to help billionaires build luxury shopping malls is a troubling enough question, without even considering the $26,700 that Congel and his wife have contributed to Hillary over the years. That's all it costs to get $10 million out of a U.S. senator? Where are the pitchforks?

Earmarking is only one small slice of the political cash game, but it has the advantage of being a slice we can actually see and quantify. And what we see of Hillary's record here suggests a couple of things. One: She has no qualms whatsoever about trading your tax money for personal political capital. And two: She likes to trade much of that money for favors in the defense sector, even if it hurts the people doing the defending.

As is often the case with defense earmarks, some of Hillary's pork spending is taken out of the Army's Operation and Maintenance budget, which is supposed to be used for troop-support initiatives like body armor. In simple terms, Hillary's rampant marauding of the defense budget takes money away from troops in the field. Soldiers wind up short on equipment, and Clinton winds up with hefty campaign contributions and free flights on private jets. Carrying charges, my boy, carrying charges!

If earmarks are just a little slice of the pie in the Washington cash game, imagine what would happen if Hillary got to serve up the whole meal. It's been so long since the Clintons were in office that we scarcely remember all those funny-sounding names of scandal-plagued campaign contributors — names like Roger Tamraz, "Charlie" Trie, Wang Jun and John Huang. When it comes to the Clintons and money, there was always somebody with a story buried beneath the line item, a hard-to-find dollar figure stuck to every Calvin Butts or Robert Congel. Are we really ready to go back to those days full time?

Taibbi: Hillary, Obama, and 'the worst possible scenario'

Hillary's Flimsy Case for the Nomination
By Matt Taibbi
April 5, 2008 | TheSmirkingChimp.com

In the space of three short months, I've contrived to write two lengthy, gloating political obituaries for Hillary Clinton, only to see both of them blow up in my face after fantastic eleventh-hour comebacks that ended with scenes of the Hillmeister doing the dual flabby-arm raise on CNN while gusts of confetti whooshed across the room, obscuring almost everything except the shocking results blaring out from the crawl on the bottom of the screen. There was a time when this race looked like it might become the most uplifting in a generation. It's now threatening to become the most divisive and disturbing. It is a good time to ponder how that happened — and to address a few of the other Frequently Asked Questions about this depraved circus that is now poised to continue well past Pennsylvania.

Isn't Hillary Clinton better qualified than Barack Obama to be president, given that she is the more experienced candidate?

The idea that Clinton is somehow more qualified to deal with international crises because she has more "experience" is one of the strangest things I've seen the media swallow whole in a long time, dating back to the "tiny, sand-covered, yet-to-master-the-art-of-plumbing nation of Iraq is an imminent military threat to the United States" fiasco. According to my calculations —worked out over many hours, using long division out to eighteen places —Clinton is a second-term senator, while Barack Obama, conversely, is a first-term senator. By any reasonable standard, both are political neophytes.

Clinton talks a lot about having visited "over eighty countries" —but then, Chelsea was with her on a lot of those trips, and I doubt folks are rushing to hand her the red phone. In case anyone has forgotten what exactly first lady Hillary Clinton really did all those years, here is a press account of a 1997 trip that she made to Senegal with her daughter: "Her first stop in Senegal was at Goree Island, where she peered through the 'Door of No Return,' through which slaves passed on their way to the dreaded Middle Passage of the Slave Trade. When she arrived in Dakar, the first lady was greeted by Senegalese who danced and serenaded her with lyrics written especially for the occasion." Shit, I feel better about that 3 a.m. phone call already!

It is worth noting that Hillary was being packed off on these trips into the heart of Africa at precisely the time when her husband was getting his knob polished by an intern in the Oval Office. That's not a reflection on her personally —but for the Hillary camp to tout her advantage in foreign affairs based on these trips into the marital wilderness, as compared to a candidate who has actually lived overseas and has actual relatives living in villages like the ones Hillary passed over in her glass-bottomed boat, is beyond absurd.

When it comes time for delegates to vote at the convention, shouldn't they take into account that Clinton has performed better than Obama in the so-called battleground states? Doesn't she stand a better chance against John McCain in the national election?

In reality, the exact opposite is true. Everything about the results so far suggests that Obama is the more electable candidate according to the "battleground" voter the Clinton camp is claiming for their own.

