Giving Senator Barack Obama new momentum, one of the nation’s largest labor unions, the United Food and Commercial Workers, endorsed him on Thursday. Another giant, the Service Employees International Union, was on the brink of backing him.
The endorsement of the service employees, which with 1.9 million members is seen as the nation’s most politically potent union, would be considered a special boon. Members of the service employees’ board were casting votes by e-mail and fax on Thursday night, and two top S.E.I.U. leaders said an Obama endorsement was likely.
The two unions did not make endorsements until now largely because they were so torn among Mr. Obama, John Edwards and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. But with Mr. Edwards out and Mr. Obama winning eight straight contests, many of the top leaders of the unions decided it was time to back him.
It looks like that Giuliani-like “come and get me” strategy is really paying off for Hillary…
MEANWHILE: Someone had better buy rabid anti-Obama Hillshill Larry “Barber Bowl” Johnson and big ol’ sack of deep breaths. What a loon.
BONUS POINTS: Name the song referenced in this post’s title (without Google) and win oodles of hope and change!
Geepers, if Hillshills think the MSM is tough on Hillary, let her try spending a day in Jeff Gordon’s, errrrrrr, jumpsuit. Look at the questions from “fans” that TIME recently hurled at him:
How does it feel to go from the kid to the old man on the tour? What’s it like to hear people booing you?Will having Dale Earnhardt Jr. as a teammate cut down on the number of bottles and cans thrown at you when you win at Talladega this year?If Dale Earnhardt Jr. is in the lead for another win at Daytona, would you bump him and take out your team member?Why is it that some parts of the country support you and others don’t?Your wife is taller than you. Has that ever made you self-conscious?
TO MY GREAT CHAGRIN: The eagerly-awaited (in my house, at least) world premiere of the documentary To My Great Chagrin: The Unbelievable Story of Brother Theodore comes to MOMA this Wednesday, February 13th (also playing on March 1st). He was a complex, brilliant and vastly underrated performance artist and you can view some of his pitch-perfect and hysterical ravings in a video compilation we posted here back in September.
FUERZABRUTA: Friday I took my lovely wife Chris to see Fuerzabruta, the new spectacle from the creators of De La Guarda, for her birthday at the Daryl Roth Theatre and was totally blown away by it. I enjoyed De La Guarda, but thought it was a little over-hyped and found myself wishing it would come to an end about 45-minutes into it. Fuerzabruta, on the other hand, I never wanted to end, noticing at several points during the performance that my face was smeared with a thoroughly ridiculous shit-eating grin that only a child can accommodate without feeling like a complete tool. As an added bonus, I was selected by one of the Fuerzabruta “dancers” to join her on a metal platform and dance in front of hundreds of people before having an oversized, exploding paper cinderblock dropped on our heads. According to Chris the crowd was cheering me on (I inserted several of my death-defying robot maneuvers into my routine) and afterwards the dancer came over and gave me a big thumbs up when she found me back in the crowd. If you’re a New Yorker, I highly recommend checking this show out. If the $72 price tag is too steep for you, they sell $25 rush tix at the box office two hours before each performance.
I went to bed hearing Obama was ahead in Tuesday’s delegate count and I woke up to the exact opposite. I’m grumpy and I’ve got a long, sure-to-be annoying day at work ahead of me. If Ricki Lieberman, who keeps spamming me (after two polite requests to be removed from her mailing list) with crazeeeee-colored, goo-laced pro-Hillary emails (”
Decision making
:
With thanks to Tina Turner - She’s the best, Simply Better than All the Rest…
”), sends me another “GO HILLARY!!!” email today I hope she really enjoys the stills from the “2 Girls 1 Cup” video she’s going to find clogging up her Gmail account.
On a more serious note, I think Obama’s still in it, but he’s got to have nearly everything go his way in the upcoming primaries and caucuses to overcome Hillary’s super delegate lead (and don’t forget her surefire shameless attempt to seat her Michigan and Florida delegates). If not, say hello to President McCain. I’ll post more info as I find it.
