May 9, 2008

Behave

Filed under: Asia — maha @ 6:20 am

I’ll be away for the weekend, so behave yourselves. Note that there may be some delays in comment posting, since I won’t be available to rescue comments from the moderation filter. However, my editorial backup support team (my daughter) will log in and tidy up from time to time.

I see this morning that the situation in Burma is growing more desperate. The United Nations and a few other aid organizations are getting some supplies and food into the country, but so far not nearly enough. Here is a list of aid organizations accepting donations for Burma, and here is an update on what was happening with aid efforts as of yesterday.

Spotlight

May 8, 2008

Obama’s Fatal Flaws

Filed under: Democratic Party, elections — maha @ 7:36 am

[Update: Now I see that Armando is smearing me by misrepresenting my point in the post below. He’s done that before, and not just to me. It’s a long-standing pattern. The boy can’t stand being disagreed with. Anyway, for any TalkLeft fans who drop by here, my point was not that it is “silly” to discuss Obama’s failure to connect with white working class voters. My point is that comparing data from the Virginia and North Carolina primary results without taking other factors into account is disingenuous. I’m sure Mahablog regulars understood that, as they can read.]

Oliver Willis sheds light on the dreadful weakness in Barack Obama’s candidacy that others lack the guts to discuss: Obama gets too many votes.

Brilliant snark, that.

Today many people are comparing Hillary Clinton’s campaign to the scene in Monty Python’s Holy Grail in which the Black Knight wants to keep fighting after his arms and legs are cut off. I think the analogy fits some of Clinton’s followers even more tightly than it does Clinton herself.

Pro-Clinton bloggers obsessively continue to look for chinks in Obama’s armor. One compares the North Carolina results with the Virginia primary of three months ago and notes, in classic concern troll fashion, that Obama has “lost support.” Why that might be is a complete mystery to the blogger, but the inference is that Obama is just plain running out of steam. Demographic and socio-economic differences between the two states,* plus the effects of Clinton’s ugly “kitchen sink” campaign, are not considered.

[*For example, 31.7 percent of Virginians have college degrees, while 23.4 percent of North Carolinians have college degrees. Obama tends to do better among college-educated voters.]

Apparently we’re supposed to believe that the politician who lost both states in a rout would be a better general election candidate than the politician who, you know, actually won.

In fact, the politician herself is making the same argument (via Pam):

“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.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.

Yes, and I think we see what it is.


Greg Sargent writes,

On the Hillary conference call, Hillary chief strategist Geoff Garin made the case for her electability in some of the most explicitly race-based terms I’ve heard yet.

Garin argued that the North Carolina contest, which Obama won by 14 points, represented “progress” for Hillary because she did better among white voters there than she did in Virginia.

Translation: Obama may get more votes, but we get better votes (wink, nudge).

Armando wrote a bitterly whining post about “the problem” he thinks no one wants to talk about — “Barack Obama has trouble connecting with white working class voters.” He does, but I think that’s been talked about quite a bit. I believe I even addressed it awhile back. Then Armando says,

Discussing that concern is a mortal sin according to the Left blogs. I for one will not play the ostrich. I will consider the problem and ways Obama can solve it.

And that would have been fine, but in fact Armando does not “consider” the problem or ways Obama could solve it. He just whines.

Kyle Moore:

Armando failed to actually discuss ways of solving it, or, for that matter, do anything besides complain about the perceived taboo of talking about Obama’s failure to appeal to White Voters, thus murdering the one saving grace of his post.

I hope Armando is ready to admit to the Clinton campaign’s colossal failure to appeal to black voters, which would be a more critical problem for a Democrat. As Steve M documents, Dems have been losing the white, male working class vote for a long time. For example:

According to CNN’s 1996 exit poll, Bill Clinton lost the white vote (Dole 46%, Clinton 43%, Perot 9%). He lost the white male vote by an even larger margin (Dole 49%, Clinton 38%, Perot 11%). And he lost gun owners badly (Dole 51%, Clinton 38%, Perot 10%). However, Clinton won the popular vote overall 49%-41%-8%, and he won 70% of the electoral votes.

