Around and Abouts

The “Hillary Sexism Watch” is now on installment ninety-three.

McClatchy: “Who’d pick up more swing states — Obama or Clinton?”

National security can be compromised with a simple use of CTRL-C; highlighting the redacted (blacked-out) portions of some online government documents actually allows you to paste the previously-hidden text/image(s) into a new document. The Bush Junta has spent billions of dollars unnecessarily classifying and re-classifying information that had been public for years, and it didn’t even try to pretend that it wanted such work done right.

Oh, by the way: We’re all totally fucked. And now, on to masturbation (h/t Avedon).

Bush’s “No child left behind” rhetoric seems to have taken a grisly turn.

The GOP schism continues, albeit at a glacial pace.

Who the Democratic Party Has REALLY Been Appeasing

Everyone is up in arms about Bush’s “Democrats are appeasers” implication. Given how the party has repeatedly caved-in to the Bush Junta and the GOP when Republicans controlled Congress, it’s hard not to see appeasement, even from someone with his addled point of view.

Howard Dean has certainly been a major appeaser of the Republican Party, recruiting several “Democrats” who are anti-women’s health care, anti-gun control, and pro-death penalty, because they had a better chance of winning in right-wing districts. Never mind that recruiting right-wing “Democrats” means diluting the party’s position on key issues, or the fact that these “Democrats” will have to keep their constituencies at home happy by crossing party-lines quite a few times to work with Republicans.

Then we have Barack Obama, whose centrism actually puts him to the right of Hillary Clinton. Obama is furthering the work started by Dean of diluting both the number and power of liberals within the party in order to court Republican voters. Do the members of the Latte Liberal set condemn Obama for this? Nope. They condemn the Clintons for being centrist and working too often with Republicans — while ignoring Obama’s continuous efforts to meet right-wingers half-way.

If Obama steals the nomination from Clinton and actually pulls off a win against McCain, I wonder how his followers will feel the first time he gets Congressional Dems to water-down a bill just to get some GOP votes? Or maybe the Obamanation thinks his centrism is just a cover, that he’ll use the Democratic Party’s (by then) stronger Congressional majority to happily disenfranchise the GOP if he gets into the Oval Office?

I wouldn’t hold my breath, if I were them. Obama’s entire career has been one of suckering people into his coalition, then abandoning the promises he made to them in order to curry favor with the next person or group he views as the next rung on his ladder to power. If he gets his centrist architecture in place, he won’t be able to remodel without major structural problems occurring.

Between Dean and Obama, the Democratic Party is appeasing itself to a collapse.

Barack Obama is Unfit for the Presidency, Part XIX

The Associated Press on Obama: “…[M]aybe the Obama camp should be more worried. The voters who went against Obama Tuesday night — white, rural, older, low-income and without college degrees — don’t just live in West Virginia. They live everywhere in the country, in places Obama needs to win.”

Susie Madrak has a great find: More news on the Chicago-style political machine Obama is assembling in order to destroy the liberal netroots and the Democratic Party (although given how he’s already perverted the two groups, I’m finding it hard to care).

Meanwhile, John Aravosis decided to spew his anti-woman venom in a bizarre and fact-free tantrum against Clinton. This is just par for the course for Aravosis, whose sexism is well documented. Remember his assault on Cynthia McKinney? The “Big Girl” controversy during which Aravosis became more unhinged than Michelle Malkin? This is the type of person Obama attracts to his cult.

NARAL and John Edwards Show Their True Colors

And they’ve both misgauged which way the wind is blowing.

NARAL? No big loss. I’d forgotten about the role it played in elevating Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Besides, Emily’s List is better.

Edwards? Looks like he had at least two reasons to endorse Obama today: He’s more than likely cut a deal for the Vice-Presidential spot and he’s angling for some cash for one of his pet projects. Meanwhile, thanks to Edwards, Sir Talks-A-Lot gets to hijack the media on what would have been a big night for Clinton.

And here’s a laughable quote:

Matt Bennett, a former Clinton Administration official, described Edwards as the “troubadour of the working class” and said the North Carolina senator’s endorsement of Obama makes it “tougher for Clinton to make the case that working class Democrats can’t [or] won’t support Obama.”

Edwards is a troubadour? That’s hysterical. The media ignored him and he caved. The media have savaged Clinton and she’s flourished.

