Prometheus 6

That's the conclusion I've come to today.

Not on that note but because of it, I would like to thank my friend the ex-lion tamer for his stories from the language barrier.

When Washington Journal asked McCain supporters to call in and explain why they support him, I knew we'd get some Billary supporters.

May 8, 2008
Senator Barack Obama

Obama for America
P.O. Box 8102
Chicago, IL 60680

Dear Senator Obama,

This has been an historic and exciting campaign. Millions of new voters have been brought into the process and their enthusiasm for the Democratic Party and the principles for which you and I have fought and continue to fight is unprecedented.

After nearly six years, R. Kelly child pornography trial seems like a go
Judge hints that proceeding will start Friday as scheduled
By Stacy St. Clair

Tribune reporter

10:58 PM CDT, May 8, 2008

R. Kelly finally will have his day in court, nearly six years after first being indicted on child pornography charges.

The R&B superstar, 41, is accused of videotaping himself engaging in sex acts with a girl prosecutors say could be as young as 13. He has pleaded not guilty.

You don't even get the Politics tag, Mrs. Clinton. You just get the Race and Identity tag.

She referred to an Associated Press story on Indiana and North Carolina exit polls "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

She added, "There's a pattern emerging here."

Indeed there is. Mr. Krugman... 

More tirades from Obama supporters against Mrs. Clinton are not the answer — they will only further alienate her grass-roots supporters, many of whom feel that she received a raw deal.

Nor is it helpful to insult the groups that supported Mrs. Clinton, either by suggesting that racism was their only motivation or by minimizing their importance.

...what say you? 

Discussions of how and why Mr. Obama’s support narrowed over time have a Rashomon-like quality: different observers see very different truths. But at this point it doesn’t matter whose fault it was.

You STILL think there are different truths? You still think it doesn't matter whose fault it is?

HILL DROPS A RACIAL BOMB
By MAGGIE HABERMAN

May 9, 2008 --

Hillary Rodham Clinton played the race card yesterday as she dismissed Barack Obama as a candidate who will have a hard time winning support from "white Americans."

It was the most starkly racial comment Clinton has made in the campaign, and drew quick condemnation from some Democrats.

The centerpiece is to be a 2 1/2 -story sculpture of the civil rights leader carved in a giant chunk of granite. Called the Stone of Hope, it would depict King, standing with his arms folded, looming from the stone. At 28 feet tall, it would be eight feet taller than the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial.

Unhappy With 'Confrontational' Image, U.S. Panel Wants King Statue Reworked
By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 9, 2008; A01

A powerful federal arts commission is urging that the sculpture of Martin Luther King Jr. proposed for a memorial on the Tidal Basin be reworked because it is too "confrontational" and reminiscent of political art in totalitarian states.

The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts thinks "the colossal scale and Social Realist style of the proposed statue recalls a genre of political sculpture that has recently been pulled down in other countries," commission secretary Thomas Luebke said in a letter in April.

By law, no project like the memorial can go forward without approval from the commission, the federal agency that advises the government on public design and aesthetics in the capital.

The other notion -- that Clinton could position herself as some kind of Great White Hope and still expect African American voters to give her their enthusiastic support in the fall -- is just nuts. Obama has already won a majority of the Democratic primary contests; within a couple of weeks, he almost certainly will have won a majority of the pledged convention delegates and will be assured of finishing with more of the popular vote. Only in Camp Clinton does anyone believe that his supporters will be happy if party leaders tell him, in effect, "Nice job, kid, but we can't give you the nomination because, well, you're black. White people might not like that."

Clinton's sin isn't racism, it's arrogance. From the beginning, the Clinton campaign has refused to consider the possibility that Obama's success was more than a fad. This was supposed to be Clinton's year, and if Obama was winning primaries, there had to be some reason that had nothing to do with merit. It was because he was black, or because he had better slogans, or because he was a better public speaker, or because he was the media's darling. This new business about white voters is just the latest story the Clinton campaign is telling itself about the usurper named Obama.

The Card Clinton Is Playing
By Eugene Robinson
Friday, May 9, 2008; A27

From the beginning, Hillary Clinton has campaigned as if the Democratic nomination were hers by divine right. That's why she is falling short -- and that's why she should be persuaded to quit now, rather than later, before her majestic sense of entitlement splits the party along racial lines.

If that sounds harsh, look at the argument she made Wednesday, in an interview with USA Today, as to why she should be the nominee instead of Barack Obama. She cited an Associated Press article "that found how Senator Obama's support . . . among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening again. I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on."

Discussions of how and why Mr. Obama’s support narrowed over time have a Rashomon-like quality: different observers see very different truths. But at this point it doesn’t matter whose fault it was.

Yes it does. You, sir, were a major part of the problem.

More tirades from Obama supporters against Mrs. Clinton are not the answer — they will only further alienate her grass-roots supporters, many of whom feel that she received a raw deal.

Nor is it helpful to insult the groups that supported Mrs. Clinton, either by suggesting that racism was their only motivation or by minimizing their importance.

As much as I respect Mr. Krugman, I suggest he switch ever occurance of "Clinton" with "Obama" and shut the hell up.