Do the Clintonistas seriously think their candidate would do better with white, less educated, working-class men than John McCain will do in November? Or that Dems can win in November without the enthusiastic support of African Americans?

And the fact is that Obama has won some states that are nearly all white, such as Wisconsin. David Sirota talks about the “race chasm.”

Recall the Race Chasm graph that I published in In These Times a few weeks back. It shows how Hillary Clinton has been winning states whose populations are above 7 percent and below 17 percent black. If Democrats nominate a candidate who isn’t well supported by the black community, and that community ends up not turning out to vote in the general election in strong numbers, those states in the Race Chasm like New Jersey and Pennsylvania could flip to the Republicans, and other states in the Race Chasm like Ohio, Florida, Missouri and Virginia could remain in the Republican column (NOTE: I’m in no way saying that Clinton cannot eventually rebuild her support among black voters in a general election, just like I don’t believe Obama cannot strengthen his white support in a general election - all I’m saying is that Clinton’s current weakness among black voters is at least as important a factor in this election as Obama’s current weakness among some white demographics).

Put another way, the black vote - though only 12 percent of the total popular vote - can make the key difference in the key swing states, meaning Clyburn is absolutely right: It is not only subtly racist to generally downplay the importance of the black vote, but it is also mathematically absurd, because the black vote will likely be a decisive factor in the general election.

Call it the problem the Clintonistas don’t want to talk about.

Spotlight

May 7, 2008

Encouraged

Filed under: Democratic Party, elections — maha @ 7:42 am

Matt Towery of Southern Political Report says that Senator Obama’s North Carolina win was bigger than expected because he picked up most of the last-minute deciders. This tells us something about momentum, maybe.

Of Indiana, Michael Tomasky writes,

The narrow Indiana margin was a stunner and is worth dwelling on. How did that happen? It’d be lovely to think that substance may actually have had something to do with it. That is, it may have proved that Clinton’s pander on the repeal of the federal gas tax really didn’t work that well, and that Obama’s willingness to stand up and call it clever politics but bad policy actually persuaded a large number of voters. Maybe it proved that Obama finally found a way to minimise the pastor problem (for the time being - it will persist into November). Whatever it was, Clinton expected and needed a lot more.

This morning, most reports I’ve seen suggest she’s not quitting yet. The vanity campaign will continue. However, Todd Beeton writes,

This is-it-over or isn’t-it division echoes the mixed messages we’ve gotten from Hillary Clinton herself tonight. First there was her speech, which, I have to agree with Timmeh, was at once a rallying cry and a valedictory; in it, Clinton made an awkward and blatant plea for funds, yet the post-primary fund solicitation e-mail her campaign sent out this evening was more “thanks” than “please;” and finally we have the news that Hillary Clinton will hold no public events tomorrow, yet we also get word from Andrea Mitchell that her meeting with superdelegates set for the morning is purely routine and she intends to be back on the campaign trail by Thursday after a fundraiser tomorrow night. What all of this accomplishes, of course, is to keep both options on the table so that they can see how the fundraising goes and how the media spins tonight before deciding whether to stay in or to drop out. There is a third option as well, which I believe was proposed on MSNBC earlier, which would be to do a sort of combination of both, i.e. campaign strongly over the next two weeks but more as an ally of Obama’s than as a foe until May 20th when they both will likely once again end up winning a state and use his likely majority of pledged delegate status as the tipping point to bow out gracefully.

We’ll see. If Senator Clinton continues to run a scorched-earth, negative campaign against Obama, we’ll know she’s completely unglued.

There’s also speculation that the undeclared superdelegates will declare for Obama in the next few days. This could put an end to the nomination fight before June. Let’s hope.

