You'll see the press, and Obama's surrogates (perhaps I repeat myself) insist that tonight's result means nothing, and indeed, in the delegate count, the effect is marginal. But superdelegates ought to be sweating. White working-class voters, and various overlapping demographics - the elderly, Catholics, Jews - just aren't warming up to Obama, and they've been the backbone for the party for generations. Liberal bloggers (and Saturday Night Live, and arguably the Washington Post) are responding by suggesting Hillary's supporters are racist; these people may not be so eager to vote for Obama in November as the pundits insist. Once you insult a voter by calling them racist, they may not be eager to meekly repent by doing as their moral betters in the pundit class demand.
Hillary Clinton is still the underdog, and she faces long odds to overcome Obama in the delegate and superdelegate fights. But the fact that anointed-nominee Obama couldn't make any traction in any key demographic in West Virginia ought to keep the superdelegates awake at night. And she will be invigorated by this win; landslide victories tend to do that. The exhausted mainstream media bigfoots tried to end this story one chapter too early.
It would be an act of terminal insanity for Barack Obama to name Hillary Clinton as his vice presidential candidate. It would not help him get elected, it would drag all the Clinton controversies into the general election, and having her down the hall in the West Wing would be a recipe for disaster, dissension and civil war. Other than that, it’s a hell of an idea!
When the State Legislature passed the state budget, they included a six dollar increase on drivers' license Renewal fees to help pay for Wisconsin to be Real ID compliant. Now, Governor Doyle is playing fiscal games and stealing from Wisconsinites $6 at a time to get himself out of this budget mess. Games will not make our country more secure. Governor Doyle must wake up and stop playing these games.
"Governor Doyle is like a fast talking salesman trying to orchestrate a deal. The problem is it's the citizens of Wisconsin who are the unwilling pawns in this irresponsible deal and will ultimately pay and pay and pay.
"When I shepherded the REAL ID bill through Congress 3 years ago, it was in response to one of the key recommendations made by the 9/11 Commission, that 'fraud in identification documents is no longer just a problem of theft.' As we saw in 2001, in the hands of a terrorist, a valid ID accepted for travel in the US can be just as dangerous as a missile or bomb."
Here are the Obama rules in detail: He can’t be called a “liberal” (“the same names and labels they pin on everyone,” as Obama puts it); his toughness on the war on terror can’t be questioned (“attempts to play on our fears”); his extreme positions on social issues can’t be exposed (“the same efforts to distract us from the issues that affect our lives” and “turn us against each other”); and his Chicago background too is off-limits (“pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy”). Besides that, it should be a freewheeling and spirited campaign.
State Representative Steve Nass (R-Whitewater) is outraged with the pieces of a new budget deal announced today by Speaker Mike Huebsch, Senate Majority Leader Russ Decker, and Representative Jim Kreuser. The budget repair deal contains a tax increase, a raid on segregated funds, changes to the tobacco securitization fund and new state borrowing.
“Senator Decker has criticized big business for using accounting gimmicks, but his fake morality regarding economics doesn’t apply to state government. However, I am more shocked that Speaker Mike Huebsch would again sell-out the Republican principals on taxation and government spending,” Nass said.
Nass noted that this budget deal is the product of purely political negotiations amongst a group of legislative leaders that doesn’t represent the interests of the people. This deal fails to improve the State’s position as the economy continues to weaken.
“Any legislator that supports this kind of budgeting malfeasance is guilty of political fraud on the taxpayers of this state,” Nass said.
**
From this taxpayer:
Rep. Huebsch,
I spoke with your office yesterday and was dismayed to hear how the budget deficit is being handled. If the state of Wisconsin can’t cut less than 1/2% of the budget, there is problem. Your staffer told me the fixes would start with delayed payments. I’m ok with this, but not happy. The staffer also told me, cutting spending may work in Brookfield , but in swing districts it will negatively affect election outcomes. I believe his (your) premise is wrong in the current climate. Scott Walker proved this and it should be the Wisconsin Republican model.
This year, every Wisconsinite has to cut costs in their personal and companies’ budgets – everyone. People will understand why you have to cut spending this year. Even Gov. Corzine (D-NJ) is cutting spending. When the Republicans get attacked for cutting a bureaucratic program, there needs to be a strong, coherent response.
