John McCain challenging Barack Obama to go to Iraq is pretty childish. It’s not like a Senator’s meticulously-planned stroll through Baghdad is going to give them an accurate view of what’s going on in Iraq. Here’s McCain’s most well-known trip to the Green Zone, in which little shopping trip needed little more than a bullet-proof vest, “100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships” :

And here’s a photo from McCain’s most recent trip :



If McCain thinks challenging Obama to go to Iraq will teach him something beyond “American troops get annoyed when they get pulled from the field and put on ‘babysit a Sentor’ duty”, then maybe Barack can return the favor and challenge “Maverick” to visit a place where he could learn something. Like a junior college where he can take an Econ 101 class or a temp agency where he can learn what life is like for us who haven’t spent the last three decades in Washington D.C. married to a multi-millionaire or to a bookstore to read about how things are really going in Iraq…

This is funny. As part of the frantic number crunching that Clinton supporters are doing to convince themselves that Hillary might win the nomination, Jerome Armstrong makes this interesting observation :

A curious fact is that, though Clinton and Obama are about tied in the popular vote, it takes about 960 more votes for Clinton to gain a single pledged delegate, as it has for Obama (overall). That is, after nearly all the contests, for every 11790 votes Clinton gets, she’s earned a pledged delegate, and for every 10800 votes that Obama has gotten, he’s earned a pledged delegate.

That’s pretty significant, when you consider that it represents about a 9% hardship for Clinton, or a 9% handicap for Obama, in comparison.

Yes, the candidate who had so much institutional support that she had a 100 delegate lead before any votes were even cast now is apparently losing because she faced a pledged delegate “hardship”. The way this is written makes is seem as if Clinton had to work harder than Obama for her delegates because Obama got a “9% handicap”. This is, of course, complete rubbish. Even if Clinton and Obama were “about tied in the popular vote”, the reason for Obama’s lower vote/delegate ratio is because his campaign is much smarter than Clinton’s and realized that it was foolish to concentrate Super Tuesday states and hope that their campaign’s “inevitability” would be enough to get superdelegates to push them over the top.

Despite Hillary Clinton’s universal name recognition, large network of wealthy donors, and support throughout every level of the Democratic establishment, she lost because her campaign wasn’t as good at Obama’s when it came to one important skill…winning elections. The Clintons can be as dismissive as they want about Obama sweeping up victories in “states that don’t matter”, when it comes to the convention, a delegate is a delegate and Obama has more of them. Since the same is going to be true in November with the Electoral College, I think Democrats will probably be better off with a candidate who understands the rules of the election (regardless of their fairness) before the election.

Little Green Footballs :

Mainstreaming Terrorism to Sell Donuts

I didn’t believe this story when people first started emailing about it; but sure enough, it’s true. Dunkin Donuts, the venerable old fried dough seller, is the latest American firm to casually promote the symbol of Palestinian terrorism and the intifada, the kaffiyeh, via Rachael Ray

Michelle Malkin :

Dunkin Donuts’ spokeswoman Rachel Ray’s clueless sporting of a jihadi chic keffiyeh in a recent DD ad campaign. I’m hoping her hate couture choice was spurred more by ignorance than ideology.

Here’s the photo of Rachel Ray inadvertently supporting terrorists :

Ironic that the side who considers themselves so tough on terrorists would cry like a bunch of babies when the lady from the Food Network wears a scarf she probably bought at Pier 1 Imports.

This whole tempest in a teapot about Obama telling an untrue story about his grandfather is pretty stupid. Nevertheless, it gives Clinton supporters something to latch on to distract them from the fact that their candidate lost the election. Jeralyn at TalkLeft has a “theory” about this whole hubbub :

Barack Obama escaped hot water over his mistaking Auschwitz for Buchenwald. Fair enough. But I have a new theory now — one that’s more a curious observation than a criticism, or perhaps a little of both.

He makes a lot of mistakes about his family history. It’s like he’s retelling stories he’s heard from third parties, including campaign staff who looked the stuff up. Maybe, aside from his grandparents with whom he lived for several years, he didn’t know their side of the family that well — including the great uncle who was one of the first at Buchenwald. In other words, he’s telling stories he’s learned on the campaign trail rather than ones he grew up hearing.

It probably wasn’t his father who mistakenly told him the Kennedy family paid for his travel to the U.S. to study in Hawaii. It probably wasn’t his mother who told him the 1965 March in Selma, AL allowed her to marry his father (he was born in 1961). More likely, I think, campaign researchers and aides came up with it.

That must be it. The most obvious answer has to be that Obama’s campaign staff came up with some lies for him to tell about his family.

