Former Reddites And Indies Leap Onto Democratic Party

As I noted at All Things Democrat, I think there are a host of reasons so many former Republicans and thirdies/Indies have joined new voters flooding into the blue party, among them:

* excitement with the Dem candidates
* Bush - GOP scandals backlash
* that up to 80% of Americans feel the Bushies killed the economy and feel the country in all respects is headed 110 MPH in the wrong direction
* a desire to belong to the only party where they can even dream someone will listen to them
* absolute terror (and not of rogue bombers)
* fear for their children in Bush’s economy and Bush’s wars, given how John McCain praises his efforts

Alas, it will be up to the Dem Party leadership, itself not a single camp, to keep them through November and beyond. Feet to the fire, people; feet to the fire.

A Blogswarm To End All Swarms? Dream On!

However, the March 19th blogswarm commencing now is not to be taken lightly. Indeed, this war has never been a lightweight when it comes to brutality, sheer horror, the depths of human depravity, the ridiculously small amount of lying it took for Bush to get America to buy into a war that was not, nor was it ever, making torture sound like the most patriotic thing an American can do, anything to do with September 11th or al Qaeda, etc.

The race in November is, at its core, part of a much more fundamental competition against those who turn fascism into proud patriotism and bankrupted our nation at the same time securing record profit for banks who brought about the foreclosure crisis and energy companies demanding tax payers build them free refineries while we say thanks! for those $4/gallon at the umps.

We need a leader who can take us OUT of Iraq ASAP and not in the 100 years or so Republican presidential candidate John McCain recently proudly proclaimed it may take.

It's Getting Nasty Out There... And I'm Not Talking About Weather

(No, if I talked about weather, I'd use plenty of four-, six-, and even voluminously polysyllabic words as I curse. Vermont has actually had a 36-hour respite from our daily 12 inch dumps of snow and frozen rain BUT...)

What I'm talking about is the talk between some Democrats. And no, I'm not talking solely about Hillary Clinton and her entourage vs. Barack Obama and his Oprah machine. Every day in my travels, mostly online but also off, I see people beating up the other candidate in ways that would give the anti-Clinton elves like Ann Coulter jealousy that they didn't think of the nastiness first.

OK, true, neither Barack nor Hillary is Perfect, by whatever definition we choose to assign to that term. And as much as I have long lists of pros and cons for each of the two, I'm still feeling rather deadlocked, Vermont primary over aside.

But they're like soooooooo freaking much better than what the Republicans want to give us - John McCain, one of those rare men who is actually much more difficult to deal with when he thinks he's winning than he is petulant and tyrannical when he's not winning (see the leadup to how he quit the 2000 presidential race and his frequent meltdowns, usually in the media's face).

Some call McCain a war hero. I once did. But the first time he said it was worth it to stay in Iraq when he knew we have lost SO many soldiers and far more innocent Iraqi civilians meant he was no longer a hero, but another ambitious dickhead with a God complex who never minds leading lambs to slaughter "for a good enough cause" (read: his own).

And when I remember who I don't want to see in the White House next January, Hillary and Barack sure look pretty damned good by comparison. Maybe we can evolve them toward protection by getting them into office and then getting them to do the will of the people (for a change).

Is It Just Me Or Is Everyone Dead Tired Of The Political Partying?

Once more, the Republican Party figures it's the right one to choose WHO the Democratic presidential challenger in November must be. Meanwhile, idiots who tend to get this stuff very wrong - and with someone like CNN's Schneider rarely noted for the sake of fairness to be a major Republican type/American Enterprise Institute "fellow" when providing "non-partisan" analysis - insist that Barack has to be the candidate because John McCain and Hillary Clinton will tie each other up.

Uh, I'll ignore the BSDM implications of that last sentence - not because I'm a pussy but because I can't think anything sexual about either Hillary or John within the same week in which I want to be able to keep down my supper.

YET. What I think this all mostly amounts to, in all seriousness, is the GOP playing its usual game of "Dare Ya" with the Dems and - as happens all too often - the Democrats do exactly what Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, et al want them to do, which is usually the exact opposite of what the American people happen to tell them is needed.

