for all you little Hulkamaniacs

So, if it stars Edward Norton, Tim Roth, and William Hurt, it has to be good. Right?

HISTORY IZ HARD!!1!

Welcome to American history, as brought to you by FOX News. It is the raucous year of Our Lord 1858, and Illinois Senatorial candidate Abraham Lincoln of the fledgling Republican party has a series of contentious debates with Democrat Stephen Douglas prominent abolitionist Frederick Douglass:

UPDATE: It appears the Daily Exorcist has beaten me to the punch on this one. You win this round, Mr. D!!

Schellinger vs. Long Thompson: what will they do?

Via this South Bend Trib article, you can find the actual plans of Jim Schellinger and Jill Long Thompson. As you might expect, there's a lot of overlap between the two. Schellinger's is significantly more detailed, which is nice for the wonkier of us, and he actually makes references to the eventual goal of "universal coverage" for health care, which is a bonus to me. Plus, each candidate has one "big" idea that the other doesn't share: expanding broadband internet across the state for Jill, and 20% of Indiana's energy from renewable sources by 2015 for Jim. Of the two, again, I prefer Schellinger's.

Combined with this gas tax holiday nonsense I gotta say I'm starting to lean Schellinger.

And speaking of assuming the voters are morons, today Thompson fleshed out her plan to cut gas taxes:

Thompson said a cap on the gasoline sales tax when the pump price exceeds $2.75 per gallon would save Hoosiers today 7 cents a gallon or $150 million a year.

"The high cost of oil is having an impact on many, many Hoosier families and it’s important for us to give them a break," Thompson said.

Thompson said such savings would stimulate the state’s economy by allowing families to spend elsewhere.

Wow, that $150 million sounds like a lot. Of course, if there are 6.5 million people in Indiana, then that means every Hoosier will save... $23. Per year. Just shy of two extra dollars a month you can use to "stimulate the economy." What will you do with all that money? Buy a hot dog? Lose it in your couch cushions?

gas taxes and basic economics

Riddle me this, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Jill Long Thompson:

After you dispense with the gas tax, thus lowering the price some $.18, what's to stop the oil companies from raising the price back to where it was before and pocketing that 18 cents for themselves?

I'm not the only one wondering. Paul Krugman:

Why doesn’t cutting the gas tax this summer make sense? It’s Econ 101 tax incidence theory: if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers.
...
The Clinton twist is that she proposes paying for the revenue loss with an excess profits tax on oil companies. In one pocket, out the other. So it’s pointless, not evil. But it is pointless, and disappointing.

Meanwhile, Tom Friedman is apoplectic at the very suggestion of a holiday and what it says about our long-term priorities.

Hey Hoosiers: before you let the gas tax holiday sell you on these clowns, consider that the gas tax fuels (no pun intended) the highway trust fund, which is used by states and localities to build and maintain roads. How were your potholes this winter? Your snow plowing? De-icing? What if next winter is as bad as this past one? Would you rather have your snow plowed and your pot holes filled like last year or would you rather save 18 cents on the gallon at the pump?

You can't have both.

NBC News' complicity in, and defense of, domestic propaganda

Here is an eye-opening piece by Glenn Greenwald on Brian Williams' reaction to revelations in the New York Times that military analysts used on news shows, including NBC News, were coached by the Pentagon to give particular answers to gin up support for the war in Iraq. It's damning.

is it federalism, or corporatism?

I read a lot of stuff on politics. A lot of stuff on politics. So much goes on, though, that I regularly forget stuff that happened and rediscover it later, or find that I missed something entirely.

