With the announcement of last week's fundraising numbers the coronation of Hillary Clinton as the democratic nominee seems complete - despite the first primary still being over 3 months away. Or so seems to be the general consensus in the media and among the Democratic Party. I don't buy it yet, though I think one of her rivals needs to take her head on the way the Republicans will surely do in the general. We're going to hear about what's been going in Bill Clinton's pants by November of '08, better to do it now when we still have a choice. In the world of primary's whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

As The Economist points out in their cover story on Clinton, "No process is better at revealing flaws than American presidential elections." Don't believe them? Check out the picture they chose for the cover:

Joe Trippi of the Edwards campaign blasted Clinton for her fundraiser: "If you want to know why we need change in Washington -- and I mean real change, not just trading corporate Republican insiders with corporate Democratic insiders -- then just look at Senator Clinton's schedule... Tickets for the Clinton fundraiser are $1,000 and $25,000 per bundler. And for that money you get more than a meal -- you get a to attend one-hour breakfast sessions in four different areas of homeland security that will include House Committee Chairs and members of Congress who sit on the very committees that will be voting on homeland security legislation."

Trippi should know better than to equalize Republicans and Democrats.

BUT shame on Clinton. Lobbying reform has been needed since early on in Clinton's time as First Lady. You'd hope she'd learn if not from the criticism her husband took for his "sleepovers" then from the nearly unimaginable shattering of lobbying ethics that took place during the last seven years. I guess with Hillary and Bill it's second verse same as the first.

Continuing the theme of his "vote for me because I played one on TV" campaign, Fred Thompson has crafted a series of viral videos originally entitled "The Hunt for Red November." (And if that title doesn't work for you - why wouldn't it? - there is the more folky named "FredCast." Yes, Fred, you were in the Hunt for Red October. So what? You were also in Curly Sue.

From Pew via Talking Points Memo:

"Sen. Hillary Clinton is by far the most popular presidential candidate among her own party’s voters, but has among the lowest overall favorable ratings of the leading candidates. In sharp contrast, the front-running Republican candidate, Rudy Giuliani, evokes relatively modest enthusiasm from the GOP base, but is as broadly popular with all voters as any candidate in either party.

The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Aug. 1-18 among 3,002 adults, finds that 55% of voters who offer an opinion of Clinton express a favorable view of her, while 45% have an unfavorable opinion. Other leading presidential candidates, including Clinton’s Democratic rival Barack Obama (64%), have much higher overall favorability ratings.

Yet Clinton is highly popular with her own Democratic base. Nearly nine-in-ten Democratic voters (88%) who offered an opinion of Clinton express a positive view – with 38% saying they have a very favorable opinion. That is the highest percentage that any of the seven 2008 candidates tested – Democrats or Republicans – receives from their parties’ voters."

Motivated by last week's CNN/YouTube debate, I recently discovered prezvideo.com. It's a blog site that puts up the many videos that have popped up on YouTube or around the web dealing with 2008 Campaign - that means anything from the Giuliani Girls to debate questions to candidate interviews.

There has been an avalanche of political documentaries over the past 4 years, and I think I have seen most of them. A lot are partisan red meat, a lot more retread the same ideas from different angles, a few offer great insight into our system and it's players. One subject I haven't seen treated (and if it's out there tell me) is the failure of America's primary system. David Greenberg writes in Slate that, "the ascent of binding primaries has turned the pre-convention months into a dreary slog. After a flurry of excitement surrounding Iowa and New Hampshire, front-runners typically amass springtime victories like a college football team running up the score in the last quarter." This steamroll effect of the Iowa/New Hampshire 1-2 punch effectively nominated the "electable" John Kerry, who I never was a fan of. And left him vulnerable to attacks from the right for the months leading up to the convetion. Now it's contributing to the earliest starting race for president in US history as both sides gear up for the super accelerrated primary calendar, which will probably just make the problems of 2004 even worse.

"I know we're all dummies up here, McClane, but give us a little taste of your brilliant genius"
- Fred Thompson in Die Hard 2: Die Harder

Big f*cking deal. They want everyone's money. We're days away from the first quarter financial filing deadline so if you have some to give the presidential candidates will gladly take it. I guess that's enough time for Variety to run a third cover story on the "phenomena." News report or self-indulgent BS?

Our media moves too fast. With the big dem victory less than a week old, I'm already seeing a rash of stories and blogs about the '08 Presidential. Is that because our government puts so much more power in the hand of the President than the founding fathers intended (take that strict constitutionalists!). Maybe. I wonder though if political junkies care more about the excitement of winning than what the winners actually do.

