Let’s have a show of hands: Who out there believes that even if the Culinary Workers Union 226 had endorsed Hillary Clinton instead of Barack Obama that we’d still be seeing Clinton operatives within the Nevada State Education Association filing a lawsuit effectively barring nine caucus sites along the Vegas strip? And that if Obama's people had done this to the unions who could be counted on to vote for Hillary, that Camp Clinton wouldn't be screaming bloody murder, in turn?


Shut up, you don’t count.

Yet this is precisely what’s coming out of Vegas, according to Daily Kos’s Miss Laura.

Since both Obama and Clinton hail from Chicago and since this turf war is being waged in the Desert where Bugsy Siegel once held sway, this is beginning to look less like a presidential election and more like a mob gang war.

Now, Hillary didn’t specifically order this (or, as my Deep Throat who’d just called me with this breaking story told me, “it doesn’t have her fingerprints on it”) yet it’s notable that we have not heard Hillary, who had after Iowa publicly deplored tactics exactly like this, decry this desperately despicable chicanery that essentially turns on its ear virtually everything we've come to learn and cherish about the democratic principle of one-person/one-vote.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with voter rights. It's about politics, plain and simple.

Perhaps that isn’t so surprising since the lawsuit that would effectively bar nine caucus sites worth of casino workers from caucusing is coming directly from the Nevada Democratic Party and even the Democratic National HQ (according to the party’s spokeswoman Kirsten Searer). Plus, the Washington Post blog tells us that

(C)ulinary union leaders told the Washington Post they expected an outside group with ties to Clinton to file a motion seeking to quash the casino caucuses.

I guess this is the part where the Nevada State Education Association, which, coincidentally enough, recently endorsed Hillary, comes in. The suit is being filed through Kummer, Kaempfer, Bonner, Renshaw, and Ferrario, a law firm that has verifiable ties to Hillary.

Here’s what it boils down to: The Clinton camp (or, rather, its totally autonomous and independently-acting supporters) seem freaked out that the Culinary Workers Union, which is a formidable union and the casino workers in other unions, could tip the balance of power in a closely-contested race. The suit tries to present a concern by the NSEA that allowing these unions to hold their caucuses at their jobs, on work days, unfairly discriminates against those union workers who can’t caucus on their home turf (such as janitors who have to open schools, for instance, for other caucus sites).

The casino workers represent the “at-large” caucuses which could account for up to 10% of the final tally of the Nevada caucuses next Saturday, a large enough chunk of votes that could easily throw this caucus to one candidate or the other.

Lee Atwater lives.

It’s essentially pitting one union against another and if Hillary and even Harry Reid (whose own son is a public Clintonite) don’t step on this right now and ask for the lawsuit to be dropped, it will be political suicide for both. And the fact that the largely African-American union, which is supporting the only African American democratic presidential contender, is being targeted by a Clintonite like Dina Titus, the Senate Minority leader in the Nevada state senate, doesn’t make this lawsuit smell any better, either. (On her blog, btw, she asks those who have questions regarding the January 19th caucus to contact her. I say we give her an earful, including why there’s no mention of this lawsuit anywhere on her official website.).

But don’t expect Hillary to be speaking out in an election year in favor of a union that’s already thrown its considerable support behind Barack Obama. Remember, she’d spent many profitable years sitting at Mr. Sam’s board helping Wal-Mart carry out every down-and-dirty union-busting trick in the book.

The Las Vegas Gleaner has more and Ralston, the Vegas Pundit has a .PDF file of the complaint that may be of interest.

I've avoided posting too much about the suspicions that something regarding the New Hampshire results just isn't right. Brad Friedman has been all over it since Tuesday's primary and Dennis Kucinich is calling for a recount. But the notion that someone (not necessarily people associated with the Clinton campaign) could have tampered with the machines in precincts that used Diebold's Accuvote (sic) optical scan machines is starting to gain traction, or at the very least, that voters are entitled to certainty.

Steve Rosenfeld reports that a number of experts think the results don't pass the smell test:

Election integrity activists parsing the precinct-level results from New Hampshire's Democratic Primary say their early analyses have found anomalies suggesting vote totals may have been altered to deliver a Hillary Clinton victory.

The activists, led by the Election Defense Alliance, a nonprofit formed after the 2004 election when exit polls also predicted a victory by a candidate other then the eventual winner, point to a series of discrepancies when comparing the official results from hand-counted and machine-counted paper ballots. Computer scanners, much like a standardized test, counted 80 percent of the ballots.

They begin by noting that Barack Obama won in hand-counted precincts, which tend to be more rural with fewer voters. In contrast, Clinton won in the precincts where computers tallied results, which are larger towns, cities and Boston suburbs. That discrepancy suggested that had the computer-counted ballots been tallied by hand, Clinton might not have won a victory defying pre-election polls, the activists said.

Anthony Stevens, New Hampshire's assistant secretary of state, said on Thursday that the hand count-computer count discrepancy was not unusual. He noted that in 2004 Democrat Howard Dean largely carried the hand-count precincts while John Kerry won most of the computer-count locales.

However, later on Thursday, Bruce O'Dell, an information technology consultant who is coordinating Election Defense Alliance's analysis, found the percentages of the vote given to Obama and Clinton, according to which counting method was used, were mirror images "down to the sixth decimal place."

Farhad Manjoo, predictably, is skeptical:

Eighty percent of New Hampshire's votes are counted by computers, while the other 20 percent -- mostly votes in smaller or more rural areas -- are counted manually. Activists looking into the possibility of theft thus took a straightforward investigative approach: Did the results in hand-count areas match up with the results in machine-count areas? If the results do match, you can pretty much definitively say that the election was not stolen.

But the counts don't match. A number of amateur analysts have pored over the results, each using slightly varying methods, and they've all found some difference in the results from hand-count areas versus those from places where votes were counted by machine.

The most thorough analysis I've seen was performed by an anonymous supporter of Ron Paul. Of the votes that have been counted so far, Hillary Clinton beat Barack Obama in New Hampshire by 39.03 percent to 36.39 percent. The Ron Paulster's analysis shows that in machine-count areas, Clinton beat Obama by a better margin, 40.12 percent versus 35.76 percent. But in hand-counted areas, Obama beat Clinton by 38.76 percent to 34.70 percent.

In other words, if Obama had received the same margin across the state as he got in the areas where votes were counted manually, he would have won.

To some activists, this suggests fraud; the thinking is that Hillary Clinton's margin in machine-count areas is the product of hacking, while Obama's hand-count win represents the true result.

Thankfully, few activists are saying that what they've seen proves fraud -- they're being far more cautious, asking only that someone should look into this phenomenon.

That's because everyone understands that there is a reasonable reason for why Obama would win the hand-count areas while Clinton would win the machine-count areas: Those places simply vote differently.

American elections are hyper-local affairs. Election officials choose voting technologies based on their needs, and their calculation depends on demographics.

Officials in charge of small counties are more likely to choose to manually count their ballots. But if you've got 10,000 or 20,000 voters in your county -- like in Manchester or Concord -- you'll use machines. Money is also a factor; poorer places are less likely to have the resources for machines. Governmental efficiency might also matter -- some elections officials may not have gotten around, yet, to adopting machines -- as might local infrastructure, or any number of other factors.

But, of course, the same demographics would also affect voting results. It's likely, for example, that people in small places or poor places would vote very differently from people in large places or rich places -- and, therefore, variances in the result that look like they were caused by voting-machine fraud might actually only be the product of normal regional differences.

Manjoo could be right, of course, but shouldn't we count to make sure?

Here's why: The Accuvote optical scan machine is very easily hacked, as shown in these clips from the documentary Hacking Democracy ( should be viewed in sequence):



Like Brad, I'm not making any claims about election theft. But when you have something that seems so out of whack, and is out of whack so symmetrically, shouldn't we recount so that voters can have confidence in the results?

Labels: 2008 election, Diebold

Welcome, haterz!

