Remember the "Glamour Don'ts"?

Oh, anonymous politician, what were you thinking?

(From a post at the Glamour-Do Princess Sparkle Pony's House. Go see what Condi Rice has gone and done to herself. Extreme Makeover? You decide.)

You Be The Judge

Following are quotes from the comments at the rightwing website Little Green Footballs and from the comments at the leftwing Hillary Clinton supporting Taylor Marsh.

You, dear reader, get to try to see if you can guess from which site each quote originated.


1. When Obama said in one of his speeches that HE would heal America's broken soul, is when I really had enough of his BS. That is not the presidents job! That's a faith healers job. Protecting the Constitution is the presidents job. I don't want Obama mesing with my American soul!

2. The ObamaMessiah is headed off to a synagogue in Florida -- to woo the wary...

3. BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA: YOU ARE GETTING ON OUR NERVES. WE ARE SICK AND TIRED OF HEARING THE REGAL 1ST PERSON PLURAL ROLL OFF YOUR ARROGANT TONGUE. WE DON'T LIKE IT


4. The O'ccult Master will not allow defection in the msm.
The O'ccult Master will send out memo's and re-statements.
Thus say the O'ccult Master of the humming loons of America.
Humm the O'ccult tune or be declared off key.

5. Obama is a nasty piece of work.

6. How terribly sad that so many people have thrown their principles out the window to support a slacker like him

7. .....Thats when POTUS Obama starts Sharia Conversion Jan 21st

8. I recall reading a spin-off link about how the MSM was finally taking the ObamaMessiah to task -- that was months ago...and I think the critical, analytical articles are few and far between (they are flukes) -- the critical pieces drowned out in a vast sea of non-stop praise and worshipful awe


9. If the Dem. Convention becomes a bloodbath, thats best of all!

10. THE FACTS ARE CLEAR, WE WHITE VOTERS WILL NEVER VOTE FOR DUMBO EARS!

11. Better four more years of Republican misrule than the unAmerican BO and his passel of thugs dirtying up our country.


Prizes will be awarded. Do your best!

UPDATE: The answers that are Little Green Footballs are in green, natch. The answers from Taylor Marsh are in red, because that's the way that website's readers hope to turn the country. Goodluck with that formerly progressive people who valued a woman's right to choose and who thought torture was bad. Your new candidate, McCain, is really going to take some getting used to for you.

Good Sportsmanship is Dead.

I'm listening to Clinton supporters on Face the Nation right now swearing that Hillary Clinton has played by the rules throughout this campaign. Excuse me? Clinton has tried from Nevada on, to try to change the rules as long as that benefits her. Obama did the right thing in Michigan by not putting his name on the ballot. Mandy Grunewald, Clinton's media advisor, just said "Too bad, so sad, that was his choice". And then she stuck her tongue out. Okay, I kid, those were not her exact words, but the effect was the same.

These people spin like republicans.

Please, Hillary. Stop. You are killing us.

The President Speaks

I watched the president's press conference yesterday. I must say the whole of it made me about as angry as I would have expected it to. His main thrust was that everything that's wrong today is the fault of Congress. He asserted in various ways that he's been unable to get several handy dandy bills through for about the last eighteen months or so. Now, by my math that means that he couldn't even get his own republican congress to help him out from November of 2006 to January of 2007, but I don't think he and I do math the same way.

Watching him, I was struck by how small his thinking is. Alternative energy is only nu-cu-lar and ethanol. Drilling in ANWR will solve our dependency on foreign oil and so on. Had John Kerry been elected we'd be nearly three and a half years into our "Apollo Program" for alternative fuel sources. One would hope these would be more than just those choices that benefit Monsanto, ADM and Cargill as well as GE and ConEd.

So in the midst of all his blather, I didn't pay much attention to the one sentence that became the news shows' soundbite. The President of the United States of America said to us "I firmly believe that, you know, if there was a magic wand to wave, I'd be waving it, of course.I've repeatedly submitted proposals to help address these problems, yet time after time Congress chose to block them."

Here's the funny thing. He has been president for over seven years. He could have done something. But let's recall that what was done in 2005 was to give massive tax breaks to the oil companies and other energy firms. We stopped charging royalties to oil companies who take crude from public land. Essentially, we are allowing oil companies to take from the commons for free. And each quarter these companies are setting record profits.

And, what did George W. Bush say in 2005 when he wanted to pass that wonderful energy bill that would bring down the price of gas, which then had soared to a shocking $2.28 a gallon? He said:

"I wish I could simply wave a magic wand and lower gas prices tomorrow," Bush told the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. "But we must act now to address the fundamental problem. Our supply of energy is not growing fast enough to meet the demands of our growing economy."

Three years ago he could have waved that magic wand to improve our mass transit infrastructure (my city is trying to add light rail-a forward looking idea that cons hate), could have extended tax credits to buyers of hybrids rather than Hummers, could have encouraged our auto companies to improve fleet efficiency. Rather, the news this morning in Wisconsin is that GM is laying off 750 people at the Janesville SUV plant. Yeah, who could have seen that coming?

And now, McCain and Clinton and others say that we should have a tax holiday for the summer to reduce the price of our gas by eighteen cents a gallon. Think about that: we give the raw product away, we've given billions in tax incentives to the oil companies and now as an answer, some would like us to forgo our own revenue - money that goes to US citizens for roads and infrastructure improvements, because oil companies are overcharging us? Insane.

