Introducing our national nightmare

by twit

Via Maureen Dowd, writing for the New York Times on June 29, 2008:

Afterward, Carmella got her idol to autograph her sign, telling the smiling Hillary, “You’re going to be the next president.”

She told The Times that she and her friends were all voting for John McCain and that Hillary was just doing what she had to do.

“But I have a gut feeling,” she said with macabre faith, “that something’s going to happen so that she becomes the nominee.”

[emphasis added]

Somebody PLEASE get the Secret Service and the FBI on this… it is her certainty that really seems to qualify her as the kind of psychopath to keep an eye on.

Yes She Will… congratulate Obama on his victory

by twit

It’s time for a drink! A strong one!

Breaking News: Bubba concedes the nomination

by twit

wait, what? perhaps file it under “things we already knew“…

Former president Bill Clinton dropped a hint Monday that the end might be nigh for his wife Hillary’s dogged campaign for the Democratic White House nomination, according to reports.

“I want to say also that this may be the last day I’m ever involved in a campaign of this kind,” the former president told Clinton supporters in South Dakota, ABC and NBC reported on their news websites.

“I thought I was out of politics, till Hillary decided to run. But it has been one of the greatest honors of my life to go around and campaign for her for president,” he added at the start of his stump speech.

in the twit’s optimistic opinion, all these past-tense references to the 2008 Clinton campaign call for a stiff drink to properly appreciate the magnitude of this moment…

Bubba Gone Wild

by twit

A magazine that managed to make Angelina Jolie look like a porn star has written a long and sexified analysis of Bill Clinton. Yesterday, reports started up about Bubba’s reaction to the piece:

The Office of President Bill Clinton responded with fury Sunday to a Vanity Fair article that attacks the former president and suggests he is out of control personally and consumed by “cavernous narcissism.”

and reporters started trudging through the boring mass of fluff to find the tidbits of what we already knew:

More devastating is Purdum’s claim that about 18 months ago, a former Clinton aide tried an intervention with the former president because he was hearing so many complaints about inappropriate behavior.

According to the article, the aide believed “Clinton was apparently seeing a lot of women on the road.”

Today, the Clintons angrily continue to deny that Bill Clinton is an angry kind of guy:

The Clinton camp responded today to Vanity Fair’s long article on Bill with its own 2,476-word memo, which includes attacks on the magazine’s “penchant for libel,” on editor Graydon Carter, and on writer Todd Purdum and his wife, former Clinton aide Dee Dee Myers.

the clinton campaign takes a great leap forward

by lestro

yet, somehow more Mao than I expect they’d have hoped:

Hillary strip mines the Democratic party

by lestro

In the opening of her victory speech last night, Hillary Clinton dropped this little nugget and it got me thinking:

There are some who have wanted to cut this race short. They say “give up, it’s too hard, the mountain is too high,” but here in West Virginia, you know a thing or two about rough roads to the top of the mountain. We know from the Bible that faith can move mountains and, my friends, the faith of the Mountain State has moved me. I am more determined than ever to carry on this campaign until everyone has had a chance to make their voices heard.

In a place known as The Mountain State, her speech writer must have been particularly proud of that bit, but one can go even deeper into Hillary’s mountain metaphor.

The biggest industry in West Virginia is coal mining and the newest thing is called “mountain top removal” which involves blowing the tops off mountains and dumping the dirt into valleys, burying streams, communities, whatever and is, as one might expect, absolutely horrendous for the environment:

Mountaintop removal involves clear cutting native hardwood forests, using dynamite to blast away as much as 800-1000 feet of mountaintop, and then dumping the waste into nearby valleys, often burying streams.

While the environmental devastation caused by this practice is obvious, families and communities near these mining sites are forced to contend with continual blasting from mining operations that can take place up to 300 feet from their homes and operate 24 hours a day.

Families and communities near mining sites also suffer from airborne dust and debris, floods that have left hundreds dead and thousands homeless, and contamination of their drinking water supplies.

It’s an absolutely horrible process, one the Bush EPA has looked the other way on for years while the Bush Administration has actually been trying to expand the practice.

So here’s the deeper metaphor drawn from Hillary’s speech: Instead of doing the hard work of actually building herself up to climb to the top of the mountain, the Clinton Campaign has been doing everything it can to slice the top off that mountain and bring it down to their level by knee-capping her opponent.

Meanwhile, in doing so, she has completely poisoned the surrounding party environment and vastly hurt their chances of taking back the White House, all in the name of her own, sick profit.

