The Next Truther Demand For The "Truth"

And now, ladies and gentlemen, Karl Rove has given us a peek at the next truther meme.

From Rupert Murdoch's NYPost:

Karl Rove stunned a conference when he suggested Hillary Clinton might have brain damage.

Onstage with Robert Gibbs and CBS correspondent and “Spies Against Armageddon” co-author Dan Raviv, Rove said Republicans should keep the Benghazi issue alive.

He said if Clinton runs for president, voters must be told what happened when she suffered a fall in December 2012.

And then the lying starts.

The official diagnosis was a blood clot. Rove told the conference near LA Thursday, “Thirty days in the hospital? And when she reappears, she’s wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury? We need to know what’s up with that.”

The pagesix writer notes one of Rove's mistakes:

Despite Rove’s claims, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was discharged from New York Presbyterian Hospital after spending three days undergoing treatment for a potentially life-threatening blood clot.

3 days, 30 days, what's the difference when you're lying to the American public?

But what were the glasses for?

Let's turn to ABC for that one:

The thick glasses Hillary Clinton has been wearing in public since returning from a concussion and blood clot last month are the result of lingering effects of her health problems, a Clinton aide confirms.

"She'll be wearing these glasses instead of her contacts for a period of time because of lingering issues stemming from her concussion," said spokesman Philippe Reines. "With them on she sees just fine."

But here's the kicker.

Didn't Rove's friends on the right say that she was faking it all along?  Why yes they did - including, oddly enough, Murdoch's NYPost:

Clinton’s story beggars belief: While traveling in Europe, she contracted a stomach virus . . . which made her dehydrated . . . which made her faint at home . . . which caused her to fall and hit her head . . . which gave her a nasty concussion.

But back to page six. A Clinton spokesperson is quoted as saying:

Karl Rove has deceived the country for years, but there are no words for this level of lying.

But it's probably the new normal.

Um, What?

The Tribune-Review's got a new BFF - Dick Morris. Take a look:

Pennsylvania will be the "epicenter" of sweeping change that's coming in national elections this fall, political strategist and author Dick Morris told a gathering of 500 conservatives Friday night.

Morris was the keynote speaker at the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference, the premier annual gathering for grassroots activists and groups touting conservative causes.

The former adviser to President Clinton, and a favorite of many conservatives for his stinging rebukes of the Clintons and of President Obama, predicted Republicans will sweep the House and Senate races to take control of Congress, stop the health care law in its tracks and force a government shutdown when Obama vetoes the reversal.

Wow. That's a serious prediction, isn't it? Dick Morris must have made a career out of making serious predictions that came true, right? I mean to be invited to the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference and all. They must be interested in what he's written in the past, right?

I guess the folks over there missed this prediction from a book he co-wrote in 2005:

On January 20, 2009, at precisely noon, the world will witness the inauguration of the forty-fourth president of the United States. As the chief justice administers the oath of office on the flag-draped podium in front of the U.S. Capitol, the first woman president, Hillary Rodham Clinton, will be sworn into office. By her side, smiling broadly and holding the family Bible, will be her chief strategist, husband, and copresident, William Jefferson Clinton.

Then he amends his prediction:

But her victory is not inevitable. There is one, and only one, figure in America who can stop Hillary Clinton: Secretary of State Condoleezza "Condi" Rice. Among all of the possible Republican candidates for president, Condi alone could win the nomination, defeat Hillary, and derail a third Clinton administration.

Wow. Impressive.

So when Dick Morris writes this on the pages of the same Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

The Obama health care initiative will be the biggest unfunded federal mandate on the states in history. It will force dozens of states, particularly in the South, to abandon their low-tax ways and to move toward dramatically higher rates of taxation. It may even force Florida and Texas to impose an income tax!

We know he's full of crap, right?

Take a look at this chart from the Tax Policy Center. If I am reading it correctly, it's saying that no one making less than $500,000 per year will see a tax increase. No one.

