Real quick because I have to go to work!

I have heard several of these recently but until I heard it with my own ears, wasn't sure.

Let us review the most recent occasion an insurgent won the Democratic nomination against bitter and organized establishment opposition. It was 1972 and George McGovern, caretaker of the Kennedy delegates after California in 1968, had been given the party rules committee slot that would have gone to RFK and, failing that, should have gone to Gene McCarthy. In the 1972 primaries McGovern used his knowledge of the rules to defeat the presumptive nominee, Hubert Humphrey, with an outbreak of enthusiasm Humphrey could hardly understand, much less emulate.

But then at the convention he tried to reach out to the establishment wing of the party by nominating a labor hack, Tom Eagleton of Missouri, as his running mate. It was a sickening blow that the old politics delivered straight to the reform breadbasket. It also showed that McGovern did not have the strategic cunning or the tactical brass to dance with who brung him.

Politico reports that, "in Pennsylvania and Ohio, Clinton won a stunning seven in ten white voters age 60 and older." The reason for this is obvious once you know where to look. Hillary Clinton is pursuing the same strategies as the segregationist George Wallace did in order to convince older white Democrats to vote for her.

Those of Barack Obama's generation or younger have few memories of George Wallace and have trouble relating to his racist message. Older voters, however, are well aware of Wallace's impact and many were sympathetic at the time to his message. Hillary Clinton is craftily playing off this hidden communication and bond.

I am as politically addicted as the rest of you who lose sleep cross-tabbing late-night election returns.

I have been active in local Democratic Party politics off and on for years.  

As we voted in our local precinct organizing meeting last night to replace a recently-deceased Chairperson, I was thrilled (again) to note that the Democratic Party has built gender equity right into the core rulebook: if the Chair is female, the vice-chair must be male, and vice-versa.)

My vote is reliably Democratic across the board. I would not consider casting a GOP vote even for Lowly Interim Stamplicker.

I am a partisan. I educate myself. I do what I can to help educate others.

I vote. I vote. I vote. I vote.

And I have had it with the Clinton campaign.

Brandt Ayers has an interesting column in the Anniston Star in which he compares today's allegations of racial politics to those of 20, 30 and 40 years ago. His conclusion is that if you think the Clinton vs. Obama campaign has gotten in the gutter on race issues you need to crack some history books.

Ayers is the publisher of the Star, which is a rare voice of progressivism in Alabama and has been for many years. He has seen it all on the political front in Alabama for many. many years. He knows racism when he sees it.

In his most recent column he takes aim at the NYT's Maureen Dowd and her hysterical rants against the Clintons.

Here is a nugget by way of Limited, Inc. and The Virginian-Pilot. It's a profile of just one of the current players involved in the tangled evils of Blackwater. His name is Joseph Schmitz, and he is the "chief operating officer and general counsel of the Prince Group,"  Blackwater's parent company.

It briefly traces his connection to scandals ranging from the predictable fraud and abuse at the Pentagon through a littany of less likely connections including Ed Meese, George Wallace, Joseph McCarthy, and Mary Kay LeTourneau!

I would have trouble believing one person could have connections to so many scandals, past and present, if this were a made for TV movie, yet our reality seems to have become exactly this twisted and unbelievable now.

Hey everyone,
Today is a the Day of Action for the Jena Six.
Can you make a couple of calls to Louisana Leaders and put the pressure on?  It took me about 15 minutes to call everyone on the list.
Follow this link, you'll get the phone numbers and some talking points (if you need them).

http://colorofchange.org/...

Thanks for your help.

Hey everyone,
If you're not familiar, go to http://www.jenasix.org

                                           CLICK FOR MORE

Last week the Supreme Court ruled in two school integration cases, one in Seattle, the other in Louisville, deciding that schools can not take race into consideration AT ALL, even in voluntary districting cases.

When prospective GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson auditioned at a recent meeting of the secretive, far right Council for National Policy, he probably did not have to wonder which buttons to push.  The CNP has, since 1981, been a key conservative movement leadership network, dominated by the religious right.  As a man who entered electoral politics as moderate, has been at some pains to establish his conservatie bona fides. And these days if you want to show the religious right that you are one of them, one of the things you do is to let them know you share their Christian nationalism. Thompson, whose unofficial campaign is on a fast track, was quick to make a transcript of his remarks available to The National Review Online.  

    Snarkery, but it makes a point, I think. Why would you want any of these men, and (electoral) losers, running again if there were any reasonable alternative?

