You know, we really don't need to be spending time analyzing the mistakes of the Clinton campaign at this point. No one ever gets it right this soon after it's over anyway...

In a campaign of near-deaths and premature obituaries, the night of May 6 will be remembered inside Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign as the moment it really ended.
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But there was a sense of resignation within the campaign. She would carry on, but the outcome was inevitable. "She could accept losing," one adviser said. "She could not accept quitting."

Enough already...post mortems after next January please.

Nancy, can I call you Nancy? After all you do work for me (and all those fine folks in CA who send you to Washington every couple of years) and of course, the American People. You are third in line to the presidency, and have been granted the status of "Leader" by our party after the almost historic mid-term upset elections in 2006.

Nancy, I need to ask you a very, very simple question. Why can't we have an Impeachment hearing based on the lies that are now part of the public record as released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence? We as Americans stood by and watched your Republican colleagues using the 70 million dollar Starr Report (and softcore porn expo) run an impeachment hearing that absorbed our nation and brought the Nation's business to a virtual standstill. Bill Clinton's alleged perfidy gripped us for months and years as pundits and congressmen alike screeched "Rule of Law" and "Liar". Nancy, no one died when Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton had consensual, adult sexual relations in the People's House on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Nancy, George Bush and Dick Cheney, manipulating the levers of power, secrecy, the media and trust of the American people have managed to kill over 4000 American men and women and leave tens of thousands with injuries that will follow them for the rest of their lives. Families have been destroyed by a war that was absolutely not necessary, and should never have been fought.

I do understand that you and many of your colleagues were afraid to stand up to the ruthless political "machine" that the Bush Administration built to destroy it's enemies domestic and foreign; I understand it but can not forgive your lack of political or moral courage to stand against it. It seems to me, and many many other Americans that you were and are more interested in maintaining your personal power and position than in pursuing the truth.

We need to begin Impeachment, because the claims of Executive Privilege will not survive an Impeachment inquiry. With the revelations that administration knowingly lied us into the deaths of the brave American men and women sent into harm's way for purely political gain it is no longer acceptable to hear you and other Congressional Leaders say that Impeachment is "off the table". It is important that accountability begin now, even knowing that George Bush may have to leave office before an inquiry or trial can be completed. Such work is important to allow ongoing investigations, and perhaps personal accountability even criminal prosecutions from such work.

It is important for us all, and our children as well. During the "Clinton Scandal" the right-wing Republicans were fond of saying with some mock horror in their voices "What will we tell the children?" about their president being a philandering, sexually active if unfaithful husband. Well, what will you tell the children of future generations when they are sent off to a war because you have created a precedent to not hold any future Constitutional Executive accountable for the lies of this President and administration?

With regards,

Jo Fish
a Democratic Veteran

BUSH LIED

More as I get a chance to read the reports.

It's not gonna stop anytime soon, and it's not just hitting the least fortunate among us, it's eating the fabric of the middle-class from the bottom up.

In a decade handling evictions for the Miami-Dade County Police Department, Albert Fernandez has run across a middle-class father bankrupted by his daughter’s cancer treatment; an old woman scammed by a gambling husband; and countless families perpetually on the edge of poverty.
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If South Florida is a barometer for the housing crisis and the economy, the forecast does not look good. Like other areas nationwide, evictions are rising throughout the state, clogging county courts and spawning a boom in companies that specialize in “eviction services” like moving furniture to the curb.

In the first three months of this year, Broward County tallied 3,043 eviction requests — more than it has received in the same period since at least 1999, and an increase of 54 percent over last year. In Miami-Dade, landlords filed for 4,726 evictions from January through April, up 1,157 from the first four months of last year.

These economic policies were set in motion in large part through the efforts of the republicans who detested the banking laws enacted by FDR in the days of the Great Depression. They saw (and still see) the government as having no business in regulating business. Clearly, business can not only not regulate itself, it has no desire to do so as long as someone at the top of the food chain makes a profit whether it be executives, shareholders or both.

Enron, the major banks, what's the next industry to disappear down the rabbit hole? Construction? Airlines? Major utilities when customers can't pay the bills or they are not selling power to empty houses?

McCain = more of the same. Every fucking day.

Looks like HRC is gonna take her hubby, her extensive collection of pantsuits and daughter Chelsea and head home (or at least back to the Senate) this weekend. Apparently as she abandons her quest for the presidency she is going to share the news with her "insiders" on Friday night and the rest of us on Saturday.

She couldn't have just gracefully conceded last night I guess. She's still got that tool Lisa Caputo running around talking about the 18 million voters she has like they are actual money in the bank. Here's an idea: if they are, then perhaps each of them could cough up $1.11 for her campaign and it would retire her massive debt.

Or not.

HRC for Supreme Court... can you imagine the conversations at social dinners with The Big Dog and Clarence Thomas or Scalia? heh.

Epiphany? Maybe. Of sorts, I guess.

Mullah Nadhim preached open war on U.S. troops for years.

In Iraq, voters' fingers are dipped in ink so they can't vote multiple times.

He and many other Sunni Muslims in Iraq shunned elections and fought instead with roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades.

With provincial elections scheduled for autumn, however, Nadhim and other Sunnis say, they made a mistake by sitting out the elections in January 2005. Their absence at the polls, they say, resulted in less political power for Sunnis and more for Shiite Muslims and Kurds.

Whatever the date, one former member of the Ansar al Sunna militant group probably will be among those casting ballots. He said that spurning the last elections in favor of violence left Sunnis in Balad largely powerless.

