Beginner’s Mind

Happy 5-year Blogiversary to my friend Robert Shearer and his blog Beginner’s Mind.
Robert hasn’t been posting a lot recently as he has had a lot of medical issues to deal with, but he is hanging in there. His blog focuses a lot on his interests in Buddhism.
We also have a joint blog called Theme and Variations that we use to explore our interests in classical and jazz music.

The other “surge”

This is a deeply disturbing story that hasn’t received much attention:

No Afghan troop surge

The Pentagon has said that any sizeable increase in much-needed US forces in Afghanistan will depend on deeper troop cuts in Iraq than currently planned.

Military commanders, worried about a persistent and growing Taliban challenge, have said they require up to three more brigades, or about 10,000 troops, to fill gaps in a NATO-led force in Afghanistan.

But Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell made clear that relief in Afghanistan can only come from Iraq, where US forces now find themselves embroiled in a bloody struggle with Shiite militias.

"We really have to get down in Iraq below 15 brigade combat teams for us to consider adding multiple additional brigades to Afghanistan," Morrell told reporters Tuesday.

"So, not until we get to that point can we even consider that prospect," he said.

So, we can’t take care of business in Afghanistan because we are stuck in Iraq. This pretty much sums up the sorry state of our national defense right now and the total mismanagement of our troops by the near-criminally negligent and incompetent Bush administration.
How can anyone say that Iraq is not, by definition, a quagmire at this point? A quagmire that is negatively affecting our military operations in other parts of the world. We can’t afford to be there if that is the case. The fact that Republicans got us into the mess and are now doing nothing to get us out of it is a clear indication that they are not fit for political leadership. Before anyone casts a vote for a Republican for any position above dogcatcher, they need to consider this very seriously.

It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue

The Democratic primary race is over. The elite, Washington establishment, conventional wisdom, talking heads declared it so last night. It doesn’t matter what Hillary does now, it’s officially over.
Actually, it’s been over for some time now, at least as far back as before the Texas primary. But this is the first time the opinionmakers in Washington have been willing to acknowledge that truth.
It was really quite amazing to watch last night as it slowly dawned on the talking heads that Obama was doing much better than they had anticipated. Rather than a blowout win for Hillary in Indiana and a tight race in North Carolina, it had gone the other way. Obama did better in North Carolina than Hillary had done in Pennsylvania and Indiana was considered too close to call until well past midnight. I mostly watched MSNBC because CNN’s coverage is so atrocious (their political analyst team consisted of two Hillary supporters and two Republicans). So the first person I heard state the obvious was Tim Russert, and after that it was like the scales fell off the eyes of the other pundits and they could see clearly for the first time. They started to acknowledge a grudging respect for Obama. After weeks of pounding him relentlessly with the Rev. Wright, “Bittergate” and other manufactured controversies, Obama had surprised them and done better than expected.
From this point on, if Hillary stays in the race she will be treated with the same disdain that Mike Huckabee saw after it was clear to everyone that John McCain had the Republican race sewed up. Before last night, she was still viewed as a viable candidate. Now she will be seen as a pretender, an annoyance, a “why are you still here? candidate. And the longer she drags it out, the worse it will get. It’s over.

Something amiss

I hate watching the Spurs lose. I just can’t handle it. I get too worked up about the game and it just becomes unenjoyable. I just have to walk away and change the channels.
Of course, I’d never do that if I were watching the game live - I’m no 2 percenter. But I have no qualms about changing the channel. I usually record the games on my DVR, but if it was a blowout loss, I just delete it with out watching.
Maybe I’m being a bad fan, but I can’t help it. The point of watching a game if for the enjoyment and it just kills me to see the Spurs fall apart like they did in the 3rd Quarter last night.
The Spurs represent all that is goodness and light in the universe. If they lose then something is terribly amiss. It’s like watching Barack Obama fall behind Hillary Clinton in the polls. It’s just not right!
Oh well. Maybe the Spurs will come back on their home court. Maybe Tim or Tony or Manu will have a good night. There is always hope. And if not, they had a good season anyway and got further than a lot of people thought they would.
It won’t be the end of the world, even though it might feel that way.

