Crossing the threshhold

For the last few days, Hillary Clinton has been pushing a new campaign theme where she claims to have “crossed a threshhold” for becoming Commander in Chief of our military, while implying that Barack Obama has not. The outrageous part is that each time she does this she assumes that Republican John McCain has crossed that threshhold as well. So, in effect, she is endorsing McCain’s bid for the presidency over Obama’s.
What is she thinking?!?
Hillary has crossed a threshhold alright! Right into Joe Lieberman territory. What’s next? Will she be making a nomination speech at the Republican National Convention this summer like Zell Miller did?
I’m not a Hillary basher by any measure. I’ve always admired and supported her in the past. But lately it is becoming extremely difficult for me to defend her actions to my friends. What is going on?
Hillary is not stupid. I know that she can count. I know that she can see the writing on the wall. As Jonathan Alter pointed out in Newsweek, she has no chance of catching up to Obama in the pledged delegate count at this point, even if she were to blow him out in every contest from here on out.
So what is her gameplan with this new line of attack? How does she expect to win over Democratic voters by praising John McCain? It’s nuts. Is she just being vindictive, with the idea that if she can’t win, then nobody can win?

District 23 challenger

It seems like just yesterday that I was celebrating Ciro Rodriguez’ victory over Henry Bonilla in the 23rd Congressional District.
Now, it’s time to gear up for the next challenge. Bexar County Commissioner Lyle Larson won the Republican primary the other day and will take on Ciro this fall. Larson handily defeated millionaire businessman Quico Canseco despite being outspent nearly 10-1.

I was glad to see Larson win, partly because I think he is not as noxious as Quico and partly because he does not have the personal wealth and financial resources at his disposal that Quico has.
Larson seems like a mainstream Republican who is not out on the wingnut fringe. But then, I thought the same thing about John Cornyn before he got elected to the Senate.

On his campaign website, Larson seems to downplay (or ignore) the more divisive issues on his website and promises to “bring fiscal discipline to Washington, D.C.,” secure our borders and care for our veterans. Hardly controversial ideas.
Still, Larson covers his right flank by declaring "I am pro life and I value the sanctity of every human life.” and "I believe in traditional marriage; a union between a man and a woman". But then he goes on to emphasize his support for adoptions programs which everybody supports.
But there are some worrisome areas on Larson’s “issues” page that voters should be aware of. He talks about Social Security in alarmist terms and hints that “tough decisions must be made” about the level of benefits younger generations will recieve.
And on taxes, Larson embraces the nutty “Fair Tax” scheme most recently promoted by Mike Huckabee that would eliminate the IRS and fund the entire U.S. government (inadequately) with a massive 36 percent sales tax on everything. The goofy idea was initially dreamed up by the Church of Scientology, and is now being endorsed by the rightwing fringe of the Republican Party.

One issue that Larson skirts on his web site, not surprisingly, is the Iraq War. But one can be assured that as the Republican candidate on the ballot with John McCain next fall, Larson will have no choice but to wear the Iraqi albatross around his neck.

This should be a good year for Democrats and Ciro should not have too much trouble getting re-elected after knocking off Bonilla by a 55-45 margin less than two years ago. But he needs to take the challenge from Larson very seriously with the understanding that Larson or someone like him will be back again and again trying to pry him out of this newly blue congressional district.

A muddled election

I am deeply disappointed in the elections results last night. I very much wanted to see Texas go for Obama.
We had a chance to pick the next president of the United States here in Texas the other day and we blew it.
The election results, which gave a slim popular vote victory to Hillary Clinton and a caucus-driven delegate victory to Barrack Obama, only served to muddle things up and send the whole campaign packing down the road for the next states to decide.

Hillary is claiming a huge victory for herself, which is understandable, but when the delegates are all counted and divvied up there is less there than meets the eye.
Hillary won big in Ohio and Rhode Island, but lost in Vermont. In Texas, she split the primary delegates and lost the caucus delegates. The final tally looks like she may end up with a net gain of two or three delegates, maybe.
In other words, she did nothing to make up the gap in pledged delegates between her and Obama which stands at something like 157.
So now, instead of bowing out of the race and allowing Democrats to regroup around their eventual nominee, we are going to continue the bloody fratricide to the delight of the Republicans for the next six weeks. Hillary’s only chance of winning the nomination will be to continue her negative campaigning and tear Obama to pieces before the Democratic convention this summer so that the super delegates will be more willing to abandon him and support her.
Lovely.
The part of John McCain will now be played by Hillary Clinton for the next six weeks. Meanwhile, McCain will have time to raise a huge warchest with which to beat Democrats over the head this fall.
I don’t know if I have the stomach to put up with this for another six weeks. Yech!

E. Gary Gygax RIP

Gary Gygax, the creator of the Dungeons and Dragons role playing game, died today at age 69.
I actually got to meet Mr. Gygax back during the summer of 1983 and got his autograph when I attended the GenCon gaming convention in Lake Geneva, Wis. with my friend Jim Miller.
My friends and I were big into D&D when I was in high school. My friend Robert introduced me to the game when I was a freshman or sophomore and we played pretty regularly until we all left for college.
D&D has gotten a bad rap over the years from fundamentalist churches and that lame TV movie that starred Tom Hanks and so forth, but I have to say that for a kid growing up in small-town South Texas it was a godsend. Back before we had home computers and VCRs and cable TV, there just wasn’t much for young teens to do in the evenings. Rather than driving around town, cruising the local Dairy Queen, drinking beer and generally getting into trouble, my friends and I would gather at someone’s house, sit around a card table with a big bowl of popcorn and play D&D until late in the evening.
The game was complex and had lots of rules, but was otherwise very low-tech and required little more than the rule books, some pencils, paper and special dice. When we started, we didn’t even have dice and had to use little cardboard chits with numbers that we would keep in styrofoam cups. I remember when we finally got the special 20-sided, 12-sided and 8-sided dice it was very exciting. Back then, finding D&D games and accessories meant searching through the back corners of old hobby shops that mostly catered to people who built models and train sets. The closest one to us was in Kingsville more than 30 miles away.
Today, the game has been taken over by computers. Whereas it used to require gathering all your friends together to play a decent game, you can now play all by yourself in front of your computer, sometimes with other people half a wold away sitting in front of their computers. It’s just not the same.
I still have all my D&D books and stuff at home, packed away in a closet somewhere. Maybe when my kids are old enough and if they show any interest I might drag it all out and hopefully the magic will still work at that point. All it takes is a little imagination.

Hopes and fears

I got an email today from Move-On.org that said they had called more than 400,000 Texas voters over the weekend to urge them to vote for Barack Obama. If they called everyone of them a dozen times like they did me, that would be a lot of phone calls!
Seriously though, my phone was ringing off the hook all weekend by people calling on behalf of Obama. I never got any calls from anyone supporting Hillary. My wife assumed it was because I had given the Obama people my contact info when I dropped by their HQ last week to pick up a bumper sticker. But I didn’t tell them my name or anything. I just shook the guy’s hand and said thanks for the bumper sticker. So I assume they have my number from the Democractic Party which should be available to Hillary as well.

On a related topic, I was listening to the local wingnut radio station again last Friday and the locally-based host - Joe Pags - was having a “townhall meeting” on the air with representatives from the different political campaigns taking questions from a studio audience. What I thought was incredible is that they had a well-known educator and labor leader there to represent Hillary, a prominent local state representative to represent Obama, a local attorney speaking for Mike Huckabee, but nobody to represent John McCain! How could that be?? This was the rightwing radio station that airs non-stop rightwing hate radio day and night and they couldn’t get a McCain supporter to show up for their big election event? How pathetic!
And then I noticed that every single person in the audience asking questions throughout the show was an Obama supporter. Hilarious! I almost felt sorry for the host.

I’m now hearing that Obama will be back in San Antonio on Tuesday as the election results are coming in. If he doesn’t win, I will be sorely disappointed because it will mean six more weeks of Hillary continuing to tag team with John McCain in attacking Obama, even though she still won’t be able to catch up to him in the delegate vote. One prominent blogger has already speculated that the Hillary team might even work to defeat Obama in November so that they can be set to run for president again in 2012. I certainly hope that is wrong.
I think Obama will win in Texas, and if so Hillary should step down even if she pulls off a victory in Ohio. Ohio can be a face saver for Hillary, but it won’t be enough to keep her afloat for the rest of the campaign. Hillary blew this race on Super Tuesday when she decided to coast along on her victories in New York and California while overlooking the fact that Obama was sweeping the floor with her everywhere else.

