The Real Dream Team! ... if you love their war and the Iraq-War Recession, you'll love the next four years with these two in power . . .

Check out the The John McCain for President, Hillary Clinton for Vice President War Party Fusion Ticket over at BuzzFlash.com for more details.

The main point, other than their shared support of the Iraq War, is this recent quote from Ms Clinton about the experience of the presumptive Republican nominee (to the detriment of the presumptive Democratic nominee):

"I think that since we now know Sen. McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that. And I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold,” the New York senator told reporters crowded into an infant’s bedroom-sized hotel conference room in Washington.
“I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Sen. McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his candidacy,” she said. [read more here]

It's time for John Edwards and anyone else with a constituency in the Democratic Party to make a formal endorsement of Barack Obama. Now. They can no longer afford to wait the five and a half weeks until her next "firewall" in Pennsylvania on April 22. The divisive racial politics of her surrogates, and her direct questioning of Barack Obama's credentials, has gone beyond the pale (it's not Barack's fault that he didn't have the "experience" of being married to a President for eight years, privy to all [well, almost all] the President's secrets).

And if Geraldine Ferraro had been named Gerald Ferraro, would she have been a candidate for Vice President in 1984?

“If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position . . . And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept."
--Geraldine Ferraro, March 7, 2008 interview with Torrance, CA Daily Breeze)

As a member of Hillary's finance committee, is she speaking for the campaign? Should she be forced out for driving this racial wedge within the Democratic party? Will she be? As ridiculous as this quote is, the line in the interview that leads into it is possibly more absurd:

"I think what America feels about a woman becoming president takes a very secondary place to Obama's campaign - to a kind of campaign that it would be hard for anyone to run against," she said. "For one thing, you have the press, which has been uniquely hard on her. It's been a very sexist media. Some just don't like her. The others have gotten caught up in the Obama campaign." [emphasis added]

The myth of the mainstream media bias against Hillary is the biggest of the big lies out there at the moment. Just take a look at the absolute middle of the mainstream media: Time Magazine. On their website today for the March 17 issue on the newstands now, we see a happy clapping Hillary Clinton, "The Fighter," on the cover. The first five featured articles on the site have a decidedly pro-Hillary slant:

Ready to Rumble (The Well / Cover Story) Hillary Clinton has rescued her campaign by getting a lot rougher on Barack Obama. But Democrats worry: How much collateral damage will be done before it is over?
Clinton: One Day at a Time (The Well / Cover Story) On the day after her Ohio and Texas victories, TIME managing editor Rick Stengel caught up with Hillary Clinton to talk about the challenges ahead
NATION
The Long Way Home (The Well / Campaign '08 Obama) Barack Obama says he's "got game," but he'll need all his moves to stay ahead of Clinton
Obama: Still Confident (The Well / TIME Interview) In an interview with TIME's Jay Newton-Small, Obama talks about Hillary Clinton, double-standards, talking tough and going negative
The Race Goes On (In The Arena) By focusing on national security--and laughing at herself--Clinton managed to stay alive. Now it's up to Obama to prove he's not just another politician

It's easy to imagine from this cover and these article summaries that Hillary Clinton had just taken the lead (she hadn't) or at least narrowed the delegate gap (nope). You would never guess that the real story were those insurmountable Clinton leads in her safe firewall states of Texas and Ohio that were almost blown (until she pulled out the fear commercial and NAFTA lies). The real story was the way the media ignored 11 straight lopsided Clinton losses leading up to Ohio. If Obama had suffered 11 straight losses, the media would have been calling for him to step aside "for the good of the party" after loss number 5 or 6. But then again, Barack Obama was never their favorite. He was not nominated by the mainstream media before the first vote was even cast in Iowa. Hillary was. Hillary and Rudy (remember Rudy?) were on their way to the Democratic and Republican nominations without a serious challenge. Or so they told us. Those same media outlets are now having trouble coming to terms with the fact that the Clinton (right) wing of the Democratic Party is now well on its way to becoming the fringe rather than the center of the party.

