And the White House chef gives out juice boxes at snack time

El Presidente is heading down to Texas today in preparation for Jenna's wedding this Saturday. His spokesman says:

"He's looking forward to it," White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe told reporters aboard the plane as it flew from rainy Washington to sunny Texas. "He's excited like any proud father is to see one of his daughters get married."

"I think he's also going to make sure he gets a good night's sleep tonight so he can stay up late the rest of the weekend and enjoy all the activities."

Which is especially important because the President has been pooped all week from running around with his little military friends trying to make Iraq collapse onto itself! The American people will definitely have to talk to the White House Press Secretary Chief Babysitter and make sure little Georgie is getting a good nap every day from now on.

You can't vote in your closet

Barack Obama and homosexuality being two of my favorite political causes, you can probably guess that I was pleased to see this story pop up on my blog feed, announcing that Melissa Etheridge will be one of the co-chairs of the Obama campaign's national voter registration drive. The Times article goes on to list a few of the other co-chairs and attribute it to identity politics:

Also on the list: the R&B star Usher; the rocker Dave Matthews; Kerry Washington, an actress known recently from the “Fantastic Four” movies; Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts; and Representative Linda T. Sanchez of California.

The co-chairmen were obviously selected to appeal to the various groups the Democrats are trying to bring on board — young people, blacks, Hispanics.

But wait. Melissa Etheridge is in whatever the RSS feed equivalent of a lede is for this post, and you don't mention the gays? Come on. We know the Democrats more or less take us for granted, and we know that you can't pick out a queer from a voter list the same way you might be able to predict someone's ethnicity or age, but let's be queer - oops, I mean, clear - about something. MELISSA ETHERIDGE IS GAY. She is exactly as gay as Usher is black, which is exactly as much as Dave Matthews is supposed to appeal to young people, at least according to the New York Times. I certainly wouldn't go so far as to chalk this up to overt bias (or even some vague gay-related discomfort), but in case anyone missed that about Melissa, you should know that she's one of us.

Which gives me a great excuse to reprise the most awkward gay moment of the 2008 campaign.

Melissa Etheridge: Do you think homosexuality is a choice, or is it biological?
Bill Richardson: It's a choice. It's... it's...
Melissa Etheridge: I don't know if you understand the question. Do you think I - a homosexual is born that way, or do you think that around seventh grade, we go, 'Ooh, I wanna be gay?'
Bill Richardson: You know, I'm not a scientist.

WORST ANSWER EVER. Maybe the beard will restore his wisdom.

Mike Gravel, Obama Girl, and Soulja Boy

That is all.

operation chaos

when did a win become a loss? for the life of me, i can't understand why the media thinks that hillary should quit. because she lost one of two states she was expected to lose? because she only won indiana by two points? because she lost a southern state expected to heavily favor obama?

let's get real, folks. hillary clinton won a state that neighbors illinois and receives media from chicago, one in which she was heavily outspent, and one the obama campaign predicted to win by seven points. she won by two points, about sixteen thousand votes. granted, it isn't a huge margin. but she didn't win new hampshire by a huge margin, either. because she lost iowa by eight points, does it follow that she should have dropped out after winning new hampshire by three? obama handily outspent her in texas, and she won texas by four. should she have dropped out then?

granted, i've grumbled about the media's propensity to prematurely end her candidacy before. this isn't anything new. nevertheless, the fact that tim russert has the gall to de-legitimize her candidacy before full results from indiana came in says everything we need to know about the media. remember, media executives who determine front-page headlines and nightly news lead-ins also maintained--in the case of the AP--that britney spears died. and these are the people who gauge paris hilton as a representative of our generation, the people who covered her journey to prison for an entire news cycle.

and so these same people have pronounced her "toast," declaring that the race "is over," that she can't continue. (the new york post even has an online poll that blatantly ignores her candidacy.) well, here's my official response to our beloved "independent" media: fuck you. they've no right to determine an election's result until every vote is counted. they don't nominate our party's standard-bearers; voters do. until the punditocracy learns to curb its impulses to decide an election, our democracy is in danger. 

Lo, how the mighty have fallen into consulting jobs

Apparently Hizzoner is now doing some consulting for a thirty-six-year-old ex-kickboxer boxing champion running to be mayor of Kiev. Apparently his primary role is to offer ideas about how Kiev can reduce the level of corruption in its municipal government.

This is pretty funny to me. No offense intended to Kiev, (kick)boxers, or 36-year-olds - what's more funny is relying for your advice about corruption on a guy with a fairly spotty ethics record himself. Elise has documented this quite well already, so I won't repeat that here. Suffice it to say that of all the American ex-mayors (and even ex-presidential candidates) who you could conceivably ask to give you advice about corruption, Giuliani should probably not be at the top of the list.