Is Our Kids Reading?

A new study purports to show what school children are reading these days.

My kids aren’t old enough to read on their own yet, but I read a lot of books to them every evening and I was happy to see I’ve already got almost the enitre First Grade reading list covered.
We read lots of Dr. Seuss including many that are not on the list. I was surprised to see The Foot Book so high up on the reading list, however, (going all the way up to 2nd Grade) since it is so basic and there are many other Seuss books better suited to those age levels.
Seuss is represented on the list by Green Eggs and Ham; The Foot Book; Hop on Pop; One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish; and Cat in the Hat.
Then they have several other favorites of our including Clifford the Big Red Dog; The Very Hungry Caterpillar; If You Give a Mouse a Cookie; and Goodnight Moon.
On the Second Grade list we read Where the Wild Things Are and on the Third Grade list we read The Polar Express.

Some of my kids’ other favorite books include:
Owl Babies
Big Red Barn
Put Me In the Zoo
A Zoo for Mister Muster
Poky Little Puppy
Scruffy the Tugboat
Many Moons
Curious George
Winnie the Pooh
and lots of other Disney books.

Great Derangement

This sounds like a fun book:



Kind of sad that it had to be written. Let’s just hope there won’t be a need to write a sequel after November rolls around.

Mission Accomplished 5 year anniversary

From Atrios:


And as an added bonus, here is an in depth look at John McCain’s healthcare plan.

National Popular Vote

This sounds like a great idea.

There is a way to circumvent the Electoral College and create a popular vote without a constitutional amendment. It's called the National Popular Vote, and it takes a little explaining.
The Constitution gives states the power to decide how to allocate the electors who cast the vote for the president. The National Popular Vote is a campaign to get each state to pass a law entering into a binding agreement to award all their electors to the candidate who wins the national popular vote in all fifty states and Washington, D.C. This provision would only go into effect when states whose electoral votes total a majority of the Electoral College—currently, 270 votes—sign the compact. When that happens, whichever candidate wins the popular vote will automatically garner a majority of the electoral votes. While this arrangement is rather complex, it has the advantage of being fair and utterly nonpartisan—and could take effect as soon as enough large states agree to participate.

Reassuring quote

This is the best thing Hillary has said during the entire campaign:

"Anyone, anyone, who voted for either of us should be absolutely committed to voting for the other because it would be the height of political foolishness to have voted for one of us and what we stand for and then either to stay home or not vote for a Democrat and instead vote for Sen. McCain."

Discouraged and disgruntled

I know how Maha feels. I’m discouraged too.
It has been clear since before the Texas primary that Hillary Clinton can’t win the Democratic nomination for president, but the national media keeps going along with her charade that she still has a chance and that it is a tight race. For each primary race since then, Hillary has carefully set the bar low enough that she can easily cross it, while ignoring the fact that it gets her no closer to the nomination. She has to win every contest here on out by 20 points or better to even come close to catching Obama. She won Pennsylvania by 10 points and declared it a great victory and the media went right along.

By contrast, the bar is constantly set higher and higher for Obama. He doesn’t have to just stay close in Pennsylvania. He has to win it outright. Winning in North Carolina won’t be enough, he has to win Indiana too.
Hillary is set to win by less than 10 points in Indiana and lose North Carolina by a wider margin, but she will play up the Indiana victory as a huge defeat for Obama and one more excuse for her to press on.
If Hillary would just act like she’s on the same team with Obama and quit trying to tear him, and by extension the Democratic Party, down then together they could shred John McCain. McCain is a terrible candidate. But if they just let him coast until November while they concentrate on clawing at one another, he will build up a following that will be harder and harder to peel away the closer we get to the election.

