My lovely wife Chris just emailed this to me. Last night in the middle of the broadcast of Medium in New York City WNBC did a live “coming up at 11” spot for their nightly news and the anchor Sue Simmons, out of nowhere, let loose with a loud, “What the fuck are you doing?” My wife watches Medium (don’t ask), so I just checked the DVR and sure enough, it’s real. When they came back for the next news promo, Simmons was noticeably absent. Not sure what happened at 11 when the news kicked in. I’ll poke around and let you know.
(Youngsters and/or non-movie enthusiasts look below the fold...)
Now, after this (which isn’t getting the attention it deserves), maybe someone should do a YouTube video with Hillary starring as Veruca Salt:
Michigan Democrats on Wednesday voted to back a plan that would give Clinton 69 delegates—four fewer than the 73 she gained by winning the state’s Jan. 15 primary. Obama would get 59 pledged delegates even though he took his name off the ballot, forcing his supporters to vote for Uncommitted.
Clinton campaign spokesman Isaac Baker said Thursday the campaign won’t support any proposal that gives Clinton fewer delegates than she earned by winning the primary. The New York senator trails Obama in the race for the nomination by about 150 delegates, and is seeking to close the gap with delegates from Florida and Michigan.
“This proposal does not honor the 600,000 votes that were cast in Michigan’s January primary. Those votes must be counted,” Baker said.
Michigan Democratic Party spokeswoman Elizabeth Kerr said Baker’s assertion that the 69-59 split doesn’t take the primary results into account is incorrect.
“This proposal honors the January 15 results and takes into consideration the fact that Barack Obama’s name was not on the ballot,” she said. “We continue to think this a fair resolution to seating the delegates.”
“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” [Hillary Clinton] said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”
“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.
After that comment, here’s one pattern I’d love to see emerging to replace the Clinton campaign:
MORE: Regarding Clark as a potential VP choice for Obama, I’m not convinced. I think the economy is and will be a key factor in November (not one of Clark’s strong suits), so I’d rather see him as SecDef. I’m still leaning toward a current or former governor as VP (examples: Richardson, Sebelius or Rendell), but they all have negatives I’m still working through. I “get” why people are pushing Jim Webb, but I think Obama needs someone with a little more political experience. And I’m still fundamentally allergic to a Senator/Senator ticket, so that rules out Hillary and a few others.
BUT, let me reiterate something I’ve proposed here and elsewhere: John Edwards for Secretary of Labor. He could take a lackluster and undervalued cabinet position and, in these tough economic times, turn it into something special. It’s a no-brainer to me. I don’t understand why I’m the only person I’ve seen float the idea…
How much did they spend on advertising in Indiana and North Carolina compared to Obama?
If Hillary keeps this hopeless and ego-driven campaign lurching forward is the expectation that the Obama campaign will bail her out of debt when she finally (and inevitably) drops out?
“Senator Clinton gave the campaign a $5 million loan on April 11th, a $1 million loan on May 1st, and a $425,000 loan on May 5th,” [Hillary spokesperson Howard] Wolfson said, adding that she’d lent the campaign the money to keep pace with Obama’s spending on TV in Pennsylvania, Indiana and North Carolina.
“The loans are a sign of Senator Clinton’s commitment to the race, to continuing the process, and to continuing to be competitive with Senator Obama on television and in other areas,” Wolfson said.
JOHN ROBERTS: Well, what about that Anne Lewis, Barack Obama is charging that this is a political gimmick? Where is this the legislation for this gas tax holiday that Senator Clinton has promised. It’s only three weeks now to Memorial Day.
ANN LEWIS, SR. ADVISER, CLINTON CAMPAIGN: Well, I would agree that it’s an example of leadership. Hillary Clinton says let’s take on the oil companies. You impose a windfall profits tax. You use that money to pay to make the difference so that you can suspend the federal gas tax and you make sure with the Federal Trade Commission that those profits are passed on to the consumers.
Sitting on the sunny patio of a coffee shop last weekend, Averell “Ace” Smith hardly seemed the kind of guy to strike fear into a politician’s heart.
The 49-year-old California political operative—who helped Hillary Rodham Clinton to victories in the California and Texas Democratic presidential primaries and is now running her North Carolina operation—was a study in bland: beige polo shirt, beige slacks, bright blue eyes framed by wire-rimmed glasses, a fringe of gray hair around a pink scalp.
Yet people—many of them fellow Democrats—frequently use melodramatic imagery to describe him.
“I believe that every life lesson in politics can be extrapolated from ‘The Godfather,’ “ said Chris Lehane, a Democratic strategist and friend of Smith’s who has worked for the Clintons.
