MoveOn's Obama Ad

Will run in Ohio, Wisconsin and Colorado. The progressive activist organization, formed to defend Clinton during the Lewinsky years, and honed on the Dean campaign, held a contest. I watched all 10 finalists, and agree this was one of the best.

Liddy Dole

is in trouble in North Carolina. Forgot she was still around, didn't you?

Women's Voices Women Vote

Still fucking up elections and confusing — female! — voters in primary states.
What's left to say? They do it, they claim they didn't mean to, and they do it again.
Twelve states so far.
Oh, and their Clinton ties are pretty much documented at this point.

Oh, Death

Nuala O'Faolain (Noola O FWAY lawn). Her last interview. One woman's end of life thoughts. She's frail, fragile, absolutely honest whether you want to hear it or not.
I couldn't help wanting to hear it.

No Treats At The End

A friend sends news that Nuala O’Faolain has died. At 68. Of lung cancer, Julimac!
I first heard her in an extended radio interview, probably on Fresh Air, after her memoir Are You Somebody? came out and her telling of her childhood life in Ireland was so compelling that I went out and bought it.
But as it turns out, the novel My Dream of You was much better.
Here's her summation of her lingering death from the last line in the Times obit:

“The world said to me, ‘That’s enough of you now, and what’s more, we’re not going to give you any little treats at the end.’ ”

Note To Readers

UPDATE II: It's erratic.
UPATE:Okay, all better now.


Blogger is funky this morning. I ran across a similar problem on Dave Postman's Seattle Times blog yesterday, but I don't think he's on blogger so it's probably not related.
Anyway, some of the photos are not publishing and help is inaccessible, probably because everybody and his brother is experiencing the same thing and overwhelming them.

Angelique? (trying to publish here as an experiment).

Awesome

is the first word I would ban from the language, except maybe for church. And liaison as a verb. Task as a verb. I'll think of more in about 20 minutes as I'm driving to the library.
In the meantime, last year's spontaneous crowd amusement at the Preakness. They throw beer at them.

Myanmar

NPR is not identifying its correspondent there "for security reasons."

Book Rec

I haven't read it, but it comes out in paperback next week and I'm going to read it. Never mind that Kate Christensen is only the fifth woman to win the Penn Faulker award, NPR's excuse for interviewing her and pushing the book.
What I liked was that it's about "love and sex and revenge among 70 year old women."
The Great Man. Look for it.
There's an excerpt from the book at the link, too.

Weekend Getaway

Not for the squeamish (heights!) H/t Andrew Sullivan. Six minutes.

Angelique

It's a tulip, but I really love that I can tweak the exposure and crop the original and it looks like an abstract painting. Click on it and you'll get a screenful of it.

Catholic Voters

One of every four voters is Catholic. I did not know this.

In a recent survey of 19 states that have held a presidential primary this year, 63% of Catholics identified themselves as Democrats, compared with 37% for Republicans, a sharp increase from 2005 when 42% of Catholics identified themselves as Democrats. One of every four voters in the U.S. is Catholic.

More here.
h/t Andrew Sullivan

South Dakota Deserves Its Day in the Sun

Bob Somerby is probably the best all-round media critic I know of who's actually readable, even though his blog is worse looking than Drudge.
He seems to like Democrats more than the other guys, but he's an equal opportunity critic when it comes to newspaper writing. Also, pretty inside baseball a lot of the time.
And I've never understood how a stand-up comic became a serious, albeit witty, media critic.
Last time I looked, he was slamming Gail Collins for making fun of small towns in North Carolina. Or was it Indiana? Or Pennsylvania.
But making fun is what Collins is supposed to do. She's not exactly hilarious, just satisfyingly wry.

South Dakota wants its turn. It wants to have Chelsea visit its community colleges and refuse to answer questions about Monica Lewinsky. It wants to have Bill demonstrate his humility by visiting Badger and Peever and Ferney and Tea while Hillary and Barack show up for a state party fund-raiser that would, for the first time ever, actually raise some funds. “Montana had a huge dinner a while back, and there were 6,500 people for an event that usually got 400,” said Hauffe wistfully. “It just hasn’t rained in South Dakota.”

There’s no reason this can’t go on for a while longer. Hillary — who’s taken to mentioning her Web site address as often as the star of an infomercial — seems prepared, if necessary, to pay with her own money for the privilege of making 10 speeches a day, sleeping four hours a night and answering the same questions over and over again. Barack looks so tired that he seems ready to topple, but if you want to be the most powerful elected official on the planet, you ought to be able to outlast a 60-year-old woman.

Quote O' Teh Week

I've been sitting on this one. It was so obviously funny but insidey.
But I can't resist it.
From Paul Krugman's blog.

The great economist Robert Solow once declared, “Everything reminds Milton Friedman of the money supply. Everything reminds me of sex, but I try to keep it out of my papers.”

Hillaration

Am I turning into a Hillary hater? Nah, I reserve hate for things like soggy potato chips.
Oh, sorry about the BP ad. Eyeballs.

Is It Really About the Money?

A really good diary on Daily Kos cites a Slate article ("real journalism," not blogging) that details the dire prospects for Hillary getting back the $11.4 million she loaned her campaign unless she does, indeed, take it to the convention.
It's not like they can't afford it or anything, but money is money.
I really don't like the way this is looking.

Losing His Bearings

is what Barack Obama said regarding McCain's recent statement that Hamas wants Obama to win.
Losing His Bearings. Gotta ring to it.
Campaign theme, perhaps? Bring on the general!

Sex And The City: The Movie

Doesn't open until May 30, but Huffpo summarizes two reviews that say it's great.
From FOX:

It's going to be a very, very big hit.

I saw it on Saturday night at a private screen

ing. Women wept, cheered. It's the Neiman Marcus catalog on steroids.

The four female stars -- not to mention Chris Noth as Mr. Big, David Eigenberg as Steve and Evan Handler as Harry -- are the most appealing ensemble of the year.

It is not politically correct to say so to some of my friends, but I do miss the girls.

Aw, Jeez, Hillary!

from Huffpo, which was written before Clinton dismissed Michigan's proposal to split delegates 69 for her and 59 for him. If you haven't been paying attention, the Dems are in a kind of limbo over the votes in Florida and Michigan because party rules prohibit seating their delegates after they defied the rules and held early primaries.
Is Hillary going all the way to the convention after all? I mean, this is blood feud stuff.

On a day when it appears that the Michigan controversy may be resolved in a way that's fair to all parties -- but not in a way that gives Hillary Clinton all that state's delegates and Barack Obama none, as her campaign insists -- Clinton has just upped the ante by issuing what seems a hastily penned open letter to Obama, pretending that he is the sole obstacle to a fair resolution of the Michigan and Florida brouhaha and that she has always supported revotes (neither of which is accurate).