SAPBA Round-Up

Vince over at Capitol Annex has his weekly Texas Progressive Alliance Blog Round-Up for this past week.
As usual, Vince neglects to include any bloggers from San Antonio in his “round-up.”
So to make up for this regular oversight, I’ve decided to set up the informal San Antonio Progressive Bloggers Alliance Round-Up to highlight all the good bloggy stuff coming out of the Alamo City that is regularly ignored by our progressive brethrens in Austin, Houston and Dallas.

Peter at B&B was able to attend the Barack Obama rally in San Antonio on Friday and gives his thoughts here. He even provides some photos from his seat up in the nosebleed section.
Earlier, Peter, a native Chicagoan, had an excellent post about the similarities between the Obama campaign and that of the late Harold Washington, the former mayor of Chicago.

Over at Beginning To Wonder, AnnPW has a suggested theme song for the Obama campaign.

Donna at Happiness Anyway has a good post up about the astounding number of people we keep locked up in jail for non-violent crimes. It is a huge problem that flies below the radar screen for most people until one of their relatives gets caught up in the system.

Karen Zipdrive at Pulp Friction makes the excellent point that we would not bat an eye if John McCain were to pick a white male as his running mate. However, if Hillary Clinton were to pick a white woman for a VP or Barack Obama were to pick a black man, chaos and mayem would ensue. Go figure.

Dig ad veritas at Dig Deeper Texas is concerned that the harsh tone of the Democratic primary could hurt the winner’s chances in November.

And over at Agblogistan they are wondering if we will see any last minute surprise attacks thrown out just before the March 4 primary.

Finally, over at Rhetoric & Rhythm, Mike discusses the Hagee-Farrakhan double standard where Obama is forced to denounce a controversial black minister he has no connection to, while McCain openly embraces the endorsement of a controversial white pastor with no negative consequences.

Check back next week for more good stuff from the SAPBA!

That’s it?!?

John McCain’s campaign raised $12 million in February.
That may sound like a lot, and it is, but when you consider that Hillary Clinton raised $35 million and Barack Obama raised close to $50 million during the same time period, it’s chicken feed.
But this is consistent with how the entire election season has been going. Three to four times as many Democrats are turning out to vote in the primaries as Republicans. When McCain holds a campaign rally, he attracts just a fraction of the number that either Hillary or Obama attract.
Just imagine when the primary race is over and the Hillary people come on board with the Obama campaign (the most likely scenario). They are going to swamp the Republicans in November. Most of the Republican’s big money men know this and that is why they are keeping their wallets closed for this election. They don’t like to throw away their money on losing causes. And the Republican presidential campaign is a lost cause no matter who the nominee is.

Whose side are they on??

One reason I’ll be glad when this primary campaign is over is to put an end to garbage like this. Why is Hillary cutting ads for John McCain? Sheesh!

I was thinking the same thing yesterday when I heard Hillary supporter Henry Cisneros on the logal wingnut radio station WOAI 1200 being interviewed by Joe Pags. Pags is one of those “John McCain is not conservative enough for me” nut jobs who will end up supporting McCain in the fall anyway. And here he was interviewing Cisneros and delighting in getting the former San Antonio mayor and HUD secretary to take cheap pot shots at Obama.
The only good things is that these “my opponent doesn’t have enough experience” attacks are largely ineffective. Otherwise, George W. Bush would never have been almost elected in 2000.

But when it comes to internal bickering, I don’t think Democrats can hold a candle to the kind of vicious dog-eat-dog battles that go on in the Republican primary. I heard a radio ad for Republican state Rep. Nathan Macias that made it sound like his Republican opponent is running on Ralph Nader’s Green Party ticket. The ad is mean and nasty and vicious, and then it has the audacity at the very end to accuse Macias’ opponent of “running a negative campaign.” Go figure.

And listening to Quico Canseco’s radio ads makes me hope Lyle Larson will pull off a victory despite being outspent nearly 10-1 in the race. Canseco is shamelessly and ignorantly demagouging over the illegal immigration issue. Not only do the demogouges make the illegal immigration issue into a bigger problem than it really is, but their proposed solution is fanciful nonsense that will only exacerbate the problem over the long run. You CANNOT deport 12 million people who are already here and have long ago enmeshed themselves into our society. Providing them with a means to obtain citizenship is not just doing them a favor (not to mention their children), it is doing society in general a favor. Giving them citizenship means they will be able to serve society as well as benefit from it.

An endorsement (not)

I am constantly amazed that I actually have a U.S. Congressman representing me who I like and can support - Ciro Rodriguez. And a state senator too - Carlos Uresti.
But my state representative is a little rightwing toad by the name of Frank Corte Jr.
I just heard an ad for Corte today on the local wingnut radio station (WOAI) and it reminded me that he actually has a primary opponent this year, the equally loathsome and dumb as a brick Tony Kosub.

So I just wanted to take a minute to announce my endorsement of Tony Kosub in his bid to take down Corte Jr. in the Republican primary. Not because I want Kosub representing me any more than Corte Jr., but because on a tactical level it would be easier for a Democrat to run against Kosub in the fall. Kosub has not built up the name recognition, the campaign warchest or the legislative experience that Corte Jr. has. Therefore he would be easier to knock off in the general election, and, in the event that he does get into office, God forbid, he would be less effective and less able to screw things up.

The Hagee-Farrakhan double standard

Glenn Greenwald has another excellent post up today in which he calls attention to what I would call the Hagee-Farrakhan double standard in our political discourse.

Why is Louis Farrakhan deemed by our political establishment to be so radioactive as to not be fit for good company -- black candidates are required to repudiate his support even when they haven't sought it and denounce his views even when they've never advocated anything close to those views -- but John Hagee is a perfectly acceptable figure whom mainstream GOP politicians are free to court without any consequences or media objections?

John Hagee is the pastor of the 19,000-member Cornerstone Church which is just down the road from my house. The first thing you should know about Hagee is that he is a hypocrite. Like many religious right preachers, Hagee loudly denounces people who commit sexual infidelity (especially the homosexual kind) and says that “Christians... don’t get divorced...”
And yet, Hagee’s first marriage of 15 years ended in divorce in 1975 as a result of his own infidelity. Rather than acknowledge this, Hagee tries to cover it up today as he does on his web site where he claims that he and his current wife Diana “have five married children.”
But two of those children were actually with his first wife who has apparently been excised from his memory.
In addition to being an adulterer, Hagee reportedly rakes in millions of dollars each year through his tax-exempt television ministry.
But Hagee is most controversial when it comes to his extreme views on the Middle East. He is downright racist when it comes to Muslims in general and Palestinians in particular - having claimed that all “who live by the Koran have a scriptural mandate to kill Christians and Jews.”
Hagee also claims that there is a Biblical imperative for the U.S. to attack Iran and supports a pre-emptive strike on Iran as a first step toward fulfilling his twisted interpretations of Biblical prophesies.

But, as Greenwald notes, none of these extremist views have made Hagee (or Robertson or Falwell or Dobson) the kind of political pariah that Louis Farrakhan has become.
Farrakhan has made many controversial statements over the years that have been deemed both racist and anti-semitic. The difference that I can tell, however, is that today Farrakhan denies having said many of these things or simply does not say them anymore, whereas Hagee continues to make the same controversial statements again and again without consequence.
Thus we have the situation we saw just the other day where on the one hand Barack Obama is being hounded by Tim Russert to denounce Farrakhan despite never having sought his favor or endorsing his views; while at the same time John McCain is openly accepting the praise and endorsement of Hagee at his church in San Antonio.
A shameless double standard if ever there was one.

Vote cast

I cast my vote yesterday. I went to an early voting site at the library nearest to my house. It was around 5 p.m. when I arrived and there actually was a bit of a line, but not too bad and I was in an out in about 10 minutes. I couldn’t find my current voters card, so I brought my old one that had expired in November and they were perfectly fine with that. That and my driver’s license was all I needed.
They gave me a slip of paper with my name on it that I can use to attend my precinct caucus meeting after the polls close next Tuesday. I may try to go just out of curiosity. I bet that it will be crowded.
This is only the second time I’ve been able to vote in a contested presidential primary in Texas. The first time was in 1988, and ironically I voted for a black man then too. Four years prior to that, I had cast my first vote ever for Ronald Reagan. But by 1988 I had done a complete about face. I voted for Jesse Jackson in the primary not because I thought he could actually win, but because I wanted to send a message that I wanted a strong liberal candidate. We ended up with Michael Dukakis instead, but I enthusiastically backed his campaign to the bitter end.
This time I was not sending a protest vote. Rather, I think my candidate will actually win.
A actually got to vote in one other contested presidential primary, but that was while I was living in Connecticut in 1992. I cast my vote for Bill Clinton that year largely because I had been so impressed after seeing him in person give a speech to the Middletown Chamber of Commerce. He ended up losing the Connecticut primary to Jerry Brown, but won the overall election nonetheless.
I also got to see Hillary Clinton speak at a campaign rally on the Yale University campus that year as well. We lived close to New Haven at the time. I remember being impressed by her as well. They made quite a team.
Hillary will be back in San Antonio this Friday for a campaign rally and so will Barack Obama. It will be ineresting to see who can draw the larger crowd, although I think it won’t be any contest.