As the onslaught of political films since 2004 has proven there's much crossover between film and politics. So for all those who have been following the over exposed Lieberman/Lamont race, I wanted to point you to a great piece by Josh Marshal about how Lieberman's loss was not a referendum on the war as the conventional wisdom (ie. main stream media) is reporting, but instead about Washington bubble elitism.

My prediction? It runs all week and if the MTA doesn't break, the Union will use Christmas to end it and still save face.

Also, Steve Gilliard has a great point about the Manhattanites complaining about the strike because of the burden it puts on the poor:

People seem to forget that it takes $40K to live in New York, yet they now care about people making less. Most of the time, they never give them a second though. But now, the burden of these people is placed on the union?

So this entire illegally listening to citizens conversations could have broken before the election? Yes according to the LA Times. Too bad the NY Times couldn't have done their jobs rather than bowing to adminstration pressure - we are a republic here, remember?

"People Should Not Be Afraid Of Their Governments. Governments Should Be Afraid Of Their People" - Read it. Don't just wait to see it.

Or as Eric Alterman writes much better than I could:

It's a big moment now for all of us. If you've been keeping score at home, the incumbent president of the United States has announced that he can do anything he wants to anyone at any time, the laws be damned, all in the cause of protecting us from his own fears. He has infantilized the nation. (At the Republican convention, I heard Andy Card explain to a delegation that the president looked upon the nation the way "we all" would look upon our young children. He was dead serious and now, more than ever, I think it's the most frightening thing I've ever heard from, a public official.) It is a big moment now because it's time for us to decide if we're Americans or not. This is a country for grown-ups who take governing themselves seriously.

If we're Americans, we realize that the president is but our employee. He works for us. He takes an oath to abide by the immutable principles of a Constitution that begins with the three magnificent words, "We, The People." If we're Americans, we realize that there is not a system of "our" rights and "their" rights. Every abridgement -- potential or actual -- of someone's civil liberties is an attack on them all. If we're Americans, we realize that there is more to the country than its economy, that there is more to the system than its military. The Eastern bloc people didn't shake off the petrification of the Soviet bloc just because they wanted blue jeans and the Beatles. They wanted Jefferson and Madison, too, and all the raucous, unruly freedom that came after them. It is a big moment because it is one of those moments that forces on us the fundamental question that a wise old teacher of mine once said was at the heart of the American experiment:

Do we govern or are we governed?

USA Today is reporting that “First-weekend moviegoers gave two lion's paws up to The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and found the faith elements of the movie subtly portrayed.” But then again, as Meghan O'Rourke wrote in her slate piece last week:

“Judging the Narnia books solely by their Christianity is an impoverished way of reading them. It is a reflection more of our polarized moment—in which a perceived cultural divide has alienated Christians from secular culture and secular readers from anything that smacks of religious leanings—than of the relative aesthetic merits and weaknesses of Lewis' books."

The truth is the Christian themes are there if you look for them; only I found them rather unimportant in the face of the sense of utter disappointment the film left me with. When Santa Clause shows up, the presence of this Christian symbol isn’t what through me off. The lack of any previous or subsequent connection to the plot did. Similarly Aslan’s Christ-like resurrection didn’t bother me half as much as the fact that there really wasn’t any reason shown to care about his loss, and I was still trying to understand how Peter, who for the first three quarters of the movie could only hold his sword outstretched with trembling arms as though he was a beachcomber with a metal detector looking for buried treasure, could actually fight someone with it, let alone inspire an army to battle. Living in a post – Lord of the Rings world, I would think the filmmakers would understand the importance of character development and story logic (even if the logic follows its own faith-based rules) in translating fantasy epics to the big screen. Maybe it works for kids. I don’t know. I expected to look upon the film with wonder, but ended up watching it wondering why.

Eric Alterman writes: Peter Jennings left $50 million to his family, here. I submit to you that is one extremely big problem with American journalism today?

I think he has a point.

The president assigns his top political advisor/operator/mercenary to oversea the rebuilding of New Orleans. Is this some new philosophically minded Bush; a man who looks at destruction and creation on a metaphysical level, and sees in Rove's inhuman ability to destroy an equal inhuman ability build? Or is this is just pure political opportunism - how does tragedy make my friends money? I'll let you be the judge.

The language used to frame the issues has been its own political battlefield for years: Who created the term �the nuclear option?� (Tent Lott FYI), �private accounts� vs. �personal accounts,� etc. Some believe the right has made "liberal" into a type of curse word that no politician would dream defining themselves as. Be that as it may, today I am going to propose a new linguistic strategy:

Republicans are not Conservative. Let's stop calling them that.

