Archive for April, 2008
April 24th, 2008
Hillary Clinton’s rationales for staying in the race become more silly by the hour.
If she and the Democratic Party poobahs deny Barack Obama the nomination, even a Republican candidate as weak as John McCain will have no trouble winning in November.
Good arguments against her are found HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE.
UPDATE: HERE’s an educated (and complicated) estimate of the popular-vote totals Clinton and Obama will have at the end of the primary season.
April 23rd, 2008
Hillary Clinton is ALL CHUMMY these days with billionaire crackpot Richard Mellon Scaife, who financed some of the more vicious attacks on the Clintons during the 1990s.
Has she no shame?
April 23rd, 2008
The Chicago Tribune reports today that a federal prosecutor said in open court this morning that a potential witness in the Tony Rezko corruption trial would testify about efforts involving the White House to get U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald fired.
The Tribune piece says:
More bombshells were lobbed in the Antoin “Tony” Rezko trial even before the jury was seated this morning and they involved a purported attempt to pull strings with the White House to fire U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald. In a hearing before court began, prosecutors said they hoped to call Ali Ata, the former Blagojevich administration official who pleaded guilty to corruption yesterday, to the stand.
Assistant U.S. Atty. Carrie Hamilton said she believed Ata would testify to conversations Ata had with his political patron, Rezko, about working to pull strings to kill the criminal investigation into Rezko and others when it was in its early stages in 2004.
“[Ata] had conversations with Mr. Rezko about the fact that Mr. Kjellander was working with Karl Rove to have Mr. Fitzgerald removed,” Hamilton told U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve.
That sentence is loaded with a who’s who of political heavyweights. Bob Kjellander was the veteran Republican National Committeeman from Illinois who was a sometimes business associate of Stuart Levine, who has pleaded guilty to conspiring with Rezko to rig state boards for contracts.
Karl Rove for years was President Bush’s chief political strategist as well as an old friend of Kjellander. Patrick Fitzgerald was and is the U.S. attorney in Chicago who pressed the investigation of Rezko. Hamilton said the conversation she hoped Ata would testify to was about having Fitzgerald replaced by someone else, she said, “so individuals who have been cooperating in this investigation will be dealt with differently.”
St. Eve did not make a ruling on whether Ata will be allowed to testify.
April 23rd, 2008
THIS GUY clearly explains exactly how Hillary Clinton’s stunning victory has dramatically changed the political landscape.
I don’t think any of us expected to wake up this morning to find this kind of situation. The mind reels at this unlikely turn of events.
UPDATE: Freeport native Dan Balz offers THIS ANALYSIS.
UPDATE II: HERE’s another interesting analysis from Hillary’s old pal Dick Morris.
April 22nd, 2008
MSNBC has declared Clinton the winner, but the likely margin remains unclear.
UPDATE: THIS GUY says it’s still impossible for Hillary to catch Barack Obama.
April 22nd, 2008
While we still don’t know the outcome of today’s balloting in Pennsylvania, it might be that Barack Obama has won a crucial victory in terms of money.
Moments ago, political pundit Howard Fineman offered a keen insight on MSNBC. He said Obama has forced Hillary Clinton’s campaign to spend itself broke in Pennsylvania.
Fineman says Hillary’s big money raisers “are tapped out,” leaving her only the Internet as a source of funds for campaigning in the upcoming primaries in North Carolina and Indiana.
But the Internet is Obama’s turf, and Hillary likely won’t do well raising money online unless her victory tonight is substantial, which is uncertain at this writing.
April 22nd, 2008
ABC’s nightly newcast TOOK A BATH in the ratings last week after the network’s scandalously poor handling of the Democratic presidential debate.
Idiots.
April 22nd, 2008
In a speech last week at the Associated Press annual meeting in Washington, Hillary Clinton said that she will, if elected president, “restore respect for our co-equal branches of government.”
I can only wonder if any of the eminent news executives in the audience recognized that Clinton was wrong about this “co-equal” stuff.
(To be fair to Clinton, it should be noted that her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama, has made the same mistake.)
The notion that the Constitution created three co-equal branches of government is an article of faith among most Americans. It’s popularly viewed as the provision that gives us our system of checks and balances. But it’s not true.
Clinton, like Obama and most of the other politicians who play the co-equal card, intend to argue against any presumption that the presidency is pre-eminent.
But the fact is that the Founding Fathers did not create a system of co-equal branches of government. Rather, they intended for the legislative branch to be dominant, as is evidenced in the Federalist Papers and even in some of the arguments against ratification of the Constitution from people who wanted co-equal branches and regretted that they weren’t getting them.
Historian Garry Wills presents a convincing case against the “co-equal” theory — and against various other popular myths about the Constitution — in his wonderful book “A Necessary Evil,” which was published in 1999.
In that same year, Wills addressed the “co-equal” issue in THIS LECTURE at Harvard University. (Scroll down to pages 14 through 17 for the salient parts.)
April 22nd, 2008
Seems kind of weird at first, doesn’t it?
Here’s the deal:
At the welcoming ceremonies last week on the South Lawn of the White House, the flags of all 50 states were arrayed in the background. Among them was the flag of Mississippi, which includes a symbol of the glorious Confederacy, a sentimental reminder of those good old days of slavery.
April 22nd, 2008
From Taegan Goddards POLITICAL INSIDER, we get this roundup of the latest polls in Pennsylvania:
My own guess parallels the Mason-Dixon numbers. I figure Clinton will win by a relatively slim margin.
But I’m fascinated by the last poll on that list, the one that has Obama up by 3 percentage points. The sample size in that survey (2,338 likely voters) is much larger than the others, and the stated margin of error (2 percentage points) is much smaller.
So, the question arises: Will there be a stunning upset in today’s balloting? If so, Hillary will have to drop out of the race. But then, she’ll probably have to drop out eventually in any event.
UPDATE (1 PM CDT): By mid-day, VOTER TURNOUT was said to be extremely heavy all across the state.
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