It's not racism that caused the blowout, it's that HRC basically attached herself like a leech to Appalachia in order to win Pennsylvania.

For good reasons, people in the Appalachian areas have suspicions and resentments of outsiders, and HRC remade herself into a rural Appalachian white person fighting for them against 1) San Fransciscans 2) Economists 3) Democratic Activists 4) Those blacks playing the race card.  She appeared on O'Reilly.  She drank.  she pumped gas.  She fumbled with coffee machines at the quick-mart.  She went on about hunting.  

And no mention of gays, or mandates, or abortion, or the supreme court, or a rainbow coalition.  Shhhhhhh. It's not about what you are for.  It's about who you are against.  

She joined the culture war on the red side.

I was tempted to register with MyDD to answer this lovely that's been on the recommended list for three days:

why I resent Obama(Mosley Braun for example)
http://www.mydd.com/...

Some are claiming that HRC's discussion of her white support shows her to be racist or inflaming racism or relying on racism.  It's not that, but something else, something also pretty bad.

It's her premise that voters, even her supporters, are craven, stupid, even evil.

HRC and her fans didn't have much of an agenda besides making her president.  Despite claims to the contrary, it was her that ran the personality driven campaign, her toughness, her intelligence, her experience, her husband.

And one of the destructive aspects about HRC 08 is that is is based so little on issues.  It's about her as president, about being against Obama, and about wedge politics, and about victimization, and about her electability.  

Because HRC 08 defined that way, it's tough to suddenly join the group defined as victimizers and the side across from the wedge.  

Via Deacon's Bench, http://deacbench.blogspot.com/...

Moments ago, Edward Cardinal Egan issued a statement saying he deeply regrets former mayor Rudy Giuliani received communion during Pope Benedict XVI mass at Saint Patrick's.

This came out of the blue today. Yes, there was some controversy when this first happened, but for Cardinal Edward Egan to come out and say he "deeply regrets" it, that's a strong statement.

It all has to do with Giuliani's stance on abortion.

Well, turns out, Giuliani SHOULD have been refused communion, but not out of politics.

That fact from George Will on Sameoldstuffolous's show.  He was illustrating how those people need tax cuts, and his horror that Obama might allow tax cuts to expire. It's not just Charlie Gibson's concern: it's EVERYONE's.  EVERYONE makes a hundred grand a year.  It's just YOU that isn't.

Actually he said, "100k a year is a chicago teacher, is a chicago cop."  So maybe he's got two specific people in mind, who inherited a ton of cash.   But that's not the wage of a Chicago teacher.

Will also stated that capital gains are received by people making under 50,000 a year.  It's true. Retired people living off their investments.  Why should I working for my fifty grand, pay full boat up to 28% on my wages, why someone who doesn't work pays 15% on their income?  What is so BAD about WORKING for a living?  Because Gibson has investments?

And Will lies and says Obama accepted premise that cutting cap gains taxes increases revenue.  If Will wants to pretend his OWN stupidity, fine.  But leave the rest of us out of it.

Theda Skocpol gives her take on the meeting where HRC (allegedly) said "screw them" about working class southern voters, confirming the tone and gist of what Barber recalled of HRC:

Hillary Clinton was among the most cold-blooded analysts in attendance. She spoke of ordinary voters as if they were a species apart, and showed interest only in the political usefulness of their choices -- usefulness to the Clinton administration, that is.

I vividly remember at the time finding it impressive that Bill Clinton (NOT Hillary Clinton) showed real empathy for the ordinary people whose motives and supposedly misguided choices were under analysis. Ironically, just as Barber reported, Bill Clinton was the one who combined analysis and empathy, much as Obama himself did in his full San Francisco remarks.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

HuffPost:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain of Arizona may not have been paying the closest of attention last week during hearings on the Bush administration's Iraq policy.

Speaking Monday at the annual meeting of the Associated Press, McCain was asked whether he, if elected, would shift combat troops from Iraq to Afghanistan to intensify the search for al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

"I would not do that unless Gen. [David] Petraeus said that he felt that the situation called for that," McCain said, referring to the top U.S. commander in Iraq.

As reported on HuffingtonPost h/t Carpetbaggerreport:

http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com...

McCain’s elusive medical records
Posted April 3rd, 2008 at 11:05 am
In 1999, during John McCain’s first presidential campaign, the senator, then 63, couldn’t have been any more forthcoming when it came to his medical history. Months before a single vote was cast, McCain instructed his campaign to release 1,500 pages of medical and psychiatric records. What’s more, journalists with additional questions were given direct access to McCain’s personal physician.

