Education and intelligence are also important in distinguishing between Clinton and Obama supporters. There are several reasons why the educated voters overwhelmingly choose Obama over Clinton. One reason is that Clinton campaigns based upon flawed economic policies to pander to the lower income voters. She promotes policies such as the gas tax holiday and and her proposals for the mortgage crisis which require education and knowledge of the issues to see the serious errors. Clinton and her supporters try to circumvent criticism of her plans by the educated by writing them off as elites whose views do not matter. While Obama is developing a diverse group of supporters, Clinton is now leading an anti-intellectual movement which believes they can shout down those who criticize them as elitists. Read more
Recently in some comments, the old, doddering DFH commenter known here as Bring It On was whining about his overly cautious concern and discomfort with New Ideas, again, and telling younger, prettier people like me that We Wuz Wrong, and our newfangled notions about garden beds were Dangerous to America. Now, he’s always saying something similar about my political ideas, but rarely do I get a chance to not only know I’m right and he’s wrong, but prove it with photos.
Heh. Today is that day. I have two words for you, Oldster: One. Week. That’s how long the plants I’m going to show you have been in their raised, grass clipping-infused beds. And it’s been a brutal winter, and dry as a bone spring. And I didn’t cheat: these have not received even the organic fertilizer I bought. Nope, this is just my method, about a 1/2 week of sunshine, my love, and the blessing of the Goddess. Look upon them and weep, you doubting, doddering, doltish Dylan wannabe, you.
Some of what I’m going to show you is more than a year old, some are perennials, some are annuals, some are big-box bought, and likely genetically engineered, some are home grown from heirloom seed. Some are in deep shade, some are in full sun. All were planted with the method I described to you in my previous garden post, and all have only been moving for the last week, or in the case of the perennials, the last month. Which for this part of the country this time of year, is actually exceptional. I had stuff coming up and blooming in April as well, I’m sorry I didn’t post on that more. But, if I may puff my chest this morning, no one else in my ’hood has anything close to the bloom/spread I’ve got right now; other than bulbs most people are still looking at little green shoots and leaves and not much else. Standard Warning: lots of big pics, so slow going for you dial up people.
These ferns got moved into an area that receives about 1-2 hours of light a day. Ferns always do well in the shade, but I confess I was sort of amazed by how fast they came up and uncurled. Ferns are like sprinters: once they get going, they explode with speed and performance. They also “walk,” that is, if you plant one in one year, the next year you’ll get 2 or 4 somewhere near the original, and more and more over a wider spread each year. They are also close to unkillable. I’ve found ferns pushing up from beds I deeply tilled, covered with organic material 2ft deep, etc. And gawd, aren’t they beautiful? Again let me stress that if you have a shady, “nothing will grow here” area, Ferns are your answer. Heh, I lifted this (I think they’re called) corm, put it in a raised bed, killed 1/2 it’s roots…and then it froze in a snap freeze for two days. And my babies are still comin on Strong! Eat your heart out, Republican neighbor who spends 0000$ on a pro landscaping service next door. She’s still waiting for hers to appear. Read more
[Chris “Squishy Fix” Bowers endorsed Stoller’s post (below). Check it out. Please tell me this is parody! I’ll retract, I’ll do the walk of shame, but please tell me this is parody!**]
Tell me again why we say Kewl Kidz instead of Kool Kidz?*
* * *
I’ve always loved this passage from Neal Stephensen’s Snow Crash, and not just because I feel like I’m going to end up living in a shipping container. I’ll quote a huge slab of it just cause I love it so much. The relevance will become clear, I promise:
And finally, there is a guy that Y.T. dubs the High Priest. He’s wearing a formerly white lab coat, bearing the logo of some company in the Bay Area. He’s sacked out in the back of a dead station wagon, but when Y.T. enters the area he jumps up and runs toward her in a way that she can’t help but find a little threatening. But compared to these others, he seems almost like a regular, healthy, fit, demented bush-dwelling psychotic.
“You’re here to pick up a suitcase, right?”
“I’m here to pick up something. I don’t know what it is,” she says.
He goes over to one of the dead cars, unlocks the hood, pulls out an aluminum briefcase … “Here’s your delivery,” he says, striding toward her. She backs away from him instinctively.
“I understand, I understand,” he says. “I’m a scary creep.”
He puts it on the ground, puts his foot on it, gives it a shove. It slides across the pavement to Y.T., bouncing off the occasional rock.
There’s no big hurry on this delivery,” he says. ’Would you like to stay and have a drink? We’ve got Kool-Aid.”
“I’d love to,” Y.T. says, “but my diabetes is acting up real bad.”
“Well, then you can just stay and be a guest of our community. We have a lot of wonderful things to tell you about. Things that could really change your life.”