Update: Dylan Loewe writes at Huffington Post,

Obama cut into Clinton’s base dramatically. Hillary only won voters making less than $50,000 by a four point margin in Indiana. She also saw an eleven point drop in support among Catholics from Pennsylvania to Indiana. Additionally, as Tim Russert noted, Hillary’s slide among black voters continued to worsen. With 92% of African Americans voting for Obama in Indiana, one wonders which states Hillary thinks are winnable without the most loyal bloc of Democratic voters.

All eyes turned to Indiana and North Carolina to see what impact the Reverend Wright story would have on the race. Exit polls showed that, in both states, 48% of voters saw the issue as at least somewhat important to their decision. But that number fails to tell the whole story. Among blacks in Indiana, 44% viewed the Wright story as important. And yet, more than nine in ten black voters chose Obama. With voters citing Wright as important, but still voting for Obama, it would appear that, in fact, Obama’s response to the Wright crisis played as important a role in voter decisions as the initial controversy itself. Given his success, he clearly responded well.

Indiana voters trusted Hillary on the economy, but by a far narrower margin than previous primaries. In North Carolina, Obama won that category handily, suggesting that the fight over Clinton’s gas-tax gimmick ultimately favored Obama - and honesty. At almost every turn, voters rejected the politics of Hillary Clinton. By a twenty point gap, voters believed Hillary unfairly attacked Obama in Indiana, a reality that has no doubt contributed to the widening divide within the party.

C’mon, superdelegates, declare for Obama and put an end to this farce.

Spotlight

May 6, 2008

Obama Wins North Carolina

Filed under: Democratic Party, elections — maha @ 6:33 pm

Polls just closed in North Carolina, and the state already has been called for Obama. I don’t see the margin yet, but it can’t be very close.

Update: (Listening to Obama’s victory speech) That man sure can give a speech, huh?

Update: Indiana is still too close to call, MSNBC says, even though Obama pretty much conceded it and Clinton certainly accepted it. I’m not going to stay up to see final results.

Spotlight

His Imperial Stinginess

Filed under: Bush Administration — maha @ 11:10 am

The death toll from this weekend’s cyclone and tidal wave in Burma has reached 22,500, with 41,000 still missing. The people of Burma already were desperately poor before the disaster, as a result of the mismanagement of the oppressive military regime running the country. Now millions of people are left without food, shelter, medical services, and probably clean water to drink. Around the globe, nations and international relief agencies are scrambling to send as much aid as possible as quickly as possible.

Well, except for the United States. The Bush Administration released a whopping $250,000 from a U.S. Embassy emergency fund for the Burma relief effort. The Bushies refuse to send more until the government of Burma allows American disaster assessment teams into Burma to, um, assess.

UNICEF has five disaster assessment teams in the hardest-hit areas already, but of course the Bushies can’t trust United Nations assessments. We have to do our own. We do a heck of a job, you know.

Seth Mydans writes for the New York Times:

The United States, which has led a drive for economic sanctions against Myanmar’s repressive regime, said it would also provide aid, but only if an American disaster team was invited into the country.

The policy was presented by the first lady, Laura Bush, , along with a lecture to the junta about human rights and disaster relief.

“This is a cheap shot,” said Aung Nain Oo, a Burmese political analyst who is based in Thailand. “The people are dying. This is no time for a political message to be aired. This is a time for relief. No one is asking for anything like this except the United States.”

Dana Milbank writes at the Washington Post:

7:58 a.m.: By e-mail, the White House Communications Office sends out its “Morning Update.” It lists two events on Bush’s schedule for the entire day: a “Social Dinner in Honor of Cinco de Mayo” and, an hour later, post-dinner entertainment. To react to the main news of the day — thousands of deaths from the cyclone in Burma — Bush sends his wife out to make a statement. She criticizes the Burmese government for its failure “to issue a timely warning to citizens in the storm’s path” and “to meet its people’s basic needs.” Reporters, too tactful to draw parallels to New Orleans, quiz her instead about daughter Jenna’s wedding, and the names of future grandchildren. “George and Georgia, Georgina, Georgette,” the first lady says.

