West Virginia voters: please remove heads from asses

by: John Hlinko

Sun May 11, 2008 at 18:42:03 PM EDT

But when I read stuff like this, I can't help but wonder what the hell is in the water there:

Like most people in Mingo County, West Virginia, Leonard Simpson is a lifelong Democrat. But given a choice between Barack Obama and John McCain in November, the 67-year-old retired coalminer would vote Republican.

"I heard that Obama is a Muslim and his wife's an atheist," said Mr Simpson.

I really don't know how else to say it -- if you still believe that Obama is a Muslim, after all the coverage to the contrary, you truly must be retarded.  Or at the very least, as my old pal Fred hilariously used to say... "If you needed a 50 to pass the retarded test, you'd pass, but with something like a 52."

And of course, there's also this:

Josh Fry, a 24-year-old ambulance driver from Williamson, insisted he was not racist but said he would feel more comfortable with Mr McCain, the 71-year-old Vietnam war hero, in the White House. "I want someone who is a full-blooded American as president," he said.

Look, if you don't like the guy, fine.  Don't vote for him.

But if you're going to vote... if you're going to help choose the next president of the United States... can you please take your head out of your ass for at least a minute, while you pull the lever?

When SNL attacks... Hillary

by: John Hlinko

Sun May 11, 2008 at 08:11:57 AM EDT

Love ya, Ellen, but... the game's over

by: John Hlinko

Sat May 10, 2008 at 21:30:03 PM EDT

...over again the media and her opponents have claimed that she is defeated...And over and over again -- in New Hampshire, on Super Tuesday, in Texas and Ohio, in Pennsylvania last month, and in Indiana this week -- female voters poured out of their homes to cast their ballots for her. They know that women can compete, and they want to make sure that women, especially this woman, can win.

It's not surprising that low-income working women are the cornerstone of Hillary's success. Many of these women live on the edge of disaster.

Pretty perceptive, if you ask me, and the whole article is worth a read.  Not surprising, however.  I met Ellen Malcolm a few years back, during the 2004 campaign, and thought she was great.  Smart, engaging, just a cool person all around.

But... here's where I've got to part with her:

So here we are in the fourth quarter of the nominating process and the game is too close to call. Once again, the opponents and the media are calling for Hillary to quit.

Too close to call?  Sorry, Ellen, that's a step too far.  This isn't even close to close.  In your basketball analogy, it's the 4th quarter, 2 minutes left, and Hillary is behind by 30 points.  Oh, and it's a one on one game with Michael Jordan.

Again, it's a great read, and worth the click.  But while it would've made a lot of sense in March, now that we're in May, the game is over.  And when you're this far behind, there's no overtime.  

Can I just say...

by: Thomas Nasty

Fri May 09, 2008 at 00:52:34 AM EDT

To The Clueless Dead (for Hillary)

by: GnostixToo

Thu May 08, 2008 at 23:39:26 PM EDT

Superdelegates -- please come to the rescue

by: John Hlinko

Thu May 08, 2008 at 12:54:02 PM EDT

Superdelegates -- get off the sidelines.  End this now.  End the hurting.

For the love of God -- be super already.  

Hillary -- enough. You are embarrassing yourself

by: John Hlinko

Thu May 08, 2008 at 12:50:57 PM EDT

Hillary -- go home.  Now.  You are literally making a fool of yourself.

Barack Obama has won the nomination.  You have no chance.  It is done.  Put a fork in it. Fat lady is singing.  Enough already.

"Rocky" = The national drink of Turkey

by: John Hlinko

Mon May 05, 2008 at 16:14:13 PM EDT

Okay, it's actually spelled "Raki." But still, how cool is that?  FYI, it's sort of like Ouzo or a non-sweet Sambucca.  Not bad, but again, it's the name that makes it.  

Great Food + Communist Kitsch = Surprising theme restaurant for Warsaw

by: John Hlinko

Wed May 07, 2008 at 17:35:48 PM EDT

Greetings from Warsaw.

I'm here to speak at word of mouth marketing conference tomorrow, and my Polish hosts were kind enough to take out the presenters to one hell of a meal tonight. Intriguing, from a sociological perspective as well.

You see, Under the Red Hog isn't just a hell of a restaurant -- with insanely copious amounts of food -- it's one with a kitschy over the top Communist theme. If you've ever been to Buca di Beppo, think that, but with Russian kitsch, rather than Italian-American.