The Loss of John Edwards Is The Loss of a Voice For Regular Americans

Yesterday was a very bad day for Americans who are not wealthy, don't own mega corporations, who don't have health care or job security or big political connections.

I won't pretend that I'm not bitter, sad, and very angry that Democratic presidential nominee candidate John Edwards suspended his campaign yesterday. I thought he and his wife, Elizabeth, and many fine Americans of all economic backgrounds, waged a brave and brilliant campaign that focused on something almost NO ONE else in this campaign, short of Dennis Kucinich who dropped out last week: the rising majority of Americans suffering at the bankrupting of America by Republican rule and Democrat-capitulation.

We ALL lost, regardless of your party or preferred candidate, when we let the media and the Republican party turn this race only into an Obama-Clinton slugfest, and let Edwards get pushed ever back and finally out of contention. Unlike most - virtually ALL - presidential candidates since I became eligible to vote in 1980, I really believe Edwards meant just about everything he said. And that Elizabeth, with incurable cancer, insisted he run AND participated with him, impressed the hell out of me.

As much as I can't imagine voting for ANYONE but a Democrat in November, I do not feel either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton speak for the majority of Americans. I think they, at another time, would be viewed as somewhat moderate Republicans. But, as I've said, if Republicans won't elect moderate Republicans to office, why the hell should the Democrats. All I can do is hope that we hold their feet to the fire if one of them wins Election 2008 and that they are just sounding "conservative" and ever so careful during the race, while they show less concern for millionaires and billionaires and corporations once they get to the Oval Office.

The South Carolina Democratic Debate: Who Won? Not Us

If I had to sum up my reaction to the South Carolina Democratic debate Monday night in just one sentence, I would paraphrase what contender John Edwards said, "Excuse me, there are three people in this debate, not TWO and with all this squabbling, how many kids will be able to get health care or go to college because of this meanness."

Not only did this become a Hillary-Barack slugfest with their behavior along with how debate host CNN's Wolf Blitzer handled it, but the media after the fact seemed to ignore that Edwards was even present. Most of the clips of it shown offered no glimpse, much less a soundbyte, from the former North Carolina senator.

The relatively few who DID notice Edwards was there, like Keith Olbermann on MSNBC's Countdown, noted that he came out as the soul of reason, the only one who realizes this isn't about Hillary or Barack or even himself, but a nation filled with hurting people who can no longer afford their mortgages, their health insurance, or to be guaranteed a decent education for their kids. As Newsweek's Howard Fineman pointed out with Keith, if Clinton-Obama fights like this continue for the next month, Edwards is almost guaranteed to come out ahead of both of them put together.

Finally, the media was far more focused on the arguments between the woman candidate and the black candidate, making it sound like it was just wrong. As a pacifist and as someone who rarely feels she learns much from arguing, I'd agree. However, the media ONLY looks at Clinton and Obama and the fighting, giving almost NO attention to harsh words exchanged between Republican candidates or many of the lies the GOP runners tell about the Democrats as well as their own voting/business history. Given how the media presents this stuff, how can we possibly trust their overall analysis? Hell, they didn't give Mike Huckabee this kind of heat when he came out a few times last week to declare that the U.S. Constitution must be completely rewritten to document the word and laws of His God - something that affects all of us a HELL of a lot more than whether Hillary and Barack love each other or engage in verbal smackdowns

On The Day We Celebrate King's Birthday, What Would He Think of Racial America Today?

Since the Rev. Martin Luther King's actual birthday last week (born January 15th, 1929), I find myself wondering what the man who became this nation's most famed civil rights activist and left us with passionate legacies such as his "I Have A Dream" speech would think about the state of this nation had he not been gunned down in April 1968, just two months before Bobby Kennedy who just might have won the 1968 presidential race.

It was no secret to King that he was watched, recorded, and routinely villified by everyone from an FBI where J. Edgar Hoover was still in charge and treating the agency like his personal vengeance machine to a media that, at "best", did not want to infuriate paying white audiences by denouncing claims that King was only "in it" for himself. And, taken from us still so young, we can only guess what MLK really felt were the chances to fully break the color barriers and recreate an America that did not divide itself by race, color, creed, or religion.