Headline O' Teh Day

Robert Kagan Protests: Neocons are NOT Vampires and Werewolves!

Subhed: Neocon Thursday!

I love Steve Clemons. He's usually too wonkish to cite, but not today.

Don't know what to label this.
Corruption?
Open to suggestions.

Erm, About Rumsfeld

and those network "military analysts."
Who, said "Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, it does."
Well, me, for one.
TPM's got some frightening stuff up now, including audio of them worshipping at his feet.

10 Best Mothers

Esquire again. Guess I should subscribe. But I was gonna take Vanity Fair! Oh, well.

9. Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw

As any college student will tell you, sometimes the nicest thing parents can do is provide financial support until their child discovers what he or she wants to do. Of course, this is taken to an extreme when the child in question, like George Bernard Shaw, doesn’t know what he wants to do until he’s almost 40. Born in 1856, Shaw didn’t support himself as a writer until he began working as a theater critic in 1895 (and didn’t have his first real literary success until he was 41, with the play The Devil’s Disciple). Since Dad was an alcoholic with an inoperable squint -- society did not look kindly upon squinters in this era -- there was only one person to turn to: Mom. Her allowance/free housing kept him going until he established himself as one of the major writers of the twentieth century, winning a Nobel Prize for Literature (and an Oscar for the My Fair Lady-inspiring Pygmalion). He repaid her by tirelessly defending women’s rights. (Luckily, she was dead before she could witness his less-rousing senile final years, when he championed Joseph Stalin.)

When You Are Old

Okay, I'm still reading the Esquire thingie (below) and I owe it big time today. (Weeps)

WHEN YOU ARE OLD

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

--William Butler Yeats

Gotta Move My Back

Huh?
When nobody has your back, you gotta move your back.

Cool advice from Esquire's 75 Things Every Man Should Be Able to Do.
Most of 'em good for me, too.
Liveblogging this:
Well, not scoring a baseball game, but still.
Not throw a punch, either. Cooking I got. Not outdoor grilling, though. Heh.
Nobody needs to know how to chop down a tree. That's what chainsaws are for. I missed the memo on escape paths though.
Square footage, check.
Bow ties? No! No.

42. Talk to a dog so it will hear.

Go ahead, use baby talk.

No more liveblogging. They're all good, even the ones you don't need.

Kudos, Esquire, especially the one about women's orgasms.

Oh, Death

I loved that song by Ralph Stanley in Oh, Brother Where Art Thou.
Still.

No psychological insight, no brilliant self-awareness, can alleviate the dark realities of life, one of which is that it is finite. But just labeling it, understanding what is happening, can refocus you and put you back on a positive path.

Workin' on that.

Fat, Fat and More Fat

Turns out, some kinds may be good for you. Yeah, I'm lookin' at you, muffin top.

Lies

and the Lying Liars That Tell Them Dept.
Speaking of neocons, Glenn Greenwald's post today really isn't about them, although it starts out that way.
It's about the re-emerging neocon argument, abetted by the Israeli government, for an attack on Iran. Is that why Hillary used the obliterate word only days ago?
When I started this obsessive reading of blogs, it was largely because Sy Hersch and Scott Ritter and others had convinced me Cheney really was planning an attack on Iran. I found out who AIPAC was.
But by the time Joe Biden said Bush would face impeachment if he did it, I sort of felt like everybody was backing off a bit.
Now it rears its ugly head again.
From Glenn:

Bush has less than eight months left to fulfill his history-mandated mission "to prevent another holocaust" by attacking Iran, or else "be in the historical dock if he allows Iran to get the bomb." They're as transparent as they are dishonest and bloodthirsty.

Dark Night of the Soul

Wow, TPM is right. The amazing photos of the erupting Chilean volcano are worth noting. Go look. Scary beautiful.

27 Ugly Dresses

THIS!



NO, THIS!

More here.
My all-time favorite dress was an Army green linen sheath (it was the 60s), sleeveless with narrow red or orange piping. Very cool, very designer, bought on sale. I wore it for about a minute because I weighed 108 lbs. for about that long. I was 17. Alas, there is no photographic evidence.
The all-time worst was a calf-length white formal with Kelly green trim and a very pouffy skirt. Alas, there is photographic evidence, but I'm not posting it. Maybe some other time. I was 17.
And yours?

Toni Morrison

has always struck me as an admirably no-nonsense woman.



I'll never forget her interview with Terri Gross on NPR's Fresh Air. Gross asked one of those questions that admirers seem to consider evidence of her superior interviewing skills.
"Why don't you have any white characters in your books," she said. (Would she have asked Phillip Roth or John Updike why they don't have any black characters? Heh.)
"Because white people don't interest me," said Morrison, coldly.
I think that's when Gross's stammer really kicked in. The conversation remained uncomfortable, and when Gross thanked Morrison at the end, the real kicker came.
Instead of "it was a pleasure" or "why, thank YOU" as most of them say, Morrison replied, "you're welcome." I laughed out loud.
And she's a wonderful writer. My favorite book of hers still is The Bluest Eye, because its candor just stunned me. And I always advise people who are listening to audio books to get her own version of Jazz, it's like the music itself, her clear intention.
There's a little snippet of a Q&A with her in Time this week.
Money quote:
Do you regret referring to Bill Clinton as the first black President? —Justin Dews, Cambridge, Mass.
People misunderstood that phrase. I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race.

Start the General Election Campaign Now

Personally, I don't see how McCain can win. There's just so much ammunition.

A Conservative Comic

P.J. O'Rourke, who isn't really a comic the same way Jon Stewart isn't really a newsman, is much funnier than Dennis Miller, the only other conservative comic I know of.
O'Rourke, who makes a living writing and occasionally commenting from the right, has published a 2008 commencement address.
Sometimes, he lies.
As in:

"In a free society, with the rule of law and property rights, no one loses when someone else gets rich."

But you know he's just joking.
And sometimes, he's hilarious. As in:

All politics stink. Even democracy stinks. Imagine if our clothes were selected by the majority of shoppers, which would be teenage girls. I'd be standing here with my bellybutton exposed. Imagine deciding the dinner menu by family secret ballot. I've got three kids and three dogs in my family. We'd be eating Froot Loops and rotten meat.

