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In just under a month, we’ll be closing the deal on our house and ship off from Massachusetts to New Mexico. A lot of people ask when they hear about the imminent relocation how I feel about the move. And the honest answer is that I’m very excited. Reasons for this excitement include (but are not limited to):

1. Better weather
2. Fewer allergies
3. Great food
4. Lower cost of living
5. Cheap health insurance
6. Working from home
7. Listening to music while I work from home
8. Great sunsets
9. Martha feeling like her life is moving forward
10. It’s a purple state, so my presence might actually make a difference for Barack

I realize some of those sound redundant or are subsets of others, but they bear mentioning. Like the health insurance one. As a freelancer, I’ll be in charge of securing my own coverage. Here in Massachusetts, the group plan at work costs Free Press nearly $300 a month. In New Mexico, my individual plan will run something like $160. Which is insanely cheap. Anyway, we’re still planning our cross-country route at the end of June, but there’s a 50% chance we’ll wind up heading across Iowa on I-80. Anyone care to offer housing?  

you want to talk about hamas and appeasement, do you mr. 28% approval? great. let’s talk about hamas and appeasement:

“If George Bush and John McCain want to have a debate about protecting the United States of America, that is a debate that I’m happy to have any time, any place, and that is a debate that I will win because George Bush and John McCain have a lot to answer for,” Obama said in a campaign speech in South Dakota.

“They’ve got to answer for the fact that Iran is the greatest strategic beneficiary of our invasion of Iraq. It made Iran stronger, George Bush’s policies,” he said. “They’re going to have to explain why Hamas now controls Gaza, Hamas that was strengthened because the United States insisted that we should have democratic elections in the Palestinian Authority.”

“That’s the Bush-McCain record on protecting this country,” he added. “Those are the failed policies that John McCain wants to double down on.”

barack obama was raised in a briar patch, bitches!

in case it isn’t obvious, this is more good cop/bad cop bullshit on behalf of john mccain. from here on out, look for this pattern: outrageous and incendiary attacks made by irrelevant right-wing figures with low mainstream credibility, followed up by heartfelt statements from candidate mccain in which he clucks his tongue and loudly bemoans our divisive politics, conveniently neglecting to contradict or directly address the outrageous claims of the attacks.

credit where it’s due: clinton didn’t fuck around on this one, calling bush’s comparison “offensive and outrageous on the face of it, especially in light of his failures in foreign policy.” is this newfound emphasis on party loyalty a sign she’s beginning to accept the idea that obama has won? is it merely confirmation that she’s not, in fact, extraordinarily stupid and/or evil? or is it just more schizophrenic dithering? who knows, but hillary was a team player on this one, and it’s an encouraging sign. in fact, most of the big party leaders — pelosi, reid, emmanuel — have been impressively on-message and well synchronized lately in their efforts to shift the discussion toward john mccain and the clobbering he’s about to receive. is this what an organized and disciplined democratic party looks like? i’m not sure i’ve ever seen it before, but i could definitely get used to it.

From the C-SPAN homepage:

Pres. Bush’s request for Iraq war supplemental funds was defeated 141-149, with 132 Republican members voting “Present.” 

Those special-election losses that keep adding up for the GOP must have them really scared if they don’t even have the balls to endorse their President’s budget. But voting against it would just be too strong a statement, apparently.

about fucking time:

you had me worried for a while there, johnny.

meanwhile, in the parallel universe inhabited by the clinton campaign…

NEW YORK (AP) — Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed to remain in the presidential race until the final primaries next month while her campaign built a case that she now leads in the popular vote if the disputed contests in Michigan and Florida are counted.
…
“You don’t walk off the court before the buzzer sounds,” Clinton said on CNN. “You never know, you might get a three-point shot at the end.”

you’ve got to admire the consistency of the clinton playbook. some overpaid consultant decided some time last year that hillary’s biggest obstacle to the nomination was not her high disapproval, her war vote, or her abrasive personality, but her gender. the only way americans will vote for a woman, someone decided, is if she’s swinging the biggest, hairiest pair of cast-iron cojones this side of vin diesel. and so, ladies and gentlemen, meet the whiskey-swigging, hardhat-wearing, iran-nuking, sports-metaphorizing mister hillary clinton — not just the first woman president, but the manliest since teddy roosevelt.

almost a year later, and god bless ‘em, they’re sticking with it. obama’s lead is — let’s just get used to saying it — insurmountable. clinton, displaying a truly bushlike, balls-over-brains contempt for mathematical reality itself, not only vows to stay the course, but manages to posit the situation as a basketball analogy. yet, not unlike john kerry hunting pheasants, there’s something unconvincing about hillary’s emulation of blue collar machismo. in this case, it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the rules of basketball.

i’m not a sports guy, but i’ve watched enough basketball to know that the proverbial 3-pointer-at-the-buzzer is only decisive when the game is extremely close — like, within 3 points. as of this morning’s count, clinton needs 308 delegates to clinch the nomination, while obama only needs 137. there are only 189 pledged delegates still up for grabs in the remaining primaries. even if clinton were to win every single one of those delegates, she’d still be 119 short. in other words, she needs at least 72% of all remaining uncommitted delegates, pledged and super-. she doesn’t need a three-pointer, she needs several dozen of them, in the court-time equivalent of about thirty seconds.

