Iowa Liberal

I sure hate to veer outside the narrative of John McCain as The Man Of Integrity, but sooner or later won’t it kind of be inescapable that every time the man is caught saying something stupid, he simply claims he never said it? And that most of the time he’s being filmed or says things in front of numerous witnesses?

Arianna Huffington wrote a post recently about how John McCain told her at a party after the 2000 election that he didn’t vote for Bush. Apparently Cindy McCain said the same thing.

I mean, first thing’s first, people: How could you possibly blame them? These were two people who were still washing off Karl Rove’s slime at the time. How do you walk into the voting booth months and vote for the guy whose campaign spread rumors about your Bengali daughter being an illegitimate black child, and your wife being addicted to painkillers, and you being a little crazy after being tortured for 5 years by the Viet Cong?

But now John McCain says he was A Good Republican who marched right in that booth and voted for Bush. In fact, his people started with some classic Rovian maneuvers and started blasting Arianna personally, saying, “Consider the source.”

Arianna responded with a humiliating smackdown:

My sentiments exactly — because John McCain has a long history of issuing heartfelt denials of things that were actually true. He denied ever talking with John Kerry about his leaving the GOP to be Kerry’s ‘04 running mate — then later admitted he had, insisting: “Everybody knows that I had a conversation.” He denied admitting that he didn’t know much about economics, even though he’d said exactly that to the Wall Street Journal. And the Boston Globe. And the Baltimore Sun. He denied ever having asked for a budget earmark for Arizona, even though he had. On the record. He denied that he’d ever had a meeting with comely lobbyist Vicki Iseman and her client Lowell Paxon, even though he had. And had admitted it in a legal deposition.

And those are just the outright denials. He’s also repeatedly tried to spin away statements he regretted making (see: 100-year war, Iraq was a war for oil, etc.).

So, yes, by all means, “consider the source.”

Arianna Huffington is certainly an honest person who wouldn’t fabricate a story out of thin air, but as the founder of The Huffington Post, she’s easy for every rightwinger to blow off. “She’s a liberal!” pretty much wraps it up for them. Oh, but wait, suddenly The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times have sources corroborating Arianna’s story. Two of the sources who were also at the party have come out publicly, with a third remaining anonymous fearing McCain’s scorn (for telling the truth, mind you). The vice is clinched, no?

Ah, but look out! The two named sources are Bradley Whitford and Richard Schiff…LIBERAL HOLLYWOOD ACTORS! If you cup your ear, you can hear millions of rightwingers sighing with relief. It’s wrapped up again! Obviously, Arianna met these liberal actors in a private meeting, they all agreed to make up a story about the night John McCain partied with them (lesson to rightwingers: don’t attend liberal Hollywood parties!), Arianna would break the story and the others would get her back. One other person agreed to the alibi, but chickened out a little and went anonymous. Roll the presses!!!

You gotta give those Hollywood people credit too, they can sure weave wonderful fantasies out of thin air. Check out this hilarious detail from the NYT article:

“McCain was just sort of going off on how much he disliked Bush and the horrible things that the Bush campaign had done to his family in South Carolina, and his exasperation with Bush about his ridiculous tax cuts and he really wanted to talk to him about it, but he said the guy doesn’t have the concentration, and you talk for 10 minutes and then the guy wants to talk about baseball,” Mr. Whitford said.

Surely those liberals will sink to anything! Suggesting George W. Bush is an intellectual lightweight who was in over his head and never truly interested in the particulars of doing his job…for shame! Boo!

Man, the right almost escaped having to face reality for a second. McCain can, of course, go repeat his denial to Bill O’Reilly in the safe haven of Faux News.

But that’s beside the point. Of course he can. Any Republican can go on Fox News and be treated adoringly, with every denial or outright lie coddled and nourished lovingly. That’s what Fox News is for. But McCain has also been enjoying a love-fest from the MSM for years. Chris Matthews has admitted that the media is McCain’s real base. The question is, how long can that possibly continue before the media is forced to admit that the John McCain of 2000 is gone, and that what we have now is a man with little if any shame left, a panderer and an outright liar who does it because he thinks nobody will hold him accountable? “Hey, it worked for GWB,” he undoubtedly thinks. George Bush, of course, was able to say, “I never said that!” when confronted with his own words about not caring about Osama bin Laden anymore, and got it waived.

The media made special accommodations for Bush because that’s what you do for the mentally challenged. They’ve felt McCain deserves special accommodations because he talks to them and gives them donuts. But it doesn’t have to stay that way, folks.

The media can be forced to start treating John McCain with the same degree of scrutiny and relentlessness with which they handled Obama over the last couple months. Of course, Obama has managed to take the media beating and throw them off, but the nature of the charges against him were beyond trivial and mostly hyped up.

I don’t think McCain can take the same kind of pressure, because he’s been such a blatant fabricator there’s no way to spin it. He will lose his image as the maverick truth-teller, and it will be long overdue.

But the pressure on the media to do its job will come from one place, and one place only: you.

That is all.

-jb

p.s. O’Reilly, the bimbo that he is, claims someone wrote a blog on HuffPost claiming John McCain wasn’t tortured and collaborated with the Viet Cong, then said, “That’s Arianna Huffington.”

Somebody feel free to correct me, but here’s the only thing I found: Jayne Lyn Stahl reporting on the fact that the same group of people who swiftboated Kerry formed a group, Vietnam Vets Against McCain, that was going to peddle that line against McCain about his time in Vietnam. Stahl makes it abundantly clear that the charges are completely false, only that she wouldn’t cry any tears for McCain if the group was as successful as the Swiftboaters were.

Of course, fact-checking O’Reilly is kind of like trying to beat the Guinness Book of World Records for longest fingernails: It will occupy you endlessly, and after you’ve done it, nobody will be particularly impressed because there’s no skill involved.

UPDATE: Arianna notes a Freudian slip on McCain’s part:

O’REILLY: Did you vote for President bush?

MCCAIN: Of course not. I campaigned all over this country for him.

For all the whining McCain’s camp did about Obama saying he was losing his bearings…he sure is losing his bloody bearings. Of course, this is one part age, and one part political pandering. Even a younger McCain could not have thrown his principles out the window and turned into Bush’s butt-boy without tripping over himself daily.

John Edwards is going to endorse Obama. Listen to his last sentence.

