n a t b s

On this PA-primary-eve-day one might consider writing a scathing post about team Hillary’s latest bs, but that’s been done to death. What I’d rather do is issue a desperate plea to the people of PA to please, please end this horrible primary. There is only one way that you can end it, by giving the win to Obama. See the thing is, Obama already won sometime back in February, and Hillary’s been in denial ever since. Don’t believe me? Than how come every big contest has been do or die for Hillary? If you’re winning like Barack, you can afford to lose a big contest, but if you’re losing like Hillary, one big loss is the final nail in the coffin. So please Pennsylvenians, vote for Obama. At this point a vote for Hillary is a vote to help McCain. I wont go so far as to say it’s a vote for McCain as that would be excessive, but it is definitely a vote to keep this slugfest going, and every day it does is a gift to the McCain campaign.

I hate to break it to you but she really can’t win. So please, vote for the Democrats to finally have a candidate. If you make the right choice, we can have one tomorrow. And then we can finally start going after our real opponent John McCain. He is formidable and we can’t keep wasting our time.

What was with that debate last night? I thought CNN was bad, but wow ABC takes the cake for most terrible news network (Fox isn’t a news network). Or at least worst debate moderation ever. Right off the bat they asked Obama about the bitter remark. After beating that one into the ground for ten minutes, they brought up Rev. Wright. Aren’t we past that one already? But ABC had a new take on it: “do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?”[nyt] What, the fuck, is that? That’s not really an answerable question. How does George Stephanopoilous even pretend he’s a journalist? Other “important” issues ABC raised:

• Why doesn’t Obama wear a flag pin?
• Is he friends with William Ayers of the Weather Underground?
• Why they want to raise taxes when clearly that hurts everything

They were really adamant that raising the capital gains tax is clearly bad for the country. I didn’t think the news was supposed to take that kind of partisan position. And what do a bunch of out of work factory workers in PA care about the capital gains tax anyway?

In the second half there were more policy questions, but I found they were often given in an antagonistic tone. Overall I’d say it was 60/40 worthless-gossip questions to real policy questions. Terrible ratio, more than half that debate was worthless and stupid. The candidates should stick to holding their own rallies and q&a sessions. Or what if prominent Democrats moderated the Democratic debate? They would probably be less dickish to their colleagues. I’d like to close this with something Obama said in the debate:

What the American people want are not distractions. They want to figure out, how are we actually going to deliver on health care; how are we going to deliver better jobs for people; how are we going to improve their incomes; how are we going to send them to college?[nyt]

There’s an article in Politico today entitled “What Clinton wishes she could say,” of which the basic premise is that Hillary has been holding her tongue on several issues that the Republicans will use to destroy Obama:

Republicans will also ruthlessly exploit openings that Clinton — in the genteel confines of an intraparty contest — never could. Top targets: Obama’s radioactive personal associations, his liberal ideology, his exotic life story, his coolly academic and elitist style.

I don’t know what campaign John F. Harris and Jim Vandehei have been following but clearly it’s not this one. Hey guys, want to see me deflate your entire article with a few quotes? Ok here goes, regarding his “radioactive personal associations,” ie rev Wright and Rezko:

He would not have been my pastor. You don’t choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend. [ptr]

I was fighting against those ideas when you were practicing law and representing your contributor, Resco[sic], in his slum landlord business in inner city Chicago. [cnn]

She’s clearly not been hands off with his personal associations. What about his exotic life story?

“You said you’d take Senator Obama at his word that he’s not…a Muslim. You don’t believe that he’s…,” Kroft said.

“No. No, there is nothing to base that on. As far as I know,” she said. [politico]

Subtle? Yes. But is she staying quiet on this “issue?” No. Let’s keep going, what about his “academic and elitist style?”

