Getting back on track

I know, I know…  It’s been nearly a month since I updated this thing.  But the semester is over, my program coursework is officially DONE, and I just might get my blogging muscles moving again!

Amazing how much happens when you don’t update a blog for a few weeks.  California’s Supreme Court upheld gay marriages (and licenses were granted starting yesterday; click those links to see all the great photos and profiles of happy people), Hillary Clinton finally “suspended“ her valiant effort to destroy the Democratic party, Tim Russert passed away (you’ll probably be able to find some gripes about him in the LATA archives, but it was clear that he loved politics, loved his job, and would have loved watching this historical election unfold)…

And there’s this breaking snooze news!  Al Gore pointedly failed to endorse John McCain yesterday!

Seriously, what the…?  I suppose he did find himself in an awkward position; perhaps it would have looked ungrateful or disloyal to endorse Obama instead of HC.  But it would also have meant something.  At this point, what IS the point?

By the way, I was in Ohio last week when Obama clinched the nomination.  I had decided it would be best for my health to not read paper formerly known as The Republican Courier (now just “The Courier”).  But I couldn’t resist looking at the editorial page after the HC farewell speech.  It was strikingly subdued - although they couldn’t resist invoking Jeremiah Wright’s name (yawn).  All they could muster up was a bleat about how the country must not be as racist as JW says.

A tornado passed the city to the north, but apparently didn’t touch down.  I took what I thought was a dramatic photo of the system as it advanced toward us (a little fuzzy; it was quite windy and starting to rain):

 

But then I saw this in the NY Times:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Someone actually stood still long enough to take that picture.  Amazing.

Hillary is staying in the race in case her opponent is assassinated?

From the Times’ version of the story that is everywhere:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton defended staying in the Democratic nominating contest on Friday by pointing out that her husband had not wrapped up the nomination until June 1992, adding, “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”

Her remarks were met with quick criticism from the campaign of Senator Barack Obama, and within hours of making them Mrs. Clinton expressed regret, saying, “The Kennedys have been much on my mind the last days because of Senator Kennedy,” referring to the recent diagnosis of Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s brain tumor. She added, “And I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation and in particular the Kennedy family was in any way offensive.”

No apology to the Obamas, as Olbermann and others have pointed out.

Calculating and contemptible (which was my first reaction, and which I’ve edited and elaborated since), or merely outrageously, regrettably clumsy?  I have a hard time believing it was a mistake.  She is a professional politician who knows exactly what she is saying (and, as the AP version points out, it’s not the first time she’s made this “historical observation”).  If she was indeed simply trying to make a historical observation, and has “been around” as long as she says, she knows she could have chosen other Democratic contestants who ran longer than RFK and were not assassinated (as this otherwise forgiving blogger/columnist points out).  Was she letting slip that she intends to stick around long enough to see if something catastrophic happens to Obama?  Was she trying to cement those fears and doubts in voters’ heads - fears that are already very much on their minds?  Her explanation, that because of Ted Kennedy’s brain cancer diagnosis the Kennedy family has been on her mind, would have been a lot more plausible had she not - as noted above - invoked this very same “historical observation” in March.

As reprehensibly as she has been campaigning, she long ago forfeited the benefit of the doubt.

Hillary plots her revenge

For a fleeting moment last week, I thought I detected her tone softening - as if perhaps she was paving the way for a more graceful exit.  But no.  After sweeping the ”hard-working… white American” voters of WV last week and KY yesterday, she found a new low road to travel: comparing the DNC punishment of the Florida and Michigan primaries (and Sen. Obama’s agreement with those rules - rules she once agreed to, also) to the GOP’s theft of the 2000 election.  How does that work?  Florida and Michigan broke primary rules and forfeited their delegates.  HRC had no problem with those rules until it became clear that she desperately needed the delegates.  Now, FL and MI aren’t being punished for breaking the rules, they’re being “disenfranchised.”  And her efforts to have them seated, well, those efforts are just as brave as the efforts of the suffragists and abolitionists!

But wait!  There’s more!