That Mark Penn Thing

Digression:
Liberal bloggers hate Mark Penn. When I first started paying obsessive attention to the presidential campaign and American politics in general about a year ago, I didn't know who he was except he was some guy associated with the Clintons.
I mean, really, what person with a job and a family and a real life has time to keep track of all this stuff? Like most people, I had never heard of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz or Douglas Feith either before the Iraq War, which produced a rash of publicity for the neocons.
Which is just to say that there are plenty of rich and powerful people we've never heard of even if we did read a story in Time magazine ten years ago that mentioned some of them.
End of digression:
A TPM writer thinks it's notable that an anecdotal story emerging in Time's story about the Clinton campaign's mistakes relates a meeting at which Penn apparently believed that a Hillary win in California would net her all 370 delegates from that state. The campaign's chief strategist didn't know that the Democrats do not have a winner-takes-all system, like the Republicans. Instead, delegates are designated in a proportional manner according to the votes for each primary candidate.
It is rather appalling, although Hillary herself is falling back on the argument that she'd be the nominee today if the Democrats did it like the Republicans, evidence some say that she's really a closet Republican.
This anecdote is supposed to show that the Clinton campaign, like the Bush pattern, valued loyalty over competence.
As one commenter put it, "I think this is testament to the idea that just because someone is a ruthless bastard doesn't meen they are a SMART ruthless bastard."
Karl Rove, anyone?
Rove was once believed to be the smartest of all. Mark Halperin (I call him Mr. Smirky), former political director at ABC News and now with Time, actually wrote a whole book about how the Democrats should follow Rovian tactics to win and if they didn't, they'd lose.
That was before the 2006 election, I think, and I suspect the book didn't sell too well afterwards.

Hillary's In Until...

Here, she's talking about the DNC meeting May 31.
Obama campaign says it'll cross the magic halfway mark on pledged delegates May 20. I figure they'll just let it go to the DNC, piling up superdels all along the way.
Larry O'Donnell had something this morning that said by June 15. Somebody else had an unnamed Clinton staffer saying they lost it in February.
Some say she's got to keep going to raise money to pay off campaign debt. As of today, she's loaned the campaign $11-plus mil.

On To The General Election

Love, Sweet Love

The Math: Post-Tuesday

There are six state primaries left with 217 delegates at stake.
And there are 270 uncommitted superdelegates.
Total, 487.
Total needed: 2024.5 (.5, heh)
Obama needs: 184.5 (.5, heh)
Clinton needs: 341

You see, she could win every delegate in every state and still not make the math work.
But, of course, they'll split each state. In some, West Virginia, Kentucky, she'll get more. In others, Oregon, whatever, he will.
So it comes down to the superdels, just like everyone has been saying from almost the beginning.
Obama's campaign thinks he'll be the nominee shortly after May 20, two weeks from yesterday.

Thomas Edsall has a good story on Huffpo today.
More math:

Conversely, the significance of Clinton's victory in Indiana was undermined by indications that a statistically significant number of Republicans, perhaps as many as 7 percent of all the votes cast, were following the suggestion of conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh to cast ballots for her in the Democratic primary.

The Other Candidate

Oh, yeah, John McCain had two primary contests tonight. He won 78 percent of the Republican vote in Indiana and 74 percent in North Carolina. Ron Paul, who hasn't yet dropped out, got 7 percent in each. The rest went to Romney, Huckabee and "no preference."
There's a lesson here, but I'm too tired to think about it.

It's Over

Hillary barely squeezes by with a 2 percent ( I meant 2 point lead) lead in Indiana. Obama takes N.C. by 14.
"There's a Democratic nominee now," comments ... wait for it...wait for it. Karl Rove.

As for the delayed count in Lake County, which took Hillary down another two points, not likely there was any funny business. The Republicans would have had to collude, and that's really unlikely.

Hmm, Indeed

From Josh Marshall at TPM.

Hmmm

NBC just reported that Hillary Clinton is holding no public events tomorrow. We'd earlier reported that she'd cancelled her morning show appearances. But that's not that surprising. There's not a lot good to talk about. But canceling all public appearances, if that's what they're saying, is a different story.

Hillz!

Okay, I guess they're counting Lake County. The spread is now 2 points, 51 Clinton, 49 Obama, with 91 percent of the vote in.
And she says, "Well, tonight we come from behind," Clinton said in an otherwise subdued speech. "We've broken the tie, and thanks to you, it's full speed on to the White House."
What tie? Where? States won, delegates won, popular vote? Not any of those.
Was there a tie in Indiana? Maybe there was in some polls, some time.
On to the White House. Yeah, right, as a guest.

Oops, Kos is skeptical of the Gary results.

The question is whether this was legit. The way the vote is being released makes this stink to high hell.

If this was legit, that's some serious machine action at work. If it's not legit, that's some serious machine action at work.

Flowers

Gold-edged primroses

Their origins are one of botany's enduring mysteries. Darwin called the mystery "abominable."
Heh. Quote tonight from Nova's "First Flower," while awaiting the final primary results.
Come on Lake County.

Yawn, Numbers

Half hour to go before the Lake County, Ind. results come in. That's Gary, baby, Barack country. Some pro-Obama types think he could cut the gap to 2 points.
Why so late? They're counting 11,000 absentees. Where I come from, they count late absentees over the next week. Jeesh.

As of 8:40 p.m. CDT, about half of 11,370 absentee and early voting ballots had been counted, said Michelle Fajman, the county’s elections supervisor. By contrast, in the 2000 presidential primary, 2,822 early and absentee votes were cast in Lake County. In the 2004 primary, 4,053 early and absentee votes were cast.

“This has far and away surpassed any primary we’ve ever had. We don’t see these kinds of numbers until a general election,” Fajman said.

In the meantime, his campaign thinks it will be all over in two weeks on May 20, when he sweeps Oregon and Hillary takes Kentucky. But the Oregon win puts him over the 50 percent mark of pledged delegates, able to make a case to the Supers that it's time to step up.
As of tonight's results (so far), Obama gets 42 delegates, Hillary gets 35. His gain makes up for her win in Pennsylvania.

Waiting It Out

Waiting for more N.C. results and watching the gap in Indiana fall from 12 points to 4 as more and more of the heavily Obama precincts are counted.


So, here's a quote of the day:

Political analyst Stuart Rothenberg on the News Hour on PBS a few minutes ago.
"At the end of the day, Jeremiah Wright hurt Hillary Clinton." Because the whole controversy should have helped her and hurt him more, and it didn't.

Here's another, from Obama in N.C.
(not direct quote) Somebody (he means Hillary) said North Carolina would be a game changer, but it turns out the only game that's going to be changed is the game in Washington (D.C.).

Should be noted here that Hillary, Bill and even Chelsea spent a lot of time in N.C. A lot of time, Bill was doing 8 and 9 events a day. Somebody, probably that dependable and reprehensible pollster Mark Penn, must have said there was a way to turn the flood. They were wrong. They've been wrong all along. Remind you of anyone?

Be Still My Heart

Updated: Uh, polls in Indiana close at 4 p.m. PST, N.C. 4:30. I'm going to the store. I can't stand this.

Indiana polls close in an hour, N.C. a half hour later. Ignore the exit polls.
And Josh Marshall at TPM picks up on a little noticed trend. The more ridiculous Hillary gets, the better she seems to do.


