There was in interesting story on the BBC today with a black comedian speaking extensively about how tough it is to do Obama jokes because African Americans love him and are extremely sensitive about them.  He gave examples and talked about the challenge.
Jokes and comedians aside, my only thought coming out of this was how the new Crazier Republican Party with the teabagger thing and their nutty extremist rhetoric against Obama has surely killed any chance for a generation of any black votes.  If pretty benign jokes by a black comedian brings rage, imagine how calling the first black president a Nazi, Communist, "not American," or all of those crazy hardcore racist posters at wingnut protests must come across.  
The whole Birther thing and Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh's calling President Obama a "racist" have blown my mind (I'm Hispanic) as it has my family and friends.  Republicans who acknowledged that they have lost the Karl Rove Republcan dream for at least a generation of making any inroads into minority voters are starting to forget this since the media-created hoopla beginning in the Summer of the Teabagger.
It made me think that Democrats might not be so stupid after all for lying back getting attacked with all of this crazy extremist rhetoric.  Obama is being stoic in a Jackie Robinson sort of way, and behind all of the shouting, people see it.  I guess it really is a long term rope-a-dope strategy.

My respect for Josh Marshall took a nose dive after his confident assertion that Sonia Sotomayor would actually be the second Supreme Court appointee.  What??!!  I was taken aback and simply couldn't believe he was so cocky in his ignorance.

I found Kathleen Parker's most recent column incredibly interesting.

 

I've been fascinated and giddy, even in her glory days of the Republican Convention, at John McCain's wacky pick of Sarah Palin as his running mate.  It was clear from the outset that she was completely out of her league despite the fringe right's crazy continuing enthusiasm.

 

I'm stating the obvious.  It's been happening for a long time where the splits have become more and more evident with the disasterous Bush/Cheney years.  The 'realists' like Brent Scowcroft, Colin Powell, Jon Dean, etc. (the list goes on and on) have dropped off like flies from the extremists who have been in power.

 

To cut it short, in recent weeks as very prominent conservatives and Republicans have finally just threw up their arms in disgust as the Sarah Palin comedy show with more than a little help from lying angry guy McCain has made their party a laughing stock.  Palin has exposed the party as obsolete, devoid of ideas (non-white people) and running on the fumes of religious fundamentalists, gun freaks, greedy corporate types, overeager war mongers.

 

I think the column by conservative Kathleen Parker who joined George Will, David Brooks, Andrew Sullivan and a growing list of disgusted Republicans in telling the obvious  truth about Sarah Palin–she is not ready.  Parker has gotten loads of hate mail and wrote about it.  It comes from the fringe Hannity, Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt, Fox News crowd who John McCain bent over backwards to try to win over, even willing to give up his precious "maverick" image and probably his true ideals.  

 

John McCain is going to lose.  After the election he's going to hate himself for selling his soul to the devil.  It will be like waking up after going out on an all night drunk and finding that you slept with the ugliest, fattest most disgusting guy in the bar while all of your friends sat back and watched.  His image is forever tarnished and the John McCain of 2000 can never be resurrected.  

 

As for the Republican Party, this was bound to happen.  Bill Maher has spoken for years now about how real Republican ideals are not always so crazy but they've been hijacked by the far right.  If Richard Nixon was running today he'd be considered a flaming liberal.  It will be interesting to see if the party completely implodes.  They started going nuts after they got slaughtered in 2006 even with the Tom Delay redistricting.    Republicans are used to winning and to lose to someone like Barack Obama who has inspired a new generation of voters is going to frustrate them even more as their losses will probably continue for a long time.  

 

Sarah Palin is a dumb bell, but as much as she's going to help Obama/Biden get into the White House, she is probably going to help accelerate the Republicans inevitable civil war that's been brewing for a long time.  

I have a Rick Davis side note.  Last night I was watching the News Hour with Jim Leher, and they had a story about the financial crisis's impact on Florida voters and how it's affecting the candidates. One thing caught my attention when they played a clip from John McCain where he says that he began taking a stand against Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac two years ago.

 

"Two years ago, I warned the White House and the Congress

that Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac needed to be fixed..." blah,

blah, blah.

 

He's

a buffoon, but if he indeed had that kind of insight, then why wasn't he

leading the fight to increase oversight and for more regulation then?  To have such incredible insight as he

is implying in the clip to foresee one of the worst economic disasters in the

history of the United States, wouldn't he feel compelled to fight for nothing

else?  Shouldn't he have distanced

himself from folks like Phil Gram, the granddaddy of this disaster?  And most of all, why would he hire Rick

Davis to lead his campaign???!!!  

