Post #400: Senator Clinton still corrupt. News at 11.

Senator Clinton proposes a blatant vote-buying scheme:

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday that every child born in the United States should get a $5,000 "baby bond" from the government to help pay for future costs of college or buying a home.

Why can't Democrats realize that just throwing money at voters during an election campaign is a major no-no in a democracy?

The SEIU's dilemma

Picking a presidential candidate to back in 2008 is turning out to be a tough call. This is the point in the decision-making process that the SEIU has reached(hyperlink in original):

Writing on his personal blog, Marc Cooper, a contributing editor for The Nation, suggests that “the already sputtering Edwards’ campaign” hit “a definitive speed bump” yesterday when Edwards failed to win the endorsement of the Service Employees International Union. Cooper thinks “the much-coveted endorsement of Big Labor’s biggest union seemed to slip one notch closer toward never happening.”

So why did Edwards fail to win this key endorsement. The reason offered by Cooper is:

SEIU officials are openly concerned that their once-favored Edwards is running a distant third in most national and state polls (with the exception of Iowa) and may no longer be a viable candidate, no matter how many union resources are poured into his campaign.

You see, the union could endorse their entirely sycophantic suitor Edwards, but he seems like he might lose. So, in order to guarentee that they endorse a winner, the union is thinking about endorsing Mr. and Mrs. NAFTA for the White House instead. Doesn't that sound a little counterproductive?

Senator Clinton thinks independent voters are idiots.

That is really the only way to explain this:

U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton said Sunday she can appeal to Republicans as well as Democrats on the presidential trail.

Clinton appeared on "Fox News Sunday." Host Chris Wallace, citing his acerbic interview with former President Clinton last year as well as the former first lady's comments this year, asked, "Why do you and the president have such a hyper-partisan view of politics? … Why do we want another president who thinks so much in terms of right versus left and red state versus blue state?"

After attempting to turn the questioning to declining family income and the loss of healthcare, Clinton said, "Oh, Chris, if you had walked even a day in our shoes over the last 15 years, I'm sure you'd understand. But you know, the real goal for our country right now is to get beyond partisanship. And, I'm sure trying to do my part. Because we've got a lot of serious problems that we're trying to deal with."

It's just amazing to me how stupid you would have to be to believe this. The Clintons spent most of the 90s defending themselves from what they claimed was a fanatical Republican Party that was consumed with an anti-Clinton vendetta of unparalleled ferocity. According to the Clintons, the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy -- when it wasn't attempting a coup against the constitutional government -- was using "hate radio" and "Right-wing militias" to prepare for a military conquest of Washington D.C.

Now Hillary Clinton wants you to believe that she is the one Democrat in America who can get along with conservatives. Who does she think she is, Barack Obama?

Giuliani makes a bold proposal.

You've got to give the guy credit for this proposal:

Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani urged NATO to admit Australia, India, Israel, Japan and Singapore on Wednesday as part of proposals to combat Islamic extremism.

On the merits, there are a few big problems and some plusses. For the most part, the list looks a lot like the "anglosphere" idea -- an alliance of the post-colonial English-speaking states -- that's been floating around the Right-wing blogosphere for years. Plus-wise, Australia, Singapore, and Japan will probably be easy to sell on a counter-terror alliance. Australia is a staunch ally of the United States on terror already, and Japan is likely to continue happily beefing up its self-defense forces with more U.S. support. Singapore may or may not go along, although it doesn't seem as if they have much to lose by staying away from the idea.

India, on the other hand, is a question mark. Although India might decide to go along with the deal to rachet up the pressure on Pakistan, India might decide that getting too attached to the United States isn't in its long term interests. India is in a tougher neighborhood than Singapore or Australia, so India has a lot more to lose by ending up on the wrong side of NATO's potential expansion into Asia.

The biggest problem on the list is Israel. That's not to say that the deal is a lousy one from the Israeli point of view. I'm sure that Israel would applaud any gesture of the West to help it fight terror, as opposed to, say, politely lionizing the terrorists as anti-Zionist freedom fighters. In other words, the real deal-breaker is that Left-wing parties around the West will almost certainly unanimously rise up against plan as the demented plotting of yet another Neocon cabal (not that Giuliani was going to win New York City in 2008 anyway, though).

Idiocracy

Back in the days when any Tom, Dick, or Harry with a crayon box could scribble out a design for a 9/11 memorial, there was one particular design that struck me as the epitome of American stupidity. Someone with perhaps just a moment's exposure to real-life architectural principles decided that since the Twin Towers were constructed from positive space, the memorial should be the same two Twin Towers constructed out of negative space. That is, since the originals were stacks of matter erected into air, the memorials should be shafts of air excavated out of matter.

Yes, someone actually proposed digging two 400 meter shafts with offices hewn out of the sides on the World Trade Center site. At the time, it seemed like the most crazy ass proposal imaginable.

The time passed. A dissertation was written. A job was hunted for. Then one day, I wake up and discover that negative space won the memorial competition after all! Apparently, the winning design decided that the single most important aspect of 9/11 to memorialize was the concept of two big craters with broken street mains dumping water into them. Now we're stuck with two geometrically shaped craters with highly stylized broken street mains elegantly dumping water into them.

You might be a liberal if...

you recycle Democratic Party talking points into blog posts.

The talking point was Republican Senator John Warner handing the Democrats an early Christmas present by pulling the "MacArthur trick" on General David Petraeus:

He [Senator Warner] then asked Petraeus a pointed question: "Do you feel that [Iraq war][sic] is making America safer"?

Petraeus paused before responding. He then said: "I believe this is indeed the best course of action to achieve our objectives in Iraq."

That was, of course, a non-answer. And Warner wasn't going to let the general dodge the bullet. He repeated the question: "Does the [Iraq war][sic] make America safer?"

Petraeus replied, "I don't know, actually. I have not sat down and sorted in my own mind."

This was a question with no correct answer for General Petraeus, and thus the General's reponse was virtually guarenteed to become the sound clip of the week in the liberal media. It's also interesting to note that a certain purportedly conservative blogger has fallen for it hook, line, and sinker:

He's fighting a war that he hasn't even decided is vital or even beneficial to the security of the United States. That's how lost we are in mission creep. That's the depth of the hole in which Petraeus has been ordered to keep digging.

Another Whiff of Fascism

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards proposes mandatory preventative care under his universal health care plan:

Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards said on Sunday that his universal health care proposal would require that Americans go to the doctor for preventive care.

"It requires that everybody be covered. It requires that everybody get preventive care," he told a crowd sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Cedar County Courthouse. "If you are going to be in the system, you can't choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK."

All citizens will make mandatory visits with government inspectors or face punishment: in any normal presidential campaign cycle, this position would have been the kiss of death for the Edwards candidacy. For some bizarre reason this year, all of the Democratic presidential candidates seem to be assuming that this is the way forward for Americans. It's as if the Democratic party has lost all faith in the ability of Americans to care for themselves without government intervention.

Senator Craig

I was listening to talk radio on a drive today, and one of the hosts was wandering aloud about what the Senator Craig scandal supposedly meant. These were a lot of the obvious questions such as "Why is it okay for Democrats to be gay but not Republicans?"

Suffice it to say that this line of reasoning misses the real meaning entirely. In reality, it is all about Iraq. Just look at the timing of the last big scandals. Before the 2006 elections, there was the Mark Foley scandal. When the Democrats were launching their spring offensive against funding for the troops in Iraq, there was the Alberto Gonzales scandal. Now we're a week or so away from General Petraeus' report on the surge in Iraq and another vote on war funding, and now yet another Republican scandal is all over the media.