This guy gets it best:

The day begins with the Clinton campaign “leaking” something to the Drudge Report to set expectations for the day. That then gets repeated on political blogs and cable news, where Clinton surrogate Terry McAuliffe elaborates. Today’s “expectation”: That the Clinton campaign expects a “15 point” defeat in North Carolina. Clinton’s yapping puppies in the news media repeat the manufactured expectation all day long, in which the bar is supposedly now that if Clinton comes within 15 points in that state that she has somehow “won” with a 14 point (or 6 point) defeat.

Pentagon Propaganda Program

that placed pre-programmed ex-military as "advisors" to the news media for the Iraq War was busted by the New York Times two weeks ago.
Response so far from the outed networks. Bupkis.
The program is illegal and was suspended by the Pentagon following the news story. I personally believe the networks haven't covered the story because they are afraid they may be legally liable as well.
John Kerry wants an investigation and he needs your signature on a letter.

It Is About Rape

so you might not want to read reporter Joanna Connors' first-person series in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. And it's long.
But it is exactly what I am convinced journalism must be to remain relevant in the age of the internet.
It explains the world to people in a way that nothing save long-form can do.
At least read the first of the five. I think you might just keep on with it, as I did despite my first instinct to drop it because I had no time.

White Knuckle Primary Day

I actually declared a temporary hiatus following the Pennsylvania primary, thinking I just couldn't take it anymore. But I couldn't stay away even a week.

A few days ago, Hillary said today's primaries in North Carolina and Indiana could be game-changing, suggesting her campaign knew something, something good, no one else did from their own internal polling.
Most polls have consistently shown the race tightening in N.C., with Obama winning by as little as 5 points, while Clinton has consistently led in Indiana by less than 10 points. Such an outcome changes nothing and the race goes on to June 3, the day of the last primary.
Then this morning, the Zogby two-day tracking poll has Obama up by 15 points in N.C. and with half a chance at taking Indiana by a slim margin, or losing by a slim margin.
Such an outcome is expected to bring the superdelegates out of the woodwork for Obama and possibly even convince Clinton to throw it in before the next primaries. Even though she's supposed to win big in both West Virginia and Kentucky, it's just not going to be enough.
In fact, everyone who does the numbers including "independent analysts" say it's already not enough.
(Obama's up by 12 points in upcoming Oregon, can't remember who's got the edge in the other Western state. Can't even remember whether it's Montana or Wyoming. Wyoming, I think.)

Keith Olberman is usually a little too much for me even though he's on my side, but this bit is kinda funny.

Oprah, Spielberg, Gates: Where They Live

And more. C'mon. Forbes knows you wanna see them.

No, Bill and Hill didn't make the cut. We're talking Billionaires here.

Loving Couple

Mildred Loving died today at age 68. Her husband Richard died in 1975 following a car accident.
Their case Loving v. Virginia established in 1967 the right of people of different races to marry.


Bettman/Corbis

Gas Tax Holiday

You know it's a crock, right. Tell 'em.

Inside Passage To Alaska

There's more than the cruise ship option, according to Ross Anderson at Crosscut. Mmmm, sounds kind of cool.

For the boatless, the most popular option is the Alaska ferry, the Columbia, which (thanks to Alaska taxpayers) remains one of the great cruising bargains. It's essentially a small cruise ship, which leaves Bellingham at 6 p.m. each Friday, year round, steaming the Passage to Southeast Alaska. The one-way passenger fare is $240 to Ketchikan, which takes two full days; $325 to Juneau or Sitka, which is another full day. Kids 6-11 sail for half price, under six for free. (The vehicle fare is much stiffer — $740 to Juneau. But what would you do with a car up there, anyway?)

The hitch, of course, is accommodations. There are a few cabins, but they're pricey and they're usually booked months in advance. So most travelers set up backpacking tents and inflatable mattresses on the stern deck. I've always done it that way; the last time, I counted 80 tents, lashed to each other to keep them from blowing away in the slipstream.

There is a decent restaurant, a bar and a coffee shop on board. But no casino, no dancing girls. Entertainment is provided by the scenery, a good book, or the Alaskan in the next seat.

Then there is the BC ferry, a similar ship that runs between Port Hardy at the northern tip of Vancouver Island, and Prince Rupert, near the Alaska border. This route takes in some of the most spectacular stretches of the Inside Passage, with the added advantage of being able to transfer to other boats for travel into the BC fjords.

Tough On Crime

Funny, I don't hear any candidate talking about crime this election season.
The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any developed country, maybe even in the world, I'm not sure about that last part.
Anyway, the cost of locking up non-violent drug offenders started catching up with the states a few years ago. Even Republican legislators began to rethink the knee-jerk policies.
Now, it's come to this.

Between 1987 and last year, states increased their higher education spending by 21 percent, in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to the Pew Center on the States. During the same period, spending on corrections jumped by 127 percent.

In the Northeastern states, according to the Pew report, prison spending over the past 20 years has risen 61 percent, while higher education spending has declined by 5.5 percent.

No Comment

It's Just Wrong

that...

1. The pump tube in every body lotion is (purposely?) designed to reach only to the top of the last 1 1/2 inches of liquid, thereby requiring you to replace the product at least two months early. So the "bonus" ounces were no such thing, but just a waste product. Oh, sure, you can unscrew the top every time and tip the bottle to get a few drops out, smacking the bottom. But where do you put the gunky top in the meantime? So you fish a piece of plastic or paper out of the waste basket and gingerly set it on that. This will last a day or two, then you'll replace it rather than deal with the hassle. Exactly! "They" count on this.

2. The lace panels on your panties are placed exactly where your thumbs just naturally go to pull them on. This guarantees that your thumbs will tear the lace, meaning that eventually the panties will have to be replaced long before it would otherwise be necessary. Exactly! "They" count on this.

3. Aging women begin to grow whiskers at the same time they begin losing their near sight. They can't even see them with their glasses on, which is why they mostly give up on mascara. (Hillary has an artiste to do it for her.) The only way to detect these black, coarse, vile straggles is to stroke for them, feel the stump and then wander, hands shaking across the chin, trying to capture the bugger with the tweezers.
The chin stroking is not a sign of wise old age, it is a nervous habit.
Don't tweeze, you say? Shave.
Now, I love the tiny little lady razors as much as anyone, but the thing is, the buggers grow back.
Like, right away. Arrgh.

4. — 10. Your choice

Horses!

Lorenzo: the Flying French Man

h/t Andrew Sullivan

Lorenzo : the Flying French Man...
by alatebo

More horse stuff from alatebo in France.

Sufei Saturday

Bad Boys of Beijing. Sorry, I'm addicted.

What Happened? Lincoln Chaffee's Take

It started with the tax cuts, according to former Sen. Lincoln Chaffee, who switched parties to become a Democrat, lost re-election in Rhode Island, and has a new book out.
He supports Barack Obama.
Compelling reading, disturbing insight, fairly short.

