brainrow

A joke, via Daily Kos:

A big insurance company just announced they will give $10 million to anyone who can invent a car that gets 100 miles per gallon. Meanwhile, Exxon says they’ll give $11 million to anyone who kills that guy.
—Conan O’Brien

Reminds me of Dick Cheney dismissing conservation as “a sign of personal virtue,” not a basis for an energy policy, and this White House press briefing from May 2001:

Q: Does the President believe that, given the amount of energy Americans consume per capita, how much it exceeds any other citizen in any other country in the world, does the President believe we need to correct our lifestyles to address the energy problem?

MR. FLEISCHER: That’s a big no. The President believes that it’s an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policy makers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one. And we have a bounty of resources in this country.

Future generations — our children, our grandchildren — are just going to have to look out for themselves. In this administration, we’ve got our hands full just grabbing everything we possibly can for ourselves. It’s the American Way. “Don’t start thinking about tomorrow.”

This short-sightedness has been a cornerstone of the Bush Administration, it’s true. But it’s not just them. It’s been U.S. policy for decades. When do we grow up?

Atrios asks:

Didn’t Apollo Creed beat Rocky?

Well, yeah.

That’s why I assumed Hillary was comparing herself to the indomitable Rocky, the Flying Squirrel, not the punch-drunk palooka played by Sylvester Stallone. Stallone has endorsed John McCain and the use of Human Growth Hormone. I don’t understand why so many people are confused about this.

Cartoonist Ruben Bolling takes us to a magical place where the high-rollers never lose:

Hillary is Rocky:

Hillary Clinton has vowed to fight on in the contest to be the Democrats’ presidential candidate, comparing herself to the film character Rocky.

Rocky was always tough. Spunky. Never gave up.

In this scenario, I’m guessing Bill Clinton is supposed to be Bullwinkle?

The video of Bush being booed at a baseball game has been removed by YouTube. They’ve posted a message saying “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by MLB Advanced Media.”

Interesting. President of the United States goes to a baseball game at a stadium paid for with taxpayer money and the crowd boos him. But we have no right to see that without “express written permission of Major League Baseball.”

Congress, while you’re rooting around in the steroid scandal, maybe you should make some adjustments to copyright law, too. Bush’s performance was not part of the game, and cannot possibly be “intellectual property” of Major League Baseball under any reasonable standard of fair play.

Political cartoonist Tom Tomorrow gives us neocon regrets after five years of war in Iraq.

The beat goes on.

This is why I could never be president. I was never any good at sports.

Update: Major League Baseball claimed copyright and made YouTube take the video down. Way to go, Major League Baseball!

Colorado Jyms is feeling down:

[F]rom time to time the facts seem to stack up and I cannot put a positive spin on the things I see.

1) Oil prices continue to climb which in all likelihood means we have past ‘peak oil’ and there is no more cheap oil for us to drill.

2) Even if there was cheap oil to be found, having a chunk of Antarctica the size of 7 Manhattans drop into the water is a good indication that we have already past the point of easy remedies.

3) The party that is supposed to save the day by a landslide of votes indicating the country is truly ready for change, ready to stop the war in Iraq, to start making real environmental progress cannot find a candidate to run for president.

4) The country is spiraling into a recession.

5) Do I really need to find any more reasons? Climate change, end of cheap oil, recession, no savior to save the day. That pretty much sums it up.

Game over.

I posted a comment on Jyms’ site, and I’ll repeat it here:

I’ve been in this same mood lately, myself. It’s not useful.

It’s true we’re facing serious problems. President Kennedy famously said, “When written in Chinese the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.”

Did you notice how Barack Obama, confronted with embarrassing video of inflammatory remarks by his pastor, didn’t act just to limit the political damage to himself? He confronted danger, and he seized opportunity: he moved the ball down the field on the issue of race in America.

The Democrats have found a candidate to run for president. You’ll see.

This is going to be a tough century here on planet earth. Terrible things are going to happen. Terrible things have happened throughout history, and humans have always found a way to turn crisis into opportunity, and build a new world on the ruins of the old. They don’t wait for a savior to save the day; they step up and save it themselves. Leaders emerge. Years later, they’re remembered as saviors. In the moment, they’re just struggling along with everyone else.

You’re right about “game over,” though. The old game is over. As you said, we’re past the point of easy remedies. All the choices now are tough ones. We can’t afford to play around anymore. There’s work to be done.

