Original Face

What she didn't do

    She didn't release her pledged delegates.  Hillary Clinton might have ended campaigning for the Democratic nomination for president but she did not end her campaign.  In techo-election law lingo that can only make a lawyer happy, today she "suspended" her campaign. 
    Now most likely this suspension has as much chance of coming back to life as Ted William's cryogenically suspended body (Or did Teddy go for the economy model of preservation only paying for his head to be placed in liquid nitrogen?).  However, if something were to happen, say a piece of videotape, another crazy preacher, revelations from the outcome of the Renzo corruption trial or a major stumble when Obama is off his prepared remarks, the green flag will be waving again and it's full throttle to the finish.
    So while you have time to go to the 'fridge for another cool one or pop some corn, don't turn the television set just off yet.  There may be more racing action to come.

If you haven't got anything good to say...

    Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Teddy's daughter, is famous for her saying that "If you haven't anything good to say about anyone, come sit next to me."  Political journalism hasn't changed much, at least for the better, since TR's days.  Rumor, innuendo and malicious gossip are still the coin of the realm as far as media outlets are concerned.
    The latest is that there is an explosive tape of a candidate's spouse in the hands of one of the television networks.  I am not going to repeat what is it, or of whom.  Those rumors were buzzing about the Sunday shows and the blogosphere.  In doing so, the rumor takes on a kind of truth of its own that is poisonous to the political process.
    That being said, if the rumor does have truth to it...good Lord, Almighty!  The roof will blow off that presidential campaign.  So, stay tuned...because if it is verified...I will let you all know immediately.

Will the chubby lady start singing?

    The deal approved yesterday by the Democratic National Committee should be the end of the party's presidential nominating process.  By half-ing the delegate votes in the contested primary states of Florida and Michigan, it become almost impossible to create a scenario whereby Clinton can secure the nomination barring a complete collapse of Obama's super-delegate commitments.
    That should be, right?  It's game over and time for Hillary to come stage and do the old "it's been a good battle, and I support Obama" speech.  Yet, nothing this year has gone remotely according to script and there is a sense that the end game of the Democratic nomination campaign will not as well.
    With her concession speech, the night of the long knives will begin in earnest.  There are Democratic politicians and operatives who have been biding their time for 16 years to rid their party of Bill 'n Hill as well as their sycophants.  Obama's supporters will clean out and fumigate the party headquarters.  In the end, if one has a Clinton line on one's resume, one better start looking for a new line of work.
    The Clintonistas know this.  They have been ruthless to enemies both within and without the Democratic Party.  They understand what a bitch pay-back can and will be.  As power fades, the news media will start their own pawing over the carrion, feasting on scandals both known presently and to be uncovered.  The process, as anyone who has been watching Showtime's "The Tutors" has seen, is brutal and complete.  The only open question is whether salt will be sprinkled around their Scarsdale home.
    Is it therefore in the Clinton's interest to have Obama succeed?  Would they be better off having the 2008 nominee fail and fail horribly?  Yes. It is.  If Obama loses to McCain in this current political environment the thirst for blood will against him and his team will turn the activist's attention away from their desire to purge Clinton people.
    But how to do this without leaving fingerprints?  For Hillary to have any future in politics she must be able to say "I told you so" to the party.  To do that also requires, however, that she and her people cannot be seen as complicit in leading to his loss.  So, no.  There will not be any third party run.  Bill will not publicly endorse/embrace McCain. 
    They will leave it to feminists and others to carry the burden here.  They will quietly make sure that McCain and those 529 committees favorable to him are funded fully. Unions who have problems with Obama's elitism will only work in a perfunctory manner to get out their vote.
    It may not be the night of the long knives, but a season of continuous small, well placed cuts can be very very damaging as well.  Anyway, I've heard her sing karaoke.  She doesn't have much of a voice.

