No honor among scoundrels

As is usual in political debates the kerfuffle over whether Hillary lied or "misspoke" about coming under sniper fire in Bosnia is missing the point. Making such a claim is deeply insulting to the military. It is essentially saying that the military failed to do their job of protecting Hillary while she was first lady. It is a slap in the face to the many soldiers who put themselves in the path of real bullets so that Hillary didn't have to.

Either Hillary didn't understand this or she did understand it and made those statements anyway, either deliberately or inadvertently. No matter how you slice it, her willingness to puff herself up at the expense of the military completely undermines her claim that she is better qualified to be commander-in-chief. The person who answers the now-proverbial 3 AM phone call needs to understand that falsely claiming to have come in harm's way is something you Just Don't Do. Hillary doesn't understand it. Her lame excuse of having "misspoke" shows that she still doesn't get it. She repeated the claim at least three times. That's a lot of misspeaking.

If there were even the tiniest shred of honor left in Hillary Clinton, this would be the end of her campaign. She has undermined her last frantic argument for having the superdelegates override the will of the voters and give her the nomination. But of course this will not be the end of her campaign. Because Hillary, like George Bush, knows nothing of honor, cares nothing for democracy or the party or even the country. It's all about Hillary. It's all about winning no matter what the cost. By any means necessary.

I've been an Obama supporter since the beginning, but up until a few months ago I would have been happy with either one of them. No more. I swear to God, if Hillary somehow manages to twist enough arms to get the nomination, I'm voting for John McCain.

Worried about the economy? It’s the war, stupid.

“When you’re spending over $50 to fill up your car because the price of oil is four times what it was before Iraq, you’re paying a price for this war. When Iraq is costing each household about $100 a month, you’re paying a price for this war…”

“And the price our families and communities are paying reflects the price America is paying. The most conservative estimates say that Iraq has now cost more than half a trillion dollars, more than any other war in our history besides World War II. Some say the true cost is even higher and that by the time it’s over, this could be a $3 trillion war…”- excerpts from a speech by Barack Obama on the war.

Finally, a politician is speaking the truth about why our economy is in a tailspin. With oil costing $100 a barrel, we are experiencing the double whammy of both the budgeted cost of the Iraq invasion and the hidden cost of energy price increases in every thing we buy, including necessities such as food and electricity. It is not very complicated. When folks need to spend more on necessities, they spend less at the mall and save less.

It’s the war, stupid.

Listen to what each candidate says about the major issues

Here's an easy way to hear for yourself where the presidential candidates stand on key issues: ExpertVoter.org. This site consists of a grid with candidates on the y-axis and issues on the x-axis. When you click on a square, you'll see a short video of that candidate speaking on that issue.

I've never even heard of some of these candidates. Too bad for them.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

While the news media has a sex scandal as its top story no one seems to be noticing that the U.S. economy is quietly coming apart at the seams.

Extra! Extra! Democrats grow a spine!

Not just a spine, but a brain too! Will wonders never cease?

Keith Olbermann takes Hillary to the woodshed

For a well deserved spanking. It's ten minutes long, and like most of Olbermann's special comments worth every second.

Should we throw money at the schools? No!

Kathy writes:


Want to provoke me? Then say this, "Throwing money at the schools won't fix them."


OK, I'll bite: throwing money at the schools won't fix them.


If that's true, then
Why do some people pay $25K a year for their kid to attend private school?


Because some people have more money than sense. The LCF public schools are a prime example. They spend less than $7k per child. Does a $25k private school provide an education that is three times better?

Education depends far less on money than it does on a student's willingness to learn and a teacher's ability to teach. To the extent that private schools are better than public schools (and certainly in many cases they are) it is less because they have more money and more because they can afford to be selective about their students and teachers. Private schools can fire incompetent teachers and expel disruptive students. Public schools can't. And one of the reasons they can't is (watch me torpedo any I hope I ever had of a political career in California) the teacher's union and their intransigent tenure policies.

(Since I'm an equal-opportunity basher, I'll also call out the no-child-left-behind law as a major contributor to the disaster that is our public schools. We need to be teaching our kids how to think, not how to game standardized tests. Life doesn't have an answer key.)

