It’s Super Duper Tuesday, with whipped cream and a cherry on top.
I don’t know who is going to win on the Democratic side, though it appears that the sick old man, John McCain, will win on the Republican side (I’m still pulling for Chuch Norris’s guy).
Too many polls, too many states, I can’t get a picture of what is likely to happen, or how undecideds will break.
Electoral-Vote.com/ is a good place to start if you want to handicap the races.
Hillary was at an event at the Yale Child Study Center, where she volunteered in law school, and she teared up when her former boss there, Penn Rhodeen, said how proud he was of her.
This is not a story. This should not be a story. Public figures tear up all the time.
Bill Clinton teared up a number of times, his doing so while listening to PMaya Angelou’s poetry comes to mind, Poppy Bush did so at the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, Reagan did every time a boyscout said the pledge of allegiance.
This is, nor should it be a big deal, though doubtless the Sunday gasbags will talk about nothing else..
Well, I came across a blog posting from the marvelously named “Horse’s Ass” blog (and the story behind that name is a hoot) has suggested that Rudy Giuliani is the “Max Bialystock of Politics”.
If you’ve never seen Mel Brooks’ movie, The Producers, or the subsequent musical, you need to understand that Max Bialystock is an unsuccessful Broadway producer who realizes that he can make money by selling a few thousand percent of a production, and when it fails, no one will expect their money back.
So he chooses the wrong director, the wrong lead, the wrong play (Springtime for Hitler), and, of course, it turns out to be a smash hit, and his deception is revealed.
David “Goldy” Goldstein posits that Rudolph Giuliani did the same thing.
But could Giuliani and his high-paid strategists really have been that stupid? Or, is it possible that the Florida Strategy has actually worked exactly as planned?
While the rest of the presidential field were trudging through the snows of Iowa and New Hampshire, trading rhinoviruses with voters in diners and VFW halls throughout the heartland, Giuliani and his team were leisurely soaking up the rays in sunny Florida, making a few appearances, playing a little golf, and all the while laying claim to the Sunshine State’s winner-take-all primary. While Romney, McCain and Huckabee were emptying their campaign coffers duking it out in Nevada and Michigan and South Carolina, Giuliani apparently spent his $50 million-plus campaign war chest on what…? Sunscreen and greens fees? Two percent of the vote, and a single national delegate? According to media reports the Giuliani campaign is so broke his top staffers have foregone their salaries, raising questions of how he could have spent so much money for such poor results? But perhaps the better question might be, did he actually spend the money at all?
Think about it. Giuliani may be arrogant and vindictive and ethically challenged, but nobody’s ever accused the man of being stupid, so perhaps he and his advisers knew all along that he didn’t stand a chance on the national stage once Americans really got to know him. But just because he couldn’t win the White House didn’t mean he couldn’t make a little scratch on the side, and taking a lesson from Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom in Mel Brooks’ legendary The Producers, perhaps Giuliani realized he could make a helluva lot more money from a presidential flop than he ever could from a respectable run?
Go read the whole thing, it’s a hoot.
No clue as to what it means, but he won, and it’s likely that he will get almost all of Maine’s delegates.
Romney 68%, McCain 21%, Paul 19%, Huckabee 6%, and Ronald Reagan’s festering corpse 2%*.
Of note is the fact that both Senators Collins and Snowe endorsed McCain.
As I said, I don’t know what the heck it means.
*OK, that was undecided.
When Jake Tapper ran a story suggesting that Bill Clinton suggested that slowing the economy of the developed nations would have to slow their economies to deal with global warming, when he was actually showing that such a strategy would not work.
Here is Bill Clinton’s quote:
“And maybe America, and Europe, and Japan, and Canada — the rich counties — would say, ‘OK, we just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions ’cause we have to save the planet for our grandchildren.’ We could do that.
But if we did that, you know as well as I do, China and India and Indonesia and Vietnam and Mexico and Brazil and the Ukraine, and all the other countries will never agree to stay poor to save the planet for our grandchildren. The only way we can do this is if we get back in the world’s fight against global warming and prove it is good economics that we will create more jobs to build a sustainable economy that saves the planet for our children and grandchildren. It is the only way it will work.”
(emphasis mine)
But Jake Tapper reported it thusly:
In a long, and interesting speech, he characterized what the U.S. and other industrialized nations need to do to combat global warming this way: “We just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions ’cause we have to save the planet for our grandchildren.”
At a time that the nation is worried about a recession is that really the characterization his wife would want him making? “Slow down our economy”?
I don’t really think there’s much debate that, at least initially, a full commitment to reduce greenhouse gases would slow down the economy….So was this a moment of candor?
Remarkably hacktacular. In fact, it was so hacktacular that right wing blogs, such as The Corner on National Review Online, and Hot Air are criticizing Jake Tapper for being unfair to Bill Clinton.
