ARGH!!! So now that Democrats will in January have the White House, the House and the Senate, Joe Lieberman (Lieberman for Lieberman Party-CT) gets to keep his Senate committee chairmanships as if he were a Democrat. This after Lieberman campaigned for Republican John McCain and several other Republicans for Senate.

Now, far be it from me to try and define regular, ordinary words for politicians, who don’t seem to understand the meaning of regular, ordinary words. Words like “Party” and “Loyalty” and “Procedure” and “Majority” and “Governance.” Politicians don’t want to know these things, preferring instead to make things up as they go along.

During these past couple of years when Democrats didn’t have an actual majority in the Senate, Lieberman has been allowed to be a Republican mole in the Democratic Caucus, reporting to his puppeteers and financial backers every move planned by members. He has been allowed to hold several committee chairs, including Homeland Security, where he has steadfastly refused to enforce subpoenas, investigate illegalities of the Bush administration, or even to investigate FEMA’s horrendously inadequate response to hurricane Katrina.

So Lieberman has been rewarded with a pass from the now-actual Democratic majority, encouraged to do more of the same obstructionism that has made him so immensely unpopular outside of Israel.

One day soon, as the public wakes up to realize the Republicans are now a fringe party of right-wing wackos and religious nuts and the Democrats are what the Republicans were before they purged everyone with any sense, there will be a new Progressive Party for the “rest of us.” And it will, within 8-12 years, be electing more than a handful of representatives and Senators, way more than the fringe Republicans, Greens, Libertarians, Communists and Nazis can ever manage.

Sigh. The more things “Change,” it seems, the more they remain the same.

Hillary Clinton Claiming “Experience” She Doesn’t Own

I have a framed, surprisingly personal letter of thanks on the office wall signed – not stamped – by President Bill Clinton. It came in reply to a short email we sent one Christmas when he was being perpetually impeached for lying and obfuscating about his large “bimbo problem.” We sent holiday greetings from our family to his, along with a post script asking him please not to resign. Hillary didn’t respond or add her signature to the letter, even though the email was to them both and all four of us attached our names. Just not all that involved in White House life or her own personal life, I supposed at the time.

I personally wondered during those times what the deal was with her. Protecting the privacy of your dysfunctional marriage is one thing, but private is not something Bill’s amorous adventures were. Had she no pride? No ambitions for herself? No common sense?

This last year has informed me that she’s turned Bill’s bad behavior into a debt “owed” to her, and she’s projected that onto America in general too. News flash to Hillary Clinton: I don’t owe you a darned thing.

Hillary used Bill to purchase a senate seat in a state where she’d never lived, and New Yorkers bought it (I don’t know why). She used him to set herself up for a Presidential run, and has been using him as attack dog throughout the primary season so far. And now she’s using him to pretend she has Presidential “experience” and is magically “qualified” to be CiC – while at the same time telling the world that Republican candidate John McCain is more qualified for that job than Barack Obama, the challenger who is beating her soundly in the Voter’s Choice Awards.

Now, just to inject a little bit of FACT into this ridiculous scenario, Barack Obama has been an elected legislator since 1996. Hillary’s first elected job began in 2000. This gives him a full 4 years of actual electoral governmental “experience” on her. If merely occupying a bedroom in someone else’s mansion counted, John McCain would be fighting for the Republican nomination with Laura Bush.

The only thing Hillary was ever officially in charge of when her hubby was Prez was health care reform, which went precisely nowhere and is still not done all these years later. Her health care plan if she wins the nomination this year is no better, and will again sell us out to the death by spreadsheet industry. [To be fair, Obama's isn't materially better]. So now she says she’ll be there when “The Phone” rings in the middle of the night…

Hillary’s “Red Phone” Ad

Insulting, n’est ce pas? Note to Hillary: Phones have been around for a few generations already. Most people have heard a phone ring in the middle of the night, and most don’t have “operators standing by” at a switchboard (plus whole squadrons of aides and secretaries) to screen those calls first. Most of us have answered our own phones, even in the middle of the night, and even when the news was bad. This does not count as Presidential-level “leadership experience” or specific qualification to be Commander in Chief. Honestly.

More on Going Negative:
TNR: Go Already!

Well, John McCain locked up the Republican primary last night, and his only remaining rival Mike Huckabee good-naturedly dropped out as expected.