* * *

12:39 p.m.: The White House Briefing Room. On the podium, the understudy to the understudy to the substitute to the understudy to Bush’s first White House press secretary is giving a sparsely attended briefing on what he knows about Burma blocking relief efforts (”I am not aware of that report”), about the awarding of the Congressional Gold Medal to a Burmese dissident (”no announcements at this point”), and about word that the Saudi crown prince is dying (”I have not seen those reports”). The news of the day thus dispensed with, the questioning turns to why West Point allows its graduates to play pro football immediately but the Naval Academy does not.

Bush is, in Milbank’s words, forgotten but not gone.

Dan Eggen quotes the First Lady:

Earlier yesterday, US first lady Laura Bush condemned the military Government in Burma for its “inept” response to the cyclone, marking an unusual foray by the President’s spouse into a high-profile foreign policy crisis.

Appearing at a White House news conference, Mrs Bush alleged that the country’s rulers purposely declined to warn people of the impending danger.

“Although they were aware of the threat, Burma’s state-run media failed to issue a timely warning to citizens in the storm’s path,” she said. “The response to this cyclone is just the most recent example of the junta’s failures to meet its people’s basic needs.”

Did you catch that, New Orleans?

To be fair, France isn’t doing much better. The Associated Press reports,

In France, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner also expressed regret over Myanmar’s policy on international aid, saying the country insists only on aid that the government would distribute itself and has spurned French as well as U.S. offers of personnel.

The country’s modus operandi is “not a good way of doing things,” said Kouchner, the co-founder of French aid group Doctors Without Borders, said he himself had applied for a visa to travel to Myanmar to help coordinate, but was highly doubtful it would be granted.

France has so far proposed $309,200 in aid. “It’s not a lot but we don’t really trust the way the Burmese ministry would use the money,” he said.

That’s a good point, and we can commiserate. We have FEMA.

BTW, today Burmese dissident leader Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded a congressional gold medal. Yesterday Agence France-Presse (AFP) quoted a Burmese government official who said Aung San Suu Kyi is safe, but I have yet to see corroboration of that.

An Oldie But Moldie: Mahablog post from December 28, 2004, on the Bushie response to the tsunami.

Update: Dan Froomkin writes,

When a country run by a despotic and isolationist regime is laid low by a massive natural disaster, the diplomatic thing to do is to respond with a show of compassion. Not kick ‘em when they’re down.

More than 22,000 people have died in the staggering devastation caused by this weekend’s cyclone in Burma. But when First Lady Laura Bush made her first-ever visit to the White House briefing room yesterday, to talk about what’s going on in that country, it was not to deliver a message of goodwill.

Rather than announce the launch of a massive relief effort that could take advantage of a rare diplomatic opening, the first lady instead tossed insults at Burma’s leaders, blamed them for the high death toll, and lashed out at their decision to move forward with a constitutional referendum scheduled for this Saturday.

The traditionally issue-averse first lady’s concerns about the Burmese junta and its abuses of human rights date back several years, and she’s been particularly outspoken since last fall.

But why respond to a catastrophe with such hostility? The awkward timing, as it turns out, may have had something to do with an event entirely unrelated to the cyclone.

“I’m going to leave tomorrow for Crawford, for Jenna’s wedding, and I wanted to be able to make a statement about Burma before I left,” the first lady told reporters.

I suppose one would have to be pretty damn shallow to stay married to George W. Bush all these years.

Spotlight

May 5, 2008

Regulation and the Right

Filed under: conservatism — maha @ 2:54 pm

We all know righties are against government regulation. Well, except when they aren’t.

