Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
For fun, go check out Hillaryis44.org. Notice in the right-hand column a series of polls that show Hillary’s lead::
And then, for some reason, the polling updates stop. Why?
Here is a clue. Here is another.
We really are dealing with people working in an alternate universe.
Beer became the only legal alcohol in the United States. (Why today is not a national holiday baffles me.) On April 7, 1933, Prohibition was modified to allow beer with no more than 3.2% abv. It was the beginning of the end, as Prohibition was officially repealed on December 5th of the same year.
Penn canned, sort of:
Sen. Hillary Clinton’s chief presidential campaign strategist is quitting his post amid criticism of his public relations firm’s contacts with the Colombian government over a pending free-trade deal, Clinton’s campaign announced.
Mark Penn will continue to advise Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Mark Penn and his political consulting firm will continue advise the New York senator’s Democratic presidential bid, but Penn will give up his job as chief strategist, campaign manager Maggie Williams said.
“After the events of the last few days, Mark Penn has asked to give up his role as chief strategist of the Clinton campaign,” Williams said.
Penn is CEO of public relations giant Burston Marsteller and is president of Penn, Schoen and Berland, his political consulting firm.
Not sure why she can not simply break from him completely, but I am assuming if he was completely severed they would lose any and all polling data they need to run the campaign in the short term. If not, I don’t know why the hell she is keeping him around in any role.
As I write this, Doug Feith is asserting on 60 Minutes the War in Iraq was the right thing to do, even after everything we have learned.
***Update ***
It turns out that Mark Penn is a uniter, and not a divider, because BTD and I agree on something.
Yesterday in Oregon:
Finally, Clinton is still telling the “woman-turned’away-and-died” hospital story that she has been told is not true, and has been asked not to by Rick Castrop, chief executive officer of the O’Bleness Health System in Athens, Ohio. Get the facts of the story here.
Ultimately, while I gained some respect for Clinton and her supporters that I did not previously have, what I have confirmed for myself that remains true of Clinton is this type of behavior that anything goes, that she can do or say anything to opponents, that she can tell whatever stories she wants because it is all excused by the chase for power, that its part of the game, and that if you can’t take that, you oughtta not be in politics. That is, she defends old schools biznass as-is. In fact, she excuses too much with the same line (almost verbatim) we’ve been hearing from the current resident of the White House who also subscribes to “Ends justify the means” philosophy. Clinton tells us to “leave it to the history books” to decide right and wrong. But we don’t live in history books. We live here, now. I have to say when I hear Bush and Clinton say “leave it to the history books” it sounds to me a lot like “I can do what I want and maybe one day it will seem honorable, because now it sure doesn’t.” And I’m hard-pressed to think of how this thought ever came to be an acceptable defense for anything.
It just never stops.
Can’t anyone explain to her why lying and embellishing is a bad thing? Has she never heard of the 2000 election and a story about the internet? Does anyone in that campaign think? Or can she just not help herself?
*** Update ***
Apparently the popular vote math we ridiculed yesterday is a theme among Clinton and her supporters:
Hillary Clinton once again tries to pretend that she was more against the Iraq War than Obama was. It turns out that this is true if you ignore the events of 2002, and those of 2003, and those of 2004 and then misportray the events of 2005.
In other news, according to a Bush administration official, if you exclude all of the people who do not have jobs, currently the economy is humming along at full employment.
*** Update #2 ***
Via the comments, this piece (published last night at 5:30) which states that Clinton will stop telling the story as part of her standard speeches.
*** Update #3 ***
Is Hillary getting a raw deal on the health care story:
The Washington Post article said Clinton was told the story during a campaign stop by Meigs County Sheriff’s Deputy Bryan Holman, and identified the Pomeroy woman by name. (The Messenger elected not to use the woman’s name in this article.) The 35-year-old woman died Aug. 15, according to The Washington Post.
Seeing the article, O’Bleness Health Systems reviewed its patient records and found that the woman had been a patient of its affiliates, O’Bleness Memorial Hospital and River Rose Obstetrics and Gynecology, according to a press release it issued Friday.
“We reviewed the medical and patient account records of this patient,” Rick Castrop, CEO of O’Bleness Health Systems, said in the press release. “There is no indication that she was ever denied medical care at any time, for any reason. We clearly reject any perception that we ever denied any care to this young woman.”
Castrop asks in the news release that the Clinton campaign “immediately desist from repeating this story.”
An article about the health system’s allegation that Clinton told this false story without verifying its accuracy was published on The New York Times Web site Friday.
“Hospital administrators (at O’Bleness) said Friday that (name withheld) was under the care of an obstetrics practice affiliated with the hospital, that she was never refused treatment and that she was, in fact, insured,” that story said. Anti-Clinton blogs seized on the story, posting it under such banners as “Hillary Clinton caught in another lie” and “Clinton’s make-believe health care horror story.”
However, contacted by The Messenger, Holman claimed the hospital he was referring to when he spoke to Clinton wasn’t O’Bleness, nor an affiliate.
Holman said when he spoke to Clinton, he never mentioned the name of the hospital that allegedly denied the woman care, nor did he mention the woman by name.
More as it comes out.
Heh.
A year ago, the Mortgage Bankers Association was thrilled to sign a contract to buy a fancy new headquarters building in downtown Washington. Interest rates were low, the group’s revenues were steady and the prospects for quickly renting out part of the structure were strong.
But since then, the association has fallen on tough times as many of the subprime mortgages dispensed by some of its members proved dicey. Borrowers discovered the loans were more costly than they had anticipated. Foreclosures soared, and cheap, inexpensive credit dried up, slowing the economy.
The result: The trade group is about to find it harder than it imagined to pay its own mortgage.
Scheduled to close on the building in the coming weeks, the association will have to pay millions of dollars more than it would have a year ago when it contracted to buy the 160,000-square-foot structure — millions of dollars it is now less able to afford.
The brokers who engineered this mess earned my sympathy like Enron traders who yukked it up about shutting off granny’s electricity. If the association gets foreclosed and faces bankruptcy then an angel somewhere will get its wings.
I can spare a bit more for owners and sunny-day real estate agents because, though their behavior perfectly illustrates the defects among even educated consumers that fed the poisonous bubble (that’s why the NYT Magazine gave 5 pages to a chat in a taco chain), these guys seemed to think that they were doing, well, if not the right thing then at least only risking themselves. Reading them talk about interest-only ARMs the way I talk about an ATM withdrawal is like getting dispatches from another world – I understand that people somewhere think that way, but I’d never seen them in their natural environment before. It’s sad.
Publius on the counterproductivity of staying in Iraq:
Here, the overriding risk is all-out civil war – whether inter-or-intra ethnic group – or regional war, or both. Our presence mitigates these risks [to the government] – at least in the short term. Thus, Maliki can take risky actions like raiding Basra or openly turning the army into a wing of Badr, knowing that he and his allies won’t be exposed to the full risk of those actions (civil war) because of the American presence. Similarly, other countries (like Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia) feel less urgency to engage diplomatically (which is itself a “risky” omission) because of the American presence.
Question – if we are basically acting like a wing of Maliki’s Badr brigades, and the Badr brigades are so closely tied with Iran that its fighters draw pensions from the IRGC, can we get Iran to pitch in for the mental health care of our troops? After all of the blood that America has shed on Iran’s behalf it seems like the least they could do.