“Some people are Fredos; at game time they disappear. There are Sonnys, who yell and scream. . . . The most effective ones are the Michael Corleones. Very quiet, they know under which rib to insert the knife. . . . Ace is a Michael Corleone.”
And Chris Lehane is something that didn’t make it into The Godfather ... the horse’s ass.
A leader of the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton has switched his allegiance to Barack Obama and is encouraging fellow Democrats to “heal the rift in our party” and unite behind the Illinois senator.
Joe Andrew, who was Democratic National Committee chairman from 1999-2001, planned a news conference Thursday in his hometown of Indianapolis to urge other Hoosiers to support Obama in Tuesday’s primary, perhaps the most important contest left in the White House race. He also has written a lengthy letter explaining his decision that he plans to send to other superdelegates.
[...]
Bill Clinton appointed Andrew chairman of the DNC near the end of his presidency, and Andrew endorsed the former first lady last year on the day she declared her candidacy for the White House.
[...]
“He has shown such mettle under fire,” Andrew said in the interview. “The Jeremiah Wright controversy just reconfirmed for me, just as the gas tax controversy confirmed for me, that he is the right candidate for our party.”
Well, maybe Obama’s press conference about Wright yesterday wasa really good idea:
Indiana 9th District Rep. Baron Hill, a previously uncommitted Democratic superdelegate, is endorsing presidential candidate Barack Obama today.
[...]
Hill released a statement this morning on his decision.
“Some have advised me to be cautious, to wait and see which way the electoral winds may blow,” he said. “I confess that I have listened to those voices and been tempted by their reasoning. But, the stakes are just too high.
“We cannot continue to pursue the same politics of personal destruction we have engaged in for a generation, some never-ending ‘groundhog day’ endlessly playing out the cultural wars of forty years ago,” Hill said.
“If we are going to develop real solutions for Hoosier families, for America’s families, we have to move past the partisan gridlock,” he added. “I believe both Senator Clinton and Senator Obama want to do that and I believe both are formidable candidates. But I also believe that only one of them truly can. I am proud of Senator Obama’s call for change in Washington — change I have been advocating since I first sought public office. I am truly hopeful that his campaign and election will help unify our nation and ultimately change our politics.”
Hill said Obama’s repudiation of the controversial remarks of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., was a sign of leadership and strength of character.
Baron Hill is a Blue Dog Dem and the kind of politician the much-coveted “lunch bucket” Dems in Indiana admire. This is a huge score for Obama and a much needed boost for the campaign in a crucial state.
Now look for Baron Hill to be branded as a misogynistic, money-hungry, Kool-Aid drinking, race-baiting, unpatriotic, latte-sipping fucktard by Hillary supporters in 3, 2, 1…
MORE (6:30PM): Obama’s up in the super-del count 3-2 today over Hillary. It looks like the Wright brouhaha wasn’t having the desired effect the Hillshills was hoping it would.
As to Wright himself, well, I have my own thoughts. First and foremost, I guess I am no longer the delicate fainting flower that most other bloggers and media commenters are these days. I spent several years in the early days of this blog being all sorts of outraged about petty bullshit. I spent days calling Ted Rall an asshole (he still is, I think), days opining about what an asshole Michael Moore is, and so on. I got my panties all in a bunch about Ward Churchhill (also a dick), and stupid things Bill Maher may or may not have said, and so on.
And you know what? They may be assholes, or jerks, or whatever term you want to use, but they sure as hell didn’t run this economy into the ground. They aren’t responsible for turning a huge surplus into a several hundred billion dollar deficit. I have yet to read any memos from Barbra Streisand detailing how we should spy on American citizens.
And so it is with Jeremiah Wright. Is he a jerk? I don’t think there is any argument to be made that lately he hasn’t in fact been one big, giant, puckered asshole. His ego tour the past few days was all about him, but so what? I blame the media as much as I blame him. Is it an offensive notion that the government created aids? Absolutely, but I refuse to get all bent out of shape about it, because the government that tortures people and ran the Tuskegee experiment and wiretapped MLK for years opens itself up to crazy accusations like that.
Read it all. And if you happen to be in close proximity to Joe Scarborough or Larry Johnson, please rub their fucking noses in it.
One thing that may shock a few people who have only started visiting Rumproast in the last few months is that one of the most heavily-trafficked posts I’ve written was one supporting Hillary Clinton against what I saw as unfair attacks by Chris Matthews. I thought the media and Matthews in particular were willfully trying to dictate the outcome of the primaries and I found the piling on unseemly after Clinton suffered just one, albeit shocking, primary loss (Iowa). You couldn’t find one cable news channel that wasn’t declaring that Hillary was toast pre-New Hampshire and trying to yank the will of the people away from the electorate.