To me, the tax cut was a stalking horse. The Cheney-Bush strategy behind the cut was to set the tone—to preempt the Congress not just on taxes but on every issue. It would tame any future resistance to a radical agenda by serving up this politically irresistible prize: lawmakers could go home and say they had voted to cut taxes. The White House was out to neuter Congress, and the minute Congress rolled over for the cuts, it set the stage for one-branch rule in America and all the consequences we live with today. The two aggressive personalities at the top of the executive branch had tested the Congress and had found it lacking. A coequal branch of government? In their wisdom, the Founders had given us power to respond when events demand that we check and balance an unwise president. I looked around in the Senate and saw few who had the courage to wield that vital power.

Also, Arcana Saturday

University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
From the Digital Scriptorum at Columbia University. Surf through highlights here.

Frogs 'N Toads Saturday

Why not? Look and listen.



P.S. Please congratulate me. This is the first time I have managed to embed an audio clip. It's actually quite simple, but it took awhile to find the simple instructions.

Doin' The Math

I don't do it, Josh Marshall at TPM does. Hillary and Barack don't have time to go after McCain, so others are picking up the slack.

I'd also forgotten that back in September, when President Bush first rolled out the Korea model of the permanent occupation of Iraq which Sen. McCain (R) has now embraced as his platform, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office did a study of what a 50 year 'Korea model' presence in Iraq would cost.

The study was done with highly conservative estimates, figuring a much smaller contingent of troops, and basically all the best case scenario numbers, including everything being basically chill over there like McCain says it'll be.

They came up with an additional $2 trillion over 50 years.

Now, an interesting point of comparison is the projected shortfall in the Social Security budget, which is on the contrary tabulated on highly pessimistic assumption. That number over 75 years is projected at $4.7 trillion.

Now I hasten to add, again, that the Iraq numbers are highly optimistic and the Social Security ones highly pessimistic. If we do a simple back of the envelope calculation we get the 75 year cost of Iraq would be $3 trillion.

And remember that the Social Security number is the one that is supposed make the country curl up, collapsed in upon itself and supernova.

Hillary, Racism, Sexism, Feminism

A little analysis from Betsy Reed, executive editor at The Nation.
She hits the high points, even though I have to say that from early on, I still remember Jesse Jackson, Jr.'s misogynistic sarcasm toward Hillary (note we haven't heard a word from him since, though) and some Hillary surrogate's statement that Obama supporters just wanted to have a black best friend.
Anyway:

"More than any single thing, that moment with Bill Clinton in South Carolina represents the rupture that was coming," says Harris-Lacewell. The moment occurred in late January, when the former President compared Obama's landslide win, in which he received a major boost from African-American voters, to Jesse Jackson's victories there in 1984 and 1988. Because the former President offered the comparison unprompted, in response to a question that had nothing to do with Jackson or race, the statement was widely read as chalking up Obama's win to his blackness alone and thus attempting to marginalize him as a doomed minority candidate with limited appeal. Obama was now "the black candidate," in the words of one Clinton strategist quoted by the AP.

Women's Voices Women Vote Fri. Update

Diarist at Daily Kos has the latest on the voter suppression, Clinton ties story from NPR.
Short, worth a read.
Most interesting to me was the sidebar story from a reporter from the Center for Investigative Journalism looking at the conflict-of-interest in members of the board like Maggie Williams, Hillary's new campaign manager, getting contracts with the group.
And then there's the executive director's husband, whose firm got $700,000.
Just bad. Just stink.
* Women's Voices Women Vote Update

* Women's Voices Women Vote NOT!

Fainting Goats

I've seen this about three times but in case you haven't. It was on the mommapostcards site, so in case your momma didn't share, here it is.

Mother's Day Is May 11

Wonder what I'll get. Maybe another not trip to the art museum. Or maybe not the zoo.
Anyway, postcardsfromyomomma is going to be a book.
Fun read.

McCain On Iraq

There are two ads up and running with the 100 years quote and according to one follow-up poll, they're having an effect. I've suggested giving a few bucks to the Democratic National Committee and MoveOn.org for their efforts to counter McCain while his prospective Democratic opponent, whoever that may be, is still in the primary battle.
In the meantime, both the Republican National Committee and McCain himself have complained that the ads are misleading. They're not. There's no need to be so foolish as to accuse McCain of advocating "war" or "fighting" in Iraq. His own words resonate, as videos down further on this page show.
But I wanted to add this:

McCain wants to stay in Iraq until no more Americans are getting killed, no matter how long it takes and how many Americans get killed achieving that goal—that is, the goal of not getting any more Americans killed. And once that goal is achieved, we'll stay.

from Rick Hertzberg of the New Yorker in January. He was there, he heard it all.
Hat tip Josh Marshall at TPM for reminding us all again.

An Honor

One of the things on my to-do list is to get to the down-and-dirty game of maximizing hits for my blog. But so far, I've just procrastinated.
I have learned, however, that it's good to be cited by other blogs. I don't know if it's happened before, but here's one.
Just cool, that's all. I think all she did was plug in WVWV to Google blogs and find me. Still.

FISA As Of Today

Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com has bulldogged the telecom immunity issue from the beginning, along with Firedoglake.com and McJoan at Daily Kos.
Today, he picks up the behind-the-scenes games going on in the House to get a bill despite the obvious disinterest of the people and the stalwart performance of many of the Blue Dogs whose re-election is threatened by Republicans in swing districts.
Money quote:

(Steny)Hoyer's motives, then, appear to be two-pronged: (1) he and the House Democratic leadership simply want to grant amnesty to telecoms -- they favor it -- because they do not want the lawsuits relating to illegal spying to proceed to resolution; and (2) they are deferring to the tiny number of Blue Dogs who favor amnesty and warrantless eavesdropping.

In the interest of more and better Democrats, Act Blue is taking contributions towards an ad campaign to run in Dino (Dem in name only) Chris Carney's Pennsylvania district not unlike the R's who targeted the vulnerable House Dems who stood firm against telecom immunity.

Remember, the whole issue about the lawsuits against the telecoms is that discovery in those suits is the only way at this point we are likely to learn just how extensively the administration was involved in illegal spying on Americans, and just how far up the chain it went.
The administration is not going to hand this stuff over without them.

Lesson: Primary politics isn't the only thing going on right now.

Hillary Clinton on O'Reilly

I don't have to be fair, but I surprisingly find myself deciding to anyway. This is a TPM video created from two nights of interview.
If I were one of O'Reilly's regulars, I would think "she's not so bad. I might disagree, but she's actually likable and funny and holds her own (although he's entirely soft here, not the usual O'Reilly)." 5 min.
They won't vote for her, though.

