Ohio. Texas. Indiana. Pennsylvania.
Obama LOST THEM ALL.
Why is he still in the race?

Comment upgraded to a post as per Lambert’s request. My not-so-humble analysis of what happened to tonight with Indiana:

What happened tonight:

1. Mess with HRC’s supporters’ minds

2. Try (and fail) at some run-of-the-mill cheating

3. Delay as long as possible a call of Indiana for HRC

4. Delay contributions that normally follow a win

5. Push SDs over the fence to BO’s side

6. Up the ante on WWTSBQ

7. Major troll infestation at major HRC-supporting sites

I think my point 1 worked very well: these results were exactly what was expected after all. Actually, it’s pretty bad news for BO. His base is young voters and AAs and that’s it. Can’t win that way.

Heck, even BTD at TalkLeft took back his electability argument tonight.  Read more 

ACLU of WV at West VA Blue

After boldly standing up to The Bush administrations’ fear mongering in February, word comes that House leadership may now be working with Senator Jay Rockefeller to possibly rush a pro-telecom amnesty bill through Congress in the next few days.

Civil libertarians in the Mountain State, say no to back room deals.

The FireDogLake community is trying to do something about this.

Rising Hegemon has an excellent post contrasting how ordinary Americans are getting hammered by rising medical costs while health insurance companies rack up the profits.

You know, people should really stop calling for Hillary Clinton’s death. It’s creepy. And rather uncivil. Even if one well-recognized process for bringing about Unity is to slaughter all your political opponents.

Shakespeare’s Sister already called out Nice Polite Republican radio’s Ken Rubin for comparing Hillary to Fatal Attraction’s Glenn Close; in case you don’t remember, Close’s character is shot at the, er, climax of the movie. And of course, GE’s pathetic blowhard Keith Olberman envisioned a similar, Sopranos-like fate for Hillary, with “somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out”. And this post from “creative class” [cough] A-lister Matt Stoller fits right in to the same creepy pattern:

Time to Get a Killer Instinct Against Clinton
Clinton is very weak [as any fool can see, after PA], she’s come after liberals [with provocations like truly universal health plans, not fake ones], and we should just put her away. … We [What you mean, “we”?] have rejected her, so she has to find her votes somewhere … And if we can’t, let’s figure out how to fix this institutional lack of a killer instinct.

Yeah, Matt’s right. The weak deserve to die. Especially those who aren’t part of our dominance hierarchy.

Sure, sure, just talk. Metaphor. Look, there’s a discussion of the SEIU and MoveOn!

Not.  Read more 

Apparently, having to show govt-issued picture ID to vote in Indiana isn’t the only obstacle or potential roadblock: Gaming Indiana: The quirky state voting law that could affect Tuesday’s primary —  Read more 

Maryland balks at pay package for former CareFirst CEO

The Maryland Insurance Administration argued Monday that the nearly $18 million CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield is prepared to pay William Jews, its former top executive, is too much.

Attorneys with the state agency said the MIA wants to cut the annual and long-term incentives CareFirst, the region’s largest health insurer, plans to pay Jews, who left the nonprofit in November 2006. The insurance administration also argued that the primary focus of a nonprofit is not to generate profits or encourage its top managers with incentives to increase profits.  Read more 

CRANK ECONOMICS

John McCain wants to ease up on state regulations that require health insurers to cover specific conditions. So what would happen to kids like Jake Bernard, who gets speech therapy for his cleft lip only because Florida law requires it?  Read more 

Best I can tell, it’s the sex, stupid — or more accurately, the rape; because these men are all about the power. They claim the power not merely to arrange marriages to women forty years younger, but to damn those women’s souls, and the souls of those women’s children. Read what this “prophet” wrote to a woman who refused him the sex he expected her to provide as the newest and youngest of his 18 wives:

Manti, USA - James Harmston’s letters to his youngest bride threaten fire and brimstone for her refusal to sleep with him.