JUST ON MSNBC: Chuck Todd just said that Hillary is currently up by 70 delegates, including committed super delegates. That spells good news for Obama in the next couple of rounds of voting where he’s sure to substantially whittle away at her lead, but he’s got to pull off a March 4th win in Texas or Ohio if he doesn’t want Hillary to lock this up.
The severely abbreviated Super Bowl Sunday edition*...
“Yes We Can” song (hi res version here, info here)
According to some of the commenters over at Atrios’ place, this is just more all-flash, no-substance gruel for the starry-eyed hope junkies who blindly support Prince Obama. They’re right. Dems need to nominate a thoroughly uninspiring policy wonk if we’re going to beat St. Maverick in the general election. It’s worked so well for us in the past. Someone get Dukakis or Mondale on the phone and see if they’re available for the veep spot.
U.S. Democratic presidential candidates Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) (L) and US Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) wait to go onstage for the CNN/Los Angeles Times Democratic presidential debate in Hollywood, California January 31, 2008.
Barack Obama is such a sore loser!!! I can’t believe HE SNUBBED HILLARY AGAIN!!! Look at how he refuses to maintain eye contact with her and pretends to be having a conversation with someone to his left. You can clearly see that he ISN’T talking to the man in the right of the photo. I’d like to see this smug POS spin this. What a phony. He is clearly intimidated by a powerful and dignified woman and acts like a CHILD as a result. Hopefully The View will bring up his disrespectful and misogynistic behavior today! This immature and oh-so-smug man (LOOK at his face ... it radiates SMUGNESS) is NOT ready for the presidency!!! SHAMEFUL!
Late on Sept. 6, 2005, a private plane carrying the Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra touched down in Almaty, a ruggedly picturesque city in southeast Kazakhstan. Several hundred miles to the west a fortune awaited: highly coveted deposits of uranium that could fuel nuclear reactors around the world. And Mr. Giustra was in hot pursuit of an exclusive deal to tap them.
Unlike more established competitors, Mr. Giustra was a newcomer to uranium mining in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic. But what his fledgling company lacked in experience, it made up for in connections. Accompanying Mr. Giustra on his luxuriously appointed MD-87 jet that day was a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton.
Upon landing on the first stop of a three-country philanthropic tour, the two men were whisked off to share a sumptuous midnight banquet with Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, whose 19-year stranglehold on the country has all but quashed political dissent.
Mr. Nazarbayev walked away from the table with a propaganda coup, after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader’s bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy. Mr. Clinton’s public declaration undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.
Within two days, corporate records show that Mr. Giustra also came up a winner when his company signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy into three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium agency, Kazatomprom.
The monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers in a transaction ultimately worth tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra, analysts said.
Just months after the Kazakh pact was finalized, Mr. Clinton’s charitable foundation received its own windfall: a $31.3 million donation from Mr. Giustra that had remained a secret until he acknowledged it last month. The gift, combined with Mr. Giustra’s more recent and public pledge to give the William J. Clinton Foundation an additional $100 million, secured Mr. Giustra a place in Mr. Clinton’s inner circle, an exclusive club of wealthy entrepreneurs in which friendship with the former president has its privileges.
(Password-free link to the NY Times article here.)
I wasn’t going to watch the debate tonight because a) I already know who I’m voting for and b) I’m a total loser and the season premiere of Lost is on, but I may DVR it just to see if Anderson Cooper brings this up. Of course, after he hits on super important stuff like “The Snub.”
p.s. This will be my one and only post during the primary cycle highlighting potential shady $$$ dealings by the Clintons. Consider it a friendly reminder to the Hillshills that Obama’s “boneheaded” (his description) interactions with Rezco is relatively small potatoes compared to what reporters might find in the Billary bin. You may want to reconsider your Freeper-like dancing-in-your-own-feces routine when it comes to digging through Obama’s underpants drawer. Instant karma’s going to get you.