Maureen Dowd wonders whether the Clinton strategy is Hillary or Nobody:

Even some Clinton loyalists are wondering aloud if the win-at-all-costs strategy of Hillary and Bill — which continued Tuesday when Hillary tried to drag Rev. Wright back into the spotlight — is designed to rough up Obama so badly and leave the party so riven that Obama will lose in November to John McCain.

If McCain only served one term, Hillary would have one last shot. On Election Day in 2012, she’d be 65.

Why else would Hillary suggest that McCain would be a better commander in chief than Obama, and why else would Bill imply that Obama was less patriotic — and attended by more static — than McCain?

Sure. Another four years of war in Iraq, another four years of right-wing judicial appointments, another four years of inaction on health care, another four years of “millionaires first” tax cuts and ruinous deficits — all those are a small price to pay to get the Clintons back into the White House. Wreck the party! Wreck the country! Wreck the whole planet! Hillary must rule!

Hillary Clinton on Jeremiah Wright:

“I think given all we have heard and seen, he would not have been my pastor,” Clinton said in a news conference in Greensburg, Pennsylvania.

Well, of course he wouldn’t.

Wherever Hillary Clinton goes, whoever she meets, whatever she says or does, there is one thought always foremost in her mind: How will this play in Peoria?

If she picks her friends based on whether they can help her politically, don’t you suppose she would pick her pastor the same way?

Hey, that’s why she voted to authorize the War in Iraq. Who cared whether Saddam really had the WMDs? The war looked quick and easy, and it was popular as hell at the time, so there was no need to actually look at the National Intelligence Estimate. Gallup had all the necessary intelligence for Clinton’s decision.

When polls showed Americans turning against the war, so did she. If she wins the Democratic nomination, you can rest assured that she will continue to oppose the war for as long as the political winds are blowing that way — at least, until Election Day.

We’ve reached another milestone in Iraq:

The number of United States military personnel killed in Iraq since the US-led invasion five years ago has passed the 4,000 mark.

The latest to die were four soldiers whose patrol vehicle was blown up by a bomb in southern Baghdad on Sunday.

President George W Bush offered his “deepest sympathies” to the families of US military personnel killed in Iraq.

Separately, the bodies of two US security contractors kidnapped in Iraq more than a year ago have been found.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said it had recovered the remains of Ronald Withrow, who was seized in January 2007, and John Roy Young, abducted in November 2006.

On Sunday, insurgent attacks and military operations left at least 47 people dead across Iraq.

The bloodshed comes despite an overall reduction in violence since last June, following the US deployment of an extra 30,000 troops in violence-hit areas – the so-called “troop surge”.

Another hundred years of this war, as John McCain suggests, and this won’t seem so bad.

Update: The New York Times has a database of the lost lives. Each pixel represents one soldier. Click to see different faces.

James Carville on Bill Richardson’s endorsement of Barack Obama:

“An act of betrayal,” said James Carville, an adviser to Mrs. Clinton and a friend of Mr. Clinton.

“Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic,” Mr. Carville said, referring to Holy Week.

Oooh! Classy!

Carville was one of the upstart political geniuses who ran Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992. Two years after the Clinton political brain trust took over the national Democratic Party, the Republicans won substantial majorities in both houses of Congress. From then until 2006, the best Democratic showing in Congressional elections came in 2000, when they won a 50-50 tie with Republicans in the Senate — a tie that was immediately broken in favor of Republicans by Dick Cheney.

In 2006, Democratic strategists considered how best to fight their way back. Clinton-aligned strategists like Carville and Rahm Emanuel argued that Democrats had to concentrate their limited resources on a small handful of races where Democratic chances looked best. Howard Dean, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, had a different idea: give the Republicans a fight for every seat. It might produce some surprises, and even in districts and states where Democrats were defeated, the fact that the party was in there fighting might plant some seeds that would bear fruit in years to come.

Dean’s strategy helped Democrats regain control of both Houses of Congress in the 2006 elections. Immediately, Carville called for Dean’s resignation, saying “I would describe his leadership as Rumsfeldian in its incompetence.”

Really? Democrats win Congress for the first time in 12 years, and you say the guy responsible is incompetent?

You know, I don’t think Carville has any business calling anyone Judas.

Sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying. The Daily Show reviews the first five years of the War in Iraq:

Perhaps, to view this war as a success, we have to look at it the way the president does: backwards.

And they bring us “Dick Cheney, International Man of Misery.”

Obama calls for a national dialogue on race. Jon Stewart looks at how the cable news channels respond.

This video contains bad language. Normally, I wouldn’t post it on this blog, but in this case, the bad language is used to make a serious point about 90% of our political discourse.