Clinton rolls out improved operating system: Jobs v.3.0

by lestro

Despite the flaws and security holes in Inevitability v1.x, Experience v2.0, Fighter v3.3, Commander-in-chief v1.2 (a rush release that was hastily recalled when it was discovered to open the user to the nearly fatal error-inducing internet worm Bosnia Bullshit), the combo pack Experienced Fighter v2.4 and the most recent iteration Gun-Toting Shot Drinker v4.0, the Clinton Campaign has high hopes for the upcoming release of its newest opertaing system: Jobs v3.0.

So every speech she gave in Indiana on Friday and Saturday had the same topic sentence. “My campaign is about jobs, jobs, jobs and jobs,” she said, always to thunderous applause…

Since the race started, Mrs. Clinton has cycled through several political personas: the battle-tested White House veteran, the fighter, the girl — her word — tougher than any boy.

Now she is the Dream Boss: the one who will give you a job, provide health insurance, but also understand just how hard you work and the mundane details of what you do.

The new system is a throwback to the first Clinton system, which wowed the world with a fresh look and took the nation by storm 16 years ago with an effective advertising campaign that highlighted youth and hinged on the brilliantly catchy yet simple jingle “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Hillary “penis-snatcher” Clinton

by twit

what?

Read this and tell me the same damn thing isn’t happening to the Democratic Party:

“I’m tempted to say it’s one huge joke,” Oleko said.

“But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it’s become tiny or that they’ve become impotent. To that I tell them, ‘How do you know if you haven’t gone home and tried it’,” he said.

Over at the DNC, Obama needs 100 superdelegates to step forward and the nomination battle is over.

since the primaries will have lifted Obama over 1,900 delegates (elected and super), he’ll only need about 100 more, out of about 300 uncommitted superdelegates.

Yet some otherworldy force convinces them that they are impotent.

Hey, did I mention that I slept with Chelsea Clinton?

by lestro

Yup, we got together, did a bunch of blow and then fucked like wild animals for an entire weekend, before her girlfriend came home and threw me out. I haven’t really heard from her since the abortion, but I get a text message every now and again.

Hey, it could be true, right?

and that is all that matters to me and Chelsea:

It turns out those Republican talking points were right

by lestro

So Obama has apparently decided to go a little more on the offensive in criticizing Clinton’s response to the “cling to” thing. The Associated Press reports on Obama’s latest comments:

“She is running around talking about how this is an insult to sportsmen, how she values the Second Amendment. She’s talking like she’s Annie Oakley,” Obama said …

… Obama continued, saying “Hillary Clinton is out there like she’s on the duck blind every Sunday. She’s packing a six-shooter. Come on, she knows better. That’s some politics being played by Hillary Clinton.”

… “I just have to remind people of the track record,” Obama said. “This is the same person who took money from financial folks on Wall Street and then voted for bankruptcy bill that makes it harder for folks right here in Pennsylvania to get a fair shake. Who do you think is out of touch?

“This is the same person who spent a decade with her husband campaigning for NAFTA, and now goes around saying she’s opposed to NAFTA,” Obama said, referring to the North American Free Trade Agreement that is widely unpopular in blue collar communities.

The Clinton Campaign fired back, proving that Penn wasn’t the only problem in that staff…

“For months, Barack Obama and his campaign have relentlessly attacked Hillary Clinton’s character and integrity by using Republican talking points from the 1990s,” said spokesman Phil Singer.

“The shame is his. Senator Clinton does know better — she knows better than to condescend and talk down to voters like Senator Obama did.”

Since we’ve been over the elitist crap before (an Ivy-League multi-millionaire who has lived in a protective Washington bubble who thinks we are too dumb to notice when she lies to us – multiple times – about shit that’s ON VIDEO using her opponent’s – and party eventual nominee, if we are being honest here, hill – using an actual, literal misspeak to use his education against him…), let’s just jump to that ‘Republican talking points from the 1990s’ bit, shall we?

love letters from gangsters and thieves

by twit

why, Alan… my, how you do go on…

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said on Tuesday the U.S. economy was in recession, and said it would be appropriate to tap public funds to resolve the mortgage-related crisis that has helped pull the economy under.

why, Bubba… my, how you do go on…

Mark Penn, who lost his job as chief strategist to the Clinton campaign because of his work for the Colombian government on a controversial trade pact, wasn’t her only adviser with such ties. Another is Bill Clinton.