William F. Buckley Jr. RIP

William F. Buckley Jr. was one of those conservatives for whom I had a great deal of respect. I admired his willingness to engage the other side in debate. His TV show Firing Line provided a national outlet for prominent liberals of that era such as Gore Vidal, John Kenneth Galbraith and Noam Chomsky to gain some badly needed exposure.
Conservative commentators today, by contrast, are much less educated and very much unwilling to engage the other side in a direct debate. Can you imagine Rush Limbaugh inviting someone like Chomsky or Vidal onto his radio show and actually allowing them to talk?
I saw Buckley in person once when I was at Texas A&M in the mid-1980s as part of a current affairs program at the university. It was a live debate between Buckley and Galbraith on the merits or demerits of Big, or as Galbraith corrected, Strong Government. At the time, I think I was siding with Buckley. I have long since switched to Galbraith.
When I lived in Connecticut, Buckley’s newspaper columns were widely distributed and I would read him every week. I remember my impression at the time was that he would cram as many big words as he could into each column and often times not come to any clear point.
In his later years, as the modern conservative movement was becoming more and more radicalized, he stayed grounded in the conservativism of the past. He was highly critical of President Bush and the war in Iraq and was thereafter largely sidelined by his ideological heirs.

Steroid obsession

Aaarrrrgggghhhhh!!!! Why is Henry Waxman still wasting time on this?

Congress asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Roger Clemens "committed perjury and made knowingly false statements" to a House committee.

This is all “he said-she said” nonsense. They can’t prove squat! I hope that Mukasey throws this back in Waxman’s face and tells him to stick it in his ear.
I know that investigating all the myriad Bush scandals is not as glamorous as going after a baseball superstar, but I’d really appreciate it if Waxman would go back to doing his real job.

Even temperment

One thing that has impressed me about Barack Obama lately is his even temperment. Nothing seems to ruffle his feathers or break his stride. He doesn’t raise his voice, he doesn’t get testy or perturbed. In fact, he seems to have handled all the pressures of the campaign amazingly well.
Glenn Greenwald has a good post about how Obama effectively handled a rightwing attack on his patriotism without getting defensive and agitated.
So far, this is one of the qualities I like best with Obama and it contrasts well right now with the shrill tone that Hillary Clinton has lately adopted as she desperately tries to salvage her presidential prospects.
Clinton’s “outrage” the other day over the content of some Obama campaign fliers was clearly a tactical effort on her part to try and link Obama to someone most Democrats despise - Karl Rove. You know that Clinton did not just pick up one of these flyers the other day and fly into a rage. Rather, there was probably a strategy session where they came up with the idea of trying to link Obama to Rove, followed by a search through the campaign literature for something that they could pretend to get upset about. It all came across as very fake and very staged. But the point was not to reach out to politically astute people, but rather those who don’t pay much attention to these things and would be more likely to be persuaded by such mock outrage.
Needless to say, I’ll be glad when this is all over and the Democrats can all kiss and make up and stop all the sniping and backstabbing.

Running Mates

An interesting column today from George Will speculating about who John McCain is likely to tap as his VP choice. After briefly toying with and then dismissing the ideo of a woman (Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison) and a black man (Gen. Colin Powell), Will gives us a list of five or six WASPy males who are currently preening for the job.
Before reading the Will piece, I was prepared to make a bold prediction that McCain would try and exploit the Hispanic community’s reluctance to support Obama by picking a right-wing Hispanic as his running mate — someone like Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida.
But that didn’t seem to cross Will’s radar screen, so perhaps it is something McCain will not consider. Maybe they are afraid it would further enrage the anti-immigrant wingnut faction of the party.

Meanwhile, on the other side I have said before that Bill Richardson would be a smart choice for Obama and would go a long way at bridging the black-Hispanic gap that currently exists. But they may also decide that having one minority on the tickets is groundbreaking enough and play it safe by going with a white male. I hear that John Edwards is available.

Oscar impressions

Yawn! I wasn’t terribly interested in the Oscars this year. Once again, I have yet to see any of the major category nominees and it is unlikely that I will rush out and see them anytime soon. The only one I wouldn’t mind seeing sooner than later is Johnny Depp in “Sweeney Todd”.
I wouldn’t mind eventually seeing “No Country For Old Men” “There Will Be Blood” and “Michael Clayton”, but I’ve said the same thing in the past about other Oscar films that I have yet to see. I’ll probably never see “Atonement” or “Juno”.

The best film I saw all year (which I finally watched over the weekend) was the “Bourne Ultimatum”, which I was delighted to see win three Oscars, a sweep of every category it was nominated for. I was also happy that “Ratatouille” won for best animated film, although it should have been nominated for Best Picture as well.
But the Academy has even less respect for action/adventure movies than it does for comedies. Thus the past oversights for all time great films like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I thought the acting awards were fairly predictable except for Best Supporting Actress which I figured would go to Cate Blanchett. I was disappointed with the Oscar choice for Best Song going to some independent film no one has ever heard of and no one will ever see, passing over three Disney songs from “Enchanted”. I can pretty much guarantee that I will soon own a copy of “Enchanted” and know all those songs by heart, while I will probably never hear the other song again.

But that is what the Academy likes to do these days. Diss the big megaplex movies that most Americans get to see in favor of little known independents that you would be lucky to find at your local video store in a year. This somehow demonstrates the Academy’s superiority and elite tastes compared to the mongrel hordes who shell out most of the money that supports the industry in the first place.
If the Academy wants to honor these kinds of movies every year, then they should put their money where their mouths are and back these films from the get go. Give them enough financing to get better distribution and advertizing and marketing budgets so that people will actually have a chance to go see them during the year instead of only having a choice of films that the Academy typically turns its nose up to.

McCain’s run of bad luck

No, I’m not talking about the NYTimes story today about John McCain’s close ties to a female telecom lobbyist.
What caught my interest while reading through McCain’s Wiki bio entry was the number of times he was involved in a flying mishap that resulted in the loss or near loss of his airplane. There are five all totaled, four of which resulted in the loss of an aircraft and one that was “a close call.”
Not all of these were McCain’s fault, in fact, it’s not clear if any could be directly blamed on him (except possibly the close call incident). But it sure does seem like an amazing run of bad luck for one pilot. How common was it for pilots to lose aircraft like this?

The first incident occurred sometime prior to 1960 while McCain was in flight school in Texas.

During a practice run in Texas, his engine quit while landing, and his aircraft crashed into Corpus Christi Bay, though he escaped without major injuries.

Next came the “close encounter” in 1962:

His aviation skills improved, but he had another close call when he and his plane emerged intact from a collision with power lines, after flying too low over Spain.

The third incident occurred in December 1965:

...he had his third close call when a flameout over Norfolk, Virginia led to his ejecting safely, and his plane crashed.

Then, perhaps the most bizarre and deadly incident occurred onboard an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin in July 1967:

The crew was preparing to launch attacks, when a Zuni rocket from an F-4 Phantom was accidentally fired across the carrier's deck. The rocket struck McCain's A-4E Skyhawk as the jet was preparing for launch. The impact ruptured the Skyhawk's fuel tank, which ignited the fuel and knocked two bombs loose. McCain escaped from his jet by climbing out of the cockpit, working himself to the nose of the jet, and jumping off its refueling probe onto the burning deck of the aircraft carrier. Ninety seconds after the impact, one of the bombs exploded underneath his airplane. McCain was struck in the legs and chest by shrapnel. The ensuing fire killed 132 sailors, injured 62 others, destroyed at least 20 aircraft, and took 24 hours to control.

Wow! Talk about bad luck! This guy seemed to be destined for trouble. It makes me wonder if anyone was really surprised when McCain got shot down and taken prisoner just a few months later:

McCain was flying as part of a 20-plane attack against a thermal power plant in central Hanoi, a heavily defended target area that had almost always been off-limits to U.S. raids. McCain's A-4 Skyhawk had its wing blown off by a Soviet-made SA-2 anti-aircraft missile[48] while pulling up after dropping its bombs. McCain fractured both arms and a leg in being hit and ejecting from his plane.

He parachuted into a lake where he nearly drowned before being dragged out by an angry mob that nearly beat him to death. He might have died from his injuries, except that the Vietnamese figured out that he was the son of an Admiral and decided to keep him alive so that they could torture him and try and use him as a propaganda tool.