Background: Brody Mullins and Kris Maher of the Wall Street Journal today claim that Barack Obama won the support of the Teamster’s Union by privately pledging to end government oversight of the Union. Both the Teamsters and the Obama campaign deny there was a quid pro quo. The Obama campaign says Obama was on record in favor of ending the government oversight of the Teamsters back in 2004.

The Teamsters point out that Senator Clinton also had told them she was opposed to the oversight:

The union also noted that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Obama’s rival for the Democratic nomination, suggested that she might also support ending the union’s consent decree with the federal government when she spoke to the Teamsters’ general executive board last year.

“You can’t go around dragging the ball and the chain of the past,” Mrs. Clinton said on that occasion — the March 27, 2007, meeting of the board — according to an audio tape that the union made available. “And I think that’s true for anybody, any organization, any individual,” she continued. “And so I would be very open to looking at that, and to saying, ‘What are we trying to accomplish here?’ and see what the answers were. At some point, you turn the page and go on.”

Of course, the Clinton campaign now says Senator Clinton didn’t mean she was actually going to do anything about government oversight, and the Clintonistas have taken up right-wing talking points about the alleged Teamster quid pro quo to slam Obama.

BTW, I believe the oversight under discussion is a consent decree made between the Justice Department and the Teamsters back in 1989 that allows the feds to supervise the Union and Union elections. The Teamsters signed the decree to settle a civil racketeering lawsuit that federal prosecutors had brought against the Union, charging it with being controlled by mobsters.

We’re getting to the punch line — rightie blogger response to the Wall Street Journal story goes along the line of how dare anyone even think about not regulating unions! Here’s an example, from Townhall:

Today’s Wall Street Journal implies that Barack Obama may have offered the Teamsters a quid pro quo in order to win the endorsement. Making matters worse, his “deal” involves looking the other way on the issue of corruption. … Making back-room deals with the Teamsters — now that’s a “new brand of politics”!

In other words, reducing government supervision of the Teamsters is tantamount to “looking the other way on the issue of corruption.” The Teamsters were corrupt in the past; therefore, they will always be corrupt. They are corrupt by definition.

Funny Big Corporations and financial institutions are not held to the same standard, huh? Even as the nation’s economy is reeling from the mortgage crisis, the Right is hollering about unfair regulation of financial markets. Paul Krugman writes,

But while our out-of-control financial system has been bad for the country, it has been very good for wheeler-dealers, who collect huge fees when things seem to be going well, then get to walk away unscathed — indeed, often with large severance packages — when things go wrong. They don’t want regulations that would stabilize the economy but cramp their style.

And now that the financial clouds have lifted a bit, the pushback against sensible regulation is in full swing. Even the Fed’s very modest proposal to curb abusive mortgage lending with new standards is under fire, and there are worrying signs that the Fed may back down.

Here’s another little anomaly. Everybody knows righties are in favor of liberty and personal freedom, right? Well, except when they aren’t.

Art Brodsky writes in Huffington Post that the Right is fighting net neutrality:

Just in time for the House Telecommunications Subcommittee’s hearing tomorrow (May 6) on Net Neutrality legislation, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) and the American Spectator are out with new attacks on the simple idea that people should not have their Internet experiences subject to the whims of telephone and cable companies. …

… The April 28 [American Spectator] blog post, cleverly headlined, “Public Know Nothings,” — a play on Public Knowledge — read like a basic corporate hit job on Net Neutrality of the kind one might read at any number of blogs or by any columnists in the thrall of the corporate world. But the story, combined with Armey’s April 22 Washington Times headlined “Spare The Net,” raise the inevitable question — what is it about individual freedom that “conservatives” like the Spectator and Armey don’t like?

To be fair, the debate is larger than the Spectator and Armey. Most congressional Republicans oppose the idea of giving consumers freedom on the Internet. They take shelter in their anti-government, anti-regulation rhetoric, preferring to allow Internet freedom to apply to the corporations which own the networks connecting the Internet to consumers, rather than to consumers themselves.