Tell me again why we should trust this Dick?

Super Tuesday Mystery Date

Yes, I have not blogged much on Barack or Hillary. Chalk it up to extreme ambivalence.

Make no mistake, I'll volunteer for the winner, but I'm no big fan of either.

They have nearly identical records in the Senate and that means both of them have been too chicken to even vote symbolically against the war in terms of budgets.

I've always seen the Clintons as way too DLC for my tastes but I'd like to see a woman president in my lifetime.

As for Obama: I don't need hope or inspiration. Call me a cynic. (Kennedy wasn't as good as "Kennedy.")

So to oversimplify and run wild with generalizations:

Dream or dud?




The Barack voters are hoping that their Mystery Date will be a dream and not a dud. Their hearts are all a flutter and they're betting on the guy without too long of a record (all the better to project your hopes and dreams on to).

Between Heaven and Hell

And Hillary? She's the woman with too long a record. YEARS of Republican smears that have taken a toll, especially in an election when people desperately want CHANGE. She's stuck on the ground between Heaven and Hell and can never hope to fly -- politically speaking -- with the angels that some in the public and the press have Obama circling.


But at least the Democrats are reaching for the stars, while the Republicans continue to bow down to Zombie Reagan.
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Vagina-Americans have their say

So why were the polls so wrong in New Hampshire?

We heard last night that it might have been the Bradley Effect at work ("instances in which statistically significant numbers of white voters tell pollsters in advance of an election that they are either genuinely undecided, or likely to vote for the non-white candidate, but those voters exhibit a different behavior when actually casting their ballots"), but if you look at the breakdown of the vote by race and gender, you see that black women broke for Hillary and white men for Barack:


Now look at the breakout purely by gender and you see that Hillary was the clear winner among females:


This is not how it went down in Iowa. While the same percentage of the voters were women in both races (57%), in Iowa, Clinton only received 30% of the women vote there ( 35% Obama, 23% Edwards). In NH it was: 47% for Clinton, 34% for Obama, 14% for Edwards.

Now add to this that 39% of Clinton's supporters made up their minds on election day:


and it sure looks like John Edwards fucked up royally when he responded to Hillary's barely welling up for a second by playing the "Women are too emotional to be Commander in Chief card" or as Nation columnist Katha Pollitt put it:

John Edwards just lost my vote. How dare he take cheap shots at Hillary Clinton for letting her eyes mist over (not "crying" as was widely reported) at a meeting with voters in Portsmouth NH earlier today? This is a man who has used his most private tragedies--his wife's cancer, his son's fatal accident -- in his campaign in a way that had a woman done the same she would surely be accused of "oprahfying' the lofty realm of politics. This is also the man who promoted himself early on as the real women's candidate, and who has repeatedly used his likeable wife to humanize his rather slick and one-dimensional persona. Today he deployed against Hillary the oldest, dumbest canard about women: they're too emotional to hold power.

Let's go now to one of the best blog takes on last night. It's from Jeff Fecke (a man!) over at Shakesville:

And that’s why she won tonight; because women recognized that, at least for tonight, their future was inextricably bound up with Hillary’s, and that, at least for tonight, they needed to send a clear message that misogyny and sexism just won’t work anymore. Clinton may yet lose — there are plenty of legitimate reasons to oppose her. But if she loses, it won’t be because she was too emotional, or because she reminds someone of their ex-wife. It will be because she loses on her merits as a candidate. That’s as it should be, and it’s why our country should be grateful to the angry women who rallied to her, angry women who were angry for a righteous reason, angry women who accomplished something grand. [Emphasis Added]

In closing: a little story.

A few years back I worked for what was at the time the Hispanic shop of a top ad agency. I was basically doing three jobs at once: Corporate Communications Director, Co-director of PR and I also wrote all the correspondence for the CEO (who was not a native English speaker). I put in 70 to 100 hours a week.

