Any Hillary Clinton supporters out there? I’m just wondering — and not disingenuously, I honestly don’t know — what the basis of her claims of superior foreign policy experience might be. I get the sense that I’m supposed to impute to Hillary the foreign policy experience of Bill. Now, I don’t doubt that Hillary Clinton was more active than most First Ladies in the presidency of her husband. However, I don’t think she gets credit for merely being around — I don’t want the surgeon’s wife trying an operation on me. So, if she is claiming foreign policy experience from her stint as First Lady and if she performed foreign policy tasks in the Bill Clinton White House, I’d like to know specifically what those are. Otherwise, I don’t think she gets any particular bonus points for having been First Lady.
Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas to everyone out there. Highlights from Christmas morning at the Masson household:
1. Cole coming downstairs to find a drum set waiting for him under the Christmas tree. He was unwavering when anyone would ask him what he wanted from Santa: dinosaurs and drums. Our ears will pay for that moment of extreme joy, but my goodness, there won’t be very many moments like that.
2. A corollary to #1, but Cole saying, “Santa must not know whether I’ve been bad or good.” Clearly Cole is a harsher judge of his conduct than Santa is.
3. Amy’s excitement. I think she was more excited about Christmas morning than the kids.
4. Harper deliberately opening her presents. She’s only two, so it takes a lot of concentration. But, she was up to the task.
5. My disappearing civil liberties coffee mug! (Brought to me by George W. Bush and the Patriot Act.) It’s a mug with the Bill of Rights printed on it, and when you fill it with hot coffee, the text fades. My family has me pegged.
Clinton Impeachment: Nine Years Ago
From dday at Daily Kos:
In December of 1998, the House of Representatives, through a bill authored by serial adulterer Henry Hyde, during a lame-duck session of Congress where Speaker and serial adulterer Newt Gingrich (who started up with a mistress while his wife was in the hospital with cancer) had to hand over his gavel to Ray LaHood, during a floor debate marred by the resignation of potential House Speaker candidate and serial adulterer Bob Livingston, voted to impeach the President of the United States for only the second time in American history. The count was 228-206 on the perjury charge, and 221-212 on obstruction of justice (two other counts failed).
That episode was fairly instrumental in getting me fed up with the national Republican party. I had been pretty happy about the GOP sweep in 1994, but by the end of 1998, I was livid with them for toying with the very serious business of impeachment. And it wasn’t because I was a devout Clinton supporter — I never voted for the man — it was because the Republicans were making a transparent power play on trumped up charges you knew they didn’t care about. Had a Republican committed the very same acts, there is no way on earth that Gingrich, Hyde, et al. would have lifted a finger in opposition.
Don’t call it a come back
A new e-mail client based on the ancient (but excellent) e-mail client, Pine, has been released. I have an e-mail account that’s hosted on a Unix server and I use Pine to read that mail. It’s far and away my favorite e-mail client.
The computing and networking group at the University of Washington has released Alpine, an open-source e-mail client for the desktop and the web. It’s based on Pine, the ancient but rock solid text-based e-mail client also developed at UW.
You may remember Pine from your school’s computer lab, your dad’s old Windows 3.1 box or (if you’re like Epicenter’s Dylan Tweney) from when you last checked your mail. Though it’s been the choice of Unix power users for almost two decades, Pine is also remarkably easy to use and simple enough for just about anyone to pick up.
Part of my love has to do with the nature of having an account hosted on a remote server — I can get to it from anywhere, and I can keep it there. Using a pop mail server with the e-mail client on my desktop computer means that, once I’ve downloaded it, I’m going to have trouble if I want the mail when I’m at a different computer. The other part of my love is just the simplicity and speed of Pine. It’s all keyboard based, so I don’t have to reach for my mouse in the middle of typing something.
Winter solstice
Happy winter solstice everybody. The days will now get longer. Light has defeated dark. Pagans everywhere rejoice.
Edwards: Are we going to negotiate with those people?
