revision99

Can anybody tell me what the heck Hillary Clinton is up to?

I mean, God love her, she ran a helluva campaign, and she would have been a helluva president, and the road to power is a helluva lot smoother for women now than it was a year ago at this time. But everyone in the country knows that it’s over and she didn’t win.

Everyone, that is, but Hillary Clinton.

OK, there is something to be said for perseverance against great odds. The British in World War 2, for example. They should have surrendered. They were totally outmatched, and their great cities were being bombed at will by the Germans. It was only a matter of time. But they held on — against all odds, I might add — and miraculously they were saved. Sure, it took a gigantic effort on the part of their American friends, but it happened because the Brits simply wouldn’t quit, even when it looked as if they were already defeated.

Is this what Senator Clinton thinks will happen to her? That maybe she’ll get that One Big Endorsement that will change everyone’s minds, or that Barack Obama will be caught on video swearing allegiance to Osama bin Laden? I mean, she’s not winning the popular vote, states won, the pledged delegates or the superdelegates. This whole idea that Florida and Michigan should be counted feels way too much like changing the rules after game has started. Her argument about winning in the big states is weak — New York and California, to name two, are solidly Democratic. The fact that she beat other Dems in those state primaries doesn’t mean that they’ll turn Republican in November if she’s not the nominee.

But Clinton is not stupid, and I don’t see her as delusional, so I have to ask: What the heck is she up to? What’s the point of continuing to campaign past the end? Some would say it’s the money. Her campaign is in the hole big time, largely to her, and she wants to keep the donations coming in so she can retire that debt. But I think she’s too honorable to pull a scam like that, getting people to send money for a goal she has already abandoned.

So…

• Is she making a power move for the Vice Presidency?
• Is she trying to retire that huge debt?
• Does she have something horrible on Obama that she’ll pull out around convention time?
• Is she gunning for 2012?
• Fill in your own answer here.

Help me out, people. I’m just trying to understand. I’m not one of those who has already decided that she will drop out of the race, and the only discussion is when she will do it and what she will negotiate for in exchange. I’m not standing by the door glancing at my watch and jingling my keys. I think she’s got something up her sleeve, and I want to know what it is.

And I want to know before she springs it, because I’m just that special kind of guy.

Let’s say he gets elected.

Because of his age, he will inspire the young. Kids are idealistic. You can call it naivete or foolishness, but they tend to have faith until it’s destroyed by a few years of watching cynical “leaders” hustle their sleazy scams for their own aggrandizement at the expense of everyone else. A president who shows them it’s OK to care about each other, the environment, peace and justice on earth should bring thousands — if not millions — of them out to get involved in public life one way or another. This kind of thing could backfire, or it could change the world for the better.

Because of his origin, he will be a source of pride for African Americans. The sense of helplessness and anger they must feel after the past two hundred years should be reduced just a bit by knowing that they have elected a president, a leader for the entire country, and that a whole bunch of white folks went along with them. I personally think the whole concept of “race” based on color, and the idea that some colors are better than others, is bullshit, but that’s easy for me to say, and if the many beautiful people of color want to claim Obama as their own and look up to him and begin to believe that things must be getting better and that they have a fair chance for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that’s all to the good, don’t you think?

Because he is human, he will make mistakes. The mystique surrounding Obama threatens to raise expectations so high that when he does something normal, or supports an unpopular program or says something that sounds condescending, some will be so shocked that they will reflexively attack him — for letting them down. He has been pretty diligent in trying to let us know that this is bound to happen and that he’ll deal with it intelligently when it does, but many of us don’t want to have the gold diluted, and we’re not listening. And let’s also remember that Obama is getting a lot of money from big corporations, and he is being advised by people from those interests, and typically many of those contributors end up in appointed government jobs if their man wins. He owes those people, and it probably will not be possible to deny them everything they want, so he might have to hand out some distasteful favors while in office. Nobody’s perfect.

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“Old Friends, Part 4″ coming soon!

I think tonight is the night Barack Obama won the presidency.