Medical Marijuana News O' Teh Day

I haven't heard a story like this before. Both Swedish and UW turned him down because he smoked for pain, which is legal in Washington state. I'd like to see a reporter go a little farther with this story, was their federal funding in jeopardy if they okayed the liver transplant?
In my experience, it's the feds who mess with this stuff, but maybe the medical committees are just jerks.
In any case, he died.

SEATTLE -- A musician who was denied a liver transplant because he used marijuana with medical approval under Washington state law to ease the symptoms of advanced hepatitis C died Thursday.

The death of Timothy Garon, 56, at Bailey-Boushay House, an intensive care nursing center was confirmed to The Associated Press by his lawyer, Douglas Hiatt, and Alisha Mark, a spokeswoman for Virginia Mason Medical Center, which operates Bailey-Boushay.

Dr. Brad Roter, the physician who authorized Garon to smoke pot to alleviate for nausea and abdominal pain and to stimulate his appetite, said he did not know it would be such a hurdle if Garon were to need a transplant.

Whew, At Long Last

something to make us laugh. Leave it to the Brits, hat tip Andrew Sullivan. 2 min.

Babs!

From the AP:

After three decades of keeping mum, Barbara Walters is disclosing a past affair with married U.S. Senator Edward Brooke, whom she remembers as "exciting" and "brilliant."
Appearing on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" scheduled to air Tuesday, Walters shares details of her relationship with Brooke that lasted several years in the 1970s, according to a transcript of the show provided to The Associated Press.

A moderate Republican from Massachusetts who took office in 1967, Brooke was the first African-American to be popularly elected to the Senate. Both he and Walters knew that public knowledge of their affair could have ruined his career as well as hers, Walters says.

Campaign 2008

Everything you need to know in 7 1/2 minutes. If I'd known this was coming, I could have been gardening. Or napping. Fun to watch.

Feminism Personified

It has always been my contention, cynical though it may seem, that incompetent and corrupt women should have the same opportunities as incompetent and corrupt men. It can be argued that there are many fine examples in the current Bush administration, but Lurita Doan, recently and belatedly fired as head of the General Services Administration, is the ready example.
She politicized the department by actively endorsing efforts by federal employees to elect Republicans and she also apparently gave one of her friends a nice little contract.
It really was a little contract, less than $100,000 as I recall. Sometimes the corrupt women just fail the imagination test.
This is longish at six minutes, but hold on for the very last frames.

FISA UPDATE

Once again, McJoan at Daily Kos is on top of the telecom immunity issue, this time about the emails and other documents that were exchanged between the telecoms and the administration as they tried to push the measure through the Senate.
Meanwhile Steny Hoyer apparently is working behind the scenes to persuade the Blue Dog Dems in the House to go along with immunity, rumored to be emerging as an amendment to a supplemental budget bill. Ah, democracy.
The fight ain't over, folks.

Money quote:

If one thing in the whole amnesty debate wasn't already clear, this information absolutely crystallizes it. This fight has nothing to do with national security. It has everything to do with megacorporations breaking the law and doing everything in their power to get away with it--including getting advice from the Department of Justice about how to do so!

Women's Voices Women Vote UPDATE

This follow-up from Daily Kos: (ignore what look like links in the following, I'm too lazy to go through and manually remove them, but they're in the original linked above, if you want to go that far.)

The basic problem is this: when you call people who are registered to vote and give them the impression that they are not, then compound the error by making such calls at a time when there's nothing the voter can do about it, you're going to lead to a lot of registered voters who believe they're unable to vote. Whether the result of deliberate design or massive negligence on the part of WVWV and/or its vendors in terms of the timing of the calls and the determination of who would be called, the end result is something which rightly raised suspicions about the intent of this program.

I understand that some have defended WVWV by arguing that post-primary deadline is actually the most successful time to register voters, but not when you're consistently confusing voters and angering state elections boards while doing so. Given the complaints, this should have been fixed or ended long before now.

Honestly, I don't think WVWV has gone far enough to fix the mess they've made. A press release and withholding some of the mailing isn't enough. I believe they're obligated to go through the list of every NC resident/residence they called and determine who is eligible to vote. They should explain to those voters that they were reached in error and should show up and vote on May 6. They should call back the unregistered voters and inform them that one-stop absentee registration and voting is still available until Saturday. And they should explain who they are, and how WVWV can be reached if there's any questions.

[When an Obama campaign vendor accidentally called thousands of Washington state voters with the wrong caucus date, they re-called all of them -- at their own expense.]

Big errors require big solutions, and I believe steps like these could confirm the good faith which so many of us had in WVWV's work.

I should mention that the North Carolina Attorney General is now investigating. Most interesting news out of this so far is that the executive director is married to the vendor that got more than $700,000 in business out of this outfit last year.

Vegetable O' Teh Day

You don't want to know this. I don't either. But we have to open big and swallow hard.
In testimony yesterday before the Senate Judiciary Committee the former top classification official at the Department of Justice said the classification process that still keeps legal memos on torture secret showed either profound ignorance or deep contempt for the rules.
Guess which one I choose.
But tha-a-at's not all, folks.
He also disclosed that there are apparently secret, private laws passed by the White House that no one knows about and no one needs to know about under this administration's view.
Yep, that's right.

Mr. Elwood acknowledged that the administration believed that the president could ignore or modify existing executive orders that he or other presidents have issued without disclosing the new interpretation.

I Wrote A Letter Today

to NBC Nightly News, hosted by Brian Williams. The anger was just piling up too high.

It is bad enough that NBC has yet to report or respond to the New York
Times' revelations concerning the undisclosed conflict of interest of your so-called military advisors.
But then Brian Williams decided to pimp Peggy Noonan's inane column
questioning Barack Obama's patriotism.
Now, you have decided not to offer Arianna Huffington a forum for her new book, presumably because it critiques Tim Russert and other media
inside-the-beltway know-nothings.
It's time you folks began to recognize that this is the new internet world
and millions of your viewers and your advertisers' customers are watching carefully.
We expect to be informed fully and evenly about the news of the day. If you
cannot, will not, provide that, we can easily decide to pull the plug or switch the channel, and I plan to do so and tell everyone I know, including those who read my blog, to avoid NBC whenever possible.
Your market is shrinking, and you cannot expect to make it all up with
reality shows. We want real reality. We have options.

Now I learn that apparently Brian Williams felt forced to respond to blog commenters besieging him about the Noonan thing and the network's decision to ignore the NYT story about its military analysts.
Glenn Greenwald takes a close, detailed look at just how conflicted GE-owned NBC is and, by implication, Williams.
Here's a snippet:

Just consider what is going on here. The core credibility of war reporting by Brian Williams and NBC News has been severely undermined by a major NYT expose. That story involves likely illegal behavior by the Pentagon, in which NBC News appears to have been complicit, resulting in the deceitful presentation of highly biased and conflicted individuals as "independent" news analysts. Yet they refuse to tell their viewers about any of this, and refuse to address any of the questions that have been raised.

