Friday, February 29, 2008

the gettysburg address, via the ny times

i totally stole this from sp, on whose blog i found it, and thought it was just the damn coolest thing i'd seen in a while. thanks, sp.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

my godson!

it's avin!


damn, is this a pretty kid or what?


locking mommy out of the house.


rockin' a cowboy hat.


triumphant.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Locking up the "snotty bitch" vote.

okay. because i know that language matters, and i'm careful to avoid buying into stereotypes whenever I can, i've been trying to avoid using the b-word in reference to hillary clinton. it's been really difficult for me, but i've worked hard and avoided it for the vast majority of this campaign. and i've tried to focus on what i love about obama instead of what i hate about hillary. i've really, really tried. but today, it's over. this woman is officially a nasty, hateful bitch.

see for yourself.

"Abandon hope all ye who enter here."

Frank Rich has a fantastic editorial today in the Times. Here's an excerpt:

"...In the last battleground, Wisconsin, the Clinton campaign was six days behind Mr. Obama in putting up ads and had only four campaign offices to his 11. Even as Mrs. Clinton clings to her latest firewall — the March 4 contests — she is still being outhustled. Last week she told reporters that she “had no idea” that the Texas primary system was “so bizarre” (it’s a primary-caucus hybrid), adding that she had “people trying to understand it as we speak.” Perhaps her people can borrow the road map from Obama’s people. In Vermont, another March 4 contest, The Burlington Free Press reported that there were four Obama offices and no Clinton offices as of five days ago. For what will no doubt be the next firewall after March 4, Pennsylvania on April 22, the Clinton campaign is sufficiently disorganized that it couldn’t file a complete slate of delegates by even an extended ballot deadline.

This is the candidate who keeps telling us she’s so competent that she’ll be ready to govern from Day 1. Mrs. Clinton may be right that Mr. Obama has a thin résumé, but her disheveled campaign keeps reminding us that the biggest item on her thicker résumé is the health care task force that was as botched as her presidential bid.
...
As for countering what she sees as the empty Obama brand of hope, she offers only a chilly void: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. This must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and — talk about bizarre — against democracy itself. No sooner does Mrs. Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as unrepresentative of the country.

Bill Clinton knocked states that hold caucuses instead of primaries because “they disproportionately favor upper-income voters” who “don’t really need a president but feel like they need a change.” After the Potomac primary wipeout, Mr. Penn declared that Mr. Obama hadn’t won in “any of the significant states” outside of his home state of Illinois. This might come as news to Virginia, Maryland, Washington and Iowa, among the other insignificant sites of Obama victories. The blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga has hilariously labeled this Penn spin the “insult 40 states” strategy.

The insults continued on Tuesday night when a surrogate preceding Mrs. Clinton onstage at an Ohio rally, Tom Buffenbarger of the machinists’ union, derided Obama supporters as “latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust-fund babies.” Even as he ranted, exit polls in Wisconsin were showing that Mr. Obama had in fact won that day among voters with the least education and the lowest incomes. Less than 24 hours later, Mr. Obama received the endorsement of the latte-drinking Teamsters."

Saturday, February 23, 2008

the prodigal daughter

hi guys. i'm in a blog-updating mood, probably because i'm procrastinating on a huge work project and i'm caught up on all my scrabulous games.

1) i'm beginning to think that hillary's taking a dive. like, really taking a dive. what could she be thinking? after wisconsin i thought that maybe she finally understood that the negative campaigning was a) not succeeding in making obama look bad and b) making her look even worse. but apparently, that lesson hasn't been learned.

then comes the debate. first she repeats these outrageous plagiarism accusations (and then closed just a few minutes later with an almost word-for-word quotation from one of bill's 1992 campaign speeches). then she continues this ridiculous "all talk, no action" meme. THEN, today, she actually compares obama to bush.

so, it seems to me that her strategy has to be 1 of 2 things. either 1) she has finally realized that obama's going to be the nominee, and she's decided to continue the negative campaigning and attack ads so that she can lose texas and/or ohio, bow out gracefully, making obama look tough as hell (or, to borrow her ridiculous phrase, "battle-tested") in the process. i hope, hope, hope this is the case, and if it's true, it will be the most noble thing she's done in her "35 years" of public service. but the other option, the one i think is sadly more likely: 2) she really, really doesn't get it. she is in total denial, thinks that she'll somehow recover from a dozen losses in a row despite a total inability to rally from any of her previous defeats. and she doesn't see that, by attacking the almost-certain democratic nominee with such vitriol, she's risking permanent damage to the democratic party.

2) i'm thinking that the guy who packed the amazon.com package i received earlier this week pretty much has me pegged. the package contained:

The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran
Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Veronica Mars Season 2

um, right. that's all i got.

Sunday, February 03, 2008

yes we can.

YES WE CAN.

f