Well, I learned something today in the context of the Crazy Train trying to burnish his "populist helper of the poor" cred against former community organizer and civil rights attorney Barack Obama. I never knew that John McCain voted to abolish the federal minimum wage.

they're his base

The Associated Press hops on the Crazy Train. Meanwhile, Josh on McCain's "I didn't say 100 years in Iraq, I just said 100 years in Iraq!" issue:

The rub here is this: McCain does not want to leave Iraq. Period. He wants tens of thousands of troops to stay in Iraq permanently. He made a big point of this during the primaries when it was politically advantageous to do so. And he followed up with a qualifier explaining that it's okay because our occupation of Iraq will soon be like our presence in Germany and Japan where nobody gets killed. But there's little reason to believe our occupation of Iraq will ever be like that. We tried this in Lebanon; the French tried this in Algeria; the British even tried it in Iraq. Western countries have a very poor history garrisoning Muslim countries in the Middle East. Iraq isn't like Germany or Japan, not simply because of the history of the country but because both countries accepted decades-long US deployments as a counterweight to threatening neighbors. The relevant point is that McCain believes American troops should stay in Iraq permanently. His pipe dream about Iraq turning into Germany doesn't change that. It just shows his substitution of wishful thinking for sound strategic judgment.
...
...The New Yorker's Rick Hertzberg put it all quite elegantly back in January just after McCain started saying this. "McCain," he wrote, "wants to stay in Iraq until no more Americans are getting killed, no matter how long it takes and how many Americans get killed achieving that goal--that is, the goal of not getting any more Americans killed. And once that goal is achieved, we'll stay."

all quotes are taken out of context

...that's why they're "quotes."

That being said, what exactly is "out of context" about the Crazy Train saying we should stay in Iraq for 100 years? He said exactly that-- twice!-- yet on multiple occasions I've heard people say I took his statement "out of context" because "he was talking about a South Korea-type occupation without the casualties we have now."

So McCain only wants to stay long enough to quell violence, so that we can then... stay?

Zachary Roth at the Columbia Journalism Review takes the absurdity even a step further, saying:

It’s clear from this that McCain isn’t saying he’d support continuing the war for one hundred years, only that it might be necessary to keep troops there that long. That’s a very different thing.

Really? How? The fact is that, as long as our soldiers have been in Iraq, there have been terrorists, militias, and warlords killing them, and there's no indication whatsoever that they plan to stop anytime in the foreseeable future. How in this context, then, in the actual real world where real living soldiers live and die, is it possible to "keep troops there" without "continuing the war?"

For that matter, what happens if McCain presses on with the occupation and its attendant casualties for 4 years and the violence doesn't go down? 6? 7? What if the violence goes up? Would he leave?

How, then, is "John McCain wants us to stay in Iraq for 100 years" not perfectly accurate?

gullibility

Eleanor Clift wrote in Newsweek on Friday:

Hillary lost the media a long time ago through a combination of arrogance and entitlement, but she has won grudging respect in some unlikely quarters. Conservative commentators Pat Buchanan and Joe Scarborough are openly rooting for her, and Tony Blankley, who first gained notoriety as Newt Gingrich's spokesman, confessed somewhat sheepishly, "She's almost beginning to appeal to me."

Yes, absolutely, if hard-core Republicans who have publicly despised Hillary as a ball-busting, bra-burning "Feminazi" are openly rooting for Hillary to win, it must be because they have developed a respect for her and genuinely would like to see a Hillary Clinton White House.

Behold, the miracle of the ages! Hillary Clinton has converted Pat Buchanan!

This "honesty" factor is why I also love David Brooks so much, because in his columns he sheds all partisan feelings and ideology and takes a fresh, objective view of the world. Then, when he inevitably discovers that the doctrinaire conservative position is the correct one, I know he's telling the truth!

We see this kind of thing happen all the time, and yet no one on TV ever seems to catch this stuff in real time. They never consider that anyone in the media might have ulterior motives because, after all, media figures just comment on the news; they would never desire something so obscene as to affect the news! The notion that even the most partisan Republican, given a news show, would ever cover the news and give commentary with the objective of making it easier for the Republicans to win is absolutely preposterous to these people.

Why, what do you mean Bill Kristol isn't an honest broker?

No one ever asks during the media coverage if maybe there's a hidden agenda behind Bush's (or even, for crying out loud, Karl f**king Rove's!) "concern" that Democrats will hurt themselves by failing to back his proposals. Because if there's anything that keeps the Republican president up at night, it's his concern for the electoral viability of Democrats!

