alternative hippopotamus

Little Isis (emphasis mine):

MCCain takes PA-$ 21 million Dollars
McCain takes Florida Virginia and North Carolina-$ 39 million dollars
McCain Takes Ohio-40 million dollars
Rachel Maddow in tears, an Obama Concession speech, and a pity party in Grant Park in Chicago for 250,000 worshipers….Priceless!

I will LAUGH!!! I will laugh a million laughs and then I and my vibrating friend will laugh and we will have a laughathon.

Good luck with that! Here’s hoping you and your vibrating friend blow a fuse.

I used to think Victoria Jackson was funny. Perhaps she still is on stage. But, this is just sad: (HuffPo)

“I don’t want a political label,” she wrote on her website, “but Obama bears traits that resemble the anti- Christ and I’m scared to death that un- educated people will ignorantly vote him into office.”

Later in the posting she wrote: “We must in all seriousness ask if Barack Hussein Obama could be a Muslim terrorist sympathizer or a Marxist mole. His closest friends include Communists, domestic and Muslim terrorists, racists and convicted felons. In his book Audacity of Hope, Barack Hussein Obama says, ‘I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.’”"

John Murtha, East Coast sophisticate:

Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) is in an unexpectedly tight race for an 18th term after effectively calling the constituents of his southwestern Pennsylvania district racists and rednecks.

Yes, growing up in Rockville, MD, I have had my share of being referred to as a redneck. Hint: it doesn’t go over well with the locals.

I thought this reflection by a former PUMA was interesting, and at least suggestive of a Republican dirty-tricks operation:

Over the last couple months I noticed my favorite Hillary board begin to change. Republicans were made moderators and the new members vs old members was 2:1. People who were the foundation of the board began to be silenced and censored. I had posts deleted for pointing out Sarah Palin supported giving $150 per severed wolf paw in Alaska that was killed from an aerial plane. I had posts deleted that said trickle down economics doesn’t work. I had posts deleted that showed McCain favors giving tax cuts to the wealthy while Obama wants to give a break to the poor and middle class. I was told by “Hillary supporters” that McCain has a better tax plan AND healthcare plan than Obama. When I said no and pointed out reasons why..you guessed it..my post was deleted. Right there was my proof these were never Hillary supporters. How can someone favor, much less state, McCain has a better plan for the economy, a better plan for middle Americans, a better plan for healthcare, when Obama and Hillary’s aforementioned plans were almost identical?

My life in DC brings me amongst a good deal of people who would either call themselves “liberals” or “progressives.” I don’t really make a distinction between the two words, but I like the notion of progress in the word “progressive.”

That, however, is not my point. My point is that even the Must Have Hillary! supporters are now more or less Obama supporters. At least in the circles in which I run. But that doesn’t seem to be the case in the blogosphere. Or, to be more specific, there’s a group of blogs that seem to have whipped themselves into an irrational hatred of the Democratic nominee and the party that supports him.

Unfortunately, the once excellent Corrente is one such site. It has become mostly unreadable. And, that’s really too bad.

Noting that Cannonfire is popular with a certain… I don’t know, cult of the blogosphere, I thought I’d have a look see. This bit caught my attention:

Kos and Josh Marshall would support Duke Cunningham for president if Duke were a Dem — and chic-ly black.

In the sort of gatherings that I go to, someone who made that kind of statement would either be asked to leave, or at the very least told that hate speech isn’t acceptable. Likewise, someone wearing a T-shirt that said “Sarah Palin is a [redacted]” would receive similar treatment. Well, if it actually used the word “redacted” that at least would have a point to it. But, you know what I mean.

Usually people get angry over issues of power. When suddenly confronted with one’s impotence, it’s tempting to lash out. I believe that’s ultimately what’s at play. Isn’t that one of the points of the story of Cain and Able? Cain, sensing his impotence in the contest between himself and his brother lashes out- killing him. Indeed, without some kind of third force coming into play- say the wish for a better society, or understanding the harmful nature of violence, we’ll became a nation of Cains.

I should emphasize that I’ve been one of the DC hosts for Drinking Liberally for 3 years, and nothing along the lines of hate speech has ever happened. I”m curious where these progressive-turned-Republican-voting bloggers get their material from? And, if they are genuinely interested in the issue of hate speech have they turned the mirror on themselves?

NYT:

Mr. Buckley said he had “been effectively fatwahed by the conservative movement” after endorsing Barack Obama in a blog posting on TheDailyBeast.com; since then, he said he has been blanketed with hate mail at the blog and at the National Review, where he has written a column.

As a result, he wrote to Richard Lowry, the editor of the National Review, and its publisher, Jack Fowler, offering to resign, and “this offer was rather briskly accepted,” Mr. Buckley said.

While I don’t agree with Mr. Buckley often, or his father almost ever, I do appreciate their sense of elan. NRO is a creepy place occupied by hollow people.

As this TPM thread points out, there’s something minimalistically and syntactically just right about turning Palin’s “Drill, Baby, Drill” to Hillary’s “Jobs, Baby, Jobs.” If I had to choose one moment that captures the essence of this race, this might be the one.

Other things I wish I’d said: (Ygles) “I think the epithet of choice has something to do with revenge being a dish best served atop a Nobel Prize. “

Two woolly mammoths meet at the end of the Ice Age. One says to the other: “Great News! The Ice Age is about to end! We’re going to survive!”

The other one turns away, indifferent to what the first woolly mammoth said. “But have we shown leadership in the process?” the mammoth wonders.

