Does anybody know how to play this game? Part 2

Chet writes about why the Liberals are not succeeding:

When I was a kid, a friend tried to teach me chess. I was awful. The reason was that, although I considered myself intelligent, I really had no idea what I was doing. As a result, I would concoct these elaborate, twenty-move plans that had nothing to do with how to win the actual game in front of me, and which I was utterly unable to adapt as the board changed. That's more or less the game Dion is playing. It depends on a whole series of things going his way which are not going his way. Worst of all, it depends on his opponents not actually wanting or knowing how to beat him, and on the voters being incredibly naive and gullible. He's cruising for a disaster, and he doesn't seem to have any idea of it.

I keep hoping Dion will have some kind of epiphany and realize that he will never be Prime Minister unless he figures out a way to put the ball in play.
He reminds me of a kid who stands in the batters circle huffing and stomping and swinging his heart out, but when he gets to the plate and sees the pitcher glaring at him, he freezes.

Great line of the day

Over at Inkless Wells, Paul Wells takes on the racist ignorance of the anti-apology crowd:

“My husband went to elementary school in small-town Eastern Ontario in the 1940s. He tells me that there were many occasions when his teachers gave him ‘the strap.’ Lots of kids were punished or disciplined that way, in those days…
“By modern standards, my husband and his classmates were physically abused. Should they now be getting an apology from the government, and perhaps some compensation?”

Gee, Karen, that’s an excellent question. I can certainly understand your concern, and I can tell you’re a really smart, thoughtful person. I’ve given this matter a little thought myself.
Here’s a handy checklist to ascertain whether your husband’s treatment rises to the level of what the Prime Minister will be addressing this week. Ready?
• Was your husband systematically raped by authority figures at school for years on end?
• If he spoke the language he had learned from the cradle did he get beaten?
• Were his classmates dropping like flies from tuberculosis due to appalling hygiene and incompetent health care?
• Here’s an excerpt from a transcript of an interview with Bernadene Harper, who attended one of the residential schools: “In the evenings what I remember is, when all the girls were put to bed, we had night watchmen that would take care of the building. I always had the fear of having a night watchman coming in and shining the flashlight around, because I knew that’s when things were happening with the little girls. I guess that’s where the abuse had started.” Does that sort of institutionalized nightly horror ring a bell for your husband?
If you answered “Yes” to any of these questions, then your husband had a horrible time indeed and I think he’s owed an apology. If not, I think we’ll get around to your husband a little later. ‘Kay thanx.

Emphasis mine.

Does anybody know how to play this game?

Bottom of the 10th and the Jays need one run to tie, two to win. They're managed to load the bases, with nobody out.
So why oh why didn't they bunt?

Talking grease spot = Harper's Conservatives

I wonder if a talking grease spot * is really the image the Conservatives want to have in Ontario? Dion says

"... What do the Conservatives offer Canadians? They offer a cartoon, a talking grease spot,” he said. “When are the Conservatives going to stop insulting Canadians and offer a real plan to tackle climate change instead of cartoons and a campaign of lies?”"

I'm getting the impression, too, that Harper's iron fist is starting to rust.
This attack ad campaign is getting sillier and sillier, when the Young Conservatives start acting like Hare Krishnas in their yellow t-shirts handing out their little prayer cards while refusing to tell a reporter their names -- proud of their work, aren't they -- and now the gas pump ads aren't going to run and the gas companies aren't about to be bullied by 26-year-old Ryan Sparrow screeching about a contract.
Yeah, that Ryan Sparrow.
Classy, boys, real classy.

*Kady O'Malley from Macleans calls it Oily the Splot and Oily, the virtual spokesblob.

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."