Legislative achievements

Wow. Obama really kicked some butt last night in Wisconsin. He blew out Hillary worse than John McCain blew out Mike Hucakbee. Just think about that for a minute. And then consider that Hillary recieved more votes than McCain and Huckabee combined, and still lost by nearly 20 points. The Republicans better wake up and smell the coffee, because they are heading toward the short end of a Reaganesque landslide in this fall’s general election.
The Obama phenomenon is continuing to surge ahead and it looks like it will finally swamp the struggling Hillary campaign right here in Texas. If Obama wins in Texas, it’s all over for Hillary.

On a slightly different topic, I want to comment about political hit that MSNBC’s Chris Matthews pulled on Texas State Sen. Kirk Watson who was on air last night as a surrogate for the Obama campaign. Watson had obviously been prepped with the latest campaign themes to regurgitate in short bursts, but instead got hoodwinked by Matthews who wouldn’t let him talk about those things and instead insisted that he list Obama’s “legislative accomplishments” in the Senate. Poor Watson could only stare blankly because he did not know what to say and had obviously not been prepped for that question. Matthews clearly knew this and made great sport of embarrassing Watson over it.
First, if Watson had been a little quicker on his toes he would have shot back and turned the tables by asking Matthews to list the legislative accomplishments of John McCain, who has been in the Senate much longer than Obama, and has no better track record of authored legislation signed into law. He could have also pointed out that if people were interested in who had the biggest list of “legislative accomplishments” they could have gone with any one of the other candidates with far more experience in the federal legislature (Dodd, Biden, Richardson).
But Obama really does have some “legislative accomplishments” under his belt despite his short time in the Senate. And the interesting thing is that most of them were achieved by cooperating with and co-sponsoring legislation with Republican lawmakers - including John McCain on at least two occassions. Obama co-sponsored immigration reform legislation with McCain. He also co-sponsored with McCain a bill to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Other interesting bi-partisan efforts include the Lugar-Obama act that expanded a cooperative threat reduction agreement to include conventional weapons; and the Coburn-Obama Transparency Act which funded a website run by the Office of Management and Budget where people can see how federal funds are being spent. He has also worked on legislation with Republicans Kit Bond and Chuck Hagel.
I think the fact that Obama seems to work so well with Republicans speaks well of his sincerity in building a broad coalition that can actually change the partisan tone in Washington.
I’m sure the next time the Obama campaign sends out a campaign surrogate on MSNBC, they will be stuffed full of talking points about Obama’s “legislative achievements” and it is probably a good think in the long run that Matthews rubbed their noses in the dirt now rather than saving it for later when it might have hurt more.

Obama endorsement

Is this what it was like in Iowa and New Hampshire?
San Antonio, and the rest of Texas, is being inundated by the political campaigns. We’ve already had Hillary Clinton make an appearance here. Today we have Barack Obama conducting two townhall-style meetings. On Thursday, Sen. Ted Kennedy will be here on behalf of Obama and Gov. Mike Huckabee will also drop in as part of his Quixotic crusade against Republican frontrunner John McCain. Then, on Sunday, Hillary Clinton is supposed to be back again. I’ve also heard that former President Bill Clinton will be campaigning here on behalf of Hillary soon. And I’m sure that is not all. This thing is just getting started with two weeks before the make-or-break primary.
Obama is expected to continue his post-Super Tuesday winning streak today with primary victories in Wisconsin and Hawaii. Unless a miracle occurs for Hillary in Wisconsin, she will have her back against the wall in Texas and Ohio where she will have to win by large margins to avoid being forced out of the race. By contrast, Obama does not HAVE to win here, but if he fails to knock off Hillary then, it will probably mean that we are headed for a brokered convention and that could end up being a lot uglier than anyone wants to see.
I tried to stay neutral in this race for as long as I could, believing that either Hillary or Obama would make an excellent president. But I don’t want to see anything happen that could damage the Democrats chances of retaking the White House in November. Another four years of the Bush presidency with his surrogate John McCain would be unspeakably disasterous. Our nation’s superpower status is hanging in the balance.
Therefore, I’ve gone full bore toward supporting Obama because I see him as having the best chance of winning the nomination outright at this point, and of going on to victory in November. I’m hoping for a clear Obama victory in Texas on March 4 followed by a gracious withdrawal by Hillary so that the Democratic Party can come together in time to weather the onslaught of political attacks being put together by the rightwing spin machine.

Update:
It looks like Obama is sweeping the San Antonio Progressive Bloggers Alliance here and here.

Meanwhile, the local wingnut blogs have endorsed: Rudy! Huckabee! Fred! Romney! ummmm Huckabee?

Political comebacks

As someone who had written John McCain off long ago (just like everyone else did), I’m wary of dismissing other candidates too early. While it would seem that Hillary is in a heap o’ trouble right now (and indeed she is), things could still turn around for her on a dime as this article makes clear.
Still, the people who are saying that Hillary can win in Wisconsin next week are the same ones who said she could win in Washington and Maine and Virginia, etc. So I’m not convinced, but I’m also not going to write anybody off.

Meanwhile, I love to read stuff like this where the Republican Party realists are forced to face up to the reality of their dismal election prospects in November.
With both Obama and Hillary drawing twice the number of voters as all the Republicans combined in a Red state like Virginia, it is very clear that the general electorate is swinging very heavily to the Democratic side this year regardless of which candidate ultimately wins the nomination.

By the way, Hillary was in San Antonio last night for a rally at St. Mary’s University where she got introduced by County Judge Nelson Wolff. The crowd seemed big and enthusiastic, but that is to be expected in a state that has been starved for some attention from these national candidates. I’m sure a lot of people who went may end up voting for Obama, but just wanted to be at the rally to see a Democratic superstar.
And I think the archbishop showed extremely poor judgement by sticking his nose into it and whining about how some candidates’ views don’t match up to all of the Catholic church’s hardline dogma. It was reported that the archbishop had been prompted to speak by local Catholics upset by Hillary’s presense at a Catholic university. I would’t doubt that one of those people complaining most loudly is my old friend Mark.
I just want to hear the archbishop next dress down Sen. McCain for his support of the death penalty and the War in Iraq. Fat chance.

E-N endorses McCain, trashes Hillary

I just caught up on my newspaper reading and saw today that the San Antonio Express-News made their presidential endorsements on Sunday here and here.

Boy! If it wasn’t alreadly plainly clear which side they are coming down on there can be no doubt after this.
The first clue is the prominent placement of the McCain endorsement on top of the Obama endorsement. Sure, this might be quibbling, but the visual impact is unmistakeable.
Then when you read the “endorsements” the contrast becomes distinctly clear. They practically gush over McCain calling him a “war hero” and “political maverick” in the subhead.
There are no such gushing descriptions for Obama. Instead, they set up a rhetorical trick in the lead sentence saying that “America needs a president that tries to create unity out of diversity...” and then follow that by saying that Obama is “the Democratic candidate that offers the best chance to reach that lofty objective.
In other words, they don’t really think Obama can do it, it’s just that he has “the best chance” among the Democratic candidates (i.e. not Hillary).
By the third graph they jump into the political fray, mentioning that Hillary Clinton is “bracing for the fight of her life.”
By contrast, in the McCain editorial they never once mention the name of any of his primary opponents. Instead, they wax philosophically about how all of McCain’s “maverick” positions will prove to be “attractive points for independent voters.”
The only good things they have to say about Obama are done when making a negative contrast toward Hillary.
The main difference, they claim is that “Obama expresses a message of hope that emphasizes what is good for the country, not the party.” With the implication being that Hillary is doing the opposite.
Then they claim, incredibly, that “Obama tends to falter in debates” which is clearly a matter of perception on their part. Before noting that Obama is a powerful speaker on the campaign trail.
From that point on the editorial deteriorates into what can best be described as an anti-Hillary screed. They bring up the failed health care reform of the Clinton years. They talk about the “polarizing baggage that undoubtedly would hamper a Clinton presidency.” They talk about how Hillary and Bill have run a campaign “that has been, at turns, nasty and undignified.” They mention Hillary’s “win-at-all-cost approach” that “is a turnoff to many voters.”
And they wrap it all up with this doozy:

Obama may have a hard time translating his words into action. But embracing his message of hope and a new approach to American politics is a far preferable gamble than the prospect of another era of Clinton politics.

Sheesh! Thanks for that backhanded endorsement E-N.

We Can’t Do It

Atrios is right. This is wonderfully funny in a scary kind of way...

Inspired by the new Obama video making the rounds on the Web, some talented satirists did this competing video for John McCain.