If you've come here from Sweet Jesus I Hate Chris Matthews, let me first apologize for not picking up the place a little and not having any cake in the house. But frankly, I hadn't expected so many visitors.

I set the site up a few days ago on a whim, simultaneously thinking that someone really ought to set up a central point for All Things Tweety, and wondering why no one had done it before. I put up a starter post, opened the doors to others who felt the need to vent their bile after watching Hardball, and figured it would be one of those far-flung corners of the blogosphere, updated occasionally and visited more occasionally. That in two days it's spread like wildfire gives me some hope that maybe...just maybe...the Washington pundit corps, including Tweety, have been chastened just a bit, and that Americans may start greeting what they say with more skepticism than they have lo these last seven years.

Labels: blogs, Chris Matthews, hack journalism

Last winter I did a few posts about my former obsession and still guilty pleasure, televised figure skating. This week, the siren song of high-definition television led me to sit through treacle like a rebroadcast on one of the VOOM channels of not just an entire hour of skating to the music of Seal, but two hours of Kristi Yamaguchi Friends and Family with music by some preposterously cute multiracial kid I never heard of from High School Musical whose name I've forgotten, and three surprisingly and refreshingly zaftig divas called the Cheetah Girls who seem to be a similarly big hit among the tyke set.

Aside from the miracle of the now-44-year-old Brian Boitano still being able to do all those huge triple jumps, the other jaw-dropper was watching all these skaters I used to watch during my most obsessive period who not only haven't aged a day in fifteen years, but some of whom now look almost younger than their own kids. 36-year-old Ekaterina Gordeeva not only hasn't aged a day since 1994, despite witnessing a husband drop dead right on the ice, but daughter Daria, now a leggy fifteen-year-old who's the spitting image of her father only with better teeth, is a damn fine skater in her own right.

Long missing from these tours of veterans from the heyday of televised figure skating; the days of the Battles of the Brians and the Carmens in the 1988 Olympics, and the overexposure the "sport" received in the aftermath of the infamous Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding knee whacking incident has been Christopher Bowman. As Dick Button noted before this short program at the 1988 Olympics (perhaps the high point of Bowman's career), "If he ever gets around to devoting himself full-time to it, he could be an astounding skater":



Americans have always been ambivalent about male figure skaters. In a country where hockey means that a kid who loves to skate is more likely to pick up a sport that involves hitting a puck (and other players) with a stick than to put on a spangled costume and take ballet lessons, Bowman was a rarity. In 1988, the sexual ambiguity of Brian Boitano and Canadian rival Brian Orser (who has since been unwillingly outed) was offset by the ferocious heterosexuality of Christopher Bowman. In hoping to remove the impression of figure skating as a "gay sport", American figure skating circles put its hopes in the cute kid from Hollywood with the "million dollar feet and the ten-cent head" who had already been branded as "Hans Brinker from Hell" by skating pundits, as Boitano's successor. But with Christopher Bowman, as with so many other athletes who have risen through the ranks of their sports loaded with potential but unable to overcome their personal demons, the "ten cent head" won out. As you can see from the commentary in this video of Bowman's long program at 1988 Skate America, Bowman was painfully aware of the expectations the sport was placing on him:



This program may look easy by today's standards, but the triple axel was a huge deal in 1988. Note also the reference to Bowman saying he started skating at age five because he was an "overactive child". It's hard to believe that as recently as 1988, the prevailing wisdom about what we know now as ADHD extended solely to putting skates on the kid. With the perspective we have today, it's pretty clear that Bowman's problem extended far beyond a simple overabundance of energy, because not even competitive figure skating tould tame the scattered mind that inhabited the skater's body.

After a disappointing 4th place finish at the 1992 Olympics and a seven-year professional career, Bowman became a coach in Los Angeles, appeared as a commentator on a few skating broadcasts, married and had a daughter. In the rare occasions when you'd read about him, you'd gasp at the bloated figure teaching kids to skate. Then you'd recognize Christopher Bowman behind all the flesh, and for a while it seemed as if he'd finally gotten his act together.

In recent years, Bowman seemed to drop off the face of the earth. Even his own official web site seems to have been abandoned years ago. He had become one of those "Whatever happened to....?" footnotes until he was found dead in a cheap motel room in Los Angeles shortly after noon yesterday:

"He just passed away in his sleep," Bowman's mother, Joyce, told the Detroit Free Press, which first reported details of his death, according to The Associated Press. "His friend told me that he was fine. He just went to bed and didn't wake up."

The cause of death was under investigation, said Lt. Joe Bale, adding that a full examination should take place this weekend. However, signs pointed to a "possible overdose," Bale said.

Even if it turns out Bowman's death wasn't caused by an overdose, it's clear that too many years of hard living and too much cocaine use had taken a toll. The irony is that despite his best efforts to live fast, die young, and make a good-looking corpse, he hung on too long to achieve the last two, and not long enough to get his head together. One wonders if he was ever evaluated for adult ADHD, and what would have happened if he had.

There are some quotes on Bowman's web site that seem to encapsulate Christopher Bowman in a nutshell:

"Either lead this sport, follow this sport, or get out of the way."


"It's not what you can afford to have but what you can afford to lose."

"The skater whose effort is going nowhere, generally gets there."

"Be nice to other skaters on the way up, for you may see them on the way down."

"Beware of the skater who has nothing to lose."

As for me, I'd rather remember Christopher Bowman this way:



(Updated 1/15/08 in response to a comment to enclose "ten cent head" in quotation marks. The expression is a play on a line from Bull Durham and is in no way intended to make light of mental illness. Stories about Bowman's death have since been updated to reveal that Bowman had sought treatment for bipolar disorder shortly before his death. Thanks to commenter "ceci" for pointing this out.)

Labels: figure skating, pop culture

So we almost went to war against Iranian speedboats that said nothing to our warships; the supposed "threat" may have been coming from the shore or another vessel:

Just two days after the U.S. Navy released the eerie video of Iranian speedboats swarming around American warships, which featured a chilling threat in English, the Navy is saying that the voice on the tape could have come from the shore or from another ship.

The near-clash occurred over the weekend in the Strait of Hormuz. On the U.S.-released recording, a voice can be heard saying to the Americans, "I am coming to you. You will explode after a few minutes."


The Navy never said specifically where the voices came from, but many were left with the impression they had come from the speedboats because of the way the Navy footage was edited.

Today, the spokesperson for the U.S. admiral in charge of the Fifth Fleet clarified to ABC News that the threat may have come from the Iranian boats, or it may have come from somewhere else.

We're saying that we cannot make a direct connection to the boats there," said the spokesperson. "It could have come from the shore, from another ship passing by. However, it happened in the middle of all the very unusual activity, so as we assess the information and situation, we still put it in the total aggregate of what happened Sunday morning. I guess we're not saying that it absolutely came from the boats, but we're not saying it absolutely didn't."

So we have a president who's just itching to enlarge his penis by nuking Iran. We have a vice-president who's so batshit crazy he wants to nuke Iran just for the hell of it. And here we are with trigger-happy warships in the Strait of Hormuz.

Meanwhile, back where insecurity will be assured by the Department of Redundancy Department and the Natural Guard, the telephone companies -- you know, the ones to whom the Democrats in Congress are going to give immunity for tapping your phone looking for terrorists? The ones who co-operated in the Bush Administration's illegal wiretap program to "help with the war on terror"? Well, just like they do when you or I don't pay the bill, they've suspended the program because the government is a deadbeat:

The big telephone companies are only too happy to let the feds snoop on your phone calls and Internet use --- as long as the government pays its bills. But an audit has just revealed that the telcos have been cutting off wiretaps, because the incompetent FBI has been unable to pay its phone bills on time.

Forget the constitution --- when it comes to wiretapping and Internet-tapping, for the telcos, it's only the bottom line that matters. The AP reports that a Justice Department audit has found that phone companies "have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau's repeated failures to pay phone bills on time."