I am discouraged with the Republican leadership. I feel we are reacting and not taking the fight to the Democrats. Why should we be on the defensive for an issue that is black and white? If Republicans can’t sell spending cuts during this period of Wisconsin ’s history, when would you be able to? Let’s starting doing what is right for Wisconsinites and stop pandering to special interests and soft Republicans.
(Name withheld)
**
From Sen. Neal Kedzie:
For those keeping score at home, the budget deficit is about $527 million and budget talks over the last couple of months have resembled a visit to the mound by the pitching coach,” Kedzie said. “Most legislators, and the public, have been anxiously standing in the batter’s box waiting to see if they’d be served a fastball, curve, or the dreaded screwball.”
At a quick glance, Kedzie says the budget repair bill:
·Lapses $69 million from unencumbered balances
·Raids $50 million from Transportation Fund and replaces it with bonding
·Prohibits $21 million appropriation to implement the federally mandated Real ID Act
·Creates $28 million Transportation Fund deficit to be replaced with bonds
·Delays $125 million school aid payments
·Depletes the ‘Rainy Day’ fund by $57 million
·Changes the Tobacco Securitization Funds to capture $209 million
·Increases the non-resident snowmobile trail use sticker from $18 to $35
·Creates a $15 million tax increase by eliminating current deduction for rental payments and interest payments for certain entities
Jeremiah Wright founded Trumpet Newsmagazine in 1982 as a "church newspaper" primarily for his own congregation, but apparently also for others in need of regular doses of radical politics sugarcoated with biblical references. Stanley Kurtz reviewed the 2006 issues of the magazine for his Weekly Standard article "Jeremiah Wright's 'Trumpet.'"Would Barack Obama have been familiar with its contents? Kurtz surmises:
It seems inconceivable that, in 20 years, Obama would never have picked up a copy of Trumpet. In fact, Obama himself graced the cover at least once (although efforts to obtain that issue from the publisher or Obama's interview with the magazine from his campaign were unsuccessful).
(My daughter Sandy was in Australia when my mother died last year, but she wanted to participate in the memorial ceremony by sending this letter, which was read by my wife, Janet. She was able to make it back later month for a private family funeral. Sandy was married last month in France.)
SANDY’S LETTER
I would paint this portrait.
My grandmother would be printed in bark brown ink on a background of the pages of old classic books, you’d be able to see traces of words in the shadows of the folds of her jazzy bright blue blazer, which I’d make bright cobalt blue, and to accent her strong cheekbones I’d spread a little sparkly copper dust. She would have a real copper necklace, because she always wore exotic necklaces.
I would put real blue eye shadow on her eyes. She would not be smiling, but she would be looking sharply and warmly at you with those grey, eagle blue eyes. The frame of the painting would be driftwood and pale bamboo, there would be little figurine cardinals with painted wings framing the whole thing.
I would show her to you in her shy dignity. In her private strength.
I think of her as a small world, not just a person. It was a solitary, woodsy sunlit world full of books and stories. She lived in her own world, and was an entirely unique woman.
As long as I can remember I have been listening to the novel of her life; it is the novel I have to write someday.
My grandma never, in my entire memory of her, ever asked for anything for herself. I seem to remember taking advantage of this as a girl, Amy, my best friend, and I would put grandma through agonizing epic plays, and long after grandpa was snoring with crossed arms on the sofa, Grandma would stay with us, through the plot twists and copious tangents. I think it was a secret pact between us, you hear my stories, I’ll hear yours.
We always had an affinity; she taught me something about loving books and loving stories, but it also just something natural in both of us, something in our blood. And grandma was a true book lover; she has probably read more than nearly anyone I have ever met. I would often and find her with her nose buried in Kierkegaard’s or some other massive book. Back in the day, there was no messing around with cheap novels; she was all Tolstoy, Huxley, and Cather. But the funny thing was, despite her obvious philosophical penchant, she always read the books for the stories.
When grandma was a young woman, after her first husband Lambert died in the war, there are a series of innocently bohemian sounding stories. Grandma, a Montana country girl, drove to New York City with a girlfriend and proudly walked up to the New York Times office and nearly announced that she’d come to write for them. She told the story, amused by her own naiveté, when the woman at the desk said; you know how many women write for the New York Times, and grandma: no? and the lady: zero, not one. And see, if weren’t for this, if weren’t for her time, and her shy nature, I am certain she would have been a writer.
