We've just gotten our hands on a new Sunlawn reel mower ... and love it! For a relatively low cost - especially considering the rising price of gasoline - these people-powered mowers are the perfect solution for taming your wild lawn as summer approaches. So do your conscience (and the environment) a huge solid and get your hands on one of these. You won't regret it.
Some people simply have no idea about which they speak. Take this individual, for instance, who blames incidences of women receiving ugly comments based on their appearance ... on the women themselves. Right, and in other news, the rape victim totally asked for it. My old college student paper seems intent on giving me a headache every time I read it.
Q: What could possibly be better than holing up at HfA campaign headquarters, watching wall-to-wall coverage of the Pennsylvania primary, armed with a new laptop and tons of blogging energy?
A: Seeing The New Pornographers in concert in Cleveland.
This has been the latest edition of Asked & Answered.
I donated to Barack Obama's campaign today, in part because of the race the candidate has run, but mostly I donated because of last night. I donated today because last night represented the most embarrassing manifestation of what has rapidly become - thanks to the petty, high school tactics of the mainstream media and, in no small part, to the Clinton campaign - a race to the bottom. A race that has allowed well-heeled members of the media to sidestep the issues facing actual, reality-based Americans and instead focus on the latest "gotcha" attack, last night's exemplar being a particularly idiotic line of questioning inspired, in part, by right-wing water-carriers like Sean Hannity.
It's bad when you've got Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos doing battle to see who could ask - or introduce via video - the dumbest set of questions seen so far in this campaign. Hey, guys, when you get the privilege of interviewing the next president about the most pressing issues facing everyday Americans, let me clue you in on something: Everything you talked about last night for the first 40 or so minutes will never scratch the Top 100 of those issues. Questions about "bitter", about flag pins, about pastors, about loose acquaintances aren't important. The economy is. Getting out of Iraq is. Providing healthcare for all Americans is. This isn't a game. You shouldn't be happy with what you did, just like some moron shouldn't be happy about what he just left in the toilet.
Leaving Charlie and George, who just can't help it, alone for a moment, let me address someone who can - Hillary Clinton. Welcome to the absolute bottom of the barrel, Senator. Here's a tip: When you help engage in the sort of distracting, tabloid-style attacks that plagued - to your often-vocal dismay - your husband's administration, you become no better than those slinging the mud. I don't care whether or not the Republicans will resort to gutter politics this fall; I know they will. What's up to you is whether or not you will. The answer, only reinforced last night, is clear. You will. And you have.
Hiding behind the excuse that "the Republicans will do it later" isn't a justification for doing it yourself now. Watching Clinton, who managed to hit some soft notes for this hardened Obama supporter last night and who seemed at first to be willing to rise above, play tag-team, low-rent attack machine with Gibson and Stephanopoulos was sad to see for someone who had a great deal of respect and admiration for the former First Lady. I've seen her speak twice, during the 1992 and 1996 race, and she was a brilliant, forward-thinking leader. Fast-forward to last night, when she seemed all-too-happy to join in the needless distraction. I'm left to think she either believes what she said or is otherwise simply desperate to win the nomination. Times have most certainly changed.
It's clear there are two campaigns being waged right now: The real one facing real Americans. And the fake one, the game, being played purely for the entertainment of the Beltway insider set. Thanks for the latter, we're unable to take part in the former. But we're smarter than that, no matter what the insiders think. It's a shame they're not giving you the credit for being willing to rise above. Something, clearly, they're unable to do. The question pestering me most of late has been "At what cost?" At what cost to the party is Clinton willing to take the nomination? At what cost are we willing to take part in the distractions? At what cost are the media willing to trade access and influence for honesty and integrity? The sooner we end up on the right side of those questions, the sooner we can focus on the fall and taking this country back.
Last night wasn't a great night for America. Last night we saw the ugliness that has sullied what should be a campaign about the issues. Last night two seemingly capable anchors did John McCain's dirty work for him. But last night was last night. And today is new. Today is fresh. Today we begin again. And I started today by donating to Barack Obama, because while today is important, tomorrow is crucial.
At the end a story about how Hillary Clinton is treating the "bitter" non-flap, a tongue-in-cheek Ezra Klein wrote the following:
And yes, yes, I'm just writing this because I'm a misogynist who hates Hillary and loves Obama. There's absolutely no way decent progressives could find any of this worrying.
Spot on. I see the response he's only partly joking about offered by too many so-called progressives around the so-called progressive blogosphere. It needs to stop.