You’ll realize political lamesmanship has reached a level of stupidity (and inexplicable desperation) that is mind-boggling after you check out the rabid anti-Obama Hillshills, including the normally thoughtful Tom Watson, analyzing (and reanalyzing) Barack’s alleged “snub” of Hillary before the State of the Union address. This guy sums up how I feel about this slap-fight-at-recess immaturity in a pretty funny way:
I thought the grownups were going to be in charge again. Now excuse me while I get back to drawing the REO Speedwagon logo on my notebook before homeroom is over…
One thing that rabid anti-Obama Hillshills like Taylor Marsh and Larry Johnson should realize (besides the fact that there’s more than one hair stylist in the world) is that Barack isn’t just another teflon candidate, he’s the first real Boomerang Candidate. If you hurl shit at him, you’ll find a landslide of it heading back in your direction and most of it won’t be coming directly from him. And that political phenomenon isn’t going away any time soon (including during the general election, if he makes it that far). The media, including several rightwing pundits I never in a million years would have imagined going puppy-eyed for someone as liberal as Obama, are in the tank for him, much more so than they are for St. Maverick, and unless he’s got a skyscraper-sized skeleton or two hiding his closet (which I doubt) or he pulls a Bill and starts wagging his finger at journalists (once again, which I doubt), there’s nothing that’s going to pry that boomerang effect away from him in ‘08. I’ve seen a lot of concern trolling directed at Obama and his followers indicating that we have no idea what the Republicans will throw at him in November. They proclaim that his love affair with the media will eventually wear off and they’ll go all Sweeney Todd on the Chosen One. It ain’t gonna happen.
Take South Carolina for example. He was up against not one but two of the best political minds of our generation, both of whom were still juiced up from a surprise victory in New Hampshire and a strong level of support from Democrats, including myself, who thought the media was piling on Hillary a bit too much post-Iowa. After a relatively quiet win in Nevada they strolled into South Carolina down in the polls but up to their necks in overconfidence. They unleashed The Machine, an awesome and ugly thing, and went to work lowering expectations and trying to muddy up Obamamania with Rottwilliam Jefferson Clinton clumsily leading the charge. They thought they had teed it up perfectly; a loss for Barack would be a very bad loss and a win was ultimately a loss because all of his votes would have come from a swarthy swath of Brother and Sister Souljahs, clearly laying bare the inevitability of his ultimate doom on Supercalifragilistic Tuesday when whitey would rule the roost.
And then Obama beat the Clintons like a pair of mewling political simpletons in South Carolina. He crushed them, blowing away Hillary by more than a 2:1 margin and leaving Bill looking like a post-beatdown Scut Farkus in A Christmas Story—a laughable, bloodied fool. And then Barack deftly orated all over their sorry asses in his victory speech, smothering both of them (and their entire operation) under a comforting blanket of change and hope and unity that was laced with some of the most inventive velvety venom ever unleashed in the political realm. It was expert gamesmanship and a definitive warning to everyone, pols and pundits alike, that Obama’s not some naïve flash-in-the-pan dreamboat who will be ground up by the vast right-wing conspiracy in the general election, but a savvy political player and a real threat in ’08.
He’s the Boomerang Candidate. Go ahead, fling it. I dare you. You’ll be sorry you did.
JUST IN: Toni Morrison, who famously dubbed Bill Clinton “the first black president,” is endorsing Obama today along with Ted Kennedy.
After reading this and this, I’ve lost nearly all interest in reading or viewing anything even remotely political for a few days. The insertion of the Clinton machine into this election cycle has been like pouring raw sewage into what should have been the.best.punch.bowl.ever. I’m not naive, I knew it was going to get a little ugly, but I never imagined it would get this ugly this early. If Hillary wins the nomination, not only will I have a hard time pulling the lever for her in November, but I may switch to being an independent voter. Obama or Edwards could have saved this party. The Clintons are going to drown it in the bathtub.
