Bodicea Brutusina Clinton, the high-profile Bosnian War heroine and Democratic Party presidential nominee hopeful, has personally discovered the secret of eternal life.
As a consequence, Mrs. Clinton has opted to run her campaign on Geological Time. The “True Grit” political performer will launch her Whitewater Mist Youth Dew before the Penn Primaries in a bid to “self-fund” her flagging campaign coffers, thereby courageously “raising her bar of beholden-ness” for potential Beltway donors and clarifying her “transparency index”.

What I find interesting is that the states where Obama has done best are mostly solid Red states which a Dem presidential candidate will never win no matter how passionate local Dems are about one candidate over the other (cue also speculation that a lot of his wins have been swung by Repubs voting to “spoil” the Dem primaries because they think Obama will be easier for the GOP to beat).

Clinton has done best in the states which are traditional Dem states in presidential elections and in potential swing states i.e. the states that the Dems actually need to win in order to take the White House.

To my eyes that makes Clinton the candidate more likely to beat McCain in November.

so I ask, j_p_z, have you ever watched The Wire?

in cities throughout America, in the wake of the ‘white flight’ that followed the tumultuous events of 1968, to choose one example, African Americans have been confined and relegated to the periphery in physical, geographical, political and economic ways that give the bloody great lie to the notion of a “developed world.”

Eastern cities like Baltimore (where The Wire is set), Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, etc, contain ghettoes of unimaginable poverty. a young black man in America living in these neighbourhoods has only one choice: deal drugs, run with a drug crew, live hard and die young. in terms of rational choice, it beats working for a minimum McWage. the murder-rates for the ‘hoods i speak of is astronomical, yet it garners little press, much less political action.

school-age children are ‘educated’ in an ailing public system that regularly fails them, and in any case it’s only a matter of time before they’re out on the corner, slinging crack or heroin.

that’s all i’ll say on the matter of “race relations” in America.

except perhaps one more thing – whatever Obama’s weaknesses, foibles, etc, he is a genuine phenomenon, and definitely not something the States has seen before. I’m with him – just because.

i’ll close with a similar statement to your own qualification – i don’t mean this to sound harsh, i’m not looking for a fight – i just felt i had to bring it up, because the situation i’m describing bothers me, and i often wonder if Australians are aware of how dire it is in the U.S. and sorry about the lack of spaces between paragraphs – i don’t know how to do that.

For! I meant “for” not “or’. Who designs these keyboards anyway? Sober midgets?

Oprah/Letterman…

…or Oprah/Leno.

Oh what the hell, just replace Diebold with Endemol and put the whole thing on a professional showbiz footing. ‘Big Brother Survivor Presidential Idol’. At least the candidates would have some decent writers and props people or a change.

Readers have been asking about why the Texas caucus results from last night have been so slow coming in. As of this moment, only 39 percent of the caucus precincts are reporting.

Eric Kleefeld called down to Texas, and the Democratic Party tells him, in so many words, that the caucus reporting was voluntary.

Precincts were not required to report results to the state party, but they set up a voluntary reporting system so that the media would have results to report. Nice of them, no?

Shakes head.

Amid the uncertainty, Clinton acknowledged the prospect the two might wind up on the same ticket as presidential and vice presidential candidates.

“Well, that may be where this is headed, but we have to decide who is on the top of the ticket,” Clinton, who usually dodges the topic when asked, said on The Early Show on CBS.

Clinton and Obama both said later it was “premature” to discuss a joint ticket.

Interesting that Clinton is the one saying it. Also interesting to rack up a count of former VPs who sent on to become Prez. It’s a well-lubricated passage.

“As I’ve said before, what I want most (and what I think is needed most) is a genuinely boring president, but none of these jokers fits the bill.”