But alas, neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton managed to lock up anything – though God knows they should probably think about locking up their most rabid supporters, who aren’t the least bit shy of ravaging the Party while lobbing nasty epithets at each other.

I’d say it’s a problem with our primary system, which does have many problems, but I don’t really think it’s that. I think people are just too emotionally involved with personalities, and not very well-versed on how politics actually work in this country. Where “Machines” generally run the show and the best any candidate can do is hope to contribute to the policy platform come convention time.

Personally I don’t much care which of the remaining contenders get the nomination. I supported John Edwards early on and still hope he’ll wield enough power at the convention to get his health care ideas into the platform. But the truth is that a genuine populist is never going to have a seat at the “Machine” table if they won’t let themselves be molded into whatever the machine demands. I’ll vote Democratic in November because I sure as heck don’t want another Republican, and John McCain makes me sort of nauseous with all his flip-flopping. I never could ride those rides at the fair without getting sick.

Both Clinton and Obama have their own machines. Hillary runs as if she were a complete “insider” (and she is) who should get the nomination for no other reason than that she and her hubby believe she deserves it. And in the end, she may be right regardless of what We the People think about that. She’s utterly ruthless (the tears are for show) and eminently capable of out-machoing any and all chickenhawks. That makes me think she’d be more anxious to go to war than she would be anxious to avoid such a situation. Do we need more of that?

Obama on the other hand has embraced the Dean 50-state strategy and deployed a regular army of ground troops in all the states Hillary has dismissed as meaningless. It has served him well, and he’s energizing lots of support from minorities who have long felt abandoned by the system. Whether they’d actually vote in November is anybody’s guess, and I’d guess not if he’s not the nominee. Both Clinton and Obama are too far to the right to appeal to me, so it’s not my fight.

Regardless of who gets the crown, the Party will run the show both through the election and for all the in-power years thereafter. That’s how it’s designed to work, and nobody has yet successfully mounted a real challenge. Sans a viable third party option (and no, I’m not talking about Nader, who is a Republican-financed shill) we can be assured that the outcome is not and never was in doubt. For whatever it’s worth.

Obama still leads Clinton in delegates, neither can take the nomination even if they win 100% of all still outstanding delegates. It’ll be a brokered convention, we’ll get whatever our ‘betters’ decide we get. And, given glaring lack of Democratic action on outstanding high crimes and misdemeanors of the Imperial Presidency of GWB since they were elected in ‘06 to do something about it, I don’t expect things will change significantly come January ‘09 regardless of which Party wins.

But at least my primary vote in May will finally mean a little something. Usually there’s no point because it’s all over by then!

Seems Solis was hiding the campaign’s lack of cash on hand from Mrs. Clinton, who apparently figured it out for herself clearly enough to donate $5 million of her own money to the cause. What the heck have they been buying with all the millions raised? Answer: expensive dinosaurs – campaign advisors, chairs and managers. They cost a whole heck of a lot, but they know nothing about current reality and why Obama’s eating their lunch. Check out campaign chair Terry McAuliffe on Tweety’s show last week…

On the Democratic side, between Clinton’s rejected lawsuit to block culinary workers at Las Vegas and Reno casinos from caucusing (the union had endorsed Obama) and her campaign’s lengthy list of dirty tricks and voter intimidation tactics in Nevada, one might wonder how the heck she managed to ‘beat’ Obama (though Obama got one more delegate out of the deal than Clinton did).

Clinton knows she won’t win South Carolina next Saturday. She might get second, but Edwards may place strongly and beat her once again. SC’s Republicans went strongly for McCain, which has Huckabee claiming Thompson stole his margin of victory and Thompson thinking about quitting. Since it’s South Carolina that has the Reconstructionist subculture wanting to secede from the union and declare itself under Sharia… er, Biblical law, one would have guessed Huck would show much better. Looks like even serious southern Republicans have more sense than they’re given credit for. Especially since they overwhelmingly rejected – with their votes – Huckabee’s disgusting defense of the Confederate battle flag.

Can’t wait to see what SC does on the Dem side, this primary circus could get even more interesting in the next few weeks (through February 5). My own personal take is that McCain is the only reasonable candidate Republicans can run. He has enough cross-over value to independents and centrist Dems to make up for the Bush deficit going in. None of the other Republicans have that.

Widespread Cheating & Vote Supression by Clinton Campaign in Clark County, NV