Here’s my “theory” : Barack Obama’s family told him stories that turned out to be untrue because grown-ups always exaggerate stories they tell little kids. We all probably believe some stories of questionable truth that our parents and grandparents told us (insert religion joke here), but unlike Barack Obama, you and I don’t have the Clinton campaign and the entire Republican establishment trying to figure out whether or not Uncle Ernie is a liar.

I’m all for clamping down on Big Brother, but this needlessly alarmist post at BoingBoing is the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen since the faux-controversy about the NSA website dropping cookies :

“I was reading an article this morning on the new American Airlines luggage charge (THAT’s gonna go over well), and noticed an aside starting on page 3. Las Vegas is using RFIDs in outgoing luggage now to help move bags more efficiently. After realizing that…um…I had bags that just got back from Vegas about 20 ft. from me, I realized I had to check it out. Oh yeah, there’s a RFID. Freaky. And does the tag mention that? Nope. And it’s not like airports don’t have scanners…”

Don’t we want the airlines to be able to track our luggage? It’s not like you’re getting forced to get a “110 110 110″ tattoo or something. If you don’t want the airlines to track your every move (as if they’d even care), just take off the tag once you get your bag back.

This morning, I was all set to link to a post over at The Carpetbagger Report, noting that Hillary Clinton’s campaign has taken the high road lately and that Obama supporters would be better off chilling out and letting Hillary step aside on her own terms. Then I saw that Clinton compared her cynical and self-serving crusade to get the Florida and Michigan votes counted to the struggles of the civil rights era and I remember why I’ve found her campaign so damned infuriating.

It’s stunning to me that Hillary Clinton supporters would have the audacity to claim that the popular vote is a metric that we should be using to determine who should get the Democratic nomination while at the same time insisting that Obama shouldn’t receive a single vote for Michigan. I’m ambivalent about whether or how the MI and FL delegates should be seated, but if you’re going to hold yourself up as a champion of voting rights and insist that the popular vote is a more legitimate way to gauge voter intent, then it’s pretty craven to chase a strategy whose only purpose is to cut into Obama’s lead with the implicit conclusion that not a single person in Michigan supports Barack OBama.

But, you might argue, Obama chose to take his name off the ballot and therefore his lack of support is just the result of his own choices. Well, if we’re going to follow the rules to the letter and punish candidates for their choices, then it bears repeating that the rules state that Michigan and Florida don’t count and that the Clinton campaign made the choice to agree to the DNC sanctions against these states. If you’re only going to recognize the rules that help Hillary Clinton win, just drop the self-righteous bullshit about your sterling commitment to democracy and be honest enough to admit that you’re only interested in Florida and Michigan because you think Clinton is a better candidate.

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and all of the other Democratic candidates competed under the same rules and Clinton lost. Now she’s trying to work the refs and is trying to change any rules that might keep her from winning. That’s understandable, but when you wrap your attempts to move the goalposts in a veneer of moral superiority and question the values of your opponents (specifically, questioning whether or not Obama supporters believe in voting rights), don’t be surprised if you piss a lot of people off.

So for all the talk about how much work the Obama campaign has ahead of itself trying to court alienated Clinton supporters, it’s worth pointing out the alienation works both ways.

The Queen of Rockabilly Wanda Jackson (who would also belong on a list of things cooler than John McCain).

Also, there’s an interesting discussion of ageism on the Things Younger Than McCain site. While I agree with some of the concerns about McCain’s age, I think it overlooks the real issues. Specifically, that John McCain is a ethically-questionable phony who doesn’t understand average Americans and doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to economics or the war on terror.

We’ve been waiting for a long, long time for the Democrats to grow a pair when it comes to national security. It’s nice to see that Obama’s going to come out swinging :

Not to be outdone, MoveOn has a new ad that makes Obama’s ass-kicking look mild in comparison :



Speaking of things devastating to McCain, did you know his favorite fundie John Hagee said that God let the holocaust happen so that the Jews would move back to Israel?

If John McCain was hoping to use his speech at the Republican convention in September to try to woo working class voters away from Obama, he might have hit a snag. It seems that McCain’s speech (which traditionally happens on the final night of the convention) will be happening at the same time of the NFL season opener between the Superbowl champs NY Giants and the Washington Redskins. Whoops. I wonder how many people are going to want to skip the big game just to hear an old man give a patronizing speech about war?

I know this is a couple of months late, but isn’t the Clinton campaign’s insistence that including the MI and FL delegates is acceptable under DNC rules because the rules could change in committee sorta like arguing that something is constitutional because we can amend the constitution? If she had a self-conscious strategy from day one of going after those delegates in the hopes that she could get those delegates seated, it would be one thing, but every bit of evidence indicates that her campaign’s reliance on FL and MI is just a desperate gamble, a last-minute plan to cling to when it became clear that Obama’s delegate strategy made him the inevitable winner.