-mg

Mmm, mmm, good! One of our old friend Brian’s many cringe-inducing witticisms involved his contention that scandal was really the domain of liberals. It’s my own opinion that scandal follows power, but has extra savor when it’s accompanied by moral hypocrisy: an environmental crusader who races Hummers on the sly, say.

I would say in defense of liberals however that most of them, when having affairs, aren’t too damned stupid to use birth control.

-TT

-mg

Make any type of disparaging comment to somebody who has drunk the Greek Kool-Aid and you’re bound to hear one thing: “But, but…we do a lot for the community!!” as if college social fraternities and sororities are charitable organizations that are unfairly characterized as simply a way to emphasize differences in race, religion, or economic background by means of symbols, ritualism and group-think. Seriously bro, like, wtf? Personally speaking, I could think of better ways to experience college than to spend it with people that look, think, and act like I do. But hey, that’s just me, and I’m probably just jealous, right?

Here in Iowa City the Greek system is waning. They’ve had to shut down a few houses due to either lack of interest or being in general disrepair because of low pledge numbers. This comes as no surprise considering that with the advent of community based technologies like Facebook and the current preference of students to live off campus it isn’t necessary to purchase your way into social groups. Nor do you have to suffer the humiliation of hazing or pretend that you enjoy a barracks-like living arrangement. And cutting your own rent check, paying the utilities yourself and doing your own laundry is going to better prepare you for the outside world more than honing your social graces at the Kappa Kappa Gamma Spring Formal ever will.

I have to admit though that it’s going to be hard for those frat boys when they’re forced to explain to a judge why they chose to sell drugs despite enjoying such privileges in life.

-mg

Republican bellwether Rush Limbaugh, whose bluster couldn’t keep McCain out of the nominee spot, has also had to confront his own dwindling influence in regards to the Democratic primaries and voters at large. Now that Operation Chaos has proven to be a dud in Indiana and North Carolina (Clinton only won Indiana by a hair and Obama easily won North Carolina) he is claiming that he thinks Obama is the weaker candidate…..after performing well in both primaries.

Is there any doubt that Rush would have taken credit for Tuesday night regardless of the outcome?

-mg

The only thing that people find remarkable about The Stones is the fact that they’re still going. Besides making the Baby Boomers that still dote over them feel relevant what purpose do they serve? They remind me of those Dockers clad fuckheads you run into at the countless Blues-Fests white people love to go to who insist on lecturing you about “real” music.

Anyways, Keith Richards dissed David Bowie. Oh, how rock and roll.

Newt Gingrich’s remarks about the GOP in peril will doubtless be all over the blogs today, and there lies the cheap, beautiful irony of the whole situation. Gingrich is dead right - obviously he is: no product whose sole selling point is “don’t you hate our competition?” can last long. Sooner or later, a seller’s own product is either going to rise or fall on its own merits, not on the perceived shortcomings of some identified greater-evil. You know who’s never understood this, though? Republican bloggers. They don’t have the first idea of how to present a positive message; their one trick is in trolling lefties to make them look unhinged. Their skill in pulling off this trick can’t be denied, but in terms of broader media spin and ballot-box bottom lines, it’s pretty much stopped working, as the Jeremiah Wright affair proves. Unfortunately for the GOP, it is the only song the online right-wing faithful know how to sing; it is too late in the election cycle for the right-leaning volunteer corps to learn a new one. Many of them aren’t particularly interested in winning approaches, anyhow; they’re too high on the fumes of their own self-regard. They’ll do the only thing they know how to do - holler about the evil liberals - while a disinterested political marketplace grows less and less interested in what is by now a very old and tired routine, and while the same routine dooms their candidates to irrelevancy. Oh, well, my Republican friends: there’s always 2012, right?

-TT

Empty crap like this:

Clinton retorted, “Instead of attacking the problem, he’s attacking my solutions,” and ran an ad in the campaign’s final hours that said she “gets it.”

It’s called pointing out that your “solutions” are no such thing. That’s logic, Hillary. You do the same thing every chance you get.

As for what Hillary “gets,” it seems to be only that she can say whatever she wants without paying too many penalties from voters. What she doesn’t get is that it hasn’t been good enough to win, and that the high road was the one to take against Obama. She didn’t get that, and right now Obama is closing in on the nomination and pulling in superdelegates left and right.

Obama only needs a minority of the remaining superdelegates to clinch the victory, and throughout these past few “rough” weeks he’s still been getting the majority. This means Hillary’s hopes are resting upon something so terrible happening that virtually all the remaining superdelegates swing for her.

This isn’t going to happen, and she doesn’t get that either. All the negativity, the slime, the Republican race she’s been running, has been for naught, except to battle-test Obama and see he’s doing just fine. Hillary had her argument, briefly and tenuously, and now it rests punctured and bleeding.

The only question is, when will she get it?

-jb

Pollster is where I go to get a sense of what’s going to happen on election night. Drudge and the rest of the bottom-feeders will only link to polls representing outliers because they can hype the horse-race narrative that online traffic tends to gravitate towards. Pollster uses a running aggregation represented by simple line graphs so naturally you get a better sense of where things are headed.

The easy money is on Barack winning North Carolina. No surprises there so naturally the press will cover the tighter race in Indiana more closely because it will give the pundits plenty of opportunities to stroke their chins and ruminate over “what it all means”. And nobody will dare come right out and state the plain and simple truth that it’s mathematically impossible for Clinton to win the nomination because they’re scared shitless of being labeled as “in the tank” for Obama.

What else will happen? Wolff Blitzer will fail to burn an effigy of Jeremiah Wright as a statement of public odium and revulsion which will provide definitive proof to right wing bloggers that an Obama presidency means certain enslavement for the white race.

-mg

Updates:

8:33pm-Barack Obama just gave his first official general election stump speech.
8:44pm-Lake County results haven’t come in yet and I think those numbers might just bring him to within three to four percentage points of Clinton.

10:50pm-Lake County is coming in and the deficit has narrowed to two percentage points. Perhaps it will be a tie when I wake up in the morning. Regardless, it’s a helluva lot better than what I expected.

So McCain didn’t vote for Bush. So says Huff, anyway. McCain’s response? He asks us to “consider the source”. Here’s Huff’s rebuttal:

My sentiments exactly — because John McCain has a long history of issuing heartfelt denials of things that were actually true.

He denied ever talking with John Kerry about his leaving the GOP to be Kerry’s ‘04 running mate — then later admitted he had, insisting: “Everybody knows that I had a conversation.”