While I shared a title with my co-director of PR that was really only on paper as he was not allowed to speak to clients without my being present. At some point, I discovered that my male coworker was making ten grand more than I was. I took it up with the CEO and got a raise and the difference in the last year's salary in the form of two bonuses (one paid immediately and one to be paid a couple of months later).

However, before the second bonus was due, I was sitting in a meeting with the CEO, A VP and another department director (all males). We were all gathered at the end of a conference table. The CEO started in on a sneeze. He looked around as to where to direct it. He looked at each of us. The MFer didn't go for the handkerchief in his bespoke suit pocket. No, he finally turned back towards me and let out the sneeze. None of it really hit me, but I went back to my office after the meeting, called one of the partners in a company that I had worked at before and secured a job there. I then gave the CEO my two weeks notice.

In the interest of full disclosure: I just gave the Hillary Clinton campaign a whopping 10 bucks. It was for the sneeze more than the $10,000. (I still don't consider myself a Hillary -- or anybody else -- supporter.)


(Voter breakdown charts courtesy of Rimjob's diary at Daily Kos.)
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Damn, Girl! You pulled it off!

Hillary gets happy.
So I'm walking in my door tonight and the TV's on and I hear cheering on it and I fully expect to see Barack Obama giving a victory speech, but instead I see Hillary Clinton and I think, well, maybe she came in second, but no, the text on the screen is proclaiming her the winner of the New Hampshire primary and for someone who isn't a big Hillary fan, I am a somewhat surprised at my happiness.

I have written numerous Hillary posts in my head, but I haven't managed to get one down on "paper." It's the result of the huge ambivalence I feel over a Hillary candidacy. On the one hand, she's way too DLC for my tastes and there's her Iraq vote. But, on the other hand, call me a sexist* (I know you will) but I got a real thrill in the early debates when she dominated and bested a stage full of men.

I was ready to write an entirely different post tonight. One on the overt sexism Hillary Clinton has faced in the last day or so. I was going to point you all to Melissa McEwan's post at Shakesville on how Obama and Edwards should have reacted to the unrelenting reports of "Hillary's emotional moment":

"The sexism being wielded against Clinton is despicable, and it needs to stop. I want to beat Clinton on the issues, not because I benefited from the favor of bigotry."

That wasn't so hard, now, was it?

I was also going to quote Gloria Steinem in today's New York Times about gender and race in this election re Hillary and Obama:

What worries me is that she is accused of "playing the gender card" when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations.

What worries me is that male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own, while female voters were seen as biased if they did and disloyal if they didn’t.

Steinem goes on to plead that this should not, however, be a contest for who has it worse running for president -- a black man or a woman. As she put it:

The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together. That’s why Senators Clinton and Obama have to be careful not to let a healthy debate turn into the kind of hostility that the news media love. Both will need a coalition of outsiders to win a general election. The abolition and suffrage movements progressed when united and were damaged by division; we should remember that.

Can we all** agree that it's pretty damn wonderful that, finally, after 200+ years the first two winners in the Democratic presidential primary process are an African American and a female? And, that there's a damn good chance that one of them will actually end up as President?

* Though, I've never had the chance to vote for a female president . . . or governor, or senator, or US rep., or mayor (wasn't in Pgh for Sophie), or city council person, etc.

** And, by "all" I am of course excluding our Rethuglican trolls. Oh yeah, I'm guessing that the Edwards supporters ain't exactly happy either tonight and I'm saying that they should also be less than happy with his response to Hillary's "moment."
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Barack's Rising Stock

Since www.intrade.com was right on the money on the Iowa results yesterday, I thought I'd check out the line on Obama and Clinton today and it looks like Barack's stock is rising fast:


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Betting on Iowa

Anyone out there want to hazard a guess as to who will win in Iowa tonight? If you believe you're a real political maven, you can actually bet some cold, hard cash on the answer at http://www.intrade.com/ . So who do the markets predict will win in Iowa? Here's the line on that:

DEM.IOWA.OBAMA
Barack Obama to Win
BID: 60.0 ASK: 64.9 LAST: 64.9 VOLUME: 3185 CHANGE: +8.9

REP.IOWA.HUCKABEE
Mike Huckabee to Win
BID: 54.5 ASK: 59.5 LAST: 53.2 VOL: 2246 CHANGE: -5.8

However, they're still betting that Hillary Clinton will take the nomination for the presidency on the Democratic side:

2008DEM.NOM.CLINTON
Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic Presidential Nominee in 2008
BID: 61.1 ASK: 64.5 LAST: 61.1 VOL.: 362815 CHANGE: -3.8

And for the Republican nomination?

It's a bit of dead heat between McCain and Giuliani:

2008.GOP.NOM.MCCAIN
John McCain to be the Republican Presidential Nominee in 2008
BID: 26.5 ASK: 27.5 LAST: 27.4 VOL.: 174149 CHANGE: +3.4

2008.GOP.NOM.GIULIANI
Rudy Giuliani to be the Republican Presidential Nominee in 2008
BID: 24.5 ASK: 25.0 LAST: 25.9 VOL.: 143834 CHANGE: -1.9
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Around the Burghosphere

1) Agent Ska and Sherry also jump into the John McCain/Bitch controversy.

Ska's comments remind me of this quote from Katha Pollitt at The Nation:

The other night I got an irate e-mail from an old acquaintance on the left. He was furious because I'd quipped in an interview that if people didn't stop making sexist comments about Hillary Clinton, I might just have to vote for her.

Sherry supplies the correct definition of "bitch" over at The Pittsburgh Women's Blogging Society.

2) It's gonna be OK! The ADB let's us know that, "There is absolutely no cause for concern."

3) Those Carbolic Smoke Ball folk delve into the intricacies of the professional relationship between Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato and Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl.
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"How do we beat the bitch?"

That question was asked to John McCain by one of his classy supporters. After trying not to laugh -- and failing -- he answered:

"That's an excellent question."

He did add, "I respect Senator Clinton, I respect anyone who gets the nomination of the Democrat Party."

I'm sorry. What party is that?

I've heard of the Democratic Party.

McCain also found it trés amusing when another of his supporters chimed in with, "John, I thought she was talking about my ex wife."

Oh, those funny, funny family values lovin' Repugs!

Stay classy, guys!

Video here:


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Jack Kelly Sunday

In this week's column, Jack Kelly, the former "National Security" Correspondent for the P-G, ventures out into national politics. We all know Jack's political leanings (somewhat right of center, to say the least) and so it's not surprising that he's using this week's column to undermine Senator Hilary Clinton's presidential campaign.

The first sentence:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton apparently has hit a speed bump on the way to her coronation.

And it goes on from there. He starts with a number of appraisals of her performance at a recent debate (I didn't see the debate, but I guess she didn't do too well) and then goes into over drive with some Rassmussen poll numbers.

But it could spell big trouble in the general election. Pollster Scott Rasmussen reported a shocking result from a recent poll. In a head-to-head matchup with Libertarian fruitcake Ron Paul, Hillary drew just 48 percent of the vote.

This was not because Rep. Paul, who is polling in the low single digits among GOP voters, has had a sudden burst in popularity.

"When we polled among people who knew who Ron Paul is, she got 48 percent of the vote," Mr. Rasmussen said. "When we polled among people who didn't know who Ron Paul is, she got 48 percent of the vote."

Fruitcake? Did J-Kel just call Ron Paul a fruitcake? I trust that that smear won't go unanswered by the Friends of Ron Paul who occasionally surf through this blog (coughMark Rauterkuscough).

Looks like Commando Kelly got his research from this page at Rasmussen Reports. He's really working towards setting up a Clinton-Giuliani matchup. He has this to say about it.

In head-to-head matchups against more likely Republican nominees, Mrs. Clinton trails former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani slightly...

And a little later

The polls make it clear Rudy Giuliani is the Republican most likely to beat Mrs. Clinton.