“If we fail to do so, I worry that we will pay not only a moral cost, but a political cost as well,” she said. “We know the road to a Democratic White House runs right through Florida and Michigan. If we care about winning those states in November, we need to count your votes now. If Democrats send a message that we don’t fully value your votes, we know Sen. McCain and the Republicans will be more than happy to have them. The Republicans will make a simple and compelling argument: why should Florida and Michigan voters trust the Democratic Party to look out for you when they won’t even listen to you.”

As “Desperado” observes, that sounds rather like she’s telling her supporters to vote for John McCain if she loses this fight, doesn’t it?

Expect good things

A friend of mine has embraced this mantra: “Expect good things.”  Instead of spinning and fretting over worst-case scenarios, she sets her mind on best possible outcomes, and “expects” them.  Where I come from, a deep Midwestern pool of pathologically practical Lutheran genes, we have a rather different mantra: “Hope for the best, expect the worst.”

It’s kind of how I’m approaching the election these days.  Here we are - in a recession, an energy crisis, a healthcare crisis, a military quagmire (today is the fifth anniversary of the “end” of major combat operations in Iraq), beholden to a president and a Republican party with some of the lowest favorable ratings in modern history - and the Democrats have somehow gone from a “sure thing” to a statistical tie with John McCain, a man who promises not to change a thing in his administration’s management of Bush’s war, and to continue the Bush economic policies that are working so well for us all.

To whom do we owe our thanks?  To an inexperienced Obama campaign that may have gotten a little complacent and cocksure - just as Clinton was getting desperate enough to launch her “kitchen sink” strategy (the apparent success of which goes to show you really can’t underestimate the critical thinking skills of an electorate)?  To the emergence of a really ugly side of Bill Clinton?  To Obama’s failure to finish off the Rev. Wright controversy weeks before Wright finally forced him to, allowing Clinton reverse her slide and begin, as Josh Marshall put it, “controlling the agenda”?  So many choices!

And yet the silver lining here may be that, despite the media-magnetizing idiocy that is the Democratic Primary, McCain is not sailing ahead.  As Marshall observes, he’s still on a honeymoon, with no opponent and a distracted press.  The “mainstream” media hasn’t even begun to comment on his inconsistencies on Iraq, his campaign finance cheating, the rich irony of his criticizing Obama’s “elitism” as he flies around the country on his heiress wife’s corporate jet, and yet he’s only managing to stay even with Clinton and Obama in the polls.  Once there is a genuine contest underway, who knows?

Expect good things.

Buckle up

What a fabulous headline:

Botanist sues to stop CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe

Thank you, Boing Boing for calling it to my attention. My “reading week” semester break is drawing to a close, I failed to completely catch up on reading - let alone get ahead - and I was feeling a little stressed and glum. This really puts things in perspective:

A lawsuit has been filed in Hawaii in an attempt to hold up the start of operations by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) atom-smasher on the French-Swiss border.

…Firstly Wagner is concerned that careless atom boffins might slip up and create a miniature black hole. This would then suck in surrounding mass, gaining unstoppably in size and power in a runaway process until it had engulfed the entire Earth and packed it down inside its swelling, unescapable event horizon.

Some physicists have theorised that black holes might act as spacewarp wormhole portals into alternate universes, or something. Summarising, it appears that the boffins at the LHC - should one of them clumsily spill his tea on the controls, for instance - could easily catapult the entire world through a rift in the very fabric of space-time, into another universe which could be entirely hostile to life as we know it. (Eg, essential processes such as fermentation of alcohol, TV, pizza delivery, gravity etc might simply not work; or there could be a parallel Earth ruled by an evil victorious Nazi empire with space battlecruisers and so forth.)

That would be bad: but even if the LHC guys manage to avoid it, there are other ways in which their meddling might destroy the world.

A particularly violent game of proton billiards, for instance, of the very sort the LHC’s superpowered seven trillion electron-volt atomic cues are designed to play, might lead to all sorts of trouble. Quarks might get mixed up into “negatively-charged strangelets” which would turn everything else they touched into strangelets as well. The Earth, and then perhaps the entire universe, could be turned into a fearful strangelet soup; or perhaps custard.

CERN representatives of course insist the particle smasher “is not a threat to the Earth.”