So, if the Democratic National Committee were to agree with you on the requirement for 4 boring years, is it politically possible for them to draft the Nobel Prize winning Al Gore??… With Obama as VP candidate and Hillary to be put in charge of a revamped White House intern program

The exception is this: “there’[d be] a ton of spoken and unspoken racial resentment…”

That isn’t really true, I don’t think, upon reflection; or maybe, it’d be partly true, within circles that get smaller and smaller all the time. This is just one reporter’s opinion, but personally I feel that ‘race relations’ in America (by which I mean primarily black/white relations) are steadily and consistently improving, and have been for many years now. The very vitality of Obama’s candidacy has doubtless contributed to that, but it certainly can’t claim credit — this process of improvement has I feel been underway for quite a long time (for reasons that take too long to explain, and anyway, it’s just a personal impression, could be very different thru other eyes). I think overall that zany flareups like the Jena nonsense are the spastic flailings of an ever-dying source-code of racial bitterness. There’ll be some sporadic continued troubles in the future, to be sure, but fewer and fewer of them as time goes on, I feel. Don’t ask me why (I could tell you, of course, but it would take a month), and again someone in another region or in other circumstances might strongly disagree; but still, I felt the need to correct the impression I left previously.

Hillary has run a positively tone-deaf and politically incompetent campaign, and I think that says far more about her credentials than all the waving around of her questionable CV she can do. She has run a reactive and unimaginative campaign that conceptually follows Obama’s lead and responds meekly to an agenda set by him, and I think that alone disqualifies her to be president, much as the Dems disqualified their entire side in 2000 and 2004 on strict Darwinian grounds: their opponent was a shady, semi-literate ventriloquist’s dummy and everybody knew it, and they still couldn’t figure out how to beat him. And then they didn’t sit down and learn a good lesson about it afterwards.

Hillary simply does not look or sound presidential. She changes her tone and image to suit perceived marketing demands — and that is supposed to make voters deposit high trust in her candidacy? Bill Clinton could actually get away with being a sort of charming slippery chameleon because, ironically, that is truthfully what he really was, so he was really being himself when he did it, and I think voters could smell that authenticity about him, for good or ill. But Hillary Clinton, deep into a years-long (or maybe life-long) campaign strategy, said in public only a few weeks ago (!!) that she felt she had finally “found her voice”. Well, certainly good timing to find it before she takes the oath of office! Perhaps if she were a truly serious person, she might have put off running for president until *after* making this momentous discovery. Why is it we should give her the job, again? Because we owe her something? Or her husband? Or both of them? Or because there’s nobody else available? What?

(btw, following this logic, I wonder what a Michelle Obama run for the White House will look like in 8 or 12 years. At least we won’t worry about unemployment, because she will “require us to work”!)

If it’s down to McCain vs. Obama, I think there’s a decent chance that the voters will just subconsciously say, You know what, forget the issues, it’s pretty much always better to have a young optimistic guy than a glowering old guy, and then it’ll be Obama in a landslide. One way or another, the toxic Bush presidency needs to be not only defeated but exorcised, and an Obama victory symbolically cleanses the house of evil spirits in a way that either Clinton or McCain do not. Of course I think Obama will then proceed to merely truck in a whole house full of evil spirits of his own, but that’s a tale for another day.

On the other hand, it’s worth noting that the Dems are split almost evenly, and that’s just in-house. If the GOP stays united and really comes out to play (a big if), then that’s a solid 40-45% of the vote right there, and there’s bound to be a lot of Hillary voters who will cross over to McCain rather than drink the Obama Kool-Aid, in which case McCain wins by a bit more than a hair, there’s a ton of spoken and unspoken racial resentment, and everyone stays nervous and upset and unhappy for another four years, as the US continues down its extraordinary path of self-ruination.

As I’ve said before, what I want most (and what I think is needed most) is a genuinely boring president, but none of these jokers fits the bill. Of the three, Hillary is most boring, which is good, but I think she has the least chance, except in a sort of bitter backroom squeaker that leaves everybody unsatisfied. So the choice to me seems like either, let McCain continue to wreck America (and also as much of the world as can’t get out of the way fast enough) in the manner we already know, or else let the batshit-crazy Dems wreck it in even newer and faster ways, while also continuing forwards with most of the destructive processes we’ve got now.