Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Oppose, oppose, oppose. do not congratulate. this is not business as usual.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Sometimes the world just tells you your cat is here.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

Nothing worth doing is easy.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

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The New Clinton Strategery

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Rube Goldberg*, eat your heart out, but I think this commenter is right on the new Clinton strategery:

Bill Clinton revealed their plan today:

(1) build up massive popular vote margins in WV, KY, and PR offset by only marginal popular vote losses in OR, MT, and SD

(2) get the DNC to seat MI and FL delegations based on the January primaries with Obama getting 0 popular votes for Michigan

(3) convince superdelegates that giving the nomination to the leader in pledged delegates rather than the leader in the popular votes (using their calculations) would be a repeat of the 2000 Bush-Gore from which the Democratic Party would never recover.

That’s their plan. They’ve got their netroots minions talking it up.

That would explain why the Clinton campaign spent months talking about seating the Michigan delegates and then immediately rejected the plan crafted and offered by Clinton supporters in Michigan, and it would also explain the popular vote rhetoric as of late. I am not sure how they are going to pretend that an election where half the candidates were not on the ballot constitutes the “will of the people,” but I am sure the Clintons and their supporters are up to the challenge.

Rather than take the time to ramp down her supporters and exit gracefully after certain big wins in WV and KY, the Clintons are instead whipping them into a lather. Expect healthy continued doses of the Southern Strategy throughout WV and KY, repeated casual “the black guy can’t win” remarks, and by now it is clear that her “hard-working white voter” comment of the other day was no accident.

Yay, team. President McCain has such a nice ring to it.

And one last thing- every last damned one of you who chastised Andrew Sullivan over the past 6 months for Clinton Derangement Syndrome, myself included, owe him an apology. As Tim noted last night via IM, he was as right about Clinton as Andrew and I were wrong about Iraq.

*** Update ***

And the other thing I think is amusing is Hillary’s belief that if this bizarre scheme works, she is just going to be able to magically sew the party back together and the African-American vote will be hers in the fall by a solid margin. It will not.

* By the way, I should probably credit whoever I saw use the Rube Goldberg reference the other day in regards to the Clinton camp, but I don’t remember who it was.

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The Iraq-berg That Sunk The Unsinkable Clinton-tanic

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Publius muses on why Hillary’s genuinely inevitable campaign machine seemed to keep losing its traction, and comes up with a word that rhymes with frak.

Publius’s analysis exactly agrees how I felt back when I was still on the fence. In the beginning I expected Clinton to make some public statement about how her Iraq vote was a stupid move and how at some level she regretted making it. I have no doubt that a good fraction of the Democratic party’s liberal base was waiting for the same thing.

For me anyway it wasn’t about exacting a pound of flesh or anything like that. What’s the point? If I was out for revenge I would have to write off most of the party. For me it was a of a judgment test. Congress got railroaded by jingoism, panicked political fear and better salesmanship into something that most independent observers now recognize as a bad idea. John Edwards genuinely seems to regret the box of chaos that he helped open.

Recognizing a mistake isn’t just a petty bit of retribution, It’s a first step towards naming the weakness and watching out for it it in the future. More than anything else I needed confidence that she wouldn’t do it again. I don’t want to sit around wondering when will be the next time that our President, terrified of being outmessaged and politically outmaneuvered, tacks to cover her ass and leaves good policy bleeding by the side of the road.

And you know what, I didn’t have to wait for Hillary to become the President. What did the Clintonites do after PA failed to deliver the big comeback margin that Hillary needed? She cynically aped the bullshit Republican gas tax plan, whereas Obama stood by good policy even when it could cost him votes. The whole fake populism gig, calling Obama supporters ‘elitists,’ dismissing African-American voters as irrelevant, reeked of panic and flopsweat. In other words both campaigns did exactly what I expected them to do.

Anyhow it’s almost over and the right guy’s going to win. Go team.

***Update***

Conason’s surprised. Honestly, I’m not. I read Bush right by guessing that the child is father to the man. Hillary’s refusal to revisit Iraq tells me that she either cares about policy until it’s politically useful to defenstrate it (my working model), or her judgment is far worse than I could have guessed. It’s like an Athenian Senator saying you should support him even though he still thinks that Syracuse was a great idea. Even Michael f*cking Ledeen has enough shame to lie about it.

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Open Thread

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Because it is Friday and we need one.

*** Update ***

By the way- did Joe Wilson age 20 years in the past year, or is it just me? Check out this Hillary commercial airing in Oregon:

I started watching it and had to do a double-take when I realized that was him. I thought they had started with someone else (“WTF is R. Lee Ermey doing in this?”), and it took me a little bit before I recognized him. Here is a photo from 2007:

She looks the same, he looks like he has aged dramatically. Maybe it is just the hair cut, although he has gone through a lot of bullshit in the past few years. Or am I seeing things?