Meanwhile…

Hillary Clinton promises to atomize the Democratic Party if that’s what it takes to be the nominee this fall. And she’s got the chops to do it, having steeled her nerves dodging sniper fire in Bosnia, negotiating peace in Northern Ireland, and making friends with arch conservative and former arch-enemy Richard Mellon Scaife (yes, the man who orchestrated the vast right-wing conspiracy to bring down the Clinton presidency) - who now has glowing things to say about her.

(Evidence that we have in fact already slipped into a parallel universe? Photo of new chums Scaife and Clinton, borrowed from TPM.)

Easy to see why McCain supporters are getting worried about his airtime, what with the two-ring circus that is the Democratic Primary. But that benign neglect comes in handy when the press gives him a continuous pass on some serious whoppers. After McCain repeatedly confused Sunnis and Shiites a couple weeks ago, Chuck Todd told Tim Russert that McCain has enough foreign policy experience “in the bank” to get away with these little “slip-ups.” The comment inspired Kevin Drum to write the best characterization of McCain I’ve yet seen:

Let’s recap. Foreign policy cred lets him get away with wild howlers on foreign policy. Fiscal integrity cred lets him get away with outlandishly irresponsible economic plans. Anti-lobbyist cred lets him get away with pandering to lobbyists. Campaign finance reform cred lets him get away with gaming the campaign finance system. Straight talking cred lets him get away with brutally slandering Mitt Romney in the closing days of the Republican primary. Maverick uprightness cred allows him to get away with begging for endorsements from extremist religious leaders like John Hagee. “Man of conviction” cred allows him to get away with transparent flip-flopping so egregious it would make any other politician a laughingstock. Anti-torture cred allows him to get away with supporting torture as long as only the CIA does it.

Remind me again: where does all this cred come from? And what window do Democrats go to to get the same treatment the press gives McCain?

Finally, during my relative silence of the last couple weeks, we passed the 5th anniversary of Bush’s illegal war in Iraq, and lost the 4000th (plus) American service person. What does Dick Cheney have to say about the losses? “They volunteered.” Wow. For 3, 4, and 5 tours? For stop-loss? I’m sure that’s all in the fine print, but what an attitude from Mr. 5 Deferments. (Here’s the source of the remarkable image above.) And for all you HRC voters who say you’ll switch to McCain if HRC is not the Democratic nominee this fall? McCain promises he won’t change course in Iraq. Is that really what you want?

The Bridge to Decision: A guest post

A guest post from Cristina White, who contributed Political Tai Chi earlier this month.  Thank you, Cristina!  If you didn’t see Obama’s incredible speech, you’ll find many links to it at YouTube, or you can read the text here.

For the last several months, I have been trying to decide between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. One reason I leaned toward Hillary was that she has been through the worst of it with the Republican smear machine. She knows how to fight, and we will need that to win the White House. Then, during her 60 Minutes interview, she was asked about the rumors of Barack being a Muslim. I was shocked at the evasiveness of her answer. It seemed calculated to gain political advantage, and that is the kind of politics Bush-Rove gave us. I want a candidate who can fight, but still fights clean.

I turned toward Obama. I admire his fighting style, but wondered how he would deal with difficulty. During this long campaign, he has mainly met with adulation and success. The first real trouble he has encountered was in his proximity to his former minister, a man who condemned America. In Obama’s speech addressing the issue of race, my question was answered. He repudiated Jeremiah Wright’s vitriolic remarks, but he did not reject him. He spoke of the good that he had achieved and inspired, and reminded us of the history that the man had lived through, the tentacles of racism that had left an imprint of anger and bitterness. Obama asked us to look squarely at the road that brought us here, and to begin the work of repairing the fissures and cracks of our common national highway.

All these months, I have been constructing a bridge toward a decision. When the final trestle was in place, I realized it was Obama’s response to this current controversy that landed me squarely in his camp. Because there he was, between a rock and a hard place. What would he do? He put one foot on the rock, one foot on the hard place, and stood taller because of it. He said this is who I am, this is what I’m made of, these are the people who shaped me and brought me to this day and to what I believe. Here I stand. Will you stand with me?

Yes, Barack Obama. I will stand with you. And proud to be there.

Hillary Rove Clinton

Two months ago, I said I “kind of like” Hillary Clinton. Most definitely not as a presidential candidate, as I think made clear, but as a public figure. I even said that she seemed to hold public service in high regard.

