Via Pacific John:

Ruling favors Latino voters in Texas Democrat suit
AP

By PAUL J. WEBER, Associated Press Writer Paul J. Weber, Associated Press Writer - Tue Aug 25, 4:18 pm ET

SAN ANTONIO - Latino voters [sic] celebrated a federal court ruling Tuesday that came down against the Texas Democratic Party and could put the complicated "Texas Two-step" presidential delegate system in jeopardy.

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I've seen people talking around some kind of "outburst" and had been too busy with RL to know what it was about.

She didn't like being asked what her husband's opinion was, rather than her own. That's it?

Actually, by checking out the YouTube threads, one sees that there were troubling, substantive issues with her approach.

One thread, among countless similar ones, informs us thusly...

what a fat horse, what a fat bitch a royal bitch

bitch so rude

guys guys she was just on that time of the month

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How Johnson did it.

Via Helen Thomas

I covered the battle to create the Medicare system back in the 1960s. The cries of "socialized medicine" worked for years until President Lyndon B. Johnson rammed Medicare through Congress in 1965.

Johnson signed the Medicare legislation on former President Harry Truman’s desk in Independence, Mo. Truman had first proposed a health care program for the elderly back in the 1950s.

Truman, still feisty at age 81, was all smiles.

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Granholm will be at the White House tomorrow and the hopeful word in some feminist circles is that she might be there for the announcement that she is being nominated to the United States Supreme Court. If this is the case, I think Democrats have very good reasons to oppose her appointment.

I thought we all could use some words of encouragement this morning:

Embedded video from CNN Video

Update:

Don't forget this and this and this and, of course, this.

Aux blogs, citoyens!

If the door breaks, nobody out here can afford to get it fixed.

Hilarious.

Read the whole post, which details why the behavior of Caroline Kennedy has only resulted in her shooting herself in the foot--repeatedly. And why Governor Patterson isn't as boxed in as others think:

[I think I'm going to leave this sticky for a bit. The picture doesn't get any less wrong with time, and -- yes, I know this will surprise you -- the A-list just doesn't seem to be covering it. Susie did, though. --lambert]

Nothing, silly! Sure, Hillary Clinton may have been the first serious woman presidential candidate but that doesn't mean Jon Favreau, Obama speechwriter, mocking her gender (grope!) means anything. No, it's just "harmless fun" (read: misogynistic bigotry is fine by us!).

In the Washington Post, Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac put forth this suggestion:

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The Guardian's Ewen MacAskill:

Hillary Clinton to accept Obama's offer of secretary of state job

Hillary Clinton plans to accept the job of secretary of state offered by Barack Obama, who is reaching out to former rivals to build a broad coalition administration, the Guardian has learned.

Obama's advisers have begun looking into Bill Clinton's foundation, which distributes millions of dollars to Africa to help with development, to ensure that there is no conflict of interest. But Democrats do not believe that the vetting is likely to be a problem.

Take "the Guardian has learned" for what it's worth...

Oh wait:

Today's New York Times: Soldiering On, Clinton Preserves Her Options

[S]he has been steadily raising money for her political action committee, which advisers say could become a means to champion women’s issues.

Mrs. Clinton won about 17 million votes in her presidential primary campaign, and by all accounts she will emerge on Election Day as a respected force in the eyes of not only her allies but also of people around Mr. Obama, for whom she has raised several million dollars and done more than 75 rallies, fund-raisers, conference calls and other tasks.

...

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[For more on HOLC, also supported by Nouriel Roubini, who has correctly called the shots on this Clusterfuck over and over again, see here.]

[UPDATE HOLC is also a Gen-X/Gen-Y play, did they but know it. Via new homeowner Atrios.]

Speaking of "principles":

[HILLARY: T]here are several principles that must be part of a broader reform effort that begins this week and continues in the coming months.

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[I'm leaving this sticky because I think it's still the litmus test, and because of the impassioned comment thread. --lambert]

Here's a litmus test for whatever Congress comes up with as they huddle with the finance boiz over the weekend: HOLC good, RTC/RFC bad.

I may not understand this class warfare finance stuff, but I can sure quote people who do! Nouriel Roubini:

The most important policy action ... is rather the realization that a generalized debt and solvency problem required a solution that leads to significant debt reduction.