Brodsky goes on to explain how the Right’s point of view is burdened by a “tragic misunderstanding of how telecommunications policy, markets and technology worked in the past and how they work today.” Know nothings, indeed. (For the record, I believe you probably can find some right-wing bloggers who do have a clue that if Net Neutrality goes, their blogging privileges might go with it.)

Spotlight

May 4, 2008

Distractions

Filed under: Republican Party, Democratic Party, News Media, elections — maha @ 10:30 am

Joan Vennochi writes in today’s Boston Globe:

THE REAL NEWS of April played second fiddle to the presidential campaign, the pope’s visit to America, and the Texas polygamy case.

The death toll for the US military in Iraq hit 49 in April, making it the deadliest month since September, according to the Associated Press. Around Iraq, at least 1,080 Iraqi civilians and security personnel were killed last month, an average of 36 a day, according to the AP tally. While that’s down from March’s total of 1,269, or an average of 41 per day, those casualties certainly don’t add up to a stable Iraq.

It’s not as if there is no news from Iraq, you know. Bradley Brooks reports for the Associated Press:

The US military fired guided missiles into the heart of Baghdad’s teeming Sadr City slum yesterday, leveling a building 55 yards away from a hospital and wounding nearly two dozen people.

Separately, the military said late yesterday that four Marines were killed on Thursday by a roadside bomb in Anbar Province. No other details were released, and the names of the Marines were withheld pending notification of their families.

The strike in Sadr City, made from a ground launcher, took out a militant command-control center, the US military said. The center was in the heart of the 8-square-mile neighborhood that is home to about 2.5 million people. Iraqi officials said at least 23 people were wounded, none of them patients in the hospital.

See Juan Cole for more details.

Similarly, awhle back John McCain came out with a health care “plan” that was such a bad joke it ought to have got him laughed out of the presidential race. It might have, had the American people heard anything resembling substantive discussion of it from news media. (See also Steve Benen.)

Instead, we get 24/7 coverage of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. As Eugene Robinson said,

There’s something maddening about this presidential campaign. It has become irrelevant whether anything the candidates say actually makes sense. All that matters is how their words will “play” with voters who are presumed to be too stupid to realize that they’re the ones being played.

Bob Herbert, yesterday:

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is no doubt (and regrettably) a big issue in the presidential campaign. But what we’ve seen over the past week is major media overkill — Jeremiah Wright all day and all night. It’s like watching the clips of a car wreck again and again.

We’ve plotted the trend lines of his relationship with Barack Obama over the past two decades. What did Obama know and when did he know it? We’ve forced Barack and Michelle Obama, two decent, hard-working, law-abiding, family-oriented Americans, to sit for humiliating television interviews, reminiscent of Bill and Hillary Clinton on “60 Minutes” at the height of the Gennifer Flowers scandal.

We’ve allowed the entire political process in what is perhaps the most important election in the U.S. since World War II to become thoroughly warped by the histrionics of a loony preacher from the South Side of Chicago.

There’s something wrong with us.

Frank Rich points out in his column today that the alleged craziness of anything the Rev. Wright said pales in comparison to the utterances of one Rev. John Hagee, whose affiliations with John McCain seem to be an issue only among us leftie bloggers.

Here Rich gets to the heart of the matter:

Mr. Hagee’s videos have never had the same circulation on television as Mr. Wright’s. A sonorous white preacher spouting venom just doesn’t have the telegenic zing of a theatrical black man.

Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell can blame America for the 9/11 attacks, and the Right blinks and yawns. Some obscure who-is-this-guy-again? college professor named Ward Chamberlain blames America for the 9/11 attacks, and the Right goes ballistic. Likewise, some redneck yahoos in Alabama get caught with an arsenal of explosives and weapons that included 130 grenades, an improvised rocket launcher and 2,500 rounds of ammunition, and it’s no big deal. But an exploding backpack in Las Vegas or, worse, the threat of homemade cherry bombs in Michigan causes Righties to beocme unglued if they suspect the perpetrator might be Muslim.