The Clinton strategy for winning the presidency is so simple, even a chimpanzee could grasp it. You win the blue states, the Massachusettses and the New Jerseys, almost automatically, just by being pro-choice and saying nice things about trees and gay people. You concede the really red states, the places like Tennessee and Kentucky where you're fucked anyway, places where huge pluralities believe the devil really exists and has thick red skin and a bull's horns. That leaves you free to compete hard in the mixed-bag states by drifting to the right as far as you can without losing your in-pocket blue territories, which is really hard to do unless you start wobbling on abortion or selling out the spotted owl. It is through the prism of this new Clintonian strategy that presidential politics has basically been reduced to winning Florida and Ohio.

But saying that Hillary is better qualified to take on John McCain because of her performance in those states only makes sense if (a) you believe that the people who voted for Clinton in the primaries will not vote for Obama in the general election, and (b) you believe that no Democrat can win the traditionally red states. In fact, Hillary has mostly been winning the traditionally blue states —places like New York, California, Massachusetts and New Jersey —that are going to go blue in November anyway, no matter who is running on the Republican ticket. And even in the states Hillary has won, it has been registered Democrats, not swing voters, who have carried her to victory, while Obama has dominated her in virtually every contest among registered independents. Even in her home state of New York, Obama whipped Hillary among independents by fifteen percent. In Missouri, that margin was twenty-eight percent. In California? Thirty percent.

Obama, meanwhile, has performed extraordinarily well in traditionally red states like Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina. And sure, some of that is due to the black vote. But all of his victories have been marked by two things: larger-than-usual turnout and routs among independents, leading to the large number of blowout wins that are basically responsible for his delegate lead at the moment. On Super Tuesday, Hillary won sixty percent of the vote in only one contest, Bill's home state of Arkansas. Obama won seven states by that margin or more.

In other words, Hillary is winning the Democratic voters who are going to vote Democratic anyway. Obama is bringing in new voters, and he's winning large numbers of swing voters in red states.

What happens if Hillary ends up taking the nomination despite trailing in both the popular vote and the delegate count?

Put it this way: If this race ends up getting decided by a bunch of political insiders, in defiance of the popular vote, it's going to render all self-righteousness about the 2000 debacle meaningless. And if Hillary ends up winning it by claiming Florida delegates from an uncontested election, in the process once again disenfranchising thousands of minority voters in Miami and other urban areas (who would have voted for Obama, just as they voted for Gore in 2000), then it'll end up being a double fuck-you to the public, a signal that the Democrats are no different from the Bush Republicans.

What if the nomination gets decided by the superdelegates?

In the old days, we had a different name for superdelegates. We called them party bosses. If either Clinton or Obama wins by virtue of a superdelegate revolt against the popular will —particularly when both candidates have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the superdelegates through their leadership PACs —then we're looking at an election that huge pluralities of the country will view as illegitimate. One more experience like this and we'll end up with Swedish election observers stepping in to run the 2012 race.

Are the Clinton camp's attacks against Obama racist?

Not really. What they are is opportunistic. The Clintonian campaign philosophy is basically an inverse of the Nixonian Southern Strategy: It accepts as gospel the notion that the old coalition of white labor and blacks that kept the South Democratic for generations has been severed forever by the rise of evangelical Christianity and social conservatism. Therefore the Clintons don't try to win back those white workers in the lost Southern states through, say, a more staunch advocacy of unions; instead, they try to pry away Nixon's old "silent majority" voters by courting the same fears about safety and national security that Tricky Dick used to take the South away from Democrats in the first place.

It's no accident that Hillary ran her "3 a.m." commercial in Texas but not Ohio; this was a cunning ploy to win back those scared white voters whom the Clinton strategy insists are needed to win. And it worked: After the ad, her support among white Texans jumped from forty-four to fifty-six percent. Does it help that her opponent is a black dude with a Muslim middle name? Sure. But the fearmongering by the Clintons is more about winning blue-collar votes without alienating their big-business buddies than it is about exploiting fears of a black planet. With the Clintons, ideology is always whatever gets them through the night. They haven't been reduced to balls-out, Willie Horton racism yet. That's not to say that they won't get there —they're just not there yet.

Won't the Republicans go after Obama with even nastier stuff?