Let me explain in detail how we now need bold policy action to resolve this most severe financial and economic crisis…

Households in the US have too much debt (subprime, near prime, prime mortgages, home equity loans, credit cards, auto loans and student loans) while their assets (values of their homes and stocks) are plunging leading to a sharp fall in their net worth. And households are getting buried under this mountain of mounting debt and rising debt servicing burdens. Thus, a fraction of the household sector – as well as a fraction of the financial sector and a fraction of the corporate sector and of the local government sector – is insolvent and needs debt relief.

When a country (say Russia, Ecuador or Argentina) has too much debt and is insolvent it defaults and gets debt reduction and is then able to resume fast growth; when a firm is distressed with excessive debt it goes into bankruptcy court and gets debt relief that allows it to resume investment, production and growth; when a household is financially distressed it also needs debt relief to be able to have more discretionary income to spend. So any unsustainable debt problem requires debt reduction. The lack of debt relief to the distressed households is the reason why this financial crisis is becoming more severe and the economic recession - with a sharp fall now in real consumption spending – now worsening. The fiscal actions taken so far (income relief to households via tax rebates) and bailouts of distressed financial institutions (Bear Stearns creditors’ bailout, Fannie and Freddie and AIG) do not resolve the fundamental debt problem for two reasons. First, you cannot grow yourself out of a debt problem: when debt to disposable income is too high increasing the denominator with tax rebates is ineffective and only temporary; i.e. you need to reduce the nominator (the debt). Second, rescuing distressed institutions without reducing the debt problem of the borrowers does not resolve the fundamental insolvency of the debtor that limits its ability to consume and spend and thus drags the economy into a more severe economic contraction.

So of the five possible uses of fiscal policy – income relief to households (the 2008 tax rebate), rescue/bailout of financial institutions (Bears Stearns, Fannie and Freddie, AIG), purchase of assets of failed institutions (an RTC-like institution), recapitalization of undercapitalized financial institutions (an RFC-like institution), government purchase of distressed mortgages to provide debt relief to households (an HOLC-like institution) – the last option is the most important and effective to resolve this severe financial and economic crisis. During the Great Depression the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation was create to buy mortgages from bank at a discount price, reduce further the face value of such mortgages and refinance distressed homeowners into new mortgages with lower face value and lower fixed rate mortgage rates. This massive program allowed millions of households to avoid losing their homes and ending up in foreclosure. The HOLC bought mortgages for two year and managed such assets for 18 year at a relatively low fiscal cost (as the assets were bought at a discount and reducing the face value of the mortgages allowed home owners to avoid defaulting on the refinanced mortgages). A new HOLC will be the macro equivalent of creating a large “bad bank” where the bad assets of financial institutions are taken off their balance sheets and restructured/reduced; thus it will be the macro equivalent of the “bad bank” that Lehman tried to create for its bad assets.

Creating a new HOLC mechanism is likely to be more effective than creating a new RTC (whose purpose was to buy and dispose over a number of years of the assets of already failed S&Ls): we need to provide debt reduction to households well before hundreds of banks failed as working out the bad assets only after banks have failed is costly.

Bottom line: Households first, then the banks (which, in the end, turns out to be better for the banks, too).

And HOLC, while Obama is still waiting for word from his finance guys to scroll up on his teleprompter, is the solution Hillary has already advocated:

Nice metaphor for Wall Street's Clusterfuck:

This situation reminds me of that old fable, where people are standing by the side of a river and they keep seeing babies being rushed down the river in the current and they desperately reach out trying to save as many babies as possible. Day after day they're reaching out. They get new tools, they build a bridge, they get a ladder, they're constantly trying to get to those babies. They're hoping that they can save as many, until finally somebody walks up and says, “Who's throwing them in? Go upriver, find out what the real problem is and stop that!”

That would be leadership:

This is the greatest market upheaval since the Great Depression. We are, indeed, in a crisis, and in times of crisis there are opportunities for leadership. Congress could show the American people that leadership working with the President by embracing this bold proposal.

And a concrete policy proposal, at least for homeowners:

Unfuckingbelievable.

(via the Make Them Accountable e-mail newsletter)

Last night, Hillary Clinton gave a pitch for the ages.

How good was it? A tribute to her is now far and away the highest-rated post on Democratic Underground, a site full of dedicated lefties who until yesterday were keenly aware that she was an entitled, Rovian, racist, assassin-witch who was bent on destroying her party. On msnbc, the speech sent tingles almost visibly up the Obama-lovin' / Hillary-hatin' legs of Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and Rachel Maddow.