Money may be part of the solution, but it is only one component of what has to be a more comprehensive set of reforms. Absent those, throwing money at the problem is not likely to accomplish much.

Retroactive immunity: Victory! (Again!)

Well, the Dems somehow found their spine (again) and refused to pass retroactive immunity.


Locked in a standoff with the White House, House Democrats on Tuesday maintained their refusal to shield from civil lawsuits telecommunications companies that helped the government eavesdrop on their customers without a secret court's permission.


So for now the hope remains alive of some day uncovering the full extent of the Bush administration's lawbreaking.

Should we throw money at the schools? Yes!

Want to provoke me? Then say this,

"Throwing money at the schools won't fix them."

If that's true, then

• Why do some people pay $25K a year for their kid to attend private school?


• How would we pay the teachers required to reduce our class sizes down from 31 per class in the high school?


• How would our school district pay for art, music, drama, counselors, librarians, computers and more if parents didn't generously donate to PTA, Boosters, the Educational Foundation and more?

My husband and I recently attended the LCF Educational Foundation fundraiser. It was great to see old friends, make new ones, and raise loads of money for the schools. Our community's lucky that it can supplement the meager money it gets from the state. Even with what the parents chip in, our district spends $6,875 per child. Unfortunately, the Pasadena Star News says that the state budget shortfall is expected to shrink our school district's budget by about $2 million, or 6% of the total. That'll be tough to do without impacting classrooms.

I recently sat on a panel with a member of the Westport, CT school board. He told the audience that his district was getting SmartBoards into the classroom. I laughed, as there's no way we'd have money for that. I looked their district up on GreatSchools.net, and their high school spends $15,610 per pupil. It's no wonder they have one teacher per 10 kids.

We only dream of such things in California...California dreaming, on such a winter's day...

Clinton campaign resorts to theft

The Clinton campaign has become so desperate for money that they are stealing from their supporters (now former supporters).

Delegate Count Swings Back and Forth Over Time

On Tuesday, the state of California released the official totals from its Feb. 5 primary, which was won quite handily by Sen. Hillary Clinton. David Draten, a blogger at Calistics, does a district by district breakdown of the vote using the final tallies and the delegate selection rules from the California Democratic Party. He finds that the final delegate total was 203 for Clinton to 167 for Obama.
But the original election night numbers were 207 for Senator Clinton and 163 for Senator Obama - which is still the reading in delegate counts at most media sites. (Drayton points out, correctly, that many media sites are still using the wrong vote totals to calculate the delegates - he used the official results from the state of California.)
If his numbers are correct, that would be an eight vote swing for Obama in a race where every delegate counts. But there may be states whose final totals will give delegates to Clinton. (Texas, for instance, won't know what its final pledged delegates total is until final state caucus meetings are held in June.)
It only shows that we may not have a clear idea of what the pledged delegate total is until well into the summer. The links are to the newly reported supplemental vote totals and must be added to the previously reported totals to get an accurate vote count for each candidate.

Saturday night and Sunday morning in our little town

Recently, my wife and I sat down with our four year old sons to watch a DVD of a recent Hollywood blockbuster. Five minutes into the film, an 80-year-old woman who is watching TV hears a noise and quickly turns to face a prowler. She picks up a double-barreled shotgun with a box of cartridges and blasts away Rambo style. When she runs out of shells, she gets a welder’s torch to burn the intruder into a marshmallow. One of my sons had the good sense to become frightened, so we switched to an episode of Thomas the Train that we have seen maybe 100 times.

Last week, the FCC proposed a $1,400,000 fine for ABC and its affiliates for a brief glimpse of a woman’s bottom in a 2003 episode of NYPD Blue. What does it say about us as a country when brief nudity or foul language generates letters by the thousands and resulting FCC action, while there is not a peep over grisly violence in films and on TV? On an offensive scale of one to ten (a topless Lou Dobbs on CNN being a ten) was a nanosecond of Janet Jackson’s nipple at the 2004 Super Bowl really worth more than a two at most? Was it really more offensive than any scene in CSI, CSI Miami, CSI Newark, Cleveland, etc.? Why is it that Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" is forever burned into our public consciousness? Meanwhile the score of that game has long been forgotten. Football is our true national sport despite Major League Baseball's pretense. And when Keith Jackson or John Madden use phrases such as “aerial bombardment” and “a ferocious defense destroyed their ground attack” to many, it is a bigger turn on than anyone's nipple.

