So busy. And so bitchy! That’s me. I’m an evil bitch; trust me it’s true. And thus you shouldn’t ever listen to me. Still, something woke me up this morning faster than the coffee.

I’m not going to make the claim that I know this graphic to be absolutely true. But it rings true, to my mind. Via the comments in this post. Which you need to read, all the way thru. SN is spot on in this point:

Powerful forces want to keep society in its current shape. For good reason, there is not only physical capital, but the doctrine of incorporation to contend with: we become physically the shapes and habits that they live. Moses never reached the promised land, and there is a desert to cross to take this generation out of the desert and into the land of milk and honey. Either we will face a reactionary century, or a new, progressive century, there is no third choice.

I guess that’s really been my problem with HRC and BHO supporters all along. And I’ll even admit that my guy would’ve hardly been better, perhaps a little, perhaps not.  Read more 

After Hillary Clinton’s historic 41-point victory in the West Virginia primary, two questions loom: How long will Barak Obama cling to his shattered dreams of the presidency, and how much damage will be done to the Democratic Party by his stubborn and divisive refusal to accept the obvious?  Read more 

Is Obama up for the GOP hate machine? I haven’t heard him do anything to counter-punch these attacks. He’s looking more and more like Kerry.

GOP memo calling immigration a “tar baby” (Politico)

… [McCain] has standing among Hispanics. Barrack Obama has not made the sale to Hispanic voters. Thus, this issue is a tar baby for anyone who touches it, with land mines everywhere.

Prince Frederic von Anhalt, aka Prince Von A-Hole, called Barack Obama’s wife a “washerwoman.” (TMZ)  Read more 

and since politics is letting me wait in vain …

Bush opened his mouth today before the Israeli Knesset, and said this little gem:

Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.  Read more 

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And then there’s “Low Jumping” …  Read more 

Few people I know, actually do. A piss-poor description is at Wikipedia. Since it’s the most recent thing I’ve read, I’d recommend Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Had I been around in the 1850s, I’d have been a Whig with a keen eye on the new Republican Party. If I had a pony in the 1860 GOP race, I will say, probably to the amazement of the historically ignorant, that I would have been a Seward booster (can’t vouch for that link, but read some books, too!). Yeah, Lincoln was good, but I think Seward would have been better—experience and a strong ideological base are important, IMO, not to mention a kick-ass wife like Fanny.  Read more 

Gleischaltung. Because remember, no matter how hard I try, I’m never cynical enough. See Stoller’s money quote today on Obama’s consolidation of power:  Read more 

Today is May 15th,

The Universal Declaration on Human Rights

Universal Declaration of Human Rights  Read more 

Death Gap Widens Between Educated and Those Not

WEDNESDAY, May 14 (HealthDay News) — Being well-educated can lengthen your life span, according to new study.

The research, published in the May 14 issue ofPLoS ONE, shows that the gap in overall death rates between Americans with less than a high school education and college graduates increased rapidly from 1993 to 2001.

The implication here is that less well educated people don’t know how to take care of themselves. This is part of a larger PR drive for “wellness programs” which our corporate misleadership hope will subsitute for action on healthcare.  Read more 

Missed this one. Gawd:

Earlier this week, the Ninth Circuit issued a ruling in United States v. Arnold that the Fourth Amendment’s “reasonable suspicion” requirement does not apply to the search of a laptop during an international border crossing. The court rejected Arnold’s argument that a laptop should be treated similarly to a home or office for privacy purposes, holding instead that a laptop was akin to a traveler’s luggage. George Washington University Law School Professor Orin Kerr discusses the holding in more detail at the Volokh Conspiracy blog.

Yeah, my laptop bag has a handle, so it’s luggage and so is what’s in it.  Read more 

UPDATE
News Corp unit cleared of piracy in DISH suit

SANTA ANA, California (Reuters) - A federal court jury on Thursday broadly cleared News Corp’s NDS unit of satellite television piracy charges in a suit brought by DISH Network that could have been worth more than $1 billion.

The jury awarded only $1,500 in damages from NDS for a single test incident with a satellite television smart card.

Sometimes the bad guys win.

U.S. jury reaches verdict on NDS, mistrial possible  Read more 

For those unpersuaded by or dismissive of the 90 examples in Shakes’s Hillary Sexism Watch, [by Erica’s massive takedown* (via violet),] or our own less systematic efforts, try this from Marie Cocco in WaPo:

I will not miss seeing advertisements for T-shirts that bear the slogan “Bros before Hos.” The shirts depict Barack Obama (the Bro) and Hillary Clinton (the Ho) and are widely sold on the Internet.

