Unintended Ironies: “MALPRACTICE”

… screams a headline at TPM, as The Person Who Kidnapped Josh Marshall rails against people who make mountains out of molehills.

… this kind of dingbat sniveling does far more damage than it gains … talking trash … just makes you look stupid … it’s silly and counterproductive and … has done them much more harm than they realize …

Who are “they”? What heinous Crime against Proportionality have they committed? Like they say in the used metal-detector-with-complimentary-yogurt-maker ads, “MustC2Bleave!!!” … and decide for yourself who’s manufacturing mountains.

DNC, Show Us Clinton’s WMDs *NOW* Or Stuff a Sock In It

She’s going to destroy the party! We must act now or it will be curtains for us. John McCain will win in November if we allow Clinton to continue her reckless and dangerous quest for the nomination. The Party is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.

HI, Will!  I don’t even know you yet but I am inventing PUMA, right this every second.  Party Unity My Ass.  See?  It’s like Back to the Future. Isn’t this cool?

Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…
The dead rising from the grave!
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!
What’s next? Howard Dean giving a speech at the United Nations with pictures of trailers in the desert filled with voter registration forms for unregistered voters?

Will you people get a grip?!

How can you guys expect us to take you seriously if your superdelegates keep coming up with lame excuses for why they’re switching their votes? It’s completely unbelievable. And there’s no reason to pre-emptively strike Clinton by saying she’s going to say mean things about you. Sticks and stones and all that. Besides, she hasn’t *done* anything to you yet.

It seems to me like the DNC and the party power brokers have decided to unilaterally disarm Clinton without taking the voters into account. They desperately want the anti-Clinton candidate to win. Does the fact that Obama’s campaign cut a deal with the DNC on joint fundraising have anything to do with it? The DNC is headed towards insolvency but instead of settling FL and MI so that it is fair to voters and to Clinton, they’d rather screw the voters in those states and, by extension, every other state that Clinton won. And voters are rightfully withholding their DNC contributions until the problem is solved to their satisfaction. Too bad solving it gets in the way of the party’s beautiful plans to take over the presidency.

Now they are reduced to relying on the Obama campaign to bring in the big bucks and bail them out with the vendors they are beholden to in Denver and all of the downticket candidates who are hurting. And those big donors for Obama, who can now open their pockets with $28,500 donations instead of the paltry $2300 per candidate are demanding quo for their quid. Out trots Andrew to do the dirty work. Now, I wouldn’t call him a traitor, but you know what happened to Colin Powell.

So, produce the evidence, Mr Andrews. Bring forth the nukes and the poisoned gas or stop the stupid fearmongering and STFU.

Hillary’s a Sticker

In this upside-down year when a leading Presidential candidate has been relentlessly hounded to quit (see Lambert’s WWTSBQ Watch) it was refreshing to find this list of reasons why Hillary should stay in the race:

10 reasons why Hillary should stay
by Bob Hepburn

But Hillary vows she won’t quit the race before it’s over. She compares herself to Rocky Balboa, of the famous film about an underdog boxer. “When it comes to finishing the fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common,” she said recently. “I never quit. I never give up.”

And she shouldn’t.

Indeed, here are 10 reasons why Hillary should stay in the race:

1. She has strong, well-thought-out positions on topics from health care to Iraq and the environment. If anything, she has a wonk-like obsession with policy.

2. She is smart, has outstanding academic credentials, and was her husband Bill Clinton’s most trusted White House adviser.

3. She has a strong personality, enthusiasm, determination. She has never been afraid to fight for what she believes in.

4. She has a strong team of advisers who could form the backbone of a Hillary White House.

5. She is still winning primaries, and has won almost all the big states, including New York and California, that the Democrats must win in November to gain the White House. While Hillary trails slightly in elected delegates, she is virtually tied with Obama in popular votes. Polls show they are in a dead heat in Indiana while Obama leads in North Carolina, two states with primaries next Tuesday.

6. She is the beneficiary of the political damage inflicted upon Obama by the controversial comments by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who was Obama’s pastor for 16 years. Obama is outraged by the latest assertion by Wright that criticism of his incendiary sermons is an attack on the black church, but polls show his support slips every time Wright opens his mouth.