Well, let me rephrase that. HRC holds HRC in high regard, so much so that she would apparently prefer to see John McCain elected if she is not the Democratic nominee this fall. She is so eager to cripple Obama that she has repeatedly touted McCain’s leadership and experience (and drastically overstated her own) over Obama’s. She declared that both she and McCain have both passed some as-yet-unspecified Commander-in-Chief test, leaving that poor green Obama at the kids’ table. Then her campaign opened and dealt a crisp new deck of race cards: while HRC was campaigning for McSame, her staff was caught red-handed running a web site video of Barack Obama, edited to make the bridge of is nose wider and his skin darker… making him, you know, “blacker.” Just in case people weren’t aware that he’s black. (Then they lied about it.) Meanwhile, HRC went on 60 Minutes and did her level best to not quite kill off the “Obama is Muslim” rumors being circulated by her high profile surrogates and a viral email campaign. And Geraldine Ferraro went on every program that would take her to charge that Obama would not have gotten this far if he weren’t black, and that she wouldn’t be taking so much flak for speaking truth to power if she weren’t white.

And somewhere in the past two weeks, my grudging respect and modest admiration for HRC turned to disappointment and disgust. Either she is a spineless, valueless figurehead allowing vicious campaign managers to position her as a race-baiting megalomaniac, or she’s a race-baiting megalomaniac. (Or, equally plausibly, she’s a Republican.)  Keith Olbermann seems a bit disappointed, too (I tried to embed that video, but it’s not working; so click that link and watch it on Americablog; it’s so worth it.)

Political Tai-Chi: a guest post

A guest post by Cristina White, who graced Left at the Altar at its previous address with two other contributions, an essay and a theater review. Many thanks, Cristina!

Watching Barack Obama during the 20th debate with Hillary was a revelation. It was political debate taken to another level, that of T’ai Chi as martial art. Forty-some years ago, when I began studying T’ai Chi, one of the concepts that fascinated me was that, in facing an opponent, you offered no resistance; instead, you yielded to the on-coming force and used your opponent’s energy to let him topple himself.

I watched Obama do that repeatedly during the debate, and it was incredible. One example: he was asked about Louis Farrakhan’s support, and he stated that he had denounced Farrakhan. Hillary said that it was all very well to denounce, it was better to reject. Obama pointed out that no offer was made for him to reject, but if she thought reject was stronger, fine — “I denounce and reject.” The audience laughed and, once again, he won the point, and the audience. No wonder that nothing the Clinton campaign throws at him sticks. He simply keeps his center, yields, and then turns the force directed against him to his advantage. The energy meant to bring him down instead levels his opponent. He did it again and again with Hillary during the debate, and the next day, when challenged on the issue of al-Qaeda in Iraq, he did it with McCain.

Brilliant.

All the news that’s fit to ignore?

I’ll sign on again later to catch up on last week’s Campaign 2008 funnery, but for now I simply have to ask: how is it possible for the NY Times to write a whole story on Obama’s safety and Secret Service protection (even providing us with his Secret Service code name), without mentioning the disturbing fact that at last week’s Texas rally, that same Secret Service “protection” inexplicably suspended security checks at the entrance of the stadium, and that they have apparently been doing this at Obama rallies around the country?

The week in review

So much to chat about this week, but since my classes began on Super Tuesday, I didn’t have any time to mull over the events with you: Romney’s bizarre campaign “suspension” (I guess that term leaves plenty of room for him to change his position in the coming months - as he’s already done on abortion, gay rights, immigration, etc) (but, say, how many other people do you know who would willingly suspend the hemorrhaging of $40 million in personal fortune in order to prevent Democrats from surrendering to terror? the man is a true patriot), Obama’s even-better-than-expected showings, and recent polls showing that Obama is more likely to beat McCain. When I tossed off that remark about crossing a Clinton-McCain bridge if I came to it, I wasn’t all that concerned that I’d come to it! But with Clinton and Obama virtually tied, and the decision increasingly likely to be left in the hands of Democratic Establishment “superdelegates” (more on that when I get my thoughts in order), I guess I’d better start my cost/benefit analysis on Clinton and McCain.

A scathing new Frank Rich column discusses the dangerous game HRC continues to play with her “thick deck of race cards.”