In my musings, I can't seem to escape the conclusion that Dr. King would be profoundly disappointed that a fight for which he gave his life, although things HAVE changed, has really not resolved itself in the four decades since his assassination. We pretend race is no longer the big controversy it once was, yet we let our law inforcement organizations engage in racial profiling, let courts pretend crimes committed by people of color really ARE deserving of harsher punishment than those committed by whiter people with money. We sit back, albeit uncomfortably, while pundits have just moved the angry stereotyping of blacks to those we label "law breaking illegal immigrants" to whom we attach some of the same awful rhetoric: lazy, welfare cheats, people who "deliberately" grow large families to qualify them for additional public assistance and people who demand special treatment to get into good schools and jobs rather than "work as hard as whites" do.

I also believe Dr. King would be just about as incensed as many of us are that people insist "Obama isn't black enough", that he's the first black candidate for president (forgetting Frederick Douglass, Carol Mosely Braun, Shirley Chisholm, and yes, even Jesse Jackson to name a few), and that he can "only win IF" other people of color just "blindly" vote for him to promote their own race (like whites haven't done this).

While I would dearly love to think that MLK would have more reasons to be dutifully proud of "how far we've come" than not, this is the kind of wishful thinking we usually only allow white Southern Christian candidates and would be no more true coming from King than it does from them. At the same time, I can't help but think about how many - including a few of the tighty righty GOP presidential contenders out there today - griped when it was enacted and continue to resent it that King's birthday was made into a national holiday.

John Edwards: Stay or Go?

Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger Report discusses the big question(s) before 2008 Dem presidential candidate (and John Kerry's VP choice in the 2004 race), John Edwards, regarding whether it's time for him to pack it in or continue on toward the Dem convention this summer which is what Edwards has said he will do.

As I've said, I'm undecided at this time. However, Edwards (along with Dennis Kucinich) comes closer to my "ideal" candidate than do Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama who, IMHO, are too willing to make concessions I don't like, don't believe are good for the country in its current shape (which isn't all that good). To me, both represent the DLC approach to Democrats which I find too much like middle ground Republicanism to help Democrats as a whole. If the Republicans don't want to elect moderate Republicans, why should Dems do it for them?

Interestingly enough, I did NOT support Edwards in 2004 though I came to support the Kerry-Edwards' ticket simply because Edwards was on it and I saw a progressive-ism growing in him that seemed utterly absent from Kerry. The Edwards running today is a much-changed man, I believe, from 2004 and I do NOT believe this is an act. John Edwards' approach on universal health care, the working class, and so many other issues.

Right now, his campaign isn't doing super great. But what's strange is that he's got at least half the delegates of Obama and Clinton WHILE, where Republicans like Thompson and Giuliani barely have a handful of delegates BETWEEN them, pundits aren't shouting to push Fred and Rudy off the campaign trail as they are with Edwards. Why? What's the difference? Could it be that Edwards is simply not "corporate money" enough for the DLC crowd while among Repugs, Rudy and Fred will definitely sell their souls?

What's your take?

Chris Matthews, Hardball, Mea Culpas, And An Embarrassment of Rich (and Neverending) Embarrassments

Salon starts of this piece about how MSNBC's Hardball host, Chris Matthews, has caused the Internets (all of them!) to be agog about his terribly treatment of Hillary Clinton and goes on to say he's offering his mea culpas, which may or may not be because he could lose his job otherwise.

But let's be honest here: almost everything that comes out of Matthews unchecked and mealy mouth, usually about Democrats in particular, has been damned embarrassing.

Matthews started his very erratic slide - and this tool was never the most sharply calibrated instrument to begin with - when he went totally gaga about how MANLY Bush looked in May 2003 with his stunt landing on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln to announce "Mission Accomplished" and "all combat pretty much over in Iraq". Matthews literally noted Bush's (quite obviously) padded crotch and opined that every woman in America had fallen in love with the brainless wonder and every man was proud that, if they had to have a president who had a bigger codpiece than they did, at least it was "this MAN's MAN". (Geez, I want to retch just thinking about this.)

