Is it real or is it ...

This story -- Police unveil cardboard cops -- just begs for a clever comment a la The Gazetteer. Who is away for the weekend, darn it.
The one on the right is the cardboard replica.

Well, duh!

My reaction to the news that the United States wants to stay in Iraq forever is "well, duh!"
Of course that's what they intend to do.
The Bush administration has the maturity level of a bunch of testosterone-addled, wargame-playing teenagers. These guys actually believe that America has to have a visible, swaggering , threatening presence before it can influence the Middle East.
And they're a backward-looking bunch -- they never really got over feeling emasculated by Bush Daddy's decision not to invade Iraq in 1990, by Jimmy Carter's Iranian hostage crisis, by Richard Nixon's withdrawal from Vietnam.
So they think that staying in Iraq will keep America sitting in the catbird seat this time, able to run the whole Middle East. That's why they started the war in the first place.
And when Barak Obama is elected president the pressure on him to keep Americans in Iraq will be intense and unrelenting.
Iraq is now "strategic", ya see.

There are no rules in a knife fight

Pardon me for being cynical, but Obama's decision that the Democrats should refuse donations from businesses and interest groups strikes me as a sort of silly and ultimately unproductive.
Obama will get some style points from the election reform folks, but style points don't win elections. The general public is only going to notice that the Republicans and their friends are running a lot more TV ads than the Democrats are. Downticket Democrats who don't have Obama's fundraising charisma will be worried and resentful, while it will provoke a lot of corporations and businesses and interest groups to join the "he's too inexperienced" chorus.
But then again, maybe I'm just too cynical.

Who's at the table

Bella Abzug once said:

If men could have babies, abortion would be a sacrament.

I remembered this line when I was thinking about how our perspective about what is important can change depending on who's at the table when the decisions are being made.
Over the course of my own lifetime the women's liberation movement has brought substantial changes just about everywhere, from corporate leadership priorities to health research. As baby-boomer women entered the workforce determined to establish legitimate and substantial career paths for themselves, and as they got a seat at the table where the benefits were being negotiated, we saw many corporations and public employers and unions give importance to things like child care benefits, family-friendly policies of all kinds, prosecuting sexual harassment, equal pay for work of equal value, taking responsibility for environmental damage, etc -- things which, when I was growing up, were either unheard of or considered completely trivial. And once women were running the research labs, we saw some significant changes in what was considered important research, from male-female differences in drug trials to
All of these changes followed when women got a seat at the table. And these changes not only benefited women, but also men. As well, the analyis and rhetoric around the importance of inclusion and diversity were also adopted by Aboriginal people, visible minorities, gay people, and other marginalized groups to advance their own causes.
So now Barak Obama will have a seat at the table.
More than that, he'll be the chairman of the board.
I'm looking forward to seeing what changes this will make -- more than we can imagine now, I think.

Obama

What an amazing accomplishment. And to think America went from "I have a dream" to Obama within my lifetime.
As disappointed as I am that Hillary didn't make it, and as upsetting as it was to see the demonization of Hillary and of women in this campaign, it's easy to be enthusiastic about the man who will be, I hope and believe, the next president of the United States. Chris Bowers analyzes how he did it. It comes down to this:

Without his opposition to the Iraq war, Obama doesn't dominate among activists to nearly the same extent. And without his activist advantage, he doesn't win the nomination. The DFH's delivered Obama the nomination.

Terry McAuliffe has lost it

Or, maybe, he never had it.
Here is Clinton campaign manager -- her CAMPAIGN MANAGER!- Terry McAuliffe babbling this morning about how Hillary has won the nomination. The conclusion of the YouTube commenters was that he was drunk


So this evening I watched Obama's speech and the incredible tribute he gave to Hillary.
And then I watched McAuliffe on the Daily Show, where he babbled on about her being the next president, and called Barak Obama an ass.
Did she really let clowns like this manage her campaign?

R-e-s-p-e-c-t

Digby writes the truth:

Obama supporters should acknowledge the fact that Clinton got an enormous number of votes and represents a vital constituency in the Democratic party that must be respected if we are going to win. And Clinton supporters need to acknowledge the fact that while their candidate came extremely close, at the end of the race, she came up short. Somebody has to win it and by the measures the party has set forth, Obama is the one who did.

