March 23, 2008 - March 29, 2008

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And the Pulitzer goes to ... Sinbad?!

Filed under: Hillary Clinton

My favorite part about the controversy over Hillary Clinton lying about being under sniper fire is that it was first broken by Sinbad.

Yes, that Sinbad (nee David Adkins), the star of A Different World and numerous other family friendly sitcoms from the 1980s and 90s.

The controversy began March 11 when Sinbad told the Washington Post's website that he was along on the trip and didn't remember any threat of danger:

In an interview with the Sleuth Monday, he said the "scariest" part of the trip was wondering where he'd eat next. "I think the only 'red-phone' moment was: 'Do we eat here or at the next place.'"

Hillary tried to claim she mispoke because she was tired, but it turns out she's trotted out the anecdote on numerous occasions.

Now a Florida blog is asking how Sinbad got the scoop that the mainstream media missed:

Both CBS's Sharyl Attkison and NBC's Andrea Mitchell have pointed out during their reports that they were actually with Clinton on that Bosnia trip and recalled no sniper fire, rushing crowds or exagerrated danger. Since headlines have been filled with the news, other journalists who took that trip 12 years ago -- including former MTV News reporter Tabitha Soren -- have weighed in.

So why did it take comic Sinbad to blow the lid on the whole deal?

BREAKING: New video has surfaced that confirms Hillary's account and DISPUTES SINBAD! Check it out:

Posted by Kevin Hoffman at March 28, 2008 12:24 PM | Comments (0)

 

Obama Makes Fox News Eat Itself

Filed under: Media

So, Fox News' Chris Wallace goes on Fox and Friends, the network's version of a vapid morning show, and calls them to task for "two hours of Obama bashing" over the candidate's comment that his mother thinks like "a typical white person."

They try to interrupt him a few times, but Wallace is pissed enough that he's clipped Obama's quote from the newspaper and, accusing his colleagues of cutting Obama's statement off mid-sentence, reads it in its entirety.

"...who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know, there's a reaction that's been bred into our experiences and [doesn't] go away and sometimes comes out in the wrong way. And that's just the nature of race in our society."

Continues Wallace: "Frankly, I think you're somewhat distorting what he had to say."

To summarize, then: Obama gives a speech on race that expects people to actually digest the whole thing. And here, in the belly of the beast, an on-air personality has shown himself equal to the task. He's living Obama's dream. It's a small moment in itself, but, to borrow a phrase, a hopeful one.

Posted by Jonathan Kaminsky at March 26, 2008 12:45 PM | Comments (5)

 

Is John McCain smarter than a fifth grader?

Filed under: John McCain

John McCain, the self-proclaimed foreign policy guru and best candidate for president of the United States, apparently has very little understanding of the situation on the ground in the Middle East.

As Cameron W. Barr and Michael D. Shear of the Washington Post report:

McCain said it was "common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that's well known. And it's unfortunate." A few moments later, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, standing just behind McCain, stepped forward and whispered in the presidential candidate's ear. McCain then said: "I'm sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al-Qaeda."

Such a blunder puts any Bushism to shame. If only McCain remembered that al-Qaeda in Iraq is composed of mostly Sunni Muslim extremists, with Shiites and U.S. forces often being the targets of their attacks.

Iran, on the other hand, is ruled by Shiites and the country supports a Shiite-led government in Iraq. For months, the U.S. has asserted that Iraq Shiite militias have been training and obtaining weapons in Iran to further their cause.

Perhaps old man, maverick McCain needs to learn when to keep his mouth shut. And, perhaps, the Democrats need to capitalize on these senile moment. Talking Points Memo put out an interesting clip calling McCain's perceived strengths his Achilles heel.

Monday, McCain reconfirmed his commitment to the war, the same war that he says he’ll fight for 100 more years if necessary when elected president, taking a dig on his potential Democratic opponents:

I don't know if it's naiveté or what the problem is, but they're dead wrong when they say we should leave Iraq.

Now, if calling their potential ignorance into question isn’t just the perfect example of the pot calling the kettle black, I don’t know what is.

Posted by Beth Walton at March 26, 2008 12:13 PM | Comments (0)

 

Hillary plays pastor card in paper owned by anti-Clinton conspiracy nut

Filed under: Hillary Clinton

Although Hillary Clinton once said she wouldn't sling mud over Rev. Wright's incendiary remarks from the pulpit, today she dumped a heaping handful of it. And in the most unlikely of outlets: the paper owned by the man who helped get her husband impeached.