I used to like Hillary and I respected her a great deal. Now I can hardly stand to listen to her speak and usually change the channels if she comes on. She is starting to veer into Ralph Nader territory for me. It would be the ultimate betrayal of her principles if she helps McCain to win, just like Nader betrayed everything he once stood for by helping worst president ever George W. Bush to defeat environmental champion Al Gore.

I’ve lived through too many presidential elections where I’ve seen the Democratic nominee get slimed mercilessly by the Republican spin machine and the compliant media. Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry and now Barack Obama. People don’t even know who they are before the start of the campaign and by the end they can’t say their names without spitting. That is how good the Republican spin machine is at villifying people.
The Republican base is demotivated this cycle because of the war and the economy. But all they need is the flimsiest excuse to vote against someone like Obama or Kerry or Dukakis and people like Karl Rove and Lee Atwater specialize in giving them that excuse.
They don’t need help from Hillary Clinton, but they are getting plenty of help anyway this year.

Disney movies

I bought 101 Dalmations Platinum Edition recently bringing my total number of Disney animated films on DVD up to 42.
(uh oh, here is the inevitable list)

101 Dalmations (Platinum)
Alice in Wonderland
Aristocats, The
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Bambi (Platinum)
Beauty and the Beast
Bug’s Life, A
Cars
Chicken Little
Cinderella (Platinum)
Dinosaur
Dumbo
Finding Nemo
Fox and the Hound, The
The Heffalump Movie
Home on the Range
Hunchback of Notre Dame, The
Incredibles, The
Jungle Book, The (Platinum)
Lady and the Tramp (Platinum)
Lilo and Stitch
Lilo and Stitch II: Stitch Has a Glitch
Lion King, The (Platinum)
Little Mermaid, The (Platinum)
Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, The
Meet the Robinsons
Melody Time
Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers
Monsters Inc.
Peter Pan (Platinum)
Piglet’s Big Movie
Pocahontas
Pooh’s Grand Adventure
Ratatouille
Rescuers, The
Rescuers Down Under
Robin Hood
Sword in the Stone
Tigger Movie, The
Treasure Planet
Wild, The
Winnie the Pooh: Springtime with Roo

And on VHS tape I have:

Aladdin
Emperor’s New Groove, The
Fantasia
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
Toy Story I & II

And I have the following Disney non-animated or partially animated movies on DVD:

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Air Buddies
Apple Dumpling Gang, The
Bedknobs and Broomsticks
Escape to Witch Mountain
Return from Witch Mountain
Gus
Love Bug, The
National Treasure
Pirates of the Caribbean I, II & III
Tron

And on VHS:
Mary Poppins

I am anxiously awaiting the release of Sleeping Beauty Platinum Edition this Fall followed by the Pinocchio Platinum Edition early next year.
Other Disney animated films I need to get to finish out my collection include:

Hercules
Tarzan
Mulan
Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
Fun and Fancy Free
Three Caballeros, The
Make Mine Music
Saludos Amigos
Song of the South
Black Cauldron, The
Great Mouse Detective, The
Oliver & Company
Brother Bear

I generally stay away from the multiple sequels (Bambi II, Cinderella III, etc.) with a few exceptions such as the Winnie the Pooh movies which my kids love.
I may get more of the sequels later on, but they are not a high priority until I get all the main titles first.

Having this many Disney movies on DVD means, of course, that my kids are completely spoiled when it comes to watching TV. Films that I might have seen once on TV when I was growing up are now available to them as many times as we will allow. But I don’t see that as being a bad thing necessarily. Right now their TV viewing is pretty much limited to Disney movies and PBS anyway.