There's one historic incident of someone actually having a real affect on an election with this tactic that still rankles me when I think about it. From Joe Klein at Swampland:

...John McCain is probably the favorite candidate of Osama bin Laden, just as George W. Bush was Osama's presidential preference.

Why? Because both Bush and McCain have bought Osama's disinformation about Iraq being the central front in the war on terrorism. Of course, bin Laden wants the gullible neocons to take the Iraq bait because Afghanistan really is the central front of the war on terrorism--more precisely the Afghan-Pakistani border areas where the real Al Qaeda lives. The war in Iraq has been a grand strategic gift to Osama, keeping the U.S. military tied down elsewhere and off his tail.

Ron Suskind had a relevant scene in his excellent book The One Percent Doctrine: It's the Friday before election day in 2004 and Osama bin Laden has issued a videotape in which he lambastes President Bush. The top dawgs at the CIA are gathered to analyze the tape. Dep. Director John McLaughlin says, "I wonder who Osama is voting for?" Everyone cracks up because the answer is so obvious.

I remember this episode from the tail-end of the 2004 election pretty vividly, and I remember what everyone was saying after this video came out because the obtuseness of it infuriated me. You may recall the manner in which this video was popularized, specifically that it was trumpeted by every conservative and every Republican under the sun as indisputable proof that "Osama wants John Kerry to win," and I don't remember any of the Russerts or Matthews' (or, frankly, Kleins) discussing whether or not Osama was smart enough to bait that hook. Democrats on TV were laughed off the stage if they tried to make that point, and thus were left trying to close the deal for Kerry over the consensus argument that both Bush and bin Laden were unified in their opinion that Bush was "stronger on terrorism."

And 4 years later, when Pat Buchanan and Joe Scarborough (who became a GOP congressman during Gingrich's Contract with America) publicly root for Hillary Clinton to be president, Eleanor Clift writes it with utter credulity, never once doubting their motives.

Jesus, Krugman, just endorse already!

One of the most disappointing casualties of this protracted primary has been a large measure of my respect for NY Times columnist Paul Krugman. I've very much enjoyed his work over the last several years, but his willingness to pulverize Barack Obama in every single column for the last several months, sometimes on the weakest of pretenses, coupled with his unwillingness either to castigate Clinton or otherwise to just come out and say he supports Clinton, is really irritating.

Most irritating of all, however, is writing an article attacking Obama on a number of different points, every single one of which apply to Clinton as well.

Take today's column, for example. Krugman argues that, if Obama can't defeat Clinton with his big cash advantage and with everything having heard his case and with substantial establishment support, then he's a weak candidate and Democrats should be worried that he can't beat McCain.

Yet it was Hillary Clinton who began the race with universal name recognition, a huge cash advantage she inherited from her senate re-election warchest and Bill's fundraising, and 150 free superdelegates earned before a single vote had been counted. It looks to me like, of the two of them, Obama has been by far the better at "knocking out" his opponent. Others in the media are pointing out today that the results of Pennsylvania's primary actually left her less likely than ever to win the primary because she needed a huge win and didn't get it. Try as she might, she just can't make headway on Barack's delegate lead. The Wall Street Journal flatly asserted that the primary, for all intents and purposes, is over, and that it will be McCain vs. Obama in November, one way or another.

Krugman also argues that Obama's soaring rhetoric means "not much" to working families, judging from Ohio and PA (I guess there isn't a large number of working families in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Washington, Alabama, or Missouri). Can we not argue by the same token Colorado and DC proved that Clinton has failed to endear herself to college graduates and young people, and has actually burned her bridges with the African American community?

Why does Obama keep losing "big states," you ask? This is not a difficult question, Paul. Both candidates are extremely strong. Democrats really like both candidates. They both can raise a ton of cash and have locked down support in various sections of the Democratic electorate. And both are (now) liked by the establishment.