"Right now, everything is being run by the Shiites," he said. "God willing, this time it will be better than before."

It never ceases to amaze me (and after what seven loooong years it should) that the drones who run the Federal Propaganda Apparatus Government miss the fact that changing human nature in matters like sex and puberty is akin to changing the course of the Mississippi River... sure there's a short-term engineering solution, but sooner or later Ol' Man River is gonna meander back to the way it wants to go...

The nation's campaign to get more teenagers to delay sex and use condoms is faltering, threatening to undermine the highly successful effort to reduce teen pregnancy and protect young people from sexually transmitted diseases, federal officials reported today.
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"The bottom line is in all these areas we don't seem to be making the progress we were making before," said Howell Wechsler, director of the division of adolescent and school health at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which conducts the survey. "It's very troubling."

Except when it doesn't.

Coming on the heels of reports that one in four teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease and that the teen birth rate has increased for the first time in 15 years, the data is triggering alarm across the ideological spectrum.
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"Since we've started pushing abstinence, we have seen no change in the numbers on sexual activity," said John Santelli, chairman of the Department of Population and Family Health at Columbia University. "The other piece of it is abstinence education spends a good amount of time bashing condoms. So it's not surprising, if that's the message young people are getting, that we're seeing condom use start to decrease."

"We may be witnessing the beginning of a trend where we're reaping the harvest of medically inaccurate and ineffective sex education, which is abstinence-until-marriage sex education," said Michael D. Resnick, who studies teen sexual behavior at the University of Minnesota. "With a growing proportion of young people exposed to those curricula, I think we can begin to understand why we're beginning to see a reversal of the positive trends that had been happening."

We are truly led by fucking children.

Elite, according to the republicans and McCain is being a Democrat who can read and write and is on their first marriage.

Not an old guy who is a multi-generational Naval Academy legacy who divorces the woman who raised his kids while he was away locked up in a POW camp, comes home and marries a rich woman 17 years his junior after dumping said first wife with like a $2000 a month settlement.

By all accounts the non-Elitist Mr. Cindy Lou McCain-Hensely is worth upward of $100 million dollars. That's pretty damn blue-collar if you ask me...

Hello, Captain Obvious... everytime I pull up next to a big-ass SUV or truck I resist the smart-ass urge to ask "How's that piece of shit working out for you at the pumps" (I did ask that once a while ago... didn't get a good reaction for some reason, and gas was only $3 a gallon then). So when I see that the chairman of GM makes this statement, I have to wonder... uh, duh?

No wonder, then, that Americans are changing their driving habits so quickly. With sales plummeting, General Motors said Tuesday that it would stop making pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles at four of its North American plants.

The company is also considering selling its Hummer brand, an emblem of the megavehicle. Rick Wagoner, G.M.'s chairman, explained the moves by saying that he thought the shift toward more efficient cars was "by and large, permanent." (My emphasis)

If the teleprompter works at a McCain speech, would anyone notice? Wow, that was awful.

He sounded older than he looked, and that's saying something.

From todays Froomkin column:

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is expected to use his White House visit today to push President Bush to take a more aggressive approach toward Iran -- and there are some signs that he'll have a receptive audience.

Both Olmert and Bush are badly wounded and looking for salvation. Olmert is facing corruption allegations that could drive him from office. Bush is wildly unpopular, desperate to salvage his legacy and fighting irrelevance as the general election begins in earnest -- with even the Republican candidate trying to keep him at a distance.

Ah, Johnny we hardly know ya... I remember you from NAS Cecil Field when you seemed like such a reasonable guy...just back from being a POW, Skipper of squadron and being a "turn-around" artist in a most Navy way resurrecting a squadron down at its heels. But now, you're tired, you're old (in more ways than one) and you want to keep our great Nation headed into a path of corporate-sponsored self-destruction...

"For all his fine words and all his promise, he has never taken the hard but right course of risking his own interests for yours, of standing against the partisan rancor on his side to stand up for our country," McCain said less than two hours before Obama spoke in the same arena in St. Paul, Minn., where McCain will claim the Republican nomination in September.

In the early evening of Friday, December 15, 2000, with Christmas break only hours away, the U.S. Senate rushed to pass an essential, 11,000-page government reauthorization bill. In what one legal textbook would later call "a stunning departure from normal legislative practice," the Senate tacked on a complex, 262-page amendment at the urging of Texas Sen. Phil Gramm.

There was little debate on the floor. According to the Congressional Record, Gramm promised that the amendment-also known as the Commodity Futures Modernization Act-along with other landmark legislation he had authored, would usher in a new era for the U.S. financial services industry.
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Watershed indeed. With the U.S. economy now battered by a tsunami of mortgage foreclosures, the $30-billion Bear Stearns Companies bailout and spiking food and energy prices, many congressional leaders and Wall Street analysts are questioning the wisdom of the radical deregulation launched by Gramm’s legislative package.

I have been away training for a "new" job, and am finally ready to get back into the blogging again. I don't know if I even have anyone stopping by anymore... I have been haunting the comments over at Jane Hamsher's place (Firedoglake) for the last few months and now I'm back here too.

So to start it off, did everyone see the Obama-AIPAC speech? He rhetorically began his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi in a completely different way than St. Ronnie did all those years ago. His appeal to the sense of social justice that led to those young men to Mississippi and ultimately to their deaths was an incredible argument in front of the AIPAC folks, and one that did not miss the symbolism he was trying to build on with his remarks.

Obama it is...

It's gonna be a fun ride, and I'm glad to be here watching. Thanks for being here too...