Thus, Matthews simple-minded diarrhea of the brain isn't something that started with this election cycle. It's just that he's getting exponentially worse. In addition to the Hillary remarks, he's said Obama was inspiring because he did so well in Iowa considering he's a true candidate of the third world. Uh, I know Chicago has problems, but when did Illinois join the third world? And it gets worse from there.

Sadly, the only thing MSNBC is doing in having Matthews plastered on EVERY presidential campaign focused broadcast is to render useless the little bit of better analysis they DO have (and considering their team, we're pretty much down to Keith Olbermann who shouldn't have to be paired with a fellow host so incompetent he could be named a major Bush appointee).

"Everything's PERFECT With New Hampshire Primary Vote Recount" - Unless You Bother to Read The Numbers

The stench wafting across the border is riper than Cabot Creamery's special blue cheese. Cough.

Bradblog is all over some of the irregularities already found with New Hampshire Democratic Primary votes recount (Republican recount to come after the Dems); I visited Brad AFTER I saw this happy horseshit on WMUR (a New Hampshire TV station's Web site). From WMUR (for MURky fact-gathering, perhaps?):

The continuing Democratic primary recount in New Hampshire has not found any voting problems.

As of yesterday, even TINY counties were noting that optical electronic scanners had reported HUNDREDS of ballots were blank (thus not counted) when they were indeed marked for a candidate.

Something really doesn't meet the stink test here. And Diebold may have changed its (bleeping) name, but it sure hasn't changed its rigged machinery.

Race and Gender NOT Just Dem Issues, IMHO

According to this MSNBC happy horseshit, race and gender are becoming big factors in the Democratic presidential nomination campaign. But that rather IGNORES the fact that race and gender have ALWAYS been big factors on the right - and the farther right you go, the bigger the factor - which have pretty much FORCED them to be issues for anyone who doesn't think blacks, women, and other minorities don't belong strictly doing the dirty work for the wealthier white so-called Christians.

BTW, I hate that in 2008, we're discussing gender and race as much as we are. When I was a wee child in the 60s, I envisioned a time when these would not be big issues. Apparently, I was wrong.

But it's just as wrong to pretend that race and gender are only issues for Dems when the Republicans have never put forth a serious candidate of color and one who doesn't have a penis. This speaks VOLUMES about their fears and dark desires, IMHO.

Was New Hampshire's Primary Vote Count ACCURATE? We Need To Know: Here's Why

Last week, I noted that Ohio Congressman - and still Democratic presidential hopeful - Dennis Kucinich (along with a Republican few know) demanded a recount in New Hampshire to carefully recount the votes cast there last Tuesday. But what's gone under the radar is the WHY: that in the Democratic primary alone, whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama won, on the surface, depends on how the votes were counted. Specifically, the hand-counted votes seemed to go to Obama; the electronic machine counted ones seemed to favor Hillary.

I very much applaud Kucinich for making the demand; we NEED to know if there is a problem and, if there is, whether it's willful or a deliberate cheat. While our (already, if not always so fairly or appropriately) elected leaders have already kissed away true voting reform until 2012 at the same time that those in the know indicate that, even if verified voting reform were enacted TODAY, we can't even be sure the 2012 vote will be who we actually elected.

As you might imagine, there is HUGE doubt as to this November's validity of vote. And if you aren't paying attention to this, you may deserve what YOU get, but I don't think the rest of us do.

Schizophrenic Iowa Caucus Candidate Results Math

With perhaps less than 25% of Iowa's precincts reporting in the big caucus today, NBC has already projected Mike "I put the suck in" Huckabee as the winner of the GOP race there and perhaps Barack Obama as the winner of the donkey lane. (As I type this, CBS News seems to be projecting the same). But there are some problems here, not the least of which is that 25% is a long way from 100% and that we already saw this kind of "jump the shark" math make a complete and utter mess out of the "easy Bush steal" of the 2000 Florida vote where all the networks went back and forth with who won.

