It's February 29, an extra day in our calendar. Time to rest, reflect, take stock of things. I want to say something nice about Hillary Clinton, and I want you, especially if you're an Obama supporter like myself and like most of the people on Daily Kos, to take a break and say something nice about her, too. This isn't snark, sarcasm, vitriol, or damning her with faint praise. Not because there's been too much snark and vitriol, though there has, and not because the healing needs to start if we're going to kick McCain's ass to the curb in November, thought it does, but because Hillary Clinton really deserves our praise and thanks. Take this null day on the calendar and have the patience to read through this, and reflect on what we all owe to people like Hillary Clinton.

There's a lot here, and some of you may not want to spend a day that only comes around once every four years -- even less often than a blue moon -- thinking about a candidate you may have already dismissed. That's up to you. But do me a favor and recommend the diary, so it doesn't float down and get lost in the Friday morning shuffle. I'd really appreciate it.

I'm pretty cheesed off at the hugely recommended diaries telling me that it's time for JRE to drop out now and let two states' results turn this complicated nominating process into the horse race that our corporate masters want it to be.

I've been here since 2003 so I've watched a lot of things happen, both in politics and on this site, and I'm not fooled either by the clarion calls for me and other Edwards supporters to dump my candidate and sign up on the Obama bus, or by the weird logic that's being used to tell me why I should do so. While I think Edwards has the smallest chance of winning the nomination of any of the three candidates, this in no way demonstrates that he should drop out at all, and certainly not now.

What would you do if you were suddenly given $300 million?

Some time ago I started asking people what they would do if they won some preposterous amount of money -- say, $300 million -- in the lottery. This is fundamentally a stupid question, because nobody I know plays the lottery, but the answers I received told me much more than I had expected about the nature of power and politics in America.

Money is power. This has always been the case, and has only become more so as our society has been saturated with a kind of phony individualism based on greed. So when I ask someone what they would do if they won $300M in the lottery, what I'm really asking is what they would do if they had a significant amount of power to indulge their desires. And therefore, I'm really asking what their desires are: if you could alter reality to a small but meaningful extent, how would you change the world? Come below the flip to hear about their responses and what I believe all of this says about the malaise a lot of us feel about the American political system.

Brian Williams just took three minutes of the attention of seven or eight million people, including my laundry-sorting self, in order to tell us about The Nanny State. This surely well-researched tome by Denver Post reporter David Harsanyi argues that: 'The government cannot protect you from the vagaries of life and it cannot make you a better person, and that's what the nanny state tries to do."

I don't normally watch the corporate news, but when I do it's so jaw-dropping that sometimes I have to write about it. Maybe you don't watch it, either, but at least ten times as many people just watch NBC let Harsanyi market his drivel as come to Daily Kos every day. So it might be worth it for you to see just how the propaganda gets catapulted:

I watch the corporate network news a couple of times every week because I think it's important to keep an eye on what our corporate overlords deem newsworthy. Those of us who frequent this site are often prone to insulating ourselves from the MSM as much as possible, for compelling reasons, but I think this leads us all to start taking for granted that most of our fellow Americans are at all informed about and interested in the actual truth of matters. And they are not.

But General Electric's NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams actually provided something like information tonight. The lead story was the UN meeting which expressed a "general hostility toward Bush and the administration", and the fact that Bush was being pressured to try diplomacy, which wasn't deemed likely to work. Also, revolt in the Senate over "interrogations".

Just put down the remote and rushed up here to inform y'all that NBC's Brian Williams just did a piece entitled "Blog of War" in the Nightly News broadcast.

It wasn't even that skewed away from blogs and toward the MSM. On the whole, I was impressed.

I'm just going to recycle my 2000 acceptance speech, tho.

--"First of all, I'd like to thank you all for having the patience to come out here and hear me speak. I have no intention of actually running for office. Anyone who thinks I would be a good candidate should have their head examined. I have no talent at politics and less interest in governance. You'd do better choosing a president by lottery. Nevertheless, the Alphanumerican people have long since grown bored with an election that lacks a crackpot billionaire, and while I'm not technically a billionaire, there seems to be no one else willing to take on this responsibility this time around. Since I have something I'd like you to listen to, I don't mind spending millions of dollars in order to try to convince you, just for a moment, to listen. You might perhaps enjoy it more than listening to those other two replicants gush and bore you to death.

I just picked up the phone we only use for DSL in our flat here in beautiful Virginia, our home for the last 6mos., and got an electronic phone poll on the Governor's race.

The questions were fairly well-balanced, asking me about my demographic and political views, then asking me whom I'd vote for Governor, LTGov and AG. Then it asked me which of ten choices was most important to me (economy, taxes, transportation, education, abortion, gay marriage, gun ownership, death penalty, other things I forgot but NOT "the war") and then had me give fave/unfave/unsure ratings for a bunch of candidates.