He signed himself “Your Husband, King and Priest”, and sent copies of his letters to five of his 18 wives, one of whom was Rachael’s mother, Pauline.

Talk about an ego — this guy’s is huge. It’s clear to me that he’s on a power trip. Factor in the isolation, add on the acculturation to be obedient, top it off with enough incest to magnify the effects of recessive genes, and … behold:

Rachael Strong is now 21 and has broken free of Mr Harmston and the sect. Since she and her mother walked out some nine months ago, they have been living scarcely 100 metres away from the True and Living Church (known here as TLC) in the small town of Manti, and her former husband continues to cast a long shadow. “I wasn’t going to argue with him. He was the prophet,” Ms Strong said, cradling her two-year-old daughter Kirsten, the offspring of an earlier polygamous marriage within the sect.

Mr Harmston conceded he had been married to her. In the vocabulary of his church, he said: “I was sealed to her for a while”, and then he hung up.

Where is the Biblical charity in behavior like Harmston’s?  Read more 

Jake Tapper tells the tale:

In an interview with National Journal’s Linda Douglass, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe downplays the impact Obama’s race will have on any November match-up, saying “the vast, vast majority of voters who would not vote for Barack Obama in November based on race are probably firmly in John McCain’s camp already.”

Did Obama run out of Democrats to offend? Is this strategy part of the “party building” meme?

Will this be a chapter in How to Win Friends by Insulting People” by Barack Carnegie and Dale Obama?

Expect W.O.R.M. 1.0 by tomoorow morning.

3 NYPD detectives cleared in wedding-day shooting

NEW YORK (AP) — Three detectives were acquitted Friday in the 50-shot killing of an unarmed groom-to-be on his wedding day, a case that put the NYPD at the center of another dispute involving allegations of excessive firepower.

What does it take to send thug-cops to jail?

Big Tent Democrat at Talk Left points out teh stupid:

Elizabeth Drew writing in Politico confirms what we have been seeing for months - the House Dem leadership is populated by fools. Consider this unforgivable ignorance:  Read more 

Melissa McEwan posts her Hillary Sexism Watch: Part 83, starring the Frat Boys of MSNBC.

Remember when being quiet in school was expected?

The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network has registered five participating schools in Katy, at least two in the Clear Creek school district and more than 20 in the Houston area. The organization estimates that more than 6,000 schools and several hundred thousand kids will keep silent Friday.
Usually these students try not to speak the entire day, although some break their vow if required to participate in class. Many also distribute pamphlets or wear T-shirts, letting peers and teachers know why they’re keeping mum. This year, students are protesting in the name of Lawrence King, a California eighth-grader who in February was shot and killed by another student, allegedly because he was gay.
The event began in 1996, but only started getting negative attention recently. In 2005, the conservative legal group the Alliance Defense Fund staged a counterprotest, called Day of Truth, which supports the “free speech rights of Christian students to present an opposing viewpoint to those organizations that promote homosexual behavior in the schools,” according to the group’s Web site. Then this year, the American Family Association sent an alert encouraging parents to keep kids home Friday if other students at their schools are participating in the Day of Silence.
We all know about politicians and lawyers and pundits, but I am astonished afresh at the sheer blind stupidity of school district superintendents on a regular basis. This week, Texas boasts a particularly inconsiderate specimen:

Alton Frailey, superintendent of Katy’s school district, let all teachers know that — though no one asked his district to participate in the silent protest — if someone did, “my answer is no.”  Read more 

Just in time for Equal Pay Day tomorrow, John McCain - along with other Republicans - block the Ledbetter Equal Pay legislation. It seems the good Senator believes that while equal pay is great and all, mandating such things is interfering too much in private enterprise:

I am all in favor of pay equity for women, but this kind of legislation, as is typical of what’s being proposed by my friends on the other side of the aisle, opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems,” the expected GOP presidential nominee told reporters. “This is government playing a much, much greater role in the business of a private enterprise system.”

