Month: May 2008

She has a slightly tin-ear for politics, but I really like Michelle Obama. I don’t expect her to get a free ride in the campaign but I think efforts to demonize her will ultimately be helpful to the Obama campaign. She simply isn’t unlikeable. And no one likes someone that picks on a nice lady.

Wow, I wanted to post this earlier this week…but it’s been way too busy around here!  
I know I promised to post new pictures of my works in progress last time, so here they are.  I finished the body of my sweater late last week, did a 3-needle bindoff to sew the shoulders together, and now I’m on row 37 of the 82 rows needed for the hood.  

After I finish the hood, I just need to run an applied i-cord up the front edges, put in the zipper, and sew the sleeves on.  Think I can do that in the next 2 weeks, considering I’ve never done the i-cord thing before?

I also have a pair of socks for CBtY that are almost done (I just need to do 2 or 3 more rows of ribbing at the top), but I forgot to take pictures of them.

Instead, I have pictures of my yummy Blue Moon Fiber Arts sock yarn that I got at MD Sheep and Wool:

I think the first socks I make from this stuff are going to use that bright red/pink yarn (the color is called Lovers Leap, and as soon as I saw it I knew it was perfect for CBtE), and I’m going to use the stitch pattern from these Froot Loop socks, with modifications to fit CBtE’s foot.  

Yes, he really likes those colors…  🙂

I find it telling that John McCain is now declaring himself against Telecom immunity. I know, I know, he is really not against it. All he wants is an apology from the telecoms and then he is for immunity. But the fact of the matter is that McCain has already voted for immunity and is on the record saying it is ‘disgraceful’ that immunity didn’t pass. So for him to come out now and say that he is against immunity is a clear sign that immunity is not polling well among the libertarian wing of the party. And with Bob Barr gearing up to run on government abuse of our privacy rights, McCain stands to lose significant support in some critical states. I think there is a good chance that Barr will pick up double digits in a few states. Idaho comes to mind.

First off, I’ve updated my earlier post on contact info for the Democratic leadership, “We Can Call Them” with new email addys and fax numbers and website links provided courtesy of our members. Take a bow all who collected and provided that information, you know who you are.

Second, a big shout out to John Aravois of Americablog for calling for Clinton to quit, and for the Dem Leadership to give her a push if she won’t do it voluntarily. I’ve had my run-ins with John in the past, but I am very proud of the position he has taken on this RFK assassination controversy.

Unfortunately, I’ve yet to see Atrios or Jane Hamsher or Digby or Josh Marshall (though at least he posted the video of Clinton’s remarks) weigh in on this controversy. I think at the very least they ought to take some kind of position.

Just my insignificant opinion, but is neutrality a virtue at this point? Maybe they’re all away for the weekend, and will post something eventually, but this is a significant event in the campaign. Why the silence? Atrios big post this morning is about mass transit, for chrissakes? (ps. Duncan, these are my views and not Booman’s so don’t blame him if I riled your feathers).

(cont.)

Update [2008-5-24 13:41:7 by Steven D]: Atrios has now commented on the Hillary’s RFK assassination controversy. He doesn’t think it’s that big a deal. Go read it if you wish.
Third, if you’re a Clinton delegate (pledged or super) and a person of color, or married to a person of color, or have a grandchild who is a person of color, do you really want Hillary Clinton as your candidate after this? Seriously, do you? I recommend you inform her that for “personal reasons” you can no longer support her campaign. And I’d make it real clear what those personal reasons are. I imagine it’s been bad enough for you watching her march around declaring herself the champion of poor, hard working class WHITE people over the last 2 months, but opening up the Pandora’s box of assassination talk ought to be the last insult to your integrity you should have to take from her.

Finally, a compendium (off the top of my head) for the Clinton camp’s reasons why she should be President.

She’s a fighter

She’s more experienced

She’s passed the commander-in-chief test

She’s inevitable

She has more name recognition

She’s got Bill to be her co-president

She’s got more money (well she used to have more money)

She’s running an historic campaign

She’s ready to answer the phone at 3 am

The media is against her

She’s winning the important states

She’s a shot and a beer kind of gal

She knows how to shoot a gun

She’s the only one who’s been vetted

She’s more electable

Obama’s support is only among out of touch liberal elitists and blacks

She’s for hard working class white people

She’ll obliterate Iran

She likes John McCain (okay, that’s not really a reason, but she has said he’s more prepared than Obama to be president)

She can handle the heat in the kitchen

Obama has a crazy pastor

Something could still happen to Obama to throw the nomination to her, something like what happened to RFK in June, 1968

I’m sure I forgot a few, but notice the pattern? Its all I’m the greatest, bestest candidate in the whole world, or Obama’s a stinking dead fish who should be thrown away in the trash ASAP. Not much else. Not much that’s very inspiring, or offers a vision of a new politics. Long on self promotion and short on leadership.