“The Change You Deserve”

As part of the GOP’s plan to reinvent itself its image, the party is going to slip Effexor XR into everyone’s food. There’s also talk of inserting “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” subliminally into all American audio and/or visual media, and requiring everyone to wear American flag lapel pins that measure your mood.

See Obama.

See Obama pandering. Pander, Obama, pander!

(With apologies to Dick and Jane)

Barack Obama is Unfit for the Presidency, Part XVIII

Deb Cupples has an excellent piece building on a Chicago journalist’s critique of Obama called “Just Words? Yes, According to a Chicago Tribune Blog — and Most National Media Haven’t Figured it Out.” Cupples details Obama’s dishonesty and his indentured servitude to the pharmaceutical and health industries very succinctly.

Add Wesley Crusher’s and Fat Albert’s blogs…

…to the ever-growing list of “Writers I Can No Longer Take Seriously Because They Support Obama,” courtesy of zuzu.

Barack Obama is Unfit for the Presidency, Part XVII

The New York Times has written a massive expose of Barack Obama, showing the country what so many of us on the pro-Hillary side have seen for a while: Barack Obama is a power hungry fair-weather friend who has been pursuing the White House for most of his life. Further, his centrist stance is, ironically, highly Clintonian — such irony being lost on Obamazoids, of course, who condemn the Clintons’ Third Way centrism.

[Obama] moved from his leftist Hyde Park base to more centrist circles; he forged early alliances with the good-government reform crowd only to be embraced later by the city’s all-powerful Democratic bosses; he railed against pork-barrel politics but engaged in it when needed; and he empathized with the views of his Palestinian friends before adroitly courting the city’s politically potent Jewish community.

To broaden his appeal to African-Americans, Mr. Obama had to assiduously court older black leaders entrenched in Chicago’s ward politics while selling himself as a young, multicultural bridge to the wider political world…

“He has a pattern of forming relationships with various communities and as he takes his next step up, kind of distancing himself from them and then positioning himself as the bridge,” said Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian-American author and co-founder of the online publication Electronic Intifada, who became acquainted with Mr. Obama in Chicago.

Even moments that supporters see as his boldest are tempered by his political caution. The forceful speech he delivered in 2002 against the impending Iraq invasion — a speech that has helped define him nationally — was threaded with an unusual mantra for a 1960s-style antiwar rally: “I’m not opposed to all wars.” It was a refrain Mr. Obama had tested on his political advisers, and it was a display of his ability to speak to the audience before him while keeping in mind the broader audience to come…

For more on Obama’s sordid glide to power, see “Obama knows his way around a ballot” and “Obama in Senate: Star Power, Minor Role” from the Chicago Trib and NYT, respectively.

Kudos to the Times for doing some journalism, for once.

(Via Jeralyn)

What If Wonder Woman Endorsed Clinton?

DC Comics is wading into politics with a new mini-series called “DCU Decisions,” to be released every other week in September and October of this year. DC’s Executive Editor, Dan Didio, explained why:

…For the first time, we’ll be having our characters make true political stands in regards to their leanings, as well as what motivates them to be heroes, and what they believe is necessary for their world and their country to move in the direction they believe to be the right one…

I want people to take away an understanding of the depth of commitment of our heroes, not just that they’re vigilantes, but that they believe in the system that they participate in. I want people to take away that fact that our heroes are motivated by different reasons and have different views, but yet all of them are able to work together doing what’s right for the people they protect, for the country, and for the world. And I want people to take away the idea that all of our heroes aren’t of a single mind or of one motivation. Each one is driven and driven in different ways to do different things in order to achieve the greater good.

This should be interesting. Comic books have delved into politics before, but iconic heroes like Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman have never declared support for a particular candidate (and by extension, the candidate’s political party). Hell, it’s rare for a comic book superhero to do more than dance along the fringes of a vaguely-defined political issue. Off hand, only Wonder Woman, as written by Phil Jimenez, and Green Arrow come to mind as heroes actually engaged in political activism.

How will heroes with differing political views interact with each other once those views become public knowledge and political leverage? How will it affect team dynamics? How will the general public feel about the heroes once those heroes’ political leanings or affiliations are revealed?

If only DC hadn’t picked a fauxgressive bastard like Judd Winick to pen this story… He’s not one of DC’s better writers.