The report found that more than half of 990 bills supposed to pay for surveillance in five FBI field offices weren't paid on time. In just one office, the report found, "unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000." And when the bills weren't paid, the telcos often cut off the surveillance.

In one case, the report found, a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) investigation had to be cut off because the FBI didn't pay its bills on time. The AP notes, "FISA wiretaps are used in the government's most sensitive and secretive criminal investigations, and allow eavesdropping on suspected terrorists or spies."

It's hard to know which is worse, the venality of the phone companies, or the incompetence of the FBI. When it comes to what appears to be illegal wiretapping and Internet-tapping by the NSA, the telephone companies say they have no choice but to invade people's privacy --- the government says they have to do it. But as this report shows, that's the case only so long as the bills are paid.

After the Michael Dukakis debacle of 1988, the word "competence" fell into disfavor as a qualification for the presidency. That idea doesn't sound so bad now, does it?

Labels: Bush Administration, idiocy, Iran attack, NSA wiretapping

Funny how this clip of Dan Abrams from last night doesn't include Chris Matthews as one of those declaring Hillary Clinton's candidacy dead before the New Hampshire primary:



Rachel Maddow has been all over this for the last 36 hours, and boy, is she pissed. When Rachel starts actually taking phone calls, you know she's not going to let this go. Nor should she, because what the punditocracy did in advance of this primary deserves to be held under a microscope. Ever since Bill Clinton's 1993 campaign, the media have focused on bullshit and the horse race aspect of campaigns instead of on where the candidates stand on real issues and providing an actual service to viewers. With the New Hampshire results slapping them in the face, is there any chance at all that the media has been chastened? My guess is no, but stay tuned.

Labels: Rachel Maddow

Not personally, but via his Blackwater Praetorian Guard thugs:

The helicopter was hovering over a Baghdad checkpoint into the Green Zone, one typically crowded with cars, Iraqi civilians and United States military personnel.

Suddenly, on that May day in 2005, the copter dropped CS gas, a riot-control substance the American military in Iraq can use only under the strictest conditions and with the approval of top military commanders. An armored vehicle on the ground also released the gas, temporarily blinding drivers, passers-by and at least 10 American soldiers operating the checkpoint.

“This was decidedly uncool and very, very dangerous,” Capt. Kincy Clark of the Army, the senior officer at the scene, wrote later that day. “It’s not a good thing to cause soldiers who are standing guard against car bombs, snipers and suicide bombers to cover their faces, choke, cough and otherwise degrade our awareness.”

Both the helicopter and the vehicle involved in the incident at the Assassins’ Gate checkpoint were not from the United States military, but were part of a convoy operated by Blackwater Worldwide, the private security contractor that is under scrutiny for its role in a series of violent episodes in Iraq, including a September shooting in downtown Baghdad that left 17 Iraqis dead.

None of the American soldiers exposed to the chemical, which is similar to tear gas, required medical attention, and it is not clear if any Iraqis did. Still, the previously undisclosed incident has raised significant new questions about the role of private security contractors in Iraq, and whether they operate under the same rules of engagement and international treaty obligations that the American military observes.

“You run into this issue time and again with Blackwater, where the rules that apply to the U.S. military don’t seem to apply to Blackwater,” said Scott L. Silliman, the executive director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at the Duke University School of Law.

Officers and noncommissioned officers from the Third Infantry Division who were involved in the episode said there were no signs of violence at the checkpoint. Instead, they said, the Blackwater convoy appeared to be stuck in traffic and may have been trying to use the riot-control agent as a way to clear a path.

Anne Tyrrell, a spokeswoman for Blackwater, said the CS gas had been released by mistake.

So which is it? Reckless, cowboy-type behavior, or incompetence? Either way, Blackwater should no longer be permitted to operate in Iraq -- or anywhere, for that matter.

Some information about CS gas is here. And this is from a report of the Journal of the American Medical Association from August 4, 1989:

Tear gas has gained widespread acceptance as a means of controlling civilian crowds and subduing barricaded criminals. The most widely used forms of tear gas have been o-chlorobenzylidenemalononitrile (CS) and (-chloroacetophenone (CN). Proponents of their use claim that, if used correctly, the noxious effects of exposure are transient and of no long-term consequences. The use of tear gas in recent situations of civil unrest, however, demonstrates that exposure to the weapon is difficult to control and indiscriminate and the weapon is often not used correctly. Severe traumatic injury from exploding tear gas bombs as well as lethal toxic injury have been documented. Moreover, available toxicological data are deficient as to the potential of tear gas agents to cause long-term pulmonary, carcinogenic, and reproductive effects. Published and recent unpublished in vitro tests have shown o-chlorobenzylidenemalononitrile to be both clastogenic and mutagenic. Sadly, the nature of its use renders analytic epidemiologic investigation of exposed persons difficult. In 1969, eighty countries voted to include tear gas agents among chemical weapons banned under the Geneva Protocol. There is an ongoing need for investigation into the full toxicological potential of tear gas chemicals and renewed debate on whether their use can be condoned under any circumstances.

[snip]

The widespread use of tear gas agents naturally raises the question of their safety. Relatively little, however, has appeared in the mainstream medical literature regarding their toxicology. In general, authors of review articles have averred that, if used correctly, the noxious effects of exposure are transient and of no long-term consequence (2-4). Much emphasis has been given to the findings of the Himsworth Report, (5) the results of an inquiry by a committee appointed by the British Secretary of State for the Home Department following the use of CS in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, in 1969. In addition to investigating the use of CS in Londonderry, the committee reviewed a wide range of scientific data. Its main conclusion was that while exposure to CS can be lethal, most likely in the form of toxic pulmonary damage leading to pulmonary edema, such an occurrence would only be at concentrations that were several hundred times greater than the exposure dosage that produces intolerable symptoms.

Many questions remain, however. Epidemiologic inquiry following the use of tear gas under actual field conditions has been almost completely absent.

And a paper published in 2000 in the British Medical Journal states:

The key issue with regard to the safety of CS is not CS toxicity itself but that of its formulation.

Do we know the formulation of the CS gas used by Blackwater?

Here we have a private army, unaccountable to no one, not even the president, using tear gas against American soldiers because of a traffic jam. Where is the outrage? Why is Blackwater still allowed to operate in Iraq? Where is Congress?

Labels: Blackwater

Vastleft, at Correntewire, about John McCain, the would-be Commander-in-Chief of the United States Armed Forces, already offloading responsibility for Iraq to Gen. David Petraeus:

If McCain is planning for us to stay in Iraq for 100 years, does Petraeus leave a living/dying/killing will that says when we can leave, or will they be keeping his head in one of those “Futurama” jar thingies?

Labels: bloggers, John McCain

People who heat their homes with natural gas aren't dealing with horrifically higher fuel prices this winter. But what do you think is going to happen when the price of home heating oil drives those of us with oil burners to finally convert over?

Because we have an oil burner and an electric stove, we don't even have a gas line coming into the house. So when our old furnace went a few years ago, converting wasn't an issue -- we didn't want to have the entire yard torn up to run a gas line. We're on an equal payment plan with a price cap, so this winter we're paying a "mere" $3.09 a gallon for home heating oil. We probably pay more than the going price when prices drop, but playing arbitrage with home heating oil is for people less busy than I am. But if you do have oil heat and you pay on a per-fillup basis, you are in for some serious ticker shock next time you fill your oil tank:

The U.S. average retail price for home heating oil soared 5.4 cents over the past week to a record $3.40 a gallon, the government said on Wednesday.

The national heating oil price was up 98 cents from a year ago, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said in its weekly survey of heating fuel costs around the country. It was the fourth week in a row that heating oil hit a record.

Heating oil prices are rising because of higher crude oil costs, which topped at a record above $100 a barrel last week, and tight supplies.