We’re now seeing the media pull the same stunt with Obama and their incessant and self-serving obsession with Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Once again, they’re manufacturing a controversy and flicking the auto-repeat switch to keep it wedged into as many news cycles as possible. That beady-eyed butthead Joe Scarborough can’t got three seconds without barking out Wright’s name like a Tourette’s tic and, unfortunately, a majority of MSNBC’s hosts and anchors who follow him are nearly as bad. Many pro-Hillary bloggers have become even worse, cheering about how Wright is “the gift that keeps on giving” and plopping YouTube embed code for anti-Wright videos into every other of their posts. There used to be a time when liberal blogs defended Democrats against repugnant and relentless intellectually dishonest media attacks, now it seems to be all the rage to not only endorse those attacks but to outdo them. The political blogosphere has become, in many ways, no better than mainstream media, if not worse.
So I’m giving a tip of the hat to pro-Hillary blogger Riverdaughter from The Confluence, who I’ve taken issue with before, for trying to inject a little sanity into the debate. While she writes a few things in her “Whoa! The wheels are coming off Obama’s campaign” post and her follow-up comments I disagree with, overall she makes some very thoughtful and intelligent points regarding Wright and the media’s manipulation of what she refers to as a “manufactured scandal” that several pro-Hillary bloggers and supporters should take to heart. And if you’re an Obama supporter it may do you well to read her post and her comments and realize that there may be enough wood to build a bridge across the Great Divide regardless of how this fucking mess turns out.
It’s official: Barack Obama has offered the vice presidency to an 82-year-old woman.
At a town hall meeting in Wilmington, North Carolina, Monday supporter Jean Weiss stood up to ask a question and began by telling the Illinois senator that he’s “captured her heart” with his foreign policy stands.
“When you said ‘yes I will sit down with all my enemies, we’re gonna sit around the table, we’re gonna work this thing out,’” Weiss said, “sir, that was not naiveté—that was wisdom.”
She then moved on to a question about water supply. “Before I answer the question,” Obama said, “I just want to know–will you be my running mate?”
The crowd erupted in applause, and Weiss ran up to the stage and gave him a hug.
“That’s my running mate there,” Obama said as she trotted back to her seat, her arms in the air. “She is 82 years old. She’s got some fire!”
Weiss wasn’t done, though, until she offered some advice on how to handle his rival Hillary Clinton.
“Don’t hit on Hillary,” she said. “Bring us all back. Let her do that stuff. Leave her alone, you don’t need to do that. You are higher than that. Bring us up higher than that.”
Eighty-two-year-old Jean Weiss sees in Sen. Barack Obama the wisdom and courage of her late husband, a German-born American hero who flew 50 missions in World War II and later became a peace activist.
Her husband, E. Karl Weiss, died in 1992 of cancer of the esophagus, just four years into the New York couple’s retirement to Wilmington.
And so Weiss knew Obama was her candidate when he said at a debate many months ago that should he become president, he would sit down with America’s enemies and try to work it out.
Weiss told Obama as much Monday in an exchange that brought down the house at UNC-Wilmington.
What brought her there, though, was a long life that gave her three children and a caring husband, who was a grounds and building superintendent at a parochial school in New York.
“He was a peacemaker,” she said. “I loved him.”
Now Weiss lives on a tiny pension and Social Security, but having once lived in Africa with her husband as a missionary, she realizes her wealth.
She attends a conservative evangelical church, where good people support the war and President Bush, she said, but when she heard Obama was coming to Wilmington, Weiss had to see him.
[...]
“I would have loved to have my husband here with me today,” Weiss said. “He would’ve said, ‘Go up there and talk.’”
I love this woman! Pass this story and video around. This needs to go viral.
Today I woke up to Joe Scarborough, Andrea Mitchell, Willie Geist and Mike Barnicle, four of the whitest people you’ll ever encounter sharing a split-screen, blabbing on and on about Rev. Jeremiah Wright and how hard it is for American Caucasians to shoulder the burden of his very existence.
Insecure white people suck. If you need me I’m going to be out in my garden enjoying a beautiful Brooklyn day.
Hillary is now pimping what she’s calling “The Oregon Compact” (dig the fancy header graphic!) and demanding that Obama agrees to two debates in Oregon, including one focused on her “compact.” I honestly can’t decide if this is utterly guileless pandering or if Hillary has gone completely off the rails. Where’s the Iowa Compact? Where’s the New Hampshire Compact? Where’s the Louisiana Compact? Where’s the New Mexico Compact? Where’s the compact for her home state of New York? Hell, where are the Michigan and Florida Compacts? Look for my new petition site at my-state-wants-a-fucking-compact-too.com.