I will not miss walking past airport concessions selling the Hillary Nutcracker

I won’t miss episodes like the one in which liberal radio personality Randi Rhodes called Clinton a “big [expletive] whore”…

I won’t miss [nice use of anaphora!] Citizens United Not Timid (no acronym, please), an anti-Clinton group founded by Republican guru Roger Stone.

I won’t miss political commentators (including National Public Radio political editor Ken Rudin and Andrew Sullivan, the columnist and blogger) who compare Clinton to the Glenn Close character in the movie “Fatal Attraction.”

The airwaves will at last be free of comments that liken Clinton to a “she-devil” (Chris Matthews on MSNBC, who helpfully supplied an on-screen mock-up of Clinton sprouting horns). Or those who offer that she’s “looking like everyone’s first wife standing outside a probate court” (Mike Barnicle, also on MSNBC).

But perhaps it is not wives who are so very problematic. Maybe it’s mothers. Because, after all, Clinton is more like “a scolding mother, talking down to a child” (Jack Cafferty on CNN).

When all other images fail, there is one other I will not miss. That is, the down-to-the-basics, simplest one: “White women are a problem, that’s — you know, we all live with that” (William Kristol of Fox News).

Most of all, I will not miss the silence.

I will not miss the deafening, depressing silence of Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean or other leading Democrats, who to my knowledge (with the exception of Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland) haven’t publicly uttered a word of outrage at the unrelenting, sex-based hate that has been hurled at a former first lady and two-term senator from New York. Among those holding their tongues are hundreds of Democrats for whom Clinton has campaigned and raised millions of dollars. Don Imus endured more public ire from the political class when he insulted the Rutgers University women’s basketball team.

Bingo. Double bingo. Triple fucking bingo. Special Bazillion-Dollar Jackpot Happy Hour Triple-Bonus Pony bingo. I do have just one nit to pick with the headline:  Read more 

Interesting article in this month’s Atlantic:

To understand how Obama’s war chest has grown so rapidly, it helps to think of his Web site as an extension of the social-networking boom that has consumed Silicon Valley over the past few years. The purpose of social networking is to connect friends and share information, its animating idea being that people will do this more readily and comfortably when the information comes to them from a friend rather than from a newspaper or expert or similarly distant authority they don’t know and trust. The success of social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and, later, professional networking sites like LinkedIn all but ensured that someday the concept would find its way into campaigning. A precursor, Meetup.com, helped supporters of Howard Dean organize gatherings during the last Democratic primary season, but compared with today’s sites, it was a blunt instrument.

The true killer app on My.BarackObama.com is the suite of fund-raising tools. You can, of course, click on a button and make a donation, or you can sign up for the subscription model, as thousands already have, and donate a little every month. You can set up your own page, establish your target number, pound your friends into submission with e-mails to pony up, and watch your personal fund-raising “thermometer” rise. “The idea,” Rospars says, “is to give them the tools and have them go out and do all this on their own.” The organizing principle behind Obama’s Web site, in other words, is the approach Mark Gorenberg used with such success—only scaled to such a degree that it has created an army of more than a million donors and raisers.

The social-networking model provided Obama with something that insurgents before him, from Gary Hart to McCain, always lacked: a means of capturing excitement and translating it into money. In the 2004 primary, Howard Dean raised $27 million online. Obama is fast approaching $200 million.

So there you go.  Read more 

Surprise! Verizon and AT&T Win Homeland Security Contracts.

Verizon Business, a unit of No. 2 U.S. telephone service provider Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N), said on Wednesday it has won a contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security worth around $678.5 million over 10 years.
… AT&T Government Solutions, a business unit of AT&T Inc (T.N), won a $292 million contract to serve as the secondary network service provider in the Eastern and Western region.

And nothing for Quest.  Read more 

KY campaign flyer via CBN:
 Read more 

Atlanta. Go read for the big picture.  Read more 

…is Listen. Listen to what people say, and not what you think or want to hear. Listen to those who present facts, instead of believing in fantasy and fiction that makes you feel fuzzy inside. Hear the voices of those who aren’t like you, who belong to groups and have “identities” different than your own. Or, you can stick your head in the sand, and pretend like Chimpy does: that your feelings influence the shape of the universe. They do, but not in any way that makes a difference.