While distillate fuel inventories, which include heating oil and diesel fuel, increased by 1.5 million barrels last week, stocks are still down almost 15 million barrels from a year ago and are in the lower half of the average range for inventories at this time of year, according to the EIA.

Washington D.C. again had the highest heating oil price at $3.77 a gallon, up 8.7 cents from the previous week. The next-highest prices were in New Jersey at $3.55, New York at $3.52 and Connecticut at $3.50.

The lowest price for heating oil was in Nebraska at $3.01 a gallon, up 2.3 cents, followed by Iowa at $3.04, Kentucky at $3.08 and Ohio at $3.09.

Northeast households that rely the most on heating oil are expected to pay a record average $3.34 a gallon for the fuel this winter, up 84 cents from last winter, according to the EIA.

Heating oil costs in the region, where one out of three households use the fuel, are forecast to average $2,078 for the winter, up 38 percent from last year.

If that 1/3 of households switches to natural gas, the price advantage of natural gas disappears. For houses like mine, the options are few and far between. It's clear that additional insulation is on the home improvement menu for this spring, and remodeling the basement family room to deal with the problem of the previous owners of the house finishing it by just slapping up some paneling WITH NO INSULATION has to be added (thus pushing the kitchen work off yet ANOTHER year). Many homeowners in my area are adding wood stoves, but you need more tree-free clearance than we have. We looked into a pellet stove, but they are horrifically expensive, the pellets are nearly impossible to get, and you need to be able to store a ton of them. I don't know about you, but to me the thought of a pile of wood product sitting in a corner of a basement that has already seen its share of mice, in an area where termites and carpenter ants are a problem, is not a thrilling one.

So far George W. Bush has refused to release 586 million in emergency fuel-assistance funds provided by Congress. People like me can pay increased heating bills by cutting back elsewhere. There are many people who can't. It should not fall upon Hugo Chavez to be able to make political hay out of providing oil assistance to Americans who need it. If you live in the New York area, you've heard the radio spots in which Joe Kennedy's Citizens Energy Corporation advertises heating help from Citgo, the Venezuelan oil company. Predictably, the wingnuts are having fits about this, since Hugo Chavez seems to have replaced Fidel Castro as the western hemisphere boogeyman of choice. Whatever you think of Chavez or Kennedy or these ads (I find them primarily just peculiar), the fact remains that if our own president would recognize the effect of high fuel prices on real Americans with limited resources who have to often choose between feeding their kids or keeping them warm, Chavez would have no room to play on this particular field.

Labels: oil

After reading from Melissa at lunchtime that Tweety was back on his Hillary Hatred Horse today, I decided that no matter how dirty a job it was, someone had to do it.

Behold Sweet Jesus I Hate Chris Matthews.

So far the awesome Melissa and the equally awesome Richard Blair have signed on as contributors, with hopefully more bright lights of Blogtopia(™ Skippy) to come.

But Chris Matthews may have inadvertently done a service with his fear and loathing: he may have actually made younger feminists, post-feminists if you will, understand what it was like for women in the 1970's and earlier

Like Rebecca Traister, for instance:

Is it possible that for the first time in my life, my reaction to a political news cycle could have mirrored a larger national feeling? Could Matthews and his threatened brethren, who came damned close to putting this Hillary disbeliever on the path to feminist redemption (who knows how I'll vote; but I do know that I am happy that I'll now likely have the opportunity to cast a vote for the candidate of my choice and not of MSNBC's), actually have shaped what happened on Tuesday in New Hampshire in a similar fashion? Exit polling and analysis be damned, we'll likely never really know what electoral alchemy landed Hillary Clinton an unexpected victory. Finally, around 11:30, Matthews was forced to suck it up. Looking like he was chewing on a lemon, he said of his nemesis, "She stood there and took the heat under what looked to be a difficult time. I give her a lot of personal credit. I will never underestimate Hillary Clinton again."

An unlikely promise. But here's a message from the women of New Hampshire, and me, to Hillary Clinton's exuberant media antagonists: You have no power here. Now be gone, before somebody drops a house on you!

From Maureen Dowd to Chris Matthews, we've seen a microcosm today of exactly what happens in this society to women who talk too much, who don't look like supermodels, who have reached an age when all the botox in the world won't make them 25 anymore. And it isn't just Hillary. If you saw Chris Matthews with Elizabeth Edwards (another tough old broad, albeit one with a warmer demeanor) last week (I'll try to dig up the video), you know that while he reserves his worst barbs for Hillary, any woman will do.

All of this may have made me angry, but it hasn't made me stupid. Hillary is still the candidate who voted for Kyl/Lieberman, something we shouldn't forget while George W. Bush is thrusting his defiance at Mahmoud Ahmadinejad again just when the election season is getting going. But while I may disagree with Hillary Clinton on policy, and I may not be willing to vote for her, I'm damn well going to defend her right to be a candidate.

Especially if it means I get to rip Tweety to shreds.

Labels: blogs, Chris Matthews, hack journalism

You know, I've seriously thought that if Hillary Clinton is the nominee, I'll do a write-in vote or sit this one out. I'm only saying this to show that I am no Hillary partisan.

But Maureen Dowd, who out-Hillary-hates even Chris Matthews, outdoes herself today:

Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back to the White House?

Bill Clinton was known for biting his lip, but here was Hillary doing the Muskie. Certainly it was impressive that she could choke up and stay on message.

She won her Senate seat after being embarrassed by a man. She pulled out New Hampshire and saved her presidential campaign after being embarrassed by another man. She was seen as so controlling when she ran for the Senate that she had to be seen as losing control, as she did during the Monica scandal, before she seemed soft enough to attract many New York voters.

Getting brushed back by Barack Obama in Iowa, her emotional moment here in a cafe and her chagrin at a debate question suggesting she was not likable served the same purpose, making her more appealing, especially to women, particularly to women over 45.

The Obama campaign calculated that they had the women’s vote over the weekend but watched it slip away in the track of her tears.

At the Portsmouth cafe on Monday, talking to a group of mostly women, she blinked back her misty dread of where Obama’s “false hopes” will lead us — “I just don’t want to see us fall backwards,” she said tremulously — in time to smack her rival: “But some of us are right and some of us are wrong. Some of us are ready and some of us are not.”

There was a poignancy about the moment, seeing Hillary crack with exhaustion from decades of yearning to be the principal rather than the plus-one. But there was a whiff of Nixonian self-pity about her choking up. What was moving her so deeply was her recognition that the country was failing to grasp how much it needs her. In a weirdly narcissistic way, she was crying for us. But it was grimly typical of her that what finally made her break down was the prospect of losing.

As Spencer Tracy said to Katharine Hepburn in “Adam’s Rib,” “Here we go again, the old juice. Guaranteed heart melter. A few female tears, stronger than any acid.”

The Clintons once more wriggled out of a tight spot at the last minute. Bill churlishly dismissed the Obama phenom as “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen,” but for the last few days, it was Hillary who seemed in danger of being Cinderella. She became emotional because she feared that she had reached her political midnight, when she would suddenly revert to the school girl with geeky glasses and frizzy hair, smart but not the favorite. All those years in the shadow of one Natural, only to face the prospect of being eclipsed by another Natural?

How humiliating to have a moderator of the New Hampshire debate ask her to explain why she was not as popular as the handsome young prince from Chicago. How demeaning to have Obama rather ungraciously chime in: “You’re likable enough.” And how exasperating to be pushed into an angry rebuttal when John Edwards played wingman, attacking her on Obama’s behalf.

“I actually have emotions,” she told CNN’s John Roberts on a damage-control tour. “I know that there are some people who doubt that.” She went on “Access Hollywood” to talk about, as the show put it, “the double standards that a woman running for president faces.” “If you get too emotional, that undercuts you,” Hillary said. “A man can cry; we know that. Lots of our leaders have cried. But a woman, it’s a different kind of dynamic.”