He denied admitting that he didn’t know much about economics, even though he’d said exactly that to the Wall Street Journal. And the Boston Globe. And the Baltimore Sun.

He denied ever having asked for a budget earmark for Arizona, even though he had. On the record.

He denied that he’d ever had a meeting with comely lobbyist Vicki Iseman and her client Lowell Paxon, even though he had. And had admitted it in a legal deposition.

And those are just the outright denials. He’s also repeatedly tried to spin away statements he regretted making (see: 100-year war, Iraq was a war for oil, etc.).

So, yes, by all means, “consider the source.”

I have no doubt that the online devoted are willing to make excuses for any number of verbal blunders that are sure to come out of McCain’s pasty gob during the run-up to his certain defeat in November but how is it going to make them look when the only way out is to tell people that they’re stupid for misunderstanding what he’s saying? Elitist, indeed.

-mg

John McCain let the cat out of the bag a little bit today in Denver:

“My friends, I will have an energy policy that we will be talking about, which will eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East,” McCain told a crowd of 300 at a Jewish Community Center in Denver.

“That will prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East.”

Ignoring the obvious implications of the above statement for a moment I think that it needs to be pointed out that John McCain currently has no sensible energy policy to begin with, let alone “eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East”. But to just come right out and state a common sense observation like the above is very out of character for any politician, regardless of affiliation.

-mg

In Iowa:

Clive businessman Marty Parrish was escorted from Sen. John McCain’s town hall meeting by Des Moines police and members of the Secret Service after asking McCain if he had called his wife Cindy an expletive in 1992.

Parrish, an ordained Baptist minister who holds a master’s degree in political science, was questioned by Secret Service agents before being released. He was not charged in the incident. Parrish asked whether McCain called his wife Cindy an expletive related to the female anatomy, as has been alleged in the book “The Real McCain,” written by Dem strategist Cliff Schecter.

McCain’s response got him a round of applause from the crowd: “There’s people here who don’t respect that kind of language, so I’ll move on to the next questioner in the back.”

In an interview with IowaPolitics.com, Parrish said his intentions were simple in posing the question to McCain. The former Joe Biden campaign worker stressed he is very concerned about the Republican presidential nominee’s temperament.

“We have a man whose temper can get the best of him,” Parrish said. “What I am worried about is his temper. Our country is in a serious crisis. This election is the most significant one since 1860. It appears America is asleep — so I stood up and asked the question.”

Question: What the fuck is up with getting escorted out by police and Secret Service for asking that question? Is it their job to protect McCain’s feelings as well?

p.s. Waiting for rightwingers to come to McCain’s defense for calling his wife a cunt in public…

-jb

While they’ve been functional for some time, improvements in battery technology have held electric cars back somewhat. Fortunately, a new battery promises to open some doors.

It is the quickest electric motorcycle in the world. On a popular YouTube video, the black dragster cycle nearly disappears in a cloud of smoke as the driver does a “burn-out,” spinning the back wheel to heat it up. As the smoke drifts away, the driver settles into position and hits a switch, and the bike surges forward, accelerating to 60 miles per hour in less than a second. Seven seconds later it crosses the quarter-mile mark at 168 miles per hour–quick enough to compete with gas-powered dragsters.

What powers the “Killacycle” is a novel lithium-ion battery developed by A123 Systems, a startup in Watertown, MA–one of a handful of companies working on similar technology. The company’s batteries store more than twice as much energy as nickel-metal hydride batteries, the type used in today’s hybrid cars, while delivering the bursts of power necessary for high performance.

Well, if power is what it takes to win over American audiences, then that’s what this new battery delivers. What’s even better, it eliminates a few other concerns:

In the past, automakers have blamed electric vehicles’ poor sales on their lead-acid or nickel-metal hydride batteries, which were so heavy that they limited the vehicles’ range and so bulky that they took up trunk space. While conventional lithium-ion batteries are much lighter and more compact, they’re not cost effective for electric vehicles. That’s partly because they use lithium cobalt oxide electrodes, which can be unstable: batteries based on them wear out after a couple of years and can burst into flame if punctured, crushed, overcharged, or overheated. Some auto­makers have tried to engineer their way around these problems, but the results have been expensive.

A123’s batteries could finally make lithium-ion technology practical for the auto industry. Instead of cobalt oxide, they use an electrode material made from nanoparticles of lithium iron phosphate modified with trace metals. The resulting batteries are unlikely to catch fire, even if crushed in an accident. They are also much hardier than conventional lithium-ion batteries: A123 predicts that they will last longer than the typical lifetime of a car.

What benefits can we expect to gain if cars like the plug-in Chevy Volt coming in 2010 utilize this battery?

If the Volt is popular, electric cars could finally start to take off–and that could reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and petroleum consumption. A recent study by the Electric Power Research Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council suggests that electric vehicles similar to GM’s car could eliminate billions of tons of greenhouse-gas emissions between 2010 and 2050. A study by General Electric indicates that if half the vehicles on the road in 2030 are electric-powered, petroleum consumption in the United States will shrink by six million barrels a day.

And batteries like A123’s could have repercussions far beyond the Volt. Even cars with internal-combustion engines are being engineered to rely more on electricity: the simplest examples involve batteries recharged by souped-up alternators that would allow a car to shut off its engine when it approaches a stoplight and restart when the driver hits the accelerator. In conventional hybrids, versions of A123’s batteries can deliver as much power as nickel-metal hydride batteries at one-fifth the weight. The new batteries could also benefit plug-in hybrids, which can be recharged from a standard electrical outlet. Indeed, A123’s batteries may be used in a plug-in version of the Saturn Vue hybrid SUV that’s due out in 2010.

Yes, this is a necessity.

-jb

I know I just used the term the other day, but by all means, can we now throw the term “threw them under the bus” under the bus? Michale Calderone notes the ubiquity of the term, and John Cole suggests a worthy replacement in his post titled, “Obama Kicks Jeremiah Wright In the Junk.” The problem there, of course, being how much easier it is to throw women under the bus than kick them in the junk, so I will attempt to nominate a second option:

“Obama pulled a Clarence Boddicker on Wright.”

-jb

If this rebuttal makes sense to you, then you do!

Take, for example, the post-9/11 “chickens-coming-home-to-roost” sermon. Wright may have been ill-advised and impolitic in giving this sermon on the Sunday after 9/11, but he certainly was neither wrong nor alone in the view he expressed.