Thinking About November
By PAUL KRUGMAN

The fight for the Democratic nomination seems to be winding down. It’s not completely over, but the odds now overwhelmingly favor Barack Obama.

Assuming that Mr. Obama is the nominee, he’ll lead a party that, judging by the usual indicators, should be poised for an easy victory — perhaps even a landslide.

Yet Democrats are worried. Are those worries justified?

"The majority has taken, once again, their go-it-alone policy," Boehner lamented yesterday. "It's time for Democrats and Republicans to work together."

To induce this working together, Boehner decided to stop the House from working at all. 

Republicans Vote Against Moms; No Word Yet on Puppies, Kittens
By Dana Milbank
Friday, May 9, 2008; A03

It was already shaping up to be a difficult year for congressional Republicans. Now, on the cusp of Mother's Day, comes this: A majority of the House GOP has voted against motherhood.

On Wednesday afternoon, the House had just voted, 412 to 0, to pass H. Res. 1113, "Celebrating the role of mothers in the United States and supporting the goals and ideals of Mother's Day," when Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), rose in protest.

"Mr. Speaker, I move to reconsider the vote," he announced.

Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), who has two young daughters, moved to table Tiahrt's request, setting up a revote. This time, 178 Republicans cast their votes against mothers.

It has long been the custom to compare a popular piece of legislation to motherhood and apple pie. Evidently, that is no longer the standard. Worse, Republicans are now confronted with a John Kerry-esque predicament: They actually voted for motherhood before they voted against it.

The Lucrative Art of War

Congress is finally moving to shut one of the more egregious forms of Iraq war profiteering: defense contractors using offshore shell companies to avoid paying their fair share of payroll taxes. The practice is widespread and Congressional investigators have been dispatched to one of the prime tax refuges, the Cayman Islands, to seek a firsthand estimate of how much the Treasury is being shorted.

No one will be surprised to hear that one of the suspected prime offenders is KBR, the Texas-based defense contractor, formerly a part of the Halliburton conglomerate allied with Vice President Dick Cheney. According to a report in The Boston Globe, KBR, which has landed billions in Iraq contracts, has used two Cayman shell companies to avoid paying hundreds of millions in payroll, Medicare and unemployment taxes.

First of all, if you have to say you don't want to sound like a bigot, you KNOW you sound like a bigot.

Secondly, if Obama proves Black folks are equal then we've ALWAYS been equal, only held back by society.

Like Kristol and Brooks, McCain regards Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln as political idols; like them, he never hesitates in asserting that government power should be used to rekindle American (and Republican) pride in government. Unlike most neoconservative intellectuals, however, McCain is intimately familiar with the bluntest edge of state-sponsored force. A McCain presidency would put legislative flesh on David Brooks’ fuzzy pre-9/11 notions of “grand aspiration,” deploying a virtuous federal bureaucracy to purify unclean private transactions from the boardroom to the bedroom. And it would prosecute the nation’s post-9/11 wars with a militaristic zeal this country hasn’t seen in generations. 

Be Afraid of President McCain
The frightening mind of an authoritarian maverick
Matt Welch | April 2007

The John McCain presidency effectively began on January 10, 2007, when George W. Bush announced the deployment of five more combat brigades to Iraq. This escalation of an unpopular war ran counter to the advice of Bush’s senior military leadership, ignored the recommendations made by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, and sidestepped the objections of the Iraqi government it was ostensibly intended to assist. But the plan was nearly identical to what the Republican senior senator from Arizona, nearly alone among his Capitol Hill colleagues, had been advocating for months: boost troop levels by at least 20,000, give coalition forces the authority to impose security in every corner of Baghdad, and increase the size of America’s overburdened standing military by around 100,000 during the next five years.

By enthusiastically endorsing McCain’s approach, the lame duck president all but finished the job of anointing the senator his political successor. McCain had already spent the previous three years lining up Bush’s campaign team, making nice with the social conservatives he railed against in the 2000 primaries, and positioning himself as the most hawkish of all the nomination-chasing Republican hawks. For the purposes of the 2008 campaign, Bush’s surge announcement was almost the perfect gift: McCain got to solidify his case with primary voters even while giving himself operational deniability. (“We’ve made many, many mistakes since 2003, and these will not be easily reversed,” he said on January 11, while reiterating his call for even more troops.) The sheer unpopularity of Bush’s move did knock the previously front-running McCain a notch or two behind Rudy Giuliani in the polls. (Both men have consistently finished ahead of Democratic contenders Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in head-to-head competition.) But it also allowed McCain to recapture some of his lost reputation as a straight-talking independent. “I would much rather lose a campaign than lose a war,” he said with a grin on Larry King Live right after Bush’s speech. The press, which had been souring on the candidate during his noisy lurch to the right, breathed an audible sigh of relief. “Defiant McCain back as maverick,” declared the Chicago Tribune.

In discussing that drug bust at San Diego State University, Reason Magazine's Matt Welsh asks:

I always wonder what happens to these guys who are arrested in their early 20s for meeting a sliver of the insatiable undergraduate demand for pot-smoking. I was never any dealer, nor much of a user, but I've known and worked with quite a few perfectly successful people who dealt drugs in college. I have also known a couple who were unlucky (and/or careless) enough to get carted off to jail, but those guys I lost track of. (Though through the magic of Google I see one former mushroom-dealing colleague running a successful business in Texas, so hopefully it all turned out well.)