Here's the thing: Like Dowd, I too saw the Infamous Diner Incident™ as showing more narcissism than humanity. But this column made the back of my head explode. It's rare that you see even MoDo show her "Let's Re-live High School" card so completely. Let's look at the most cranium-combusting passage again:

...it was Hillary who seemed in danger of being Cinderella. She became emotional because she feared that she had reached her political midnight, when she would suddenly revert to the school girl with geeky glasses and frizzy hair, smart but not the favorite.

Because after all, we all know that "the favorite" was MoDo, right? The pretty, smart Irish girl who got all the boys? This passage tells you a lot more about MoDo than it does about Hillary. You want to talk about reaching your political midnight, Maureen? Take a look in the fucking mirror.

See what she makes me do? She makes me defend Hillary.

And that, my friends, is what happened in New Hampshire yesterday.

Labels: hack journalism, Hillary Clinton, Maureen Dowd

Well.

So yesterday the question wasn't who would win New Hampshire, but how big Barack Obama's victory would be. And when the dust settled, it wasn't Barack Obama who prevailed in New Hampshire, but the Big Crybaby herself.

So what happened?

Josh Marshall says:

It's hard for me to remember an election where the trend of polling and the final poll results so failed to predict the actual vote. Certainly, there's no example I can remember of it happening in such a high profile contest. In the next couple days we'll probably get a better sense of what happened. My hunch is that the polls were not 'wrong', that they were right in showing a big bounce for Obama, but that there was a late swing in Hillary's direction.

That, however, is just a hunch. And it's undermined, at least to a degree, by the fact that, as far as I can remember, none of the polls showed any slackening of Obama's lead, even though I believe the pollsters were still surveying as late as Monday evening.

Perhaps we'll know more once the numbers are more closely examined. But it will probably remain undetermined to a significant degree.

According to CNN, women broke for Clinton by a whopping thirteen percent.

So given that Obama had been polling just fine among women, what happened?

If the media coverage of the Infamous Diner Incident is any indication, with a negative tone that spilled over into even Keith Olbermann's coverage, I would guess that Democratic women in the Live Free or Die state saw a bunch of white men deciding what was sincere and what was "appropriate behavior" and decided to put them in their place. Yesterday on Morning Joe, Scarborough was asking the candidates appearing on his show if they've ever cried on the campaign trail, a question to which Rudy Giuliani, so predictably it's becoming a running joke, responded:

"This is not something I would judge anybody on one way or the other. And the reality is, if you look at me -- Sept. 11, the funerals, the memorial services, there were times in which it was just impossible not to feel ... the emotion."

The media pileon was everywhere. Was she sincere? Was she being petulant that her coronation wasn't going to be a coronation after all? Was she tired? Was it a sign of weakness? I'm putting question marks in to be charitable, but the pileon was clear. It's as if they were jackals waiting for the soft underbelly so they could pounce.

On Monday night, Rachel Maddow talked about this with Dan Abrams, the ubiquitous Pat Buchanan, and some asshat from the obviously Obama-leaning Huffington Post:



Digby is all over this, citing a comment from Pam Spaulding at Pandagon (emphases mine):

Oh, I just heard NBC’s Brian Williams bring up “The Bradley effect,” (aka the Wilder effect).

a phenomenon which has led to inaccurate voter opinion polls in some American political campaigns between a white candidate and a non-white candidate.[1][2][3] Specifically, there have been instances in which statistically significant numbers of white voters tell pollsters in advance of an election that they are either genuinely undecided, or likely to vote for the non-white candidate, but those voters exhibit a different behavior when actually casting their ballots. White voters who said that they were undecided break in statistically large numbers toward the white candidate, and many of the white voters who said that they were likely to vote for the black candidate ultimately cast their ballot for the white candidate. This reluctance to give accurate polling answers has sometimes extended to post-election exit polls as well.

Researchers who have studied the issue theorize that some white voters give inaccurate responses to polling questions because of a fear that they might appear to others to be racially prejudiced. Some research has suggested that the race of the pollster conducting the interview may factor into that concern. At least one prominent researcher has suggested that with regard to pre-election polls, the discrepancy can be traced in part by the polls’ failure to account for general conservative political leanings among late-deciding voters.

I’m not sure that it applies here, given the complicating factor of gender bias, and what we can now call “The Tweety Effect,” where the misogyny of a talking head in the MSM so enrages a demographic that they go out and vote in a manner that will put egg on the face of the talking head.

I would be more inclined to agree with Pam here were it not for the fact that Iowa is every bit as white as New Hampshire, and the result there was very different.

I watched the "diner breakdown" footage. I was inclined to see it as Hillary pulling aside the mask she wears all the time to show us the person that people who know her say they see; someone who's warm and empathetic and human -- until she effortlessly segued into the obvious slam on Obama. But whether it was real or calculated, the media frenzy surrounding one moment in a campaign was preposterous.

The giant maw of the 24 x 7 news cycle has been looking for a "Dean Scream" moment. Barack Obama isn't going to give it to them. God knows the highly disciplined John Edwards isn't going to give it to them. They aren't looking for it from a Republican, relentlessly fellating the bunch of them as they are. That leaves Hillary. Her "meltdown" at the last debate didn't do it for them, so they latched onto this one and held on like a pit bull.

As Dday notes at Digby's place, Tom Brokaw, who is what passes for an elder statesman of television news these days tried his best to smack down Tweety as gently as possible:

BROKAW: You know what I think we’re going to have to do?

MATTHEWS: Yes sir?

BROKAW: Wait for the voters to make their judgment.

MATTHEWS: Well what do we do then in the days before the ballot? We must stay home, I guess.

BROKAW: No, no we don’t stay home. There are reasons to analyze what they’re saying. We know from how the people voted today, what moved them to vote. You can take a look at that. There are a lot of issues that have not been fully explored during all this.

But we don’t have to get in the business of making judgments before the polls have closed. And trying to stampede in effect the process.

Look, I’m not just picking on us, it’s part of the culture in which we live these days. I think that the people out there are going to begin to make judgments about us if we don’t begin to temper that temptation to constantly try to get ahead of what the voters are deciding, in many cases, as we learned in New Hampshire when they went into the polling booth today or in the last three days. They were making decisions very late.

Be sure to watch this and the other videos at the link above for more "up is down" analysis, including how Rudy Giuliani's fourth-place finish in a northeastern state is a victory (as opposed to Barack Obama's second-place finish, which is a loss).

There is another possibility, one which our resident troll, who knows who he is and often behaves like the fourth grader who socks all the girls in the arm before class and gets away with it because boys will be boys, made sure to joke about in an e-mail when it hadn't even entered my mind. That possibility is something that Brad Friedman, who is THE go-to guy for election shenanigans, wonders about: When all the numbers for Republicans and Democrats came in right on the money, or close to, the late polling numbers, what happened in the #1 and #2 spots on the Democratic side?

You'll need to read this post first, then this one. In Dixville Notch, where the ballots are paper and are counted by hand, in public, an early report of one extra vote turned out to be false. But it's worth taking note of what Brad points out, that 40% of New Hampshire uses Diebold optical scan machines that have been shown to be easily hacked; machines that are run by a subcontractor famous for lax security.

Brad may be completely off base here, though it is certainly getting interesting that it's really mostly since electronic voting has been instituted that we've seen final vote tallies be so far off from late polling that it has voters and pundits scratching their heads, wondering what happened. A coincidence? Possibly. In New Hampshire, it's hard to tell. Perhaps women voters really did protest-vote for Hillary to send a message to the media. Perhaps New Hampshire voters decided that the nation needed to take a closer look at Obama before anointing him; that not enough of a vetting process had occurred. I don't think it's a bad thing that the "Super Duper Tuesday" states are actually going to have a role in picking the nominee this year. But whether you smell a ballot-counting rat in this particular situation or not (and even Brad isn't claiming there's anything bogus here, just that you have a situation once again where an unexpected result in ONLY ONE MATCHUP is coming out of Diebold machines), there shouldn't even be any grounds for anyone to even consider the possibility that memory cards in the voting machines were swapped out at the last minute to change a likely result.

