If she becomes the NYS senator AND runs and wins in 2010, Caroline Kennedy will be our first female POTUS.

I'm going to show you a few things, and perhaps you will understand why women believed Hillary Clinton stood a better chance than anyone, ever before her, of becoming the first female POTUS:

Mae Ella Nolan became the first woman member of the House of Representatives. She succeeded her husband.

The first woman elected to the Senate was Hattie Wyatt Caraway of Arkansas. Appointed to fill the vacancy caused by the death of her husband, U.S. Senator Thaddeus Caraway, Ms. Caraway then sought and won election on her own in 1932.

The first female governor was Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming who was elected on November 4, 1924 and sworn in on January 5, 1925. She was preceded in office by her late husband William B. Ross.

I shouldn't have to point out the obvious, here, but just in case: each of these women were already well known to their region's voters and had the goodwill vote going for them. However, it appears that it was outrageously easy to create a resentment wedge and divide female voters - the largest demographic block of all - when it came to trading on your husband's name to reach for the highest office in the land.

Enter Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg - America's lost princess of Camelot. By remaining out (for the most part) of the political and celebrity spotlight until her 40s, Caroline built up a heaping truckload of political capital and never used an ounce of it until January 2008, when she very publicly switched horses (she had contributed to both Hillary Clinton's and Barack Obama's campaigns in 2007) and put the finishing touches on the Camelot torch-passing ceremony.

There's hardly a woman between the ages of 35-55 who didn't pick up and flip through the copy of Life Magazine when the Princess of Camelot got married and sold those photos. I can still remember the clovers on her dress. Women of a certain age watched her grow up, from a distance, with a mixture of quiet sympathy, curiosity and envy, not the least of which had anything to do with her proximity to John-John, our American prince.

Is that enough goodwill for you?

Now here we are, and we're told she wants a Senate seat. She'll get it. And if she keeps it in the next election, I have no doubt whatsoever, she'll be running for POTUS in 2016. Unless she fucks up and pisses off DC, Washington insiders will cream all over themselves seeing she wins.

In 2004 there was an election year Democrats thought they were sure to win.

Late in the season, a story was breaking in the news that Democrats thought would totally put them (us) over the top. TANG.

George Bush's failure to show up for National Guard duty. The only problem was, there was no proof anywhere as so many records had been scrubbed. In late August we heard word that proof had been found and the story was going to be featured on an upcoming 60 Minutes. That story aired, put together by Dan Rather and Mary Mapes, September 8th 2004.

Democrats and Bush-loathing independents rejoiced! Hallelujah, the truth was out and there was no way the American people would re-elect him.

And that very same night, websites with very close ties to the Republican campaign denounced Rathers' and Mapes' evidence and called the documents forgery. Whether or not they actually were forgeries is still up for debate in some quarters but the only thing that mattered in 2004 was that Republicans wrote the story that the media used forged evidence against George W. Bush, and the people who wrote the story seemed to have had advance information about what to do and when.

Now it's 2008 and we're at it all over again. Instead of relying on a great campaign, there's a contingent of people who are determined to use an internet rumor against John McCain's running mate. A rumor that has almost no relationship to her performance or abilities as a back-up commander in chief, but whether or not she has a white trash family.

Today is the last day of August.

You aren't really going to do this all over again, are you?

Oh, and by the way: Barack Obama's opponent is John McCain. Palin is red meat for RW fundies, a distraction for us. That's it.

My first thought upon hearing that John McCain chose under-investigation Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate was, "oh, they must really be trying to throw it."

That it's an obvious ploy to take advantage of the rift on the Democratic side makes it the more entertaining: McCain, with this move, reveals all of the pandering and hypocrisy that's gone into the 2008 political season. Lifting that veil, I'd normally say that automatically takes him out of the race, but where it really gets interesting is that it's the kind of dramatic move that's designed to appeal, in an apolitical way, to the internet base. Then you have all the sexism coming from the left side of the 'net. McCain is dangling a very huge fish in front of them; if they can't resist the bait, watch a contingent of Democratic women stay home.