American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, has engendered enormous anger among people who don’t have the wherewithal to fight back on a regular battlefield. Should it surprise us that some of them resort to weapons of the weak—what we call terrorism. (Does an errant bomb dropped from a screaming jet inspire terror?) Do we suppose those fellows released from Guantanamo after years in a Kafkaesque nightmare are all just going to go home and say, “Let bygones be bygones”? Do we Americans think we are the only ones who get angry enough to strike back when attacked? Or is it that we think we’re the only ones entitled to get angry enough to kill?

Love harder! Love until your answers are yes, yes, yes, and yes! And don’t you dare think that “love” is more about giving our government carte blanche than actually loving the country and its people.

-jb

Hating Newsweek’s cover this week, but the essay within demolishes the madness about “elitism,” both through historical examples of presidents past who served the people fine while having some aristocratic airs, namely FDR, and Obama’s own personal history:

He was raised by a single parent, his mother, who lived on food stamps for a time. He graduated from an Ivy League college—Columbia—but worked as a low-paid community organizer in Chicago. After Harvard Law, he turned down the high-pay, high-prestige jobs in corporate-law firms to work in a small civil-rights firm, mostly on voting-rights cases. He talks about his experiences helping the poor in the shadows of shuttered steel plants in Chicago. “Politics didn’t lead me to working folks,” he says, “working folks led me to politics.” His wife, Michelle, is more emphatic. “I am a product of a working-class background,” she says. “I am one of those folks who grew up in that struggle. That is the lens through which I see the world.” (A close read of her Princeton thesis suggests where her heart lay even after four years in the Ivy League: the paper is a paean to staying in touch with her black working-class roots.) “So,” Michelle recently told a high-school audience in Evansville, Ind., “when people talk about this elitist stuff, I say, ‘You couldn’t possibly know anything about me’.”

Obama’s chief campaign adviser, David Axelrod, bridles at the elitist charge: “In terms of his personal habits, this is a guy who is an ESPN sports fanatic, who plays basketball for relaxation. When he’s out and about, he’s more solicitous of the people around him, the people on the street and the kitchen workers and the police officers than almost any politician I have known. Anybody who advances the argument that he’s an elitist simply doesn’t know the guy. It’s generally the elite who advance the argument.”

Bingo.

-jb

I know, I know, Keith Olbermann was allowed to express his opinions (unlike Phil Donahue who got canceled despite having excellent ratings) and thus MSNBC became the socialist flagship the Communist News Network could only dream of being…this can’t possibly be true:

It seems that Arianna Huffington has run up against the impenetrable wall that is Tim Russert’s ego. Huffington, who is currently on tour for her new book Right Is Wrong: How The Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded The Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe, will be appearing on CNN, ABC, and CBS. She had been booked on Morning Joe and Countdown with Keith Olbermann as well, but those bookings were suddenly and inexplicably cancelled.

NBC confirmed that Huffington wouldn’t be booked on any NBC-affiliated show to promote her book, but refused to explain why. Huffington’s people say that this is Tim Russert’s doing, that Russert is out for revenge because Huffington called him a “conventional wisdom zombie” in her book and devoted seven pages to faulting Russert for allowing his Meet the Press guests to go unchallenged (not to mention HuffPo’s RussertWatch).

Russert, one of the most obstinate fat cats of the Beltway, likes to dish it out (to Democrats) but sure can’t take it, can he? He is to question as he sees fit and not be questioned!

-jb

Who’s the fiscal conservative here?

Mr. McCain’s plan would appear to result in the biggest jump in the deficit, independent analyses based on Congressional Budget Office figures suggest. A calculation done by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington found that his tax and budget plans, if enacted as proposed, would add at least $5.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

Fiscal monitors say it is harder to compute the effect of the Democratic candidates’ measures because they are more intricate. They estimate that, even taking into account that there are some differences between the proposals by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, the impact of either on the deficit would be less than one-third that of the McCain plan.

By the numbers, Bill Clinton was one of the most fiscally conservative presidents of the last half century. Both Democratic candidates are more fiscally conservative and more responsible with taxpayer money, than John McCain, who is happy to add $5.7 trillion more to the national credit card.

Why? Because today’s GOP is George W. Bush’s GOP trying to sell themselves with Ronald Reagan’s soundbites. But the two no longer intersect. They have utterly embraced Bush/Cheney’s complete disregard for financial responsibility, and gleefully believe they are avoiding tax dollar waste as long as they can charge it off. Yes, it’s insane, stupid, and reckless, but so it goes when you have a cult of personality around a team of idiots and schemers, and a not-so-principled candidate irrevocably hitched to them.

-jb

UPDATE: It’s Bush, stupid!

43 percent of respondents are concerned about the 71-year-old John McCain’s close ties to George Bush.

36 percent have concerns about Clinton’s political opportunism, and 27 percent are concerned about Bill Clinton being back in the White House.

34 percent have problems with Obama’s “bitter” remarks and 32 percent give a damn about Jeremiah Wright.

McCain can’t disown Bush. That’s why he’s still getting beat by either Democrat in most match-ups. Democrats must unite soon and stand up against the past 8 years.

Bob Cesca:

If the corporate media had been as diligent about watchdogging President Bush as they have been about watchdogging Reverend Wright, it’s very likely we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq.

If the corporate media had spent as much time exposing the obvious flaws and grotesque inequalities of Reaganomics throughout the last 30 years as they’ve spent on Wright, we wouldn’t necessarily be staring into the maw of another depression.

If the corporate media were as diligent about debunking the lies surrounding Iran’s so-called nuclear program as they’ve been about Wright, there wouldn’t be such a sense of inevitability in terms of attacking — or entirely obliterating — Iran.

So what is the very serious corporate media, the only industry that is explicitly protected by the Constitution, doing to remedy their failures of the recent past? Rather than watchdogging the Bush administration and Senator McCain on Iraq, Iran, the economy and all the rest of it — areas in which Senator McCain is laughably wrong and dangerously inconsistent — what are we seeing instead?

All three major cable news networks are wasting valuable air time on Senator Obama’s former pastor. Why? Is the story newsworthy? Sure. Is wall-to-wall Wright coverage more important than Iraq or gas prices or the climate crisis? No way. But Reverend Wright is a scary, shouting black man and scary shouting black men equal ratings-sweet-ratings.

It’s not as if those in the media can possibly have avoided explanations of their fundamental dysfunction. Being functional simply isn’t their priority, and pontificating about “what people want to hear” without being challenged on it is cheaper and easier than being real journalists.

