We didn't lose the game; we just ran out of time. - Vince Lombardi

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

He must be off the pipe, because Marion Barry is actually making sense:

To fix our schools, we have a responsibility not just to talk but to act. That’s why I’m joining those firmly in favor of the package of federal money for D.C. schools that Mayor Fenty proposed and that President Bush included in his budget. If Congress approves this package, the District will get $74 million in fiscal 2009 for our public schools, public charter schools and scholarships, so that our lowest-income residents can attend private schools that their parents choose. I want Congress to know that the District’s leaders support this package.

I know it may surprise some that I would support a school voucher program, but I am proud to do so—and I especially support the D.C. scholarships. Many here in Washington also favor this program: community and business leaders, educators, parents, and elected officials who are putting children first. I would oppose this voucher program if it took money from the D.C. public schools, but it doesn’t.

I support this package because it provides much-needed financial support to all D.C. schools and because it offers parents a choice without hurting public schools. That’s a win-win situation. We must make sure that children in the District are given every chance to attend schools that work for them. To do anything else is wrong.

Maybe Hal was right-the Democrats and the Republicans are changing places. (Note: This makes ten posts for today, in case some people were counting : ))

Hmm, I don’t know about this.

It’s not quite Birkenstocks and tie-dyed T-shirts, but presumptive Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) has shown he’s willing to go the extra mile to embrace the global warming movement.

The latest sign of that is the recently introduced “eco-friendly” campaign merchandise the McCain campaign has showcased on its Web site. Included are his and hers “Go Green” McCain embroidered polo shirts, T-shirts, hats and visors with or without the recycle logo. Organic cotton onesies for the babies. You can also find “Go Green” McCain tote bags, notebooks and travel mugs (with up to 100 percent recycled material and an “enhanced biodegradability additive”).

This is the latest move by McCain to show his willingness to include so-called “green” issues as part of his campaign’s platform. This comes on the heels of a May 12 speech in which he addressed global warming. He also used the opportunity to take a swipe at policy under the Bush administration. 

“I will not shirk the mantle of leadership that the United States bears. I will not permit eight long years to pass without serious action on serious challenges. I will not accept the same dead-end of failed diplomacy that claimed Kyoto,” McCain said in the speech.

Never mind that the Senate – including one John McCain – voted 95-0 against Kyoto.

I actually think it’s good that the Republican nominee is going against much of his party when it comes to climate change. I don’t think it’s so good that the McPander Express seems to be in full swing here.

Is this really a good idea?

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will propose borrowing against future state lottery revenue to help close a budget shortfall estimated as high as $20 billion, administration officials told The Associated Press.

In a revised budget to be released Wednesday, Schwarzenegger will propose raising $15 billion over three years by selling bonds based on anticipated lottery revenue, then use about $5.1 billion of that for the coming fiscal year to help erase the deficit, the officials said Tuesday.

The other $10 billion would be left in a reserve fund the Republican governor wants to create as part of a budget reform proposal. It would be intended to ease the effect of year-to-year revenue fluctuations.

Both the lottery and budget reform proposals would require approval from voters on the November ballot.

If the lottery plan fails, Schwarzenegger will ask the Legislature to approve a temporary 1 cent increase in the state sales tax to pay for the reserve fund. The increase would last no more than three years.

I don’t know enough about how much is in the lottery fund to know if this would actually work or not. It sounds like a good alternative to taxes, but then isn’t borrowing one of the things Grey Davis was voted out over?

It’s true: she’ll never go away.

LUIS SALGADO will forever see Hillary Clinton on his thigh.
Salgado, 28, owner of the Ill Skillz (4948 N. 5th) tattoo parlor just got a portrait of Clinton inked on his leg at a tattoo convention in Baltimore.

Artist Buffalo Bill, of Sunbury, offered a free Hillary tattoo to any takers because his daughter Sarah Taby is a big Clinton supporter and thought the tattoo would give Clinton good exposure.

Salgago, 28, who is also a Clinton fan, jumped at the chance. Salgado’s new ink is featured in Tattoo Review. The mag’s publisher Carey Exton says he thinks many tattooed people are for Clinton because she “tells it like it is.”

“Hell, yeah,” Salgado says, when we asked if he voted for Clinton recently.

He likes “her experience, her motivation and the fact that she doesn’t bite her tongue.” We asked a Clinton spokesman for comment on whether the New York senator would respond in kind and get a tattoo of Salgado, but there has not yet been a reply.

