The Big Dog Will Land: Alison's Only Hope of Inspiring Democratic Voters Coming to Kentuc ky

This is the only real reason she's running: her daddy knows Bill Clinton, and Kentucky Democrats think Bill Clinton walked on water.

If the Big Dog says vote for her, they will.

Sam Youngman at the Herald:

Former President Bill Clinton is scheduled to attend campaign events with Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes on Aug. 6 in Lexington and Hazard.

The 42nd president is making his second trip to the Bluegrass for Grimes, who is Kentucky's secretary of state. He attended a fundraiser in Louisville for the challenger to U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in February. 

 While in Lexington, Clinton will appear with Grimes at an event at the Carrick House. They'll campaign together in Hazard at the Hal Rogers Center.

Yes, she'll probably take the Golden Triangle and Eastern Kentucky. But most Democratic candidates in statewide races do. 

It's Western Kentucky where Democratic Senate campaigns die, and only a Clinton swing through there - in, say, October - can prevent Alison from following Dan Mongiardo (2004), Bruce Lunsford (2008) and Jack Conway (2010) into that grave.

Clinton Envy Is A Terrible Thing, and AynRandy Has It Bad

It's now gotten to the point that only Wonkette can do justice to the bottomless derp that is news about the Tribble-Toupeed One.

Sen. Rand Paul is just sick of the Democrats doing war on women by tolerating the continued existence of Bill Clinton, the sexual predator who had a consensual affair with a lady who worked for him (this is the only real instance of workplace sexual harassment in history, according to Republicans). And so he is calling on all Democrats who have ever raised money with Clinton to return it immediately to protest the notorious anti-woman blowjobs of 20 years ago. Seems reasonable!

In an interview to be aired Sunday on CSPAN, Paul laid out his crystalline logic:

“They can’t have it both ways. And so I really think that anybody who wants to take money from Bill Clinton or have a fundraiser has a lot of explaining to do. In fact, I think they should give the money back,” Mr. Paul, Kentucky Republican, said. “If they want to take position on women’s rights, by all means do. But you can’t do it and take it from a guy who was using his position of authority to take advantage of young women in the workplace.”

Aqua Buddha says what? That must have been one hell of a blowjob, to erase all the transvaginal ultrasound bills and comments about the sacred status of rape babies.

Needless to say, Rand Paul is only interested in what’s best for women, and what’s best for women is to remind everyone that the Democratic front-runner’s husband was a big horndog who did sex stuff two decades ago, so that women will be spared the indignity of a Hillary Clinton presidency. It’s quite the public-minded thing of him to do, really.

We could maybe say that if Rand Paul is going to target Hillary Clinton through the not-exactly-obscure marital misdeeds of her husband, then it would be entirely fair to wonder why he hasn’t distanced himself from his own family member’s history of questionable associations and racist newsletters… then again, there are so many excellent reasons to reject Rand Paul, why even bother?

I repeat: I sincerely hope Ms. Tribble-Toupeed One is frequently fucking her brains out with the pool boy.

Stick to Politics, Bill - It's What You Do Best

The tragedy of this is not that it's unusual, but that it's heart-breakingly typical.

From The Nation:

When Demosthene Lubert heard that Bill Clinton's foundation was going to rebuild his collapsed school at the epicenter of Haiti's January 12, 2010, earthquake, in the coastal city of Léogâne, the academic director thought he was "in paradise."

The project was announced by Clinton as his foundation's first contribution to the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, which the former president co-chairs. The foundation described the project as "hurricane-proof...emergency shelters that can also serve as schools...to ensure the safety of vulnerable populations in high risk areas during the hurricane season," while also providing Haitian schoolchildren "a decent place to learn" and creating local jobs. The facilities, according to the foundation, would be equipped with power generators, restrooms, water and sanitary storage. They became one of the IHRC's first projects.

However, when Nation reporters visited the "hurricane-proof" shelters in June, six to eight months after they'd been installed, we found them to consist of twenty imported prefab trailers beset by a host of problems, from mold to sweltering heat to shoddy construction. Most disturbing, they were manufactured by the same company, Clayton Homes, that is being sued in the United States for providing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with formaldehyde-laced trailers in the wake of Hurricane Katrina . Air samples collected from twelve Haiti trailers detected worrying levels of this carcinogen in one, according to laboratory results obtained as part of a joint investigation by The Nation and The Nation Institute's Investigative Fund.

SNIP

Wall, the former OCHA spokeswoman, responded by e-mail, "We all knew that that project was misconceived from the start, a classic example of aid designed from a distance with no understanding of ground level realities or needs. It has had a predictably long and unhappy history from the start."

Even Conille largely concurred, in a telephone interview, that there were many problems with the project, saying, "It made sense at that time, and I guess someone could argue it wasn't the best idea in retrospect."