-jb

In a not-no-stunning display of poor leadership, President Bush has once again recommended that drilling of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is the solution to our current energy woes. Iowa Liberal has tackled this issue as have many others. At the very least, rational leadership would accept the simple fact that policies based upon keeping the cars running at all costs are doomed to failure as demand has simply exceeded supply with no possibility for reversal. Rational leadership would start looking at making other arrangements that aren’t completely dependent upon cheap and plentiful liquid hydrocarbons which are disappearing faster than even a pessimist like myself would have imagined. Politicians who lead people into believing that drilling ANWR is a solution are selling false hope.

-mg

Sullivan targets what has evidently soured Wright on Obama, and thus made it possible for Obama to sever their ties for good?

“I think that is part of Jeremiah Wright’s view of Obama as well (as Sharpton’s): he will never forgive him for winning so many white votes, and breaking the pattern and ideology of victimhood and marginalization that forged Wright’s identity.”

Out with the old, in with the new, in thought as well as deed. Obama was right not to throw Wright under the bus just because Clinton and the Republicans were freaked out by a few soundbites.

Funnily enough, virtually anybody who wasn’t a slobbering partisan hack or a Beltway zomboid could easily tell that Obama didn’t share Wright’s more flamboyant humdingers. Yet who foresaw Wright refusing to be preached to?

The student has become the master, and the master has refused to relent. Obama had already made the break from such old-school banter in forging his own philosophy, but as we saw, many whites recoiled at him even being associated with such a person.

I’m not sure I enjoy Sullivan’s tone entirely. When we live in a world where police stop filling unarmed black people with fifty bullets, more scorn can be heaped upon the Sharptons and the Wrights. They aren’t entirely wrong. Racism is still alive, and thumping along at a still unforgiveable pace in this country, and somebody should be pointing the finger. Blacks are victimized and marginalized still, and most of Obama’s opponents are all too happy to forget it. Listening to the rightwing radio yesterday, all I heard was the outrage that black people weren’t more thankful for how good they get it in this country. How could Obama sit in that pew and listen to an angry black man!?!?

Because a lot of black people are fucking angry, and they’re not wrong. Yet there are angry white people incensed that they even have to hear the thoughts of such blacks. Yeah, there’s something wrong there.

But if Sharpton, Wright, et al. can’t find leeway in their own outlook for somebody like Barack, who bridges the divide and looks for compromise, then he has no choice but to stand up to them as well. It might seem like he’ll end up with everybody against him at that rate, but no…

…oh no. In with the new.

-jb

Parts two and three below the fold.

Continue reading…

Omigod!

As oil prices soared to record levels in recent years, basic economics suggested that consumption would fall and supplies would rise as producers drilled for more oil.

But as prices flirt with $120 a barrel, many energy experts are becoming worried that neither seems to be happening. Higher prices have done little to suppress global demand or attract new production, and the resulting mismatch has sent oil prices ever higher.

That has translated into more pain at the pump, with gasoline setting a fresh record of $3.60 a gallon nationwide on Monday. Experts expect prices above $4 a gallon this summer, and one analyst recently predicted that gasoline could reach $7 in the next four years.

No way!

In the United States and through much of the developed world, the higher fuel prices have led drivers to reduce their consumption, and gasoline demand is expected to drop this year. But that drop will be more than offset by the rise in energy demand from developing countries. In the next two decades, demand is projected to jump by 35 percent, and developing countries will consume more oil than industrialized countries.

C’mon, why they wanna do that? Only Americans really need cars!

The outlook for oil supplies “signals a period of unprecedented scarcity,” Jeff Rubin, an analyst at CIBC World Markets, said last week. Oil prices might exceed $200 a barrel by 2012, he said, a level that would very likely mean $7-a-gallon gasoline in the United States.

Some regions are simply running out of reserves. Norway’s production has slumped by 25 percent since its peak in 2001, and in Britain, output has dropped 43 percent in eight years. Production from the giant Prudhoe Bay field in Alaska has dropped by 65 percent from its peak two decades ago.

Shhh…teh oil is 4evah eff U don make teh oil angry witchoo!

“It’s a crunch,” said J. Robinson West, chairman of PFC Energy, an energy consulting firm in Washington. “The world is not running out of oil, but rather it’s running out of oil production capacity.”

That’s right, man, you go, dude! The world is NOT RUNNING OUT OF OIL! We’re just having a harder time figuring out how to get it, but the world is NOT RUNNING OUT OF OIL! If we could just drill some MORE, we’d be okay because THE OIL WILL ALWAYS BE THERE!

Lookee here, watch me with this calculator…if I decide that the world will need 15 million barrels a day from Saudi Arabia, I just multiply that by 100% and that’s what Saudi Arabia will be able to produce.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter, is completing a $50 billion plan to increase capacity to 12.5 million barrels a day, but it signaled recently that it would not go beyond that. That means Saudi Arabia could fall short of the 15 million barrels a day that most experts had expected it to produce in the long run.

Not 100%? Who will give me 100% so my calculator will work right? OPEC give me 100%?

OPEC’s 13 members plan to spend $150 billion to expand their capacity by five million barrels a day by 2012. But OPEC will need to pump 60 million barrels a day by 2030, up from around 36 million barrels a day today, to meet the projected growth in demand. Analysts say that without Iran and Iraq — where nearly 30 years of wars and sanctions have crippled oil production — reaching that level will be impossible.

Fine, OPEC is retarded anyway. Somebody else give me 100% Maybe 1000%?

But the International Energy Agency estimates that current investments will be insufficient to replace declining oil production. The energy agency said it would take $5.4 trillion by 2030 to raise global output. Otherwise, it warned that a crisis before 2015 involving “an abrupt run-up in prices” could not be ruled out.

Pfft! Everybody is retarded.

-jb

p.s. If only there were some way we could spend about $400 billion to power the whole nation on solar by 2050…

Those Brazilian oil fields that were supposed to stave off our collective day of reckoning have a lot in common with most of the other off-shore petroleum deposits that are supposed to allow us to keep commuting to work in Ford F350 extended cab pickups. They’re almost physically impossible to get to making them prohibitively expensive to exploit:

April 28 (Bloomberg) — Brazil’s plan to become one of the world’s biggest oil exporters hinges on exploiting crude 6 miles below the ocean surface in deposits so hot they can melt the metal used to carry uranium to nuclear plants.