Hillary Clinton's campaign announced a new rationale for Democrats to nominate her.  Having conceded that she will not end the primaries with the most elected delegates, or most popular votes, or the most superdelegates, or the most states, or with polls showing her leading among Democrats or doing better against McCain, her latest speech in Scranton set forth the following:

The explosion, the deadliest attack in Karbala in nearly a year, overshadowed a Baghdad visit by Vice President Dick Cheney, who met with Iraqi and American leaders and extolled what he described as "phenomenal" security improvements in the country.

http://www.nytimes.com/...

Five years into it.  The Brits and Poland are forgotten.  The US is at the highest troop levels since the invasion.  Last Sunday's NYTimes told of how the oil is being siphoned off, sometimes literally, to fuel insurgents.

Of course, my first reaction to the declaration of "a dKos writers' strike" was....those are the "dKos writers"?  

http://www.dailykos.com/...

If someone asked me who the "dKos writers" were, it would be someone like Hunter, or Bill in PM. Not the people claiming it, for sure.

But that's not the exagerration that gripes me. It's analogizing that "strike" to the writers strike that affected real people's real lives for months.  Billions of real dollars lost.  

Remember the circumcision diary guy?

Due to the confusion in the diaries and comments yesterday over what HRC 08 raised over what time period, here's a summary based the latest unofficial and somewhat off the record comments by HRC 08 staffers.

http://www.nytimes.com/...

Actually, I'm able to talk about God fine; I've got no problem with religion or the religious 99% of the time: but this makes me so angry I can't see straight.

The background is four customers and a store manager killed in suburban Chicago:

5 Women Dead In Lane Bryant Shooting
 

WMAQ-TV
updated 7:07 a.m. CT, Mon., Feb. 4, 2008
TINLEY PARK, Ill. - Five women have been confirmed dead in a Saturday morning shooting at a Lane Bryant store in Tinley Park. Police have launched a manhunt in search for the gunman.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...

Previous versions of HRC 08 were carefully centered around what (she and her advisors thought) were good for the general election.  Here's a list of a few of the hits that her electability in the general took in the last panicked, desperate days before the New Hampshire primary:

Now Bill Clinton is trying out an attack on Obama, claiming that his Obama is no better than his own wife on the Iraq war.  Yes, HRC voted for the IWR, and for the blank check that gave Bush legal power to keep us in Iraq forever, but somehow, the guy who opposed it is just as bad as she is.

From a man who claims that unlike his wife, he was against the war "from the start", it's the epitome of negative campaigning--to claim that all candidates are equally bad.

But it's not true: in 2002, Obama was challenging Bush to fight, not in the "dumb war" that HRC and JE would authorize, but our eternal enemies of povery, ignorance -- amd our new enemies of Bin Laden and growing energy dependence.  

Let's see the speech that we all wish HRC and JE had heeded before empowering Bush's disasterous war.  Before they went along for the ride.  Before they gave Bush a blank check.  Before they were "fighters".

Let's all read it with the hope that we empower more Obama and less Bush/war in the future.

One of the most overlooked stories in the campaign season is Hillary Clinton's ideas on staying in Iraq in massive force for the foreseeable future.

When Tim Russert asked her on MTP to commit to getting US trops in Iraq down to 50,000 by the end of her first term in 2013, I was sure she was going to give us the old bellylaugh.  

I was sure she was going to say, "Now Tim, I can't imagine we would have any purpose for having 50,000 troops there."  

But no, she REFUSED TO COMMIT TO 50,000 FOUR YEARS INTO HER PRESIDENCY.  I was gobsmacked.  What is she planning, I thought? Or is she not planning at all beyond getting elected?

An op-ed piece from John Schmidt, the co-chair of Clinton's finance effort in Illinois for 1992, now co-chair of Lawyers for Obama:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/...

Bill Clinton on the "Charlie Rose Show" last week compared Barack Obama's experience unfavorably to his own before he was president. That brought back vivid memories of conversations with him in the fall of 1991 when he came to Chicago looking for support.

I ended up agreeing to be co-chairman of Clinton's Illinois finance effort. But it was certainly not his experience that persuaded me.

He had spent 11 years as governor of Arkansas. He was, he said on "Charlie Rose," "the senior U.S. governor." Well, yes, but of a state with a total population less than Chicago's. And Arkansas is not only small but poor, with an overwhelmingly rural economy.

Clinton had no experience at all in the national government.

His most striking limitation was the fact that his entire adult experience outside government consisted of three years teaching at University of Arkansas Law School, during which he ran unsuccessfully for Congress.