In other news, Edwards endorsed Obama today, a story that’s also a month or two late. Endorsing now is like waiting until the bottom of the 9th to bet on a baseball game. I’m glad he did it, but if he was going to wait this long, why not wait another week or two and announce so that his pledged delegates are what pushes Obama over the finish line?

Josh Marshall has a good explanation of why Obama lost West Virginia last night which busts the “only Clinton can win white, working-class voters” myth :

There’s been a lot of talk in this campaign about Barack Obama’s problem with working class white voters or rural voters. But these claims are both inaccurate because they are incomplete. You can look at states like Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and other states and see the different numbers and they are all explained by one basic fact. Obama’s problem isn’t with white working class voters or rural voters. It’s Appalachia. That explains why Obama had a difficult time in Ohio and Pennsylvania and why he’s getting crushed in West Virginia and Kentucky.

If it were just a matter of rural voters or the white working class, the pattern would show up in other regions. But by and large it does not.

In so many words, Pennsylvania and Ohio have big chunks of Appalachia within their borders. But those regions are heavily offset by non-Appalachian sections that are cultural and demographically distinct. West Virginia is 100% Appalachian. If you look at southeastern Ohio or the middle chunk of Pennsylvania, Obama did about the same as he’s doing tonight in West Virginia.

Josh includes this handy map of all the counties where Clinton won by > %65, which neatly corresponds to the Appalachian region of the country :

The unfortunate thing about this map for Clinton is that her biggest strength seems to be in places where Democrats are unlikely to win in November, regardless of how well she does in the primaries. Compare that map to the electoral breakdown of the last two presidential elections :



The Clinton campaign may want to fool itself into thinking wins this week and next are indicative of a weakness on Obama’s side, but her heavy support in the Appalachian region makes it clear that back-to-back wins in WV and KY are simply scheduling flukes, like Obama’s post Super Tuesday winning streak. Now if Clinton can win big in some of those remaining greyed-out states (OR, MT, SD), then she’ll have something to really brag about.

- I gave away my couch on Craigslist to someone with a Gmail address. Now that she’s in my contacts, I can see every time she’s online. Kinda creepy, but according to her status message, “Son of Rambow” was really good. Thanks, girl who has my old couch.

- The story of the teacher who was fired after being “accused of wizardry” might be my favorite since “whistle ass”.

- As much as I love the video of Bill O’Reilly throwing a temper tantrum on the set of his old show, I think I like this animated gif even more.

It’s like an amuse bouche of petulance.

- I went to M-W.com to find a word to use for the title of this post and setttled on this because I liked the example sentence :

the exhibit was a hodgepodge of mediocre art, bad art, and really bad art

I think I’ve been to that exhibit.

- This week and next would be good opportunities for Clinton to drop out of the race on a high note rather than spend the next month dragging her feet looking like a delusional, lame duck candidate who nobody thinks can win. Using her WV or KY victory speeches to graciously bow out would be better for everyone involved.

- I was all set to write a long blog post about potential VP picks, but Chris Bowers’ post about Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius pretty much sums up what I’ve been thinking. For the VP pick, I don’t see Obama picking someone like Sen. Webb who would be a tacit admission by the campaign that he’s lacking foreign policy credentials. I think he’d be better off picking someone who (a) is from a red state that isn’t in the deep south, (b) has executive experience, (c) who he’s comfortable with, and (d) can help unite the party. A female governor from Kansas who endorsed him would satisfy those criteria well. I think Govs. Tim Kaine and Brad Henry would also be interesting picks, though most red staters are going to have baggage that would piss off the base.

- I’m sure those pesky Catholics were just taking that whole “great whore” thing out of context. Nice to see that the Catholic League isn’t going to let a little thing like denigrating their entire religion get in the way of electing a Republican.

- Speaking of Sebelius, what the hell is Jerome Armstrong talking about here?

Plus, there’s something there that the media will binge over the couch– Obama choosing a older white woman from Kansas, where his now deceased mother is from originally.

I know Jerome can’t stand Obama, but the implication that choosing a female running mate from Kansas is somehow indicative of an Oedipus complex is just creepy. Ewww…

Hillary Clinton’s devotion to the oil company handout disguised as tax relief that she stole from McCain is just sad. The more she pushes the point, the more she looks like a shameless panderer and makes Obama, by contrast, look like someone willing to make the right choice even when it’s politically unpopular.