There are no rules in a knife fight

See, this is what worries me about Obama -- could he possibly be so stupid as to give up his enormous fundraising advantage with individual donors, just so he can get a few style points from election reformers?
Yes, apparently -- Obama Floated Idea Of Voluntarily Capping Donations.
In an election campaign, there are no points for style.

Lists

I could have given you a short list of the things that I don't like about Hillary Clinton and about Barak Obama. But at the top of Obama's list would be some of his supporters. This seems to be a fairly common observation among the Hillary-bloggers.

Nuts

So today John Bolton says that starting an illegal preemptive war of choice against Iran "is really the most prudent thing to do" and it would teach the Iranians a lesson.
I'll just bet it would.
As Josh Marshall says, just another example of John Bolton's keen strategic thinking. In Bolton's world, bombs apparently don't deliver ordinance or death anymore, they just deliver messages.
So, of course, does the phone. And without causing any pictures like this:


Iran is pretty direct about sending its own war messages, thank you very much. Like the message in this Robert X. Cringely story:

. . [while in Teheran in 1986 for another story, Cringely] decided to go see the [Iraq-Iran] war since I had been in Beirut and Angola, but had never seen trench warfare, which is what I was told they had going in Iran. So I took a taxi to the front, introduced myself to the local commander, who had gone, as I recall, to Iowa State, and spent a couple days waiting for the impending human wave attack. That attack was to be conducted primarily with 11-and 12-year-old boys as troops, nearly all of them unarmed. There were several thousand kids and their job was to rise out of the trench, praising Allah, run across No Man's Land, be killed by the Iraqi machine gunners, then go directly to Paradise, do not pass GO, do not collect 200 dinars. And that's exactly what happened in a battle lasting less than 10 minutes. None of the kids fired a shot or made it all the way to the other side. And when I asked the purpose of this exercise, I was told it was to demoralize the cowardly Iraqi soldiers.
It was the most horrific event I have ever seen, and I once covered a cholera epidemic in Bangladesh that killed 40,000 people.
Waiting those two nights for the attack was surreal. Some kids acted as though nothing was wrong while others cried and puked. But when the time came to praise Allah and enter Paradise, not a single boy tried to stay behind.
Now put this in a current context. What effective limit is there to the number of Islamic kids willing to blow themselves to bits? There is no limit, which means that a Bush Doctrine can't really stand in that part of the world.

And Bolton thinks they'll get all fluttery about a US bombing raid?
I don't know how badly the Iraqi soldiers were demoralized after this incident -- the Iran-Iraq war continued another three years and Saddam didn't care -- but I can't believe that most soldiers wouldn't be completely devastated at being told to make war on children.
Oh...yeah...

Today's Nelson Moment

Ha. Ha.

[Conservative MP and former Heritage minister]Oda spent nearly $17,000 on limo rides in her party's first 15 months in office, according to receipts obtained by the NDP ...about half of that amount was never proactively included in publicly disclosed ministerial travel and hospitality expenses.

You know what's going to happen next

Hillary may have ecked out a win in Indiana but she needed a big win to show momentum and she didn't get it.
Her speech sounded like a concession speech.
So say she announces tomorrow or the next day that she is pulling out. We can just predict what will happen next -- remember all of Obama negatives which Hillary supporters were supposed to be racist for even mentioning? Well, after a one-day honeymoon, suddenly all of this stuff will be just so terribly important as the poor poor voters struggle to evaluate Obama's character, so it wil be just so terribly legitimate for the media to cover it, not racist at all, and it will be wall-to-wall Obama Swift Boat time, everything from Obambi to flag pins to secret Muslim to why does Obama hate Israel? to will Joe Lunchbucket vote for someone who can't bowl? to how cosy is he with Chicago land developers to -- wait for it -- this pastor named Wright.
I hope Obama learned a little from Hillary and just laughs in their face.

It's not a bug, it's a feature

A reader at Talking Points Memo describes what I like about Hillary's campaign:

By being a 'fighter' and playing to the lowest kind of populism (and wow do we hate it), Hillary is showing that if she were somehow to get nominated, she'll run exactly the kind of stay-on-the-offensive campaign that will force mistakes from McCain and make it more likely that she'll win in November. She's also making it clear that Obama will never run that kind of campaign.. . . Obama, by contrast, will run a high-minded campaign and may well win on merit. And he'll always be on the defensive. As I said, I favor him Obama a wide margin. But I favor a Democrat over a Republican by an even wider margin.
The upshot: I'll happily support Hillary if she 'steals' the nomination. . . . It's not about fighting back. It's about taking the first shot. She won't let them get their Swift Boats in the water to start with. . . . yes, it'll be very very ugly, cue the 'Unity12' theme music and hand-wringing by the delicate. But I think we're in for ugly no matter what, because they're not going to stop. We may as well engage or get used to losing.