Not long ago, I was talking to former Bush speechwriter David Frum, and he told me he thinks that Obama's Achilles' heel is patriotism. Put Obama in the general election, he said, and the Republicans are going to hammer him relentlessly. They're going to bring up everything they can find that bolsters the argument that Obama isn't slobberingly, priapistically patriotic: the famed decision to stop wearing his American flag pin because it was being used as a substitute for "true patriotism"; the now-infamous photo of him holding his hands at his waist while Hillary patriotically clasped her heart during the national anthem; the comments by his wife, Michelle, about being really proud of America "for the first time in my adult life"; the associations with Sixties radicals. Along with his middle name and the unkillable rumors of Muslim leanings, it's obvious where the Republicans are going to be aiming if they have to run against this guy all summer. If and when that happens, Obama is going to find out pretty quick that there's no explanation you can possibly give to Middle America for taking off your flag lapel pin that is going to make sense to them.

So Obama is weakest on the issue of patriotism?

No -- Obama's real weakness is that nobody really knows yet what he's all about. He is running as a symbol of a new politics, a politics somehow less disgusting and full of shit than the old politics. But if it were to get out that he's not that —that all he is the same old deal dressed up in black skin and a natty suit —then he quickly morphs into a different kind of symbol, a symbol of how an essentially bankrupt political system can seamlessly repackage itself to a fed-up marketplace by making cosmetic changes, without altering its basic nature. There have been disturbing signs along that front, from the accusations that Obama aides called his anti-NAFTA stance "just politics," to his angry stumpery against a Maytag plant closing even as he pals around with Lester Crown, a Maytag board member who raised huge sums for his campaign. Right now, Obama has millions of voters thinking Santa Claus really does exist; but if he keeps getting caught turning the usual tricks with campaign donors, attention is going to shift away from his heroic image and toward the prosaic reality, which in politics is always grubby and depressing. And with that, his value as a symbol will evaporate, and Christmas turns into just another holiday with those same relatives you hated every other day of the year.

Should Obama go negative against Hillary, as the press is urging him to?

It doesn't matter what Obama does at this point. He's fucked either way. If he gets into a catfight with Hillary, the peanut gallery will slam him for being just another typical politician. If he sits there and just lets her plunge knife after knife into his abdomen, he'll have every hack at Time and Newsweek saying he doesn't have "what it takes" to compete in the "blood sport" that is politics (as if any of those news-mag yuppie turds know anything about actual "blood sports"). I'll say one thing: This endless he-said/she-said piss-fighting between the two camps, with its attendant daily purging of loose-lipped campaign staffers of the Samantha Power/Geraldine Ferraro genus, is a bad place for Barack Obama to be. Nobody in American history has ever been better than the Clintons at calculating the electoral math of resentment, paranoia, media aggression and just flat-out, back-alley nastiness. Every day, the Clintons come up with some new and brilliantly devious way to color the subliminal background of the electoral canvas, from using comparisons to Jesse Jackson to buttonhole Obama as a "black candidate," to floating rumors of an "unstoppable" Hillary-Obama ticket —despite the fact that Hillary would rather eat a KFC bucket full of her own shit than run with Obama —in order to con on-the-fence voters into thinking that a vote for Hillary might also be a vote for Obama. That's why it seemed so weirdly appropriate that Samantha "she's a monster" Power was forced to resign from the Obama campaign, while Gerry Ferraro could all but call Obama a nigger and then claim that she was the victim of discrimination. We expect the Clintons to play dirty, and don't demand that they apologize for doing so. But we'd be disappointed in Obama if he went there.

[And that's the real double standard in this campaign, folks! Then again, it's partly Obama's own fault for trying to run a 'clean' campaign. – J]

So with all this Democratic infighting, is John McCain going to be the next president?

McCain may be an asshole, but he's not an idiot. He's doing exactly the right thing right now by going overseas for a fact-finding tour in Europe and the Middle East —basically exiling himself from the public eye —while Obama and Hillary claw each other's eyes out every five minutes on MSNBC. He's smart enough to know that whichever candidate emerges from the Democratic scrum is going to have a face like an uncooked side of beef come general-election season; he doesn't need to say a word to raise both of their negatives. Hillary is doing half of McCain's dirty work for him by repeatedly assailing Obama's supposed lack of experience and questionable patriotism, while Obama is inadvertently helping McCain's cause by forcing Hillary to go all craven psycho-bitch on him to stay alive in the race. We saw this effect on display most overtly after the Cleveland debate, when the angry back-and-forth banter by both Obama and Hillary left McCain, for the first time, leading in the polls against either candidate.