Check out the story behind it, which is actually quite fascinating. But frankly, I'm amazed that the Poles can already laugh at this painful era.

You know what? Good for them.

Commander in Chief Obama… With a Little Help From His Friends

by: JonGee

Tue May 06, 2008 at 12:54:13 PM EDT

If you thought Hillary Clinton played the "3 AM call" card, wait til you see what John McCain has up his sleeve.

As great a candidate as Barack Obama is, he will certainly be facing an up-hill battle against McCain on these core issues.

Obama's one and only foreign policy credential is his constant and unwavering opposition to the war in Iraq. When you consider what an unmitigated disaster the war has been, that is no small credential.

McCain, on the other hand, has been a staunch supporter of the war and has made no bones about his intentions of prolonging the war for an indefinite period of time (a time-frame, it would seem, up to 100 years).

But, the fact remains that McCain has far more military and foreign policy experience than Obama. He was educated in the military, served in the military and was a genuine military hero.

Obama can't suddenly invent foreign policy experience. That's why it is imperative that he surround himself with advisors with significant military and foreign policy experience.

Once he has nailed down the Democratic Party's nomination, one of Obama's first steps should be to secure two key Cabinet posts: Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense. While such announcements are usually made after the election, Obama needs to get these people on board immediately.

SECRETARY OF STATE

Whatever difficulties Joe Biden and Obama have had in the past, Obama should select Biden as his Secretary of State. Biden's foreign policy experience is unmatched in the Senate. As Chairman of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, and a committee member since 1975, Biden has encyclopedic knowledge of all key matters relating to foreign policy. He has been to Iraq eight times and has personal relationships with key political and military figures in the region.

As Secretary of State, Biden would serve Obama well, advising on Iraq, Iran and every other political and military hot spot in the world.

SECRETARY OF DEFENSE

While Biden would bring incredible diplomatic experience to the Obama presidency, the job of Secretary of Defense should be given to Colin Powell. This selection would be met with resistance from many in the Democratic Party, but it shouldn't. Powell is the perfect choice.

Despite Powell's role in the events that led us into the debacle in Iraq, the fact remains that Powell not only is the finest military mind we have, but is an experienced military commander.

While the Democratic Party has long been the party of peace, the sad fact is that we do face military threats on many fronts.

Iraq may be the wrong place for us to be deploying the bulk of our military forces, but we must be prepared to use force (along with diplomacy) on other fronts. Powell's biggest crime was allowing Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld undermine him at every step.

Powell's performance in front of the United Nations, a performance fueled by his loyalty to his Commander in Chief, helped to pave the way for our invasion of Iraq. This act cannot be completely forgiven.

But, for the sake of an Obama victory in November, we need to forgive and move on.

The team of Obama, Biden and Powell will not only offer America security, but the combination of strength and diplomacy gives us the best shot at peace in the coming years.

Prediction for tomorrow

by: John Hlinko

Mon May 05, 2008 at 10:42:45 AM EDT

-- IN: Clinton 53%, Obama 46%
-- NC: Obama 55%, Clinton 44%

Hillary's team will whoop it up, and try to claim Indiana as a moral victory, but...  this will be a game ender.  With the teeny number of remaining primaries after NC and IN, Hillary will be all but mathematically eliminated from the delegate race, and realistically eliminated from the popular vote race.

Keep an eye on the superdelegates Wed, the day after NC and IN.  They will start to break for Obama in groups. First a wave, then a torrent.

If Hillary is smart, she will save face, and drop out by the end of the week.  

Tomorrow, the polls will start turning back to Obama

by: John Hlinko

Fri May 02, 2008 at 22:55:42 PM EDT

There. I said it. I am drawing my line in the sand. Tomorrow when you check the polls, you will see the momentum start to swing back to Barack Obama.

Tomorrow night, you will start reading about that in online media -- tentative stories, but stories nonetheless. And come Sunday and Monday, you'll see the meme of an Obama mini surge making its way into the major media.

Do I have the power of clarvoiyance? No. In fact, I'm not even sure how to spell clarvoiyance (and am too lazy to look it up). But I can read the Rasmussen and Gallup three-day tracking polls.

Note that in both that Clinton's momentum halts today, after the polls moved dramatically in her direction the last few days. Given that the result each day is the average of the combined three days, that tells me that the final day actually showed movement back towards Obama.