For his part, Léogâne Mayor Santos Alexis says he is still waiting for Bill Clinton to follow through on his pledge to equip Léogâne with hurricane-proof school buildings. Asked about his view on the Clinton Foundation's claims to having completed an "Emergency Hurricane Shelter Project" replete with new classrooms for his town, Alexis is defiant. "If those at the Clinton Foundation are sure it's done then they should prove it, they should show it to us, because I know nothing about it," he remarked coyly, gazing out from behind his shades. Seated at his desk in a crumbling municipal building, the mayor said he is still waiting for the real Clinton Foundation schools, "built with norms that protect people from hurricanes and flooding."

Read the whole disgusting thing.

Liberals know real solutions to hard, long-standing problems are never cheap or easy, but take a very long time and cost a great deal of money.

"When they talk of hatred, we must stand against them."

Digby:

Here's the last president who faced an outbreak of horrible political violence during his term and I think it holds up well today:

Yesterday Hillary and I joined tens of thousands of people in Oklahoma City, and of course millions of you all across the country, to witness the end result of abject hatred. I was there, as President, to represent all of you in the mourning. But also I felt that we were there, Hillary and I, as ordinary American citizens as well, as husband and wife, as parents, as neighbors of those people.

No words can do justice to how moving it was to be there yesterday. No words can do justice to the courage of those who worked in the rescue operation around the clock. And one person has already given her life in that endeavor. No words can do justice to the small acts of kindness and generosity, all the people in Oklahoma who won't take money at the gas station or the local coffee shop or the barber shop or even at the airline ticket terminal for people who are there working to try to help them put their lives together.

But I will never forget, more than anything else, the faces and the stories of the family members of the victims. I was walking through the room shaking hands with them, and I saw a lady with her children who had been in the Oval Office just a few weeks ago as her husband left my Secret Service detail to go to what seemed to be a less hectic pace of duty in Oklahoma City. I saw the children of a man who was a football hero at the University of Arkansas when so many people who are now on the White House staff were friends of his. The young Air Force sergeant took out two pictures his wife had taken f me just 3 weeks ago when I visited our troops in Haiti. And she was one of those troops, but she came home because we wound down our mission there. And she married her fiance, and 3 days later she went to the Federal building to change her name. And so he had to give me the pictures his wife took. I saw three children, teenage children, with a woman and another child taking care of them. One of them had one of my Inaugural buttons on. Their mother died last year of an illness. Their father went to our Inaugural, and they asked me to sign the pin to their father who is still missing—three teenagers losing both parents.

I could go on and on and on. I say to all of you, first we must complete the rescue effort and the recovery effort. Of course, we must help that community rebuild. We must arrest, convict, and punish the people who committed this terrible, terrible deed, but our responsibility does not end there.

In this country we cherish and guard the right of free speech. We know we love it when we put up with people saying things we absolutely deplore. And we must always be willing to defend their right to say things we deplore to the ultimate degree. But we hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other. They spread hate. They leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable. You ought to see—I'm sure you are now seeing the reports of some things that are regularly said over the airwaves in America today.

Well, people like that who want to share our freedoms must know that their bitter words can have consequences and that freedom has endured in this country for more than two centuries because it was coupled with an enormous sense of responsibility on the part of the American people.

If we are to have freedom to speak, freedom to assemble, and, yes, the freedom to bear arms, we must have responsibility as well. And to those of us who do not agree with the purveyors of hatred and division, with the promoters of paranoia, I remind you that we have freedom of speech, too, and we have responsibilities, too. And some of us have not discharged our responsibilities. It is time we all stood up and spoke against that kind of reckless speech and behavior.

If they insist on being irresponsible with our common liberties, then we must be all the more responsible with our liberties. When they talk of hatred, we must stand against them. When they talk of violence, we must stand against them. When they say things that are irresponsible, that may have egregious consequences, we must call them on it. The exercise of their freedom of speech makes our silence all the more unforgivable. So exercise yours, my fellow Americans. Our country, our future, our way of life is at stake. I never want to look into the faces of another set of family members like I saw yesterday, and you can help to stop it.

Our democracy has endured a lot over these last 200 years, and we are strong enough today to sort out and work through all these angry voices...

Bill Clinton Stumps for Jack Conway in Kentucky

Media Czech has it all, of course.

President Bill Clinton Part One:



Jack Conway Part One:



See the rest of both speeches here, as well as the speeches of Senator Wendell Ford, who for 24 years held the seat for which Conway is running, BlueDog DINO Ben "Wire Hangar" Chandler, repug-lite KY-6, and Lt.-Gov.-without-portfolio Daniel "Sour Grapes" Mongiardo.

Read the Herald's coverage here.

Sex and the Torturing Politican

Twenty years ago this Sunday, a Miami Herald reporter got a phone call and the rules of political campaigns changed forever.