And that doesn’t exactly make me want to see her get within a thousand miles of the White House. Again, just my humble opinion.

Anyone else not enjoying the campaign anymore?

Welcome back.

This week we will be starting an entirely new project, but first some old business.  Seen in the photo directly below is our last project in a plein air style frame.  I was able to buy it for $14.99 at a craft store!  Such a deal.  Usually I have to go order from pleinairframes.com to get better frames but once in a while I get lucky.  It actually has a silvery finish that may not come through in the photo.  I think that it suits the painting well.

On to the new painting.  I wasn’t ready to leave the subject of Victorian houses and will be painting from the photo seen directly below.  This time around I am using my own photo, taken in Cape May, New Jersey when I was there just a few days ago.  Cape May is the promised land of Victorian structures, having more than 600 in a square mile.  It is well worth a visit.

I will be doing this piece in my usual acrylics in an 8×10 format.

I started with a dark underpainting to cover lines that were on the canvas from an earlier Grand Canyon piece seen here a few cycles back.  It was completed on another canvas while this one collected dust.  It will finally prove useful here.  On the brownish background I painted the outline in a pink color, only because that shade was handy and would show well against the brown.  The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

That’s about it for now. I’ll see you next week with more progress on this piece. As always, feel free to add photos of your own work in the comments section below.

The House and Senate have been unwilling to exercise one of their most important responsibilities, which suggests they may be looking at a different part of the dictionary than the rest of us.

For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.

Last year Kung Fu Monkey produced one of the great political analyses of our time in his essay on shamelessness.  Among other points he wrote “[y]ou reveal a man’s corrupt, or lying, or incompetent, and what does he do? He resigns….Public shame has up to now been the silver bullet of American political life.”  Unfortunately our current leaders appear immune to such pressure, and the brazenness may have leaked into the rank and file as well.  It may in fact be another reason why Republicans are in such trouble this time around.  Their policies are very unpopular, but consider the climate for scandals as well: Democrats – Mark Dann, Eliot Spitzer – resigned, while Republicans – Larry Craig, David Vitter, Vito Fossella – are all still proudly serving.  Public opinion has turned against them and disaster looms for their party, but they stubbornly remain in office.  People notice such things.

In the end such chutzpah is for voters of Idaho, Louisiana and New York to pass judgment on.  All of us, though, should be concerned about the White House openly defying what should be a coequal branch of government.  The most galling recent move was in its fight with the House Judiciary Committee.  The HJC is trying to force the testimony of Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten; Congress wants a judge to compel it.  Administration attorneys argue that such questions should not be resolved in court.  They say Congress could force the President’s hand with blocked appointments or withheld funding of Executive branch agencies, among other tactics.  Conflicts have traditionally been resolved with just such give and take.  The lawyers essentially said, “you dummies, don’t waste your time pursuing this in court.  You have all the tools you need and could have used them all along.”  And of course they are right.  We now have the spectacle of the executive branch telling the legislative how it is supposed to work.  Even more remarkably, Congress knows as much and used such tactics less than a year ago to get the Vice President to back down on one of his more outrageous claims.

Congress could also look into a new memorandum signed by the President that would replace the “Sensitive but Unclassified” information category with “Controlled Unclassified Information.”  It looks like another situation where Congress could demand some answers or threaten consequences in short order.  The key change appears to be introducing the word “Controlled”, because the Post quotes the National Archives and Records Administration as saying controlling information “may inform” its response to FOIA requests.  Given the track record of the last few years I don’t think there is any “may” about it, but we need to start thinking ahead, too.  Changes being made now – even in a lame duck period when everyone is paying attention to election year politicking – can have profound effects long after the next President takes office.  If this change goes through, the Archives could flatly refuse valid requests by a claim that the information needs to be controlled.  It might not withstand court scrutiny, but that would take a long time to wind through the system.  While it did so we would presumably have other refusals.  And of course it might be upheld, which means that much less transparency from government.  It would be much better to have it challenged by Congress before it ever gets the chance to start down that road.

The most disturbing abdication of responsibility was outlined in Radar Magazine by Christopher Ketcham.  His 5,000 word investigation “The Last Roundup” describes a program centered around a previously-unknown government database called Main Core.  Ostensibly created to facilitate government function in the event of a catastrophic attack, it now is a system swelled with details on over eight million Americans.  As seems to be the pattern the administration prefers to have this questionably legal program quietly working in the background and not used in any way that might prompt a challenge.  They understand that the longer they are able to assert new powers, the stronger their case will be if they ever need to defend it.  Unless Congress gets involved we should expect this latest piece of our burgeoning surveillance state to become permanent.  Bruce Fein, a former Reagan administration Justice Department official, says in the article, “[i]t’s really up to Congress to put these things to rest, and Congress has not done so.”  And so we continue to wait for its concept of oversight to move from “an omission or error due to carelessness” to “watchful care.”

