Fark.com reports that a group of people in San Francisco have started a petition to, well… I’ll quote them.
Kennedy had a stadium named after him. Reagan has an airport. Where will George W. Bush have his name emblazoned? In San Francisco, it looks like that honor will go to a sewage plant.
Of course, my understanding is that this is just something one group is proposing, versus a city initiative.
It is widely assumed that there are no escalators in Wyoming.
Does anyone else remember the Air Marshals? I seem to recall that, once upon a time, every single flight had an air marshal on it. They’re basically federal agents who ride the plane undercover and carry a gun and extensive training. Anyone who tries to hijack a plane would find that the air marshals had different plans for them.
So with billions and billions in funding going to making us feel safer from terrorists, what percentage of flights would you think have air marshals aboard them?
The TSA won’t say, but CNN’s put the number at less than 1%.
Let’s try to actually fund this? You can’t say you’re tough on terrorism and then refuse to fund programs to stop it. It seems like one of the few programs that might actually work.
I hadn’t paid much attention at the time, but Hillary spoke the other day about how she was “battle-tested” and ready to lead the country, unlike Obama. (Or so she thinks.)
CBS quotes her as having said:
“I remember landing under sniper fire… There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”
Wow, sounds impressive. The problem? The CBS article continues:
Problem is: that’s not how it happened at all. And we should know: CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson and a CBS News crew accompanied the First Lady on that Bosnia trip.
A photograph shows Clinton talking to Attkisson on the military flight into Tuzla.
And pictures CBS News recorded show the greeting ceremony when the plane landed… [T]here was no sniper fire either when Clinton visited two army outposts, where she posed for photos. And no sniper fire back at the base, where she sang in a USO show starring Sinbad and Sheryl Crowe.
It’s great that she was over visiting troops in Bosnia, don’t get me wrong. It’d just be nice if, you know, she didn’t start wildly embellishing tales. And in an election where every move gets scrutinized, didn’t she realize that her lying would set her up for comments like this one:
Mike Allen of Politico.com said: “Who knows if she misremembered, misspoke, exaggerated, whatever. It makes the case for Sen. Obama that all this experience that she’s been talking about is at least partly in her imagination.”
Also, the comments on CBS News are rapidly plummeting in quality, and may soon surpass Youtube in terms of insanely bad comments…
I used to like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. They were both well-qualified, I thought, and the country would be in good hands either way. But I worried that Hillary had too many people who were opposed to her for one reason or another, so I thought Obama had a better chance of getting the Democratic nomination. I still supported Hillary, mind you, just not as much.
That all ended several months ago. It seems to me that every time she opens her mouth, she comes across as more and more bitter. She’s polarizing the Democratic party, and embarassing us at the same time. While she’s better than McCain, getting shot in the face is better than burning dying in a fire.
If you’d asked me in February to pick my top two Democratic candidates, I’d have said Obama and Richardson. And I haven’t wavered on that. (Clinton dropped from third place, though, to dead last among the Democrats.) They complement each other perfectly. So I was ecstatic when Richardson just came out in support of Obama.
Of course, the Clintons were not pleased. Which brings up another point of mine: I used to like Bill Clinton. Sure, he could have exercised some better control in personal matters, but if that’s the biggest criticism eight years later, job well done. But now he’s getting nasty and negative. I saw a survey somewhere that showed that his approval rating (yes, they apparently do track approval ratings of past presidents) has gone down since he started campaigning for Hillary. Fail.
But in the linked article, Richardson explains that he doesn’t think he’s “crossed” the Clintons, nor that he owed her his endorsement. But the best part of all is this little bit:
Richardson was asked Sunday about James Carville’s comment that Richardson’s Obama endorsement “came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver.” Carville is an adviser to Clinton’s presidential campaign and a CNN political analyst.
“Well, I’m not going to get in the gutter like that,” Richardson said. “And you know, that’s typical of many of the people around Sen. Clinton. They think they have a sense of entitlement to the presidency.”