Is now a good time to remind everyone that had we kept Jimmy Carter's CAFE standards in place we wouldn't need foreign oil?

Calling Bullshit on Bitter

By now you've heard:

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not."

"And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

And though he's responded and though this has been a theme of Barack's: the divisive anger bitterness and fear that the republicans spoon out like fake potatoes in the school lunch line; Hillary has gone to full pearl clutching mode over Barack Obama's 'elitism'.

Bullshit, Ms. Wellesley College. Can she get more republican than she has over the last few weeks? How are you going to run against John McCain by becoming John McCain? Rumors are that she's already calling Bill a 'cunt'. Okay, I made that up just to keep my cuss meter rating high. But really.

Here's your response to Obama's statement:

For the last eight years we've been given a steady diet of fear, fear, fear. And when people are afraid they grab for the things that make them feel safe. For some that is religion, for some that is guns. I say get rid of the fear, keep the religion and yes, keep the guns. But this country divided against itself, divided against those who look different or worship different cannot stand.

Hillary's campaign insinuates something about Obama

As you've no doubt heard by now, Clinton campaign staffers released this photo to the Drudge report, trying to create an insinuation of something sinister in Obama's background.


I find it particularly disingenuous of the Clinton campaign. It seems obvious to me that picture is taken completely out of context.


After all, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Hillary's been to a wedding shower or two in her day.

Update: I added the link for the boys who haven't had to play games at bridal showers. Look here.

What do we want? The C-Word! When do we want it?meh.

Change has become so overwrought that pundits are now saying the "C-word" rather than have to force their fingers to type out the h-a-n-g-e. But look, there's fresh change right there because only in 2007 or so did the C-word mean "cunt". Looks like we've got to come up with something else to call Ann Coulter. She has so owned the term, though. It'll be hard to make the, er, change.

Now that the word is entirely meaningless, I'd like to harken back to the halcyon days of maybe July to remind ourselves that when we mean change we can be talking about a new direction for the Iraq occupation (that direction being home), or for the economy (trickled on long enough. T'aint working.) We could even pin our hopes on John Edwards and think that change could mean a return to populism, casting out this mystifying elitism that has struck us dumb. Overarching these specifics, change to me means that we are sick and tired of the day to day acceptance of lyin', thievin' politicians.

And folks, that includes parsing. We all remember Bill Clinton's famous instance- 'it depends on what your definition of 'is' is'- We are suffering through the after-effects of the worst case in history: the link between Saddam and Al Qaida. Between Saddam and 9/11. Between Saddam and terrorism. John Edwards created a video of some world-class parsing by Hillary Clinton in the debates. Yesterday I watched the Willard M. Romney clip where he says he has no lobbyists in his campaign. He very carefully states to the reporter that there are no lobbyists running his campaign. No lobbyists attend senior strategy meetings. Then the reporter asks about a specific lobbyist and Willard says that guy ain't being paid. So far so good for the new W. Technically not lying. Probably acceptable to the mormon god, I don't know, I never took those Latter Day Saints up on the offer for the free book. But then, right after technically not lying to the reporter, the new DubbaYoo says "I don't have any lobbyists at my elbow that are arguing for one industry or another industry". Bzzzzzt. Ron Kaufman is a lobbyist. Paid or unpaid, he is frequently with Romney on the campaign trail. How do I know this? Easy, mere seconds prior Romney admits as much.

The C-word. Change. Look, even if the words are technically true thanks to careful placement of modifiers if the intent is to deceive, it is a lie.

How different would Hillary be from what we've got?

One of the reasons I like Barack Obama is that the rest of the world loves him. There will be so much for the next democratic president to undo* that regaining the admiration for the United States by the rest of the world will be no easy task, but one that Obama already has a head start on.

Further, Obama has distanced himself from Hillary Clinton on foreign policy matters. In turn it seems Hillary hasn't really distanced herself from the current Bush Administration standard operating procedure. From John Nichols column:

In the race for the Democratic nomination for president, the two frontrunners are lining up on opposite sides of the question of whether foreign policy should be conducted in public or behind the tattered curtain of corruption that has given us unnecessary wars in Vietnam and Iraq, U.S.-sponsored coups from Iran to Chile, trade policies designed to serve multinational corporations and a seeming inability to respond to the crisis that is Darfur.

Hillary Clinton, the candidate of all that is and will be, wants there to be no doubt that she is in the Kissinger camp.

The New York senator's campaign is attacking her chief rival, Illinois Senator Barack Obama, for daring to suggest that, he would personally meet with foreign leaders who do not always march in lockstep with the U.S. government.

In Monday's night's YouTube debate, candidates were asked it they would be willing to meet "with leaders of Syria, Iran, Venezuela during their first term," Obama immediately responded that, yes, he would be willing to do so. He explained that "the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them -- which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration -- is ridiculous."

Clinton disagreed in the debate and now her camp is declaring that, "There is a clear difference between the two approaches these candidates are taking: Senator Obama has committed to presidential-level meetings with some of the world's worst dictators without precondition during his first year in office."

Leaving aside the fact that Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, a popularly elected leader, is not one of the "world's worst dictators," it is particularly galling that Clinton -- in her rush to trash Obama -- is contradicting her own declaration in an April debate that, "I think it is a terrible mistake for our president to say he will not talk with bad people."

*Not saying the next president will be a democrat. Maybe the president after that. I should really be more optimistic.