I think his comments were elitist and divisive and the Democratic Party has been unfortunately, viewed by many people over the last decades as being elitist and out of touch

Wrong again Politico! And finally, his liberal ideology, the one issue his Democratic opponent and colleauge, couldn’t possibly criticize him on…right? Wrong. As anyone who’s been reading this blog knows, she has totally been criticizing Obama for being too liberal:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign has also started slapping the L-word on Obama, warning that his appeal among moderate voters will diminish as they become more aware of liberal positions he took in the past [washpo]

Well there you have it, Politico is completely wrong. Hillary has been attacking Obama on every one of the issues this article claims she can’t touch. Kind of sad really, as it illustrates how Hillary is playing this just like a Republican would. Hell, maybe he’ll do better against McCain because he’ll use the same attacks, but Obama will be able to point out way more policy contrasts between himself and McCain than himself and Hilldawg. And the fact that he’s been doing so well despite all these cheap attacks may demonstrate that he’s more than ready to take on grandpa in the election. If only he didn’t have a prominent Democrat constantly undermining him, he could be trouncing McCain right now.

Hillary’s latest desperate move? Trying to define herself as the sole anti-war candidate:

One candidate will continue the war, one candidate only says he’ll end the war, and one candidate is ready, willing and able to end the war [source]

Umm…fuck you. Seriously. This is almost as bad as the “McCain and I are more experienced” line. It’s a little better because she’s not saying McCain is better than Obama in this case, she’s just saying they’re the same. She has to stop giving McCain sound bites for ads, and she has to stop kneecapping her colleague. And this is coming from the woman who voted to authorize the war! She’s just like Bush: say one thing, do another. You know Hillary, if you continually lie about something it doesn’t make it true.

Her basis for that assertion, by the way, is “Senator Obama says he will get American troops out in 16 months, but his advisor[sic] says you can’t count on that.” [source] It is true that recently some of his advisers have referred to his plan as a best case scenario that might not play out exactly as planned, and it is. Getting out of Iraq is going to be very difficult, and if Hillary is trying to suggest that it’s going to be easy than she’s flat-out lying to us. At least Obama’s campaign is honest.

The National Priorities Project recently released their annual report on how American tax dollars were spent over the past year. Are you ready for this? 42.2% of every tax dollar went to military spending. Specifically, 28.7 cents went to current military operations, 10 cents went to interest on military debt, and 3.5 cents went to veterans benefits. By the way, 4.4 cents went to education, and 2.6 cents went to the environment and science. So yeah, military spending is almost half of all spending, and we spend almost ten times as much on our military as we do on education. I can’t imagine why we have so many problems in this country.

I find these figures to be not very surprising, but completely appalling. Our priorities are completely bass ackwards. I mean, if we had some sort of real enemy that required spending more on our military than all other countries combined, I guess I’d learn to accept it. Maybe this kind of spending made sense during the cold war, but in the “war against terror,” aka the war against disgruntled people with box-cutters, I just don’t see the need. To protect ourselves from terrorism we don’t need stealth bombers and fancy nukes, we need intelligence (in both senses of the word). I see it as a law enforcement battle, not a military one. I also see it as a pr battle; when people really fucking hate you it might be a good idea to try and figure out why, and then try to make them like you.

Anyway, isn’t it great to know where your taxes are going? And it’s almost tax time again, yay! Maybe we should all only pay 57.8% of what we owe as a form of protest. The scary thing is that it’s going to be so hard to get that number down because there are so many entrenched military-industrial-complex interests that will scream bloody murder if we try to cut military spending. Maybe our only hope is to stop increasing the military budget (lord knows we’ve increased it plenty in the past 8 years) and thus the amount we spend will go down, relatively speaking, as inflation increases.

On closing, can we just reflect on the fact that our country is putting a huge percent of it’s productivity and effort towards killing people? How did we get to this point? What kind of horrible aberration is this? Why is there money being deducted from our paychecks to kill innocent people halfway around the world? Doesn’t that just make you sick? I know I don’t want my efforts, my labor, perverted like that. You can check out the whole pdf here.