Ross is love.

The duel.

For anyone that cares, I'll be on tonight with results from North Carolina and Indiana. The notoriously unreliable exit polls are starting to come in, but it's almost pointless to parse them. I'd make a guess that Clinton will do very well in Indiana, to the tune of 5-7 points. In North Carolina, Obama is heavily favored, but I think that one's very much open.  While you breathlessly anticipate the results of yet more goddamn Democratic primaries, enjoy (and, potentially, base your vote on) these dueling Top Ten lists. Clinton's is clearly ridiculous: TiVo should come in at #3, at worst.

And keep those "Lazy things to do before I'm 31" idears comin'...

When I was 31.

OK, so I'm going to be 31 in about ten days. If anyone has any ideas about anything that one should do before one turns 31, I'm all ears. The winner gets to hear me talk about doing that thing. The criteria are these: (1) Do-able in the next ten days [so no skiiing]; (2) Require little or no money, since one thing I likely won't be doing before I turn 31 is getting rich [so, reading Little Women is probably doable, going to France is not]. Be creative.

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¶ Is Texas potentially in play for November? A Rasmussen poll has McCain leading either Democrat by around five points, with a margin of error of four. Also, John McCain is calling for a "League of Nations" to balance Iranian influence in the Middle East. --You know, I'm trying to be respectful, but he continues to make it hard for me not to make fun of him for being really old. If he starts going on about the perfidious Spaniards and refuses to stop calling him "Barrick" Obama, it'll be open season. Fair warning.

¶ New "make-or-break" primaries tonight, just like many times before. Now, we're really actually kind of nearing some kind of an end. And anything really could happen: In Indiana, the candidates had been about tied until Obama's not-very-good couple of weeks, and now Clinton seems to hold a small lead. In North Carolina, Obama had been up by around 25%, but now they're within a few points depending on the poll, and Clinton's actually been ahead in a couple. A loss by her in both states could really put the brakes on her somewhat tenuous but tenacious campaign, while a dual win could propel her forward. Most likely, there'll be an indecisive spilt, which seems to be how these things go.

Related, a bit: The Weekly Standard, the ulta-neoconservative publication, has a bit called "An Exceedingly Strange New Respect", talking about Hillary Clinton. I mention it only because I wonder if it doesn't get to the heart of something that I've found among friends: all of the most die-hard Republicans I know (really, every last one) either are voting for her, or consider her a comfortable second choice, in spite of the fact that they're supposed to hate her with a fiery vengeance.

Hillary [Clinton] may still be a nanny-state type in some of her policies, but in her own life she seems more and more of a Social Darwinian, refusing to lose, and insisting on shaping her destiny. If the fittest survive, she intends to be one of them. This takes her part of the way towards a private conversion. She is acting like one of our own.

If this weren't enough to make right-wing hearts flutter, Hillary has another brand-new advantage: She is hated on all the right fronts. The snots and the snark-mongers now all despise her, along with the trendies, the glitzies; the food, drama, and lifestyle critics, the beautiful people (and those who would join them), the Style sections of all the big papers; the slick magazines; the above-it-all pundits, who have looked down for years on the Republicans and on the poor fools who elect them, and now sneer even harder at her...

And what caused this display of intense irritation? She's running a right-wing campaign. She's running the classic Republican race against her opponent, running on toughness and use-of-force issues, the campaign that the elder George Bush ran against Michael Dukakis, that the younger George Bush waged in 2000 and then again against John Kerry, and that Ronald Reagan -- "The Bear in the Forest" -- ran against Jimmy Carter and Walter F. Mondale. And she's doing it with much the same symbols.

Full article here.

 

The legacy.

If I thought that this was represented with anything more than boredom on the part of my fellow Americans, I might take more pleasure in the statistical fact that President Bush is now, officially, the least approved of President in the history of measuring the approval/disapproval of presidents. His approval rating is currently at 28%, which is not quite the lowest recorded, but his disapproval stands at 71%, which tops Nixon's number right before he resigned. I'd like to consider this as a form of vindication, but I think it mostly reflects the fact that gas prices are high, rather than a solemn and somber acknowledgment that we elected (or came close enough to electing), twice, a man and an administration whose sole goal seemed to be to consolidate power around himself and his monied associates, while simultaneously spreading all manner of crap on the Constitution, our soldiers, our poor, international law, the environment, and the general rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that we, in our brightest days, were meant to espouse on behalf of all mankind. After eight years, innocent men, women, and children languish in an offshore prison, the once sacred right of habeas corpus, essential to western justice for centuries, is broken at the whim of this or any future president, and we dither about our environment for fear that the economic, health, and spiritual benefits to a cleaner, more energy-efficient world might endanger the ability of oil barons in an outmoded and increasingly fossilized industry to make obscene profits. The hundreds of thousands of civilians dead and dying in Iraq, and those in Afghanistan who dared to hope before we lost interest, find themselves wishing that we had kept our precious gift of 'freedom' to ourselves.

Fucking up the dollar through eight years of artificial stimulus, overspending, and trickle-down economics is the least of your crimes (a word I don't use lightly), Mr. Bush, but I suspect that that's what has people so down on you.

I'd like to be optimistic for the future, but America, by design, is a slow-moving machine, and power, once conglomerated, doesn't surrender itself easily. It would take a secular saint to hand back the power that the office of the president now yields, and I don't see any such person running. We gave away that power, we handed off our virtue for the promise of a little security and a lot of revenge. That's not President Bush's legacy, it belongs to all of us.

Coffee.

I take it by MSNBCs wacky music, we're supposed to take a way that "she ain't like you an' me." As someone easily frightened and confused by commercial dispensing products, I find it endearing. She's unlike me in that, having just had my entire exhaust system replaced (on my car, you scamps) I can no longer afford coffee. Except for the free coffee at work, which tastes a bit like watery, brewed butt (with a delicate coffee flavoring).

And what is up with that music? Seriously. Is she balanced on a ball?