And finally

A Paul candidacy excepted, the arithmetic of the 2008 election is clear. In a two-candidate race, the Republican wins, especially if the Republican is named Rudy Giuliani. In a multiple candidate race, Hillary Clinton wins.

But let's take a look at what Rasmussen actually says. This page has the info. Looks like our pal Jack didn't look deep enough at the data. The first paragraph, indeed, begins with:

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows former Mayor Rudy Giuliani leading Senator Clinton 46% to 44% in an early look at a general election match-up.

But what's the margin of error? How does it match any trend in the poll data or is it a new trend? Jack doesn't bother with any of that, no sir. He's got his talking point that Clinton trails Giuliani slightly and runs with it all the way past November, 2008. Rasmussen, though, has slightly more to say on the subject:

Clinton and Giuliani have been in a very competitive match-up for most of the year, but Clinton had gained ground in three bi-weekly consecutive polls. By October 9, the Democratic frontrunner was leading the former mayor by seven percentage points. But, the current results suggest a return to the longer trend-line established for this race.

Individual polls can sometimes overstate volatility in a race, especially when the results carry a four percentage point margin of sampling error. One way of addressing this is to look at a rolling-average of three consecutive polls. Using this approach, Clinton and Giuliani have both been within two points of the 45% mark for eleven consecutive polls dating back to May 1, 2007. The candidates have been within two points of each other on seven of those eleven surveys. [emphasis added]

Ok, so it's a two point lead within a four percentage point margin of sampling error. Any wonder why Jack Kelly didn't mention that? Then there's this next paragraph from Rasmussen:

Still, while the candidates have hovered consistently around that 45% level of support, a modest trend in Clinton’s favor can easily be detected. During the first eight sets of three-poll averages, Giuliani was “ahead” in seven and tied with Clinton in the eighth. Clinton has held the advantage in the last three updates of the three poll rolling average. She currently leads 47% to 44%. [emphasis added]

So by averaging three consecutive polls together, not only is there a trend (albeit a "modest" one) in Clinton's favor, but she's actually leading by a slightly larger margin than in the individual poll Kelly is touting as support. Any wonder why Jack Kelly didn't bother to mention any of this?

Jack Kelly does, however, write the arithmetic is "clear" that Giuliani beats Clinton in 2008.

But this is but one poll. What do the other polls have to say? From the PollingReport.com we can read that the poll numbers are far from what Jack Kelly said.

Newsweek from 10/31-11/0107, to the question: Suppose you had to choose between [Senator Clinton], the Democrat, and [Mayor Giuliani], the Republican. Who would you be more likely to vote for?" If other/unsure: "As of today do you lean more toward [Senator Clinton], the Democrat, or [Mayor Giuliani], the Republican? (MoE 4%)

45% said Giuliani, 49% said Clinton

Quinnipiac from 10/23-29/07 to the question: If the 2008 election for president were being held today, and the candidates were [Senator Clinton] the Democrat and [Mayor Giuliani] the Republican, for whom would you vote? (MoE 2.4%)

45% said Giuliani, 43% said Clinton

Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg from 10/19-22/07 to the question: If the November 2008 general election for president were being held today and the choices were [Senator Clinton], the Democrat, and [Mayor Giuliani], the Republican, for whom would you vote: [Senator Clinton] or [Mayor Giuliani], or would you vote for a candidate from some other party? (MoE 4%)

41% said Giuliani, 47% said Clinton

Do I need to continue? Ok one more, this one from Fox.

FOX News/Opinion Dynamics from 10/9-10/07 to the question: Thinking ahead to the next presidential election, if the 2008 general election were held today for whom would you vote if the candidates were [names rotated]? (MoE 4%)

43 % said Giuliani, 47% said Clinton

The point here is not further any supposed "coronation" of Senator Clinton, but to point out, yet again, how our friend at the P-G, Jack Kelly, misstates manipulates and distorts in order to further his own political agenda.

Yet again.