And you thought Al Gore’s fans were in denial…

The Windy City comes to its senses:

With Mayor Richard Daley running the vote, the Chicago City Council on Wednesday repealed its controversial ban on foie gras.

Over the shouted objections of Ald. Joe Moore (49th), the ban’s sponsor, the council used a parliamentary manuever to put the ordinance on the floor for a vote.

The council voted 37-6 to repeal the two-year-old ban, which critics argued had made Chicago--and the City Council--a national laughingstock.

Ald. Thomas Tunney (44th), a restaurant owner,forced the vote on the measure that prohibits restaurants in the city from serving the delicacy made from the engorged livers of ducks or geese.

Moore, whose pleas for a debate were ignored by Daley, warned fellow aldermen “tomorrow it could happen to you.”

What could happen? I could lose my nanny state? Oh, the horror!

To paraphrase R.E.M., it’s the end of the world, but I’m insured for it.

Last November, I spent several days in the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, in banks’ headquarters in the City and in the pale wood and glass of a hedge fund’s St James’s office trying to understand the credit crisis that had erupted over the previous four months. I became intrigued by an oddity that I came to think of as the end-of-the-world trade. The trade is the purchase of insurance against what would in effect be the failure of the modern capitalist system. It would take a cataclysm – around a third of the leading investment-grade corporations in Europe or half those in North America going bankrupt and defaulting on their debt – for the insurance to be paid out.

I asked one investment banker what might cause half of North America’s top corporations to default. No ordinary economic recession or natural disaster short of an asteroid strike could do it: no hurricane, for example, and not even ‘the big one’, a catastrophic earthquake devastating California. All he could think of was ‘a revolutionary Marxist government in Washington’. That’s not a likely scenario, yet the cost of insuring against it had shot up ten-fold. Normally one can buy $10 million of end-of-the-world insurance for between two and three thousand dollars a year. By early last November, the prices quoted were between twenty and thirty thousand, and even then it was difficult to buy in quantity – at least, said the banker, ‘not from anyone you trusted’.

Some would argue that the way things are going we will get a Marxist revolutionary government in Washington, but at least you could be insured from its effects.

Really?

Reporters on the presidential campaign trail are buzzing about Barack Obama calling WXYZ’s Peggy Agar “sweetie” during a tour Wednesday of a Chrysler plant in Sterling Heights.

The comment came during a tour of the plant when the Democratic presidential candidate tried to brush off a question from Agar about help for autoworkers. “Senator, how are you going to help the American autoworkers,” Agar asked Obama. “Hold on one second, sweetie,” he replied, explaining he would answer in a later media availability.

In a posting on the New York Times Political Blog titled “Obama: Hold On, Sweetie,” reporter Jim Rutenberg pointed out this wasn’t the first time Obama used the word: “Back in Pennsylvania in early April, Senator Barack Obama took some heat for calling a female factory worker ‘sweetie,’ in Allentown.”

Obama’s comment to Agar has also been discussed by reporters for The Atlantic, Chicago Tribune, and Newsday.

The RNC, always the bastion of women’s dignity, has called him out on it.  Really? This is an issue?

This is a good example of why I could never go into politics.  If media people react to being called “sweetie” this way, imagine how they would react to being called “dipshit”.

Ah, the joys of living in the YouTube era.

It’s already been an exciting week for accidental on-air cursing, with New York broadcast institution Sue Simmons interrupting last night’s Medium to ask what the FUCK New York is doing, but Sue and Bill O’Reilly just left us wanting more. So video guru Richard Blakeley (who’s explored reportorial bloopers before) collected ten of our very favorite meltdowns by people whose job it is to not curse on TV. Some of these went out live, some were stolen from satellite feeds, but they’re all golden. From Jim Ryan telling Dick Oliver that he’ll explain how to be a reporter later to broadcast legend Bill Plante throwing a tantrum at the White House to vintage Sam Donaldson and Leslie Stahl, it’s a cavalcade of rage and frustration. Like life. Click to watch!

They say that people often forget the camera is there-but the camera never forgets you, heh.

How to keep Spot happy.

A NON-alcoholic beef-flavoured beer for dogs is being sold at a British pet shop, the Daily Mail reports.

According to Pets at Home manager Mike Hall, the drink contained potassium, vitamin B and protein.

“There’s nothing in there to harm them, that’s for sure,” he said.

“It means pets are even more a part of family life as they can enjoy a beer, too.”

The non-alcoholic drink is imported from Holland where it is called Kwispelbier, “the tail-wagging beer”.

