The Pubhouse Dialogues

Hillary Clinton's comments to McNews have amplified and expanded on the offensive implications of her campaign's conference call this week and turned what might have been a minor story into the major campaign sound bite of the moment. Touting her broad base among "hard-working Americans" (who she helpfully translated as "white Americans" in her very next phrase) and "whites... who had not completed college" as a sign of her superior electibility, Senator Clinton sprayed a veritable shitfroth of racism, anti-intellectualism, statistical inaccuracy,and sheer squirrel's-ass craziness straight into the media mainstream.

It is now exceedingly clear that Air America's Rachel Maddow is right if exceedingly kind when she notes that the Clinton campaign is "post-rational." Clinton's arguments that she is the superior nominee, with their exit poll demographics and electoral vote maps, have always been based on the faulty premise that voter behavior in the primaries is 100% determinative of voter behavior in the general election. This premise, the logical detritus of the long disproven "inevitable nominee running a general election campaign from day one" strategy, is, to be blunter than I've seen anyone else be about it, complete unsupported horseshit-- nowhere in history is there any evidence of such a correlation.

Accepting this premise is a complete prerequisite to accepting that Hillary Clinton has any continued viability as a candidate. To accept it, however, is to follow Goldilocks down the rabbit hole (if I may abuse allusions as badly as she does). To reject it is to be confronted with the fact that her continuing campaign has less to do with her concern for the future of the party than it does with her "tough fighter" self image, her lust for power, and her sense of entitlement. At some point, the depths to which Senator Clinton is willing to go to continue this exercise in political narcissism should, and to me already has, disqualify her for any further office whatsoever.

I repeat: this is as disgusting as it is desperate, and it needs to end now.

Myanmar has lost so many people and homes and roads and...and...and...

From the Christian Science Monitor, a great news source from my parent's religion:

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Somaly Mam is a real phoenix. She is not a flaming egotist like a "born again" person. She is the real deal.

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"Have you gone berserk, can't you see that man's a ni?"
--Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks, Richard Pryor, et al.

This morning's Clinton campaign conference call, occuring as it did the morning after an Obama blow-out in North Carolina and a narrow squeaker for Clinton in Indiana turned Obama's statistical advantage into a lead pipe cinch of the nomination, may have been expected to be a fairly low key event. No such luck. The Clintonistas, it would seem, are still "in it to win it," facts be damned, and presented many indications that they have no qualms about winning it in as ugly a fashion as possible. A main theme of the call-- Clinton wins with white voters.

With a black identified biracial candidate running for President in a country that has never really faced down its racial attitudes, some crypto-racist content is to be expected. Indeed this campaign, particularly in the last few weeks, has inspired a plethora of racially coded commentary, from references to Obama's "elitism" (which many in the black community took as a code for "uppityness") to the observation that small town voters in Pennsylvania "weren't comfortable" with Obama and didn't see him as "one of them" (gee, wonder why).

While racial demographics have always played a role in the analysis of this campaign, it has been for the most part tip toed around until this morning. What exactly the Clinton campaign is actually trying to sell here is anybody's guess. Is it the idea that Obama's voters may be too lazy and shiftless to actually come out in November? The idea that it is somehow okay that the percentage of voters in this day and age who based their selection largely on race did so, and should be encouraged to continue doing so?

This is as disgusting as it is desperate, and it needs to end now.

Somebody has to remember the real history,not the made up one.
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In what can only be described as a defining moment in her campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination, Senator Hillary Clinton, in a speech outside Indianapolis last Friday, stated “I sometimes feel like the Goldilocks of this campaign. You know, not too much, not too little. Just right.”

Clinton's statement was notable not just because she screwed up a simple literary reference in a way that made it appear that she was threatening to invade peoples' houses and criticize their belongings before stealing them, but because in a rare moment of what can only be dubbed accidental candor she managed to put her entire campaign into context as never before. Clinton was referring not to beds, chairs, and porridge, but to the proposal for a summer gas tax holiday she had stolen from Papa Bear John McCain. Never mind that the proposal itself is, per the Speaker of the House and Senate Majority leader, dead on arrival. Never mind that even if it happened it would be of minimal if any benefit to anyone but the oil companies. Clinton wanted us to know that McCain's unfinanced version was toooo hot, and Obama's complete rejection of the proposal tooo cold. Clinton's, which offsets the expenses of this pretend gas tax holiday with the revenues from a make believe windfall profits tax on the oil companies (which is, if not also dead on arrival in Congress, a cinch for a Bush veto)is presumably just right, and as such should be a further reason for the Democratic party to give her a nomination that she is clearly unable to win by conventional means.