So of course I'd heard about TimesSelect, where content formerly available to me for the price of ignoring ads was now going to cost me $50 a year. But we're negotiating to buy a house, and Mrs. F. and I started new jobs last month, so it never really dawned upon me until this morning when I went to click on Bob Herbert's column and found that indeed it was true: the OpEd columns are now behind a subscription wall.

Now, I'm not going to miss a damned thing. Anything Herbert, Krugman or Rich says is going to be excerpted and posted right on this website and countless others. So will Maureen Dowd's two funny lines of the week. I will not miss Tom Friedman's relentless cheerleading for global serfdom, and Kristof? Meh.

In Hunter's diary this morning, he raised the issue of people responding to Kos's rhetoric rather than the substance of his criticism of anti-war protestors:

If there's one single thing that has resulted in the political impoverishment of progressive ideals over the past couple of decades, it's the hypersensitivity of progressives and the desire to throw up their hands and take their toys away if their particular interest group gets criticized. It's an even worse problem than the overall control of the media and discourse by the corporate/military complex.

I went over to Redstate, so you don't have to, and I was rather astounded by the absence of this key race from their recommended diaries and even their member diaries. Nobody seems to care. The only account of OH-02 on the site at all that I could easily find was a frontpager where diarist Leon H squawks about Kossacks making up ways in which Schmidt is smearing Hackett, i.e., that Hackett as a civil service officer didn't really see combat. Once his own sitemates point out to him that he's wrong, he apologizes and corrects himself.

And that's it, folks.

That's all they have to say about it, whereas we have a cool near-live reporter on the ground and people networking all over the place. You have to think that this bodes well, especially in the sense of generating a belief that we deserve to win and are going to start winning big in 2006.

I lurk on a lot of these blogs, and while much of what is said is reasonable or obvious enough that I don't feel the need to do much more than make occasional snarky comments, there are a few things that always puzzle me.

Today's is the seemingly generally acknowledged problem of "Dems don't understand racial issues." The word "racial" in this context nearly always means "black." From what I've read, there seems to be a disconnect between black voters, who pretty consistently go 90/10 Dem, and the generally white politicians who campaign for black votes. There's a fear afoot that at some point, black voters are going to become weary of seeing "their" issues ignored by Dem pols other than during campaign season, and they're going to stay home on election day.

So the question I'm asking here has two parts:

I'm sorry if you thought the pie fight ad was offensive. The ad is certainly jejune. Fake lesbians with fake boobs having a fake pie fight on a fake reality show is just plain dumb. It's the sort of badly-scripted, badly-acted corporate infotainment that will make future archaeologists roll their eyes when they look back at our benighted era.

But let's just pause for an instant and try to think of a few things that are genuinely offensive:

This is the lead story on al-Jazeera right now:

A hack translation runs something like:

So it looks like Our Beloved Leader was right. Freedom is on the march.

The one thing that's keeping me from rappelling into the nearby construction site after midnight, stealing all the dynamite in the foreman's trailer, strapping the explosives to myself and walking into the local Golden Corral forty-five minutes after the megachurch next door lets out - the one thing other than watching the Republicans grit their teeth and stay with DeLay even though they know they ultimately will not save him and he will take more of them down with him - is that even the wonkiest among us have finally had it driven completely home that the only way to drive these criminals out of power is to go way back to the extremely simple and positive. To answer the question What do the Democrats stand for? in fewer than fifteen words, none of which has more than three syllables.

We always appreciate nicely put-together and well-referenced support for our struggle to encourage ordinary Americans to understand the extent to which their beloved Republican party has been hijacked by negligent criminals.  

But both the content and the framing of your diary cannot help but create obstacles to success in our struggle.  It is simply altogether too easy for both us and our opponents on the right to string together well-written news releases that make us understand the extent to which our beloved Democratic party votes with the extremists and against the interests of all working people, Repbulican and Democrat.  For example:

Democrats vote Yes on Usury and Debt Servitude Many Senate Democrats voted yes on cloture on the bankruptcy bill, guaranteeing its passage.  If most of these Democrats had voted no on cloture, we might have pulled off an upset.

This point was raised in Snyperkitty's diary and it's something I've been wondering about for awhile.

It's clear the USA is on the downslope of history right now.  Let's leave aside the question of whether this can be reversed and enjoy a little late-night weekend thought experiment.

I keep hearing different explanations for the red/blue divide: religious v. secular, rural v. urban, faith v. reason, etc.  I think at this point we've all figured out that most people are purple, and that binary oppositions are machine thinking and not human -- nearly all of us are a little bit of both and a little bit of neither rather than one or the other.  

But from the anecdotal evidence all over this site and others, esp. people's conversations with their friends and relatives, I thought I'd throw my $.02 into trying to explain the divide.