Clinton is loved among working class, less educated people and older Dems, so she does well in Appalachia, and she's also nursed a great relationship with the Hispanic community, putting her in a strong position in the Southwest. Obama has captured the hearts of African Americans, giving him a virtual stranglehold over the South, but also is respected and trusted among people on the ideological periphery of both parties, port side, starboard, and under the main mast, making him an unusually strong competitor in the Great Plains and Mountain West. Both candidates are too good to lose any of their demographic strongholds, so they trade victories depending entirely on which populations comprise the largest percentage of a given state's voters.

These are simple and obvious realities, and if Krugman were an honest player in this discussion he would see them plain as day. I expected a lot more of him than this.

IN-02: isn't SCHIP a government-run program?

From The South Bend Tribune:

SOUTH BEND -- The health care system needs reform but U.S. Rep. Joe Donnelly, D-Granger, says it shouldn't be through a government-run program.

Insurance companies currently have a lot of control in the system and the playing field needs to be more level with patients, Donnelly said in a phone interview with The Tribune on Wednesday.

He said he supports the re-importation of prescription drugs from Canada to help senior citizens save money.

Donnelly said Medicare Part D must be changed to remove the coverage gap, or the "doughnut hole." The hole lies between $2,250 and $5,726 in total prescription drug spending, where a participant has to pay for all of their drug costs until they reach the out-of-pocket protection threshold.

If Congress could negotiate drug prices with drug companies, prescription drug prices would drop, Donnelly said, shrinking the doughnut hole and helping senior citizens save money. He said seniors eligible for the Veterans Affairs program are already paying 42 percent less on their drugs, because the VA negotiates prices with pharmaceutical companies.

Donnelly said he supported renewal of the national State Children's Health Insurance Program, which would have provided health care for 98,000 children in Indiana. SCHIP was enacted in 1997 to last for 10 years and expired last September.

These Hoosiercrats piss me off to no end. Using "government-run" as a pejorative? What is this, 1985? News flash, Donnelly, people vote for Democrats because they don't want the government to be run by free market fundamentalists and corporatist sellouts. Or were we not supposed to notice that you don't support programs competing with corporate middle-men, but you do support programs subsidizing their profits?

John McCain opposes equal pay law

The title, borrowed from the Washington Post, pretty much says it all:

NEW ORLEANS -- Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who skipped a Senate vote seeking equal pay for women last night in order to campaign for president, said he opposed the measure because it would prompt a flood of lawsuits.

Senate Republicans defeated the bill yesterday on a vote of 56 to 42, by blocking a full debate and vote on the bill. Democratic Sens. Hillary Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.) both returned to Washington in order to support the measure, which is aimed at responding to a recent Supreme Court decision that sets a deadline on how quickly workers must sue over pay discrimination. The presumptive GOP nominee is visiting poor communities throughout the nation, including towns in Alabama and Appalachia; today he toured New Orleans' Ninth Ward.

"I am all in favor of pay equity for women, but this kind of legislation, as is typical of what's being proposed by my friends on the other side of the aisle, opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems," McCain told reporters yesterday. "This is government playing a much, much greater role in the business of a private enterprise system."

As Echidne asks, how exactly would McCain equalize pay in this country without lawsuits? For Crazy Train, equal pay for equal work isn't worth it if it means the government having to regulate or enforce anything. Some principles.

Women. Always bitching about equal pay. If they want money so badly, why don't they just marry into a wealthy family? Ya know, like John McCain did!

"Justice Thomas, at least put down the magazine"

Saw this last night. James Spader as Alan Shore from Boston Legal arguing against the death penalty before the Supreme Court. The whole clip is worth a watch, but starting at 3:20 there's a brilliant indictment of the Court, and from my perspective a great argument why a Democrat, any Democrat, needs to be elected to the White House in the fall.

Heil Zirkle!

Ah, how we've missed you Tony Zirkle! From WSBT South Bend:

SOUTH BEND – Tony Zirkle, Republican candidate for 2nd District congressman, said he is willing to talk to any group that invites him, and that’s why he addressed a weekend gathering in Chicago of the American National Socialist Workers Party.

The occasion was a celebration of the 119th anniversary of the birth of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

That would be a pretty fun article by itself, but Der Zirklefuehrer didn't stop there. He also let them take pictures.