When you have right wingers complaining that you are unfair to Bill Clinton, it is clear that you have jumped the shark.
Well, Krugman nails it again.
First, he cites a study that predicts that, a plan without mandates would cost $4,400 per newly insured person, and one with mandates would cost only $2,700, because the young and healthy will take their chances, leaving only those already needing medical treatment on the plan.
His summation nails it:
But while it’s easy to see how the Clinton plan could end up being eviscerated, it’s hard to see how the hole in the Obama plan can be repaired. Why? Because Mr. Obama’s campaigning on the health care issue has sabotaged his own prospects.
You see, the Obama campaign has demonized the idea of mandates — most recently in a scare-tactics mailer sent to voters that bears a striking resemblance to the “Harry and Louise” ads run by the insurance lobby in 1993, ads that helped undermine our last chance at getting universal health care.
If Mr. Obama gets to the White House and tries to achieve universal coverage, he’ll find that it can’t be done without mandates — but if he tries to institute mandates, the enemies of reform will use his own words against him.
If you combine the economic analysis with these political realities, here’s what I think it says: If Mrs. Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, there is some chance — nobody knows how big — that we’ll get universal health care in the next administration. If Mr. Obama gets the nomination, it just won’t happen.
Got your back, Doc.
Well, in the annals of right wing memes embraced by Obama, I come across this, care of Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein.
Here is the Obama ad:
Look familiar?
Just to jog your memory, here is the 1993 Harry and Louise ad:
Yep, it’s the same damn thing.
So we have his health plan, which eschews mandates, which means that adverse selection will make it a failure, and he’s campaigning in a way that will provide ammunition to enemies of healthcare reform.
This is crap. When people talk about scorched earth campaigning, there is nothing more scorched earth, or sodden earth in the case of Hurricane Katrina, than the Republican side on all of this.
We need the Republicans out of the white house, and increasingly it looks like Obama wants to be another Republican.
One of the rules of OP/ED bloviating is that if you disagree with another contributor to the editorial page, you never mention them directly.
Calling them out by name is unheard of.
Well, David S. Broder, the sultan of intellect free conventional inside-the-beltway thinking, just broke that rule, and calls out the bow-tied one.
Unelected conservative ideologues — such as Rush Limbaugh and George F. Will— can mutter in frustration, but Republican politicians recognize what was written here as long ago as last Dec. 2: “If the Republican Party really wanted to hold on to the White House in 2009 . . . it would grit its teeth, swallow its doubts and nominate a ticket of John McCain for president and Mike Huckabee for vice president — and president-in-waiting.”
Matthew Yglesias makes much of this, but I disagree.
This is not a sudden abrogation of the rules. Instead it is a conflict between two rules:
In critiquing John McCain, George Will simply joined the Ancient, Hermetic, and Occult Order of the Shrill, and you are supposed to call out the “shrill” ones by name.
TPM has a report that Romney has not bought any air time in the Feb 5 states, though there are some reports that they are starting to do so now.
If true, Romney has given up, and I don’t think that Huckabee can take his place,
Simply put, government under conservatives does not work, as shown with the voting problems.
Even after what happened in 2000, it did not get fixed.
The generally repulsive Joe Scarborough said that, “McCain’s Platform Is ‘Less Jobs And More Wars’.”
Props to Joe. Is Lori still dead?
Yep, Arlo Guthrie has endorsed Paul, a man who thinks the only thing that government should do is protect private property.
That sound you hear is Woody spinning in his grave.
If anyone out there knows of a source, or sources, of the metaphysical nutrient Schadenfreude sufficient to replace the Rudy clown show, please tell me.
Charlie Pierce on Altercation:
As I was watching the debate the other night — the Democratic one where Anderson Cooper came on afterwards and got to pretend to be Angelo Dundee — I was struck by Senator Obama’s resolute assertion that he was the candidate that can come to Washington and work with “independents and Republicans” to get things done. (One of his new ads has him sitting next to Dick Lugar, a Republican senator only slightly more relevant today than is Arthur Vandenberg.) I was struck even harder by it as I watched the Democratic Senate go supine, selling out poor Chris Dodd and the Constitution, and concocting retroactive alibis for the Telecom giants in a week where we finally got the empirical count of prewar Iraq lies. Here’s my deal with His Barackosity. Take the list of Republican congresscritters, House and Senate. Make me a list of 10 of them with whom you think you can work to achieve anything close to the progressive goals you have said you want to achieve. Give me an honest run, and I guarantee you that you can’t do it. You may get “something done” but it’s not going to have anything to do with anything resembling the values of the party you seek to represent. This is a party that has to be forcibly disenthralled from its lunatic base.
Let’s make it clear, Obama has a fairly unique background, and he’s a bright guy, he was the head of the bleeding Harvard Law Review.
He has been dazzling people for years to convince them to get his way, and if someone does not hate you with a blinding white hot passion, it frequently works.