 

McCain

and his campaign have been lying their butts off saying that Rick Davis is no

longer lobbying for Fannie and Freddy or hasn't for ever and ever...  But, McCain looked beyond that and

hired him anyway.

 

 

On

a lighter note, the funniest political cartoon I've seen for a

while.  Maybe it's just me or that

it caught me at the right moment, but every time I look at it I break out

laughing–the first time I was almost crying.  Tom Toles is wonderful.

 

The sham "suspended campaign" political stunt by the McCain campaign which held a new shiny object in front of the gullible press may have gotten the eyes off of the Rick Davis lobbying stories for a few days, but the NYT has a new story today which will surely give them more reason's to attack the country's paper of record.  Here's the only comment from the McCain campaign in the story:

 

"Mr. McCain’s spokesman, Tucker Bounds, would not discuss the senator’s night of gambling at Foxwoods, saying: “Your paper has repeatedly attempted to insinuate impropriety on the part of Senator McCain where none exists — and it reveals that your publication is desperately willing to gamble away what little credibility it still has.”"

 

The McCain political stunt is starting to look more like a belly flop.  They tried to use it as a refibulator for the campaign as the Republican's poll numbers started to spiral and Obama's to skyrocket; to take attention off of their nightmare that is Sarah Palin while she embarrassed them in her Katie Couric CBS interview; to hopefully scrap Palin's first debate; and to try to look like he was putting "country first" and save the economy from disaster; and to take the attention off of the growing Rick Davis lobbying scandal.  

 

Reality is looking like a kick in the bottom this morning.  He was all set to spin his debate performance and how he is saving the economy, even though Mr. Keating Five is much more responsible for it, but he'll have to face the facts in that interview today as Rick Davis and his lobbyist-run presidential campaign is back in the spotlight with the Newsweek article Josh Marshall has on the TPM front page and the new NYT story.

 

Maybe they'll use up their next political stunt and rush that Palin kid's white wedding.

The Huffington Post had piece earlier this week called What's Up With John McCain's Left Eye along several links to recent comments about the possibility that there is something going on with the Republican's health because of the droop in his eye.  There have been more calls for him to release his full medical records which came to a crescendo with the hard-hitting ad, and (despite being a big fan of Robert Greenwald) I think a bit over the top, by Brave New PAC making a graphic call to McCain's cancer problems.

 

Yesterday, I had lunch with some friends where we talked almost entirely about the debate and the candidates.  My lunchmates surprised me and caught me off guard because I never really sat back and considered what they threw out there seriously.  They had noticed McCain's eye, and were convinced that he had had a stroke.  One was actually quite sad about it, and still liked McCain, despite being an Obama supporter.

 

I didn't see it, but then thought that maybe he actually is having another bout with cancer.  Now, after seeing the debate and how he was on the verge of real tears when he talked about Ted Kennedy being in the hospital, I wonder what's up.  I started thinking about Bob Novak and how I really thought he was just being a shameless jerk after his hit and run, but have a lot of sympathy for him now after reading some of his post-brain tumor columns and interviews.

 

It just made me think that maybe McCain has a secret and is carrying a bit of an emotional load.  Maybe thinking about Ted Kennedy made him consider a health problem that he's having.  

 

Now, with this thought and the possibility of Sarah Palin getting her in inexperienced feet into the door of the White House really scares the heck out of me.  It's been encouraging to see that there is a growing outpouring of conservative contempt for her and a call for her to drop out.  If McCain is sick–and I sincerely hope he isn't (I was a fan of his in 2000)–it would be a nightmare if he somehow won the election, which I think is highly unlikely, and Sarah Palin in the worst way got into the highest office.  

 

I hope I'm not coming across as a conspiracy theorist, but in the event that McCain actually is hiding a health issue and his staff and Palin know about it, her "in a Palin/McCain adminstration" and comparison of herself to Harry Truman in the last FDR adminstration would make a lot more sense.  I'm just sayin'.

I'm excited about the Joe Biden news, but hopefully a few people pay attention to the New York Times' piece on uber-rich Cindy–take my private jet please–McCain.  It touches not only on her wealth and many, many houses but her father's John McCain-like propensity to toss his first family for a new woman.
He was a young husband and father before he went off to war. Wounded in combat, he returned home a hero, but stunned his wife by divorcing her to marry another woman. The warrior in this case was not Cindy McCain’s husband, but her father, James W. Hensley.