Over in the weekly presidential odds section of the jaker writes, �George Allen is a favorite of Conservatives. The thinking seems to be coalescing around McCain going out in front very early, but hard right-wingers unifying around a more traditional conservative.�

Now I am not a McCain-phile, but the fact remains that he is a traditional conservative. He believes in: Pro-business, strong military, states rights, and above all else small government. These are the idioms that mark a conservative. Right now I imagine fifty people (well if I had fifty readers I would imagine this) gearing up in their minds to say what about moral issues? Folks - the traditional conservative argument on the social issues is based on small government and states rights - they want to limit federal intervention and leave the decisions up to the states. This is a wildly different philosophy than the one adopted George Allen, Bush & Co, the religious right, Tom Delay, and the vast majority of modern day republicans. Their philosophy seems to be we believe that morality is what they say it is and they have the right to use the federal government to enforce that morality wherever they want. John C. Calhoun is rolling over in his grave. Traditional conservatives don't put the federal government over the states. Traditional conservatives don't cut army benefits. Traditional republicans don't let cities drown.

But modern conservatives continue to hide between the term conservative and all the traditional connotations that it carries in order to push their own non-conservative agenda. I say we no longer let them away with it! Lets create a new terminology (personally I like "oligarchs," but I am open to other suggestions).

From TPMCafe:

�[T]he fact is that in progressive circles, where it's considered unacceptable to be racist, homophobic, anti-environment or anti-feminist, it's been okay to cross picket lines, look down on service and blue collar workers, and frequent anti-union businesses and purchase anti-union goods. It's been okay to embrace anti-union employers who appear hip through their own marketing maneuvers. It's been okay to be hip by being anti-union... Polite progressives haven't demanded that attitudes change regarding the right to unionize, which is after all simply the right to build power among the powerless.

It wasn't always like this. In labor's hey day, progressives were with organized labor in all its struggles. Sure, labor has changed. Work has changed. The world has changed. But if organized labor is ever going to rebuild itself, no matter how many labor federations there are, no matter how many faction fights there are, there is going to have to be a move among non-union progressives to embrace the right to organize and the right to defend workers issues in the workplace through unionization. It has to become unacceptable to be anti-union among liberals and progressives if labor is going to have a chance to rebuild.�

For all those reality TV wannabes searching for fifteen minutes and indie directors searching to be the next celebrity tastemaker, you're looking to the wrong place. Michael Kinsley writes:

"Hollywood is thought to be the center of empty celebrity. But actually, of this country's three capitals (Washington for political power, Wall Street for money and Hollywood for culture), Hollywood is probably the most rigorous enforcer of fame's limits. And Wall Street is second. A movie star who stops selling tickets actually can sink into television, into commercials and ultimately into genuine obscurity. A top business figure can lose his or her job if the numbers turn south.

Washington, by contrast, is littered with has-beens, many of whom are richer, happier and maybe even more influential than when they were in elected jobs. More influential? Sure. Congressmen come running when CNN calls. CNN does not come running when one of the 435 members of the House of Representatives calls."

Just another way Richard Nixon was ahead of his time... apparently he was quite the actor in high school and college.

Day 2 of cribbed internet blogging.

So Live 8 happened over the weekend to help convince the world leaders to end poverty and hunger in africa. Wonderful music guys, but how about trying this on for size: trade in your private jets and first class seats for a $99 flight on Jet Blue and give the difference to a charity or a school or just buy a couple thousand pieces of chicken and have 'em delivered. Or what about the 100 bucks or more you charge for a live show? We've made you rich and famous - now put your money where your mouth is.

Blogging from a cribbed connection on a day without internet. With a fourth of July weekend being poised to be hit by an alien invasion, I was going to write about the last time that happened - 9 years past Independence Day took the box office by storm - and the two lasting effects of said invasion: Will Smith's cemented career as an action star and the birth of the really really annoying hollywood marketing technique of turning titles in initials (does ID4 actually make sense to anybody???)

But there is another invasion on the horizon that warrants this blog - the conservative invasion of the supreme court (no, I'm not a paranoid liberal). This Justice O'Connor resignation has thrown me for a loop - look Rehnquist would have been bad, but a conservative for a conservative is a substitution, but this... this could be the key justice in the conservative takeover of the supreme court, of which the end of Roe v. Wade would just be the beginning.

Don't believe me? Look at this short list of successors. It almost makes a torture defender look good.

Nervous as hell and feeling powerless? Daily Kos has a list of things you can do now.

Not worried because you think Bush is going to choose a compromise candidate? Atrios points out that conservative groups has set aside 18 Mil in warfunds for the coming conflict (Imagine you got an 18 mil P&A committment for your project).

Rant's over. Maybe next week we will return to my inane normal and unimportant and rather boring chatter.