Senator Clinton’s win in Indiana was by the thinnest of margins, while Obama’s win in North Carolina was commanding. He is now ahead in pledged delegates as well as states won. Mrs. Clinton has been trying to say that she has momentum because of her win last month in Pennsylvania, and that she is ahead in the popular vote if we “count all the votes,” meaning those in Florida and Michigan. The latter argument was flimsy and would have been vigorously contested by Obama’s campaign. Clinton might still try to tie things up in the DNC rules committee and credentials committee, but as of tonight, Obama can give her Florida and Michigan, where he wasn’t even on the ballot and where they knew their primaries would not count, and still be ahead in the popular vote.

Mrs. Clinton’s only hope is to convince most of the remaining uncommitted superdelegates that she has a better chance of winning in November than Obama, but that argument will fall on deaf — or at least disinterested — ears.

And in view of her weak showing tonight, her funding will probably dry up, leaving her deeply in debt and at a distinct disadvantage against the Obama money machine.

I have tried to remain neutral in this since my guy John Edwards dropped out, and I would still vote for Clinton if she became the nominee. But now that it’s over I realize I have been pulling for this outcome for quite a while. Obama is a strong candidate, an intelligent man who doesn’t talk down to the electorate (like I would). I have said all along that a Democrat will win the White House this time.

Despite what various Democratic commentators and partisans have been saying, John McCain isn’t really more of the same, but after this disastrous administration, just being a Republican is the kiss of death. McCain would be well-advised not to let it get too dirty, so he can retire with a little dignity.

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Thanks to you Precious Few who are enjoying my story of how my roommate and I saved the world from Richard Nixon. I really can’t tell you how much it means to me.  I took a break from it tonight to watch the election returns, and tomorrow night I have a gig (old guys ROCK!), so I’ll be getting to the next installment on Thursday night, Friday at the latest.

Coming soon: Nixon doesn’t like our whiskey, and makes us buy his brand.

I’m not enjoying the Democratic primary campaign.

I wish Clinton and Obama would just tell us why we should vote for them, rather than harping on why we should not vote for the other guy/gal.

But as you know, Jones’ First Law of Social Interaction (Bullies always win) has a corollary: Negative campaigning works. So now Clinton is giving Obama shit because he said this:

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest,” he said, “the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them… And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

To me, this seems like an obviously true statement. Doesn’t it to you? I mean, take religion for example. Let’s use Christianity, because that’s the one all the candidates have to pander to. It got started among the dirt-poor in the ancient Roman Empire. The early Christians were the conquered “citizens” of Rome who were consigned to having nothing, and doomed to stay that way, while the Emperor had the ancient equivalent of hot tubs and plasma televisions. For the little guy, life was a hardscrabble forty years, followed by a short illness or a fatal accident and then back to dust.

Along comes Jesus with his promise of a kingdom in the afterlife, open to all, free of want and pain. Your lot in this life is less than irrelevant to your chance for eternal happiness in heaven. In fact, the worse things are for you here, the better they’ll be in heaven, as long as you shut up and accept your lot in life. Throw in a little ritual hocus pocus and is it any wonder people would cling to it? Like, what else would helpless, powerless, dispossessed people have to cling to? Their brutal work in the fields and mines and shops of ancient Rome, where they earned just enough to slowly starve themselves and their families to death?

As the wealth in the United States continues to be stolen and given to the rich, as the middle class is slowly turned into the lower class, then the working poor, and finally The Poor, it’s no wonder that some look for solace in their beautiful fantasy of God’s love, redemption and eternal, ecstatic life in heaven. Who’d go along with all those rules and restrictions and requirements if they weren’t desperate for something to give them hope?

I applaud the fact that there is a politician in this race with the brains to see this reality and the balls to speak of it in public. What Obama said to me with those words is “The economic policies of this government are making people desperate, and it’s got to stop. We have to give folks a way to earn a decent living, have some self-respect, educate their children and keep some hope for a dignified old age. Then they won’t have to cling to fantasies, however beautiful.”

I just hope we don’t crucify him for saying it.

The President of the United States seems to be a complete asshole.

I’ve been in a state of humiliation since the “election” of 2000, or at least since I got over the disbelief and rage. I can say from first-hand knowledge that this has been easily the worst seven years the U.S. has endured since the middle of the 20th century. Sorry, I can’t speak first-hand about stuff before the midpoint. The Great Depression was probably a pretty rough time, but at least for most of it there was not an idiot at the top of the government.