It is being sold for £1.99 ($4.11) for a 330ml bottle.

Dogs drinking beer. Next thing you know, they’ll be playing poker.

It’s Spring, and Afghanistan’s cash crop is in full bloom.

According to a report released today by the National Security Network (NSN), Afghanistan’s poppy crop, in terms of the acreage of land used for its cultivation, goes beyond anything Colombia’s cocaine kings would dare to dream. It’s the country’s largest export, worth more than $4 billion per year and employing some 3.3 million Afghans. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported that last year’s harvest was of “unprecedented size in modern times and unseen since the opium boom in China during the nineteenth century.” So much for the War on Drugs.

An excerpt from the NSN report:

In plain view of the United States and the international community, the opium trade is overwhelming Afghanistan’s legitimate government. The facts are stunning: in 2001, after a Taliban ban on poppy cultivation, Afghanistan only produced 11 percent of the world’s opium. Today it produces 93 percent of the global crop; the drug trade accounts for half of its GDP; and nearly one in seven Afghans is involved in the opium trade. In Afghanistan, more land is being used for poppy cultivation than for coca cultivation in all of Latin America. The trade strengthens the government’s enemies and – unless its large place in the Afghan economy is permanently curtailed by crop replacements and anti-poverty efforts – poses a potentially fatal obstacle to keeping the country stable and peaceful.

Afghanistan is caught in a vicious cycle. The fall of the Taliban brought the end of their highly coercive crop reduction program. A combination of U.S. inattention and widespread insecurity and poverty allowed poppy cultivation to explode. As the opium economy expanded, it spread corruption and empowered anti-government forces, undermining the Afghan state, leading to more poverty and instability, which in turn only served to further entrench the drug trade. Meanwhile the illicit activity has been a boon to the Taliban insurgency, which has traditionally used poppy cultivation as a lever to improve its own position. Today, the Taliban relies on opium revenues to purchase weapons, train its members, and buy support.

Well, I suppose we could just keep re-invading them until we get it right.

Remember, drugs are bad-except for the ones the government forces you to take.

The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.

The government’s forced use of antipsychotic drugs, in people who have no history of mental illness, includes dozens of cases in which the “pre-flight cocktail,” as a document calls it, had such a potent effect that federal guards needed a wheelchair to move the slumped deportee onto an airplane.
.....

Involuntary chemical restraint of detainees, unless there is a medical justification, is a violation of some international human rights codes. The practice is banned by several countries where, confidential documents make clear, U.S. escorts have been unable to inject deportees with extra doses of drugs during layovers en route to faraway places.

Federal officials have seldom acknowledged publicly that they sedate people for deportation. The few times officials have spoken of the practice, they have understated it, portraying sedation as rare and “an act of last resort.” Neither is true, records and interviews indicate.

Records show that the government has routinely ignored its own rules, which allow deportees to be sedated only if they have a mental illness requiring the drugs, or if they are so aggressive that they imperil themselves or people around them.

Stung by lawsuits over two sedation cases, the agency changed its policy in June to require a court order before drugging any deportee for behavioral rather than psychiatric reasons. In at least one instance identified by The Post, the agency appears not to have followed those rules.

In the five years since its creation, ICE has stepped up arrests and removals of foreigners who are in the country illegally, have been turned down for asylum or have been convicted of a crime in the past.

Hey, protecting Amurka is a tough job…

The beat goes on for Hillary.

First, NARAL endorsed Obama today.  This has got to sting Hillary.  And her supporters are awfully miffed:

N, Miller: “I have never been so disgusted. How dare you claim to represent pro-choice women and then turn your back on one of the most influential women’s right advocates in recent history?”

Shameful: “I am insulted, as all pro-choice Democratic women should be, that Naral would endorse Senator Obama.”

Jon: “You could have waited until after the Oregon primary.”

Alyssa: “NARAL has completely lost my support.”

Mare: “Et tu Brute!”

The workings of the liberal mind are always an amusement to me.  When leading feminist icons stood by the supporter-groping, employee-harassing, intern-fondling, Broderick-raping Bill Clinton, narry a peep was heard.  But let them turn their backs on Hillary, and it’s a betrayal to the sisterhood.

Second, it looks like we know who our next Attorney General will be, as Edwards is going to endorse Obama. This would spill 19 more delegates to Obama, wiping out Hillary’s gains in West Virginia and then some.  Again, the Hillary supporters are upset.  Apparently, he shouldn’t have endorsed Obama until, oh, about 2018.