But if a member of Barack Obama's finance committee were to say, "If Hillary weren't married to a President, she would not be in this position," how quickly would the media be calling for that sexist spokesperson's head? "And if she were a man (of any color) she would not be in this position. She happens to be very lucky to be who she is." (And so was Geraldine Ferraro.)

Does the Spitzer Sex Scandal Hurt Hillary or Help Hillary?

When this news about New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's rendezvous with an expensive prostitute in DC broke this afternoon, my first thought was that this was bad for Hillary Clinton, and not just because Eliot was a vocal supporter of Hillary's presidential candidacy. I simply figured that the last thing any Clinton wants is for the words "sex scandal" to appear in any headline during this campaign, especially regarding a scandal involving another Democratic Chief Executive.

“I have acted in a way that violates my obligation to my family and violates my or any sense of right or wrong. I apologize first and most importantly to my family. I apologize to the public to whom I promised better.
“I have disappointed and failed to live up to the standard I expected of myself. I must now dedicate some time to regain the trust of my family.”

--Eliot "Client 9" Spitzer, 10 March 2008

But when I saw Eliot Spitzer's obligatory and stereotypically-weaselly public statement in print, I couldn't help thinking of similar appearances by another recent Democratic Chief Executive (no, not Jim McGreevey) and that Hillary Clinton will be seen sympathetically once again as the strong wronged spouse. I wouldn't be surprised to see her national numbers take a small quick uptick in the next few days.

If she does pull off the impossible and win the nomination and the election, maybe she should think about making Eliot Spitzer the US Attorney General. Not only was he a great Attorney General in New York for many years, often taking on national issues that Bush and Ashcroft ignored, but he and the first spouse could hit the town together -- keeping Bill out of the White House and out of Hillary's hair, leaving her undistracted when those important phone calls come flooding in at 3AM.

It's time for the Magnolia State to keep the string alive.

The good citizens of The Equality State, Wyoming, did their part on Saturday to start Barack Obama's next winning streak with a decisive 61%-38% victory.

Tomorrow it's the turn of The Magnolia State, Mississippi, to continue that streak. Don't let Hillary Clinton's campaign convince you that, because you're a "small" state, you don't really count.

More Evidence that America's Useless-Crap Bubble is Bursting

"Sixty-four percent of people intend to cut indulgent spending this year according to a new survey by HSBC Bank USA. Another survey by Discover Financial Services confirms that sentiment. This month, half of consumers plan to cut down on non-essential spending like eating out, going to the movies and remodeling, according to the report."

-- from "Consumers Pinching Their Pennies" on CNN.com today

It's an understandable error Tom. It's just too many zeroes.

We can understand why Tom Tomorrow left three of them off of his most recent cartoon.
For those of us for whom wealth will always be defined by a "six-figure income", the eight figures of Barack Obama's 55,000,000 monthly haul in February is already in the fantasy realm. The ten-figure net worths (1,000,000,000+) of the world's billionaires already require us to stop and count zeroes. Why would any of us even entertain the possibility of a 13-figure bill (3,000,000,000,000+) for the Iraq War?
The cartoon isn't out yet; maybe today's Tom Tomorrow blog entry is apologizing for something else that was missing three zeroes in the first draft of next week's cartoon - - the national debt since Bush II's inauguration maybe - - but our guess is that he's writing about our money (and the money of our children and grandchildren) that was thrown into the bottomless pit that is Operation Iraqi Liberation.
On Monday, you can check for the March 10th cartoon (with all its zeroes?) here.

Hey Wyoming! It's Your Turn to Start a New Obama Winning Streak!

I wish I could vote for Barack again tomorrow in the home state of soon-to-be-
EX-vice-president Richard "Dick" Cheney.
If I were a resident of Wyoming, I'd be thrilled to show the world that my state could live up to its official nickname, The Equality State, after eight years of being associated with its least-favorite son, the torturer and friend of the oil rich.