Democrats had all the momentum going into this race because of seven years of uninterrupted press scrutiny of the Bush administration; by the time November rolls around, however, most voters are going to feel like the Democrats have been in charge for over a year. And McCain will be able to swoop in and ride a "throw the bums out" uprising straight to the White House —just in time to actually keep the same old bums in charge. In American politics, always look for the worst possible scenario to emerge triumphant. And right now, that's it.

Obama as third party candidate?

I'm not in the U.S., so maybe I missed some pundit making this prediction, but... As far as I know, I'm the first to say this: Don't be surprised if Obama seriously considers running for President as an Independent if he wins the Democrats' popular delegate count, but loses the superdelegates to Hillary.

If he wins the primary delegates but loses the superdelegates, he'll have every justification to argue that the Democrats allowed Clinton-connected party insiders to trump the will of the party's base.

Besides being loved by Democrats, Obama has a lot of independent and even Republican voters' support. And I like Obama's chances running against two of conservatives' current worst enemies: Hillary and McCain. If Obama decided to run on his own, the traditional logic that a third party candidate saps votes from one or the other of the two parties would not hold: Obama would steal votes from both of them.


Clinton urges Superdelegates to support her, despite Obama's primary wins
By Peter Slevin and Jose Antonio Vargas
February 17, 2008 | Washington Post

URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/16/AR2008021602657.html?hpid=topnews

Hillary's baggage

Below are the most germane sections Eugene Robinson's op-ed. Hillary and Bill would certainly have to answer Robinson's questions eventually and try to put them to rest. The question is, would Clinton haters believe and accept their answers? And how much distracting noise would be made, and political damage be done, in the the meantime?

Fair or unfair, Hillary Clinton's nomination would initiate an exhumation and post mortem of the Bill Clinton years. Her campaign wouldn't be a debate about the future, but rather a constant defensive reaction to her critics' re-hashing arguments and scandals from the past. And meanwhile, the real tragedy of 8 years of Bush-Republican rule would be set to one side. Do we really want that?

Contrast that with an Obama nomination. We'd leave all that Clinton junk behind us. We'd be hopeful for real change. And Obama would have the moral authority to take on Bush's record and offer us something better.


The Baggage Hillary Bears
By Eugene Robinson
February 5, 2008 | Washington Post

[...]

That's the unfair part -- mostly unfair, at least. There's no way that Hillary Clinton would go to the considerable trouble of running for president in order to let her husband make the decisions, as if the Clinton marriage were out of a 1950s sitcom. Hillary has her people -- longtime friends, supporters, aides -- just as Bill has his. If she made it to the White House, her people would be the ones with real power; if his people didn't like it, there wouldn't be much they could do but grumble.

But Hillary Clinton opens the door to all the questions and suspicions about Bill's role. Has she made a single campaign appearance without claiming that "for 35 years" she's been fighting for this, that or the other?

"When she tries to portray herself as a battle-scarred political veteran and Obama as an ingenue, she counts the years she spent as first lady in Little Rock and Washington. When she adds the policy successes of the 1990s (but not the failures) to her résumé, she implies that she was part of a co-presidency. It's legitimate to ask whether she intends to be part of another.

[...]

Questions about Hillary's role in the Clinton administration, and about Bill's business and philanthropic ventures since he left office, are not just fair but necessary.

Why won't the Clintons speed up the release of White House papers that would let us see what kind of authority Hillary Clinton enjoyed? Who donated how much to the Clinton presidential library, and might those donors expect anything from a Hillary Clinton administration? What business tycoons have snuggled up to the former president, and what -- other than the chance to bask in the radiance of his wit -- did they hope to get out of the exercise?

Would Bill return to his foundation and its high-profile international projects? If so, would that work be coordinated with Hillary's foreign policy? Could donors be sure that the foundation's priorities were still being set independently, in accord with what they were told when they wrote the check?