A newer story: a few years ago, grandma and I watched an old black and white film with a sad, ambiguous ending. Grandma excitedly called me the next day and told me that she had hardly slept because she’d essentially spent the whole night writing an entire sequel. And in this second movie, all the characters found their proper place in the world, they realized their dreams, and they allowed themselves to love whom they truly loved.
Grandma always seemed to me to keep life at a kind of distance, almost like traveler, and this made her self-possessed and dignified, as if when everyone else was busy with romance, troubles, and life she was paying more attention to the birds overhead, not wistfully, just distant. And when we had the opportunity to get philosophical and I spoke to her about how she felt about death, she told me the long story of her experiences with a number of different religions, and she told me that most religions seemed to contain sets of differing furniture, this one believes in this, this one has pretty colored windows, this one doesn’t believe in pretty things…she said that she believed there had to be something after death, or else the story didn’t make sense, but that it was the deep mystery, the unknowable, so what’s the point of straining to see around the unseeable? She said though, she was certain that it would not be the (and I quote) “big chicken dinner with God” that everybody thinks it will be…but they’re be something.
I think I remember hearing her say this: that death is like the page you cannot turn until you get to it, there’s no reading ahead.
And so, like she did for the sad movie, in her memory, I write her a little sequel. I, like my grandma, do not have any firm beliefs about the unknowable, but I want to create the image of a little paradise just for her.
This is the scene:
Sun filters through a bamboo forest.
The air is full of colourful birds, and she hangs lovely feeders in magnolia trees for them.
The air is also full of the orchestral sounds of Lawrence Welk’s orchestra.
And the backdrop is Lawrence of Arabia on full screen in all its beautiful and exotic landscapes.
The bookshelves are full of books (just the old ones, with beautiful embossed leather covers.)
She would be able to look in on us, my brothers and dad and me, because she loved us so much, and her heart swelled with every one of our achievements.
The colours are all blues and browns like those that she loved.
And she is definitely there with her first husband, Lambert, who she missed, for most of her life.
And I wish for her, that death be the release of all the suffering of life.
That it be a freedom. I leave you all with these words, so that we still living, do not forget that death is a part of life, and that it is not terrible to die, but natural.
“For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered”
Before we had our long national nightmare (Watergate), we had our long national temper tantrum. In America, student protests were an indulgence of the privileged, a wail by baby boomer kids raised in unprecedented affluence against their parents' authority.
To accuse of "fascism" a generation that bled in the mud of Normandy fighting the Axis took a massive historical ignorance and overweening self-regard. The New Left had both.
Liberals are more likely to feel like victims and feel that collective action is the best way to make things happen. That may be right, but it's a frustrating way to live. The Democratic Party is a coalition of oppressed groups. These are legitimate grievances in a lot of cases, but that does not make for a happy party.
Many of the people so proud about being conservative strike me as selfish individuals who don't spend much worrying about life's inequities or the less privileged in our society. If you doubt that, just remember the reaction to the suffering of people caught in Hurricane Katrina by most conservatives.
They thought the people in New Orleans deserved what they got.
Most conservatives? Think he'll provide a source for that?
A key witness in the Joel Marino murder investigation says he saw Marino's killer walking along West Shore Drive six weeks ago, but he believes police did not take his call seriously.
"I thought the cavalry would come," says the witness, a retired Madison firefighter who asked not to be identified because the killer remains at large. "No one ever came."
This wasn't your ordinary police tip. It came from the man who saw the suspect on the day of the murder, near where the presumed killer dumped a hat and backpack that were later linked by DNA tests to the knife used to kill Marino.
The witness told his story to Isthmus after reading last week's revelation that UW-Madison student Brittany Zimmermann called 911 before she was murdered, but police were never sent. He was also infuriated by a comment from Police Chief Noble Wray, after the Zimmermann murder, urging people with relevant information to "call police, and we will come."
***
And there's more evidence of official stonewalling....