If we want to put on our tinfoil chapeaux for a minute and speculate that someone played around with the voting machines for the precincts that use them, it doesn't necessarily mean "The Clintons stole the election." Given Hillary Clinton's corporatist leanings and the continuing racism in this country, there are plenty of third parties who might have had reason to not have an Obama coronation this quickly. OK, now, let's take our tinfoil off and put it away for a while. Because as Brad points out, he has no direct evidence of chicanery, and there's certainly an argument to be made that women were turned off by the media piling on, particularly with exit polls showing that women went for Clinton by 13%. Jeff Fecke certainly thinks so, and so do I.

There's also a troubling aspect to the exit polls, and that is that the "restoration" aspect. When asked if they would vote for their candidate or Bill Clinton if the latter was running, 57% of Hillary Clinton's voters said they would vote for Bill Clinton, vs. only 14% of Edwards voters and 24% of Obama voters. The idea of voting for one person because you want, or think that, someone else in the family will be the "real" president, is part of what brought us George W. Bush. Obviously Clinton isn't the blithering fool that Captain Codpiece is, but it does point to an alarming tendency in the population to think that you can go back in time by electing a relative of the actual candidate, and an acceptance of dynasties that's appalling in a country that was founded by declaring its independence from a king.

But the point remains: if there's any reason at all to not trust the voting system, then there's no reason to even pretending we have a democracy. The New Hampshire results simply mean that it's incumbent on all of us to pay very close attention to the polling numbers in the races to come and see if a pattern emerges.

Labels: 2008 election

Sam Seder covers a less-than-packed Giuliani event in New Hampshire:

Labels: comedy, Rudy Giuliani, Sam Seder

"It's hard to see how Senator Obama's stratospheric soar above partisanship can work. It's based on the assumption that the reason we haven't all gotten together and worked all this stuff out together in a spirit of harmony is because nobody ever thought of it. Does anyone really believe this?" -- "keninny", at Down with Tyranny (in a post that's well worth your time).

UPDATE: OK, so there are two of them. Only the great Lower Manhattanite could draw parallels between Barack Obama's oratorical style and the famous John Belushi "Germans bombed Pearl Harbor" speech from Animal House in a post that for my money is already one of the best of the year:

Those bold “We're on the verge of making things different” words of his, coupled with that enervating, hymnal and most importantly—declarative and soul-deep confident delivery is that sweet tea a lot of folks can't seem to get enough of. I studied public speaking and I can see he knows just what he's doing. The cadence and modulation, the sentence structure and idea framing...

Not “I want to do”.

Not “We can do”.

It's “Join me in doing”.

It's that “last battle in Braveheart” shit. With equal parts Shakespeare's St. Crispin's Day throwdown from Henry V, and yes...maybe a splash or two of Belushi's rousing “German's bombed Pearl Harbor” speech from Animal House.

“Forget it. He's rolling.”

In fact, there may be a lot of Bluto's speech in what Obama does when, “he's rolling”. And I don't know if that's a bad thing, really. When our situation as a country is as depressing as it is presently, and all seems lost—damaged world stature, economy reeling, mistrust of our leaders, senseless, life-wasting wars to name a few bits of the overweening awfulness—maybe a rallying, hope-stuffed, emotional, declarative “Join me in doing” is the thing that's just gonna resonate most with that defeated group slumping about “Delta House”.

Labels: 2008 election, Barack Obama

This is no knock on Walter Mondale, who these days looks like Paul Wellstone when compared to the likes of Harry Reid. But back in 1984, I worked on the then-insurgent campaign of Gary Hart. (Interesting aside of New Jersey lore: heading up the hart campaign in my town was a young man named Bret Schundler.) Like Obama, Hart at that time came out of nowhere, declaring his candidacy in 1983 into a field that at that time already included Mondale, John Glenn, and Jesse Jackson. Hart put his early energies into New Hampshire, and when he won a surprising 16% of the vote in the Iowa caucuses, was well-positioned for what turned out to be a 10-point trouncing of Mondale in New Hampshire.

The problem with a surprise insurgency, as we found out also in 2004, is that after you start winning, organization becomes important. Neither Hart in 1994 1984 nor Dean in 2004 had the kind of tight organization necessary to continue a sweep through the Super Tuesday states. But Walter Mondale did, and became the nominee in 1984. But it was a pyrrhic victory, for Mondale was soundly defeated by the incumbent, Ronald Reagan, in the general election.

As Thomas Edsall notes in Huffington Post, the Clinton campaign now looks an awful lot like the Mondale camp. Clinton is no longer running for the general election; she's just trying to get past the primaries using Mondale's old strategy:

The former First Lady is planning to fight Obama in South Carolina on January 26, and in the gargantuan nationwide primary on Tuesday, February 5 -- with contests in 19 states, including New York, California, New Jersey, Georgia, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Colorado. If she remains competitive, Clinton's plan is to continue to compete in Louisiana on February 9, in Virginia and Maryland on February 12, in Wisconsin on February 19, in Ohio on March 4 -- and beyond, if necessary.

In an approach redolent of Walter Mondale's 1984 "Where's the Beef?" tactic against Gary Hart, Clinton has adopted the less memorable slogan "Rhetoric vs. Results, Talk vs. Action."

The Clinton campaign is sparing no effort to pressure the media to lean on Obama's perceived vulnerabilities. Looking to leverage Obama's slender resume, a Clinton operative argued to HuffPost that the campaign will be able to demonstrate that "Obama is just not a plausible person in this environment of international peril," and that the longer the primary campaign can be extended, the better chance Clinton will have to prove that "there is not even a second level to Obama, there is no depth."

To be sure, Obama is not Gary Hart and 2008 is not 1994 1984. Hart was an unbelievably attractive candidate in many ways. He was young, ridiculously handsome, and was one of the "neoliberals" profiled by Robert Rothenberg in Esquire magazine in 1992, appearing on the cover alongside Tim Wirth and Bill Bradley. The point of neoliberalism was to evolve liberalism past its rust belt focus and into the technological world. For all that Hart was the outsider candidate and part of the centrist neoliberal movement, he came into the race with impeccable liberal cred, having been George McGovern's campaign manager in 1972.

To the extent that young people want to blame boomers for what we see today, there's an argument to be made that being seduced by neoliberalism, as many of us were, was where we "sold out." But in 1984, those of us who supported Hart weren't thinking about the philosophy behind the movement. We were only twelve years post-Nixon, and we'd seen the only Democratic president since then trounced by Ronald Reagan. We'd perceived the defeat of Gene McCarthy in 1968 by Hubert Humphrey as a triumph of the hackocracy over necessary change. Today we would love to have someone as liberal as Humphrey, but in 1968, he represented Lyndon Johnson, he represented a war we hated, and by the time of the general election, he represented young people's heads being cracked open by police billy clubs.

By 1984, we wanted to WIN. And along came Gary Hart, with his chiseled jaw and his big blue eyes; a wonk who had worked for George McGovern; a guy who represented liberal values with a new twist that wouldn't scare the daylights out of our parents. It may have been Mondale's turn for the #1 slot, but we knew a loser when we saw one.

Hart didn't have even a tenth of Barack Obama's charisma. He was heart-stoppingly gorgeous in those days, and had a brilliant mind, but was perceived by many as a cold fish. But what he represented was transformational change, not by his mere presence the way Obama does, but a chance for a way out of the old philosophies and methods that had done nothing for us since 1968 but lose.

It is to our eternal shame that like most economic movements that start out with a constructive and optimistic vision, neoliberalism gave rise to the very centrism of the DLC against which we fight today.

At any rate, Gary Hart made a big splash in New Hampshire but we all know who the nominee was in 1984, and we also know how Walter Mondale got his ass kicked.