Yes, George W. Bush is an idiot. Worse, he is under the control of a cabal of ultra right-wing ideologues who have no clue how to run things, or maybe they just don’t give a shit about justice or morality, as long as they get theirs, which they most assuredly are. Since I live here and people around the world have no reason not to believe that I am OK with his presidency, I am humiliated.

Except every now and then the rage comes out again.

I don’t usually do this, but here’s an entire op-ed from today’s (March 16, 2008) New York Times. I know no one ever follows my links, so I’m putting the whole thing here. It’s short and easy to read, so you should read it, especially if you are one of those who think Bush is a president kind of like other presidents, that he’s good at some things, not so good at others, that he’s essentially an honest man with the best interest of the nation and the people at heart, that he makes sensible decisions that intelligent people might disagree with, but they’re still sensible. Here you go:

Through Bush-Colored Glasses

Published: March 16, 2008

President Bush admitted on Friday that times are tough. So much for the straight talk.

Mr. Bush went on to paint a false picture of the economy. He dismissed virtually every proposal Congress is working on to alleviate the mortgage crisis, sticking to his administration’s inadequate ideas. And despite the rush of serious problems — frozen credit markets, millions of impending mortgage defaults, solvency issues at banks, a plunging dollar — he said that a major source of uncertainty today is whether his tax cuts, scheduled to expire in 2010, would be extended.

This was too far afield of reality to be dismissed as simple cheerleading. It points to the pressing need for a coherent plan to steer through what some economists are now predicting could be a severe downturn. Mr. Bush’s denial of the economic truth underscores the need for Congress to push forward with solutions to the mortgage crisis especially bankruptcy reform to help defaulting homeowners. Lawmakers also must prepare to execute, in case it is needed, a government rescue of people whose homes are now worth less than they borrowed to buy them.

Mr. Bush said he was optimistic because the economy’s foundation is solid as measured by employment, wages, productivity, exports and the federal deficit. He was wrong on every count. On some, he has been wrong for quite a while.

Mr. Bush boasted about 52 consecutive months of job growth during his presidency. What matters is the magnitude of growth, not ticks on a calendar. The economic expansion under Mr. Bush which it is safe to assume is now over produced job growth of 4.2 percent. That is the worst performance over a business cycle since the government started keeping track in 1945.

Mr. Bush also talked approvingly of the recent unemployment rate of 4.8 percent. A low rate is good news when it indicates a robust job market. The unemployment rate ticked down last month because hundreds of thousands of people dropped out of the work force altogether. Worse, long-term unemployment, of six months or more, hit 17.5 percent. We’d expect that in the depths of a recession. It is unprecedented at the onset of one.

Mr. Bush was wrong to say wages are rising. On Friday morning, the day he spoke, the government reported that wages failed to outpace inflation in February, for the fifth straight month. Productivity growth has also weakened markedly in the past two years, a harbinger of a lower overall standard of living for Americans.

Exports have surged of late, but largely on the back of a falling dollar. The weaker dollar makes American exports cheaper, but it also pushes up oil prices. Potentially far more serious, a weakening dollar also reduces the Federal Reserve’s flexibility to steady the economy.

Finally, Mr. Bush’s focus on the size of the federal budget deficit ignores that annual government borrowing comes on top of existing debt. Publicly held federal debt will be up by a stunning 76 percent by the end of his presidency. Paying back the money means less to spend on everything else for a very long time.

The fiscal stimulus passed by Congress, and touted by Mr. Bush on Friday, could juice growth for a quarter or two later this year. But the economy’s fundamental weaknesses indicate that Americans are ill-prepared for hard times. That makes the need for clear-eyed policies all the more urgent. We need them from the president, Congress and the contenders for the White House.

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You can read this for yourself at the Times’ web site. They no longer charge for any of their content. It’s a great paper. They have made some mistakes, but let me know if you know someone who hasn’t. Mainly, they hold their fire until they’ve got the facts. They give you the benefit of the doubt.

There is no more doubt about George W. Bush. He’s either a liar or a boob, or both. I hope there’s something left to govern when his successor is sworn in next January.