Movie Break

We went to see our first movie as a family over the weekend. A big thumbs up for “Horton Hears a Who” which is by far the best Dr. Seuss story every put to film (not counting Chuck Jones’ made-for-TV masterpiece “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”).
Technically, our first family movie together was “Cars” which we went to see two years ago when Isabel was just a few months old. She slept in her car seat through the whole movie.
The kids did very well and now Nathan (age 4) wants to go back and see “Kung Fu Panda” later this summer.
He is not so sure about the new “Speed Racer” movie which we saw a trailer for as well. He is also dead set against seeing “Wall-E”, the new Pixar movie because the trailer was loud and scary. But we will see them both eventually anyway as I am a huge Pixar fan and was a Speed Racer fan as a youth.
I noticed that the new Indiana Jones movie is coming out soon and a new James Bond film is set to come out in the fall. Other films I am looking forward to seeing eventually include Iron Man and Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.

We’re No. 1 (in incarceration)

Ineresting story in the New York Times today. There’s a lot to chew on here and I am excerpting it at great length....

Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’
By ADAM LIPTAK

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)

...The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63.

The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

....It used to be that Europeans came to the United States to study its prison systems. They came away impressed.

“In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States,” Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in “Democracy in America.”

No more.

“Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror,” James Q. Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. “Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons.”

Prison sentences here have become “vastly harsher than in any other country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared,” Michael H. Tonry, a leading authority on crime policy, wrote in “The Handbook of Crime and Punishment.”

Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States “a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach.”

The spike in American incarceration rates is quite recent. From 1925 to 1975, the rate remained stable, around 110 people in prison per 100,000 people. It shot up with the movement to get tough on crime in the late 1970s. (These numbers exclude people held in jails, as comprehensive information on prisoners held in state and local jails was not collected until relatively recently.)

The nation’s relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of people in American prisons.

“The assault rate in New York and London is not that much different,” said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group. “But if you look at the murder rate, particularly with firearms, it’s much higher.”

Despite the recent decline in the murder rate in the United States, it is still about four times that of many nations in Western Europe.

But that is only a partial explanation. The United States, in fact, has relatively low rates of nonviolent crime. It has lower burglary and robbery rates than Australia, Canada and England.

People who commit nonviolent crimes in the rest of the world are less likely to receive prison time and certainly less likely to receive long sentences. The United States is, for instance, the only advanced country that incarcerates people for minor property crimes like passing bad checks, Mr. Whitman wrote.

Efforts to combat illegal drugs play a major role in explaining long prison sentences in the United States as well. In 1980, there were about 40,000 people in American jails and prisons for drug crimes. These days, there are almost 500,000.

Those figures have drawn contempt from European critics. “The U.S. pursues the war on drugs with an ignorant fanaticism,” said Ms. Stern of King’s College.
....
Several specialists here and abroad pointed to a surprising explanation for the high incarceration rate in the United States: democracy.

Most state court judges and prosecutors in the United States are elected and are therefore sensitive to a public that is, according to opinion polls, generally in favor of tough crime policies. In the rest of the world, criminal justice professionals tend to be civil servants who are insulated from popular demands for tough sentencing.

Mr. Whitman, who has studied Tocqueville’s work on American penitentiaries, was asked what accounted for America’s booming prison population.

“Unfortunately, a lot of the answer is democracy — just what Tocqueville was talking about,” he said. “We have a highly politicized criminal justice system.”

The article doesn’t address how much it costs taxpayers to house all these non-violent offenders in our prison system, but you can be assured that it isn’t cheap.

McCain's budget nonsense

Why don’t stories like this get more attention?

McCain Tax Cuts Would Bloat Deficit Or Take Huge Spending Curbs
By LAURA MECKLER
April 22, 2008; Page A6

Sen. John McCain is proposing tax cuts that would either cause the federal deficit to explode or would require unprecedented spending cuts equal to one-third of federal spending on domestic programs.

.... Altogether, he proposes more than $650 billion in tax cuts a year, much of it benefiting corporations and upper-income families. That includes the cost of extending tax cuts implemented under President Bush that he voted against twice.
To help pay for it all, the Arizona senator says he would cut $160 billion a year from a federal discretionary budget that totals a little more than $1 trillion. He hasn't specified where the cuts would come from.