    Nixon won in '68 after losing in 1960, but that was a wild fluke, largely caused by LBJ's crisis of confidence and subsequent withdrawal from the race. (There may be no George Wallace this time around, either, to take away union and other voters who normally vote Democratic...) There has to be a VERY good reason for a loser to run again; if Gore had run in 2004, I could maybe handle that, but 8 years is a long time to wait, even for some crazed fanatic like Nixon.

Yesterday's post by kos on the seeming inevitability of Barack Obama winning the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination inspires me to dredge up yet another episode from Grassroots, Sen. George McGovern's 1977 autobiography. He starts out Chapter 8. THE NOMINATION [p. 155], with a chart:

In the opening days of 1971 "Jimmy the Greek" Snyder, the nation's most celebrated odds-maker, announced that the odds against George McGovern winning the Democratic presidential nomination were 200 to 1. A year later, early in 1972, Jimmy listed the odds as follows:

Another battle over the soul of the Democratic Party, another war. This quote is from Sen. George McGovern's 1977 autobiography Grassroots. He's quoting from a speech he gave in Detroit on April 15, 1972, a little more than a month after he'd surprised everyone with a strong second-place showing in the New Hampshire primary; after George Wallace won the Florida primary with 42 percent of the vote; and after McGovern won a decisive primary in Wisconsin and picked up delegates in caucuses in places as unlikely as Georgia and Mississippi (emphasis added).

McCain will not be the GOP nominee. He is too compromised and has too many enemies.

And scandal will be a big part of McCain’s fall.

Unlike 2000, the Keating Five scandal will get Murtha/Abscam-like scrutiny and reveal a McCain who will bend the rules when it is in his interest.

But the Abramoff Scandal will be the one to pull McCain down.

That may sound odd, as McCain was not involved with Abramoff during Jack’s lobbying career and led the Senate’s Indian Affairs Committee investigation of Abramoff.

Did I say investigation, I meant cover-up.

From the start, McCain worked overtime to keep a lid on the most damaging aspects of the Abramoff scandal.

As they say in Washington, the cover-up is always worse than the crime.

To the jump...

With the publication of American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, we now have a pretty good idea on whom to blame the nation's problems.

The 997 page book casts itself as:

"...the first comprehensive reference volume to cover what is surely the most influential political and intellectual movement of the last half century. More than fifteen years in the making--and more than half a million words in length--this informative and entertaining encyclopedia contains substantive entries of up to two thousand words on those persons, events, organizations, and concepts of major importance to postwar American conservatism."

See below where I name names.

Cross-posted at...

Many leftist Democrats find it as incomprehensible as it is unforgivable that Hillary Clinton continues to support the war in Iraq even as it becomes recognized as the worst foreign policy mistake since Vietnam - perhaps much worse.  So why this obeisance to the war in spite of all popular logic to contrary?  Today's New York Post may have offered a part of the answer.  

Even while noting that President Bush is in a "White House Freefall" in the context of the war, Rupert Murdock's tabloid NYPost, which attempts to dominate "Joe-Sixpack" opinion in New York State, refuses to believe that his lack of popularity is due to the war itself.  According to the  Post's June 5 (very twisted) analysis:

No young person who has ever followed politics with the ferocity of a sports fan, no citizen who has been an idealist for at least a few hours, hasn't daydreamed about a third party or independent candidate - a third party winner, actually. At some point everyone with a civic soul, no matter what their ideological flavor, has yearned for an independent spirit to break through the homogenized, cuisinarted horse manure that is modern American politics.

Editorialist Keith C. Burris at the Manchester (CT) Journal-Inquirer has won, hands down, the Eugene J. McCarthy Best Obituary sweepstakes, for which the munificent prize is a virtual full-fidelity audio CD of one hand clapping, existentially. Burris also wrote a just and thorough appreciation of him as the preface to McCarthy's last major book, No-Fault Politics: Modern Presidents, the Press, and Reformers. (Crown: 1998. ISBN: 0812930169.)

George F. ("Triumph Of The") Will, however, receives a lump of coal. Preferably slingshotted from about 20 feet at the back of his vegetable-marrow head. In order to keep his hands busy instead of performing such a salient, if indictable, public service, the Slangwhanger-in-Chief took Gus Flaubert's hearteningly vicious advice, "When you write a friend's biography, do it as if you were taking revenge for him."