In an interview today with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Hillary said she would have left her church if her pastor made remarks like Rev. Wright's.

"He would not have been my pastor," Clinton said. "You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend." ...

"You know, I spoke out against Don Imus (who was fired from his radio and television shows after making racially insensitive remarks), saying that hate speech was unacceptable in any setting, and I believe that," Clinton said. "I just think you have to speak out against that. You certainly have to do that, if not explicitly, then implicitly by getting up and moving."

What's surprising is that Hillary decided to launch this attack in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. The paper is owned by Richard Mellon Scaife, a conservative idealogue who bankrolled the Arkansas Project, the dirt-digging campaign that led to Bill Clinton's impeachment.

From the Wikipedia entry on Scaife:

So involved was Scaife in efforts against Clinton that many Democrats believed Hillary Clinton's statement condemning a "vast right-wing conspiracy" against her husband was a direct reference to Scaife himself. President Clinton later admitted to sexual indiscretions, but the other allegations that came out of the Arkansas Project were never proven.

Has Hillary sold her soul?

Posted by Kevin Hoffman at March 25, 2008 3:00 PM | Comments (2)

 

Battered and broken elephant lumbers towards St. Paul

Filed under: National Republicans

The chairman of the Michigan Republican party, Saul Anuzis, in an article over at Politico, has this to say of the state of the GOP in 2008: “After twelve years of being in power, you tend to get fat and lazy, and in some cases arrogant with respect to your positions ... If you go back to 2006 most people would agree that not only did we lose our brand, that we damaged our brand significantly. We are clearly rebuilding.”

Politico documents the "dire straits" of state GOP parties. Here are some highlights:

CALIFORNIA: "According to figures compiled by the California secretary of state’s office, the number of registered Republicans there has dropped by roughly 207,000 since October 2006."

NEW YORK: "A January 2008 state Board of Elections report shows the state Democratic party took in $491,302 and had closing balance of $1.4 million. Republicans, by contrast, took in $26,000 and had a closing balance of $395,000."

NEW HAMPSHIRE: "the state GOP has been driven by a dispute between moderates and conservatives, the state Democratic party took in four times as much money as its Republican counterpart in 2007. At the end of the most recent reporting period in February, the state GOP reported just $64,000 cash on hand to the Democrats’ $159,000."

ARKANSAS: "In Arkansas, where Republicans lost the governorship in 2006 and are outnumbered in the state House and Senate by 3-1 margins, state GOP Chairman Dennis Milligan said he is facing defections and malaise."

Perhaps the best (though surely not the most dramatic) indicator of a party tangled up in a mess of identity crises and low morale was this nugget, about a a meeting of Republican state chairs held in Vegas in early March:

...roughly a dozen Republican state chairmen met in Las Vegas --the first gathering of its kind in recent memory, according to one of the chairmen who attended.

Formally, the purpose was to exchange ideas on “improving each state party’s performance,” said Sean McCaffrey, the executive director of the Arizona Republican party. But there was widespread concern expressed over the direction of the party as a whole.

Even that effort to strengthen the individual state parties fell short of the mark. With the exception of Florida, no Southern chairmen were in attendance. Many, it seems, were uncomfortable with the symbolism of meeting inside a Las Vegas hotel the same weekend as Palm Sunday.

“That’s a real problem with the Republican party that they went to a casino on Palm Sunday,” said one GOP state party chairman, who refused to come due to the timing.

“Here we are the values party,” the chairman added. “You’ve got to walk the walk here. If you don’t, you’re going to lose. You can’t disaffect your base.”

Posted by Jeff Severns Guntzel at March 25, 2008 2:47 PM | Comments (0)

 

Will McCain win Washington state? Mais non

Filed under: John McCain

When I moved to Washington state in almost 10 years ago, my cousin's husband asked me about what my friend up there did for work. He worked for Boeing, I replied. "Oh, of course," said my cousin's spouse. "Everyone up here works for Boeing."

When John McCain tubed a major contract for Boeing that ended up going to European provider Airbus, the Northwest was outraged. McCain's political opponents have produced the following video, which is amusing on multiple levels.

The French take a lot of static from various sources, which is sometimes well-deserved, sometimes utterly undeserved. Regardless, it's funny to see the right-wing bugaboo of Pierre the Heavily-Accented Frog be used against one of them.

Posted by Jeff Shaw at March 25, 2008 8:47 AM | Comments (0)

 

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