And loses the opening battle to Greenwald.
Adventures in Family Values
Republican family values, of course…
Vito Fossella built a career as a staunch “family values” pol, polishing his image in his predominantly Catholic district with a string of anti-gay votes.
He even shuns his gay sister, Victoria Fossella, refusing to go to family events if she and her partner attend, a source close to the family said.
So far, all the good Republican street cred! Except:
His double life is now exposed with the news he has a 3-year-old love child with a divorced Air Force colonel, and critics are calling him a hypocrite.
More here. Sadly, this is par for the course with the current lot on the Hill. January can’t come fast enough.
Bill O’Reilly Flips Out
A charming little clip from back when he had hair. Enjoy. And if you’re at work, ahmmm, you might consider a headset.
The New Clinton Strategery
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.
Dennis Leary, What Have You Done?
Dennis Leary, No Cure for Cancer:
That’s the problem in this country. People are never satisfied with stuff the way it is. You gotta make it bigger and better and stronger and faster. Same way with pot. For years pot was just joints, and then bongs came out and bongs were ok too, but then bongs weren’t good enough for some people. “Neeehhhhhh!” Remember that friend in high school wanted to make bongs out of everything. Making bongs out of apples and oranges and shit? Come in one day and find your friend going, “Hey! Look man, I made a bong outta my head! Put the pot in this ear and take it outta this one!
Via Memeorandum, this:
The Kingwood teenager’s story of decapitating a corpse and using the head to smoke marijuana was so outlandish that at first Houston Police Department senior police officer Jim Adkins did not believe it.
Yet, Kevin Wade Jones Jr., 17, appeared almost indifferent as he relayed the bizarre description of his and two friends’ activities at an Humble area graveyard, Adkins said.
“I just doubted it because it’s very morbid, and I couldn’t see anybody doing something like this,” Adkins said Thursday.
Not until police went to the home of another Kingwood 17-year-old, Matthew Richard Gonzalez, did the officer believe the tale.
“He regurgitated in his plate of food when I asked him about it,” Adkins said. “So I knew there was some truth to the story.”
Now, Jones, Gonzalez and a juvenile whose name has not been released are each charged with abuse of a corpse, a misdemeanor. All three were arrested Wednesday night.
Idiots.
Senator Clinton, WHERE IS THE BILL
Apparently things are more dire than we thought, and if we do not have the Gas Tax Holiday, the good folks at Corrente will be forced to survive on ramen noodles and ketchup packets. I think we will all agree that is a better choice than their current diet of paint chips and bullshit election year talking points, but still a pretty sad situation.
At any rate, Sen. Clinton, I beg you to introduce your bill so we can get it passed immediately.
What? There is still no bill? What? It won’t get passed? What, even if it did, no one would see any real savings anyway?
Shit. As a newly minted member of the creative class, I am fresh out of ideas, because, let’s face it- what gets more creative than pretending people are starving to death and won’t find relief unless Obama is beaten rhetorically with a mythical gas tax holiday proposal? I mean, it is pretty hard to top that.
*** Update ***
Read August. I went down that rabbit hole once. Not this time.
*** Update #2 ***
Eureka! We have a bill!
A Series Of Unfortunate Ads
Here I was about to write a semi-long post about the Clinton campaign’s fourth-quarter full court press with no goalie, and then I see Tom Levenson wrote it first.
[B]roadly speaking, judging by the issues papers on her website, Clinton has maintained a fairly sophisticated approach to global warming and applied research, with the implication that the policies near and dear to scientists’ hearts — more money, and even more important, respect for the real knowledge developed within by scientific process, would flow under a Clinton presidency. What Clinton provided for public consumption may be boilerplate, but it has been good boilerplate.But now, what she said at the Indiana interview this morning changes the game. She said, in effect, if the smart boys and girls don’t agree with her, then to hell with them.
That is, of course, precisely the anti-rational madness that has dominated the George Bush years. It is inimical to science or a scientific world view. If we are to pick and choose the facts we like, it is a very short step, quickly taken, to making them up. And that way lies an ever more rapid collapse of the American republic.
Do I have anything to add? Not really. Hillary seemed to be doing fine until the inevitability meme died, and then her campaign went a little crazy. It’s reached the point now where she doesn’t just sound like a Republican, she sounds like the intellectual dregs that the GOP tries to keep off of network TV. She sounds like David Horowitz. Are we really that far from Gastaxofascism Awareness Week? Her rhetoric offers up the same paranoid conviction that all of the experts on Earth are either wrong or out to get you.
Maybe Hillary knows that her populist message really is pap and nonsense, but then maybe Horowitz does too. They’re both either stupid enough to believe what they’re saying or enough morally stunted to lead masses down an intellectually poisonous path in return for some cheap attention.
I’ll still vote Democratic regardless of who wins this forever primary; Supreme Court appointments matter too much to consider anything else. That said, if Dems offer this kind of leadership in ’09 I promise the same party loyalty that John showed after Schiavo.