Mr. Clinton supports the pact with Colombia even though his wife opposes it, a Clinton campaign spokesman said Tuesday.

why, Karl… my, how you do go on…

… even Rove had to agree that Sen. Clinton has run a poor campaign.

“She has run a horrific campaign,” said Rove. “It has been astonishingly bad. … [Obama] has strategically always run a better campaign than she has tactically.”

why, Energy Information Administration… my, how you do go on…

… the Energy Information Administration predicted that average gasoline prices will shoot up to $3.60 a gallon in June and average $3.54 per gallon over the summer driving period, an increase of 60 cents a gallon over last summer.

It’s entirely possible, EIA Administrator Guy Caruso said, that gasoline prices could top $4 a gallon during parts of the summer driving period, defined as April 1 to Sept. 30.

Mark Penn goes against the family

by lestro

The Clinton Mafia whacked one of its own Sunday when the Clinton Campaign canned chief strategist Mark Penn, approximately four months too late to truly help the campaign.

Officially, Penn resigned, but there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that he was asked to leave following some questionable dealings with one of his other clients (he never resigned from his firm to work on the campaign – that’s called hedging your bets.):

Mark Penn, the chief strategist behind Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential bid, quit under pressure Sunday, two days after reports surfaced about Penn meeting with Colombian officials interested in promoting a trade deal that sthe New York senator opposes.

But then again, that campaign has really been running around in different directions, mostly because of Penn’s failed strategy of betting on name recognition, entitlement and winning the big states of Feb 5 had no back-up plan and has been getting its ass kicked since voting started by a candidate who not only recognized the importance or organizing a national effort but that the Old World Dems strategy of winning just the big states hadn’t work in elections past…

In her favor, however, this is probably the best strategic move Clinton has made so far in this campaign.

Unfortunately, it should have been made months ago when it had a chance to make an impact in turning her campaign around…

wait, what? … what? …what? …what?

by twit

this spins me right around, like a record player:

My colleague Jeffrey Ressner was at Hillary’s fundraiser last night at the Wilshire Theater in Los Angeles, and captured the audio (.wma) of a really jarring scene: A woman dragged out in handcuffs, screaming that she was the only black supporter of Hillary there. (She wasn’t.)

what?

Clinton herself had some fairly strong stuff to say, particularly on Florida and Michigan: “If we don’t figure out Michigan and Florida, our candidate will lack the legitimacy that we want,” she told the crowd.

what?

“I was among the very first to speak out against the Taliban. . .I was invited by the Taliban to visit [but I declined,]” she said. “Some days I may think I want to wear a burqua, but I don’t want to do that. . . “

what?

At the end of the event, the music played to usher people out, but Hillary stopped the music and implored the crowd to donate. “I need your help. I’m being outspent,” she said.

Hillary Clinton has no soul

by twit

is that too harsh? This is a story from February 1999, when Hillary was working on her first Senate campaign, one that we might imagine would require a fair amount of faking a “real” marriage with Bill.

You know, like one where you might be there with your spouse while their political fate is decided? Or maybe just a quick congratulatory call to say, see, I told you not to worry?

The article is pitching the anecdote as an illustration of her ‘iron focus’ on her political campaigns. I was struck by how inhuman it makes her appear, like she may understand how regular people go about their caring and sharing lives, but she’s not having any of it:

Both the loyalty and the focus were on display in February 1999, when the Senate voted not to remove Bill Clinton from office.

In the White House residence, Ickes and the first lady were poring over New York state maps in preparation for her Senate bid.

A call came in informing the first lady that her husband had been acquitted, Ickes recalled. “She puts down the phone and says, ‘Harold, we were talking about Buffalo.’ ”

With that, they went back to work.

the other icy frosting to the story is this snapshot from inside her current campaign for President:

superdelegate de ja vu

by twit

Hooray! Pelosi tells the big-time Clinton donors that the Democratic nomination is not for sale.

Which really is stating the obvious, but these are big-time Clinton supporters we’re talking about…

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has reaffirmed her position that superdelegates should not “overturn the will of the voters” in the face of criticism from top donors to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).

but will somebody send a nasty letter to the Washington superdelegates, please…

Look, it’s already started, just add an address:

“The Speaker believes it would do great harm to the Democratic Party if superdelegates are perceived to overturn the will of the voters,” Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly said in a statement late Wednesday.