Let's start with the Democrats. Though Obama is now projected as the Dem winner, the last numbers I saw actually put John Edwards ahead, followed by Obama and Clinton. Strangely enough, however, even when Edwards held a good percentage lead over the other two, NBC's and some of the other networks' pundits were making it sound like this was great for Obama and a big loss for Edwards. Uh.... huh?

Some of the same pundits were calling a vote for any Dem but Hillary an "anti-Clinton" vote. Gee, who knew that Democrats only had two choices: Hillary or NOT Hillary? They also saw the votes as broken down along specific lines: all blacks and those whites who happened not to like Hillary all voted for Obama, according to these puny pundits, while all women and those blacks who didn't like Barack handed their support to Hillary. Now this wouldn't explain how Edwards still comes out so strong, but this simplistic twit shit doesn't make much sense otherwise anyway. Earth to Pundits: not all blacks, not all women, not all "there is no such thing as evolution and mankind and the dinosaurs began to live contemporaneously with one another on Earth about 5 minutes ago" fundamentalist fruitcakes all think, act, and vote alike.

Another weird Punditry spin, this one espoused by MSNBC's Chris "I jump on board whichever ship isn't sinking quite as fast at the moment" Matthews, is that Obama is somehow more a child of Kenya than of the U.S. To hear Matthews talk, you'd think that Barack arrived in this country about 10 minutes before the caucus. Perhaps I've missed something, but I don't see Obama as anymore (and Matthews actually used this reference) "a child of the third world" than Mike Huckabee is the voice of intelligent Christians (of which I'm not sure Mike is one), or Rudy Giuliani is the voice of adulterers everywhere, or that Hillary is just another Bill.

Meanwhile, Matthews is rather "kind" in noting that Huckabee seems out of touch with what's going on in the world or even in this country. Huckabee, for example, is claiming he appeared on Jay Leno's "The Tonight Show" last night not knowing there was a writers' strike going on (and if you believe this one, than kindly believe I'm a 6 foot tall anorexic natural blonde 17 year old who wants someday to be as smart as the "so dumb she almost makes Paris Hilton seem like she has an IQ in the double digits" Miss South Carolina). But even if you buy (and you shouldn't) Huckabee's claim of ignorance on crossing picket lines, he's equally clueless about a number of other far more important points, such as Pakistan's politics and his repeated statements that religious freedom and true democracy in the US can only be achieved by forcing every American to be baptized into his evangelical faith and to rewrite the Constitution based on his version of the Bible.

To sum it up, if the media's coverage of the Iowa caucus tonight is any indication of how the rest of their reporting on the November's upcoming presidential vote will go, we're in even bigger trouble than we've been.

Matt Drudge And New Online Politico Joined At The Hip

Have you heard much about the new online political "magazine" called Politico? I first saw the links for it several weeks ago; only after that did I begin to read and hear lots of mumbling about Politico being less than fair to those not of the red power tie persuasion (I'm still divided myself; I do think I see more Republican bias though I have seen them mock GOPers, too).

But here's what Glenn Greenwald writes today of Matt Drudge and Politico being joined at the hip (that's GOT to hurt):

The new online political magazine, The Politico, is a pernicious new presence in our media landscape. As I noted the other day, it really is nothing more than the Drudge Report dressed up with the trappings of mainstream media credibility. Today, Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News writes on his blog about what is merely the latest episode (of many) proving how closely coordinated The Politico is with The Drudge Report. It is not hyperbole to say that the former is all but an arm of the latter.

Last night, The Politico's Mike Allen published a petty, trite hit piece on Barack Obama -- entitled Rookie Mistakes Plague Obama -- claiming that Obama "has also shown a tendency toward seemingly minor contradictions and rhetorical slips" and referencing "imprecise or incomplete statements by Obama over the years." As Bunch noticed, Allen's story was "highlighted on the Drudge Report no later than 18 minutes after it was filed by Allen (how does he do it!)." Drudge continues prominently to promote The Politico's story today:

As I noted earlier this week, The Politico has instantaneously become one of the most-linked sites (I would guess the single most-linked) on The Drudge Report. Drudge links produce a volume of traffic unlike any other. Central to the business and political plan of The Politico is, quite transparently, overt courting of Matt Drudge and active cooperation with him.