With military spending -- about half the total -- likely to rise or perhaps stay even, most if not all of the cuts would have to come from domestic programs. The discretionary budget, which excludes entitlements such as Medicare or Social Security, covers areas such as medical research, federal prisons, border security, student loans, food inspections and much else.
The $160 billion figure is equal to the total budget in 2007 for the departments of Education, Energy, Homeland Security, Justice and State.

The chances of cuts of this magnitude are "nonexistent," said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group that promotes fiscal discipline. "There's not a consensus to cut back on the functions of government that much," he said. "Those are very, very deep cuts."

When he talks about cutting spending, Sen. McCain usually focuses on congressional earmarks, home-state projects that members of Congress insert into spending bills. His stump speech mentions a museum commemorating the Woodstock festival in New York and the infamous "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska. But earmarks total only about $18 billion a year, according to independent estimates.
Sen. McCain and his aides haven't said where he will get his $160 billion in annual discretionary-spending cuts.

Stories such as this make it clear that John McCain is not a serious presidential candidate. He doesn’t have the foggiest clue as to what to do about the massive deficits that the Republican policies of the past eight years have left us with other than to make outrageous (and ultimately false) claims that he will slash vital government programs to nothing. And even if he did, it would not be enough to cover the massive tax cuts that he is proposing we tack on top of Bush’s already massive and fiscally irresponsible tax giveaway to the wealthy.
But McCain has a “free ride” to spout these outrageous claims while the so-called-liberal media obsesses over “bittergate”, flag lapel pins and other meaningless tripe.

Republicans for Hillary!

The election results in Pennsylvania last night were just awful. You couldn’t have asked for a worse scenario for the Democrats. Doña Clinoxte won by just enough to keep her tilting at windmills for the rest of the primary season, but not enough to make any difference in the ultimate outcome of the race.
I really can’t understand why any Democrat would be supporting Hillary at this point in the race because it is ultimately self-defeating.
However, it is quite easy to understand the motivation of these Hillary supporters:

Sandra Reed of Gettysburg has been a Republican since she was old enough to vote.
But, Tuesday, she and her husband, Vernon, went to the Adams County Courthouse and became Democrats.
"We were registered Republicans, and we will always be Republicans, but we want to help Hillary get the No. 1 position for the Democrats," said Reed, 70. "So, we are switching for the primary to vote for Hillary, then we will switch back and vote for McCain."

Lovely. They go on in the article to explain that they got this idea from listening to Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh is no dummy. But clearly a lot of Pennsylvania Democrats are.

Fortunately, the Spurs won Game 2 with the Phoenix Suns last night, so I have lots to be happy about. Now if I can just blot out the whole election debacle for another month or two....

Chicken Expression

The following is a Letter that Sharon at Bluedaze has written to the Wise County Messenger in response to the above photo at a Chicken Express in Bridgeport, Texas.

Don't worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.  — Robert Fulghum

Sometime during April, Wise County watched as the Bridgeport Chicken Express displayed the following on their marquee:

Try the Hillary Special
Two fat thighs
Two small Breasts
And a left Wing!

Let's forget about the political message — we don't care to do business with Democrats — and look at the many, negative messages this sign sends our youth.
Disparaging remarks about other people's physical attributes is acceptable behavior.
As many as 86 percent of American children are bullied at school. Later in life, children who were bullied suffer from poor self image and emotional problems while children who bully others are at a greater risk of breaking the law. On campus homicide and suicide has increased 500 percent in the past four decades.
Men are judged by their accomplishments women by their thigh and breast size. 
If a girl is born with the genetic predisposition to have full thighs or small breasts, there is little she can do about that other than dieting or surgery.
One in five women has an eating disorder and up to 20% of those affected will die as a result. Ninety-five percent of those who have eating disorders are between the ages of 12 and 25.
More than 360,000 women and teenagers underwent surgery to have their breasts enlarged with silicone or saline implants in 2005.  Any surgery involves risks, and, since breasts implants have a shelf-life, all of those women will face at least one more surgery. The risks from implants increase over time and include ruptures, silicone migration, bacteria or mold that can grow in saline implants and escape into the body, cognitive problems, pain, hardening of implants, loss of sensation, and financial burdens from repeated surgeries.
John McCain has male pattern baldness over which he has no more control than Hillary has over her breast size. Maybe he has a small penis but I'm sure Chicken Express would never display a sign denigrating any man because of physical attributes over which he has no control.

