More importantly, when did you come to the conclusion that a kilted, bagpipe-playing picture of yourself is an appropriate avatar?

May I also humbly suggest that you not juxtapose said avatar against a phrase like "a few penséss that have come to mind", exposing careless readers such as myself to rather unfortunate mental images.

Dude,
Lets play some tunes sometime.

Sorry I'm not more articulate right now. Music's claimed a much bigger chunk of my brain than politics has lately.

Language has also been shoved out of my skull, obviously.

Hey Greg, another off-thread comment. Any thought about hosting friends for the June 14th TPMaholics fundraiser? Are you on my.barackobama.com?

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/04/tpmcentered-obama-fundraiser-w.php

Carol, Slouch, Ben, same question to you. (I'm not sure whether everyone saw the post, so we've been taking recruitment to people we know in the threads.)

It wouldn't have to be a big soiree. Even a few guests can make a house party.

I'll submit that Liberals should sit on the sidelines and let us DLC types win an Election. Your ability to do that has been very spotty...in fact non existent in the history of the republic. Seen and not heard...is a good axiom.

BTW - nobody said the Teamsters weren't salt of the earth folks but when they decided to support Reagan back in the day....think that told most folks that they weren't democrats.

BTW, that's one of the best blog titles I've read this season.

Is that Absurdistani bagpipe music I'm hearing, or is it Hillary on O'Reilly?

Yes, the Clinton campaign's Republican-ish distain for liberals, whose latte-sipping, Prius-driving ways are ostensibly hostile to the political interests of working Americans. Whereas Republican tax cuts for the wealthy, with spending cuts for the rest of us, are supposed to be just fine for the common man.

You'd think, though, that suppressing the African-American vote would make a hell of a lot more sense for a Republican than for a Democrat. (Can ya see the steam coming out my ears after I read the WVWV vote-suppression story this morning?) What the hell is the Clinton campaign thinking? The Democratic party has a tragic tendency to shoot itself in the foot, but this is the first time I've seen a Democratic candidate do it on purpose.

1. Actually, my teacher back in high school who was in charge of the Young Democrats used to use it jokingly.

The two-party system in this country does not fit the real battle being fought. The real battle is a class battle. The poor and middle-class, who have less, battling the rich, who have more. This election is all about this class battle. Obama is the leading poor and middle-class candidate. He speaks logically, and is the closest thinker you will get to the average person. With Hillary Clinton America will get a greater defender of the rich than Obama. Clinton's pockets are full of big business and Wall Street. McCain, following in Bush's footsteps, would be the worst candidate keeping in mind the class battle. He wants to make the tax cuts for the super rich permenant. That's all I need to know to not vote for him.

During the Bush years this country has been hi-jacked and bankrupted by those in power (or at least they let it happen). The next president must reverse the 8 years of neglect the average middle-class citizen has endured. It is not that bad now, but wait until the extra money you have saved starts to dwindle because of rising energy, food, etc. prices. It will not happen overnight, but in six months or so the results will devastate. So, do not be fooled by the false two-party distraction that our media and government propagate!! It is all about class. The people with less money versus those with lots more money. And there are more people in this country in the later category.

Musings but not assertions:

It appears to me that it would be impossible for Hillary to defeat John McCain because of how she configured her nomination campaign strategy.

She started her campaign with the assumption that the liberal wing of the party was captive to her, and that she did not have to cater to it in order to gain the nomination. That freed her up to run a right of center primary season effort. She is still doing so, with her Shot and a Beer, and her Duck shooting, and Sniper defying pandering.

Hillary did not foresee the rise of Senator Obama, and especially his huge support among progressives. She had calculated that he would draw strong support from the African American community, as did Rev. Jackson, but she could afford to ignore that, since she could count on them to support her in the general election.

Then Iowa changed everything. Senator Obama won in a state with scarcely any African American voters.
Hillay had lost a large portion of progressive white voters to Senator Obama.

Hillary had painted herself into a corner. She had to rely on right of center voters to bail her out. She can not move back to the left during the remainder of the nomination campaign.

That means, should Hillary get the nomination, she does not have either the African American or the progressive base of the party safely locked up which would allow her to run as a centrist during the general election.

She would have to cater to progressives, in general, and the African American community in order to try and win back their support. That would leave her unable to run in the middle, and that would cost her the support of most Independents, and would make her easy picking for the Republicans to paint as being out of the mainstream.

In a Nutshell:

What Hillary did, was try to run her general election campaign during the primary season, instead of courting the progressive base of the party, and then running as a moderate in the general campaign. That fatal mistake has made her completely unelectable in November.
If she tried to continue to run to the right of center, the progressive base will stayed alienated from her, but if she moves back to the left, McCain would be able to run as a centrist, and Hillary would get massacred.

Just my musing on where I think Hillary made a fatal mistake at the outset, which reflects very poorly on her leadership talent level.

What do you folks think about my analysis of the situation?