Oliver Willis flagged a pretty strong quote from John Edwards on the subject of the 17 year old girl who was first denied a life saving liver transplant before her insurer, Cygna, changed its mind and approved the transplant. The delay may well have cost the girl her life.
John Edwards tonight cited the case of a 17-year-old California girl who died after her insurance company refused coverage on a liver transplant to save her life as a call to action to change the current system of healthcare in America.
Nataline Sarkysian died last night at UCLA Medical Center after complications arose from a bone marrow transplant to treat her leukemia. Her insurance provider, CIGNA Healthcare, first denied the potentially lifesaving transplant, but relented after a loud public protest and outrage. By that time, though, Sarkysian passed away before the procedure could be performed.
“Are you telling me that we’re gonna sit at a table and negotiate with those people?” asked a visibly angered Edwards, challenging the health care companies. “We’re gonna take their power away and we’re not gonna have this kind of problem again.”
His approach to dealing with the insurers differs from that of Clinton and Obama who would probably prefer a more collaborative approach.
Legislators get bowl tickets
The Indy Star has an article on legislators accepting bowl game tickets from Indiana and Purdue Universities and questioning whether this might be a conflict of interest. Is it a perk given to legislators that is not given to ordinary citizens? Yes. Is it given to curry favor with legislators who make decisions that affect the universities? Probably. But, somehow I don’t feel any sense of outrage. Maybe I’m jaded. However, it does give me an opportunity to trot out one of my favorite political quotes:
If you can’t take their money, drink their liquor, fuck their women, and then come in here the next day and vote against them, you don’t belong here.
—Jesse Unruh
World War I soldiers almost all extinct
One of the four remaining American World War I vets died Thursday. I don’t know why this strikes me as remarkable, time and humans being what they are. The former moves on inexorably and the latter die as a consequence. Maybe it’s a fact of my own aging. Growing up, World War I seemed like an accessible bit of history to me — like a modern event since plenty of people who participated were still alive in the 70s and 80s. The fact that Civil War veterans were all dead seemed perfectly natural since it was a “historical” event and somehow not as real.
McCain’s Path
John McCain’s primary hopes seem to have been only mostly dead. His uptick in New Hampshire has spilled over a bit to Iowa.
On the other hand, if he can put together surprise victories in these early primaries, there is simply no way to overstate the deep well of adoration, tacit support and general desire to fluff that McCain will be able to draw from within the Washington press corps. And even those core Republicans who’ve never been crazy about him will breath a elemental sigh of relief that they’ve got a candidate of stature, experience and ability rather than a freak, a goof or a Ken doll.
Perhaps his opponents will take a page out of the Bush play book and rehash the South Carolina smearing of McCain by suggesting to uninformed voters that McCain’s adopted Bangladeshi child is an illegitimate black child.
Meanwhile, Jerome Armstrong at MyDD suggests that Obama v. McCain is about the worst case scenario for Democrats in the Presidential election cycle.
A McCain vs Obama race would be the worst case scenario I could imagine for us. Why? Because the talky-centrists like Jonathan Alter from Newsweek and Joe Klein from Time that Obama panders too, who now come to Obama’s defense to attack the progressive Krugman, would soon say: “Obama’s great but he’s too young and inexperienced, let’s go with McCain.”
I also fear the inroads to Latinos that McCain would make. He’s their only candidate that isn’t a wall-builder and hater toward illegal immigrants, and that would hurt Obama the most.
What a fascinating thing. The love of McCain by the chattering classes is viewed as a formidable (and apparently obvious) asset of McCain’s.
Lakota Indians Declare Independence
Here is an item for the hardcore states rights, anti-tax zealots among you. The Lakota Indians have renounced their prior treaties and declared their independence from the U.S.A.
The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States, leaders said Wednesday.
“We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us,” long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down neighborhood of Washington for a news conference.
A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old.
. . .
Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.The new country would issue its own passports and driving licenses, and living there would be tax-free — provided residents renounce their US citizenship, Means said.
I wonder if the Ron Paul Liberty Dollar would be accepted currency in Lakota-land.
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