If you are a Democrat or a progressive independent voter, or a liberal of any kind, it’s time to ask yourself what that means.

Barack Obama won the Mississippi primary today, and there will be a six week break before the next primary, a big one: Pennsylvania. Please, may Clinton and Obama cool their campaign rhetoric, especially the slurs and smears, for a while. This sniping is really getting to me, and I suspect many other voters feel the same.

The Dems are reinvigorated this season, and passions are running high. We had — what? — eight well-qualified candidates going in to this election. And a Republican party in disarray and obviously clueless as to how to run the country. How could we lose? I don’t think there’s been so much energy on the Democratic side since 1972, when George McGovern cranked up his populist anti-war campaign. All the young people woke up from their love-ins in surprise to find an old fart actually speaking the truth! You had to be there, but trust me: it was thrilling.

The passion looks different this time. I have talked to a lot of voters who are saying if their guy (or gal) doesn’t win the nomination, they are going to stay home on election day in November. Or vote for McCain. They are so powerfully invested in Obama or Clinton that if they don’t get their way, they are going to do something to give us President McCain, which will be sort of like another term of President Bush.

Naturally, no one person can actually accomplish this, and my data is admittedly anecdotal, but come on, people! I’m shocked how often I am hearing this kind of talk, and how vehemently these feelings are expressed, and how incredibly horrible it would be if enough of us carried out these threats and the Democrats failed to retake the White House this year. I don’t want anyone reading this to be offended — I don’t mean this as a personal insult, but I cannot stress enough the importance of getting a forward-thinking President in office AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

It’s the Supreme Court, Stupid!

Think about it. Presidents, congresspeople and senators can be voted out of office if they are doing stuff the voters don’t approve of. The justices are appointed for life. The court is currently teetering on the 5-4 brink of going all the way to Right-Wing World, which could have disastrous effects on reproductive rights, civil rights, freedom from religion and the balance of power in the federal government.

For most of you reading this, understand: The next President will have one, maybe two, maybe even three Supreme Court appointments. The Court can either be rebalanced through the appointment of moderate legal scholars or packed with “strict constructionists” who will always vote with the right-wing religious fundamentalists, and they will be there your whole life.

We stayed home in 2000. We said we didn’t like either candidate. Al Gore just wasn’t exciting enough. Some even said that both parties and both candidates were sides of the same coin, not enough difference to even think about. As a result we now have Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito. Do you really want to take your ball and go home this November, and let McCain get the opportunity to appoint a few young, ultraconservative justices?

This is too important to mess around with. Clinton and Obama are both light years better than McCain. Either of them will be a breath of fresh air after the past eight years. They can’t both win the nomination, and they will not be on the ticket together (get over that). Even if you have come to hate your candidate’s rival, I urge you to bite the bullet and support the eventual nominee.

Please, there is too much at stake to do anything else.

I’m getting tired of this Democratic nominating campaign.

I mean, I was playing my guitar during coverage of this most recent “Super Tuesday,” the Texas/Ohio/Vermont/Rhode Island primaries. I didn’t sit glued to the TV screen as I have in all the earlier Super Tuesdays and Saturdays, eagerly awaiting the incoming results. In fact, I barely paid attention to them. I just picked up the news at the end, when most precinct totals were in and the results were final.

Except nothing’s final yet for the Democrats.

John McCain has already started trashing Senators Clinton and Obama, and at the same time kissing up pandering whoring himself smoothing over relations with the radical right end of his party, and by the time of the Republican convention they’ll be ready for the usual coronation. With no doubt about the outcome, the money from contributors will be flooding into the war chest and the “real” presidential campaign will have been going on for months.

But the Democrats are still slugging it out, beating each other up, giving the Republicans a bunch of excellent sound bites to use in their eventual (dirty) campaign against whoever wins the nomination. They’ve got two big states, Michigan and Florida, who broke the DNC rules and held their primaries too early. The DNC doesn’t want to seat those delegates, who are mostly pledged to Clinton. Clinton is saying it wouldn’t be fair to “disenfranchise” those voters. Obama is saying it wouldn’t be fair to let those states willfully break the rules and not bear the established consequences.