“Do you have anything in writing? Something I could take with me?”
“Gee, I’m afraid we don’t. Why don’t you stay. You seem like a really nice person.”
“Sorry, Jack, but you must be confusing me with a bimbo,” Y.T. says. “Thanks for the suitcase. I’m out of here.”
Yes, it’s always nice to have a “graceful” way out of these situations.
But why do the words “Matt Stoller” suddenly come into my mind? Read more
For my mere support of Hillary Clinton, I have been called a racist, more times than I can count. One of the refuges I have found in this crazy blogosphere, has been Anglachel’s Journal.
Podesta, Lux, McNary, and WVWV President Page Gardner think they can quarantine this inquiry off from anything outside of North Carolina, they had better look [Ooooh!] at the comment threads this controversy is generating.
Oh, great. Now we’re using comment threads from The Obama 527 That Used To Be Daily Kos to threaten people—make that Democrats—on the OFB’s ever-expanding Enemies List. It never ends, does it? It never ends. Read more
The Democratic voters of Michigan and Florida are unhappy, or so we read. They, or if you will, their representatives, moved up their primary dates and drew a punishment from the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee. Since then, what have the voters of Michigan and Florida actually done to try and reverse or repair their problem? Nothing but complain. Read more
Orrin Hatch has written a song for McCain. It’s shallow and vapid, you can read the lyrics and barf here. But what’s really priceless is Tweety’s reaction after playing a snippet on Hardball:
I will be singing it on the pillow tonight.
I bet he will.
Obama may send a thrill up their legs (although that’s more about beating Clinton), but at night it’s McCain they dream about.
So listen up, I am going to make this easy for you. Do not screw this up. Use the three obvious points, and use concrete examples, which I have helpfully provided for you. If you do not say these three things, you are a total failure as a surrogate. Read more
Just peeping in here before hitting the beds (I’m helping out an elderly neighbor today with his yard) to say that it’s almost over. Soon the Village will be making up shit about some other laughable aspect of our kleptocracy, and we won’t all be shouting at each other anymore. I hope. Anyway, see you soon. And get outside, durnit! In these parts the sun is a-shinin’ and I’d be a fool not to be in it.
I spoke in an undergraduate class today. As a friend of mine has said a few times about her students, pretty soon you’re going to have to explain to them what the Lewinsky scandal was. This isn’t a comment on the quality of the students, just that the degree to which 19 year olds have shared cultural and historic experience with me is shrinking fast. Bush v. Gore happened when they were 11. What’s recent history to me is a vague recollection for them.
As I discovered this over the last few years, I dropped 1990s references in my classes. If I make them, I have to give a rather detailed background discussion because they don’t really remember Bill Clinton as president.
In fact, a year or so ago I was responding to a question in class that indirectly brought this subject up (I think it was a question about Johnson’s impeachment) and I said — with my usual measure of heavy sarcasm — something like this:
Oh yeah. That’s right. You’re the kids so many “concerned Americans” were worried about back then. The cry at the time from enemies of Bill Clinton was “What will we tell the children? What will this do to the children?” Read more
The New York Times and the GOS Hardy Boys are on the case, proving … something.
Hillary has been telling a story about an anonymous pregnant woman in Ohio who died (along with her child) because she couldn’t afford healthcare. The alleged hospital, previously anonymous, came forward to deny liability and to breach patient confidentiality. Read more
MATTHEWS: Let me give you a scene that may face you in the next year or two, where the national security adviser calls you at 3:00 in the morning and tells that you a couple of jet — commercial jets have been hijacked. And they believe it is al Qaeda. And, as we know, al Qaeda always tries a second time. They tried for the World Trade Center after ‘93. They came back in ‘01. They’re heading for the Capitol. What do you do?
OBAMA: Well, look, I am hesitant to engage in hypotheticals like that, because…
MATTHEWS: But it has been predictable.
OBAMA: Oh, well, the — I don’t think anybody predicted 9/11. And, so, we don’t know what kinds of circumstances are going to come up.
I mean, I’m used to the right wing talking points from Obama, but channeling Condi’s weaseling on 9/11 moves beyond the absurd to the surreal.
It’s too fucking disheartening. Am I insane, or did the blogosphere spend some time, back in the day when we actually had a media critique, setting the record straight that not only did plenty of people predict that Bin Laden was going to attack (BRIEFER: “Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.” BUSH: “You’ve covered your ass, now.”), but that he could do so with airplanes? Like, as far back as 1998? That’s what a quick search brings up, and I’m sure there’s more, even setting aside CT stuff. Read more
I’m 48 years old. I was born when Eisenhower was still President.
The kids today have no idea what I’ve seen.
One of my earliest memories was JFK’s assassination. I was three, and I remember I couldn’t understand why if JFK was dead (gone to Heaven) he was still on television.