Lesson: Don't ever underestimate the degree to which the so-called mainstream media is compromised by its corporate controllers and connections.
P.S. NPR, by the way, also had a military analyst under contract and cited by the NYT story. They seem fairly sure he was not as compromised as suggested by the story, but have in response created a set of pretty strict guidelines for the use of "sources," including disclosing to listeners the source's ties to outside organizations and causes.
This is Journalism 101, something many news organizations have been consistently lax about in recent times.
Who's good at this, there must be some good, right? As far as I know, McClatchy does it righter than most. There are really good people in other organizations, but overall, the organizations themselves are not reliably consistent. The NYT itself took a hard look at its own past use of some of these military advisors as op-ed writers.

MoveOn's McCain Ad

Takes up the Iraq War theme playing out in the Democratic National Committee's ad and will air in Iowa and New Mexico where Bush III is campaigning while the Dem candidates continue the primary battle.


This is small donor funded. You can send 'em some love here.

Better Than Online Dogs Story

TROUBLED WA Opposition leader Troy Buswell has broken down in tears at a press conference and admitted he sniffed the chair of a female Liberal Party staffer.

With tears in his eyes, Mr Buswell had to compose himself before telling the media in Mandurah this morning that his behaviour had been unacceptable.

In Australia, the Liberal Party is politically conservative.

Also, this:

As revealed by The Sunday Times, Mr Buswell crawled around on his hands and knees in front of a former Liberal staffer before she left the job late in 2005.

In a separate incident, he lifted her chair and started sniffing it after she had sat in it in his parliamentary office.

The scandal follows an admission by the Liberal leader earlier this year that he had snapped open the bra of a Labor staffer.

Deputy Liberal leader Kim Hames was today standing by Mr Buswell, describing him as a "rough diamond with a robust sense of humour''.

Hat tip: kos

Women's Voices, Women's Vote. NOT!

So, uh, it sounds good, right? A multi-million dollar non-profit devoted to getting single women to register and vote. They're one of the lowest voting groups in the population, probably the lowest voting.
And their board consists of a lot Democratic good guys, a young black law student from Howard University, former Bill Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, now CEO of the Center for American Integrity (Integrity!). Oh, yeah, Maggie Williams, Hillary's newly named campaign manager, also a black woman, is on their leadership council. Some other guy from Talk Left, etc.
But as it turns out, the group is the machine behind what appears to be the current flurry of voter suppressing robo calls happening in North Carolina preceding Tuesday's primary election.
A guy calls a voter, tells him or her a voter registration packet is in the mail, and that it must be signed and returned before they can vote.
Except it's too late for voter registration, and many of those receiving calls are already registered. And a large number of them are...wait for it...wait for it...African American voters.
Needless to say, confused voters are flooding election offices with calls and complaints.
Some can claim this was just an inept, poorly managed but good faith effort based on bad voters lists. But this is the eleventh state where WVWV has pulled similar stunts.
It's being documented here in perhaps the best election related investigative piece I've seen so far this season, and it's a non-profit that's done the legwork, not a major news organization, although I hope they'll hop on this bandwagon.
Do I think this is a pro-Hillary effort? Yes, I do. Will anyone ever be able to prove it? Probably not.
But ever since the choice flyers went out before the New Hampshire primary from Hillary supporters challenging and misrepresenting Obama's record, I've been disgusted with HRC. Many of the female elected officials who signed that flyer later disowned it, saying they had been misled by the campaign.
And you may remember, Obama was favored in the polls to win New Hampshire. Those flyers went out really late, the female turnout and vote for Hillary was huge, and she won.
I've been disgusted before, but I haven't been this angry since New Hampshire.
Women's Voices, Women's Vote indeed.
The HRC campaign is stepping all over my issues to win, and I'm pissed.

Obama Picks Vice President

Scott Horton at Harper's

On the very day I decided to add Horton to my short political blogroll (over there on the right), he announced he wasn't going to blog anymore. I believed him.
Apparently there was a change of plans.
Tonight, avoiding at all costs the lure of volumes of paperwork, I checked out the link. He's still blogging.
I had just begun reading Horton regularly, drawn by his ability to boil it all down for a layperson like myself with none of the (sometimes admirable, but nevertheless often tedious) partisan irateness of Glenn Greenwald at Salon.
Horton's background is impressive and his expertise daunting. He's a lawyer with firsthand — meaning working — cred on torture, illegal detention, war crimes and the DOJ fiasco.
You can check it all out here.

Enough Of Politics For Today

Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry
by Howard Nemerov
Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle That while you watched turned to pieces of snow Riding a gradient invisible From silver aslant to random, white, and slow. There came a moment that you couldn’t tell. And then they clearly flew instead of fell.
From Sentences by Howard Nemerov, published by the University of Chicago Press. Copyright © 1980 by Howard Nemerov. Reprinted with the permission of Margaret Nemerov. All rights reserved.

Food Crisis Petition

I trust these people, but I can't remember why. Somewhere in the way back, I checked them out.
Anyway, if this is what they say we need to do, I'm doing it.
At the very least.

Headline O' Teh Day

Life Lesson: Don't Buy Dogs Online From Africa

From my favorite — read only — local paper. Comments are pretty good, too.

No Stopping Gas Prices?

Okay, it's the New York Sun and all, but name me anyone who's been truthful and/or right lately about it all. We have a president who can't bring himself to say the word recession, a GOP candidate who has the worst economic plan of the three according to an independent government analysis.
I didn't know Mexican supply had fallen off a cliff until I read this. It's short. And bitter. As are we all.
Oh yeah, lapel pins and Jermiah Wright. Don't forget what's important.
Morning rant over and out.

**

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.

***Addendum

Interview with Jared Bernstein about his new book at Huffpo.

Remember this:

So McCain's real targets if he's serious about all of this are Social Security and Medicare.

Yak Penis, Yummm

Well, Andrew Sullivan linked to this Der Speigel treatment of a specialized Chinese restaurant today, why shouldn't I? File under oddments.
Sorry you have to follow the link, but Reuters doesn't allow photo grabbing.

Donkey penis served on a bed of lettuce: For Chinese guests, eating the sexual organs is not a test of courage, but rather a treatment for the libido.

McCain Will Lose

no matter who the Democratic nominee is.
Count on Frank Rich of the NYT to notice something no one else (not even the liberal blogs I read) seems to notice, AND TELL YOU.
I've believed all along that we'll have a Democrat in the White House next year despite all the damned punditry nonsense.
Money quote:

...few noticed that on this same day in Pennsylvania, 27 percent of Republican primary voters didn’t just tell pollsters they would defect from their party’s standard-bearer; they went to the polls, gas prices be damned, to vote against Mr. McCain. Though ignored by every channel I surfed, there actually was a G.O.P. primary on Tuesday, open only to registered Republicans. And while it was superfluous in determining that party’s nominee, 220,000 Pennsylvania Republicans (out of their total turnout of 807,000) were moved to cast ballots for Mike Huckabee or, more numerously, Ron Paul. That’s more voters than the margin (215,000) that separated Hillary Clinton and Mr. Obama.

