By Hanlon, on August 27th, 2008 at 10:39 PM
 You know, I understand why Hillary’s supporters are miffed. I really do. It’s not hard to sympathize, they put their all into a historic campaign that just happened to lose to another historic campaign. It stings, especially since she went from shoo-in to underdog to “can’t win”. But this crap is just stupid as hell.
Now that Obama has captured the Democratic nomination, the choice is clear: John McCain has far more experience and understanding of critical issues — the war in Iraq, economic prosperity, health-care reform and energy security, to name a few — than Barack Obama. John McCain has been a member of Congress for 26 years; Obama has yet to finish his first term in the Senate. I may not agree with McCain on every social issue, but he has earned the right to stand where he does after years of making tough decisions as a federal lawmaker.
The only, repeat only, thing to back up this whole “Hillary supporters for McCain” idiocy is their claim that Obama doesn’t have enough experience and McCain does.
Read the article. I mean it, read the whole thing. One thing should pop out at you: there’s no policy discussion. Not once, not effing once will a PUMA moron who claims to support McCain actually explain what it is about a McCain presidency that would be better than Obama. Never. In fact, let’s review that last sentence again.
I may not agree with McCain on every social issue, but he has earned the right to stand where he does after years of making tough decisions as a federal lawmaker.
That’s a coded sentence. The translation is “I am so petty that even though I know McCain is the antithesis of the woman I supposedly support, I’m voting for him out of spite anyway.”
You want to know how to quickly set feminism back? When these women can’t act like adults after their candidate is fairly defeated and instead have one nice big nation-wide pout, cutting off their nose to spite their faces. Celebrate Hillary’s campaign, don’t piss it all away by refusing to move on.
By Hanlon, on August 27th, 2008 at 09:06 PM
Clinton can’t get through one sentence without a standing ovation. This is pretty nuts.
By Hanlon, on August 27th, 2008 at 08:59 PM
 One of these days, when our children are reading in their Houghton-Mifflin history books about what happened between 2000 and 2010 (I don’t expect the damage undone immediately), they’re going to ask us how in the world no one stopped it.
So a court is reviewing whether or not FBI requests for information can be constitutionally kept secret, and what little information has trickled out is worrisome.
“You can’t tell me that any terrorist is going to make anything out of the fact you issued NSLs to AT&T and Verizon,” said Circuit Judge Sonia Sotomayor, using a hypothetical example.
U.S. Assistant Attorney General Gregory Katsas said the FBI “assesses the need for secrecy in each particular case.”
Between 2003 and 2006 nearly 200,000 national security letters were sent out. Of those about 97 percent received gag orders.
ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer said the gag order had prevented the small Internet service provider the ACLU was representing from speaking out “against an FBI investigation that he believes is illegitimate.”
Here’s how it works: the FBI sends you a letter requesting information. Maybe you feel like fighting them, maybe you don’t. Let’s say you do, that the FBI is asking for something that couldn’t possibly be in the interest of fighting terrorism. There’s a problem, though. You can’t reveal what the letter said, so even if you felt like doing something about it, any evidence is under gag order.
Katsas says the FBI assesses the need for secrecy, but that’s not good enough. Any time we’re required to simply trust that an agency or the government will do the right thing, we’re already in deep trouble. We shouldn’t need to trust them because the law should prevent them from doing anything in the shadows. Period.
By Hanlon, on August 27th, 2008 at 08:44 PM
Just when you thought Hillary Clinton had topped out on class, she actually stops the roll call vote midstream and calls for Senator Obama to be declared the nominee by acclamation.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHFykdKig3Y
To quote Will (albeit with fewer expletives), this takes the wind out of the right wing’s sails a full day or two; they pretty much have no choice but to actually cover the convention now.
By Hanlon, on August 27th, 2008 at 02:44 PM
 I like to consider myself a bit of a watchdog at times. If something seems fishy, I check it out. I also appreciate it when others do it. The sad thing, though, is when fact checkers need their facts checked. Media Matters lays it out perfectly with a recent AP article “checking” claims made of McCain at the DNCC.
From the AP:
THE FACTS: McCain voted with President Bush 90 percent of the time from January 20, 2001, to when Congress left Washington on its annual August recess, according to a study by Congressional Quarterly. But McCain wasn’t always a staunch Bush backer. In 2005, his support for Bush’s position on legislation reached a low of 77 percent; last year, when he launched his latest bid for the GOP presidential nomination, he voted with Bush 95 percent of the time.
Then MM points out that according to a Congressional Quarterly study, that 77% was an extreme outlier, as the other years from 2001 to 2007 hovered in the low nineties. This is kind of like when someone accuses you of drinking every day, and you respond with “not true, last month I stayed sober for two whole days!”