The storytellers of the media, of course, have been able to talk about nothing else all weekend. Will Clinton's imaginary gas tax holiday excite the busy little worker elves of North Carolina and Indiana? If enough of them clap, can she magically overcome Obama's statistical deadlock on both the delegate count and popular vote total and fly like Tinkerbell straight to the White House?

The moral of this story? Morality has nothing to do with it, children.

Buffy is an NA and I am part NA. This is a different version and come over and kick me if you can't take it but I am SO sick of war that I will pester you all until you stop it. She was blacklisted by our puny government and therefore is an utter "hero" to me!

Written by Donovan in 1965.

Yes Phil was a tortured soul. Any artist or writer or thinker always is. Trust me! He splintered into two personalities (like Garth Brooks did) and committed suicide not long after this. Depression is the pure stamp of feeling. Most of the good ones die young and he is proof of this statement.

Pete Seeger was a folk singer who spoke very well about this country and the problems therein. If you are too young to remember this song...it's like a prophecy!!! This song was written by Malvina Reynolds.

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While most of the left blogosphere kept busy yesterday mocking Law Day, or as Bunnypants would have it, Loyalty Day, your Curmudgeon kept the day as May Day, which is what yesterday was. An organized potluck for the people working on the latest project- a communal meal for the workers- was a big hit. The most salient point of the event was that when people each bring a bit to share, the bounty enjoyed by all exceeded the total of the individual appetites.

Huh- fancy that. When people pitch in a bit, everybody benefits, and in fact that common effort results in surplus.

But while these little life lessons went on yesterday, KARE-11's resident smug prick Rick Kupchella presented a 'special segment' screed on how some folks- transportation construction workers- are getting paid just too damn much money, in his opinion. Yup- on May Day, an anti-union screed, stirring the pot of divisive envy. For this act of arrogant stupidity, Kupchella gets his first Ignoranus of the Moment title.

Entirely lost in the windswept barren waste between his ears is the idea that these workers might not be getting unearned benefit, but that the average worker has been getting undeserved punishment with lowered earnings while the ownership class reaps ever-growing wealth from the equation. It isn't that the prevailing wage needs to excised, it needs to be expanded.

War war war...

Yes, it is a money-maker and the chief american enterprise. It is where Puddinhead wants all and I do mean all of our resources to go. That way It can funnel these billions of dollars to Its friends who are as abysmal as It is. We sit by and pay our taxes as this occurs. We pay for the war.

I am starting a new concept today: Heart like a Wheel.

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A stray observation from having found a copy of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune on a bus stop bench last week, and great news for Minnesota media consumers who like their thinly veiled right wing status quotidian commentary served up with healthy side orders of smarm and smugness-- James "Don't Call Me Jim" Lileks is back after a long exile as the editor of (and most frequently sole contributor to) the Strib-sponsored BuzzMn.com blog site. Lileks, an attempted satirist of the fatuous "Isn't that cute? Isn't that true?" school, can now be found in the Strib every Friday.

Not Doug Grow. Not Eric Black. Not any of the other writers the Strib sloughed a year ago to cut costs. Nope-- Lileks, whose stuff, seriously, a literate dog wouldn't deign to shit on during paper training.

The Star-Tribune was once a world class newspaper. Now, it's mostly just absorbent.

I wrote this to a pal at Livejournal (where I am arrietty42) tonight and it bears repeating, I believe - in part. I wrote this for my dear friend Playgirl.

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Albert Hoffman died today at 102. He took the first hit of acid/LSD25. The Yippies in 1968 (whom I joined after the killings at Kent State in 1969) believed that it could help end the Vietnam War. Here is a British documentary that proves it.