Nothing is funnier than seeing well-off pundits who have never lived check-to-check a day in their lives tell the real working people who have what they should and shouldn't be angry about. When you, wealthy, white pundit, have your seemingly delicate sensibilities offended about Barack Obama rightly pointing out the frustrations of working Americans, yet so many of those working Americans are yawning at the faux outrage, you begin to realize something: That these pundits consider this race nothing more than their little ant farm, a game and a fun distraction with no real repercussions. But those actually facing the actual repercussions aren't laughing. They're mad, and, in many cases, bitter. Which is exactly what Obama was talking about. You can bitch and moan about what he said, but doing so only makes you appear as out-of-touch as the next limousine pundit. It's time for people to get real.
So Barack Obama is catching some flack for these comments:
You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.Obama's response (more here) to the criticism was pitch perfect:
Turn up your speakers, Cleveland ... and Come on Cavs!
Here's some backstory, too. I dare anyone to tell me that's not the best NBA team theme song ever. Ever.
I'm convinced Hillary Clinton is an intelligent, decent person committed to improving her nation for the better. I'm also convinced she's fiercely loyal to the most incompetent, divisive, underhanded set of advisors this side of the Republican Party I can remember. All we've learned in recent months from Sen. Clinton's campaign is that:
• States where Clinton doesn't win don't matter.
• States holding caucuses don't matter.
• States not big enough don't matter.
• States that feature a large enough racial voting bloc don't matter.
• States that broke the rules shouldn't face the consequences for breaking those rules.
• The states that Barack Obama has won won't necessarily be Democratic wins this fall, yet the ones that Clinton won will only be Democratic wins if and only if Clinton is the nominee.
• John McCain is qualified to be president, while Obama is not.
• Obama, though he's not qualified to be president, is apparently qualified enough to be vice president, meaning in some small way that he is qualified to be president.
• Obama, though ahead in pledged delegates, popular vote and states won should consider taking the second slot on the ticket.
• Obama is an affirmative action hire, and he's only this successful because he's black. (Tell that to Presidents Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley-Braun.)
• Obama may not be a Muslim, but he might be lying.
• Obama may be a Christian, but his pastor is a crazy, an anti-Semite, an America hater.
• Obama is being two-faced on NAFTA, despite the fact that the opposite is actually the case.
• Obama has sleazy business dealings, though you're acting like a Republican if you inquire about Clinton's.
• Those supporting Obama are cult-like adherents to "a concept" and "one speech".
This small list doesn't even scratch the surface, nor does it contain the even more overblown arguments I've heard from some sectors of Clinton supporters. And yet people wonder why I support Obama. I'd like to know some people can consider themselves true progressives and yet sign on to this kind of gutter politics. We're supposed to be better than this, remember?
The longer this drags on, the worse it gets for the party. The more the Clinton campaign drags Obama through the mud, the more they give McCain's team ammunition heading into the general. The more the Clinton campaign disparages the Democratic party and its many constituencies, the harder they make it for their candidate to get the help she needs from the base this fall should she pull this thing out.
Why can't anyone just admit that the Clinton campaign, one at first centered around experience, political skill, and inevitability has veered completely off course thanks to those perceived strengths? Experience should have prepared the Clinton campaign for a motivated, people-powered candidate. Political skill should have enabled the Clinton campaign to prepare for a post-Super Tuesday climate decidedly pro-Obama. Inevitability should have given the Clinton campaign the opportunity to rise above it all and try to fight this campaign on the issues.
Instead, none of these things have happened, and we're instead faced with a campaign that has decided that the only true path to victory includes permanently driving a wedge between party elites and the party faithful, potentially alienating an entire bloc of first-time and young voters, doing the Republicans' dirty work against the likely nominee for them, and, should their candidate overcome all of these obstacles to secure the nomination, doing so at the very likely price of losing the general election to a bona fide crazy old idiot, giving a party that shouldn't have been in power for the last eight years four more years to fuck things up for the rest of us.
Bra-vo. Brilliant fucking strategy.
What do Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd and my friend and periodic guest contributor William Bogan have in common? All three appear in the New York Times. Yes, you can now call Bill "Big Media Bill", as he took part in an audio interview of Texas and Ohio voters as part of the Times's "Voices of the Voters" series. To hear Bill's take on the important issues facing the electorate, scroll down and over until you find "Bill Hogan". Now, we all know Hogan isn't Bill's last name, so I'm guessing that Judith Miller was told by "senior administration officials" that that was how you spelled it. Or it could just be a typo. Anyway, don't let that get in the way of some good analysis. Congrats, Bill!