Maybe more people will learn more about how the multi-millionaire has left her half siblings (a sister from her father's first marriage and another older half-sister who came along before that) with nothing.  There's something really nasty about that.  The Cindy McCain story of adopting the sweet little Briget McCain from Bangladesh and giving her a piece of the company is wonderful and heartwarming, but leaving her sisters and their family's out in the cold is just about the same as John McCain's leaving his first family in Newt Gingrich fashion.

Bob Herbert had a good column in today's Times.  He pointed out the obvious:  John McCain has not been fully vetted and has gotten a free pass by the folks he calls "my base," the MSM.  Along with Republican colleagues' serious concerns about his famous temper, he mentions the "bomb, bomb Iran" song and his horribly distasteful joke about Chelsea Clinton that the NYT did not reprint.  If you never heard it, here it is:

"Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? 

Because her father is Janet Reno."

McCain will probably continue to get a free pass, perhaps because his campaign is tanking.  What about that whole "How do we beat the b*tch?" question?  Really though, perhaps Dali Llama's karma will come and bite the Republican in the behind should he lose it during a debate.  What about his publicly calling his uber-rich wife Cindy the "C-word?" It's bound to happen sooner or later in grand style.  It's in his nature.

If the McCain gaffes seem endless, so do the tales about his angry, profanity-laced eruptions. Senator Thad Cochran, a Mississippi Republican, said of Mr. McCain: “The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine.”

Senator Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican, told Newsweek in 2000: “I decided I didn’t want this guy anywhere near a trigger.”

I've appreciated how TPM has been on top of the disturbing situation in Zimbabwe and the Mugabe situation.  It's actually made me much more aware of it and forced me to read more to understand it.  In today's TPM ticker story Mugabe: "How Can A Ball Point Pen Fight With A Gun?"

 

One of the first things that I've asked myself is 'where the hell is Nelson Mandela?'   Archbishop Desmond Tutu spoke out recently against Mugabe and his oppressive regime which only highlights Thabo Mbeki's silence and South Africa's permissive passivity to their unlawful thug neighbor.

 

Mandela, who is one of my heroes, actually has spoken out quite forcefully in the past when he was much more in the public eye, but his silence now when the voice of a giant is needed makes him seem like he's in line with the weak Mbeki.  

 

Much like I lost lot of my respect for Bill Clinton, a man I adored, during the Clinton/Obama fight with his injection of subtle racism, Mandela is starting to lose some of his luster.  As a Catholic, the Vatican's silence against Mugabe too has given me yet another reason to scar the church in my eyes.  Thank God for Christopher Hitchins (although, I'm sure he'd tell me to go to hell for thanking God.)  Although a week old, he penned a great story in Slate asking the same questions about Mandela, the Pope and Mugabe.

 

 

By his silence about what is happening in Zimbabwe, Mandela is making himself complicit in the pillage and murder of an entire nation, as well as the strangulation of an important African democracy...

 

It is the silence of Mandela, much more than anything else, that bruises the soul. It appears to make a mockery of all the brave talk about international standards for human rights, about the need for internationalist solidarity and the brotherhood of man, and all that. There is perhaps only one person in the world who symbolizes that spirit, and he has chosen to betray it. Or is it possible, before the grisly travesty of the runoff of June 27, that the old lion will summon one last powerful growl?..

 

As for the revolting spectacle of Mugabe flying in to a Food and Agricultural Organization conference in Rome last week, there were quibbling FAO officials who claimed that the ban on his travel to the European Union did not cover meeting places of U.N. organizations...What is it going to take before the Roman Catholic Church has anything to say about the conduct of this member of its flock? Mugabe has been a devout Catholic ever since his days in a mission school in what was then colonial Rhodesia, and one is forced to wonder what he tells his priest when he is asked if he has anything he'd like to confess.

 

http://www.slate.com/id/2193213/

No Hillary for VP. 

 

 

1.)  The Republicans are foaming at the mouth for the possibility of Clinton on the ticket to salvage their original attack plan when they thought she would be the candidate to unite Republicans and hand them a sure win.

 

2.)  She represents everything that Barack Obama represents and has campaigned against.

 

3.)  Megalomaniacs Bill and Hillary would hijack his administration.

 

4.)  That RFK assassination comment.

 

5.)  That twisted "Shame on you Barack Obama" attack.

 

6.)  Her vile injection of racism into the campaign.