Hillary Clinton has no shame

by lestro

So apparently Hillary Clinton “misspoke” about the whole running-from-snipers thing in Bosnia. Which I suppose is Clintonspeak for “lied through her ass”:

During a speech last Monday, she said of the trip: “I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”

According to an AP story at the time, Clinton was placed under no extraordinary risks on that trip. And one of her companions on it, comedian Sinbad, told The Washington Post he has no recollection either of the threat or reality of gunfire.

But wait, there’s more. The statements she made last week also contradict what she said in her book:

Clinton wrote: “Due to reports of snipers in the hills around the airstrip, we were forced to cut short an event on the tarmac with local children, though we did have time to meet them and their teachers and to learn how hard they had worked during the war to continue classes in any safe spot they could find.”

So, caught in this obvious lie, the Clinton campaign did what they do best and tried to obfuscate and distract:

“That is what she wrote in her book,” Wolfson said. “That is what she has said many, many times and on one occasion she misspoke.”

yeah, just this once.

except it wasn’t.

Olbermann calls Hillary a Republican

by twit

among other things…

a video with better sound quality is available via Raw Story.

thank goodness we don’t have to restrain ourselves here.

baby robot overlords and other morning cartoons

by twit

It has been a long couple of days of chronicling the slow-motion train wreck of the Democratic Party, but there’s good news, at least by comparison, as the world welcomes its new baby robot overlords:

A tiny chemical “brain” which could one day act as a remote control for swarms of nano-machines has been invented.

The molecular device – just two billionths of a metre across – was able to control eight of the microscopic machines simultaneously.

“… this is the first time we have created a nano-brain,” [Dr Bandyopadhyay] told BBC News.

… One day they may be able to guide the nanobots through the body and control their functions, he said.

and if the baby robot overlords can’t save us in time, there’s always galaxy-crushing gamma rays:

The spooky thing about this pinwheel is that it appears to be a nearly perfect spiral to us, according to new images taken with the Keck Telescope in Hawaii. “It could only appear like that if we are looking nearly exactly down on the axis of the binary system,” Tuthill said.

… Unfortunately for us, gamma ray bursts seem to be shot right along the axis of systems. In essence, if this pinwheel ever releases a gamma ray burst, our planet might be in the firing line.

… Both the massive stars in WR 104 will one day explode as supernovae. However, one of the pair is a highly unstable star known as a Wolf-Rayet, the last known stable phase in the life of these massive stars right before a supernova.

When the Wolf-Rayet goes supernova, “it could emit an intense beam of gamma rays coming our way,” Tuthill said. “If such a ‘gamma ray burst’ happens, we really do not want Earth to be in the way.”

Since the initial blast would travel at the speed of light, there would be no warning of its arrival.

hooray! now on to the funnies:

“The Clintons have always had a touch of the zombies about them: unkillable, they move relentlessly forward, propelled by a bloodlust for Republicans or uppity Democrats who dare to question their supremacy.”

“Will Hillary win Pennsylvania? Who Cares?”

bonus points: “The next time Hillary uses the recycled red phone ad, counter with one of your own. When the phone rings in the middle of the night, have a woman’s voice, with a flat Midwestern accent, answer it and say, “Hold on” into the receiver.

Then she should shout, “Bill! It’s for you!””

Hillary’s big tent

by lestro

No, not her pant suit.

Jesus, you’re horrible. Stop it. That’s just mean and there’s no place for it in intelligent political discussion.

This week the Clinton Campaign launched a new Web site called Delegate Hub to address “The facts and myths about the race for delegates.” It functions mainly as blog to collect articles and clips about the superdelegates that present issues in a Clinton-favorable light.

Here’s the intro statement:

As more voters make their choice for the Democratic nomination, there is growing interest in the facts and myths about the race to reach 2208 delegate votes – the number required for a candidate to secure the nomination with Florida and Michigan included. The Obama campaign is claiming, without precedent or justification, that automatic delegates (commonly referred to as “super delegates”) should switch to Sen. Obama en masse based on arbitrary metrics, with the aim of tilting the delegate balance in his favor. The fact is: no automatic delegate is required to cast a vote on the basis of anything other than his or her best judgment about who is the most qualified to be president.

Did you catch that part about Michigan and Florida? Those are the states whose delegates that Clinton agreed should not count, until she realized she was getting beat pretty much everywhere except the states where her opponent agreed to not campaign in.