I've finally gotten around to adding some of my favorite design sites to the ever-growing blogroll on this site (see "The Design World", left). Feel free to check them out and have your mind blowned. And then write me with suggestions as to anything I've missed. Designers of the world, unite!
With regard to what I posted yesterday about Bill Cunningham and what we can expect from the Smear Job Express through the election, I give you Josh Marshall:
Hopefully, everyone can now see the McCain strategy for running against Barack Obama. Yes, we have some general points on taxes, culture wars and McCain as war hero who can protect us in ways that flash-in-the-pan pretty boy Barack Obama can't.
But that's not the core. The core is to drill a handful of key adjectives into the public mind about Barack Obama: Muslim, anti-American, BLACK, terrorist, Arab. Maybe a little hustler and shifty thrown in, but we'll have to see. ...
[snip]
Don't insult your intelligence or mine by pretending that John McCain's plan for this race doesn't rely on hundreds of Cunninghams - large and small - across the country, and the RNC and all the GOP third party groups, to be peddling this stuff nonstop for the next eight months because it's the only way John McCain have a real shot at contesting this race.
Exactly. This is how they operate.
So John McCain had to quickly apologize for and repudiate yesterday's pre-speech remarks of Cincinnati radio gasbag Bill Cunningham. Cunningham, for his part, isn't taking being thrown "under the Straight Talk Express" lightly, and has responded forcefully to the repudiation and has disputed the notion that the two - he and McCain - have never met. But that's beside the point. The point here is that no matter how much distance McCain tries to put between him and people like Cunningham who use their time at campaign events (and this will continue to occur) to drag the race into the gutter, the reality is that, like it or not, he endorses what they say.
You can't have it both ways. You can't let someone embarrass themselves, embarrass you and shame our democratic process only to quickly repudiate their remarks. This was your event, John. You can't act like you can't control what your sawed-off surrogates say. Nor can you honestly tell us that you didn't know this would happen. Cunningham didn't arrive at his personality yesterday. He's been like this for years. So either you knew something like this was going to happen and you didn't much care or you're telling us through your apology that you're a colossally incompetent individual who can't do his research. Either way, and in either case, you're unfit for duty.
Now, the real question is this: Will garbage like this stop? Of course not. Very rarely does the apology get as much play as what's being apologized for, and, whether McCain thinks the remarks were "disparaging" or not, they were still broadcast - over and over. Sort of like the time when Mike Huckabee swore off the use of negative campaign ads, only to then show reporters the negative ad he refused to air. He knew what he was doing and so does McCain. Spend a moment making a half-hearted apology and allow the sniping to play on a near-constant loop before the electorate. Sounds like Straight Talk to me.
As Cleveland prepares for tonight's Democratic presidential debate - and digs out from under the latest winter storm - I'd set my browsers to a great site like the Buckeye State Blog for live coverage. Liver than live, in fact. They probably have a correspondent on-the-ground right now, looking over my shoulder as I type, or getting the scoop (no pun intended) from a Wolstein Center snowblower operator.
... adding, on completely unrelated news, don't let anyone ever tell you that cable television programming is a waste. Having not had respectable cable since last August (due to our move to a temporary location and wait at our new home - yeah, new home! - for the cable guy to show up), I feel like I've missed so much. There's just so much worthwhile stuff out there, as much as there is utter crap. Watching Keith Olbermann last night for the first time in a long time not through online clips felt like coming home. And I know I'm probably the last person around to hop on board the DVR train, but wow! I saw 90 percent of "Little Children" last night. Great movie. Has anyone else seen it?
So, you may notice the ad to the right - "It's okay to question Obama" - and follow the link and wonder to yourself: "Hey, Hughes, I thought you supported Obama. What gives?" Know this: Any ad on my site isn't necessarily a reflection of how I feel, it's a reflection of the fact someone wanted to spend some money to advertise here. And that's it. I would hope that discerning readers would understand that.
On another note: So did anyone else watch the Oscars? What did everyone think?
I mean, I know there are many ways you can prove you're a Republican, but going for a twofer like this isn't personally the best choice. Way to go, John McCain:
Early in Senator John McCain's first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.
A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client's corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself - instructing staff members to block the woman's access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.
When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist's client, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.
Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.