It’s all about fear. Righties base their political choices on what they fear. At the same time, they are drawn to what they fear; they obsess over what they fear. Because they are afraid of angry black men, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is a big deal to them. He excites them because he vindicates them.

On the whole, the Left doesn’t react the same way to right-wing craziness. That’s partly because there’s so much of it, of course. We hear about a Republican politician associating with an extremist religious whackjob, and we think, What else is new? And news media, which has bought into the narrative that “religion” is something the Right holds a patent on, doesn’t ask questions about the religiosity of the Right. It’s only a “story” when it’s about the Left.

Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign continues to degrade everything liberalism stands for by sucking up to the Right. But I’ll have to save that for another post.

Spotlight

May 3, 2008

Trials and Tribulations

Filed under: elections — maha @ 8:36 am

It’s cold, dark and gloomy here in the New York City metro area, which pretty much matches my mood. Since it’s Kentucky Derby Day I thought I might just post some old Derby videos, but at the moment YouTube is offline. Naturally.

(Fortunately I’ll be spending most of the day rehearsing Handel’s oratorio Israel in Egypt with my community chorale. This will be our fourth rehearsal this week, which is one reason I haven’t been posting much. The performance is tomorrow. After that it’s back to regular daily blogging, I promise. But singing does cheer me up.)

Hillary Clinton is pushing her “gas tax holiday” plan for all it’s worth, convinced that Hoosiers are too stupid to realize that it’s not a serious proposal (and who’s an elitist now?). As Eugene Robinson wrote,

The House Democratic leadership opposes suspending the gas tax, so the whole thing is moot — except perhaps as a case study in political cynicism: Say any damn thing you think the voters want to hear, even if you know it’s a terrible idea and won’t happen anyway. Psssst, voters: McCain and Clinton think you’re too dumb to catch on.

Of course, Tuesday’s primaries are in states that solidly supported George Bush in 2004, so maybe they are that dumb. We’ll see.

Speaking of pain: For those of you who live with chronic pain, I have a three-part series about pain, suffering and Buddhism posted at the other blog. Posts are:

Pain and Suffering
Suffering and Attachment
Pain and Buddhism

Spotlight

May 1, 2008

Happy Mission Accomplished Day

Filed under: Bush Administration — maha @ 5:11 pm

Jill Serjeant and Bernard Woodall report for Reuters:

LOS ANGELES, May 1 (Reuters) - Ports along the U.S. West Coast, including the country’s busiest port complex in Los Angeles, shut down on Thursday as some 10,000 workers went on a one-day strike to protest the war in Iraq, port and union officials said.

“We are hearing there is no activity taking place up and down the West Coast,” said Steve Getzug, spokesman of the Pacific Maritime Association, which represents all 29 ports from San Diego to Washington state. “There is no unloading or loading.”

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union said some 10,000 workers joined the protest. The union says that many of the big shipping companies are profiting from the war.

“Longshore workers are standing down on the job and standing up for America,” said ILWU International President Bob McEllrath. “We’re supporting the troops and telling politicians in Washington that it’s time to end the war in Iraq.”

Well, at least somebody gives a bleep.

While American media were obsessing about the Rev. Wright, the April death toll in Iraq was the highest in eight months. Fifty U.S. soldiers were killed, bringing the total to 4,065 U.S. soldiers who didn’t live to see the Fifth Anniversary of Mission Accomplished Day.

Outright Barbarous

Jeff Feldman has a new book about to be published called Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy . I’ve seen an advance copy, and he does a great job calling out the Right on its recklessness and meanness. Jeff is having an online book launch party on Facebook today, so drop by andsay hi.

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