Today, in a mirror image of 1984, it's the neoliberal/centrist/DLC candidate Hillary Clinton who's the establishment candidate against the young upstart. Obama is more like Hillary Clinton in terms of philosophy than he is like the fiery populism of John Edwards, one which ironically hearkens back to the old school liberalism that came out of Minnesota when I was young. That Hillary Clinton is going back to Mondale's tactic of focusing ahead to the "Super Tuesday" primaries gives me an ominous fear that it could be 1984 all over again, in which the guy to which a generation passes the torch gives that generation hope for a while, only to pull the rug out from under them, because The Hacks Always Win.

Of course Obama isn't a cold technocrat like Gary Hart, and today we have the 24 x 7 news cycle and talk radio and the blogs. There's no incumbent at all against whom the nominee will be running, let alone one with the mythology of Ronald Reagan. And we already know the Republican nominee, unless a white horse we don't know about comes through at the convention (and isn't named "Jeb Bush"), will be completely loathsome. But still -- that 1984 is being mentioned as a model for anyone is troubling, for it is a return to the "It's my turn" politics that gave us a certain loss in 1984.

Labels: 2008 election

Wouldn't it be nice if Florida and Ohio weren't even close? Wouldn't it be nice if the Democratic nominee had a comfortable enough lead that the Republicans couldn't steal those states again?

Of course there's a long time between now and the November election, but as of right now, the strongest candidate against all of the Republicans in Florida and Ohio is not Barack Obama, and it's not Hillary Clinton.

It's John Edwards.

In a survey conducted by Public Policy Polling the evening after the Iowa caucus last week, Edwards leads all four Republican front-runners in Ohio and three out of the four in Florida. Obama beats the only fading candidates Giuliani and Romney, ties Huckabee, and loses to McCain in Ohio. In Florida, Edwards beats Huckabee, Romney and Giuliani, and is only behind McCain by a percentage point. Obama narrowly edges Giuliani (with little enough room that Giuliani could steal it), loses to Huckabee and McCain, and ties Romney.

Now a lot can change between now and then, and polls like this so early in the game are only indicative of a single snapshot in time. But it does make one wonder why the media have written John Edwards off so early when all the early indicators show that he's the strongest of the three front-runners against the entire Republican field.

The full poll results are here.

Labels: 2008 election

Loath as I am to give any of the Big Boiz any credit for anything, there's no denying that Jerome Armstrong's delegate counters are pretty nifty, so if you want to keep track of the delegate counts for both parties, check 'em out in the left-hand sidebar. And while you're there, you might note that right now, going into New Hampshire, Barack Obama has two more delegates than John Edwards has. Just in case you were tempted to believe the punditocracy that seems to think Edwards is done and should drop out now.

Labels: 2008 election

Now I'll bet you never thought those words would come from me, right?

But let's look at the dilemma that Hillary Clinton is in. As we watch her "inevitability" meme vanish in the wind, and her voice is raised ever more often, the mask of "likeability" that she's tried so mightily to cultivate has begun to drop; or perhaps the protective shell she's used so much over the years against the constant verbal feces that have been so relentlessly thrown at her from the right.

But perhaps it's a no-win situation for her this year. She can't possibly match the transformational quality that suffuses Barack Obama's candidacy, because let's face it: for all that we are a long way from an end to misogyny in this country, white women have done far better over the last thirty years than have black men. And if she were to run the kind of campaign John Edwards is running, she'd be branded as "too soft" -- something Edwards has faced as well, except he doesn't seem to care.

After making my customary weekend list of things I wanted to get done yesterday and finishing my yoga practice, I made the mistake of putting on the TV yesterday just in time to watch Punkinhead, Andrea Mitchell, and David Gregory discussing whether Elizabeth Edwards' omnipresence, and habit of making points that her husband either neglected or chose not to make, is a problem for him. And there you have the new John Edwards meme from the Heathers in the media: he's pussy-whipped. Remember, this is coming from a panel that features a woman who's been a journalist for more decades than most of Obama's voters have been alive, one whose endless face-lifts and botox don't make her black leather jacket look any more ridiculous. If Hillary is the new Bob Dole for these morons, then they're trying to fashion Elizabeth Edwards, with her unabashedly dowdy clothes and suburban soccer mom hair, into the new Hillary. Be afraid, men....be very afraid.

Disgusted with this, I switched over to C-SPAN just in time for John Edwards' appearance at the Franco-American Centre in Manchester, New Hampshire. Barack Obama may HAVE Oprah, but John and Elizabeth Edwards ARE Oprah.

After Edwards' second-place finish in Iowa, the family of Nataline Sarkisyan got in touch with the campaign and offered to help. Yesterday they spoke on his behalf in Manchester:


The Lakey family, much derided by the likes of Tucker Carlson who is so invested in the status quo that he's willing to attack a child whose intestines were sucked out by a pool drain and will need care for the rest of her life, have been on the campaign trail with Edwards for a while. Now the Sarkisyans have come on board. Nataline Sarkisyan gives a name and a face to the very real consequences of insurance company practices, illustrating better than any speech ever could why you cannot play nice with these people. The Sarkisyans are not experienced public speakers, but it would be hard to find a speechwriter more effective than what you see in the above video.

There's no way Hillary Clinton could run a town meeting like this without negatively impacting her "I have balls too" need to out-guy the guys. Perhaps if she wasn't hamstrung by the thankless task of trying to be both genders at the same time, she wouldn't have felt it necessary for her surrogates to strike this kind of low blow against both Edwards and the Sarkisyan family:

John Edwards angrily took on Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton at two news conferences in a row on Sunday, saying that her campaign “doesn’t seem to have a conscience.”
Mr. Edwards was responding to a comment from Jay Carson, Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman, who suggested that “the references in Senator Clinton’s speeches are about people she has actually helped and changes she has actually made, not stories she’s pulled from the newspaper and included in her stump,” Mr. Carson wrote in an E-mail message.

Mr. Carson’s comment was in reference to an emotional town hall event Mr. Edwards held in Manchester early Sunday afternoon, featuring an appearance by the parents of Nataline Sarkisyan, a 17-year-old leukemia patient who died in December after her insurance company denied her a liver transplant. Mr. Edwards had recently incorporated the story into his stump speech as a criticism of insurance companies.
Speaking at a news conference after the Manchester event, Mr. Edwards responded to Mr. Carson’s comment when a reporter read it to him.

“The Sarkisyans contacted me because they believe I’m the kind of president who will actually fight for their daughter,” Mr. Edwards said. “People who have been through these difficult times against entrenched, powerful moneyed interests – they get it. They get it in a serious way. They’re not looking for somebody who’ll make deals.”
Then after spending an hour on his campaign bus, en route to his next event in Keene, Mr. Edwards called another news conference – before his next event had even started.

“This campaign doesn’t seem to have a conscience,” he said, adding that he had been thinking about the comment from the Clinton campaign. “The more I thought about it, the idea that somehow everything is about them, I mean, it’s an indication that they have no conscience about what’s at stake here. These families are who this is about. It’s not about them, nor is it about me. It’s about whether we’re going to actually stand up and fight for these people and how much we care about them.”

It's difficult enough for John Edwards to operate like this, given that his looks seem to give supposedly heterosexual men in the media the vapors. You have to give him credit for being comfortable enough in his own skin to continue to run these "human interest" town meetings, which always include long question-and-answer sessions and which always have a sizable role for his wife. He's not emerging from these unscathed, but then he doesn't have to prove he's as tough as the bellicose bullies in the Republican Party either.

Labels: Hillary Clinton, John and Elizabeth Edwards

For all that, as a commenter pointed out, there's a sizable case of Obama Derangement Syndrome going on over at Taylor Marsh's blog, I did find the first of these two videos over there; one which shows that despite the parallels that pundits are drawing between Barack Obama's candidacy and that of John F. Kennedy, if we look back, the reality is that Kennedy campaigned more like John Edwards -- or even Howard Dean -- than like Obama:

Labels: Barack Obama

And so, after about four hours work by a very nice young gentleman in the employ of Dish Network, we have now joined the ranks of those with bigass TVs in their living rooms; those people whom you can see what they're watching as you drive by. As bigass TVs go, ours isn't all that bigass; it's a 40", but in a 15' x 15' room, it's plenty bigass.