Tapping what may be the biggest oil finds in the Western Hemisphere in three decades will require equipment that can withstand 18,000 pounds per square inch of pressure, enough to crush a pickup truck, pipes that can carry oil at temperatures above 500 degrees Fahrenheit (260 Celsius) and drill bits that can penetrate layers of salt more than one mile thick.

Much like the “Jack” discoveries made a few years ago, nobody is even venturing a guess as to how much each barrel of oil extracted would have to cost in order to make such a venture profitable. If you guessed “a helluva lot” then you’re probably close. Rest assured, though, that when we get to that point we’re going to have more to worry about than the cost of driving our Ford Expedition to the Denny’s buffet.

-mg

-mg

Charles Grassley (R-IA) has a beef with churches that openly engage in political endorsements yet simultaneously enjoy tax exempt status. For his sins, Grassley gets tagged with the old, reliable, right-wing chestnut; the “elitist” label.

On Sunday Wead continued to press those same charges, arguing that “you cannot say there is not a legitimate scriptural rationale for these [Word of Faith] doctrines, they’re there in the Bible. If the Constitution allows freedom of religion, people who believe these doctrines and interpret them the way they choose to interpret them, have a right to believe that. And there shouldn’t be elitists who seize power in government to stop them from believing them. We’ve always had elitists like that who try to protect us dumb people, because we’re so dumb and we’re so stupid.” That’s a classic ruse used by the televangelists. They have long argued that, because Pentecostalism originated as a religious movement of the poor and uneducated, any criticism of its religious expression and worship style must stem from the disdain of mainline Protestants and evangelicals who engage in the theological equivalent of sipping lattes and driving Volvos.

Furthermore, this is not a case of the government dictating or imposing doctrine. It’s a situation involving a religious institution taking advantage of it’s special stature so that it can line the pockets of those who operate it which, of course, is nothing new in the strange realm of prosperity theology. But when a church starts endorsing candidates or political parties it needs to be prepared to answer some hard questions and at least be able to argue in favor of their status as a charitable organization without having to resort to Limbaugh-style rebuttals.

-mg

What’s really going on here? Andrew Sullivan says that we’re seeing a subtle weighing of the scales, where the old-timey dynamics come into play: White women trump black men in the pecking order.

I don’t believe that racism explains all of it at all. To my mind, the kind of tactics deployed against someone like Obama were deployed against Kerry and Gore and Clinton. Class and gender and age also weighed in the balance. And the fear of another Carter has motivated some. But the insane hysteria over Wright, the racist incidents in Pennsylvania that are only now being aired fully, the “Hussein” and “Muslim” memes, the sense of white entitlement that is so embedded in the Clintons that they don’t even fully see it: you have to be blind not to see the impact of race. Imagine if John Edwards had achieved what Obama has achieved. Imagine if he had won more delegates, votes and states than Clinton. Would Clinton have ever offered him the veep slot? Of course, race has affected this campaign, if only because the white entitlement that infuses the Clintons is invisible to most.

A reader of his pipes in:

The greatest dogwhistle of the Obama campaign so far is his ability to lay out this urgency to our generation. Viewed in this light, the only thing Obama has to tell me about yesterday’s election is that Pennsylanvia has the second oldest population in the country. After hearing that fact, I get it. He was never going to win.

A lot of statistical games are going on, but the striking differences between the voters over 40 versus the under-40 crowd encompasses a lot of subdivisions. Hillary isn’t just a woman, she’s a boomer, so she gets not only the older more racist voters, but the narcissistic boomers who can’t yet imagine they aren’t the center of the universe. In most states that hasn’t saved her, but it’s frequently created a demographic lump that won’t budge for Obama, and Pennsylvania was just one of them (Iowa, proudly, was not. When will the rest of the nation learn to listen to Iowans who aren’t named Steve King?) Had it been a Super Tuesday state, it would have gotten lost in the mix. Hillary’s had much bigger wins, and Obama’s had many more bigger wins. It’s a strange symptom of our news cycle that every new race is SO IMPORTANT because Hillary’s camp says it is. Is North Carolina important? Unlikely. And with Obama highly favored to win Indiana, Indiana isn’t so important either. Unless Hillary wins it, then it’s tha most important state EVAH!

I guess one could derive all sorts of lessons from Pennsylvania, it’s such a muddled mix…a 9.2 point lead, straddling the line between underwhelming win and double-digit victory…an interminable and stupid length of time until the next primary, when this one will be forgotten except that it gave Hillary license to keep torturing us with her slow loss, hoping somebody’ll just give her the nomination to shut her up…Obama’s need to step up his game fighting gossipy tabloidish junk that has nothing to do with the presidency…

…I mean, honestly. What is crap like Jeremiah Wright and whoever Obama shook hands with? Some image deal? And we’re listening to this after 8 years displaying to the world a President who’d be the loudmouthed guy at the end of the bar sloshed on Budweiser working at the chicken feed plant if it weren’t for his rich daddy? Apparently having a retard as President is okay, but we can’t tolerate one who doesn’t wear his flag pin because he thinks patriotism is something that deserves more than being worn on one’s sleeve!

America has from now until November to grow the hell up, consolidate support behind Obama and give him a nice 5-10 point lead over John McCain. While Republican hacktaculars like Sharon, Dana Pico, and Brian Pickrell are quaking in their boots (and let us not forget the Republican arm-wringing that went on before Bill Clinton won in 1992), in 2012 Barack Obama can run for re-election and we can simply say, “See? He didn’t enslave the white race!”

In the meantime, I’m considering taking up a new hobby, preferably something that involves gin or vodka every night.

-jb

Reminding you that George W. Bush and the GOP decided after 9/11 to lie about why we were attacked and have done so ever since.

This probably means we should stop trusting them with the keys to the car any longer, but reality is just so out-of-style nowadays.

-jb

Due to a recent spate of link spam we will be holding comments with more than one link in moderation until the onslaught subsides.

-mg

Ah, how violated McCain has been, mean old Obama misconstruing his comments to suggest he wants to stay in Iraq 100 years…only an idiot or a misanthrope could misinterpret his very clear meaning!

Sharon, as vile as ever, clears it up!

I truly cannot believe that anyone with an I.Q. over 70 thinks that McCain’s comments meant he wanted to stay in Iraq till there were no Americans killed.