A bad week for Hillary

Obama swept all of the Demcratic primaries and caucuses over the weekend - Louisiana, Nebraska, Washington, Maine and even the Virgin Islands.
And he is favored in the polls to win in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. this coming Tuesday.
The only thing Hillary did to make news was to dump her campaign manager in the biggest shakeup of her campaign so far.
Hillary’s campaign is now saying that they expected Obama would win all of those states and they are concentrating on the big states like Texas and Ohio coming up in March. But that is not entirely true. It was thought that Obama would win Louisiana because of the large number of African-Americans there, and in Nebraska because of its close proximity to Kansas where Obama is considered a favored son - his white mother’s family lives there. But Hillary was supposed to have a good shot at Washington where she had the endorsement of the state’s two female senators, and everyone said without question that Hillary would win in Maine and that it would at least be the one bright spot she could hold up after a long hard weekend.
But the endorsements in Washington didn’t make enough of a difference and she got blown out in Maine.
Quite frankly, I think Hillary has her work cut out for her if she expects to win this nomination race. Obama clearly has the momentum and the advantage right now. Saying that she is waiting for Texas and Ohio makes her sound too much like that other New York politician who claimed that he would jumpstart his flagging campaign with a big win in Florida. If Hillary doesn’t start to turn things around now, she will continue to bleed support in the other big primary states coming up.
I’m not ready to write her off quite yet, but she is getting close to the point where I may have to declare that it’s all over.

Voters prefer Democrats 3-to-1

This is the most telling result from Super Tuesday.

Democrats turned out more than twice as many voters as Republicans did. Just look at the vote totals recieved by each of the major candidates:

Clinton: 7,347,971
Obama: 7,294,851

McCain: 3,611,459
Romney: 2,961,834
Huckabee: 1,796,729

Clinton and Obama each recieved more than twice as many votes as McCain did and nearly as many votes each as all Republican votes cast period. Simply put, there is great enthusiasm for the Democratic candidates and much less enthusiasm for the Republican candidates. If this trend continues through November, it should be a blowout election regardless of who the Democratic nominee is.

And then they blew it....

Good post over at The Agonist: The influence of conservatives has collapsed, and they have no candidate for president

The conservatives have lost their influence in the U.S., and that loss has been quick and dramatic. There is no better proof of this than having no viable conservative candidate for president.
I don't recall ever seeing an enfranchised political group so quickly blow their franchise. After 2000 and 9/11, I was fully ready to expect that liberals and Democrats could face decades of minority power, like the Republicans did during and after FDR. In 2000 conservatives secured the presidency and both houses of Congress. They re-elected their president by a better margin in 2004, and kept both houses of Congress in 2002 and 2004. They successfully nominated and approved new conservative members to the Supreme Court. They promoted and undertook a pre-emptive invasion of a country on the other side of the world, unsupported by NATO, the UN, or world opinion. They were looking unstoppable.
But the invasion of Iraq was no victory. And as the occupation of Iraq continued with no end in sight, thousands of Americans were killed, tens of thousands were critically injured, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed and displaced. The war is expensive in so many ways, and it drags at our economy, at our standing in the world, and at our image of ourselves as a friendly and accepting nation.
So now conservatives don't have a candidate. They really don't. John McCain's record on immigration, campaign finance reform, global warming, and Native American issues has never been conservative. And Mitt Romney's record in Massachusetts is moderate to liberal, no matter how hard he panders to conservatives. In Massachusetts Romney actually approved the first state-wide program for comprehensive healthcare coverage. He also made no attempt to roll back gay marriage in the only state where it's fully legal.
So the conservatives don't have a candidate, and are shut out from influencing who the Republicans nominate for president. They are shut out because they lost touch with what Americans need. They need safer and cheaper healthcare, and conservatives offer nothing. They need solutions to Peak Oil and global warming, and conservatives go into full denial. They need home loan regulation and banking reform, and conservatives turn a deaf ear. They need the Iraq war over and their children and spouses home from it, and conservatives want to keep fighting. They need less government expense, but conservatives have spent monstrous sums on two wars and hundreds of earmarks. They want reasonable and fair taxation, and conservatives gave the richest Americans a huge and unfair tax break.
Conservatives don't represent most Americans, and independent voters and many Republicans know this. Which is why only McCain and Romney are left standing as viable candidates for the Republicans. (Although after Feb 5, even Romney's viability has faded.)
Now Rush Limbaugh, along with conservatives like Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter, are screaming that McCain has abandoned conservatives. They have got the truth turned around, though. It's conservatives who abandoned America, by forgetting a vision and practice of America that is fair, kind, equable, open, and generous -- just like its founders wanted it.

Making sense of Super Tuesday

Just kidding!!
I don’t have a clue as to what happened last night or why. It makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. I’m completely confused.
Other than the obvious ones - Hillary wins New York and Arkansas; Obama wins Illinois and Kansas (where his mother’s side of the family is from) - I’m at a loss as to why any of the states voted the way they did.
Overall, it would seem that Obama did exceedingly well despite losing some of the big delegate states like California and New York. But, as Kos pointed out, he won enough of the other states to make California almost irrelevant. In fact, if Hillary had NOT won in California she would have been in trouble.
You could say that Obama won in states like Alabama and Georgia with large black populations, but he also won in lily white states like Utah, Alaska and North Dakota. One concern for Obama is that he seemed to have trouble in states with heavy Hispanic populations like California, Arizona and New Mexico (although it looks like he may have squeaked out a victory in the latter state).
I think Hillary has her work cut out for her. Although she is winning the delegate race so far, thanks mostly to the fickle super delegates, she is almost out of cash and facing an energized Obama campaign that has been striking a chord with a large segment of the population. I guess my biggest fear is that Hillary will ultimately prevail, bloodied and broke, only to face a Republican Party that is suddenly enegized at the prospect of facing off against their favorite punching bag.

Lame Duck Budget

It is hard to look at Bush’s lame duck budget and not be totally disgusted.

But I don’t think I could say it any better than the New York Times did this morning:

President Bush’s 2009 budget is a grim guided tour through his misplaced priorities, failed fiscal policies and the disastrous legacy that he will leave for the next president. And even that requires you to accept the White House’s optimistic accounting, which seven years of experience tells us would be foolish in the extreme.

Just read the whole thing.

Bush's Legacy of Deficits

There has been so much that I’ve wanted to blog about lately, but I just haven’t had the time. It’s very frustrating.
Like the story in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal titled “Bush Legacy of Deficits will Constrain His Successor”. I mean, that headline says it all, doesn’t it?

George W. Bush took office in 2001 with budget surpluses projected to stretch years into the future. But it's almost certain that when he returns to Texas next year, the president will leave behind a trail of deficits and debt that will sharply constrain his successor....
Mr. Bush failed to work out a deal with Congress to tackle the spiraling costs of government health and retirement programs. The next president, if he or she serves two terms, could find the U.S. government so deeply in hock that it would face losing its Triple-A credit rating, something that has never happened since Moody's Investors Service began grading U.S. securities in 1917.
As a result, the ambitions of Mr. Bush's successor to cut taxes, institute universal health care or aid troubled homeowners might have to give way to the reality of soaring costs for Social Security, the Medicare program for the elderly and the Medicaid program for the poor.

Mission accomplished!!! Woohoo!!!
This is precisely what the movement conservatives wanted with their “starve the beast” prescription for massive deficits combined with mega-tax cuts. Make it so that future presidents will be “constrained” and unable to push forward with new initiatives.

The president's critics say his failings are twofold: He has squandered surpluses that could have helped pay down the $5 trillion federal debt. And he has let two terms pass without persuading Congress to take action that would preserve the government's social programs. According to the Concord Coalition, a fiscal watchdog group, the shortfall in Social Security and Medicare through 2080 will total $72.3 trillion, a number that dwarfs the impact of Mr. Bush's spending and tax cuts.

I’d say his failings are more like twentyfold or a hundredfold. In fact, his “failings” are what define his entire presidency.

When Mr. Bush took the oath of office in 2001, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected $5.6 trillion in federal budget surpluses through 2011. Through most of his tenure, the president managed to have his guns, butter and tax cuts without creating enormous budget deficits, at least as measured by their share of GDP. One reason was a surprise increase in federal tax receipts from corporations over the last couple of years. Now those revenues have flattened out and the economy is teetering on the edge of recession.

Mr. Bush and Congress, meanwhile, increased federal spending by 25% between 2001 and 2007, adjusted for inflation, according to Brian Riedl of the conservative Heritage Foundation. By Sept. 30, the U.S. will have spent almost $800 billion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A new Medicare prescription-drug benefit for seniors costs almost $80 billion a year. Mr. Bush's signature tax cuts, in 2001 and 2003, sapped tax receipts and sliced the projected budget surplus by about $1.7 trillion through 2011, according to the CBO.