MORE: Digby, who had to close down her comments because the bickering got so bad on her blog, seems to think this won’t hurt the party. I normally agree with her, but in this case she’s wrong.
FINALLY: This Daily Kos diary entry highlighting today’s editorial from Bob Hebert is worth a look, especially for the comments. If you don’t think a Clinton candidacy is going to dishearten and disengage a large chunk of the Democratic party (and reinvigorate the currently moribund Republicans), you are living in a—to quote Bill Clinton—“fairy tale.”
Taylor Marsh hugs herself after performing her kickass version of
“Love Is A Battlefield” at a Hillary Clinton karaoke benefit.
Good cripes, I’ve never paid much attention to C-list talk radio host* Taylor “Mushroom Top” Marsh, but if you want to witness full-blown Obama Derangement Syndrome, you’ve really got to check out her site. Rather than focus on why her gal Hillary deserves your vote, she chooses instead to dig deep into the scum bucket for anti-Obama oppo dreck and limits her praise for the Clintons to adoringly drooling about how skillfully they’re taking Obama “off his game.” I’ve never witnessed relentless, wild-eyed attacks on a Democratic candidate like this from a liberal/progressive/whatever blog before. If anyone can point me to a pro-Obama blog that’s unleashing anti-Hillary rants that are even remotely as unseemly or unrelenting, I’m all eyes. Until then, Mushy wins my award for Demohack of ‘08.
* Is there any evidence that Mushy is or has been a “radio show talk host” as her bio states? I can’t find any evidence of it. Or is she just a podcaster? There’s a difference, radio hosts can be heard on radios. Podcasters can’t. She allegedly “launched her radio show in Las Vegas” in 2002, but did she launch it on, ya know, a radio station? Was it syndicated and picked up by anyone? If not, sorry, she’s not a “radio show talk host,” she’s just a podcaster. And after listening to a some of Mushy’s recent podcasts, that’s a very good thing.
I’m really rooting for Michelle Obama to kick Bill’s intrusive ass—rhetorically speaking, of course.
Of course.
UPDATE (4/9/08): Due to some not-so-subtle legal threats Taylor directed at blogger John Brown, I’ve replaced her image with a more appropriate one. Sorry the Pat Benetar joke falls flat, but you can still find the original image on her bio page (linked above).
Let’s be clear, I’ve always thought Chris Matthews was a douchebag. I’ve never loathed him to the extent that some wise folks like Digby have, but I’ve been acutely aware of his spittle-flecked douchebaggery. However, I always thought him to be, at worst, a goofy douchebag. But during this primary season this bleach-drenched, jabbering man-child has attained the mantle of 100% official loathsome douchebag. He’s exhibiting a level of off-the-rails batshit crazy that’s normally reserved for the likes of the Michael Savages of the world. I sincerely believe that Matthews has gone off the deep end—way off—and MSNBC should consider sharply yanking his leash or perhaps yanking him off the air and sending him away to some remote island where he can just mindlessly bark at palm trees all day while attendants cautiously swipe at his quivering, wet chin with washcloths. He’s become a mockery. A buffoon. A fucktard. One of the biggest blights on American politics. A loathsome douchebag.
Last night after an evening of Matthews directing an utterly bizarre level of vitriol at the Clintons, Keith Olbermann, his co-host in NH primary coverage, had to pry Tom Delay’s cock out of Matthews mouth (I wish I could find a video of the tongue bath Matthews gave Delay) right before Matthews turned into a complete lunatic at the expense of Dee Dee Myers, Bill Clinton’s former press secretary:
Sure, Myers was spinning quite a bit—that’s what politicians do—but so was Delay and Matthews gave him a free pass. Witness how angry Matthews is at Myers (and the Clintons). Look at his face. Listen to his voice. Look into his eyes. We’re talking “bring in the guys with the white coats” behavior here, not just a hardballer tunneling to truthiness. An absolute train wreck that you don’t want to rubberneck. A complete and total embarrassment.