Our living room has pretty much served as a giant entry foyer and cat lounge for the past ten years. For some reason, perhaps because we have a sizable basement, half of which is finished (if you can call cheap 1970's paneling with no insulation behind it and a Celotex ceiling with some tiles held up with duct tape after last spring's Great Squirrel Adventure "finished"), we decided when we moved in that the basement family room would be our primary TV location. The problem with this has been that because there's no insulation behind the cheapass paneling, you could cure bacon down there in the wintertime (which may make it the perfect yoga studio for middle-aged women, but hardly a cozy TV-watching room). So it means that we have been doing too much sitting on the bed watching TV in the evening, leaving the living room, with it's lovely Pottery Barn Malabar rattan sofa and chairs (never mind the red carpet that's still there from the previous owners; with a little work we've been able to achieve a kind of somewhat zany Moroccan paradise look), pretty much to the cats.

All that has changed now that we have the BATV in the living room, with the same hundreds of channels of nothing to watch that we had before, with some added hi-definition channels from VOOM TV that have opened up entirely new vistas of wasting time. Aside from making Mr. Brilliant's watching the Giants beat Tampa Bay today that much more pleasant, hi-def means that you'll watch just about anything with pretty colors, nice beaches, or interesting movement, which is how I, someone for whom spectator sports consists exclusively of baseball, figure skating, and maybe an occasional tennis match, found myself this evening unable to tear myself away from watching four French guys and two Brits doing parkour across Singapore. But now I'd better go to sleep, because I have to go to work tomorrow and a program on the culture and music of Mali is coming up on the Equator channel.

Labels: television, unabashed consumerism

Labels: music

...as I did, since I'm still dealing with residual effects from what must have been some pretty powerful formaldehyde in the air at the funeral home on Friday, you can watch it here (as I am).

A couple of observations:

• The positioning is interesting -- Edwards and Obama on the left; Richardson and Clinton on the right.
• I like this format; it seems less like professional wrestling than previous debates, and it's actually a debate among the participants rather than a game of gotcha. Charlie Gibson seems to realize that he's not the show, unlike the NBC crowd.
• Obama phumphers a bit when speaking off the cuff. As good an orator as he is, there are a lot of "uh"s and "er"s and "um"s when he has to answer a question on the fly. He needs to work on this; it makes him seem indecisive. He's losing his voice, too. Four words of advice for him: Halls Ice-Blue Peppermint.
• If Hillary were a man, Richardson would have been fellating her on stage. He's so clearly angling for a job in her administration; it's almost pathetic to watch.
• Edwards takes a lot of notes. His courtroom experience shows. He's terrific off the cuff. For people who aren't paying a lot of attention, though, he does look kind of slight and too pretty next to Obama, who -- dare I say it? -- looks like a president. In a courtroom this no doubt makes Edwards seem unthreatening to a jury, but I worry that it makes him seem as if he lacks gravitas. His answers, though, are clear and concise, and clearly the best of the bunch.
• Sorry, folks, but when Hillary gets heated, she does sound shrill. I think if she got some vocal training she could learn to raise her voice without getting that shrillness. This is a problem that many women are going to have because of women's voices being higher. But when she raises her voice, there's a tension there that I think vocal training could address...assuming it's not too late. She went nuts for a moment here (about 1:35 in). (Update: Tom Schaller says about this that the Clinton era just ended.)
• Why is everyone afraid to use the name "George W. Bush"? Why always refer to him as "this president"?
• Kudos to Richardson and Obama for cutting off Gibson's parroting of Bush talking abouts about the so-called "surge." What I wish one of them would have said is that if the reduction in violence is due solely to the surge, are we prepared to spend $15 billion a month in perpetuity to keep the level of violence down. Props to Edwards for noting that where the British withdrew, the level of violence decreased.
• Hillary relaxes for a moment and shows a flash of the charm that people who've met her say she has. Why don't we see that more often?
• Obama responds to a question about "what Republicans will say" by saying that we know the Republican playbook. How will he reconcile his stated goal of ending "divisive politics" while fighting back against the inevitable smears?
• Note to Bill Richardson: Stop pounding. It's coming through on the microphone.
• Edwards is ferociously on message. The main points of his stump speech are all here; about where he comes from and for whom he fights.
• Is it just me, or does this guy from WMUR sound like Mo Rocca?
• Edwards likes to break in when Hillary is going nuts. The juxtaposition of his honeyed voice after Hillary's throat starts tightening up is really effective.
• Richardson: "Emboldering the electorate"? Sorry, we don't need anyone else butchering the English language, thank you very much.
• Edwards distills his entire message in one statement: "You cannot nice these people to death. It doesn't work. I have been in the trenches fighting them for my whole adult life. And it takes strength, backbone, fight, and you have to have to take them on. Yes, Barack, I agree with you completely. We need to unite America. And we need to galvanize the American people . And Bill, I completely agree with what you just said. But this is not a fight with politicians. And this is certainly not a fight with the American people. This is a fight for the American people against those people who are fighting the change."
• Gibson plays the class warfare card on lifting the Bush tax cuts. Edwards goes on message pointing out how the tax cuts have hurt working Americans. For those of us who listen to his every word, Edwards may seem repetitive. But who's as nutty as we are? So for people who are not political junkies, his message is consistent.

Overall: It's really worth your time to sit through this if you missed it. When you compare the one "gotcha" question, which was fairly mild ("Which debate answer in the many debates you've had would you like to take back?") to the kind of crap that Tim Russert dished out, about the Bible and the Red Sox, this was a debate about serious issues in which candidates got to answer serious questions asked by a TV journalist who at least for the moment took his responsibilities seriously (other than his insistence on parroting the Bush talking point about the so-called "surge" in Iraq), taking as much time as needed.

Overall, however, I'm not sure that we saw anything significantly different here than we've seen before. Hillary is still twisting in the wind, trying to figure out a message (change vs. experience) that'll work for her, and her raised-voice problem is something her people should address. Bill Richardson is a smart guy, but he's hard to take seriously because he seems to be angling more for a cabinet position with Hillary than for the nomination. Obama got stronger as the debate went on, with some of that initial hesitancy lessening with each question. And the fact that the questioner was in the direction of the cameras meant he couldn't repeat the mistake he's tended to make when the questioner is off to the side, of answering to the questioner instead of the cameras. I hate to get all Chris Matthews on you here, but the man looks like a president. As for Edwards, well, if you want to talk purely about message, the man is unparalleled. He's got his points, and he's going to sink or swim on that message. He's clearly trying to knock Hillary out and position this as an Obama/Edwards race. I'd almost hate to see that, because I don't see any way Edwards wins that battle. The symbolismof a white Southern male going against a black male, just reopens the wound that Obama's nomination would help close once and for all. I think a ticket with Edwards on top and Obama in the #2 spot could pave the way for a Democratic White House for the next sixteen years. If the ticket were reversed (and I think that's a distinct possibility, with Edwards being the bad cop to Obama's good cop), I don't know that it's as strong.

What is clear, and purists could say it's not fair for me to say this because I had to turn off the Republican debate after watching a bunch of rich white cancer survivors evaluate the nation's health care system based on the fact that they all have great insurance that pays for anything, is that Obama and Edwards so far outshine ANY of the Republicans. Even Hillary at least sounds like she has a brain in her head, unlike the bunch of dumbfucks on the other side of the aisle, who have no idea what to run on other than fear and Jesus. When you think about how not so long ago it seemed as if the Republicans would run things forever (and they still might; remember, they can still rig an election like nobody's business), that these six guys are the best they could come up with shows what happens when you really start believing that you can create your own reality.

Labels: 2008 election