[o]ur children are watching us
They put their trust in us
They're gonna be like us
So let's learn from our history
And do it differently — The Dixie Chicks, I Hope

I hope Wise County businesses will show more responsibility and give our children a better example to watch...

Here is the contact info:

Chicken Express
802 Hwy. 380
Bridgeport, Texas 76426
Phone: 940-683-5012
Fax: 940-683-5012

Media bias exposed

The excellent investigative journalism in the New York Times over the weekend that exposed the Pentagon’s habit of programming former military brass, winding them up and sending them out to dispense propaganda disguised as “independent analysts” has gotten the cold shoulder treatment from the news outlets that have benefitted most from this scheme.
What I thought was most interesting about the article was that the first analyst featured in the NYTimes front-page photo montage was San Antonio’s own Ken Allard who is now a regular columnist for the San Antonio Express-News. But as it turns out, Allard comes out of the article smelling like a rose because he was critical of the way the Pentagon and the news outlets handled the situation.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.
As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.
“Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.”

Well, good for Allard, although I have to admit I was a little disappointed because I was looking forward to slamming the Express-News editorial board with this story.
Nevertheless, Allard continues to be a rah-rah supporter of the war in Iraq to this day as is the E-N editorial board.

In other developments of media bias, CNN has decided that Glenn Beck needs more help bashing liberals at the 24-hour news network, so they have hired former Fox pundit and Bush administration mouthpiece Tony Snow to be conservative commentator. They are already featuring Snow prominently on their Web site such as this inane exchange with Larry King in which Snow predicts a McCain victory in November!

One note of good news, the Wall Street Journal is adding liberal Thomas Frank to its lineup of regular columnists. Frank is the author of “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”.

Spurs in playoffs

Even if the Spurs end up getting knocked out in the first round this year, their Game 1 performance against the Suns will still make it all worthwhile. I couldn’t be happier for my team right now.

Hillarycrats

It has long been clear that Hillary Clinton cannot win the Democratic presidential primary race. So what is still motivating so many Democrats to continue supporting Clinton’s quixotic campaign at this point? Obama is well ahead now in the national polls. He is regularly raising twice as much money as Clinton and he keeps picking up new superdelegates and new endorsements on a daily basis.
But in the Pennsylvania primary tomorrow, the polls still show Hillary winning by as much as 10 points.
The Democrats in Pennsylvania could do us all a big favor by finally putting Hillary’s mortally wonded campaign out of its misery. Why do they insist on continuing to prop it up just to keep this painful charade going for another month or more? Why do Pennsylvania Democrats hate the Democrats?

Of course, there is still a chance that Obama could win tomorrow and force Hillary out of the race once and for all. But I’m not going to hold my breath at this point. I am assuming she will pull out a narrow victory - but only gain a slightly larger and ultimately insignificant number of pledged delegates - and then spin it to be a major victory for her side that should totally redifine the dynamics of the presidential race. Nonsense.

We need Hillary and the Hillarycrats to abandon this futile crusade and get back on the right side. Quit doing the Republicans’ dirty work for them and start defending the party’s eventual nominee for this fall’s election. Maybe the Clinton’s will sit down after tomorrow, refigure the math one more time and come to the same conclusion most everyone else did long ago. Then perhaps they will make a graceful exit from the race and allow the party to start the healing process before we get any further into the campaign season.

Letter to ABC

The following is a letter to ABC News signed by a distinguished collection of liberal journalists. I wholly concur with the sentiments of the letter.