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A Positive Sign

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This is good news:

Eight in 10 Americans believe that the government’s $110 billion effort to help consumers will not boost the economy, according to a poll released Friday.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll conducted April 28-30 found that 82% of Americans believe the stimulus package will fall short – compared to 70% in February.

The program, passed with bipartisan support earlier this year, will give tax rebate checks to about 130 million Americans. Most single Americans earning $75,000 or less who filed a tax form will receive up to $600, and married couples earning $150,000 or less could get up to $1200.

Maybe after the rejection of the gas tax gimmick and the clear signal from voters that they know this “stimulus package” will do nothing but blow more money, the era of gimmick government may finally be coming to an end. I am not sure what is bringing about this change, maybe it is the fact that gas prices are hitting so hard and that people are in such dire straits that they know the usual bullshit will not work, but this is a positive thing. We can;t solve all these problems if all we do are play games with them. It looks like the American public isfinally seeing through the BS and is tired of it.

And before you ask, McCain voted for the stimulus package, Obama did not vote. Brad DeLong has the run down on what Obama did propose, however.

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Thought Of The Day

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I heard somewhere that refineries are still pricing consumer fuel as if a barrel of oil still cost $80. Is that true? Oil just broke $126. As Atrios pointed out, the fundamentals don’t support it cheapening any time soon.

If that’s right, eventually refineries will adjust to huge money losses that they’re taking right now. That would push gas at the pump to…$6? $8? Oy.

I don’t feel particularly smug when I stand next to my Honda Fit watching some SUV owner near tears as she puts more than $100 of gas into a car she doesn’t need. It just feels sad to think about how long it’s been since it became obvious to anyone who cared to look that we won’t be able to scare off problems like fuel scarcity and climate change by closing our eyes and wishing.

That lead time was an opportunity to make changes. Some would have been painful and some merely sensible, but it would prevent huge numbers of honest Americans get caught with their pants down. Instead we blew it out the tailpipe of cars that average 15 MPG. Now, instead of a planned transition, we get to see what happens when stubborn denial meets inescapable change. It’s simply unsustainable to live in suburban car country with a negative equity on the house, $6-7 gas (wait until you see what that does to property values in outlying suburbs) and expensive SUVs that nobody wants. The saddest thing for me was that most who will get fucked the worst had no idea this was coming. There was that one guy who warned us, but he had a snooty laugh.

I hope those guys with W stickers on the Hummer parked in front of mcmansions that the bank owns enjoyed their beer.

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The Final Metric

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ABC is reporting that Obama has surpassed Clinton in super delegate support:

ABC News’ Karen Travers Reports: For the first time this campaign season, Barack Obama has surpassed Hillary Clinton’s support among superdelegates, according to the ABC News delegate estimate.

Sen. Obama, D-Ill., picked up two superdelegates this morning giving him a new metric to tout in addition to his current commanding leads in pledged delegates, popular votes, states won, and money raised.

Rep. Donald Payne, D-N.J., switched his endorsement from Clinton to Obama and Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., endorsed Obama. DeFazio was previously uncommitted.

With these endorsements, Obama has the support of 267 superdelegates and Clinton has 265 superdelegates.

Every news organization’s superdelegate count is a little different because it is an imperfect science. Since October 2007, the Political Unit has continuously reached out to the nearly 800 superdelegates to determine their candidate preference. We also reach out regularly to the Obama and Clinton campaigns for their superdelegate lists and work to confirm any that they include on their lists.

Clinton’s advantage among superdelegates was once massive and has been dwindling steadily since Super Tuesday, when she was ahead by over 60 superdelegates.

Clinton’s institutional support from within the Democratic Party allowed her to build a commanding lead in superdelegates over Obama in the early part of this nomination battle.

This thing is slowly working itself out, and I would expect to see a few more of these in the next few days:

Rep. Donald Payne (D-10th Dist.), a New Jersey superdelegate who had been supporting Hillary Clinton for president, has switched his allegiance to Barack Obama.

“After careful consideration, I have reached the conclusion that Barack Obama can best bring about the change that our country so desperately wants and needs,” Payne told The Star-Ledger for today’s editions. It was “one of the most difficult decisions I have made,” Payne said. “I’ve really been mulling it over for quite a while.”

With Payne’s switch Obama has the backing of five of New Jersey’s 20 superdelegates. Clinton has 11, including Gov. Jon Corzine; three are uncommitted and one who has backed Clinton is wavering.

The end is near, thankfully.

*** Update ***

Apparently he is+8 supers today.

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