No, this post isn’t about HRC supporters. It’s about the fucking blogosphere, which at this point, I’m really, really close to being done with, forever. Why am I so angry/depressed/bitchy? Well, partly because I’m on the rag and sick of having back pain and cramps. But also, because I’ve realized: some of our “friends” aren’t really our friends, but overly emotional, live-for-teevee stories, ’not in my backyard,’ put it off until later, “I just don’t want to think about that now,” Scarlett O’Haras. Seriously, it’s sickening. Or: I’m an idiot, for believing that “liberal” and “progressive” Americans are any different from the other kind, and have the ability to think critically, and dispassionately. Obviously (to me) a lot of us don’t.

This bitterness is the direct result of two things. A: Reading how people at the Crack Den get all excited about Edwards stumping for Obama, when they couldn’t be bothered to hear him (Edwards) when he still had a chance. As I told a friend recently, if this gay, black, extremely well-educated and politically experienced radical gets behind a Str8 Southern White Xtian male, don’t you think there are some good fucking reasons for it? The other reason I’m pissed is because no matter how fucking nice I am, how often I reign in the cursing, sex talk, or other ’coarse’ kinds of discourse, some people still can’t seem to understand: I am my own woman, my own independent person. I think for myself. I don’t let other people tell me what to think. I’m not alone; many in the blogosphere, many less popular or well known but still pretty bright people, are also thus. Try it some time, instead of letting a “liberal hero” on teevee tell you for whom you should vote, and what should make you mad.

Words do matter. Actions matter even more. You can judge people by what they do, have done, say they will do. It’s important to pay attention to all expressed words, when it comes to judging where people stand politically. If that’s too hard for you, go back to elementary school. A private one, I guess; public schools are worse than useless in terms of education these days, for the most part. But for fuck’s sake, recognize when your mind is being directed and controlled by other people, other people who have the sole mission in life to fuck you out of your time, freedoms, and money. If I critique a candidate, it’s because there is a reason. Unlike some, who seem to do so only for the thrill of pissing other people off and getting attention directed at them, like children in a sandbox with a handful of catshit. It’s pathetic and part of the reason that despite ~80% of the country feeling that “we’re on the wrong track” and “Republicans don’t have the solutions,” McCentury still has more than a fighting chance of winning this fall.

Democrats: their own worst enemies. Still, and perhaps Always. Sigh.

I posted on it last night.

Today, both Susie Madrak and Digby join the fun.

We’re ahead of the curve, folks!

[Welcome, Yglesias readers!]

AP:

Edwards was to appear with Obama in Grand Rapids, Mich., as Obama campaigns in a critical general election battleground state.

The endorsement comes the day after Clinton defeated Obama by more than 2-to-1 in West Virginia.

Both Obama and Clinton immediately asked Edwards for his endorsement, but he stayed mum for more than four months. A person close to Edwards, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he wanted to get involved now to begin unifying the party. Obama also signed on to Edwards’ poverty initiative, which was a major cause for Edwards in his campaign and since he left.

When he made his decision, Edwards didn’t even tell many of his former top advisers because he wanted to make sure that he personally talked to Clinton to give her the news, said the person close to him. Edwards’ wife, Elizabeth, who has spoken favorably about Clinton’s health care plan, did not travel with him to Michigan and is not part of the endorsement.

AP:

Edwards was to appear with Obama in Grand Rapids, Mich., as Obama campaigns in a critical general election battleground state.

The endorsement comes the day after Clinton defeated Obama by more than 2-to-1 in West Virginia.

Both Obama and Clinton immediately asked Edwards for his endorsement, but he stayed mum for more than four months. A person close to Edwards, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he wanted to get involved now to begin unifying the party. Obama also signed on to Edwards’ poverty initiative, which was a major cause for Edwards in his campaign and since he left.

When he made his decision, Edwards didn’t even tell many of his former top advisers because he wanted to make sure that he personally talked to Clinton to give her the news, said the person close to him. Edwards’ wife, Elizabeth, who has spoken favorably about Clinton’s health care plan, did not travel with him to Michigan and is not part of the endorsement.

Readers?  Read more 

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“Deval Patrick”.  Read more 

NARAL, National Abortion Rights Action League, announced that it is endorsing Obama.

Sen. Obama has said, “A woman’s ability to decide how many children to have and when, without interference from the government, is one of the most fundamental rights we possess. It is not just an issue of choice, but equality and opportunity for all women.”  Read more 

I’m doing trim; masking tape sucks.  Read more