It must be fun being in a party that’s all delicate toes and offended sensibilities.

The other big news from last night was that the Democrats took Mississippi’s 1st Congressional District in a special election.  This was a district that went nearly 2-1 for Bush in 2004.  The Democrat won a 3-point plurality in the first special election.  His GOP opponent unveiled ads tying Childers to Obama and Jeremiah Wright.  This proved so successful, he lost the second special election by eight points.

What’s being ignored here is that the Democrats took this district by running conservative.  Childers ran as a social conservative who had never raised taxes.  Of course, he’d never had the authority to raise taxes, but still, he’d never raised them.  That’s true enough.

I really wonder if we will recognize the political landscape at all ten years from now.  Will all the conservatives be Democrats and all the big-government types be Republicans?

I’ve been reading all kinds of conspiracy theories today about why Hillary is still in it.  There’s:

The Murder-Suicide Theory: Hillary is trying to destroy Obama so she can win in 2012.  My experience is that the Clintons don’t think much further ahead than next week.  Witness the dissing of black voters in the late primaries.  They’re patient, but they’re not that patient.

The Floor Fight Theory: Hillary hopes to get enough delegates to start a floor fight and steal the nomination.  They might be thinking about this but I would imagine that Howard Dean and other Democrat heavies are letting them know that this will not be allowed to happen.

The Debt Theory: The Clintons are just trying to raise enough money to pay off their campign debts.  I’m not familiar enough with campaign finance law to know, but I expect some way will be found to take care of those once the campaign closes its doors.  The Clintons are worth $100 million and know a lot of rich people.  They won’t be on the street.

The “Dream Ticket” Theory: She’s campaigning for vice-President. Contra Sullivan, I think the so-called “dream ticket” is a nightmare.  Having two liberal senators on the same ballot—one of whom is deeply hated by Republicans—is a recipe for disaster.  They need someone with actual foreign policy experience, not pretence.  And they need a conservative.  Bill Richardson is the ideal candidate.  Moreover, if Obama is smart, he will not allow the Clintons to infect his White House.  I might have bought the Dream Ticket Theory a week ago.  But the push for a unity ticket is starting to fade.  The Clintons know when to time their moments.  If VP was their intention, they would have done it last week.

No, I think it’s really very simple.  They’re in denial.  They can’t believe the American public rejected them.  Not them.  Not the Clintons.  Doesn’t the public realize how wonderful they are?  They tried to reform health care!

That, and I am a believer in the Easterbrook Theory of Marginal Presidential Candidates.  This theory states that people who know they have no shot like to stay in just for the thrill of being introduced as “the next President of the United States”.  The Clintons love campaigining.  They love politics.  They love the dirty infighting and smearing.  They love the spin cycle.  They love taking quotes out of context.  In Double Star, one of Heinlein’s protaganists commented that politics was the only game for adults.  They love the game.

Of course, what they love most is winning.  And it’s going to hurt like hell the day they finally accept that they’ve lost.  Expect tears.  And a belated try at the veep spot.

Update: And, of course, just as I finish writing the post:

Hillary Clinton choked up Wednesday as she told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that her daughter’s presence on the campaign trail had been one of the “most incredibly gratifying experiences of my life.”

“Well, it’s one of the most incredibly gratifying experiences of my life, as a person and as a mother. I get very emotional,” she said. “She is an exceptional person, and she’s worked so hard, and she’s done such a good job that I’m just filled with pride every time I look at her.

Just remember.  It’s OK to use Chelsea to prove your matronly fides.  But saying she’s being “pimped out” is pure evil.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Is this a harbinger of things to come?

For the third time in four months, a Democrat has won a special election for a House seat representing a district that George Bush won overwhelmingly in 2000 and 2004 and where Democrats hadn’t had been out of the congressional competition for years.

This time, the Republican lost a U.S. House seat in a north Mississippi, where Democrat Travis Childers prevailed over Republican Greg Davis by a remarkably comfortable 54-46 margin.

For Republican congressional leaders and strategists who were already worried about the 2008 cycle, the Mississippi vote that was forced by Republican Governor Haley Barbour’s decision to appoint Congressman Roger Wicker to the Senate seat vacated by Trent Lott delivered a dismal result that just about everyone agrees bodes ill for Republican prospects in House races this fall.

Regardless of who wins the general election, it does look like the Republicans are going to get their clocks cleaned-again. The question is, who-or what-will they blame the coming “Thumpin’” on this time?