Call me crazy, but... between that piece of data and a general "blink" sense of how this thing is moving... I'm betting tomorrow's "momentum" is 100% "O-mentum."  

Win...Place...Oh No!

by: Blueline Bill

Sun May 04, 2008 at 09:18:59 AM EDT

The Kentucky Derby...the favorite wins...and the runner-up, well, the runner-up ran the race of her life...literally.

The filly Eight Belles finished second behind Big Brown in the Kentucky Derby on Saturday, then collapsed after the finish line and had to be euthanized.

I refuse to trot out a campaign metaphor...mostly because it's so obvious. But it's there...isn't it?

Greetings from Istanbul

by: John Hlinko

Sun May 04, 2008 at 05:27:25 AM EDT

Anyway... Istanbul.  Very cool city.  Amazing history.  

iran, hillary and hiroshima

by: sunspark

Sat May 03, 2008 at 16:51:03 PM EDT

I am staring at a photograph of corpses.  

As far as the eye can see, stretched out like some vast human landfill, they lie in heaps, twisted, distorted, flung into grotesque parodies of the people who, not long before, they were.  The photo is not close up; we see none of the disgusting wounds or the infiltrating maggots (if indeed any insects have survived the carnage).  What we see is a field of clearly charred and mangled bodies, lying in a smoky haze, while behind them, in a distance, stunned survivors stare at the wreckage of their city.

This was Hiroshima.  This is one of ten photographs just released and featured in the The Robert L. Capp collection at the Hoover Institution Archives.  The release that accompanies these photos, as well as a link to the photo I discuss above, follows.  But please note: the photo is indeed graphic.

These photographs, taken by an unknown Japanese photographer, were found in 1945 among rolls of undeveloped film in a cave outside Hiroshima by U.S. serviceman Robert L. Capp, who was attached to the occupation forces. Unlike most photos of the Hiroshima bombing, these dramatically convey the human as well as material destruction unleashed by the atomic bomb.

http://faculty.ucmerced.edu/sm...

All ten photos are devastating.  They are not for the weak of heart.  A link I found on Huffington said they were "graphic," and they are, but not in the connotation of "gross-out."  These images graphically depict the true horror of nuclear war.  They displace the false notion of complete "obliteration," to use Hillary Clinton's word for the hypothetical nuclear annihilation of Iran after an equally hypothetical attack by them on anyone in an (equally hypothetical) Middle East umbrella.  

Those of us who grew up with the haunting images of citizens atomized and their particles blown by the impact into walls to form perfect silhouettes (an image reinforced by a short story by Ray Bradbury) or fed by the horrific CGI effects from such movies as Terminator 2 might have forgotten one powerful truth about nuclear war: yes, we are aware that it is evil, that it will destroy cities, that it will cause the kind of wholesale devastation that we can hardly even imagine, but we've lulled ourselves into thinking that perhaps at the very least its victims go quickly and cleanly.  Who would not want to be atomized?  A death so instantaneous that you never even know it is there?  Perfect!

But staring at these vast fields of bodies we see the truth: outside of the city's center, outside of Ground Zero, this instant vaporization is not what occurs.  There would have been fear and panic for these people.  They would have had time to realize what was happening, to know they would die, to think final thoughts about their spouses, their children, their homes, their dreams.  Then they would have time to feel the pain, for it is obvious from the state of the corpses that the searing heat of the explosion was the cause of many of these deaths, those who did not die in the cataclysmic collapses of the buildings they were innocently sitting in.

We bandy about such terms as "nuke 'em" as if this is the easiest thing to do.  Hillary Clinton wantonly exclaims that she would "obliterate" Iran if it bombed Israel, an unconscionable action to be sure, but does Hillary--do we?--really know what such expressions mean?  Do we stop to think of the millions of innocents who would be in the way of those bombs?  Of the unbelievable and almost inconceivable horror of those last moments?  Of the suffering of any who survive the initial bombings and must handle the cleanup of countless thousands of corpses, not to mention the reconstruction of an entire country?

I'm sorry: No one should be allowed to use such expressions and go unchallenged.  No one should casually consider the liquidation of an entire country as a solution to a government's malfeasance, no matter how gross the action is that the government has committed.  No one should place the United States in a position in which, if Action A occurs, we must retaliate with nuclear arms.  This way madness lies.  

No one who makes such statements should be elected President of the United States. We've had such a one for seven years and we've been fortunate that no one has tempted him.  In this kind of dangerous world, we cannot afford another one.