One of the first links on the new site is a Slate column in which Christopher Beam reports on some “number crunching” that shows Hillary has actually received 52 percent of the vote among people who identify as Democrats. The post gives some good reasons about why the numbers are a bit hinky, but despite that concludes “Clinton’s lead is still large enough to be significant.”

However, it’s the closing paragraph that disturbs me a little:

It helps you understand why the party gives so much power to its 796 superdelegates. If they didn’t, independents and Republicans could essentially hijack their election. It also makes you wonder whether Clinton should start citing this number, if she maintains her lead through the convention in August. Even if Obama leads in the popular vote and among pledged delegates, it might disturb party gray beards to learn that the nominee has essentially been chosen by outsiders.

While in many ways that is understandable, it is hard to imagine that the Clinton Campaign is actually pushing a message of exclusion. Essentially they say that unless you are a party member, they don’t want you there. The Democratic Party as invite-only.

How to Speak Hillary

by twit

It can be an exercise in apoplectic futility to attempt to make sense of the various messages sent from the Clinton campaign. So with clips from a Feb 24, 2008 New York Times article entitled “Somber Clinton Soldiers On as the Horizon Darkens” the twit offers a translation, with emphasis added throughout:

“She has a real military discipline that, now that times are tough, has really kicked into gear,” said Judith Hope, a friend and informal adviser to Mrs. Clinton, and a former chairwoman of the New York State Democratic Party. “When she’s on the road and someone has a negative news story, she says, ‘I don’t want to hear it; I don’t need to hear it.’ I think she wants to protect herself from that and stay focused.

Hillary intentionally filters the information she receives so she doesn’t have to acknowledge reality. An uncanny bit of de ja vu all over again, considering that President Bush also likes his news filtered.

The superdelegates need to “get real” with the Clinton campaign

by lestro

And once again, the Clinton campaign has revamped its message.

After failing to get much traction by accusing her opponent of plagiarism (lifting two lines from a national campaign co-chair and long time friend and used in response to the Hillary’s fadeaway shots on Obama’s powerful oratory), the Hillary campaign is trying out some new material, according to CNN:

As Barack Obama solidifies his lead, Hillary Clinton is shaking things up with a revamped message and sharper digs at her party’s front man…

“It is time to get real,” Clinton said, “to get real about how we actually win this election… It is time to move from good words to good works — from sound bites to sound solutions.”

As it increasingly looks as though neither candidate will get the requisite delegates necessary to lock up the nomination through primaries and caucuses, the focus in this race has turned to the superdelegates, the 795 party insiders and muckity-mucks who get to be delegates fro whomever they choose.

As (mostly) high-ranking party members, however, one would expect that the superdelegates would not only vote their conscience, but also have to think about what is best for the party and which candidate has the best chance of securing the White House for the Democrats.

And with that in mind, it is time for the delegates to take Mrs. Clinton’s advice and “get real” with each of the campaigns.

The first thing to remember is that if one candidate has more elected delegates, more popular vote and more states won, but party members select the other candidate, they will destroy the Democratic Party. After all, why should rank and file members of any political party stay with a group that overrides their votes and feelings?

There would be no viable explanation for such a move and it would turn off all of those voters who thought they could believe in the Dems to listen to their collective voices.

And smart money says it would lead to a landslide for John McCain.

But beyond all that, these two candidates have similar positions and neither has any real executive experience (despite what Hillary may tell us) so one of the best ways judge these matters is to look at the administration of their campaigns.

And by that measure, the choice is obvious: The Obama campaign has been run much, much better.

It didn’t always seem that way, but after the events of the past few weeks there can be no doubt.

The first real mistake the Clinton campaign made was underestimating their opponent and the general desire for change in the country, and not just a figurehead change, but a real, honest-to-god change of perspective and vision.

In failing to recognize that, the Clinton camp decided to run a fairly traditional Democratic campaign, focusing on a few early contests and then targeting the Big States, all of which she won.

But failing to learn the lessons of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, the Clintons mostly ignored what is commonly referred to as “flyover country,” barely, if ever, visiting states that Democrats do not tend to do well in and, just like Al Gore and John Kerry before her, failing to recognize that you don’t need to win NY and Cali to win.

So, while Hillary was stumping around a few select places, Obama set up organizations in every state and drummed up support in every corner of the country, even in Idaho, where he set attendance records at an arena in Boise. Acknowledging the turnout, he opened with the line “they told me there were no Democrats in Idaho,” at which the 15,000 or so in attendance exploded into applause.

We know whose strategy proved better.