Or maybe he'll advise that the mayor of Kiev respond to corruption charges by saying, "My picture is on thousands of buses!"

Update: Corrected for details of the would-be mayor's current (not former!) boxing career. Thanks, David!

"Over"

Everybody -- and by "everybody" I mean "Tim Russert and his friends" -- says yesterday's NC and IN results basically end the campaign, whether Hillary knows it or not. That's the big narrative of the day, and Obama supporters are predictably jubilant. But the best commentary comes, as usual, from Chris Bowers:

I am finding myself resistant to the way this nomination campaign appears to be ending, mainly because there is no logic to it. All of the arguments that could be used by the punditry to declare the nomination campaign over could have been used really at any point since Wisconsin. For some reason, those arguments appear to be sticking tonight, whereas they weren't earlier. According to the logic that ends the campaign tonight, there was no reason to torture us for the past two months, except to damage Democrats for the sake of damaging Democrats. I guess I should have learned by now that that is reason enough.

The Clinton campaign will probably slog on in some form, as Ben Smith indicates. After all, she is going to win West Virginia, and maybe Michigan really won't have a single delegate for Obama. Or something else absurd that won't happen. However, the truth is that the Clinton campaign has been kept alive by inaccurate and arbitrary media rules that now seem to have arbitrarily shifted against her. Survival in that environment will prove extremely difficult indeed. Live by the arbitrary media narrative, become irrelevant by it. The nomination campaign seems to have outlived its usefulness to the national media.

Absolutely right. This whole thing is just a joke.

Election Day Voter Registration in MA: an open letter

I'm writing this blog post today to tell you about an issue that is near and dear to my heart: voter engagement/election day registration.  It isn't really a partisan issue (although you folks aren't really ones to worry about this) but it would make a huge difference in participation levels here in MA.  Minnesota has it and when I met the Secretary of State who started it there this past summer, he convinced me of the value it provides.  There's no evidence of voter fraud with it, only increased chances to promote an active democracy.  Just think about it.  College students across MA could register day of election to cast ballots, without needing to think ahead and ask for an absentee ballot. 

For the Harvard specific benefits, think about the benefits this could bring on a local level too.  Imagine having city councilors beholden to the student vote who wanted to help make sure Felipes was open past 2am.  Think about progressive student votes coming in in more conservative towns across MA like Olin College in Needham or the ladies of Wellesley.

I want you sign this petition to help move it forward, the bill promoting this is at a critical point in the approval process.  The governor has already said he would sign it, and so all it needs is to pass the legislature.  Sign here.

Harry Reid has all the energy of a sloth covered in molasses

Here is the most boring interview in the history of ever:

Notice how Senator Reid doesn't say a word for the first minute and eight seconds.

If I didn't know any better, I would think that this is the reason why nothing has gotten done in the Senate since the Democrats took the majority.

I really hope we get a nominee soon so we can stop having this nonsense as the face of our party. It's impossible to get excited about that.

Harvard Dems Gala 2008

Sunday Nights on the Lam: Reading Period Has Gotten To Me Already Edition

Okay, I concede that it's Monday. I have little to no excuse. (Actually, I do: not one but two papers. I love reading period!) But hey, Green Bay has two Monday night games next season. And my season lasts all year. (Kind of like baseball - it just won't stop, even when every event is unreasonably long and you could get to all the interesting bits in about five percent of the time.) So what follows is an unapologetically late edition of Sunday Nights on the Lam, following the theme of... no theme at all!

In semi-political news, an interesting court case has come up in Greece. Those of you vaguely conversant with queer history (or perhaps mythology?) will know that the term 'lesbian' comes from the island of Lesbos, home of the poet Sappho, who, despite the fact that very few of her works have survived to the present day, is widely considered perhaps the founding mother of lesbian poetry. (Representative sample:

Come back to me, Gongyla, here tonight,
You, my rose, with your Lydian lyre.
There hovers forever around you delight:
A beauty desired.

Even your garment plunders my eyes.
I am enchanted: I who once
Complained to the Cyprus-born goddess,
Whom I now beseech

Never to let this lose me grace
But rather bring you back to me:
Amongst all mortal women the one
I most wish to see.

Not, in my opinion, the steamiest of love poems, but I guess that's enough to get you the rainbow letter in ancient Greece.) Anyway, the island continues to exist, in that persistent way that elements of founding myths do sometimes, and apparently some of the straight islanders are all upset about the term's present connotation. So a publisher from the island and various other offended citizens are suing the Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece to prevent them from using the world 'lesbian,' on the grounds that being associated with the gays is so humiliating that it violates the islanders' human rights. Now there's the humanitarian crisis of the century.