Thou shalt not break Obamawin's Law:

No lessons shall be learned (or even considered) from the mistreatment Hillary Clinton received and/or the uncritical treatment Barack Obama received during the 2008 primaries.

The only acceptable reason to revisit this year's Democratic primaries is for something constructive, like shaming Hillary for not taking evil advice that wasn't offered to her by her campaign director.

Joshua Green explains how running an increasingly effective campaign proves that Hillary sux.

"...Hillary Clinton’s epic collapse in the Democratic primaries..."

What epic collapse? Millions of anybody-but-Hillary voters like yours truly rallied around her campaign. When it started, how many people did you know who were enthusiastic about her? How about when the primaries ended?

"...the candidate herself evinced a paralyzing schizophrenia"

Since the media is now in the business of free psychological diagnoses, did they offer her intra- and inter-party opponents one? Say, Narcissistic Personality Disorder and sociopathy?

None.

Similarly, if Clinton had won by a narrow margin, she would have had no excuse to bypass a historic candidate like Obama.

Obama should ask Hillary Rodham Clinton as his top pick for VP. The reasons are so legion, so obvious, there’s no need to enumerate them further. They can be summarized as uniting, winning, and governing, with the justice of recognizing the first major woman Presidential candidate in U.S. history, highly qualified and supported by half of Democrats.

From Politico this evening:

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Riverdaughter's post today is a hilarious must-read.

Don't know about you guys, but I'm fine with feminist women using stereotype-based humor like this; some of you may disagree. Similarly, I give far more latitude to men, GLBTs, ethnic, racial and religious groups to satirize their own groups. I freely state I'd be pissed to read something similar on Olbermann's blog. Riverdaughter's earned the right to speak so; KO hasn't. Simple. The whines I often hear about this "double standard" seem either disingenuous or humanity-bereft; I'm never sure which it is.

The US Senate’s Ladies Auxilliary met on Tuesday to discuss women’s issues... [and] finished with a demonstration on scrapbooking campaign memorabilia.

In attendance were Senators Diane Feinstein (CA), Barbara Mikulski (MD), Amy Klobuchar (MN) and Barbara Boxer (CA).

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After the health care meeting, I came upon a group of three middle-aged women. One was holding some Obama literature and saying, "Actually, I'm having a lot of trouble getting over this." I stopped and listened and joined in. All were Hillarians, still quite sore from the primary fight. I said something about the "orgy of hate." One of them said yes, and it wasn't just from the Obama people. She described how the Jim Lehrer show came to the local public TV station to do a piece on the primary. And (1) everyone in the discussion was male, and (2) every time the Hillary guy (a local county official) started to talk, the others interrupted him and talked over him and generally kept him from making his point. Six weeks later, she's still furious.

Apparently, it's Sally Quinn!

Ghastly beyond words.

Awhile ago Lambert welcomed knitters from Ravelry, more specifically coming from the Just Hillary group. (Though he didn't know that.) He said he wished we posted about knitting. So I am posting about knitting and our lovely group, but there are lots of pretty pictures.

Here's my (almost finished) latest project:

This is the back piece.

How many times can men say that Clinton needed to do what they wanted her to do?

Hillary Clinton didn't need to do anything -- she chose to get behind Barack Obama, which is what she was expected to do.

18 million people cast their primary ballot for Hillary Clinton -- she didn't need to do anything to remain a potent force in the Democratic Party. She could have, had she chosen to, told Barack Obama "it ain't over 'til its over, I'm still the better choice, I've still got more experience, I've still got better ideas, and I'm still far more electable than you -- and superdelegates have nearly three months to figure that out."

But we are now going to be told ...

• Obama's campaign was far more divisive than Hillary's
• Obama's campaign was far dirtier than Hillary's
• Obama's campaign was far more dishonest than Hillary's
• Obama's campaign was far less progressive than Hillary's
• Obama's campaign was far more leveraged on party insiders than Hillary's
• Obama's supporters drank far more Kool-Aid than Hillary's
• Obama's supporters drove Hillary supporters from virtually every blog, and not the other way around

Don't bullshit me. I'm not in the mood.

In fact, I'm never in the mood. Which is why I voted for Hillary.

And why I'm struggling about whether I can vote for Obama.