So I leave the question open to the floor: What ever happened to your drug dealing friend or aquaintance who got arrested in or around college?

There's this article in the New York Times today, I’m Not Lying, I’m Telling a Future Truth. Really. that puts a smiley face on white lies.

A series of recent studies, focusing on students who inflate their grade-point average, suggests that such exaggeration is very different psychologically from other forms of truth twisting. Touching up scenes or past performances induces none of the anxiety that lying or keeping secrets does, these studies find; and embroiderers often work to live up to the enhanced self-images they project. The findings imply that some kinds of deception are aimed more at the deceiver than at the audience, and they may help in distinguishing braggarts and posers from those who are expressing personal aspirations, however clumsily.

It’s naïve to think that the oil companies have forgotten the ’70s. They know there’s a decent chance that economic populism will return. In fact, it already has: Senator Clinton’s full proposal is to combine her tax holiday with a ’70s-style windfall profits tax.

In this light, that oil companies might pocket most of the tax cut could easily be a good thing. It helps cancel out the negative legacy of the last energy crisis: public hysteria will occasionally work in your favor. 

The 18-Cent Solution
By BRYAN CAPLAN

Fairfax, Va.

BOTH Hillary Clinton and John McCain say that we should suspend the 18-cent-per-gallon federal gas tax this summer. After her beating at the polls Tuesday, there may not be much reason left to worry about what Senator Clinton thinks, but the McCain proposal is alive and well.

There's such fear of Black violence in these situations, and so little history of it.

I'm not prepared to think about the utility of officially sanctioned protests today. It needs to be considered, though.

216 Held in Protests of Police Acquittals
By THOMAS J. LUECK

In the largest public protest against the acquittal of three detectives in the shooting death of Sean Bell, 216 people were arrested on Wednesday in carefully orchestrated demonstrations that halted traffic at busy intersections in Manhattan and Brooklyn, the police said.

The demonstrations, described by the Rev. Al. Sharpton as “pray-ins,” played out on a bright spring afternoon as boisterous displays of civil disobedience in which people signed up to be arrested, assuring organizers and lawyers that they were carrying proper identification to show to the police.

Once positioned at the intersections, demonstrators dropped to their knees or sat and prayed briefly before hundreds of police officers escorted them to buses and police vehicles.

...after one more shot at Mrs. Bill Clinton.

I have enjoyed Ta-Nehisi Coates' work since discovering him in the Village Voice. My review copy of his new book showed up the other day. Unfortunately it got in behind The Politics of Inequality, A Political History of the Idea of Economic Inequality in America by Michael J. Thompson, which is not something I want to skim. So in the mean time, check out this video The Atlantic folk put together for him.

Clinton's problem with African Americans?

Clinton's aides continue to argue she's the stronger nominee, because she continues to do well with the most important voters, crucial swing voters, who will make the difference in a race with John McCain in November, blue-collar and working-class voters, most of whom are white.

But how does a candidate claim to be the strongest and most electable nominee, when that candidate has very little support with some of the Democratic Party's most loyal followers, African-American voters? Wouldn't it be fair to say that ignoring that "demographic" tends to marginalize the significance of those voters, who also historically have felt somewhat taken for granted by Democrats?

When asked about the fact that Obama had won a significant, and apparently growing segment of the African-American community's votes, the response from Clinton's aides was to suggest that, by November, she would be able to heal whatever problems existed. And that she would be able to unite the party, in part, because of the Clinton family's many decades of such a positive record on matters of race and civil rights.

But when asked, well, wouldn't Obama enjoy the support of the segments of the Democratic electorate that have voted for Clinton -- those working-class white voters, the answer was full of doubt and concern. He's relatively new on the political scene. He's not very well known and doesn't have much of a track record, was the essence of their argument. Who knows what might happen?

He still needs to explain his spiritual advisor, Rod Parsley. And why he sought out the endorsement of the anti-Catholic John Hagee (and for that matter, why Sam Brownback defends Hagee). Besides...

Leading figures on the conservative "Religious Right" such as Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, did not sign the document, and his office said he had not been asked to sign it.

...it looks like the Mammonite sect of Christianity was excluded from this purification ritual.

Evangelicals urge pullback from politics
Christians become 'useful idiots' when faith is politicized, group says
Reuters
updated 3:35 p.m. ET, Wed., May. 7, 2008

DALLAS - A group of U.S. evangelical leaders called on Wednesday for a pullback from party politics so that followers would not become "useful idiots" exploited for partisan gain.

One in four U.S. adults count themselves as evangelical Protestants, giving them serious clout in a country where religion and politics often mix. Conservative evangelicals have become a key support base for the Republican Party.

But the movement has had growing pains and the statement issued on Wednesday, called an "Evangelical Manifesto," is the latest sign of emerging fractures as some activists seek to broaden its agenda beyond hot-button social issues such as opposition to abortion and gay rights.