We, the undersigned, deplore the conduct of ABC's George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson at the Democratic Presidential debate on April 16. The debate was a revolting descent into tabloid journalism and a gross disservice to Americans concerned about the great issues facing the nation and the world. This is not the first Democratic or Republican presidential debate to emphasize gotcha questions over real discussion. However, it is, so far, the worst.

For 53 minutes, we heard no question about public policy from either moderator. ABC seemed less interested in provoking serious discussion than in trying to generate cheap shot sound-bites for later rebroadcast. The questions asked by Mr. Stephanopoulos and Mr. Gibson were a disgrace, and the subsequent attempts to justify them by claiming that they reflect citizens' interest are an insult to the intelligence of those citizens and ABC's viewers. Many thousands of those viewers have already written to ABC to express their outrage.

The moderators' occasional later forays into substance were nearly as bad. Mr. Gibson's claim that the government can raise revenues by cutting capital gains tax is grossly at odds with what taxation experts believe. Both candidates tried, repeatedly, to bring debate back to the real problems faced by ordinary Americans. Neither moderator allowed them to do this.

We're at a crucial moment in our country's history, facing war, a terrorism threat, recession, and a range of big domestic challenges. Large majorities of our fellow Americans tell pollsters they're deeply worried about the country's direction. In such a context, journalists moderating a debate--who are, after all, entrusted with free public airwaves--have a particular responsibility to push and engage the candidates in serious debate about these matters. Tough, probing questions on these issues clearly serve the public interest. Demands that candidates make pledges about a future no one can predict or excessive emphasis on tangential "character" issues do not. This applies to candidates of both parties.

Neither Mr. Gibson nor Mr. Stephanopoulos lived up to these responsibilities. In the words of Tom Shales of the Washington Post, Mr. Gibson and Mr. Stephanopoulos turned in "shoddy, despicable performances." As Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher describes it, the debate was a "travesty." We hope that the public uproar over ABC's miserable showing will encourage a return to serious journalism in debates between the Democratic and Republican nominees this fall. Anything less would be a betrayal of the basic responsibilities that journalists owe to their public.

Spencer Ackerman, The Washington Independent
Eric Alterman, City University of New York
Dean Baker, The American Prospect Online
Steven Benen, The Carpetbagger Report
Julie Bergman Sender, Balcony Films
Ari Berman, The Nation
Brian Beutler, The Media Consortium
Michael Berube, Crooked Timber, Pennsylvania State University
Joel Bleifuss, In These Times
Sam Boyd, The American Prospect
Lakshmi Chaudry, In These Times
Joe Conason, Journalist and Author
Brad DeLong, Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal and UC Berkeley
Kevin Drum, The Washington Monthly
Henry Farrell, Crooked Timber, George Washington University
James Galbraith, University of Texas at Austin
Todd Gitlin, Columbia University, TPM Cafe
Merrill Goozner (formerly Chicago Tribune)
Ilan Goldenberg, The National Security Network
Robert Greenwald, Brave New Films
Christopher Hayes, The Nation
Don Hazen, Alternet
Michael Kazin, Georgetown University
Ed Kilgore, The Democratic Strategist
Richard Kim, The Nation
Ezra Klein, The American Prospect
Mark Kleiman, UCLA/The Reality Based Community
Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed
Ari Melber, The Nation
Rick Perlstein, Campaign for America's Future
Katha Pollitt, The Nation
David Roberts, Grist
Thomas Schaller, Columnist, The Baltimore Sun
Mark Schmitt, The New America Foundation
Adele Stan, The Media Consortium
Jonathan Stein, Mother Jones Magazine
Mark Thoma, The Economist's View
Michael Tomasky, The Guardian
Cenk Uygur, The Young Turks
Tracy Van Slyke, The Media Consortium
Kai Wright, The Root

Fox News could have done a better job moderating the Democratic debate. ABC has really shot itself in the foot here. Gibson should be demoted from his anchor chair. Stephanopoulos should be fired.