In an ongoing e-mail dialog which took place over a one-week period, April 8-14, 2008, a Captain Carl Gloede of the Madison Police Department is quoted to have told members of the Dane County 911 call center staff, in a personal visit, “not to release any information regarding Doty Street [the Brittany Zimmermann homicide]”
In another communication between Captain Gloede and a specific member of the Dane County 911 call center’s “communications” staff, a Wendy M. Phillips, Gloede tells Phillips explicitly, “[Madison] PD continues to request that the 911 call center not release information regarding the Doty Street homicide investigation and to refer any and all requests to the MPD PIO (Police Information Officer) Joel DeSpain“.
This is an inexplicable contradiction to what Madison Police Chief Noble Wray told Madison - and national - media when this botched 911 call story broke just last week.
Surprise, surprise… somebody in Dane County government is lying.
In that same e-mail, this 911 call center “communications” employee goes to great lengths to pat herself on the back for the tremendous strong-arm she gave Jason Shepard of Isthmus and other members of the Madison media, going so far as to brag about how she “refused to give him [Shepard] her last name” and how “he was not happy” with her stonewalling.
The house hs fallen on her and we're just waiting for the slippers to curl up.
Jeff Fleming and I were on TMJ4 last night, where I make that point ....(If you listen closely, you can hear John Malan in the background... I think he liked the tornado reference.)
What the Republicans need is not an abandonment of conservative principles, but a smarter, more articulate defense of even more conservatism, not less. ...
Moving toward a lite version of the Obamian/European "bipartisan"and socialist view of government and calling it a new conservatism is a prescription for utter disaster.
When crafting a tougher new law, the sensible thing for legislators to do is to see what other states have done to crack down on drunk driving. The National Conference of State Legislatures has provided a chart that details every state’s criminal drunk driving statute. When you look over the list, Wisconsin stands out in how light we are on drunk driving offenders. In the overwhelming majority of states, first non-accident offenses are at least a misdemeanor (although, admittedly, “misdemeanor” means different things in different states.) Exceptions from first-time misdemeanors include New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Louisiana, and New Hampshire - although subsequent offenses usually ratchet up the penalties in those states.
Madison…State legislators announced today plans to introduce legislation that would stiffen
Wisconsin
law for individuals who receive a third driving under the influence (DUI) conviction. On April 25, 2008, police say Jennifer Bukosky, her daughter Courtney Bella and her unborn baby were killed after the car they were traveling in was hit from behind by a vehicle driven by Mark Benson. Not long before the crash, Benson had been convicted of his third drunken driving offense. According to investigators, Mark Benson was under the influence of several prescription medicines when he got behind the wheel.
“The two questions that kept coming to mind after the loss of this mother and her two children were why this person went home after his third DUI conviction and why he still had his 3-ton killing machine in his possession,” said Representative Joel Kleefisch (R-Oconomowoc), one of the lead authors of the proposed changes.
The bipartisan legislation is also being sponsored by Representative Bob Ziegelbauer (D-Manitowoc) along with Senators Jeff Plale (D-South Milwaukee) and Alberta Darling (R-River Hills).
"The
Wisconsin
Legislature needs to take quick action on the proposed bills, so that we can prevent the loss of more innocent lives," said Sen. Plale. "It is hard to believe that people with such awful records are still allowed to drive a car. The most appalling thing is that there are people with many more DUI's that are still out there driving drunk every night. Something has to be done."
The proposed legislation would be separated in to two separate bills. The first bill would require that upon conviction of a third DUI, an individual’s driving privileges would be revoked and the vehicle being driven at the time of the third DUI, be seized by authorities. The second proposal would prevent an individual from getting behind the wheel by sending them directly to jail following conviction of a third DUI.
"Just turning up the heat on our current DUI penalties a little more won't do it,” said Rep. Ziegelbauer. “Immediate, permanent confiscation of the vehicle, any vehicle driven after revocation by multiple DUI offenders will be the kind of “game changer” we need."
The legislators plan to immediately begin drafting this legislation, working closely with the Bukosky family who plan to testify as soon as a hearing can be scheduled on the proposed legislation.
BEGALA: When people say things — I love Donna and we go back 22 years. We’ve never been on different sides of an arguments in our entire lives. But if her point is that there’s a new Democratic Party that somehow doesn’t need or want white working-class people and Latinos, well count me out.
DONNA BRAZILE, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Paul, baby, I did not say that.
BEGALA: We cannot win with egg heads.
Let me finish my point.
We cannot win with egg heads and African-Americans. OK, that is the Dukakis Coalition, which carried ten states and gave us four years of the first George Bush.
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