As the evening wore on and Matthews realized that Hillary and Bill had schooled the pundits (and Matthews, in particular), you could actually see this drooling simpleton deflate like a 99-cent-store birthday balloon. He became virtually (and thankfully) non-existent, nearly transforming into a wisp of vapor after Tom Brokaw took some not-so-subtle jabs at him following Hillary’s victory speech. And to put the icing on the cake, Rachel Maddow took out a butter knife, missed the cake completely and jabbed it into Matthew’s turkey gobble:
Pat, I will tell you that on the influential-influential, perhaps, on the left-website Talking Points Memo today, you want to know who they’re blaming for women voters breaking for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama, who they’re blaming for this late showing and a big vote for Hillary Clinton? They’re blaming Chris Matthews. People are citing specifically Chris-not only for his own views but also for…as symbol of what the mainstream media has done to Hillary Clinton.
And then Chris Matthews said, I shit you not:
My influence over American politics looms over the people. I’m overwhelmed myself.
Except, you loathsome douchebag, you’re too caught up in your own sputtering bullshit to realize that yesterday people weren’t just voting for Hillary, they were also voting against you having any influence over American politics going forward. You’ve become a festering polyp on the electoral process and yesterday thoroughly disgusted voters finally found the scalpel.
(I dedicate this post to my wonderful wife Chris for not throwing our nightstand lamp at the television last night.)
RELATED: Here’s a theory in the comments section at Matt Y’s place as to why Obama lost so many indie voters to McCain that I haven’t seen bandied about yet and, as a bonus, it contains the word “douchebag”!
GOOD CHRIST: The Mount Blogmore post linked above doesn’t fully capture the totally loathsome douchebaggery Matthews was exhibiting this morning, post-humiliation. You really have to see this. They need to start padding the walls of MSNBC’s studios if they’re going to keep this demented gasbag on the air. (via Atrios)
FINALLY (1/11/08): I wasn’t going to update this post, but it’s still getting a lot of traffic and I just found this on YouTube. It’s too bizzare not to share. Scroll to the 1:25 mark in the video or read the transcript below.
CHUCK TODD, NBC POLITICAL DIRECTOR: Well, you know, in talking with a lot of people that are involved with the Clinton campaign but don‘t get to help make the decisions, the fear is they don‘t have a plan B. The fear is that they had just one plan, inevitability and the hope that being the first woman president would be the change, that they could be the movement candidate.
And you know, the hard part of this is, is I think at the very beginning, they thought they had sort of two angles at this. They had the woman thing and they had the experience, inevitability factor.
MATTHEWS: Right.
TODD: And somehow, they lost both of them. And that‘s what‘s hard here, is that, you know, if one was plan 1A and plan 1B, there‘s no plan 1C right now.
I mean, I‘m hearing all sorts of things. Some folks that could get drawn into the campaign are telling me that the most likely scenario is that they‘ll skip the next two states and basically say, OK, let‘s make this a referendum on Obama as the nominee on February 5. I‘ll—you know, that she may—you know, I‘ll drop out after February 5, if I don‘t get this nomination, but you‘ve got to know, those February 5 states, that that‘s what you‘re voting for. You‘re voting to end it. You‘re voting for Obama as the nominee. And maybe that‘ll sort of jump start things. We‘ll see.
MATTHEWS: And it reminds me of what the Egyptian soldiers said after losing the Six-Day War to Israel: Our strategy was to rape all the women and kill all the men.
That‘s not very good strategy when you are in retreat.
That exceedingly warped analogy is courteous of “the most important political pundit out there,” as our naive Canadian friend Jeff branded him down below in the comments.
"[W]e wholeheartedly endorse the excellent Rumproast blog" -- Jim Newell, Wonkette
"Mind you, don’t let yourself be trapped dialoging with these guys: truth is their enemy; pyschological warfare and misinformation dissemination is their profession." -- TeaParty.org