it takes a latter-day iron balls mcginty to demand, as hillary is, that superdelegates should withhold their endorsements until after the last primary, when there’s no possible way its outcome could tilt the balance. i’d really like to think that she’s just stalling for a face-saving opportunity to bow out, but every time i want to give her credit for having a little class i’m disappointed. remember the texas debate, when clinton was “absolutely honored” to be sharing a podium with barack? and then, not 48 hours later in ohio, shouting “shame on you!” at the top of her lungs? by now i’m inclined to believe her when she says she means to stick it out to the bitter, bitter end.

we’re well past the point where there’s anything intelligent left to say about the clinton campaign, so i’ll just close out this post by free-associating some of the words that come to mind: pyrrhic. delusional. egomaniacal. quixotic. scorched-earth. sabotage. suicide pact. Greek tragedy.

and so on, it seems, ’til august…

Creepy!

I like the tag list:

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let’s stop kidding ourselves, the democratic primary is over. who do you like for VP?

running down a few of the short-list names that have been on pundits’ lips…

-Hillary Clinton, we’re to believe, makes up half of a “dream ticket” — maybe the most asinine thing i’ve ever heard. there’s no way the obama camp is dumb enough to buy into this farce, and frankly i’d be surprised if clinton were actually willing to take the #2 spot at all. let’s not even dignify this one.

- unsuitable as hillary is for the VP job, there’s no denying that her campaign has energized women and it would be a shame to forfeit that energy — one reason why names like Kathleen Sibelius (KS gov), Janet Napolitano (AZ gov) and Claire McCaskill (MO sen) are being tossed around lately. i don’t know much about sibelius or mccaskill, other than that they’re often cited as bellwethers of changing dynamics in formerly red-leaning midwestern swing states. but napolitano is competent and tested, and it would be interesting to see whether she’d give mccain a run for his money in his home state.

- speaking of beating mccain on his own turf… Bill Richardson is a smart pick for the experience he’d bring, especially in foreign policy; he knows his shit but doesn’t have the washington stank on him. then there’s the latino thing — hey, nothing says ‘change’ like a black-brown presidential ticket. more than that, though, richardson can deliver western states. obama is already poised to do well west of the rockies, but a popular western governor would make him truly formidable — and with CO, NM, NV, & MT in his column, he has some wiggle room in those big white eastern states hillary clinton keeps tellling us are so ungodly important.

- …which also makes montana governor Brian Schweitzer an interesting, if unlikely, prospect. he’s an affable good-ol’-boy and a colorful character — and green is definitely one of his colors, one i’d like to see more prominently displayed in the obama rainbow.

- then there’s your swing-state heavies like pennsylvania’s sen. Bob Casey, a major crossover obama backer who deserves credit for his role in cutting clinton’s lead there in half, or ohio’s sen. Sherrod Brown, or OH gov Ted Strickland. nothing against any of these guys, but their names are usually dropped in discussions of how to win over socially conservative, blue-collar, rust-belt types — y’know, the supposed economic populists who somehow always fail to vote their self-interest because they’re too distracted by wedge issues. frankly, chasing blindly after these votes to the exclusion of less populous but winnable states in the west and south is a big part of the failed conventional wisdom that’s cost democrats almost two decades of elections, with hillary clinton as its latest victim. please, no more lipservice for this foolishness. postpartisanship is all well and good, but if those elusive midcontinental swing voters aren’t ready to pull the lever for a democrat this year, slapping a pro-life white dude on the ticket isn’t going to change it.

- the same might be said of VA sen. Jim Webb, about whom i’m fairly indifferent these days, though he’s supposedly a frontrunner for the VP nod. i liked him in 2006 when he was running against macaca on an antiwar platform, but it was disappointing how quickly he backed off that position once elected — the old ‘we don’t have the votes, whaddaya gonna do?’ song & dance — and anymore his appeal as a potential VP candidate seems to be predicated on his military credentials, his republican past (!), and alleged appeal to antiwar conservatives.

- other names i’ve heard, ranging from the preposterous to simply “meh”: wesley clark, joe biden, chuck hagel or mike bloomberg (yeah, riiiight), tom daschle, john edwards.

okay, you go now. predictions? druthers?

on this site in recent months we’ve had lively debates over the extent to which the sean bell verdict was a racial episode, and over the racial identity of the geico caveman. for some reason, race seems to be the one issue we almost always find something to argue about.

but can we agree that this crosses a line?

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.

without going into full-on egghead ivory-tower academic mode, isn’t the subtext here that “real americans” don’t want a black president, and hillary clinton is okay with that?

as nice as it is to see paulie again, i have to question the public relations wisdom at denny’s. someone there evidently thought it would improve the restaurant’s image to promote the idea that they’ve hired a fictional TV sociopath to muscle the competition.