Well, here’s Real Clear Politics:

Conservatives have since shot back, claiming that McCain’s comments have been willfully misrepresented. They’re right. Senator McCain clearly said that the 100 year deployment was fine provided the U.S. was not taking casualties. He was not, pace Obama and Clinton, declaring his desire for a century of combat. He was clearly positioning America’s involvement in Iraq in the context of a country that had become a peaceful American ally. “We’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea for 50 years or so,” McCain said at the time.

Erm, okay. It’s getting so…clear. McCain can’t possibly intend to stay in Iraq until there were no Americans getting killed, but if we magically got to a point where Americans weren’t getting killed, we could stay? So if Americans keep getting killed, at some point we will just pick up and leave? Argh, Sharon’s advanced thinking has confused my puny mind! Maybe she can tell us what she really means:

The truth is–you know, the truth you dislike so much–staying in Iraq is precisely what will be necessary until the Iraqi situation is stable. What is stable? I’d say a functioning government, equipped and trained military, and a general acceptance of democracy and reform. That may actually take 100 years, but, unlike you, I’m more concerned with leaving that section of the world better off than it has been in the past.

Oh, so Obama and everybody other sane person on the planet who isn’t a hacktacular Republican got it right: McCain and the GOP are perfectly willing to keep it up for 100 years, 10,000 years, a million years, UNTIL THE JOB IS DONE!

But that wasn’t what McCain was saying! Get it yet?

Man, those guys are having fun putting on a tough show while Hillary does her best to ruin Democrats’ chances in November, but they ain’t gonna be able to take the heat when things get fired up and Obama, leading the unified Democrats, makes the full-court press.

-jb

UPDATE: Sharon throws in the towel:

Here’s some advice for you. Go home. Read what McCain said. Use some common sense, say, look at history and the way America has dealt with its conflicts. Then come back and try to make more stupid arguments about McCain’s statements biting him on the ass.

Yeah, when your argument is, “Uh, look at history!” you should note the draft up your arse, because you aren’t wearing pants anymore.

Delegate count from the PA primary:

Clinton: 52
Obama: 46

Total delegates for each so far:

Clinton: 1,556
Obama: 1,694

And it’s not just the delegate count that clearly spells Hillary’s fate. The popular vote tells the exact same story. It is to be expected that regardless of the margin, the Clinton camp will trumpet tonights win of Hillary’s home state as a devastating defeat. The cable news outlets will play along because the continuation of the Democratic Party candidate selection process affords them a few more weeks of lazy horse-race narration. But at what cost?

Mrs. Clinton did not get the big win in Pennsylvania that she needed to challenge the calculus of the Democratic race. It is true that Senator Barack Obama outspent her 2-to-1. But Mrs. Clinton and her advisers should mainly blame themselves, because, as the political operatives say, they went heavily negative and ended up squandering a good part of what was once a 20-point lead.

On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” the narrator intoned.

The pattern has become all too familiar. Clinton is the presumed winner in the upcoming caucus/primary because of wide early margins amongst all demographics. The Obama campaign moves in, organizes, and the gap rapidly narrows leading to either a win or a close second despite the Clinton campaigns repeated willingness to immediately go negative. In contest after contest, Clinton has blown huge margins yet we’re supposed to believe that come November she will not repeat the same performance when facing John McCain? And after putting up with months of the type of abuse from his Democratic rival (the nature of which my eight-year-old niece would be ashamed of) we’re supposed to believe that a knock-kneed Obama, when facing a Republican slime-machine that the Clinton campaign has shown no hesitation in aping, will be too overcome by Rovian shock-and-awe to mount an effective campaign? We already know how the Republican Party is going to attack Obama because we’ve seen it from the Clinton campaign. Obama’s performance in handling Clinton’s slash-and-burn tactics should be more than enough evidence that he’s got what it takes to face a light-weight like John McCain head-on.

I do not want to see Hillary Clinton on television after the November elections explaining that regardless of the fact that she lost the delegate count and the popular vote she is still the best candidate (just like she is doing right now). I would much rather place my bets on a battle-hardened Obama candidacy with a track-record of effective campaigning and driven by a fierce work-ethic.

-mg

I watched this on C-Span when it was originally aired in 2005. It’s a televised debate between Daniel Ellsberg and William Kristol. The subject is Iraq. The intellectual divide between these two is even more obvious now than it was when I first saw it. In short, Kristol gets his ass handed to him in a high hat. Looking back, is there anything he was correct about?

-mg

*At around twenty-three minutes check out the look on Ellsberg’s face when Kristol makes this claim.

These are some unlucky times.

It’s unlucky that after 232 years of white male presidents, a political party is forced to choose between a woman or a black man for their first presidential mold-breaking nominee. In a just world we would have had many female presidents and presidents of all races by now. This is not a just world, and our nation has been afflicted with irrational prejudices since before its inception that we have long struggled to shed. Could an atheist Asian-American woman run the country? Of course, to new heights even. Could she get elected? The odds are currently impossible.

Our current female candidate has gotten to her position largely on the coattails of her husband and shamelessly crass triangulating plastic politics. Our current black candidate rose to the top through powerful virtues few presidents have been lucky enough to possess, and has faced an onslaught of racially tinged attacks from every direction (amazingly, much of it from the campaign of the female candidate). It is progress that they are here, but as prevalent are the signs that we haven’t quite gotten “there” yet.

I feel that given the choice between a female candidate and a black male candidate, one must turn the question to their merits and leave the identity politics behind. Either one would be a historic president breaking a centuries-old pattern of injustice, paving the way for future candidates. Either one benefits the other’s cause, because our nation will now recognize that things need not remain the way they were. If we can elect a female president, then we can also elect a non-white one, and vice versa.

Sadly, this idea has not caught on. Some have simply gravitated to the candidate most like them, understandably since that’s what people do. However, some have chosen to take sides and argue that gender trumps race or vice versa. This conflict was avoidable, yet we did not swerve away. Continue reading…

This is a shepherd of men?

The sign in front of a small church in a small town is causing a big controversy in Jonesville, S.C.

Pastor Roger Byrd said that he just wanted to get people thinking. So last Thursday, he put a new message on the sign at the Jonesville Church of God.

It reads: “Obama, Osama, hmm, are they brothers?”

Byrd said that the message wasn’t meant to be racial or political.

“It’s simply to cause people to realize and to see what possibly could happen if we were to get someone in there that does not believe in Jesus Christ,” he said.