When we last saw Mike Allen, he was falling all over himself in praise of Drudge on Drudge's radio show. Immediately thereafter, Allen published a story with Drudge-like inaccuracy claiming that "it is now a virtual certainty that Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty . . . will also resign shortly" and that Gonzales' resignation would either occur at the same time or a day before -- a story which The Politico changed the following day (once Bush made clear that Gonzales would not resign) to conceal Allen's inaccuracies without indicating in any way that the story had been changed.

Allen, who was Time's White House correspondent before joining The Politico, has a relationship with the White House and with George Bush so affable that the President actually went out of his way at a recent Press Conference deliberately to plug The Politico while exchanging in giggly chatter with Allen...

The rest is here.

Frank Rich: "Bring Back The Politics of Personal Destruction"

Eh? Can't say I miss that - and with the Bushies and the severe right wingnuts practicing destructive hate speech on a second-by-second basis, I doubt we have to worry about not getting our fill of it (like a GOP Congressman from Texas saying Dems' failure to support Bush's endless failures caused the stock market to tank earlier this week).

But here, without further delay, is the March 4th Frank Rich column in The New York Times, of which I give you a heaping sniplet or you can read in full at Rozius Unbound:

If you had to put a date on when the Iraq war did in the Bush administration, it would be late summer 2005. That's when the bungled federal response to Hurricane Katrina re-enacted the White House bungling of the war, this time with Americans as the principal victims. The stuff happening on Brownie's watch in New Orleans was recognizably the same stuff that had happened on Donald Rumsfeld's watch in Baghdad. Television viewers connected the dots and the president's poll numbers fell into the 30s. There they have largely remained - at least until Friday, when the latest New York Times-CBS News Poll put him at 29.

Now this pattern is repeating itself: a searing re-enactment of the Iraq war's lethal mismanagement is playing out on the home front, again with potentially grave political consequences. The Washington Post's exposé of the squalor at Walter Reed Army Medical Center - where some of our most grievously wounded troops were treated less like patients than detainees - has kicked off the same spiral of high-level lying and blame-shifting that followed FEMA's Katrina disasters.

Just as the debacle on the gulf was a call to arms for NBC's Brian Williams and CNN's Anderson Cooper, so the former ABC anchor Bob Woodruff has returned from his own near-death experience in Iraq to champion wounded troops let down by their government. And not just at Walter Reed. His powerful ABC News special last week unearthed both a systemic national breakdown in veterans' medical care and a cover-up. The Veterans Affairs Department keeps "two sets of books" - one telling the public that the official count of nonfatal battlefield casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan stands at 23,000, the other showing an actual patient count of 205,000. Why the discrepancy? A new Brownie - Jim Nicholson, the former Republican National Committee hack whom President Bush installed as veterans affairs secretary - tells Mr. Woodruff "a lot of them come in for dental problems."

Yet 2007 is not 2005, and little more damage can be inflicted on the lame-duck Bush White House. The long-running Iraq catastrophe is now poised to mow down a second generation of political prey: presidential hopefuls who might have strongly challenged Bush war policy when it counted and didn't. That list starts with the candidates long regarded as their parties' 2008 favorites, John McCain and Hillary Clinton.

Senator McCain, who, unlike Senator Clinton, fervently supports the war and the surge, is morbidly aware of his predicament. This once-ebullient politician has been off his game since a conspicuously listless January "Meet the Press" appearance; on Thursday, he had to publicly apologize after telling David Letterman, in an unguarded moment of genuine straight talk, that American lives were being "wasted" in Iraq. (Barack Obama had already spoken the same truth and given the same pro forma apology.) Last week a Washington Post-ABC News Poll confirmed Mr. McCain's worst political fears. Rudy Giuliani now leads him two to one among Republicans, a tripling of Mr. Giuliani's lead in a single month.

Mr. Giuliani is also a war supporter and even contributed a Brownie of his own to the fiasco, the now disgraced Bernard Kerik, who helped botch the training of the Iraqi police. But, unlike Mr. McCain, Mr. Giuliani isn't dogged by questions about Iraq. To voters, his war history begins and ends with the war against the enemy that actually attacked America on 9/11. He wasn't a cheerleader for the subsequent detour into Iraq, wasn't in office once the war started, and actively avoids speaking about it in any detail.

