Hanging in the balance.

I found these on one of the PUMA-associated websites. Slate also ran an interesting article about Clinton supporters who are planning to sit this one out or vote for John McCain. This story has been kicking around for quite some time now, but I find very little discussion about the worst legacy of a McCain administration; The Supreme Court.

Listen up PUMAs; there are 9 Supreme Court Justices and they break down like this:

Crazy Right Wing

John “Big Chief” Roberts: Age 53

Sam “Scalito” Alito:  Age 58

Clarance “I Don’t Like Black People. At All.” Thomas: Age 60

Antonin “Big Tony” Scalia: Age 72

Middle Of The Pack

John Paul “George & Ringo” Stevens: Age 88

David “Hackett-Jacket” Souter: Age 68

Anthony “Little Tony” Kennedy: Age 72

Crazy-Out-Of-Touch-Elitist-Tax-And-Spend-I-Hate-America Liberals

Steven “Tyler” Breyer: Age 70

Ruth “Who’s Bader Than Me?” Ginsberg: Age 75

OK, for those of you who still think voting for McCain is a good idea, let me simplify. All the young dudes are on the right. The old people are all in the middle or the left. Look at Kennedy. That poor bastard’s been cheating death just to see a president elected who can read something more complicated than “My Pet Goat.”

This means campaign finance, environment, civil rights, government wiretapping, war powers, detainees, gay rights, gun control, all of it can get blown up if the court decides to take the case.

The Democratic congress will roll over for McCain. They will confirm his appointees. You are delusional if you think otherwise.

If you’re a woman and thinking about voting for McCain you are, in effect, saying “Please John McCain, this is my uterus, and I want you to tell me what to do with it.” 

If that’s what you’re really after, knock yourself out. It doesn’t matter to me because if Grampa gets elected, I’m getting a vasectomy.

 

Al Sharpton is right too

I generally agree with Rev. Sharpton more than George Bush, so not as strange as the previous post. His comments on Hillary:

“As you know, I’ve been in the ministry of civil rights all my life, but had dealings with entertainers because of James Brown,” Sharpton said. “The worst thing in the world is when an entertainer doesn’t know when the show is over. The audience is gone, the lights are down, you’re getting ready to cut the mics off and you are still on the stage singing. It’s over, it’s all right, it’s over. Come sing another day, but this show is over for Sen. Clinton”

more here

He’s actually be far more gracious than I would be. My comment would be something like….

“PLEASE QUIT NOW. YOU RACIST, PANDERING HARPY.”

People don’t say ‘harpy’ nearly enough….

 

“Full-speed on to the White House”???

How embarrassing is this going to get???

*sigh*

UPDATE 5/8/09: Pretty embarassing is obviously the answer. Pretty offensive, too.

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she 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.”

I think Hillary is shithouse rat crazy most of the time, and even I’m going, “Humina-humina-WHAAA? Did she just SAY that?”

I’ve never denied my own elitism, and I think claims of Barack being elite are watery at best. (This really refreshing article from Slate shows that as recently as four years ago, the Obamas’ combined salaries were less than twice mine and TeemKuntz’s.)

In any case, if she’s trying to prove that ignorance and racism are the opposite of elitism, then bring us all some Grey Poupon.

Full article here.

 

If your Glass heart should crack.

Meaganoff and I were discussing our mutual loathing of Hillary last night and I found myself nearly screaming “and another thing. That son-of-a-bitch husband of hers signed the law that overturned Glass-Steagall”!!!!!

Poor Meaganoff was caught off-guard by my outburst. Not her fault, so let me explain…

The 2nd Glass-Steagall act of 1933 was passed to ease the depression and ideally, prevent something it from happening again. Among other things, the law separated banks by type (commercial & investment) and explicitly said “You there, Mr. Banker, you can be a commercial bank or an investment bank, but ya can’t be both.”

To oversimplify to an embarrassing degree, commercial banks are for the little guys (me and you) and investment banks are for the big guys (General Motors, Exxon-Mobile). If you want to buy a house, you used to go to a commercial bank. If you wanted to buy an entire company, you went to an investment bank.