When asked if he believes that Barack Obama is Muslim, Byrd said, “I don’t know. See it asks a question: Are they brothers? In other words, is he Muslim ? I don’t know. He says he’s not. I hope he’s not. But I don’t know. And it’s just something to try to stir people’s minds. It was never intended to hurt feelings or to offend anybody.”

Or a depraved liar, take your pick. Today’s rightwingers have effectively blurred the lines between lying and stupidity so you can never quite pin them down. I mean, they say they’re not lying, they say they’re not stupid, but I don’t know! I hope they’re not. I’m not trying to hurt feelings or offend anybody, but I just don’t know! The stuff that comes out of their mouths isn’t true, and it’s incredibly stupid, but is that who they are? Or are they just ruthlessly cynical manipulators? For sure, the congregation supports the pastor:

Despite some criticism, Byrd says that the message will stay on the sign. He took the issue before his congregation Sunday night, and they decided unanimously to keep it.

One thing is for sure, this question is about as much of a mind-stirrer as, “Moon: Made of green cheese, hmmm?”

-jb

I’m going to be majorly pissed if this airline business affects the trip to Iowa I’ve already booked for August…

One big reason for the airport congestion, of course, is that the runways are cluttered up with planes making trips of only a few hundred miles. This has been a problem for quite a while. Periodically, it gets so bad that the media gets all excited and sometimes (last summer, for instance) the President makes a statement deploring it. Since the current president is a knucklehead, it apparently hasn’t occurred to him to get behind a revival of the passenger rail system. But Mr. Bush is apparently not the only elected knucklehead in this country, because absolutely nobody is talking about this.

Now get this: we are sleepwalking into a transportation crisis. As I already said, the airline industry is dying. The price of petroleum-based aviation fuel is killing it. And forget the fantasies about running it on bio-diesel or used french-fry oil. Driving cars will not be an adequate substitute, either. It’s imperative that this country gets serious about restoring the passenger rail system. We can’t not talk about it for another year. We must demand that the candidates for president speak to this issue. If you who are reading this are active reporters or editors in the news media, you’ve got to raise your voices behind this issue.

I can’t easily take a rail to Iowa, but here in Cali people fly from San Diego to LA to San Francisco all the time. Obviously it’s convenient: 45 minutes in the air and some milling around in an airport vs. a 6-8 hour road trip is massive. But however many things in the world may be possible, far fewer are feasible. Airplanes as taxis are likely go the way of the buggy-whip.

That said, there will be no politician pushing rail travel soon, and if they do, there will be no interest paid to the unsexy issue by our media, at least until their bosses stop covering the costs of their flights. If I were a smart reporter I’d do it , because chances are journalists will be laid off before they get a chance to begin the push for rail in the media.

-jb

“Haynes, Feith, Yoo, Bybee, Gonzalez and - at the apex - Addington, should never travel outside the US, except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel. They broke the law; they violated their professional ethical code.”

And they’ll retire comfortably in the US. Well, Gonzalez is having a hard time finding employment, I hear, but somebody’ll look out for him as long as he remains a loyal stooge. It is to our shame that America will not only harbor, but probably continue heaping awards and honors upon these war criminals. We are better than such black-blooded scourges, and we should prove it and actually act that way. Such is impossible in any Republican administration, as every single Republican hack will gladly stain the flag by wrapping it around such men and turn the word “heroes” into Newspeak as they apply it to them. Medals of Honor for all! If only Dick Cheney could be king!

-jb

You know, for people who claim to dislike government control of free enterprise - for people, that is, who claim to be conservative - the Bush admin sure doesn’t seem to mind liberal usage of Soviet-style propaganda tactics. Any excuses about this (predictable ones: “it’s to counter the liberal media”; “there’s no law that says the government can’t do this”) are pathetic exercises in missing the point; if you approve of this stuff, there can be no question about it - there isn’t a conservative bone in your body. You’re all right with the government presenting op-ed as news, and, more importantly, with people who’ve never served telling decorated generals how to describe the situation on the ground when they talk to the press. You are, in short, a very hardline statist if you can tolerate this from your government.

I suspect that there are, however, many people who’re happy to be Soviets, just as long as they get to keep playing the my-side-vs.-your-side game as vociferously as their free armchair time will allow. To them I say: hail, comrades, well met
- brave men fought and died to prevent your preferred form of government from replacing American democracy, but I guess we lost that one, eh?

-TT

It will fall on deaf ears, but it’s worth hearing anyway.

-TT

Man, I ain’t hatin’ or nothin’, but it’d be nice if either of the remaining Democratic candidates for President were as enlightened as a Ford appointee. You know? It’d just be nice, is all.

-TT

The battle lines are drawn, says Andrew Sullivan:

Last night (at the debate) was not Obama’s finest hour. But when you look back and see what he has already accomplished by the manner and content and care of his campaign, he is obviously on the right side. Key elements of the MSM establishment, the political establishment and the ideological right and cynical left know how big a threat he is to them. That’s why Hannity can join forces with Stephanopoulos and Clinton can channel Rove. Because in this issue, they are all on the same side.

They’ll call the candidate funded by the people elitist, they’ll portray the biracial man who tries to bring blacks and whites together as a Black Panther, they’ll call a champion of America’s greatness unpatriotic. They’ll do it because they think you’re stupid, not because they believe it. And then they’ll tell you Obama thinks you’re stupid.

The wagons are circling. Do we give up?

-jb

Mozzer made it into TMZ (which is ten times better than Perez Hilton’s shabby site, IMO). And he didn’t go to STK.

-mg

Regular readers know that Thomas Tallis is not really fully on board the Obama Express. He will be happy to vote for Obama in the general, but he does not think that Obama represents some magnificent new unheard-of direction in politics or anything. He is just a better-than-average Democrat, is Thomas Tallis’s opinion. But that said: what the hell just happened on ABC? Both Stephanopolous and Gibson lobbed softballs at Clinton all night while holding Obama’s feet to the fire. It was shamelessly bad journalism, though I guess if you’re the kind of person who likes “great TV” then you might have dug it.

Thomas Tallis, he did not dig it. Thomas Tallis found himself wishing his preferred candidate, Hillary Clinton, would have thrown Obama a life preserver. Because the Jeremiah Wright stuff was bogus and she knew it; because the “elitist” stuff was bogus and she knew it; because it was clear that the narrative ABC News wanted to push was “Obama’s on the ropes,” and they were willing to stack the deck to get that narrative across.

However, Obama partisans would do well to note that HRC did not do th