I remember Vietnam and the turbulence of the Sixties from nightly television, but not from daily life. I saw riots on television, but I never attended one.
I remember getting up for school one morning and my mom telling me that Martin Luther King had been killed. I kind of understood who he was and knew it was significant.
Two months later I woke up to find out Bobby Kennedy had been murdered too. Five years, three leaders murdered. Read more
On Sunday, Donna Brazile took to the airwaves to explain the Credentials Committee of the DNC and why Obama will control the Credentials Committee. Unfortunately, almost everything Ms. Brazile said was wrong (is she a lying shill or simply uninformed, you decide). After learning Ms. Brazile was wrong, I decided to try to figure this Credentials Committee thing out myself. I mean, how hard can it be? Read more
Elizabeth Drew is a sad testament to the fact that even the NYRB has succumbed to the Clinton Rules (check out the image of HRC devilishly laughing on their front page). The article is a mixture of projection, lies, and just plain asshatery. I could only shake my head as I read the following: Read more
And I’m someone who would be happy with either candidate as nominee — but this is just a sad thing to see Josh self-immolate himself like this.
And wouldn’t it be nice if Josh would hire himself an editor? The various errors in his posts are a bit annoying from a “professional” blogger. You’d think if you just wrote 5-6 paragraphs per day you could, um, you know, proofread them?
Maybe we could just stop printing all these new colorful Third World-style Monopoly-money bills, take it all out of circulation, and start over with money that’s solid green, like real money ought to be?
Pushing to seat the Florida delegates, at least one top Clinton fund-raiser, Paul Cejas, a Miami businessman who has given the Democratic National Committee $63,500 since 2003, has demanded Democratic officials return his 2007 contribution of $28,500, which they have agreed to do.
“If you’re not going to count my vote, I’m not going to give you my money,” said Mr. Cejas, who was the United States ambassador to Belgium from 1998 to 2001. Read more
Krugman has good perspective on Bear, Stearns (“If you can keep your head when all about you / are losing theirs and blaming it on you…”)
When push comes to shove, financial officials — rightly — aren’t willing to run the risk that losses on bad loans will cripple the financial system and take the real economy down with it.
Which is actually re-assuring to me; I don’t live in the financial economy at all; I live in the real economy.
Consider what happened last Friday, when the Federal Reserve rushed to the aid of Bear Stearns.
Nobody expects an investment bank to be a charitable institution, but Bear has a particularly nasty reputation. As Gretchen Morgenson of The New York Times reminds us, Bear “has often operated in the gray areas of Wall Street and with an aggressive, brass-knuckles approach.”
Bear was a major promoter of the most questionable subprime lenders. It lured customers into two of its own hedge funds that were among the first to go bust in the current crisis. And it’s a bad financial citizen: the last time the Fed tried to contain a financial crisis, after the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, Bear refused to participate in the rescue operation.
Bear, in other words, deserved to be allowed to fail — both on the merits and to teach Wall Street not to expect someone else to clean up its messes.
So, Bear got culled and devoured by JP Morgan (much as Spitzer may gotten culled). Interesting.
But the Fed rode to Bear’s rescue anyway, fearing that the collapse of a major investment bank would cause panic in the markets and wreak havoc with the wider economy. Fed officials knew that they were doing a bad thing, but believed that the alternative would be even worse.
As Bear goes, so will go the rest of the financial system. And if history is any guide, the coming taxpayer-financed bailout will end up costing a lot of money.
Part of me says fine! I don’t have any! Then again, I’m not (yet) able to grow all my food on my eighth of any acre, so not having “any” means only having a small amount…
[T]he big bailout is coming. The only question is how well it will be managed.
As I said, the important thing is to bail out the system, not the people who got us into this mess. That means cleaning out the shareholders in failed institutions, making bondholders take a haircut, and canceling the stock options of executives who got rich playing heads I win, tails you lose.
According to late reports on Sunday, JPMorgan Chase will buy Bear for a pittance. That’s an O.K. resolution for this case — but not a model for the much bigger bailout to come. Looking ahead, we probably need something similar to the Resolution Trust Corporation, which took over bankrupt savings and loan institutions and sold off their assets to reimburse taxpayers. And we need it quickly: things are falling apart as you read this.
But who, exactly, do we trust to put things back together? Read more
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos on Friday that it would be “harmful” to Democrats if superdelegates were to give the party’s presidential nomination to a candidate who is trailing in the delegates awarded in primaries and caucuses.
snip
“But what if one candidate has won the popular vote and the other candidate has won the delegates?” asked Stephanopoulos.
“But it’s a delegate race,” Pelosi replied. “The way the system works is that the delegates choose the nominee.” Read more