The idea behind this separation was to (somewhat) insulate these two sectors of the economy from each other. Ya know, if there was say…a problem in the housing market it wouldn’t affect the ability of large companies to get credit for their acquisitions, mergers, operations and divestitures…oh wait…yeah… That’s kinda exactly what’s going on RIGHT NOW.

Why? Well, among many other reasons, our friend President Clinton I signed a law that removed this regulation. A bunch of banks bought each other up in a mad frenzy; lo and behold, we have a bunch of banks that won’t loan companies money because they’re scared shitless about all the bad mortgages they are holding. It’s called a credit crunch people. Fun, isn’t it?

(One caveat, TeemKuntz himself is a homeowner, and every month he watches his hard-earned equity disappear as the value of his house tanks. Again, salt and pepper this entry to taste.)

If the sub-prime mess had occurred under Glass-Steagall (and there’s good reason to think it might not have), the debacle would still be kicking the shit out of the commercial banks, home values would probably still be tanking, but the entire economy wouldn’t be at risk because of a credit crunch. The problem would be contained. If Citibank had remained an investment bank, they wouldn’t be flipping the hell out right now. They would be continuing with their normal business.

In the real world, Citibank has no idea how bad this credit crunch will get. Some observers are suggesting we are just at the beginning of the mess. (Witness TeemKuntz hyperventilate).

I am not a closet socialist. I generally support free market principles, but we have to remember there are market failures, and those failures must be addressed, or we risk the entire economy.

FDR was forced to look at a lot of those failures and try to fix them. A lot of those fixes worked remarkably well. It took another democrat to undo this particular piece of legislation.

Remember kids, Hillary has got experience from working in Bill’s Administration. Maybe we should be asking what kind of experience that was.

 

Bring me some cattle.

Oh jolly days of wishy washy pundits! I know this is all old news for most of you, but this is the first primary I’ve actually followed and had minor salivation over, so pardon my naivety.

A few days ago, all anyone could talk about was Obama’s “momentum”; closing the gaps in recent polls, Hillary being on her last stand, or legs, or something upright.

Now they’ve apparently switched teams (again), joining Hillary and saying voters are “taking a closer look” at Barack. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the term “free ride” thrown around. We’re all agreeing now that he’s all hat and no cattle.

Okay, saddle up. Let’s go cattle hunting. I’m going to try to spend my (limited) free-time over the next week or so and try to get elbow deep in policy, not only for Barack, but for all three who are still White House hopefuls.

I did a quick search trying to find out about John McCain’s ideas healthcare. The only thing close to actual policy I could find was that he wants to raise cigarette taxes. Hmmm. ‘Kay.

TeemKuntz, are you ready for a roundup? (Should I stop with the cattle analogy now?)

Oh, and can anyone get me a finer point on the origin of said phrase than just “Texas”?

 

The founding…mothers? Whatever…man.

OK, I stole the title of this post from “America – The Book”. Give credit where it’s due.

Brief sidebar: Lately the best place for news analysis are the various fake news outlets. The Onion, Daily Show, Colbert. I dunno. Says something sad about the news media.

Anyway, I am going to jump into the icy waters of gender politics for a second. Yes, gentle readers I am the possessor of a Y chromosome so I realize this journey is fraught with peril, but here goes.

Are we past due for a woman president? Categorically, yes. No question at all in my mind. However, this is not a political issue. This is merely a statement about the woeful prejudices of my countrypeople. I am skeptical that prejudices can be changed. Having a woman president isn’t going to make people any less misogynistic, than say, passing the Civil Rights Act made people less racist.

My bottom line: voting for Hillary because it’s time for a woman president, is ridiculous. It’s not an ‘issue’. Gender is not an issue, and no Ms. Clinton, the boys aren’t picking on you because you’re a girl.

Are you really trying to tell me that this country is more sexist than racist? That the media is giving a black man a pass so they can gang up on a white woman? I’m asking you to really think about that.