What makes Mr. Giuliani's rise particularly startling is that his liberal views and messy personal history are thought to make him a nonstarter with his own party faithful. These handicaps haven't kicked in, the Beltway explanation has it, because benighted Republican voters don't yet really know that "America's mayor" once married a cousin or that he describes himself as "pro-choice." But perhaps these voters aren't as ignorant as Washington thinks. After the flameouts of Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, Rick Santorum, Ralph Reed and other Bible-thumping politicos who threw themselves on the altars of Terri Schiavo or Jack Abramoff, maybe most Republicans could use a rest from the moral brigade. Maybe these voters, too, care more about the right to life of troops thrust into an Iraqi civil war than that of discarded embryos used in stem-cell research.

Get the rest here.

Shifting Allegiances?

As reported by Political Wire:

Two interesting trends in the 2008 presidential race were uncovered in the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll:

• African American voters, "who little more than a month ago heavily supported Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton... now favor the candidacy of Sen. Barack Obama."
• White evangelical Protestants now clearly favor Rudy Giuliani over Sen. John McCain, "despite his support of abortion rights and gay rights, two issues of great importance to religious conservatives."

In the Democratic race, the poll found Clinton with 43% support, trailed by Obama at 27% and Edwards at 14%. None of the other Democrats running received more than 3%.On the Republican side, Giuliani leads with 44% to Sen. John McCain's 21%. Newt Gingrich had 15% support.

How About An Al Gore-Barack Obama Ticket?

I dunno. To me, that sounds fairly appealing. It would give Obama a good shot at the presidency in four to eight years and, say what you want about Al (up for an Oscar tomorrow and a Nobel Prize in April, I believe), it sure looks like he won the 2000 presidential election, James Baker and the U.S. Supreme Court aside.

BTW, here's the link to DraftGore.

(Psssst: Can you tell Hillary Clinton makes me ill?)

Maureen Dowd: "Obama's Big Screen Test"

Maureen Dowd just reminds us that this is going to be an interesting Democratic primary season. While it's not one I necessarily want determined by Hollywood, I'd prefer Hollywood to Rove- and Cheneywood. Rozius gives us all the Dowd that's fit to print, but here's a big snip:

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.- Hillary is not David Geffen’s dreamgirl.

“Whoever is the nominee is going to win, so the stakes are very high,” says Mr. Geffen, the Hollywood mogul and sultan of “Dreamgirls,” as he sits by a crackling fire beneath a Jasper Johns flag and a matched pair of de Koonings in the house that Jack Warner built (which old-time Hollywood stars joked was the house that God would have built). “Not since the Vietnam War has there been this level of disappointment in the behavior of America throughout the world, and I don’t think that another incredibly polarizing figure, no matter how smart she is and no matter how ambitious she is — and God knows, is there anybody more ambitious than Hillary Clinton? — can bring the country together.

“Obama is inspirational, and he’s not from the Bush royal family or the Clinton royal family. Americans are dying every day in Iraq. And I’m tired of hearing James Carville on television.”

Barack Obama has made an entrance in Hollywood unmatched since Scarlett O’Hara swept into the Twelve Oaks barbecue. Instead of the Tarleton twins, the Illinois senator is flirting with the Dreamworks trio: Mr. Geffen, Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who gave him a party last night that raised $1.3 million and Hillary’s hackles.

She didn’t stand outside the gates to the Geffen mansion, where glitterati wolfed down Wolfgang Puck savories, singing the Jennifer Hudson protest anthem “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.” But she’s not exactly Little Miss Sunshine, either. Hillary loyalists have hissed at defecting donors to remember the good old days of jumping on the Lincoln Bedroom bed.

“Hillary is livid that Obama’s getting the first big fund-raiser here,” one friend of hers said.

Who can pay attention to the Oscar battle between “The Queen” and “Dreamgirls” when you’ve got a political battle between a Queen and a Dreamboy?