And then there was this story in the WSJ on Monday: Rising Cost of Iraq War May Reignite Public Debate

Boosted in part by rising fuel prices and the expense of repairing or replacing vehicles worn down by the long war, U.S. spending on Iraq hasdoubled in the past three years. Last year's buildup of U.S. troops -- known as the "surge" -- and the military's growing use of expensive heavy munitions to roust Iraqi insurgents also have contributed to the cost increase. According to a recent Congressional Research Service report, the average monthly cost of theconflict -- by CRS's measure -- hit $10.3 billion in the year ended Sept. 30, 2007, up from $4.4 billion in fiscal 2004.

$10.3 billion per month. PER MONTH!!!!! That’s more than $125 billion a year!!!!
And despite all that massive spending, the Republicans still claim that if we pull the troops out anytime before Hell freezes over it will constitute a defeat for the U.S.
We cannot win with this crowd. There is no objective definition of victory that they can point to. So we have these bizarre debates where the Republican candidates dither about who will leave the troops mired in Iraq the LONGEST!!!
Good luck winning the election with that campaign theme.

Obama is a Liberal!! Eeeeek!

Did you hear that Barack Obama is the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate? At least according to the National Journal, a wonkish political magazine that circulates mostly around Washington, D.C.

While I don’t have a problem with people being “liberal” per se, I am highly suspicious of this latest designation by the magazine which seems to always determine that whoever is the Democratic Party nominee for president is also “the most liberal”. In 2004, the magazine determined that John Kerry was the “most liberal” member of the Senate.
Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly explains the flaws in the National Journal’s methodology.

Sure, Obama is liberal. I think that is fine. But you can’t tell me he is the most liberal in a Senate that includes Bernie Sanders, the avowed Socialist from Vermont. Plus, there are a number of other Senators who are known to be more highly partisan and ideological than Mr. Obama. So how did he get tagged as the most liberal?
Simple, he spent a lot of time last year campaigning for president and missed a lot of votes. And because the National Journal’s methodology is screwed up and doesn’t account for missed votes, he came out on top. The same exact thing happened four years ago with John Kerry.

But don’t expect to hear that explanation attached to all the media reports about this. And, of course, it will become the standard line in every Repubican stump speech and political ad from here on out.

Rats and sinking ships

The total number of Republicans leaving the U.S. House is up to a record 28 so far. That compares to just five House Democrats who are vacating their seats. In the Senate, there are six Republicans stepping down and no Democrats so far.
Combine that with the fact that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has seven times as much money in the bank as its Republican counterpart (there is most likely a similar disparity on the Senate side, but the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee refused to make its fund-raising figures available) and the stage is set for a very good election season for Democrats.

Dodging responsibility

This rightwing rejection of McCain, while real to a lot of the movements devout followers, is part of a larger practice by the movement’s leaders of always ducking responsibility and avoiding blame.
If McCain had a prayer of a chance of winning the next election, I don’t think we would see this intense of a negative reaction to him from the rightwing base. But because it’s nearly a foregone conclusion that Repubilcans are going to get their asses kicked in November, it is imperative for the conservative movement’s leaders to make sure that it does not appear that the country is rejecting their candidate or their ideas. Thus, this rejection of McCain for being “too liberal” is an effort to insulate themselves from the electoral drubbing that will undoubtedly take place as a consequence of Bush’s absymal failure these past seven years.

Likewise, the movement’s leaders are hard at work trying to extract themselves from the disaster of the Bush years by claiming in retrospect that Bush was not a “true conservative” and putting the blame for everything on his supposed liberal tendencies and, of course, the Democratic Congress which has had only tenuous control of the legislative branch for the past year in the face of veto threats and Republican filibusters.
They have to do this to maintain the myth of superiority and invulnerability that props up their base of supporters. They cannot admit or acknowledge that their ideas have been tried repeatedly during the past several decades and have failed miserably each and every time. So the charade continues....

Rightwing revulsion to McCain

John McCain is going to win the Republican nomination for president and the rightwingers are NOT happy about it.
My friend Nick at Conservative Dialysis had denounced McCain as a RINO (Republican In Name Only).

Texas Fred says “Conservatives have some work to do now, and that work is the job of keeping McCain OUT of the White House.”

Jimmyk is distraught because he believes “John McCain is for amnesty.”

And Owen at Boots and Sabers is prepared to sit out the next election in protest if McCain is the Republican nominee.

I’m jaded.  The McCain surge has me completely disillusioned about national politics.  I can’t vote for McCain.  I won’t. 

Before going poof and disappearing into the blogospheric ether, my old friend Bill Crawford had written off McCain and even when he was starting his comeback, was still convinced he could not win the nomination.

And rightwing radio yakker Mark Levin spells out some of the reasons for the conservative revulsion to McCain.

Update

Texas Fred is now making it clear that he will NOT vote for McCain regardless of what happens:

I will officially go on record, here and now, and I make this a public disclosure to any and all that have doubts as to where I stand, IF John McCain is the candidate chosen by the RNC to run for the White House, I will NOT support the Republican choice, I won’t vote Dem, that’s not even an option, but I may very well be writing in a candidate for POTUS…

And most of his readers seem to agree. I certainly hope that he sticks with his convictions.

Meanwhile, comedian Rush Limbaugh is throwing down the gauntlet claiming that the nomination of McCain will fracture the GOP’s conservative base.

"He is not the choice of conservatives, as opposed to the choice of the Republican establishment — and that distinction is key," Limbaugh continued. "The Republican establishment, which has long sought to rid the party of conservative influence since Reagan, is feeling a victory today as well as our friends in the media. But both are just far-fetched and wrong.”

I’ll have more to say about this later.

Edwards exits, Rudy goes splat!

John Edwards decision to quit the presidential race is really only surprising in its timing. I had expected that he would stay in at least through Super Tuesday to collect as many delegates as he could to use as leverage later on assuming that the Hillary-Obama race goes down to the wire. But instead he has bowed out now clearing the way for a two-person race in the Democratic primary. I’m sure there will be speculation that he may have cut a deal with Obama for a possible VP slot on the ticket. Wil Democrats go with the same VP candidate two elections in a row? I’m quite sure that it will have to go to a white male candidate for “balance” regardless of whether Hillary or Obama wins the race. But if not Edwards, then who?

Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani’s collapse is finally complete with his weak third-place showing in Florida. Rudy had been a walking corpse for some time now, so his departure was pretty much a given. Hit the road, Rudy! And don’t come back no more.
Huckabee is washed up too, but isn’t ready to admit it yet. I’m sure the party is encouraging him to stay in the race for now to keep the religious wingnut faction from totally freaking out.
McCain is now the clear frontrunner on the GOP side and could swamp the struggling Romney campaign on Super Tuesday.
Florida was a tough loss for Romney, who finished a close second but walks away with nothing because of the state’s winner-take-all delegate distribution policy. Until now, McCain was lagging behind Romney in the delegate count, but now he is caught up and then some.
McCain’s political resurrection which I predicted back in early December is the most interesting thing on the Republican side right now. But it also sets the stage for a replay of the 1996 election with McCain playing the role of Bob Dole, the war hero and GOP stalwart.

No subpoena for Knoblauch

Chuck Knoblauch has agreed to meet with the House Committee investigating steroid use in baseball and the reported subpoena was never issued.
It now seems as if the whole big fuss made over his initial failure to respond to the committee’s request was much ado about nothing. Maybe he was on a cruise or something when the notice came. Who knows? The point is that all the abuse he recieved - including being listed as one of the “Worst Persons in the World” on Keith Olbermann’s “Countdown” show on MSNBC - was overblown and unwarranted.

Trusting the people

I did not watch President Bush’s State of the Union speech last night. I usually don’t have time to sit down and watch the TV during primetime anyway since that is when we are in the midst of herding our children up the stairs, bathing them and reading books to them before putting them to bed - a process that generally starts around 7:30 and ends around 8:30 p.m. if we are lucky.
But I didn’t bother to record the speech either, which is unusual. I’m so thoroughly disgusted with and disappointed in this president that I don’t think I could have stomached his final, pointless SOTU address.
About the only thing I was curious about was whether or not Bush could keep a straight face when saying “The state of our union is strong”, which I think is required by law for every president to say at some point in the speech. Did anyone in the audience snicker at that moment?
But now I see today that Bush did not speak those words at the beginning of the address as is tradtionally done. Instead, he saved them for the very end and added a rhetorical twist like this:

"So long as we continue to trust the people, our nation will prosper, our liberty will be secure and the state of our union will remain strong."