The longer Hillary stays in, the more chance she has to win the nomination. And the more I see about how poorly Obama is handling things -- could he do anything stupider than not coming out in support of lower gas prices? -- I am less confident that he could win a general election.
I don't care how many economists have opined against lower gas prices -- Hillary knows exactly how many economists have ever been elected President.
Obama doesn't seem to get it -- he's running for office, not chairing a graduate tax seminar.
I used to think that Americans hated Republicans so much the Dems could run a turnip and it would win.
But I'm not so confident now. The Republicans are absolutely desperate to win this election, because if they don't they're all going to jail. The Democratic margin is going to have to be overwhelming to withstand the Republican push-back. I'm not sure Obama can do it. But Hillary can.

Great line of the day

From Lance Mannion:

The Working Class includes the 56 year old master electrician making sixty grand a year who can rewire your house blindfolded and who served in Vietnam and whose first vote for President was for George McGovern.
The High Information Creative Class includes the 23 year old C-student junior high school math teacher making twenty-five thousand a year who's working one chapter ahead of his students in the text book and who met his current girlfriend at his mega-church and of course they're both saving it until marriage.
We live in an interesting country.

First of the season

Guess what I just saw?

And it snowed a week ago!
(h/t)
Oh, maybe it was just a mayfly, a really little mayfly...

Obama supporters are creeping me out

Read the comments on this post.
There's something sick about people who are chortling over the death of a horse just because she was Hillary Clinton's pick in the Kentucky Derby. Is Obama sure he actually wants 'supporters' like this?
And then there's pansygate and pastorgate. What is the matter with these people?

Sam I am

Meet Sam, our new dog.
He had to leave his original owners because they were moving to a place which did not allow pets. So we were lucky to get him a month ago. We've been working to help Sam lose weight, though he is a top-notch counter surfer and garbage guzzler, so the weight loss campaign is likely to take a little longer than we thought.
But he is a sweet and snuggly dog, too -we've never had a dog who loves to snuggle as much as Sam does.
He and Chillou, our other Lab, get along just fine -- now that Sam is running more, he and Chillou are playing together.
And now I have also learned about Black Dog Syndrome -- I guess animal shelters have great difficulty getting people to adopt black dogs, particularly larger black lab crosses like Sam. So if you can adopt a dog, make it a black one.

Arrogant and cruel

It is, in my opinion, both arrogant and cruel for Corrections Canada to ban smoking for prisoners. I can understand the indoor air quality issues, but outdoors too?
It's just mean.

I hadn't thought of it this way before

Howard Dean on Meet the Press describes how the Democratic Party will heal itself:

I’m not the most important person in terms of bringing the party together. The most important person is the person who doesn’t win the nomination. Because I can remember when I lost to John Kerry, I had to go out and convince my supporters, it took me about 3 months, that they needed to support Sen. Kerry. I endorsed him, I campaigned for him, I went to all the college campuses and that’s what the person who doesn’t win this with 49% of the delegate is going to have to do keep the party together.

I just hope Hillary, and Bill, are getting this message.

Greasing the skids

I'm speculating, with no evidence at all except patterns of past behaviour, that the recent sabre-rattling against Iran is just to grease the skids for the confirmation hearings for The Man Called Petraeus (copyright Digby) not to mention trying to support McSame's pathetic warmongering
But, of course, I could be wrong.
Did you know they found actual guns and other scary things in Iraq that were marked "Made in Iran and endorsed by the Iran Government for use exclusively in Iraq or Israel"? Really and for true!

I try to support unions, but really!

Surprise transit strike hits Toronto:

Thousands of people headed to work or planning other trips were forced to walk, call cabs or scramble to find other ways to get around after the 9,000 members of the Amalgamated Transit Union walked out at midnight, just hours after rejecting a tentative contract proposal Friday night.

And then the union leadership blames the public for this wildcat walkout:

Union leader Bob Kinnear said he had no choice but to set aside a promise to give 48 hours notice of a walkout out of concern for the safety of his members given some "irrational members of the public."

If he thinks the Toronto retail workers and shoppers who were stranded this morning hated the transit workers before, just wait until he sees what they'll be dealing with after they go back to work.

Major leagues

So the threats didn't work and lawsuits didn't work and spinning didn't work and now the Conservatives think whining for sympathy will get Elections Canada off their backs.

...flak-jacket-clad RCMP officers storming in and copying everything . . . most of his staff is very young, the majority under 30. The official said staffers were petrified . . . RCMP at first knocked on the door and then “pushed their way in.”

Oh, cry me a river. If you don't like politics, go work for a florist.
What the Conservatives don't seem to grasp is that they're no longer playing in the bush leagues. Elections Canada is immune to bullying because they have spent the last 20 years duking it out with the federal Liberal Party.
Both sides in that battle knew that concocting and ferreting out schemes to subvert election rules is the way the game is played. I would imagine that Elections Canada is somewhat amazed that the Conservatives continue to fight a losing battle instead of quietly 'fessing up and moving on'

UPDATE: Dave says its as though they never expanded their view beyond grade four.