The rest of the article isn’t much better, either. It’s less “fact checking” than spinning, really. Amongst the asinine claims are that McCain supports alternative energy (such as with that giant energy plan act he voted against), or rationalizing that his huge tax cuts for oil companies are just “part of McCain’s plan to reduce corporate taxes overall,” or that his $1.5mil in donations from oil companies, since it “only” ranks 11th on his donor list, doesn’t really matter.
These aren’t checked facts, because not one damn fact was incorrect. The AP simply wanted to “re-contextualize” the facts to make McCain look good.
By Hanlon, on August 27th, 2008 at 02:31 PM
Thanks to reader woeds for this one (I should practically add you to the payroll…). Kucinich is, and has been, my main little man in DC for a while, but I missed the speech he made at the DNCC. I’m damn glad to have caught it here, because it’s everything I’d hoped for.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lv0smG7ptcM
It’s a shame that this is considered “radical left”.
By Hanlon, on August 27th, 2008 at 02:22 PM
 Two things happened this week that fundamentally changed the way I see Hillary Clinton. The first was a big honking article by Eric Boehlert that made me feel rather dumb. The take home message of it is:
Fact: Many in the press have portrayed Clinton’s planned convention address, as well as the fact that her name is being placed into nomination, as an unprecedented, heavy-handed power grab.
Fact: It’s not. In years past, Democratic candidates who won lots of primaries and accumulated hundreds of delegates (sorry, Howard Dean and Bill Bradley) have always been allowed to address the convention and very often place their name into nomination. It’s the norm. It’s expected. It’s a formality.
So my venom at her for wanting her name on the ballot was woefully ignorant and naive; caught up in the media frenzy. Furthermore, Boehlert brings up instances where those who were snubbed the nomination not only got their names on the ballot, but they angrily denounced the candidate and all but told their supporters not to vote for the nominee. Hillary’s been stumping for Obama, if anything she’s been extra gracious, it’s her supporters that have been the assholes.
Speaking of gracious, that’s point #2. In her speech at the DNCC, she said something that was just so perfect, I couldn’t believe it.
I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me? Or were you in it for that young Marine and others like him? Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids? Were you in it for that boy and his mom surviving on the minimum wage? Were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible?
Bingo. Fantastically put, Hillary. The people who will vote McCain out of spite for Obama or stay home to show some kind of loyalty to Hillary, to the PUMAs who don’t give a shit about party unity, aren’t just hurting Barack Obama, they aren’t even just hurting the entire Democratic Party. They’re hurting every single American citizen who would be better off under an Obama presidency.
So when more Americans lose their health care, the PUMAs will be at fault. When the war in Iran launches, the PUMAs will be to blame. And when middle and low class Americans get taxed to death while the rich like McCain himself get boatloads of money back, everyone can thank those “die-hard Hillary supporters” for helping him.
Kudos to ya, Hillary Clinton. I hope the troglodytes refusing to listen to everyone else will at least listen to you.
By Hanlon, on August 27th, 2008 at 12:20 AM
Without a blatant display of humour, it is impossible to tell the difference between religious Fundamentalism and a parody thereof.
By Hanlon, on August 27th, 2008 at 12:02 AM
 In a weak attempt to resurrect the “plagiarism” angle, we’ve got right-wingers from stupid bloggers to Rush Limbaugh now saying that Michelle Obama in her DNCC speech stole a line from Saul Alinski. As they wrote:
“Barack stood up that day,” talking about a visit to Chicago neighborhoods, “and spoke words that have stayed with me ever since. He talked about “The world as it is” and “The world as it should be…”
And, “All of us driven by a simple belief that the world as it is just won’t do – that we have an obligation to fight for the world as it should be.”
Compared with the following from Rules for Radicals:
“The means-and-ends moralists, constantly obsessed with the ethics of the means used by the Have-Nots against the Haves, should search themselves as to their real political position. In fact, they are passive — but real — allies of the Haves…The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means… The standards of judgment must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be.“
Gasp! This seems legitimate! Is it possible that Michelle really did steal from Alinski? After all, those two phrases are the same, used in the same idea. My goodness, what else might she have stolen?
Read More ->
In a weak attempt to resurrect the “plagiarism” angle, we’ve got right-wingers from stupid bloggers to Rush Limbaugh now saying that Michelle Obama in her DNCC speech stole a line from Saul Alinski. As they wrote:
“Barack stood up that day,” talking about a visit to Chicago neighborhoods, “and spoke words that have stayed with me ever since. He talked about “The world as it is” and “The world as it should be…”
And, “All of us driven by a simple belief that the world as it is just won’t do – that we have an obligation to fight for the world as it should be.”
Compared with the following from Rules for Radicals:
“The means-and-ends moralists, constantly obsessed with the ethics of the means used by the Have-Nots against the Haves, should search themselves as to their real political position. In fact, they are passive — but real — allies of the Haves…The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means… The standards of judgment must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be.“
Gasp! This seems legitimate! Is it possible that Michelle really did steal from Alinski? After all, those two phrases are the same, used in the same idea. My goodness, what else might she have stolen?
Read More ->
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