Finally, a third perspective. Palin's under investigation for misuse of authority which makes her a perfect fit for Republican Washington right about now.

Just when I was getting ready to write that I'd found a way to stop worrying and love Obama, along comes indication we'll all be expected to more or less have our brains out for the November election.

In response to the New Yorker cover lampooning the far right's irrational propagandizing against the Obama campaign, spokesman Bill Burton is quoted all over the press:

“The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.”

I think a) most readers will never pick up the New Yorker, b) if the uneducated masses should happen to pick it up, this will make a great "Obama teaching moment." And with all the attention the Obama campaign and its countless Volunteer Information-Stream Controllers are drawing to the cover, one would almost have to think they're planning to do just that. One would hope, anyway.

In the meantime, with the epic proportion of sturm und drang being parlayed around the interwebs demanding Barry Britt's blood and the New Yorker's ink, you'd think someone killed a puppy.

Pendagon writes, with no discernible trace of irony:

"Satire isn't funny when you have to explain it. The main problem with the image is that there’s absolutely no indication of satire involved."

If the typical Obama online supporter continues to imitate Dumas' Felton, I'm going to miss Stewart and Colbert, both.

http://imperialwitness.blogspot.com/

That's what it appears to be.

Look, I have (had) little against Tim "integrity is for paupers" Russert. He was a genial host and very watchable. He was also part of the bizarre clique of Heathers that was focused on taking down the Clintons in the 1990s and keeping Al Gore out of the White House in 2000.

To watch other famous TV journalists on cable news yesterday, however, you'd have thought Elvis died. Hours of coverage uninterrupted by events such as 10,000 Iowans being evacuated by floods. Hey, the river will still be there Monday, but the Heathers only have a short window of time in which to elevate a decent journalist, with a lot of on-air personality and opinion but little actual substance, into Edward R. Murrow.

Compare the reaction to the death of Jim McKay, just last week:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX87LuNI97g

Here's something to ask yourself: If Tim Russert was such a great journalist and such a great, great broadcaster, why is all the coverage focused on other journalists' reactions, and none of it on Russert's work, itself?

Don't they think something like this is a shining example of great journalism?

http://www.youtube.com/v/x4fU01IbTr0&hl=en

Compare with this Bill Moyers clip which includes Russert footage:

http://www.youtube.com/v/729rbjVi_6w&hl=en

Watching that second clip, particularly the interview with Russert, shows the real tragedy surrounding his premature death. He had traded his integrity for wealth and security, and he knew it. Was heartbroken by it.

RIP, Timmy.


http://imperialwitness.blogspot.com /

thanks

Barack Obama's supporters' #1 reason for backing him, going back to January, is "he represents change." Rev. Jeremiah Wright's reappearance in the national media has given his former protege a chance to prove that, but instead we are seeing political campaigning as usual.

Last Friday night, Wright appeared on Bill Moyers' journal and said a great many things that liberals, populists, and other political grumblers have been saying for years. About corporate media. About Bush's war. About separation of church & state. About glossed over history written by the victors. Instead of cheering, however, Obama's supporters - those desperate for change people - have let out collective groans.

Even worse, Barack Obama took to the air waves today to further distance himself and do what he said he wouldn't before - denounce Wright - and lefties cheer.

As a Hillary Clinton backer, I'm both oddly thrilled and horrified by what's unfolding before our eyes. Barack Obama stood up and denounced all of the left's salient points of the last twenty years, and people who say they're backing him because he represents change think it's the bestest thing in the world. You see, I and others always believed he was selling snake oil all along. We just never imagined that those who were drinking the Kool-Aid were aware of what they were lapping up.

the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the average annual wages in the U.S. as $36,764 for 2002.

In 2006, the median annual household income was $48,201.00

Thank goodness Charlie is there to put the candidates' feet to the fire and make sure that no one making $100k-$250k should have to worry about a tax increase.