When Tom Fiedler's phone rang the evening of April 27, 1987, he thought it might be another crank call, the kind political reporters get all the time. But Fiedler, a veteran campaign chronicler for the Miami Herald, couldn't ignore the caller's message: "Gary Hart is having an affair with a friend of mine."

Hart's inexcusable stupidity - he actually dared reporters to follow him - set a new standard for political coverage: sex lives are fair game.

The Clinton impeachment a decade later may seem to be the apotheosis of that standard, but in fact it was its nadir; it made most people realize that a politician's consensual adult sex really wasn't as important as how he did his job.

In Kentucky, Governor Paul Patton provided the egregious example of a public official who let his dick affect his job performance; he gave his mistress Tina Connor sweetheart contracts and regulatory exemptions for her businesses. His real crime, however, was that the exposure of his malfeasance led directly to the election of Republican Criminal Ernie Fletcher.

But it wasn't until the American people got collectively though metaphorically ass-raped by a frat-boy with arrested development who has probably never cheated on his wife that we really understood the moral calculus of presidential flaws.

In a president, which is preferable? Discreet extramarital affairs with consenting adults or treating the Constitution as toilet paper?

Let me put it more baldly: rather than a "good Christian" sociopathic failure bent on destroying the nation in a futile attempt to out-macho his father and who gets his jollies personally approving sexual torture of innocents, I'll take a homosexual, atheist, liberal, feminist, elitist, UN-loving, business-hating, gun-confiscating abortionist any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

Bill Clinton in Kentucky: Support Hillary or Else

It's been obvious for quite some time that the only use Hillary Clinton has for the proles is as attendants carrying the train at her coronation, but this is ridiculous.

BenRay of What's Required reports from Bill Clinton's campaign tour of Kentucky:

So, I don’t know how many of you have heard Bill on his tour of the Commonwealth today–why he so scrupulously avoided population centers, I don’t know–but there’s something that shocked me about the rally: the price of admission.

No, it didn’t cost any money to get in, but it did require you to fill out a volunteer card for the campaign– presumably at least so you can receive direct mailers later. I attempted to refuse to fill one out, and was at first blocked, and then told by the sympathetic volunteer to just put my name on it. I wonder if the high school kids that just wanted out of class had to supply their info to the campaign?

Every campaign event I've ever been to asked everyone to fill out a card with name, address, email, etc., but none so far have been stupid enough (and I've been to some pretty stupid ones) to demand personal information as the price of admission.

Consider also that the Clinton events were specifically and broadly publicized as public events, at which all members of the public are welcome, and the "sign up or get out" behavior starts to look downright sinister.

Yes, BenRay got in (read his full report), thanks to a volunteer's common sense, and let's all hope his initial blocking was a freak occurance.

But if it wasn't, I'd say Hillary appears to have adopted not only Smirky/Darth's permanent war/fuck the poor philosophy, but also his campaign event technique of permitting loyal followers only.

Cross-posted at Watching Those We Chose.

Nightmare Team

I haven't posted about the "Dream Team" meme, mostly because I considered the chances of either Hillary or Obama accepting the other as a VP to be slim and non-existent.

But now Bill Clinton is pushing the idea, meaning Hillary is seriously considering it, meaning it's time to strangle this Rosemary's baby in the cradle.

One of the major strengths of Obama as the Democratic nominee is that he is not Hillary. Yeah, most Democrats who dislike Hillary, like me, will probably hold our noses and vote Democratic in November if she heads the ticket, but the independents and even republicans who are now looking kindly on Obama will not.

And while there may be some Hillary partisans so bitter about her not being the nominee that they will refuse to vote for a Democratic ticket headed by Obama, there is no large bloc of Hillary voters who would prefer McCain to Obama.

Adding Hillary to the ticket as VP gains Obama nothing and probably costs him millions of independent votes.

Adding Obama to the ticket as VP gains Hillary few, if any, of Obama's independents, and though it probably doesn't cost her any votes, won't gain her enough to beat McCain.

Until Bill opened his big mouth again, I doubted that Hillary would ever consider the VP spot. For the past year, she hasn't been running a campaign as much as planning a coronation. The fighting attitude she has displayed lately - and to apparent good effect in Texas and Ohio - strikes me less as aggressiveness than bitter fury at not being handed the nomination on Super Tuesday. Now I wonder if she could swallow her pride enough to accept the second spot.

I think Hillary's pride would also prevent her from offering VP to Obama. She knows his charisma exceeds hers by several orders of magnitude - a quality that is counter-productive in a vice-president.

The big danger here is the party poohbahs. If the race gets any closer, with Obama's lead in pledged delegates falling below 100, the Cowards of the DNC, in their terror of an actual nominating convention fight, may try to force a ticket with both Obama and Hillary.

If they do, we can all start planning the inauguration for President McCain.