From tomorrow’s NYT:

The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.

Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.  Read more 

Feministe has the new cover of TNR. Unbelievable.

No, I take it back. Perfectly believable. Just infuriating.

You can contact TNR’s editors at letters@tnr.com.

Greg Sargent doesn’t get it:

Bloomberg News takes a look at what Hillary needs to do to earn a popular vote win, and finds that she basically needs to do the political equivalent of pitching a no-hitter, hitting for the cycle, and pulling an unassisted triple play — all in one game:

What these geniuses forget is that Florida and Michigan were stripped of their delegates, but not their votes.  Read more 

Tom Smith at Eschacon08:  Read more 

“By the time you’re thirty-five, you should have somebody do your taxes for you,” this nozzle on the AM radio said this morning, on an alleged sports-talk show. “You should have that as a goal. You shouldn’t be bragging about doing your own taxes. Guys brag … guys brag about a lot of things they shouldn’t brag about doing.
“Like, ’Hey, I built my own ham radio.’ Well, hey! So now you can talk to some other loser at 3 a.m.,” the nozzle went on. “Or ’I spent all weekend under my car workin’ on the tranny.’ Well yee-haw, Jethro!”
At this point I wanted not just to cut the radio off but to know this jerk’s name so I could call him up and tell him the loser was the ignorant wanker in his mirror who believes his line of Republican propaganda enforcing the notion that you must own stuff to be somebody, you must have money to be worthwhile, “by the time you’re thirty-nine, forty, your taxes ought to be complicated. You should have some investments, stocks and bonds, some futures, land and a house and a rental property or two.”
At that point I did turn the radio off; now, to my everlasting frustration, the web site for the local radio station that carried this sack of steaming manure  Read more 

“With sprinkles…”

Go read.

One question:  Read more 

Much of the media and blogospheric discussion of “Bittergate” has focused on whether people really are bitter, or just pissed off. Obama and his sycophantic supporters have argued that what he said was essentially true, just inartfully phrased.

They don’t get it.

Underlying their arguments is the condescending attitude that there is something wrong with the people in the small towns of America. The OFB can’t understand why those stupid people don’t like Obama the way they do, or why rural Americans “vote against their economic interests” by voting for the GOP. They assume it must be a combination of ignorance and racism.  Read more 

Fucking torturers. And we’re all complicit. Rather, as I’m sure Arthur Silber has said or is saying — I can’t read Silber without wanting to hang myself, so I don’t — we’ve always been complicit, it’s just that Bush forced us to know that we are.  Read more 

Via Talk Left, Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY) on Barack Obama:

I’m going to tell you something: That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button. He could not make a decision in that simulation that related to a nuclear threat to this country.

Not that there is ever any excuse for calling an African American man “boy,” but in case you’re wondering this racist jackass is 49, not 79. And, yes, Geoff Davis is his real name.  Read more 

Over at The Obama 527 Formerly Known As The Kos Community, Kid Oakland — author of the world’s best Obama fluff post, on the “casual poetry” of the Obama campaign, example of such here — has gone off the deep end again. I excerpt the last portion of his bathetic screed, because it’s too, too funny:

The Clintons have no compunction about ripping the Democratic party apart and destroying the career of Barack Obama if it means they might yet win.

Oakland’s stamping his feet and threatening to hold his breath until his face turns blue because somebody dared to call bullshit on Barry. In an election campaign. The idea!

Grow up, say I.

And am I the only one who finds it odd that Oakland’s peroration gives equal weight to both “the Democratic Party” and “the career of Barack Obama”?

I mean, come on, Obama’s what, 42? His career isn’t going to be destroyed and in any case, he’ll make plenty of money from book deals and going on Oprah (if her ratings rebound from the hit she took when she endorsed him, that is.)

Grow up, Kid. Obama’s career is in no danger at all.

So what’s going on here?  Read more