And that, of course, is awesome. Especially awesome here is the children's party store "Happy Birthday" strung across the table. But not nearly as awesome as THE FREAKIN' VIDEO OF HIS SPEECH.

For those of you not familiar with South Bend politics, this is another famous episode in the saga of the Zirkle:

Tony Zirkle says we should talk about segregating the United States by race.

So then you work out the percent of white people and give them a certain number of states. Same for blacks. Same for Asians and other hues of humanity.

Zirkle, who’s seeking the Republican nomination for Congress’ 2nd District, believes it’s worth debating.

“I’m not going to say which side of the debate I fall on,” Zirkle told The Tribune on Monday. But he did say the idea is worth looking into - that segregation could create a new sense of community.

Zirkle is known for suggesting controversial ideas, as in 2006 when he said there should be a debate over using the guillotine to punish "porn pimps" who prey on children.

if Democrats were Republicans

Ouch.

Much ado about little

Current delegate counts out of Pennsylvania have Clinton gaining on Obama's 160 delegate lead by...

[drum roll]
...



10.

There were 158 delegates at stake in PA. There are 157 at stake in NC and IN.

According to the New York Times, people are now zeroing in on the Hoosier State as Obama's last chance to sew this thing up:

The Indiana primary, on the same day, poses another make-or-break moment for Mrs. Clinton, according to several of her advisers, who said they would urge her to quit the race if she lost that state. Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Clinton and their allies have campaigned frequently in Indiana in recent weeks, and she has some important endorsements, including support from Senator Evan Bayh, the state’s former governor.

“She has to win Pennsylvania and Indiana — pretty much everyone in the campaign agrees on that,” said one senior Clinton adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the campaign’s electoral expectations.

Quit the race? It ain't gonna happen, folks. This has gotten so easy to predict: in about a week, after enough polls have been done to give us a sense of who's likely to win Indiana, the Clinton campaign will either say "It all comes down to Indiana" if they're up, or "Indiana doesn't matter; Democrats never win it anyway. Besides, isn't like half of it Chicago?" if they're down.

The only people who can stop this thing are the supers, and they're busy doing what politicians do best: standing in a circle and pointing at the guy to their left.

Pennsylvania primary: what's it gonna be?

Lots of good analysis of late polls out there, most accessible via TPM. Looks like there may be a late break toward Clinton, though that isn't a consensus opinion. My suspicion is that there is.

My prediction ('cuz what's the fun in watching polls and not trying to predict the spread?): Clinton by 10, 55-45. Like with every other major primary this year, just enough that the results falls within both campaign's goalposts of "victory."

military analysts: the "Trojan Horse" of the military-industrial complex

A longy but a goodie from The New York Times.

nothing says "working class" like capital gains!

Here is a great article from Frank Rich on the debate as one piece of the media's hypocritical, condescending, and tone-deaf appeals to class.

It includes a truly rare find, a thing so utterly bizarre and mind-blowing that people will travel from miles away to gaze at it, befuddled by its sheer novelty, like a two-faced baby or a 20 foot long squid: an actual, substantive critique of the Crazy Train by someone in the press, and not in the "I'll take one minor swipe at McCain to lend my savaging of the Democrats an aura of even-handedness" way.

San Francisco, "Land of fruits and nuts"

I wonder when was the last time people bashed a city renowned as a conservative/Republican stronghold, one GOP presidential candidate gleefully joined in on the mugging, and not one Republican stuck up for them?

Imagine what would happen if John McCain was in Montgomery or Provo and said something arguably disparaging about liberals or seculars! Would anyone implicate the town he was in as somehow partly responsible for the slight? For that matter, would anyone come to the defense of liberals or seculars?

Not only does the very mention of San Francisco impugn a candidate's non-liberal credibility, but there's apparently nothing you can say about this city of several million people that is considered beyond the pale, as when Bill O'Reilly said he thinks we should let terrorists attack it. Yet the only person in the media I've ever seen defend Frisco is Markos. And he's a blogger, not a pundit in the traditional media.