One thing that sails straight over his head is the link between capital gains tax and revenue from it. When you cut the tax, people are more likely to seek short term profits and create a bubble. So Charlie, what do you think about the internet bubbles and the housing bubble that was caused in part by low-cost loans?

Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama on Monday disavowed a memo criticizing rival Hillary Rodham Clinton’s financial ties to India, blaming his campaign staff for a “dumb mistake.”

...
The memo has created a furor in the Indian-American community and raised questions about Obama’s claims that he is above attack politics epitomized by secretly distributing opposition research about a rival. Placing the blame on his staff is not new. Earlier this year, Obama faulted his staff for comments in a dispute with the Clinton camp over Hollywood donor David Geffen.

Last Thursday, Obama’s campaign sent the memo to reporters, demanding that it not be attributed to their campaign. The Clinton campaign got a copy and sent it to reporters.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19299719 /

Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign has prepared a detailed memo listing various instances in which it perceived Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign to have deliberately played the race card in the Democratic primary.

The memo, which was obtained by the Huffington Post and has been made public elsewhere,is believed to have been given to an activist and contains mostly excerpts from different media reports. It lists the contact info and name of Obama's South Carolina press secretary, Amaya Smith, and is broken down into five incidents in which either Clinton, her husband Bill, or campaign surrogates made comments that could be interpreted as racially insensitive.

The document provides an indication that, in private, the Obama campaign is seeking to capitalize on the view - and push the narrative - that the Clintons are using race-related issues for political leverage. In public, the Obama campaign has denied that they are trying to propagate such a perception, noting that the document never was sent to the press.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/01/12/o...

Then you have that fun business where Obama's financial adviser met with Canadian officials to tell them not to listen to his public stance on NAFTA, and when they got caught out, tried to bullshit their way out of it and pin the tail on HC. Too bad that didn't work, huh?

http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2008/03/sme...

Did someone say, "politics of personal destruction?"

Obama Campaign Claims Clinton Has 'Character Gap' - "Sen. Clinton misled the voters of Ohio," he said, arguing that Clinton had been duplicitous and double-dealing when it came to claims that she had helped pass the Family and Medical Leave Act, in her push for revotes in Michigan and Florida, and in her claims that her campaign is not promoting the story about Obama's relationship with the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/St...

This was written on the eve of the NH primary. Read this and you'll begin to understand the historic calls for Hillary to drop out of the race - that began the night of the Iowa caucus and continue now, even when there is a less than 10% gap between the amount of delegates she and BO have.


For decades, these Deception Machines have told these tales—and they’ve largely gone unchallenged. But another story is ending in New Hampshire this week—and it has gone undiscussed too.

This week, a sixteen-year story will come to an end—a story that began in New Hampshire, back in January 1992. During that period, RNC/MSM bull-shit machines have churned endless cant about Clinton-Gore-Clinton—and those stories largely went unchallenged, and they changed the world’s history. Who would be this year’s best Democratic White House nominee? We don’t have a strong opinion. But as this 16-year story now comes to an end, we think it’s important to get clear on two points. We think it’s important to see the opportunity this milestone extends to Dems and libs. And we think it’s important to understand why so few Democrats, right to this day, know about what has transpired.


A new opportunity: With the presumptive defeat of Candidate Clinton, a 16-year story will come to an end. This gives Democrats a new chance to take control of the narratives told about its leaders. By now, it’s abundantly clear that a Nominee Clinton would be subjected to endless nonsense throughout the campaign, as was the case with Candidate Gore all through 1999 and 2000. These attacks would be based on sixteen years of mainstream demonology—and it’s clear that many Dems and libs believe many parts of these RNC tales. (Let’s not pretend that we don’t.) Obama’s nomination lets Dems start again. And, with new, more aggressive liberal institutions in place, it will be harder—much, much harder—to assemble the welter of Demon Tales that were used to trash the Clintons and Gore. The defeat of Clinton will let Democrats and liberals at long last start over again.