One more entry on the indefensible cost of the McCain/Clinton Iraq War

Watch this video and visit the American Friends Service Committee's "Cost of War" page and petition:

In the general election campaign, John McCain (and maybe Hillary Clinton) will have to be prepared to defend these indefensible economic costs of the Iraq war as well as its immeasurable human costs. Which one of the remaining three presidential candidates, getting a call from President Bush or Vice President Cheney at 3am, would have the judgement to say No? Which one would have had the foresight to keep us out of the current Iraq-War Recession?

Will the War Counter Hit $500 Billion Today?

Here's a screen capture of "The War in Iraq Costs" at National Priorities Project frozen at 7:45am on March 4, 2008. Less than five years after the invasion of Iraq, the cost of the war (not including, of course, the immeasurable human cost) will hit half-a-trillion dollars:
You can check the current cost by looking at the sidebar to your right, where I've been running this counter since this blog's birth in 2004, or by going to nationalpriorities.org, where you will find depressing comparisons of what could have been provided to the American people with those discarded dollars (like health care for 135 million people, scholarships for 70 million college students, or almost 10 million public safety officers).
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As soon as I posted this, I drifted over to the Times, where I see that Bob Herbert published a piece this morning called the "The $2 Trillion Nightmare" about how the national debt will increase by that amount just because of George Bush's war of choice, and that the overall costs will be more like $3 trillion, or six times the milestone (or is that millstone?) being achieved today.
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UPDATE 10:55am: The Huffington Post email I received this morning was headlined with Arianna Huffington's piece, "The $3,000,000,000,000 War is a Domestic Issue". This is obviously the issue of the day (but I hope not just an issue for today):

So will John McCain be called to account for the surge, and the rising costs of the continuing occupation the surge has enabled? Not likely. Getting the media to avoid a full accounting of the costs of the war -- both in terms of dollars spent and lives lost or ruined -- was one of the primary goals of the surge. And, in that respect, it has been sadly successful.

The thing about $3,000,000,000,000 is that, at a certain point, it becomes hard to ignore. As the red ink from the approaching recession continues to spill, you can bet the media will be all over the story -- the economy headlined as America's top domestic worry. The question is, will the media connect the dots between the war John McCain loves so much and the economic devastation it's helped cause? The answer could determine who is the next president of the United States.

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UPDATE 4:33pm: Or maybe $3,000,000,000,000 is a conservative estimate. Here's an Aida Edemariam article, "The True Cost of War," and a relevant Steve Bell cartoon, "The Six Trillion Dollar Chimp," from The Guardian.

I've got it. She's advertising her services for a night job in the Obama administration!

Yesterday I may have been wrong in attributing the following quote from Hillary Clinton's advertising minions to the old politics of fear:

"It's 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. But there's a phone in the White House and it's ringing. Something's happening in the world. Your vote will decide who answers that call."
-- Hillary Clinton's "Red Phone Moment" ad, 2/29/08

Today I thought of that ad in the context of this other February advertisement:

“You pour coffee, fix hair, you work the night shift at the local hospital. You're often overworked, underpaid, and sometimes overlooked. But not by everyone. One candidate has put forth an American family agenda to make things easier for everyone who works so hard. … She understands. She's worked the night shift, too.”
-- Hillary Clinton's "Night Shift" advertisement, 2/19/08

Isn't it obvious? She's campaigning to work the midnight-to-eight shift at the White House as Vice President while President Obama rests from his sixteen-hour workday.
As a publicly-professed fan of Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, Obama must already be trying to figure out which positions to offer his rivals: Vice President Clinton, Attorney General Edwards, Secretary of State Biden (or maybe Richardson), Secretary of Veterans Affairs McCain, Chief White House Guard Giuliani, UN Ambassador Kucinich ... etc.