Clinton probably can’t catch Obama in pledged delegates. She’d have to win landslides in all the remaining primaries, which is so not likely. But Obama probably can’t get the required majority of pledged delegates to lock up the nomination before the convention. This is the point where they will go negative. Jones’ Law states “Bullies always win.” A corollary is that negative campaigning is more effective than positive campaigning. In plain English, you get more people to vote for you by calling the other guy names and demeaning his abilities, integrity and experience than by laying out your own thoughtful master plan for a peaceful, just world led by you. Since Clinton is behind, she’ll be the one slinging the mud. Obama might sling some back. Whoever “wins,” the GOP will have a lot of ammunition to use against him/her in the general.

If the delegate totals are close by convention time, I expect Clinton to try lobbying or pressuring the superdelegates to flip the outcome and give her the nomination. If this works, it will piss off the electorate and make a bunch of liberal voters stay home in November. When people don’t vote, Republicans high-five each other.

Why does this have to happen? I thought this election would be a cruise, given the metric buttload of great candidates the Dems had and the horrible, horrible record the Republicans have built in the past decade. (They’re still at it, by the way, this time screwing themselves and their contributors, ha ha.) I still think the Democrats will retake the White House and increase their majorities in Congress, but damn, they are making it hard for themselves.

Now that my guy is out of the race, I’m trying hard to remain neutral about which Democrat gets to be president. Truthfully, I can live with either one. But if the primary campaign gets ugly (uglier, by some lights), I will be disheartened, and so will a lot of other voters.

I won’t go into the litany of damage the Bush Administration has perpetrated — that will take an entire series of long posts. But in order to start cleaning up the mess the nation needs unity, resolve and participation. To this end, somebody in this campaign needs to make the hard choice to drop out and enthusiastically throw support to the winner, so we can right now eliminate the possibility of a third Bush term.

I don’t need any more drama, do you?

Update: I’ve seen this video now, at two different locations, and both versions had the word missing. At the Breitbart site there is a disclaimer, referring to it as a “glitch” and including a printed transcript. Of course, everyone will see the video, and no one will read the transcript.

If anyone is wondering how dirty the upcoming presidential campaign is going to be…

…during a speech last night Michelle Obama said “…for the first time in my adult life I am really proud of my country.” The video of this speech is apparently linked this morning at http://www.breitbart.tv.

OK so far, except the audio portion of the speech has been edited to take out the word “really,” making it seem as if she meant that as an adult she’s never been proud of this country. (It’s bad editing, too. You can actually see her say the word really, and they didn’t even get the whole word removed — I can hear the first part of the word, because somebody was a little slow on the fader and somebody else was too stupid to fix it before they released the recording. As the retired “Best Tape Editor In Los Angeles,” I find this insult-to-injury personally offensive.) In Wisconsin later in the evening, John McCain’s wife Cindy responded obliquely to Ms. Obama’s statement, pointing out that she is, in fact, proud of her country.

I am resisting the urge to laugh at theses jerks, whoever they are, because maybe it’s too fine a point to call this “slimy,” and probably no one will think it means anything except those who have already decided that Barack Obama is not their candidate, but come this Fall, when Fox News is routinely identifying him as “Barack Hussein Obama” and John McCain, in the death throes of his last chance to be President, is desperately slinging whatever mud he can scrape together, we will remember that this is how it started. The neocons have been on the rise for two generations, and in power almost continuously since 1980, and they will not go down easily, and their struggle to maintain position will not be pretty.

That said, I think Ms. Obama should realize that she is now in the glare of national politics and everything she does and says will be taken apart and analyzed and used against the Obama campaign. This is why the candidates need writers. She has access to some pretty good ones, judging from the speeches her husband has been making. She should use them.

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NOTE: My information on this sleazy video comes from The Thom Hartmann Show, on Air America, which I listen to every weekday morning. I’m at work as I write this, and my employer has blocked streaming media on the web, so I can’t see it for myself until I get home this evening, by which time I bet it’s been removed.

Well, OK then.

So much for voting for John Edwards in the California primary next week. I don’t hold it against him that he dropped out abruptly the other day. If it was depressing for me — and it was — it must have been heartbreaking for him, to work so hard for so long, to hang his passions out there in public, to accept money and support from those who believed in him and in his ideas, only to be relegated to oblivion by the teevee and steamrolled by the big corporate-sponsored campaigns and not even place in the state where he was born (South Carolina).