For reasons I can't recall, although it's not on my usual blogroll, I was reading Boing Boing the other day and stumbled across this post about the newest frontier in what might be described as the New Yorker cartoon genre of consumer items: things that 95% of Americans, myself included, are just not cultured enough to get. Marjin van der Poll, a name I am reproducing here not because I have any idea who he is but rather because it's a sweet name, has designed a chair, of sorts: a cube of 0.04" thick steel that comes with a sledgehammer, which you use to bash the chair into any shape you like. (Or, to put it in artsier terms, you "hit and pound it into your own perfect piece of functional art.") The basic model (cube plus sledgehammer) costs $5924; for just $794 more, you can have the distinct honor of owning a chair "pre-formed" by van der Poll himself. (Who comes up with these prices, anyway?) There is also a video of the chair being customized. Sort of a modern, much more expensive, and infinitely less comfortable take on the old-fashioned art of sitting in a chair until it develops a groove the shape of your butt, I guess. I am reminded of the seventy-ninth thing that white people like: modern furniture.

I can't think of much else to add, so instead I'll just share the reason why I haven't found any actual content for this post: I've been going through Nerve's list of the 50 Greatest Commercial Parodies of All Time, a fabulous compilation that's a little SNL-heavy - but since SNL sort of dominates the genre, this is pretty fair. I'll leave you with something you might consider old, but since I haven't watched it in a while and it had me giggling tonight, I'll call it a classic: Robot Insurance.

That's all for this week's edition of Sunday Nights on the Lam. Watch out for those robots!

Sound policy choices

Clinton:

"I’m not going to put my lot in with economists."

(sound of my head slamming against a wall, repeatedly)

Sunday Screening

Why don't more people listen to bluegrass?

That's Chatham County Line, an amazing semi-traditional bluegrass band from Raleigh, NC. I don't have time to write at length about anything today -- if I were a sane person I'd be starting my paper about Irish revolutionary Patrick Pearse right now -- so I'll just urge you to check out their new album, IV. (Or at least download the leadoff single "Chip of a Star," which is truly beautiful and has a hook worthy of pop radio, here.)

Here's more Chatham County Line...

(That last one, "Company Blues," is probably my favorite of their songs; the album cut from Speed of the Whippoorwill is even better, since they all sing the chorus with this incredible hair-raising harmony. Go get it if you can.)

Anyway. Good luck with all the schoolwork everyone undoubtedly has, and I'll see you on the other side; this is an open thread.

The other upside of the drawn-out campaign

USA Today:

Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton are increasingly funding their presidential campaigns through donations of $200 or less, a USA TODAY analysis shows, in a break from previous contests dominated by wealthier contributors.

More than half of the $194 million that Clinton and Obama collected from January through March for their primary fight came from small donations, according to the analysis of data compiled by the non-partisan Campaign Finance Institute. That's up from about 15% of the $43.5 million collected by both Democrats during the same period last year.

[...] Obama's small donation outreach is "staggering," said Jonathan Krasno, a political scientist at New York's Binghamton University. "He has done more to reach out to people and to get their donations than I thought was possible."

Krasno said Clinton has had to find "new donors to compete with his fundraising success and to pay for a race that has lasted longer than expected."

This is a direct consequence of the extended primary season. See, our politics historically has been dominated by big money -- but in this cycle, all the wealthy donors gave the $2300 limit way back in early 2007, and the campaigns planned their spending to pretty much end after Super Tuesday. So all the subsequent campaigning has had to be funded by ordinary small donors, simply by default, and the campaigns have been forced to use these new fundraising models! Which, conveniently, are engaging countless thousands of new people into the political process and doing more to wrest control of the system away from the rich than anything else this year. Think about THAT next time you complain about the Endless Campaign...

(via Taegan Goddard)

Jon Stewart Mentions Harvard!

If you don't wanna watch the whole thing, fast forward to about 2:15.

Just a note on today's economic figures

You may have heard about the Labor Dep't statistics released today showing a little decline in the unemployment rate and a "smaller-than-expected" contraction in jobs. This has caused Drudge, typically, to flip shit and argue that the economy is rebounding. Now, this is obviously insane for a couple different reasons -- but I want to remind everybody that the real story is still wages:

Companies are cutting working hours, even as many avoid layoffs. Those working part time because of slack business or out of failure to find full-time work swelled from to 5.2 million in April from 4.9 million in March. In percentage terms, employees working part time involuntarily climbed to the highest level since 1995.

The average weekly pay for rank-and-file workers — about 80 percent of the American work force — fell $3.55 in April, to $602.56 in inflation-adjusted terms. This figure has been generally falling since the end of 2006. Gains in pay have been canceled out by the soaring costs of food and energy.

Awesome rebound!

UPDATE (6 PM): Mike Shedlock argues that the numbers are simply bogus.