...

The selection of Obama, not Clinton, may work out well for Dems—for the world. (There will never be any real way to find out.) But the centerpiece of this 16-year story remains that pivotal War Against Gore—the war which sent George Bush to the White House, and thereby sent the U.S. to Iraq. The dead of Iraq are in their graves because the press corps conducted that war—and good careful boys like Kevin and Ezra do know all about this. But you know the rule among good, careful liberals—you’re allowed to describe that War Against Gore only once. Josh Marshall described it to Howard Kurtz in August 2002, then his big trap shut for all time. Ezra described it four years later. Indeed, so you can recall what the Hardball ingenue said, let’s reprint his words right here. At the start of an American Prospect cover story, Ezra told the truth to the world. He was describing a 2005 address by Gore:

KLEIN (4/06): The address was the keynote for the We Media conference, held at the Associated Press headquarters in New York last October and attended by an audience that included both old media luminaries and new media innovators. In attendance were Tom Curley, president of the AP, Andrew Heyward, president of CBS News, and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, all leading lights of a media establishment that, five years earlier, had deputized itself judge, jury, and executioner for Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, spinning each day’s events to portray the stolid, capable vice president as a wild exaggerator, ideological chameleon, and total, unforgivable bore.

...

YOU’RE ALLOWED TO TELL IT JUST ONCE: Would Clinton be a better candidate than Obama? A better president? We don’t have the slightest idea. But what happened to Clinton, starting in late October, is the same thing that happened to Candidate Gore. For a bit of perspective, here’s Dana Milbank, just last week, followed by Milbank and Josh in 2002. What happened to Clinton, and what happened to Gore, are all part of that 16-year story:

Dana Milbank, December 2007, describing the press corps and Clinton:

KURTZ (12/29/07): For example, Hillary Clinton. Let's say she doesn't win Iowa. Let's say she gets edged out by 1,000 votes. Is the press going to savage her as a loser?

MILBANK: The press will savage her no matter what, pretty much.

KURTZ: If she wins?

MILBANK: Well, obviously if she wins by any great margin—the press with Hillary Clinton, it's a poisonous relationship. And I visited the various campaigns out there. It's a mutual sort of disregard. And they really have their knives out for her, there's no question about it out there. So—

KURTZ: And to what extent do you think that is affecting the coverage of Senator Clinton?

MILBANK: I think it unquestionably is. And I think Obama gets significantly better coverage than Hillary Clinton does, and given an equal performance he'll come out better for it.

KURTZ: Is this because journalists like Obama better than Hillary or—

MILBANK: It's more that they dislike Hillary Clinton. There is a long history there, her antagonism towards the press. It's returned in spades. And it is a venomous relationship that I see out there.

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh010708.shtml

Wasn't warrantless, by any chance, was it?

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/n...

1903: Thomas Edison stages his highly publicized electrocution of an elephant in order to demonstrate the dangers of alternating current, which, if it posed any immediate danger at all, was to Edison's own direct current.

Edison had established direct current at the standard for electricity distribution and was living large off the patent royalties, royalties he was in no mood to lose when George Westinghouse and Nicola Tesla showed up with alternating current.

Edison's aggressive campaign to discredit the new current took the macabre form of a series of animal electrocutions using AC (a killing process he referred to snidely as getting "Westinghoused"). Stray dogs and cats were the most easily obtained, but he also zapped a few cattle and horses.

...

In order to make sure that Topsy emerged from this spectacle more than just singed and angry, she was fed cyanide-laced carrots moments before a 6,600-volt AC charge slammed through her body. Officials needn't have worried. Topsy was killed instantly and Edison, in his mind anyway, had proved his point.

It happens time and time again - when profits are involved, people who use "science" strategically for their financial gain, they'll plow over anything. Animal well-being, human rights - it doesn't matter.

We celebrate Edison for the wonderful things he did for us - light bulbs, music recordings, movies, and so much more.

