Now we're just being plain silly.

She Who Shall Not Be Named touts her ability to build a coalition of racists as rationale for being the Democratic nominee. In so many words, of course.

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

Stunning. Comments like that are what makes me enjoy the following.

HRC = GWB

I'm sitting in my apartment right now watching the primary results on MSNBC. The exit polls reveal nothing that nobody didn't know already. African Americans and young people overwhelmingly vote for Barack Obama, while She Who Shall Not Be Named gets more white voters and older voters. She also gets more voters who do not have a college education, which isn't surprising since at this point her candidacy rests on the naivety of voters in the remaining primary states. More on this later.

The good news is the Obama has won North Carolina. I wonder how much one can attribute his victory to NC voters taking the advice of our 42d president over the weekend who asked a Sunday congregation at a Pentacostal church in Asheville to pray for his wife. Praying for her is something I wholeheartedly encourage. Voting is another matter.

My hope tonight is we can get one step closer to transcending the Bush years. I've said in this space before, if you're the kind of person who hates the way the Bush administration has ruined political discourse in this country, why in the world would you vote for the Clintons? The similarities are becoming more and more evident everyday. Let me summarize.

We've all heard enough about Obama's lunatic preacher, but guess who (like President Chimpy McDumbshit) has ties to Christian Supremacist organizations with political aspirations? Take this to the bank...

Furthermore, The Family takes credit for some of Clinton's rightward legislative tendencies, including her support for a law guaranteeing "religious freedom" in the workplace, such as for pharmacists who refuse to fill birth control prescriptions and police officers who refuse to guard abortion clinics.

Equally galling has been the Clintons' new line of attack to label people as "activists" or "elitists" - as if having an education or caring about a particular cause or having an expertise in a particular field (you know, an expertise that is acquired by working hard for an eduction). "Activists" was always said in derision by Right Wingers who railed against judges who ruled in favor of marriage equality. This is the same anti-intellectual ploy used by Rove/Bush. It's a total scam to win votes.

Here's how it works. Exploit the belief that your opponent, however educated, is out of touch with what concerns Middle America. You instead, are just an average Joe, of average intelligence, therefore you're in touch with what ails the truck driver or single mom waitress, in spite of the fact that you probably have a law degree from Yale and are the child of white aristocrats. This then drives the narrative through the media that appealing to this supposedly monolithic voting bloc know as the "working class" is what matters the most. However, driving this narrative through the media is not enough. It requires a substantial amount of pandering which cynically banks of these "working class" voters as being undereducated. The end result is getting these people to vote against their best interests, a phenomenon best explained by Thomas Frank in the book "What's The Matter With Kansas?".

A perfect example of this gambit by the Clintons' campaign (remember it's plural because they're both running) is this gas tax holiday, an idea that has Bad Idea Jeans written all over it. The way the Clintons frame it is like this: Lets lift the gas tax this summer so that "working class" voters will have a little more money to go on summer holiday. There you have it. The millionaires are the champions of the "working class". Now lets deconstruct how shitty this gas tax holiday idea is. First of all, we want to DECREASE the amount of gas people use, NOT increase it. Secondly, a gas tax holiday is not going to help any consumer because retailers our simply going to raise the price of gas as demand goes up. And unlike the tax, that price increase is going straight into the pockets of the oil companies, who last time I checked don't need help. But why listen to those "elitist economists" when you have your own people. Hasn't this country had enough of a president so arrogant as to not want to listen to expert opinion because they have "people"? Intelligence, to the likes of Bush and the Clintons, is the enemy - a strategy that would seem to be counter-productive if it wasn't for the fact that so many people eat this up. Here's one bloggers take listening to She Who Shall Not Be Named pandering about the gas tax holiday in North Carolina:

Only ordinary Americans, and, because this Clinton campaign stop was in a rural corner of the state, only small-town Americans, can be trusted to do what's right. It's sad, really. Not only is everyone else the enemy, but intelligence itself is suspect. What we need, she seemed to be saying between the lines, is someone at the top who's just a simple yokel. More of the last eight years, in other words.

Just watch how this issue is framed on the Sunday political shows.


Like Bush, She Who Shall Not Be Named is completely divorced from reality. It's really no wonder that Right Wing cheerleaders from Bill Kristol to Rush Limbaugh have spoken so effusively of the junior senator from New York. If you're among the 25% who still think our 43rd president is doing a great job, then you know who to vote for.

It also explains Hillary's reaction when exposed. She was angry because she was forced to abandon her psychic reality for external reality. For her, this was tantamount to giving up the truth in exchange for mere facts.

Die Hipsters

Oh, very very funny website. A place to mock hipsters of Brooklyn. I'm giggling about this entry.

I recently stole a Hipster PDA out of the back pocket of a hipster as he bent down to pick up his parents credit card. This was his to- do list:

- make up a fictional band name so i'll be the only one who knows about them
- force myself to like soy so megan will go out with me
- pay rent
- call mom and dad
- pay rent
- memorize coffee shop menu to impress others waiting in line
- don't wash hair
- walk around aimlessly looking like an artist
- email josh back home and tell him how great brooklyn is
- get drunk and babble about some pointless obscure book i only got 1/4 of the way through
- fill PDA with more paper

Yeah, so I have a beard and black-rimmed glasses. So what?

"Jesus Made Me Puke"

Hilarious article in the current Rolling Stone. Matt Taibbi goes undercover at a weekend Christian retreat and learns what it's like to suspend your mental facilities. The conclusion...

By the end of the weekend I realized how quaint was the mere suggestion that Christians of this type should learn to "be rational" or "set aside your religion" about such things as the Iraq War or other policy matters. Once you've made a journey like this — once you've gone this far — you are beyond suggestible. It's not merely the informational indoctrination, the constant belittling of homosexuals and atheists and Muslims and pacifists, etc., that's the issue. It's that once you've gotten to this place, you've left behind the mental process that a person would need to form an independent opinion about such things. You make this journey precisely to experience the ecstasy of beating to the same big gristly heart with a roomful of like-minded folks. Once you reach that place with them, you're thinking with muscles, not neurons.

The whole article is worth a read for the clown story alone.

I'm speechless