Terry McAuliffe and First Groupie Bill have tried to hoard the best A.T.M. machine in politics for the Missus, but there’s some Clinton fatigue among fatigued Clinton donors, who fret that Bill will “pull the focus” and shelve his wife’s campaign.

“I don’t think anybody believes that in the last six years, all of a sudden Bill Clinton has become a different person,” Mr. Geffen says, adding that if Republicans are digging up dirt, they’ll wait until Hillary’s the nominee to use it. “I think they believe she’s the easiest to defeat.”

She is overproduced and overscripted. “It’s not a very big thing to say, ‘I made a mistake’ on the war, and typical of Hillary Clinton that she can’t,” Mr. Geffen says. “She’s so advised by so many smart advisers who are covering every base. I think that America was better served when the candidates were chosen in smoke-filled rooms.”

The babble here is not about “Babel”; it’s about the battle of the billionaires. Not only have Ron Burkle and David Geffen been vying to buy The Los Angeles Times — they have been vying to raise money for competing candidates. Mr. Burkle, a supermarket magnate, is close to the Clintons, and is helping Hillary parry Barry Obama by arranging a fund-raiser for her in March, with a contribution from Mr. Spielberg.

Did Mr. Spielberg get in trouble with the Clintons for helping Senator Obama? “Yes,” Mr. Geffen replies, slyly. Can Obambi stand up to Clinton Inc.? “I hope so,” he says, “because that machine is going to be very unpleasant and unattractive and effective.”

Read it all here.

And yeah, Hillary does not warm the cockles of my heart. Nor, frankly, does Carville & Company. But Bill? Well, I'd do another four years of Bill. IF I had to.

Actually, after all these years of Bush & Cheney, there are whole months when dictatorships start to look good by comparison. ::sigh::

On Empire...

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Notes On Iraq, Democracy, and More

You folks have left some good comments, especially the last few days, which has my head spinning (ok, perhaps that doesn't take ALL that much effort but...).

On Odom's "Victory is Not an Option" op/ed, Karlo pegged it correctly, how the hell did we think we were going to walk in and hand them a democracy kit? It's like we told them, "OK, we're here. Bow at our feet and thank us endlessly. Now just use this democracy kit, add hot water and voile!"

First and foremost, creating an instant democracy under the very best of conditions would have been impossible for Iraq. And hell, we didn't even leave them with working electricity to heat the water to add to the Instant Democracy Soup Kit! As Karlo notes, Iraqis have no idea what either democracy or victory - which probably means something quite different to them than it does to us - looks like. How Bush & Company blame Iraqis for the mess is just beyond my grasp.

Mind you, here we are in the United States in 2007 STILL hammering out what it means to be a democracy here at home. The Red States seem to think democracy means blind obedience and shut-the-hell-upness-unless-you're-with-us mentality. And as CK accurately points out, while it's the Blue States offering resolutions against the Iraq War and amassing the highly casualties in the war (Vermont remains the state with the highest per capita death rate in Iraq - save for, of course, Iraqi civilians themselves), it's the red states making all the money off this damned war while the rest of us pay the taxes and watch our troops and Iraq's innocents die and get hurt.

As for these resolutions, well...

I'm glad the states are finally stepping up, but I STILL hold both sides of Congress completely responsible for letting Bush and Company take us into Iraq on what was already clear to many of us LONG before the invasion were trumped-up charges and the worst pack of lies I've ever heard. Hillary Clinton keeps telling us that if she's president in 2009, she'll get us out of Iraq.

Really? Hillary voted for the damned war. What is Hillary doing NOW to end it? And no, electioneering for 2009 does NOT count.

And how do we trust these ass-covering nitwits NOT to allow Bush to take us into Iraq? I'm sorry, but his assurances that the "press" is the only one planning an attack hold no water for me. He told us the same about Iraq... and now, four long years later...

Of course, Hillary is not the only person who did this (there's John Kerry and others; Obama was not yet in the Senate). But as potentially the most likely Dem nominee for president, I am gravely concerned about her positions which are far too Bush-like for my comfort.

Non-binding resolutions aren't worth jack shit.