Look, let's get some things perfectly clear. No matter who wins the Democratic nomination - be it Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama - to see that nominee chosen and then elected is going to be an immensely important achievement of some sort. It irks me greatly that somehow we're supposed to believe that an Obama win would be so much more of a milestone than a Clinton victory. Or vice versa. No matter who wins, it would be a first of some sort, so can we - and I'm looking at you, Democrats, and you, media - stop falling all over ourselves in the "important achievement" arms race?
Even before this primary heated up, when the prospect of Clinton and Obama making a run for it became obvious, I knew one thing for sure: That this race was going to hold a mirror to the face of this nation. And what I've seen so far - not only from the media, but also from people who should know better - has been distressingly sad. Can we stow the fucking sexism, please? It's bad enough that Chris Matthews has led MSNBC's charge into non-Olbermann irrelevance, but he's only the tip of the spear. While racism is far from dead - quite far - can we at least be honest enough with ourselves to admit that, even in the most seemingly progressive circles, sexism is alive, well, and thriving?
There are fair ways to critique a candidate. Issues, for one. But, and speaking here as an Obama supporter, the burdens facing Clinton with regard to the blatant dislike and disrespect she engenders starting with the Fourth Estate far outstrip what the presumptive frontrunner now faces. Looking at a recent example for precedent, take Don Imus's comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team and place them side-by-side with what's been said about Clinton (and her daughter) only so far. Racism gets you fired. Sexism gets you ratings. It's that simple, really.
No matter who makes it out of this Democratic primary as the nominee, he or she will face blatant discrimination the likes of which already disgusts me. And it hasn't even happened yet. That's why when I get accused of "hating America", those doing the accusing are, whether they know it or not, sometimes, in a backhanded way, right. I do hate what this election is revealing. I do hate how there hasn't been an election contested on fair, issues-oriented ground in my adult lifetime. And I do hate the ugly truth that the battles fought by people far older than my parents aren't anywhere near being won.
Fuck that. Let's please grow up, America.
President Bush holds up a birthday cake for Sen. John McCain , R-Ariz., upon his arrival at Luke Air Force Base in Glendale, Az., Monday, Aug. 29, 2005. McCain turned 69 Monday. Bush is traveling and will attend 'conversations' with experts and the elderly in El Mirage, Ariz., and Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., in an effort to sell older Americans on the value of a prescription drug benefit that begins next year for Medicare patients. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
U.S. President George W. Bush smiles during a town hall-style meeting at a retirement community where he talked about Medicare prescription-drug benefits for senior citizens in El Mirage, Arizona August 29, 2005. Bush on Monday urged skeptical senior citizens to sign up for a new Medicare prescription drug benefit program, touting a choice of plans with monthly premiums as low as $20. REUTERS/Jeff Mitchell
President Bush plays a guitar presented to him by Country Singer Mark Wills, right, backstage following his visit to Naval Base Coronado, Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005. Bush visited the base to deliver remarks on V-J Commemoration Day. (AP Photo/ABC News, Martha Raddatz)
Elvin Duckworth, left, Jonathan Harvey, center, and Leonard Harvey paddle a row boat through a flooded street in their Gulfport, Miss, neighborhood after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast Monday, Aug. 29, 2005. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)
David Diaz looks at the area where he and his brother used to live in the Sadler Apartments on the waterfront in Biloxi, Mississippi, August 29, 2005. The pile of rubble and empty foundations are what is left of 30 or more apartments. REUTERS/Mark Wallheiser
Evelyn Turner cries alongside the body of her common-law husband, Xavier Bowie, after he died in New Orleans, Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005. Bowie and Turner had decided to ride out Hurricane Katrina when they could not find a way to leave the city. Bowie, who had lung cancer, died when he ran out of oxygen Tuesday afternoon. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
* The photos and accompanying captions came from Yahoo! News
With Mitt cutting and running from the presidential race today, leaving Johnny McCain* (as Peggy Noonan called him earlier this week) as the only truly viable Republican candidate, I would suggest that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama immediately start focusing all of their attacks on the prospect of a McCain presidency, which would more accurately be a third Bush term. A tag-team early branding, if you will.
* How old do you have to be to refer to McCain as "Johnny"? I mean, for serious.
... adding, this is what Romney, in part, said: "If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror." To which I add this: Hey Mitt, if you are so intent on not "aiding a surrender to terror", then why the hell haven't you sent your sons off to the fight?
Well, with John Edwards withdrawing from the race, I suppose it's time I refigure my support in the upcoming Ohio Democratic primary. For what it's worth - and I'd run through a brick wall to see to it that either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, if nominated, were elected this fall - count me in Obama's corner.
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