And there in a nutshell is the entire problem with the past seven years which have been nothing short of disasterous for our nation. Back in 2000, we did not “trust the people.” For if we had, Al Gore, the winner of the popular vote, would have been named president. Instead, we trusted a screwed up electoral college system that should have been junked long ago, and a sharply divided, partisan Supreme Court which foistered the popular vote loser down our throats.
And so, for the past seven years we have had the Worst President Ever, who, in league with one of the Worst Congresses Ever, has managed to shrink our nation’s superpower status by leading us into a quagmire in the Middle East that has weakened our military infrastructure and reduced our standing in the world, while at the same time pursuing a fiscally irresponsible domestic agenda at home that has left us with record deficits and an economy on the brink of recession.
Hopefully, by this time next year, assuming that we “trust the people,” the person giving the next SOTU address will either be Hillary Clinton or Barak Obama, and the person sitting behind the president next to Nancy Pelosi WILL NOT be Dick Cheney.
That, by itself, is something to look forward to.

Blogging pays off

Thanks to a couple of paid ads that ran on my site late last year, I accumulated enough money in my PayPal account to order the Danger Mouse DVD collection on Ebay. WooHoo!
I used to watch Danger Mouse when I was in college. Particularly one summer it became a late afternoon ritual for me and several of my friends (Mark Ude, Mike Miller) to gather in my dorm room and watch DangerMouse, which was then being broadcast on the Nickelodeon cable channel.
Something about the silly British humor caught our fancy back then.

George Bush - Abysmal failure

Think Progress has a link to a chart that lays out the complete and utter failure that the Bush presidency has been.
It is not a pretty picture. When you compare the eight years of the Clinton presidency with the eight years of the Bush Jr. presidency you see a nation that is in decline.
Real GDP growth was about half what it was during the Clinton years. The national debt went up more than $3.5 trillion. Job creation has been anemic throughout the Bush years. More Americans are in poverty. More Americans are uninsured. The cost of health insurance for families has doubled. Gas prices have tripled. Personal savings rates have declined. Consumer credit debt has nearly doubled. The U.S. trade deficit has doubled. The value of the dollar has plunged.
U.S. combat readiness has done a complete aboutface. Our foreign oil dependency has increased. And our nation’s favorability rating around the world has spiked.
But it is important to remember that this complete and utter disaster of the past eight years was not all George W. Bush’s fault. It was, instead, the utter failure of the conservative governing philosophy. Bush faithfully followed the conservative mantra in almost every area and it has failed to do what it was supposed to in most cases and in many others it has done the complete opposite. So, if we simply replace Bush with another Republican who will continue the same failed policies, we will continue to decline as a nation.

A Wild and Crazy autobiography

I just finished reading Steve Martin’s new autobiography “Born Standing Up” and I thorougly enjoyed it.
My mother gave me the book for Christmas because she remembers what a huge Steve Martin fan I was when I was a kid. Steve’s “Wild and Crazy Guy” album came out when I was in junior high school and it made a huge impression on me. I devoted large sections of the record to memory and I even made my parents take me to see the “Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band” movie simply because Steve Martin had a cameo role in it. (He sang Maxwell’s Silver Hammer). I had no idea who the Beatles were at the time, much less the Bee Gees.
A friend at school and I were going to spend the summer of 1978 working on a “King Tut” record pantomime for speech class the next year, but my family moved over the summer and I never go to do it.
My Steve Martin obsession waned a bit after that, although I did group improvisational skits in my high school speech classes that were greatly influenced by his humor.
The book talks about the poor relationship that Martin had with his father while growing up. It takes you through his early years of working at Disneyland and later at Knotsberry Farms where he acquired his magic act that slowly evolved into a comedy routine. In a lot of ways he benefitted from being in the right place at the right time. He got lucky and landed a gig as a writer for the Smothers Brothers and that opened doors for him in other comedy circles. His fame slowly increased throughout the late 60s and early 70s and then skyrocketed in ‘77-78 when he became national phenomenon and suddenly went from playing packed nightclubs to doing concert arenas and stadiums with thousands of people. For a time there, his experience was similar to what the early Beatles went through, except that he was a solo act and had no one to share the journey with. He began suffering anxiety attacks that plagued him for the next 10 years.
Fortunately, Martin’s story has a happy ending in that he walked away from his stand-up career at the pinnacle of his success and launched a moderately successful movie career. He admits that there is such as thing as being too famous and he feels now that he has reached that point where he is just famous enough.

2008 Oscars

I am both happy and disappointed with the Oscar nominations this year, which is probably a very typical response.
And I think I can already predict the winners in several categories:
Best Picture will be a race between “There Will Be Blood” and “No Country For Old Men”.
“Michael Clayton” is the John Edwards in this race. You have to pay attention to him, but you know he’s not going to win.
“Juno” is this year’s “Little Miss Sunshine” and “Atonement” should not be in this category at all. It did not receive a directors nod or a Best Acting nod, so how could it end up in the Best Picture category?
They should have picked at least one semi-popular film that more than a handful of people have seen to fill the slot wasted on “Atonement”. My pick would have been “Ratatouille”.
I’m very happy with the Best Actor category. I like all the nominees this year, but it is obvious that Daniel Day-Lewis has this category all wrapped up. They might as well just put the statue in the mail for him right now. There is no way any of the other nominees will claim the prize this year. George Clooney already got one, so he is out. Johnny Depp is overdue for an Oscar, but it won’t be this year. Viggo Mortensen’s career just got a big boost and I expect he will get a lot more juicy roles in the near future. And Tommy Lee Jones, while very deserving, got nominated for the wrong movie. What happened to “No Country For Old Men”?
I don’t have a clue about the Best Actress category other than to say that it won’t go to Cate Blanchett because she is going to win for Best Supporting Actress. Nor will it go to surprise nominee Laura Linney or the too-young Ellen Page. So that leaves Julie Christie or Marion Cotillard, neither of whom I know anything about.
In the Best Supporting Actor category the winner will be Javier Bardem for “No Country For Old Men”.
In the Directing category, the prize will go to whoever wins Best Picture - either Paul Thomas Anderson or the Cohen Brothers.
The Animated Feature award had better go to Ratatouille or I will be ticked!

Sell! Sell!! Sell!!! Aieeeeeeeee!!!!!!!

The stock market is tanking today as expected and the inevitable Bush Recession is bearing down on the country. We Texans may not get hit as hard as the rest of the country, but that also means it will be getting more crowded as folks who lose their jobs elsewhere pack up their families and move to the Lone Star State.
I’ll be curious to see what kind of gyrations the wingnuts go through to try and blame this on Clinton and/or the Democrats. Too bad my friend Bill has gone missing. I suspect he is just in a deep funk right now because nothing he has been touting for the past several years is going the right way - from the quagmire in Iraq to the Republican election debacle (Rudy!).
But if it wasn’t already obvious that the Republicans are going to be non-factors in this fall’s election, the Bush recession will put the nail in that coffin. There is no way the country is going to support any of the awful candidates they currently have vying for the nomination. Now if we Democrats can just keep Hillary and Obama from scratching one another’s eyes out until after the primary is over, things should settle down into a pretty good year for our side. Good government principles and fiscal responsibility are making a comeback as is foreign policy realism. It may take some time to extract ourselves from the mess that Bush created for us in Iraq, but it will certainly go much faster with a Democratic administration rather than with a “Bush-on-steroids” John McCain presidency (h/t Pat Buchanan).
All we have to do now is survive one more year of the worst presidency of all time. Keep your fingers crossed!

E-N discovers blogging (again)

Imagine if the local newspaper (San Antonio Express-News) decided to do a big feature story on mariachi music in San Antonio, but then interviewed just one guy who plays the guitarrón.
That is essentially what they did the other day for a story about blogging and politics when the only local blogger they talked to was my friend Nick Marinelli at Conservative Dialysis.
I’ll admit that this was at least an improvement from the last time they did a feature on blogging when they couldn’t find any local bloggers to talk to and had to go all the way to Austin to find someone to feature.
Another problem I had with the story was when the reporter threw in this tidbit to demonstrate the impact of blogging on politics:

In 2004, conservative bloggers successfully debunked a "60 Minutes" story that purported to show President Bush received preferential treatment in terms of his National Guard service.

What they “debunked” was the network’s confidence in some faxed documents on which they based a particular story about Bush’s National Guard service. It is still unclear whether or not the documents were truly forgeries and, if so, who made them and why.
What was not “debunked” was the fact that George Bush recieved preferential treatment in terms of his National Guard service. That much, at least, is unquestionably true, and the whole 60 Minutes controversy served only to obscure this fact.

I Have A Dream

I recently listened to a 7-CD course on Rhetoric and the Art of Persuasion that I found at the library. The professor spent a lot of time touting Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech as one of the best examples of American Rhetoric, right up there with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. He was right. This is without a doubt one of the best oratorical performances of all time.