Both sides need to listen to Aretha now.

Teflon man

Once again, Lance Mannion nails it:

Obama managed to create the perception in the Media that he had already won the nomination long before he was even close to winning the nomination and that Clinton in continuing to campaign as if she still had a chance was being a vindictive and egomaniacal spoilsport.
With the help of a Clinton-hating Press Corps, he was able to scare Party leaders into thinking that letting the campaign go on was destroying the party and somehow thwarting the will of the people. He was able to scare enough of the right people into thinking that if they let the nomination be decided by a floor fight they'd be dooming the Party's chances in the fall.
Then, and again I don't think he had to work hard at this, he was able to convince his supporters that if the supers did decide the nomination in Clinton's favor or if she won it in a floor fight at the convention, they would have been robbed! He was able to make party leaders worry that in fact they would be robbing his supporters.
And, amazingly, what was once egregriously unfair, that the super-delegates would decide the nomination, has now become the right and only thing to do.
All of this was self-serving and self-interested and ambitious on Obama's part, all of it was tinged with hypocrisy and double-dealing, and none of it was unfair or constituted cheating or is in any way reprehensible because all of it is just in the nature of politics.
In this campaign, Obama and his team turned out to be the better politicians than Clinton and hers.
That's why he's going to be the nominee and that's why I'm so hopeful that he will win in November.
I think he'll prove to be the better politician than John McCain.
Those of you who wish to think that he won through the pure force of his goodness and the righteousness of his cause and that his beating Hillary was a case of goodness and light triumphing over evil are perfectly free to do so. The rest of us know better. Obama's just another politician with a sharp eye on the main chance, same as Clinton, and that's what we're counting on come November.

Last week I knocked the Clinton-haters off the blogroll. This week, the prospective McCain voters like Donna Darko and Tennessee Geurrilla Women are coming off for the duration. I just can't read any more about "if Hillary doesn't win then we'll vote McCain" -- a profoundly stupid thing to do, or to threaten to do.

Dog-blogging

Here are our two dogs -- who obviously think the bed belongs to them.

Conspiracy theories

Dave Johnson alerts us to the top 10 conspiracy theories of the religious right. Here's some of the best:

- Al Gore working secretly with global warming folks to take over the Unites States [and would that it was true!]
- Hillary Clinton working secretly with Janet Reno to form a lesbian plot to destroy Christianity
-the United Nations placing secret codes on the back of national highway signs to reveal the locations of believers so the new world order could persecute them.
-the Holocaust was really a big conspiracy hoax and most of the Jews who were supposed to be killed in Europe were actually walking around in New York City [this is an old one]
- Lucifer was behind the Supreme Court ruling in Topeka, Kansas regarding school integration.
- on the back of a 1993 box of Kix Cereal was a map teaching children about how the U.N. will divide up the United States

I have sometimes thought that the attraction of conspiracy theories, at the core, is the hope that somebody, whether the UN or the phone commpany, is actually in charge. It may be too frightening for some people to think that all of the craziness and chaos of the world is actually just random accidents - we are complusive about searching for patterns, aren't we?

How to respond to a right-wing smear

Best Bitch Slap EVAR:

"Please crawl back under the rock you came out from."

White trash

This is why Obama should have laughed off Rev Wright.
Hillary would have.
She would have just snorted "That's a minister for you, always preaching hellfire and damnation. Of course I'm not responsible for anything a minister says!"
But Obama didn't do that. He accepted the Republican frame that he was tied at the hip to the preacher in his church. He took it all seriously.
So now here we go again -- this time with a white guy, a Father Michael Pfleger, who belted out a mean-spirited, ugly, gratituous anti-Hillary skreed last Sunday at good old Trinity United:

. . . We must be honest enough to expose white entitlement and supremacy wherever it raises its head.
I said before I don’t want this to be political because, you know, I’m very unpolitical (mocking tone, huge laughter).
…When Hillary was crying (gesturing tears, uproarious laughter from audience)–and people said that was put on–I really don’t believe it was put on.
I really believe that she just always thought ‘This is mine’ (laughter, hoots). ‘I’m Bill’s wife. I’m WHITE. And this is mine. And I jus’ gotta get up. And step into the plate. And then out of nowhere came, ‘Hey, I’m Barack Obama.’ And she said: ‘Oh, damn!’ WHERE DID YOU COME FROM? (Crowd going nuts, Pfleger screaming). I’M WHITE! I’M ENTITLED! THERE’S A BLACK MAN STEALING MY SHOW. (SOBS!) SHE WASN’T THE ONLY ONE CRYING! THERE WAS A WHOLE LOTTA WHITE PEOPLE CRYING!

Obama can't laugh this off now, that ship has sailed.
So Obama has now released the usual deeply disappointed statement, and Pfleger has issued the usual blame-the-victim non-apology apology:

I regret the words I chose on Sunday. These words are inconsistent with Senator Obama's life and message, and I am deeply sorry if they offended Senator Clinton or anyone else who saw them.

Gee, don't overdo it, eh?
No doubt we'll be seeing this video again and again.
And every time white Americans see it the subtext will be, Obama thinks you are white trash. Not exactly the message he wanted his campaign or candidacy to promote.

"Haven't you been busy"

From the CBC:

Couillard talked about having tea with the prime minister's wife and meeting U.S. President George W. Bush at a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.
She said Bush approached Bernier and her in a corridor and, glancing at her, jovially told Bernier, 'Well, well, well, haven't you been busy.'

Nice to see the high moral tone that Bush has brought back to government. At least he didn't leap at her and start rubbing her shoulders.
And Alison is calling it Cleavage-gate:


But remember, it's not the sex, oh no, not at all...

For Your Eyes Only

Now everybody is asking why Bernier could have mislaid those secret papers for so many week without anybody noticing. It's simple. His long-suffering staff never actually gave this clown any secret papers -- they just stamped EYES ONLY on government press releases, knowing he wouldn't read them anyway.
Jason Cherniak sums up the real scandal about the Maxime Bernier affair -- that he wasn't fired long ago for all the screw-ups in his ministeral performance:

The Liberals demanded that Maxime Bernier be fired for a long list of reasons:

- suggesting to reporters that Kandahar Governor Asdullah Khalid be replaced. He was quickly forced to retract those comments and acknowledge that Afghanistan, as a sovereign country, must make its own decisions;
- his mishandling of the case of Brenda Martin, a Canadian left stranded in a in Mexican prison for two years;
- his failure to take a leadership role (or indeed any role) in the international effort to ban the production and use of cluster munitions;
- his abandonment of key foreign affairs files to other ministers - Afghan detainees (Peter MacKay), death row inmates abroad (Stockwell Day), the proposed sale of the Radarsat 2 satellite system (Jim Prentice), the Brenda Martin case (Helena Guergis), a summit of foreign affairs ministers of Arctic nations in Greenland (Gary Lunn); and,
- his failure to respond to any of the recent international crises in Pakistan, Kenya, Sri Lanka or Zimbabwe.

These were all good reasons. But, apparently, they were all well within the expectations of Prime Minister Stephen Harper from a minister of foreign affairs. Instead, Maxime Bernier was forced out because he left top-secret documents with his girlfriend who had connections to the Hell's Angels.
The Liberals saw this coming. They have been demanding that Mr. Harper look into the relationship between Mr. Bernier and his companion for some time now. They understood that while ministers are obviously allowed to have private lives, they also need to be smart in who they spend their time with.

But he wasn't smart about anything else. So it's not surprising.

Shorter

Shorter Scottie McClellan:

I'm shocked, SHOCKED, that Bush was such a liar!

You know, its amazing.
Us lefties have been saying for eight years that the Bush administration is full of liars, that they lie all the time, that they would rather lie than tell the truth.
And now numerous reasonably-intelligent people who worked inside the Bush administration are reporting how surprised and upset they are to find out that they were being lied to all along.
What on earth did they think was happening?
Over at Balloon Juice, Tim F. talks about the how the later the memoir-writers leave it, the more tattered their reputations will get:

It’s like a game of musical chairs where every seat has a rusty tack on it.