He’s starting to exhibit something that Obama rocks at: people come at him with some sort of low blow, and he manages to say exactly the right thing to deflect the attack and end up making the attacker look like the idiot. (Remember when someone started questioning Obama’s patriotism because he stopped wearing his little flag lapel pin? His response was that he’d noticed that the flags often served as a replacement for “true patriotism.”) And… Did Carville mean to equate Hillary with Jesus in his analogy?
(Also, I have to wonder… How is it not a conflict of interest to be “an adviser to Clinton’s presidential campaign and a CNN political analyst?” Are they familiar with the Republican jibe that CNN stands for “Clinton News Network?”)
In conclusion… Where’s my Obama-Richardson ’08 bumper sticker?
I’ve never liked the Olympics. I don’t like watching sports on TV. I can watch a Sox game because they’re “my” team,” and I’m cool with the Patriots games being on in the background. The Olympics, though, aren’t fun to watch. So without anything against them, I already have no interest.
I’m also really annoyed at the commercialization. Networks pay big money to lock up the contracts for TV coverage. Everything under the sun becomes Olympic-branded, costing big bucks.
But the biggest reason of all? China’s hosting them. Even as they leave communism, they’ve got major problems. They run a firewall system blocking huge parts of the Internet that’s arguably more restrictive than that in third-world military regimes. But with rising unrest about Tibet, China’s cracking down on media coverage even more, including an apparent blanket ban on coverage from Tienanmen Square.
So don’t waste your time. I know I won’t.
Actually, the more I look into it, the more reason I find. They’re banning poor people and the mentally-disabled. That’s pretty scary.
Of course, it’s not all bad: “The Beijing government has issued new mandates that require police officers in the city to act more appropriately. The government has circulated pamphlets urging officers to desist from using foul language, lose their arrogance, and not hang up on people who call to report crimes.”
What is it with Florida and screwing up elections?
Right now there’s a big debate over what to do with their election results, which officially don’t count, and in which no candidates were allowed to campaign. Hillary did anyway, and, unsurprisingly, won.
Of course, counting the votes is unfair–only one candidate campaigned, and she was breaking the rules in doing so. So obviously, it would favor her. But then again, not counting the votes would be equally unfair–you’re disenfranchising a whole state.
Right now, I suspect that, as with Florida and the 2004 general election, 2008’s Democratic primary is going to be very close. And we’re going to end up with a big fight over Florida, the outcome of which will swing the vote one way or the other.
Except I think we’re at a critical juncture. A united Democratic front can take back the White House in 2008. A bitterly-divided Democratic party, feuding over the nomination, is going to lose. And if we get into a “credentials fight” at the DNC, it’s going to be the latter.
So, from the 49 other states–actually, 48, as Florida isn’t the only one with problems: please, figure out how to hold an election!
Quoth the votemaster:
Texas finally got the votes counted. The net result is that Obama actually won Texas. Clinton got four delegates more than he did in the primary but he beat her by nine delegates in the caucus. Between Texas, Wyoming, and Mississippi, he now has a bigger lead in delegates than he had before March 4.
As an armchair (business) strategist, I have to say that Hillary’s attempt to claim him as her VP was a clever, if hilariously transparent, attempt to draw attention away from the fact that he is winning no matter how you slice it. Let me be sappy and quote the Yes We Can Song (which itself quotes Obama). It seems quite apropos here:
We know the battle ahead will be long, but always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.
We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics… They will only grow louder and more dissonant.
Apparently, in the counties that got around to holding caucuses and primaries, no one was quite sure what they were doing. People waited hours to cast their ballot (wait, you cast ballots in a caucus? How is that diferent from a primary? Why do they hold them on the same day?), which apparently also confused a lot of people by, for some reason, asking them to select their sexual orientation?
The results (of candidates, not Texans’ sexuality) are still coming in….
The weather in Ohio has apparently turned absolutely miserable, which many predict (for obvious reasons) will hurt the turnout. But, as the photo shows, Obama fans like Arya Kamangar won’t let the weather stop them. I wonder if bad weather is almost in Obama’s favor? Although at this point, Hillary fans are probably pushing really hard for turnout, too.