Oh wait, there's this, heh:

The best deal for Mr. McCain would be for Mr. Bush to disappear into the witness protection program.

What A Woman: Photographic Evidence

Jill Freedman. Never heard of her. Her photos of NYC in the 70s are so Mean Streets it's hard to concentrate after the slideshow the NYT has up today.

Five years ago, Ms. Freedman returned to the city, homesick for what she described as "the smart talking and corned beef." She barely recognized the place. "When I saw that they had turned 42nd Street into Disneyland," she said, "I just stood there and wept." Presumably much more is out there to be captured by her Leica. "I'd like to find what's left," Ms. Freedman said.

Super Tuesday Redux: Beijing Edition

I can't get enough of Sufei. Sorry.

Somebody's Got To Run Against John McCain

Because the two Democrats are still running against each other, a situation that is likely to last until late June when suddenly all the superdelegates will decide, presumably for Obama, but who knows.
Anyway, the notoriously underfunded Democratic National Committee is now playing it's second ad against McCain. The first focused on his vague notions that somehow all is right with the economy, as he understands it, which he doesn't.
It was pretty good.
This one on Iraq is better. It must be because it's got the Republicans riled up, saying the DNC illegally colluded with the two Democratic campaigns on it. Why they would have to is beyond me, the point of the ad is a no-brainer point of weakness that got tons of media play and a lot of yelling and screaming from the R's.
So, McCain didn't actually say we'd be at war for 100 years, but he did say we'd be there until Americans were no longer being attacked. C'mon, guys, just do the logic.
Anyway, if you want to throw the DNC (headed by Howard Dean) a few bucks for this act of patriotism, go here.
Yeah, I did. I kicked in $25.

Tulips, Minton, April 25, 2008

Or maybe it's Menton.

Diagnosis: Female

The New York Times review of Lisa Appignesi's book Mad, Bad And Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors.

It would be hard to imagine a mental illness that better evinces the slippery interplay among fashion, delusion, diagnosis and treatment than anorexia, which announces itself with the appearance of following rather than defying social directives and which women embrace, as they did neurasthenia, as a mode of femininity, in this case to be slim rather than morbidly sensitive and enervated.

Pursuit of Youth

Ah, MSNBC is doin' good tonight, contrariennes.
Want to see what a mess celebrities have made of their faces?
Slideshow here.

i can haz chzbrgr?

WTF? Well, I tried. Txtng iz hrd.
The good folks at MSNBC offer instructions of a sort for those of you sometimes confronted with apparently indeciferable words and phrases creeping into print these days. Very common on blogs. And a must have if you want to communicate with the Millennials.
GTG SYT

Say What? Oh, McCain

You may not have heard of Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, but Sen. John McCain didn't even bother to vote on the bill that tightens up fair pay legislation to prevent courts from doing what they did to Ledbetter, imposing impossible filing deadlines.
Ledbetter didn't even know she wasn't being paid fairly until well after the deadline the court drew for the case.
McCain said what women really need is more education and training to obtain fair pay.
Credo has a petition you can sign to let McCain know how you feel about it.

Poem O' Teh Day: Wow

Dangerous for Girls
by Connie Voisine

It was the summer of Chandra Levy, disappearing
from Washington D.C., her lover a Congressman, evasive
and blow-dried from Modesto, the TV wondering

in every room in America to an image of her tight jeans and piles
of curls frozen in a studio pose. It was the summer the only
woman known as a serial killer, a ten-dollar whore trolling

the plains of central Florida, said she knew she would
kill again, murder filled her dreams
and if she walked in the world, it would crack

her open with its awful wings. It was the summer that in Texas, another
young woman killed her five children, left with too many
little boys, always pregnant. One Thanksgiving, she tried

to slash her own throat. That summer the Congressman
lied again about the nature of his relations, or,
as he said, he couldn't remember if they had sex that last

night he saw her, but there were many anonymous girls that summer,
there always are, who lower their necks to the stone
and pray, not to God but to the Virgin, herself once

a young girl, chosen in her room by an archangel.
Instead of praying, that summer I watched television, reruns of
a UFO series featuring a melancholic woman detective

who had gotten cancer and was made sterile by aliens. I watched
infomercials: exercise machines, pasta makers,
and a product called Nails Again With Henna,

ladies, make your nails steely strong, naturally,
and then the photograph of Chandra Levy
would appear again, below a bright red number,

such as 81, to indicate the days she was missing.
Her mother said, please understand how we're feeling
when told that the police don't believe she will be found alive,

though they searched the parks and forests
of the Capitol for the remains and I remembered
being caught in Tennessee, my tent filled with wind

lifting around me, tornado honey, said the operator when I called
in fear. The highway barren, I drove to a truck stop where
maybe a hundred trucks hummed in pale, even rows

like eggs in a carton. Truckers paced in the dining room,
fatigue in their beards, in their bottomless
cups of coffee. The store sold handcuffs, dirty

magazines, t-shirts that read, Ass, gas or grass.
Nobody rides for free, and a bulletin board bore a
public notice: Jane Doe, found in a refrigerator box

outside Johnson, TN, her slight measurements and weight.
The photographs were of her face, not peaceful in death,
and of her tattoos Born to Run, and J.T. caught in

scrollworks of roses. One winter in Harvard Square, I wandered
drunk, my arms full of still warm, stolen laundry, and
a man said come to my studio and of course I went—

for some girls, our bodies are not immortal so much as
expendable, we have punished them or wearied
from dragging them around for so long and so we go

wearing the brilliant plumage of the possibly freed
by death. Quick on the icy sidewalks, I felt thin and
fleet, and the night made me feel unique in the eyes

of the stranger. He told me he made sculptures
of figure skaters, not of the women's bodies,
but of the air that whipped around them,

a study of negative space,
which he said was the where-we-were-not

that made us. Dizzy from beer,

I thought why not step into
that space? He locked the door behind me.

Today's poem is from Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream, just published by University of Chicago Press. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

On Temporary Hiatus (sp?)

Yeah, I know I could easily check the spelling but I'm feeling unmotivated.
I probably won't return for a couple weeks, but when I do I'll be better.
Happy end of primary season.

Military Industrial Complex

No one until now has detailed the extent of the connections between retired military officers, military contractors and...wait for it...wait for it...broadcast news organizations.
It isn't necessary to read the very long article in the New York Times today, the result of a lawsuit that netted the paper some 8,000 documents unless you're very keen on the dreary details.
This little excerpt gives you the general idea:

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.