   

Kant believe it

    Language matters.  Any pollster will tell you that the results of any survey are dependent upon the language that is employed for the questions posed.  Nowhere in the political arena has this been borne out than in the issue of abortion.  I have long held that the biggest change in public opinion can be tied to the decision of the news-media to use the pro-life moniker rather than anti-abortion.  Now in this issue there are pro-choicers versus pro-lifers.  No one is "anti" anymore.
    Such is the case this past week. In the British parliament, where on a non-party line enforced vote where each member was free to vote his or her opinion, the House of Commons decided to over throw the Kantian "categorical imperative."
    You remember the Kant's "categorical imperative" from introductory philosophy, right?  One of Kant's major postulates is that the moral universe is governed by the rule that people are ends, not means.  The implications of the difference between ends and means are profound.  People are rights holders not property.  Their lives are their own, not at the disposal of others.
    Yet, the Britain is about to say that it is fine that humans could be born for the express purpose of being used for the betterment of another person.  That will be the reason they were conceived and that will be the reason that they are valued.  Not because their lives will be precious in and of themselves, but because their body parts will be useful for another person.
    How can this be in a civilized society?  How can such a law be passed overwhelmingly?  Because the term used by the proponents and the media has been "savior siblings."  They get to be modern Jesuses.  Unfortunately for them they haven't been given the choice as to whether or not they want this role.  Regardless of the fact that such children have no say as to whether one of their kidneys or another organ (or many organs...What's the reason to stop at one organ?)  gets ripped from their bodies, these babies are not called what they really are: "sacrificial siblings."   They really are more Issac than Jesus.
    They are to be conceived and born to be living warehouses of spare parts for the lives of others.  How will they feel when they get older (I am making the assumption that such children will be allowed to live, not killed when their utility has ceased.  This may not be a correct assumption, given the state of callousness of society.) to find out that they were not wanted for their own sake.  How will they deal with parents, siblings and a culture that can see them as commodities? 
    Who ever told you that sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you, has never been a "savior sibling."

Obama's Heel

    Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, is nobody's idea of a conservative, or even a moderate.  Today in the Huffington Post (where would he write, The Weekly Standard?) he skillfully takes apart the Obama campaign.  Wilentz correctly recognizes that the distain which Obama and his intellectual and wealthy supporters hold for the working class will not only doom his campaign but could herald the death knell of the Democratic Party as a governing party in the United States.
    Read it.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sean-wilentz/
    barack-obama-and-the-unma_b_103353.html

How now, Big Brown

    Brown may be the color of the moment in horse racing but it is not the favorite of the punters wagering on the outcome of the next British general election.  Today, the loss of Crewe, a Labour stronghold, by nearly 8000 votes is a staggering, shocking blow to the Prime Minister.  If this majority was replicated throughout Britain, the Labour Party would be the third party in Parliament with only 100 seats remaining.  This will not stand.
    Labour MPs, even from fairly safe seats, are now fearing for their own political careers.  When that happens, loyalty to the guy on top disappears as quickly and surely as kids after a ball breaks a neighbor's window. The only thing keep Brown in Number 10 is the question of who would want to be Labour's William Hague?  It seems that soon one of the grandees of the Party will step forward and take on the job, not because they seek power, but because someone has to  be the replacement for a failed Prime Ministership.      Will some New Labourities jump to the Lib Dems and force a vote of no confidence to save themselves ?  That possibility two weeks ago wouldn't have even made it passed the editor of a political fiction in any major publishing house.  Now, the inconceivable is conceivable. 
    The only thing that seems safe to say is that the present government is finished, whether or not they want to admit it.  It is just a matter of determining how the coup de grace will be delivered.

Somebody been spikin' your spliff, Arlen?