 

7.)  Michelle hates her, and a happy Michelle means a happy President Obama.

 

8.)  Al Gore and what her 2000 ambitions did to give us 8 years of Bush.  (He can't stand her either).

 

9.)  She's a neo-liberal hawk like Joe Lieberman. 

 

10.)  Her vote for Iraq puts her more in line with McCain. 

 

 

11.)  Tonight's Non-concession speech. 

 

( I know that's eleven, and I'll bet you have more.   I'll be writing my Reps and Senators (hopeless since one is Feinstein to let them know:  No Hillary.  I'll follow Hillary's advice too and write into her campaign since she wants to know how I feel.)

 

I'm sure you have more to add to the list.

I find it remarkably symbolic that Hillary Clinton is "putting the chips down" in South Dakota.  If she had a goatee and a buckskin pant suit, she could just go stand at Little Big Horn in Montana for full karmic effect.  Slate.com's Hillary Deathwatch has her at 0.4 percent chance of getting the nomination.   I think General Custer had a higher chance. 
Meanwhile, TMPer Armchair Guerilla lays out terms of surrender for the former-first-lady-turned-senator which is brilliant which should be expected with such a stellar avatar. 
The anniversary of George Armstrong Custer's last stand is in June.

The New York Times has a story about our opportunity to vote for Hillary's new campaign t-shirt! Chelsea Clinton says, 

“We need your help to make a critical decision — our next official campaign T-shirt.”

You can actually vote, or make up your own slogan for what her new T-shirt slogan should be.
Meanwhile in the real world, Slate's Hillary Deathwatch has her chances of winning the nomination at 0.5%.   Their headline says it all:

CLINTON'S RFK COMMENT WON'T DO LASTING DAMAGE BECAUSE THERE'S NOT MUCH LEFT TO DAMAGE.  

Since even Hillary Clinton knows she's done, Democrats should start thinking more about McCain, Bush and the Republicans.  The stars couldn't be lined up better for Barack Obama and the Democratic Party:  Bush/Cheney are toxic; his nomination speech will land on the anniversary of MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech; the Republican hypocrites will have Larry Craig's Minneapolis Airport bathroom stall lingering over their convention; and Ron Paul's backers could do nationally in Minnesota what they did statewide in Nevada.  

Oh, Frank Rich:

"... As fate has it, the nominee’s acceptance speech is scheduled for the night of Aug. 28, exactly 45 years after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. electrified the nation with “I Have a Dream.”

The next day brings another anniversary: Mr. McCain turns 72. And then, on Sept. 1, comes the virtually all-white G.O.P. vaudeville in Minneapolis. You’ll be pleased to know the show will go on despite the fact that the convention manager, chosen by the McCain campaign, had to resign last weekend after being exposed as the chief executive of a lobbying and consulting firm hired by the military junta in Myanmar.

The conventioneers will arrive via the airport whose men’s room was immortalized by a Republican senator still serving the good people of Idaho. This will be a most picturesque backdrop to the party’s eternal platform battles over family values, from same-sex marriage to abortion.

For good measure, antiwar demonstrators from within the G.O.P. — Ron Paul devotees — could provide at least a smidgen of the 1968-style disruptions the Democrats may avoid. In April, the Nevada Republican state convention abruptly adjourned in midsession after the Paul forces won rule changes. The Los Angeles Times reported last week that other Paul cadres, operating below the national press’s radar, have also been fighting guerrilla battles “at county and state conventions from Washington and Missouri to Maine and Mississippi..."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/opinion/18rich.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin

Bill Clinton you $109 Million Dollar Man, your wife's elitist.  I know it's been posted already, but in the spirit of Bill Clinton's crazy 'Barack is elitist' spitfest in Indiana, it's appropriate to show who the elitist really is.  Hillary's obviously lost without Ms. Solis Doyle to get her coffee for her.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/02/friday-happy-hour-clinton-vs-coffee/

If you had a chance to see it, it was as clear as daylight. Mickey Kantor says to George Stephanopolis and James Carville:

Kantor: "Look at Indiana - 42-40. It doesn't matter if we win; those people are shit. How would you like to be a worthless white ni***r?"

Clinton surrogates know the seriousness of this and have bullied YouTube to remove the video with the second and most vile portion where Kantor uses the N-word and ABC's Jake Trapper to take down his story.  
Kantor even threatened Sam Stein on the Huffington Post by telling him that writing his reaction to the video was libelous.  
Several people posted here earlier and Clinton trolls are already on the defensive.