{Originally posted at Senate Guru.}

As I noted in my wrap-up of the OR-Sen Democratic primary, Speaker Jeff Merkley and the Democrats have the grassroots, the issues, and the momentum.  All Republican Gordon Smith has going for him is a campaign bankroll just shy of $5 million.

Smith is unquestionably vulnerable.  With enough resources, Merkley will be able to cut through Smith’s spin and deliver the facts of Smith’s record to the voters of Oregon.  But, of course, he’ll need the support of people throughout the grassroots and the netroots.

To that end, I have added Merkley to the Expand the Map! ActBlue page and am announcing the “Twenty Twenties for Jeff Merkley” effort.  Basically, I’m pleading with twenty of you to contribute at least twenty dollars via the Expand the Map! ActBlue page toward helping Jeff Merkley oust Gordon Smith.  Can twenty of you spare twenty bucks to bounce a bum like Republican Gordon Smith from the hallowed halls of the U.S. Senate?

I think we can get twenty twenties in by the end of Memorial Day weekend.  Please contribute if you can.  Thanks yet again!

I had the same reaction to reading Hillary Clinton’s assassination comment as many people here and in the media.  Either this was another insidious political dog whistle–the worst possible one–or more likely, another bit of evidence that she is out of conscious touch with the darker side of her unconscious.

Others have also pointed out that she could have picked many other election years to make her point that nomination battles go into June and beyond. But what makes the RFK example especially awful is that it doesn’t even make sense.

Because had Bobby Kennedy lived beyond that horrific day I remember vividly, the 1968 Democratic nominee was still not going to be decided until the convention.  His assassination is irrelevant to her point.    

The candidate Bobby Kennedy defeated in California and other states in 1968 was Senator Eugene McCarthy, who, like Kennedy, was an opponent of the Vietnam War, and vowed to stop it as President.

But there was another candidate, not even formally declared in June, who was the favorite for the nomination: the sitting Vice President, Hubert Humphrey. He was a supporter of President Johnson, and had a lock on the party machinery.

In the 1960s, the primaries were young and few.  In 1960, JFK won a short string of primaries and essentially disposed of Hubert Humphrey and several other candidates, but he was not the presumptive nominee going to the convention.  Lyndon Johnson still had support, and some party elders were backing Adlai Stevenson.

The primaries were more important by 1968 but in that year they still couldn’t name the nominee. Even after California, RFK was in for a summer of politics and a fight at the convention.

Back then, the general election campaign was much shorter.  It didn’t really begin until Labor Day.  The media and the parties did not assume there was a candidate for either party until the conventions had named the nominees. It was very different from the present situation, with John McCain acknowledged by Republicans as their nominee who will go to the convention without real opposition, free to attack Barack Obama.  But Obama’s responses and his own points (like the comments he made in Florida about McCain’s problems with lobbyists)are partially blocked by Hillary Clinton’s loud and absurd contentions, as she made also in Florida that counting the votes of phony primaries is a Civil Rights issue.  

So Clinton’s entire point about 1968 is invalid.  There wasn’t going to be a nominee until the convention in any case.  And the eventual nominee, Hubert Humphrey wasn’t even in the race officially in June. He was still the favorite, even with RFK’s victories in the primaries.  So why use this comparison?  To answer that requires examining her psyche, and we’ve all gotten a few glimpses that make us shudder, especially considering that she might have become President.  

I want to tackle this RFK thing from a slightly different angle. Let’s for the moment put aside all talk of assassination and look at this from the perspective of what she was asked. She was asked why people are asking her to drop out. We need to remind ourselves that she was attempting to answer that question. It’s a question that asks her to step into a non-supporter’s shoes and look at things from their perspective for a moment. Now, her answer to this question was that she didn’t know why people were asking her to drop out and that she found it somewhat mystifying given the history of long primaries in the past. She chose two poor examples to make her point, as the 1968 contest started and ended later than this one, and her husband’s 1992 campaign was effectively (if not mathematically) over in March. But it’s not so important that her examples were bad…what’s important is that she seems not to understand why she is being asked to drop out. So, I’ll explain it for her…real slow.