But there's always a dark side and it usually comes at the point where one can rationalize just about anything to prove their cause, for their financial gain.

My attitude on the subject has come a full 180 since receiving my first drivers' license, and yesterday's NY Times magazine essay by Sally Satel is the greatest example I can think of that explains why.

You can call it a gift, and 25 years ago it might have been, but now it's really a demand for potential donors to cough up spare parts for people who are either too self-obsessed or too emotionally immature to perceive how this demand devalues human life in general while trying to prop up their own.

Theoretically, kidneys should be in booming supply. Virtually everyone has two, and healthy individuals can give one away and still lead perfectly normal lives. Yet people aren’t exactly lining up to give. At the beginning of 2005, when I put my name on the list, there were about 60,000 people ahead of me; by the end of that year, only 1 in 9 had received one from a relative, spouse or friend. Today, just under 74,000 people are waiting for kidneys.

I wanted my donor to be completely anonymous so I could avoid the treacherous intimacy of accepting an organ from someone I knew. I would have gladly paid someone to give me a kidney, but exchanging money for an organ is a felony in this country.

Take a strong look at the rationalization going on in the first sentence, and the emotional immaturity of the second paragraph. "But everyone has a spare!" Here's another keeper:

The obvious place to find a donor is your own family, but that was not really an option for me. My parents were not alive and would have been far too old to help me even if they were. I have no siblings and only three cousins; I hadn’t seen two of them since high school; and the third I see maybe once every two or three years. I couldn’t call out of the blue with this news. I could just imagine my relatives tsking into the phone, “You only call when you want something.” Indeed.

Now, here's the killer: the woman who wrote all this is a card-carrying, speech-giving, media-talking member of the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank that wants to reform, ie, eliminate, welfare. Among so-called compassionate conservatives, alongside "family values," the strategy is to promote the revival of private, often church-related, charities to replace the latter-day government role in helping the needy.

Good time to bring out the old adage: beggars can't be choosers. If you're poor and you need to go to a charitable organization for a hand-out, you've got to go to one whose arbitrary rules for giving apply to you, and you've got to be willing to swallow your pride, if necessary. And of course, you have to demonstrate gratitude.

Funny how Sally Satel aligns herself with a group that's all for forcing people in need to swallow it for the sake of survival, yet she herself is unwilling. Heaven forbid ...

I guess it's just for the little people.

When did so many Democratic Underground users start putting on corsets and lace? When did we start covering our ankles and our wrists and bosoms? Democratic Underground, where 1/4 of a single forum is devoted to seeing what sexual references they can get across before the mods will kill a thread?

Is it so difficult to enjoy a sex scandal for what it is?

It did its job - the scandal did its job and another anti-gay rights, so-called Family Values politician took a tumble out of office. He'll probably be replaced by another but it doesn't matter. What we have is one more incident to show Republican "values" voters that they have been whipped into a frenzy and used for 20 years. What we have is *maybe* a new person in his place who will be a little less vulnerable to blackmail.

Larry Craig has a human failing, like all of us have failings, only he had further to fall. I'm delighted.

Thirteen years ago, Molly appeared in Nashville at the Southern Festival of Books.

I brought my copy of Nothin' But Good Times Ahead to request an author's signature.

As I was standing in the fairly long line, one of her assistants passed out slips of paper to us all (and pencils where needed), to write down what we would like Molly to write in our books.

At first I was a little taken aback; I'd never been to a book signing before and it struck me as a little cheeky to be telling an author what to say. As I thought more about it, it struck me as a good thing; as an occasional writer, I will rip hairs out getting anything that's for publication *just right.* So, yeah, give the author a break.

So I pondered over what would be appropriate to ask the Molly Ivins to inscribe. What is appropriate to ask of a complete stranger, whose work you admire?

When I finally got up to Molly, I handed her my book and slip. She gave me a puzzled look and asked what it meant. I explained to her that after publishers' accounting methods, it was probably about her take from my purchase.

And she laughed, with a great, beautiful, knowing laugh.