I should note there’s many variations on this joke. For instance, in one variation, the second wooly mammoth says: “Great! Now we’re going to get yelled at.”

The point is that in dark times, good news is received with foreboding. There’s a personality type that can’t hear anything without seeing it in a negative light.

I’m thinking of this now having seen two quotes. The first is from Hillary Clinton:

In a passionate speech introducing Joe Biden at a campaign rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania this afternoon, Hillary Clinton gave a strong endorsement to Barack Obama by celebrating the end of the Bush administration, shouting:

“Make no mistake about it. We’ve done it before and we will do it again. America will once again rise from the ashes of the Bushes.”

I bolded a sentence from that quote to compare it to another, one from Heidi Li Feldman, a local law professor here in DC who advocates for the defeat of Obama in the upcoming election. I’ve put in bold the parallel sentence to Hillary Clinton’s:

It seems likely to me that the possibility created by the betrayals committed by Senator Obama, Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi (to name just a few of the Democratic Party leadership involved) will be the possibility of fracture not the possibility of a rejuvenated mutual understanding. Senator Obama has no history of being a strong leader in the area of women’s empowerment and his policy stances have shifted around sufficiently that he has annoyed if not alienated the traditional liberals who thought he was one. So he cannot rely on a reservoir of trust and good will from people who care about these issues. What he would have to do is show that in the absence of a record on these matters and presence of a series of betrayals is to step up and apologize in terms that would seem authentic because they were authentic. I do not know Barack Obama. So I do not know whether he can do this. I have very little reason to think he will do it even if he can.

I do not mind, at this point, if he does not. Because I know that there is possibility in betrayal. The possibility of going in a new direction. We are only now starting to consider that direction and to build the organizations and find the people who will go with us on our way. But every new beginning has to be just that - a beginning. We start with noncooperation with those who cannot or will not acknowledge their betrayals. Then we build anew. It has happened before. No reason it cannot happen again.

There’s a rhetorical similarity that I’m using in antithesis here. I’m doing so to underline something I don’t really get: How Can Professor Feldman maintain that she’s a supporter of Hillary Clinton yet disrespect Senator Clinton’s message? Clinton appears to be saying that it’s a good thing that Obama could well be elected president. Professor Feldman is saying that Obama’s election would be the end of the Democratic Party.

I suppose, to paraphrase another old joke, sometimes the woolly mammoth has to want to change.

Though the profit part continues to elude me.

On Saturday I conducted an experiment I’ve been considering for the last week. The premise is that the distance between the Woodley Park Metro and Adams Morgan can be neatly collapsed into a mere singularity by use of a skateboard. Of course, that’s a bit hyperbolic, but the idea is that this would be a straightforward (and quick) way of crossing the Calvert Street bridge.

I began thinking about this approximately one week ago while using my newest longboard to traverse the sidewalk along Madison Street. That’s the one that passes by the American History Musem, Natural History Museum, and National Gallery of Art. Sections of the pavement use a rough, gravel-like surface that is impossible for a typical skateboard wheel, but is reasonably acceptable for my Landyachtz (72 mm Gumball wheels). Still, even with a monster board like a Landyachtz, the surface was rough enough to cause the screws on my front trucks to shear off. At the time I estimate I was going 7-8 mph (based on my rate of passing walking pedestrians). That’s pretty respectable. After replacing the damaged screws, I began to realize that surfaces that were previously out of bounds would now be worth trying.

The Calvert Street bridge uses a similar slab to the ones along Madison, so I though this might go reasonably well. And, it did for a bit. I didn’t notice before that there’s a significant uphill at about 1/4 mile. Between the grade and the surface it’s pretty tough going. Going back from 18th St to Woodley might not be so bad, but that’s an experiment for another day.

There is, of course, a bike lane along the Calvert Bridge, but I wasn’t ready to go there, yet. Still, that might be another solution to getting to Adams Morgan by skateboard.

But they’re aren’t a statistically significant number of PUMAs to actually observe the fall, does it make a noise? Ignoring sock-puppets, of course.

I had invited Mike Lux to speak at Drinking Liberally last Thursday. His speech was more or less the core of this post at Open Left. If you’ve never met Mike, he’s a really, really bright guy who knows polls backwards and forwards.

During Q&A I asked him whether he saw a PUMA factor or was this a fiction created by the primaries? He said that he believed it to be a fiction, and that there was no polling that suggested there was a numerically significant movement. The closing thing he saw, he continued, was primary voters who voted for Clinton, who always intended to vote for McCain. In other words, they were Republicans trying to knock Obama out of the race.

The people that I spoke with at Drinking Liberally who were familiar with the “PUMAs” believed them to be a Republican dirty trick, which is more or less what I believe. I think there’s some crazies thrown in, but the posts have a Republican aroma to their DNA.

I’m saying this having watched how things have shifted over time, at least at the rivermalkin site. Today’s spin is that voting for McCain is a protest vote. I’m not sure they’re clear exactly what they’re protesting, but I’m not sure that matters as long as you vote for McCain. How about voting for a third party, or Micky Mouse. No, that would be wrong! Only McCain is a genuine protest vote.

As it turns out, one of the PUMAs, now apparently drummed out of the cult, said that voting for McCain had potentially harmful effects. Such as, the possibility of him being elected. That was not acceptable to the pumatons, however:

masslib is just an example of the weak-minded who spew their opinions but then back down as soon as they are questioned. Just look at the comments.

PUMAs are committed to NOBAMA. PUMAs are strong. masslib was weak and was therefore only a PUMA in name.

PUMAs never cede.

Is it me, or are they starting to channel Lord of the Flies?