Republicans live on that level of hate.
They hated Bill and Hillary, etc. too.
Large margin for Clinton, about 4% for McCain.
McCain winning depresses me.
It’s not about his ability to win the election, he’s a sick old man who wants eternal war, it’s that the Heathers known as the Washington press corps won.
Yes, the good Reverend Gastric Bypass (Huckabee), is criticizing Captain Goodhair (Romney) because he took the skin off his chicken at a KFC before eating it.
While I agree that the skin is the best part, this is silly.
Dumbasses.
No clue as to what this means. The prosecutor got his bail revoked.
He’s accused of, “conspiracy, influence peddling and demanding kickbacks from companies seeking Illinois state business”.
Whether fair or not, we will hear a lot of him in the next few days.
Read all 4 articles. Even if you are a big Obama supporter, they ware well worth reading.
First, as always is Paul Krugman, who teaches an important lesson, don’t pick a useless fight with someone who buys ink by the truckload. He looks at Bill Clinton’s election of 1992, and he finds the message of Barack Obama to be a classic example of people who neither know, or understand, their history.
He makes the point, an accurate one, that Clinton ran as an agent of change and an outsider from Washington, and notes that the partisanship of that era was the result of, an “all out assault from conservatives determined to use any means at hand to discredit a Democratic president”.
He makes the point that the deliberate vagueness of Clinton in his 1992 campaign was a mistake, which, “left the business of producing an actual plan until after the election”.
His warning is that, “Otherwise, even if a Democrat wins the general election, it will be 1992 all over again.”
He’s right.
Then, on Open Left, we have a number of very good critiques of Obama and his (mis)understanding of history.
First up, Paul Rosenberg explaining why the history is wrong.
In the wake of the disasterous Bush presidency there are two possible responses. One is that, just like the last time conservatives controlled the country–1920-1932–they are destroying the country. The second is that both sides are to blame. They’re both fighting, instead of solving the problems we face. Obama represents the second response, and he is, quite simply, utterly, totally and dangerously wrong. Whatever his intentions may be, action based on this worldview cannot fundamentally reverse the damage that movement conservatism has done to our country. Because of the fierceness of movement conservative opposition, his worldview demands that we change things only modestly in the grand scheme of things.
Then we have Rosenberg (again, it’s a 2-fer) explaining why it’s wrong through rhetorical analysis. He takes a typical Obama quote, “….The believer condemns the non-believer as immoral, and the non-believer chides the believer as intolerant”, and explains a very simple point: what if someone is actually intolerant? What if one side is simply wrong, and the other is right?
Some are lying. And some are telling the truth.
And when Obama condemns both equally, as equally destructive?
That’s a lie, too. However rhetorically neat it may be.
He’s arguing, effectively to my mind, that in embracing the idea that the problem is not the problem, but that the dispute is the problem, he is enabling those who would be the least moral and least tolerant and least honest amongst us.
Chris Bowers looks at Obama too, and it’s not pretty:
Second, Obama puts forth one of his central arguments that change has not happened because we are bitterly divided:
[about 5:10 in] We are looking to fundamentally change the status quo in Washington. It’s a status quo that extends beyond any particular party. And right now, that status quo is fighting back with everything it’s got, with the same old tactics that divide and district us from solving the problems that people face, whether those problems are health care that folks cannot afford or mortgage they can not pay.(…)
[about 6:40 in] We are up against decades of bitter partisanship that cause politicians to demonize their opponents instead of coming together to make college affordable or energy cleaner.
The lack of affordable health care, the ongoing mortgage crisis, the lack of renewable energy, and the cost of college were caused by bitter partisanship? That just doesn’t make any sense to me. The failure to pass progressive solutions on all of those areas of policy might be due to partisanship, but it is due to Republicans in the Senate and the White House staunchly opposing solutions to all of these problems. Unless one believes that Republicans oppose solutions on these issues simply out of spite and resentment from the vicious attacks we Democrats have sent their way, I have a difficult time seeing how partisanship that goes beyond one party is responsible for the lack of positive legislation on these issues.
She has two children, and we’ve already had instances of what can only be called deranged behavior, such as her stalking of the Graeme Frost family.
Well, now she is saying that she is claiming that John McCain is an agent of George Soros. (H/T Whisky Fire for the catch)
I read Whiskey Fire, and I was amused, and then I read her article, and I was frightened.
Not of George Soros, as was her intent, and not of her wit or intellect, which honestly does not impress me.
I was frightened that in a few years, she would snap, and we would see another one of those stories where the police break down the door, and find that she has drowned her children in the bathtub.
It’s probably not fair, after all, my writing is not indicative of sanity, but I just get this sense that we’re going to read this story in the paper.
Anyone know of a way to help?
I’m sorry, but going to CPS based on my gut, no matter how ample, is just wrong, particularly considering how often my predictions are wrong.
But it’s like watching a slow motion train wreck.