We have reached a point in the campaign where Barack Obama has won the majority of delegates that were available to win through the contests that have been held. What this means is that Barack Obama will win the nomination (provided he is still alive to accept it) unless an overwhelming number of superdelegates decide that he is unelectable. And I don’t mean that they will decide that he is less electable. They will only overturn the expressed will of the voters if they decide is absolutely unelectable. That’s their job and that’s why the superdelegates exist. Hillary Clinton doesn’t have much control over whether or not Barack Obama is unelectable. If her opposition research team has unearthed some horrible secret that will doom Obama once the Republicans get a hold of it, she should by all means come forward with that information before Obama accepts the nomination. But, otherwise, she should cease arguing that she is more electable. No one cares if she is more electable so long as Obama is electable. But let me make this more clear. Should anything happen that renders Barack Obama unelectable between now and the convention, the delegates (who are all technically free agents) will be free to choose someone else as the nominee. This is true even on the first ballot where most delegates are ‘pledged’ to support a particular candidate. They are ‘pledged’, but they are not ‘obligated’. They can choose to vote for whomever they want. And, provided a compelling enough reason (think Eliot Spitzer) they will do so.

What this means is that Hillary Clinton can be the nominee if Obama is somehow rendered unelectable (through scandal or sudden death), and that she can even be elected on the first ballot. And, because she ran a strong campaign and received nearly 50% of the vote and 50% of the delegates, she has a far, far stronger claim to be the back-up nominee than the third place finisher John Edwards, or any of the other candidates. She doesn’t need to win more delegates to improve her case and she doesn’t need to win more popular votes to improve her case.

So, let’s imagine a hypothetical situation where Barack Obama is no longer with us for some reason when we get to Denver. Anyone can be nominated on the first ballot, even people that were not candidates in the race. Let’s say that Al Gore were to be nominated. If all of Clinton’s pledged delegates and announced superdelegates stayed with her on the first ballot, she’d be in a commanding position. But she’d still need to win over some Obama delegates to secure the nomination. It’s true that she can lower that number by winning a few more delegates out of Puerto Rico, South Dakota, and Montana, but not by much. Her real mission would be to woo undecided superdelegates and Obama delegates to prefer her to Al Gore. And by running a negative campaign all the way through to the end, she will have given the Obama delegates and many of the undecided supers more reason to oppose her candidacy.

In other words, she is making her nomination less, rather than more, likely by scrapping for every last vote and delegate, and in doing it in a negative way. That is precisely why her active candidacy right now makes no strategic sense if her goal is to win this year’s nomination.

So, why are people asking her to drop out then? The answer is multifaceted but still rather simple. She has already established her case to be the fall-back candidate should anything disastrous happen to Obama or his campaign. That’s done. Nothing is guaranteed to her, but she can’t improve her case through further campaigning. Meanwhile, she is doing four things that are hurting Obama. She is imposing an opportunity cost on him by forcing him to campaign in places like Puerto Rico that have no votes in November. That costs time and money and it prevents him from focusing on John McCain, on building his campaign team, and on expanding the map of potentially competitive states. She is also actively delegitimizing the process by which he won the nomination and hardening her supporters feelings against Obama. This makes it harder to unite the party for the main contest. She is arguing that Obama is not an adequate nominee and strongly suggesting he is unelectable. It’s never good to have a fellow Democrat running down the qualifications of the presidential nominee. Lastly, she is sucking up money and volunteer hours for her own campaign, much of which should be made available for Obama and other Democrats running for office. And she isn’t paying her bills. For all these reasons, there is a real cost to Clinton staying in the race, and she doesn’t get anything tangible out of it except to worsen her chances of winning a brokered convention.

I really want to hammer home the point that Clinton is not improving her chances of being elected president this year by continuing her campaign. She’s making her chances worse. This is a critical point which is vital to understanding why people are insistent that she drop out. By her own logic, should something happen to Obama she would be in the best position to be the nominee, but that will not change by her continuing to actively run for president. It can only harm her chances by hardening opposition to her candidacy.

There is a small subset of the Democratic Party that thinks that Barack Obama is already unelectable, and they want Clinton to be the nominee to save the party from itself. But these people need to accept that, like pornography, the delegates will know unelectability when they see it. And they are not currently seeing it. If they come to see it for any reason, they will not vote for him in Denver. And they will choose Clinton as the alternative unless they deeply resent her or they see her as also being unelectable.

To be charitable, Clinton’s recent comments about hardworking white voters and the RFK assassination have not improved her perceived electability. She would do better to stop antagonizing Obama supporters and undecided supers, and to get some rest and lay low for a while, than to continue what even the Governor of her state sees as desperate tactics.

As it is, she has already ruined her chances of being on the ticket as vice-president and is rapidly losing her chance to be the second choice candidate, should something tragic happen. So, if we are judging things by how they help Clinton, she has not been too successful lately. But if we are judging things by how they hurt Obama, she has been all too successful.

For these reasons, it really appears that one of two things is the case. Either Clinton is somewhat unhinged and is engaged in self-destructive behavior, or she is actively undermining Obama’s chances, not of winning the nomination, but of winning the election in November.

And in either of these two cases, it is necessary for responsible people to ask her to drop out. That’s the answer to the question she could not answer.