It was a campaign for president, after all, and he had to stay up, stay positive, not admit doubt, proclaim his determination to go on no matter what. But in terms of putting a Democrat in the White House, he did the right thing in pulling out before February 5. His chance of winning had been taken away. By staying in the race he would have divided the Party three ways at a time when unity should be a paramount consideration. I regret that I won’t be able to vote for him next Tuesday. Neither of the remaining candidates were my first choice, but both of them have rolled up a lot of Edwards’ ideas into their platforms (thanks, John!), and so I’ll be glad to make either of them President in November, and the sooner we choose one and get behind him/her, the more time we’ll have to work for victory in the general election.

I didn’t get to hear the two-person Democratic debate last night, because I was working. But on the drive home I heard a rerun on the radio of the Republican debate from the night before, and it was horrifyingly idiotic. McCain and Romney argued for at least twenty minutes about whether or not Romney had ever favored a timetable for withdrawal of troops from Iraq. There was a specific interview that he (Romney) had done with ABC-TV last April, in which he apparently said that the governments of Iraq and the U.S. should get together in secret and set benchmarks and timetables to control policy over there. McCain argued that “timetables” was the buzzword of the day, and if you so much as spoke the word it meant you were trying to “set a surrender date.” Romney explained himself seven or eight times in a row in ever more vociferous tones, while McCain just kept implacably repeating his accusation. While they went on and on about this bit of semantics, two retarded Iraqi women had remote control bombs strapped to their bodies and were sent into two Baghdad markets, where they blew up, killing 73 people and wounding over 150.

And these guys want to be president? Are we really so stupid as a nation that we will even consider a couple of assholes who are arguing about who will be more pigheaded and violent in international affairs? I’ve been around a long time, and I know that just being a clueless dumbass doesn’t guarantee that you’ll lose an election. A look at the current occupant of the White House should be enough to verify that.

Pick somebody and go vote in the primary (whenever that is in your state).  I no longer have a horse in that race. I’ll fall in line with the last Democrat standing and I’m still predicting that whichever Democrat is nominated will win the election in November. After listening to McCain and Romney bickering about nothing while human beings were being blasted to shreds in this stupid, useless, illegal “war,” I hope to God I’m right.

The Democratic candidates for President have been forced out of the race roughly in the inverse to how good they would have been at the job and how different from the mainstream were their messages.

Richardson, Dodd, Biden and Kucinich represented a combination of experience, competence and new ideas. Any of them would have been a good president, maybe a great one, and certainly in that mix one could find ideas and programs that diverged far from the business-as-usual that Americans have had to accept in recent decades. So the corporate media ignored them or made fun of them, and we failed to support them, and they are gone.

Now John Edwards is leaving the race. His underfunded, under-publicized campaign truly forced the leaders at least to give lip service to his progressive ideas. There was a moment when poverty mattered to the big campaigns, when universal health care had to be talked about, when withdrawal of troops from Iraq was a viable notion. John Edwards sustained that moment until this morning, but it’s over now.

I hope Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama remember the moment. I hope Edwards’ campaign continues to affect the direction of the nation. But I don’t hope much. Mostly, I now resign myself to another presidential election in which I pick the Democrat over the Republican, because those are my only choices and because I know the Right is not my direction. I’m a little disappointed.

Smarter people than I will analyze the Edwards’ campaign for the next 12 hours or so, before it passes into political insignificance. You can get the pundit scoop from MSNBC or wherever. As for me, I’m left wondering who on the national stage speaks now for the poor, the hungry, the sick, the oppressed and the homeless.

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PS: The latest Rasmussen Poll (today, January 30) shows that in a national election, John McCain would beat Hillary Clinton by eight percentage points, 48% to 40%. McCain comes out ahead of Barack Obama by six points, 47% to 41%. Meanwhile, throughout the past year Edwards led all Republican candidates by greater margins than either of the two “top tier” Democrats. So, one less problem for the Republicans to worry about, eh?

UPDATE, 5:00 pm: Ralph Nader is thinking of running for president. That should seal the coffin.