Driver's licenses for illegal aliens

Nick Marinelli and I have wrapped up our first “debate” over at his blog, but I can’t help but add a few more comments here at my site on some of the topics we covered.
One issue that came up was driver’s licenses for illegal aliens. Nick brought it up to demonstrate how far outside of the mainstream Hillary Clinton supposedly is because she, at least initially, supported the idea. But it really is a good idea, I countered, because it is not in our nation’s best interest to keep these people (13 million estimated illegal aliens) confined to the fringes of society.
Nick responds that “What’s best for society is for these illegal aliens to leave and then enter the country legally.”
I can’t argue with that, except to point out that it is outside the realm of possibility. If you say that the best thing for society is X, that may be true. However, if X is unlikely to ever happen, then we must come up with some other answer as to what is best for society. Issuin them driver’s licenses is the next best thing, I would contend.
First, there is the practical reason for issuing driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, and that is to ensure that drivers meet some standard to drive and to lower insurance premiums by decreasing the pool of unlicensed and uninsured drivers. It is to our advantage to be able to identify drivers and it keeps people from fleeing from minor traffic infractions for fear that they will be caught without a license. Fewere hit-n-run accidents, in other words.
But if you do not find that argument persuasive enough, there is also an even more persuasive argument on the issue of national security. Here to back me up is a report entitled Not Issuing Driver’s Licenses to Illegal Aliens is Bad for National Security from the Center for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology Policy.
Here, in a nutshell, is their argument:
Issuing driver’s licenses to this very large population (13 million-plus people) gives authorities the opportunty to screen and seperate otherwise law abiding illegal aliens from terrorists or criminals by confirming identity when licenses are issued.

Contrary to the argument that denying illegal aliens licenses would prevent terrorists from 'melting' into society, it would instead guarantee a larger haystack in which terrorists can hide thus making it more difficult for law enforcement to identify them. Counter-terrorism strategy is based on reducing the suspect population so that security resources can be focused on more likely suspects. Denying identity legitimacy to 13 million illegal aliens -- the vast majority of whom are not terrorists or otherwise threats to national security -- just increases the size of the suspect pool for law enforcement to have to sort through. Since law enforcement resources are already unable to effectively cope with the large illegal alien population why further complicate their task?

Also, by requiring proof of citizenship to obtain a driver’s license, it greatly increases their value on the black market and encourages illegals to obtain false ID’s with which to “prove” their citizenship.

If 13 million people living within our borders can't drive, fly, travel on a train or bus, or otherwise participate in society without a driver's license and they cannot get a legitimate one, then the market will supply them an illegal fraudulent one. State DMV bureaucracies, no matter how well- intentioned, do not have the resources, training, or skill to prevent fraud driven by this additional demand and no federal mandate will be able to prevent organized criminal elements from responding.
"On the other hand, if illegal aliens are allowed to get legitimate licenses upon thorough vetting of their identity, then the only ones who will be trying to get fraudulent documents will be terrorists or criminals -- who will face increased costs and more opportunities for mistakes if there is less overall demand - - and law enforcement resources can be focused on these activities.

So there you have it. We are essentially shooting ourselves in the foot by not issuing drivers licenses to illegal aliens.

A new dialectic

It looks like I may have found a new local blogger willing to engage in polite discourse about election-year politics. What fun!
Nick and I are currently butting heads over Bush’s tax cuts and immigration policy and so far we’ve managed to carry on a lively debate at his site without flinging poo at one another. There may be hope yet for a positive political dialectic in this country.
Meanwhile, my old friend Bill seems to have suddenly and inexplicably gone on hiatus from All Things Conservative. He has not updated the site in more than a week now with no explanation and that is highly unusual. I hope that everything is OK and that he has just not had much to say lately....

Kerrville Folk Festival

I can't believe I've never devoted a post to The Kerrville Folk Festival.
My friend Robert introduced me to Kerrville music many years ago and my wife and I attended our first festival in 1990 shortly after we were married. A few years later we ended up moving to Kerrville and I got to attend the Folk Festival pretty regularly for several years while working for the local daily newspaper.
I haven't been back in a longtime, but hopefully we will got out there in the next year or two now that our kids are a bit older.
In the meantime, I'm pleased to find that most of the performers I discovered and listened to out there now have active Web sites where you can keep up with their latest recording efforts. Here are some of my favorite Folk Festival performers I saw back in the day:

Tish Hinojosa
Chuck Pyle
Dana Cooper
Crow Johnson
Dar Williams
Butch Hancock
Jimmie Dale Gilmore
Tom Kimmel
Michael McNevin
Tom Prasada-Rao
Ellis Paul
Vance Gilbert
Trout Fishing In America Web
Austin Lounge Lizards
Tom Paxton
Peter Yarrow
Nancy Griffith
John Gorka
David Wilcox
Bill and Bonnie Hearne
Buddy Mondlock
Jon Ims

Fan mail

I got a really nice hand-written letter from Congressman Charlie Gonzalez, D-San Antonio, the other day complimenting me for my recent Letter to the Editor that was published in the Express-News.
Here is what he said:

Dear Mike:

I commend you for your great letter to the editor pointing out that often (almost always) there is no "middle ground" when dealing with George Bush. I appreciate your interest and insight.
Sincerely,
Charlie Gonzalez

He also sent me a very nice 2008 pocket planner which I plan on using this year. Pretty neat!

Comic changes at E-N

Last summer the Express-News made a big fuss over a reader survey for its comics section in advance of making a few minor changes to its comics lineup. So I was a little startled last week to open up the paper and find that they had suddenly dropped five comic strips and added three.
With one major exception, I don’t have a problem with any of the changes. I’m just surprised that they did it without any forewarning considering their past cautiousness when monkeying with the sacred funny pages.
The latest comics shakeup was brought about by the decision of T.K. Ryan to retire his long-running Tumbleweeds strip. While not one of my favorites, Tumbleweeds was still a good strip that I would read on occasion and I respect Ryan’s decision to end the strip and not pass it off to the syndicate.
The E-N took advantage of the Tumbleweeds exit to dump Willy n’ Ethel, The Amazing Spider Man, and Snuffy Smith. I was mostly indifferent to Willy ‘n Ethel. I thought Spider Man was stupid and Snuffy Smith, one of the longest running strips, should have been retired decades ago.
But the BIG problem I have was the decision to drop the daily Curtis strip (it will still run on Sundays). Curtis is an excellent, contemporary strip that has fresh and intelligent story lines (not a gag-a-day strip) and great character development. Why would they dump Curtis and keep Prickly City and Cathy, both of which scored in the Bottom 10 of the last comics survey? Better yet, dump Born Loser, Marvin or The Lockhorns to free up space.
The new strips they chose to add - Retro Geek, The Other Coast and Family Tree (Sunday only) - seem like fine choices, but why would they pass on Sherman’s Lagoon which was one of the top requested strips in the last survey? And some other excellent strips that are missing from the E-N include Monty, Big Nate, Rudy Park and Heart of the City.

Hillary surprises

Like most people who pay attention to polls, I was fully expecting Barack Obama to breeze to an easy victory in New Hampshire the other day. In fact, the last person who figured that Hillary Clinton would win in New Hampshire apparently was Hillary herself who seems to have been almost caught off guard by the surprise victory.
I’m not sure what happened exactly, although Kevin Drum is probably correct that it was just the cumulation of a lot of little things going on in the midst of a fluid situation. You can blame the polls that had Obama 13 points up, but just realize that all the polls seemed to agree on this and they also got the Republican race exactly right.
So Hillary clearly “won” even though based on the all-important delegate count it was a tie.
But Hillary will clearly benefit from the victory. Now it will remain to be seen if she can also recover her lead in the national polls and whether this will serve to undermine Obama’s support in South Carolina (or is N. Caroline next? I forget.)
I was already prepping myself for an eventual Obama victory which could still happen although things are much more cloudy than before. I think what New Hampshire does show, however, is that Obama might be the better candidate for the general election based on his appeal to independent voters. Also, he would be less of a rallying point for the wingnuts’ whose hatred of Hillary is beyond demented.
Nevertheless, I think Hillary or Obama either one would be a good candidate and would win in November.
On the Republican side, I think John McCain has swapped places with Rudy Giuliani as the new consensus candidate of the GOP establishment. This still rubs the wingnut faction the wrong way because even though he is more socially conservative than Rudy, he falls short on their immigration litmus test. In addition, McCain supports campaign finance reform, opposes torture and (the real kicker) actually wants to do something to combat global warming!
However, McCain still proudly wears the Iraq albatross around his neck and that by itself would sink his candidacy as it will any GOP nominee.