7. She fares better in polls against Republican nominee John McCain than does Obama. In a USA Today poll taken April 18 to 20, Clinton led McCain 50-44 per cent while Obama led him by 47-44 per cent.

8. She is ahead of Obama in winning support of “super delegates,” who are party officials and elected politicians. This is important because neither she nor Obama will have the 2,024 pledged delegates needed to win before the convention starts. Eighty per cent of those delegates are awarded through primaries; the other 20 per cent are super delegates, who can vote any way they want at the convention.

9. What is so wrong about a “contested” convention? They are rare in the U.S., the last one being in 1952 when Adlai Stevenson won the Democratic nomination. In Canada, though, we see them every time a party holds a leadership race. Here, emotions run high, bitter words are spoken, but no one argues that every candidate except the front-runner should drop out before the actual balloting begins. There will be lots of time after the convention to heal party rifts and focus on beating McCain on Nov. 4.

10. She is carrying the hopes and dreams of millions of women.

When I was deciding who to support after Edwards dropped out, those first two reasons were what I liked about her. I thought they’d be important assets for a President (and they will.) But I had no idea how important they (and point number 3) would become as the campaign as the campaign went on through the spring.

Watching the debate in Pennsylvania and The O’Reilly show last night, proved the truth of those first three points. She handled the questions in that debate with easem making it seem like each question was exactly the thing she wanted to talk about. Last night, O’Reilly couldn’t shake her. She not only answered his questions fully — she turned them around on him. And she makes it look easy.

While stories are surfacing that Obama is bored with the campaign, Hillary is energized making even the routine into an opportunity to connect with voters.

I totally agree with riverdaughter that we should view them as trends rather than reliable numbers.  We’re starting to see a shift in the trend with Hillary’s Campaign looking very good and she IS connecting with voters.

She’s a sticker and wasn’t ever going to quit.  But, it’s nice to see her commitment and drive start to pay off.  She might never be a “media darling” but the tone of her coverage is starting to shift just a little.  And May is looking like a good month.

Thursday: Mayday!

There are two times of the year when the faerie world and the human world come within close proximity of each other: The beginning of May and the end of October. Strange things happen and anything is possible. Like, Hillary Clinton goes on The O’Reilly Factor and gives good interview. Here is part 1 of 4:

Mayday is also a distress signal used by pilots just before they bail. It comes from the French “venez m’aider”, meaning, come to my aid. This must be what Joe Andrew was signaling today when he switched from Hillary to Obama in his home town of Indianapolis:

“While I was hopeful that a long, contested primary season would invigorate our party, the polls show that the tone and temperature of the race is now hurting us,” Andrew wrote. “John McCain, without doing much of anything, is now competitive against both of our remaining candidates. We are doing his work for him and distracting Americans from the issues that really affect all of our lives.”…

“He has shown such mettle under fire,” Andrew said in the interview. “The Jeremiah Wright controversy just reconfirmed for me, just as the gas tax controversy confirmed for me, that he is the right candidate for our party.”

Oh, brother. Does any of that make any sense to you? I can’t figure out what’s going on with the DNC. Is it some kind of Death Wish? If they’ve got some compelling reason to want Clinton to drop out for the good of the party, don’t they have an obligation to tell the rest of us so we can make the right decision? But they say nothing of substance, they don’t show us her weapons of mass destruction. They only spout this nonsense. There is no fire. So, I can only conclude that it is self-interest that is motivating this kind of announcement. Anyway, if anyone knows the real reason why Andrew and others like him are sending these distress signals, would you let us know?

Mayhill Fowler (of Bittergate fame) sees a different sort of distress signal from Obama’s campaign, which she continues to follow live. She is starting to sound like an increasingly disillusioned Obamaphile in this snippet comes to us courtesy of Jerome Armstrong at MyDD. Eriposte at TheLeftCoaster has more of Fowler’s report with some additional material. Very interesting.

Finally, May Day is a holiday to celebrate workers in many countries. My French colleagues probably have the day off. Yesterday, Hillary got an endorsement from Paul Gipson, a local steelworker labor leader in Indiana whose words of praise were, um, a bit unusual to say the least. Here’s the clip from MSNBC. Watch Hillary carefully.