    You would think a grown man, especially an United States senator, would have much more important things to do than to obsess about the NE Patriot's "spy-gate" issue.  Yet, bizarre as it might seem to any sane person, that is exactly what Arlen Specter has been doing.  He is now calling upon the NFL to launch a full "Mitchell" style report on the Patriot's "illegal" taping of opposing defensive coaches' hand signals.  If the NFL does not, Specter has said he will open his own investigation and call for Senate Judiciary Committee to hold hearings on the matter.
    Grow up, Specter.  There are millions of people dying in Burma, there is a war in Iraq, terrorist threats throughout the world, Israel under siege, an economy that is on the knife's edge, gas and food prices that are skyrocketing and this nutter is concerned about whether Bill Belichick told some low level low life to point a video camera on some assistant defensive coach?  What kind of sick, twisted mind does that?
    The only four explanations with which I can come up are:  he lost some serious, serious money against the Patriots and this is payback; the dope he has been taking to stop the nausea from his chemotherapy has been laced with crack; Bob Kraft has been sleeping with Specter's wife; or he is just a whack-job.  Whichever it is, the Republican leader in the Senate should put his arm around Specter's shoulder and tell him to knock it off; that he is making himself and the Senate look like horses' asses.

Send in the marines

    It is time to retire the old satiric song of Tom Lehrer's that held to the cliche that the military's job is just to "kill people and break things."  It is time to recognize that there are times in which force is required, indeed, in which the lack of force is shameful for the commonweal.  This is one such time and Burma is one such place.
    It is just about a week out from the natural catastrophe that has destroyed a good part of the Burmese delta community.  The lowest estimate of dead, which, at the time of this writing, is already 72 hours old, is 40,000 with another 30,000 missing.  However, these numbers are, by all reasonable estimations, very, very conservative.  The real numbers approach 100,000 dead with untold hundreds of thousands stranded without potable water, shelter or electricity and with rotting corpses acting as perfect breeding grounds for a variety of infectious diseases.
    They need help, desperately.  The international community has been quick on the scene.  Having learned valuable lessons from the South Asian tsunami of a few years back, the United States, the European Community and other nations have assembled the necessary personnel and materials to begin to restore hope in the delta.
    There is a road-block, both metaphorically and physically.  The military junta that has ruled Burma for the past several decades has refused all but the smallest trickle of aid to enter its nation.  It has refused to issue visas for relief workers, including doctors and nurses.  Each request to help is encountered with neglect, red tape and, in almost all cases, denial.
    The reasons for the junta's pernicious disregard for the lives, safety and welfare of its citizens are long and, in the end, immaterial.  What is material is getting materiel to those who need it.
    It is time for the trucks and jets to be on their way.  If they encounter resistance from the junta's army, our military and those of allies should make it known in the most clear terms possible that such resistance will be futile and fatally counterproductive.  It is a task that the world's armed services could and would, if asked, perform with excellence.
    The ever cautious diplomats will counter this proposal with the threat of China, the junta's only friend, getting involved against us.  Let China try.  With the Olympics only a few short months away, China's intervention against assistance to an unimaginable number of dying people will sicken and disgust the international community and cause these Games, and their host nation, to become laughingstocks.
    Please, write your elected officials.  Do it now.  The Burmese people cannot wait any longer.

K-Lo, you are now just embarrassing yourself

    Politics is full of suck-ups.  Little people who plant a great big wet one on some politician's butt and hold on for the ride.  However, Katherine Lopez, the editor of National Review Online, is three standard deviations from the mean as a political suck up.  Her shameless flacking for Mitt Romney is an embarrassment for National Review.  It is no longer is rational.  It comes either from a dewey eyed school girl crush or being paid off. 
   Romney, the Bob Forehead of the 2008 campaign, was blown out of the water against an extraordinarily mediocre field of candiates because the American public discovered what everyone in Massachusetts has already known: that he is much like Gertrude Stein's characterization of Oakland, "There is no there, there." 
    That has not stopped our girl.  After K-Lo dried the tears from her face, she has thrown her shoulders back and got back to drumming up this loser for the vice presidential nomination.  But K-Lo, other than you and Romney's family, no one else is even paying attention.  The guy is as stiff as his hair products.  John McCain knows that, the rest of the pundit class knows that and millions of Republican voters know that.
    This pining away for Romney is just so...unseemly.  K-Lo, get a room, would ya?

More Boris-isms

    I have been asked for more Boris Johnson sayings.  I found this page at uk.msn. Enjoy.

    http://news.uk.msn.com/boris-johnson-quotes.aspx