The only issues are the issues. The actual, real, nuts-and-bolts, economic, foreign policy, trade issues. Anything that doesn’t directly have to do with that is a smokescreen. (for further discussion, I refer you to Michael Lind’s “The Next American Revolution”)

For a generation now, we’ve been told that abortion, affirmative action, gun control, these are issues. In that time corporate power has gone completely unchecked. Labor unions have been smashed, banking deregulated, power deregulated, mergers, the revolving door between K street and congress, massive debt, a housing crises, credit crises, health care crises, CEO pay is at astronomical levels….need I go on?

These are the only things we should be concerned with. Anything else is a diversion, including gender of the Occupant of the White House.

 

For women.

It seems the “older women” contingency of voters that make up the largest and most vocal part (generally speaking) of Hillary’s voter base say they sympathize with her because she’s a woman. They support her because of the “gender issue.”

What issue is that, exactly? The fact that the United States is one of the only countries in the world that has never before had a woman at the helm? Okay. I guess that is kind of a problem. It really makes us look bad, and recently, looking good is an American value.

So, it’s time for a woman president. Past time, even. I agree.

But don’t you want the best? Shouldn’t she be the most capable? As a woman — more importantly, as an adult, tax paying, (mostly) law-abiding citizen — I want to represented by someone at least solid, not just someone with a pair of ovaries.

Hillary seems to be, in the minds of her fans, some paragon of women. But I’d like to point out her total lack of a political career prior to being First Lady. And hell, while she was First Lady. Sure, I know they ran as “two-for-one”, supporters say she was just like any other advisor.

But she wasn’t hired as any other advisor would have been, and likewise no one voted her into office. She didn’t get to any of these positions because of her merit.

This is a bit of a slippery slope, I realize, for someone who’s writing a blog with her boyfriend as co-author. But belief in someone’s abilities and talents are, presumably, only part of the reason you’re with them or love them. It also has to do with your chemistry with them, how they make you laugh, how great a lay they are. Or, more cynically perhaps, if they knocked you up. Or how much money they have. It’s a lot of different things to different people and it doesn’t amount to the same as a job interview or being an actual candidate.

And you know what? I’m gonna go one step further and say Hillary never would have been senator, never had the public appeal to get that far if her husband hadn’t gone bed hopping.

As in the Texas debate, she constantly makes jokes and references to her suffering as the betrayed wife. Her slogan-meisters must have advised her that it somehow lends credibility to her image as a “fighter.”

For the last time: sticking with someone who clearly doesn’t give a shit about your emotional state doesn’t make you a fighter. It makes you a) ignorant b) ambivalent about or out of touch with that person and / or c) proves you still need something from them other than their love.

Hillary is many things, but dumb ain’t one of ‘em. And she may have been out of touch with her relationship at the time, but I would hope certain events would have snapped it into focus pretty fast. So it seems to me that she felt she still had more to gain — namely, momentum for her own political career — from Bill.

I’m sure it’s a hard line for any politician, especially female, to walk. I think a divorce would have made her appear empowered, in control of her life. But she might have appeared “weak” to voters with more traditional familial ideals.

So she stayed, and reaped buckets of sympathy from older women who also don’t have the guts to leave their husbands.

There’s a great episode of Futurama (go with me here) where Leela gets drafted to a Blurnsball (futuristic baseball) team, making her the first woman in the Major Leagues. She’s totally oblivious to the fact that she was put on the team as a publicity stunt until outraged female athletes rise up against her, saying she’s set them back, blown away their legitimacy.

I want to see a woman in the White House. There’s no question.

But I don’t want our first female president to have coasted halfway there on her husband’s coattails and, more importantly, Monica Lewinsky’s dress hem.

Maybe this isn’t news to many. But no one seems to want to mention it. And I’m not saying she’s the inventor of gold digging (er, vote digging?), but let’s call things what they properly are and not get swept up in the “Evita”-ness of it all.

The bottom line is, I’m anti-Hillary for the same reason a lot of women say they’re pro-Hillary.

Because I have to be. For women. As a woman, how could I feel otherwise?