Meanwhile, the violence in Iraq has been filtered and sanitized by network news ever since the first shock and awe. We have been shielded from images of the resulting death and destruction while the rest of the world has seen it in living red. There is a reason they feel differently about us than we do about ourselves.

The next morning, I went to Memorial Park with my sons. On the main field were maybe 30 boys and girls ages 6 to 10 playing with what looked like assault rifles. Adult instructors were giving the little Brandons and Ashleys expert instructions on military maneuvers at a paint gun party. Hopefully there will be more to their future. Oh, and the movie my family sat down to watch … RATATOUILLE. It’s the G-rated Disney flick that just won the Oscar for best-animated movie.

Maybe we can stop gun violence by banning holsters too

The city of Chicago is trying to fight drugs by banning plastic baggies:


Tiny plastic bags used to sell small quantities of heroin, crack cocaine, marijuana and other drugs would be banned in Chicago, under a crackdown advanced Tuesday by a City Council committee.


If it weren't the Sun-Times reporting it I'd swear this was a pitch for a Saturday Night Live skit.

Another Dreier "town hall meeting"

I got another one of those "town hall meeting" calls from David Dreier today, and this time I managed to record most of it (MP3 audio is here). It took me a little while to set up the recorder, so the recording about two minutes in to the call, but the way it cuts in to the middle of the conversation accurately reflects reality. The quality is rough because the recording was made by holding an iMic up to a speakerphone.

I was hoping that the content of the call would be the same as the last one thereby providing smoking-gun evidence that this was not in fact a live teleconference, but no such luck. It still sounded pretty transparently scripted to me, but I could be wrong. But take a listen and judge for yourself.

I'm ashamed to call myself a Democrat

I can barely contain my disgust. The Democrats are a bunch of spineless wimps (and if this were my blog I would use stronger language).

John McCain's Lacking Environmental Policies

In the environmental issues section of Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign website, a quote proudly proclaims that “As John McCain said ‘Americans solve problems. We don’t run from them.’” A great quote, forceful and emphatic; it declares that Senator McCain is a man of resolve in the ongoing environmental crisis. Yet it is completely deceiving. If McCain has done anything in this ecological fight, it has been to run, quietly but consistently, away from any type of decisive action.
Recently, the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), a politically independent group which monitors the environmental voting records for different candidates, released the National Environmental Scorecard. This scorecard monitored the voting records of Senators and Representatives on fifteen crucial environmental legislations. In the rating of this scorecard, John McCain received an astoundingly dismal score of zero. McCain was the only member of Congress to skip every single vote on the environmental issues scored by the LCV! He has run away from making a decision, pro or con, on each important piece of environmental legislation in the 110th Congress.
The implications of this scorecard are enormous. As a presidential candidate, McCain has the responsibility of making his positions clear to the public. If, as Senator, McCain has not voted for any piece of environmental legislation, be it on water resources, oil refineries, drilling offshore or on renewable energy, how will voters discern what positions he will take as President? John McCain may say that he backs limiting carbon emissions, or sustaining the American National Park system, but his record lacks support for this claim. The truth must be known about McCain- he has run from every opportunity to make a difference at a time when the environmental crisis is necessitating significant change. We need a president who will work to solve these problems, and McCain is not that man.
As two seventeen-year olds, we won’t even be able to vote in the upcoming presidential election. But this is our future. Choices that will be made by voters in this election will affect us not only in the next four years, but for many years to come. We are concerned that people don’t know how John McCain might shape the environment and the world.
-Anna Applebaum and Milly BeeBee

New Barack Obama video

There's a new will.i.am pro-Barack Obama video out:



It's called "We Are The Ones" and features Jessica Alba, George Lopez, Luis Guzman, Ryan Phillippe, John Leguizamo, Kate del Castillo, Malcolm Jamal Warner and Macy Gray.