Earth to Tribune: There is a Recourse

Called impeachment:

Blagojevich’s reign follows the certifiably corrupt term of George Ryan. Whenever such failed leaders don’t have the personal dignity to stop pocketing a paycheck from citizens, those citizens shouldn’t have to wait for the next election to declare, “You are serving your interests, not ours. You are dismissed.”

If a Governor is violating the Illinois Constitution or engaged in illegal conduct, there is a such a thing called impeachment. It should be used.

That said, the voters knew virtually everything they do now about the man and reelected him in 2006.  We can bemoan that choice, but it was the voters’ choice.

He Knows His Pharmaceuticals

Jeebus, Stuart Levine’s pharmaceutical experience is long…

To get the proper framework for Levine’s testimony, you’ve got to imagine it coming from the mouth of a 62-year-old businessman in a gray suit and wing tips who used to make the black-tie social whirl as a major charitable fund-raiser.

Levine said he first experimented with drugs in 1972, primarily using marijuana and cocaine during that decade. He said he also tried quaaludes a couple of times in the same period and did LSD once.

In the mid-1980s, Levine said there was a change in his drug use when he began partying with a group of five male friends — two or three at a time — once or twice a month as his business schedule allowed.

For a while Levine said he was doing mostly ecstasy and cocaine, but by the mid-90s he had switched to crystal meth amphetamines and ketamine, both of which he would snort in their white powder form.

“I preferred the combination of those two to other drugs,” he said, describing the effect as “euphoria” and lowering inhibitions.

Levine usually partied on weekdays “in order to deceive my family,” he said. That made it easier for him to feign business reasons for being absent.

“On the weekends, we were all home and together,” he said.,

For the in-town parties, Levine said he met his friends at the hotel in the morning and did drugs until early evening, but always went home afterward.

“I was expected home,” he explained.

When they left Chicago, usually for Springfield but also for another town he did not name, it was an overnight trip in which they used drugs nonstop and never slept.

Levine said he would take drugs five to 10 times a night during the parties.

How did this guy not OD in all that time? These aren’t your mild experimentation drugs, these are your drug connoisseur Hunter S. Thompson mixes.

Even weirder when you know what the guy looks like:
Stuart Levine

Daily Dolt: Illinois Review and Porno Pete

Both are very upset about Steve Sauerberg hiring Teh GAY!

One suspects there is another thing at play though when this is said:

The LCR ad was designed to embarrass Bush by purposely pitting the President’s position in support of the marriage amendment directly against his VP Dick Cheney’s 2000 debate comments . . .

Now, Petey is pretty much against all things teh Gay, but there is one major thing worse than being gay, it’s embarrassing the child king.

Oversampling Just Isn’t that Hard to Understand People

Some of the dimmer lights in the blogosphere aren’t quite understanding the concept of oversampling for subgroups as NBC/WSJ did for the African-American sample in their latest poll.

It’s fairly simple. There is a general sample of 700 respondents with 11% African-American and 75% White respondents. Looking at their subsamples, there are 520 white respondents which is approximately 75% of the whole sample. If you read what the WSJ and Chuck Todd say is that they added 100 African-American respondents to the crosstabs–or the breakdowns by race. This means that in the general sample there are 77 African-Americans and in the smaller African-American sample there are 177 African Americans.

Before trying to discredit the poll or acting all outraged, do the math. All one needs is a basic understanding of percentages.

Furthermore, Taylor Marsh is very upset that the poll includes Republicans.  I kid you not. She might read the poll results with questions from the article she linked to and notice that it only includes Democrats and likely Democratic primary voters if they identify themselves that way. But shiiiiiiiiittttt, we’d hate to read the damn thing and know something about what we are talking about.

5 Years and Counting

This blog is older than the Iraq War so, unfortunately for me, if you go back to that time I was in favor of this godforsaken war.  I really have no excuses. The only one I ever tried after figuring out how stupid I was really that dumb, was that I figured even the Bush administration couldn’t be that wrong.  Austin Mayor then pointed out to me that they have been unsuccessful at everything they have ever tried except making Democrats wet their pants.  Point taken.  I have no excuse.

The Thing About Going Negative

It hurts you too:

As expected, one of the two major Democratic candidates saw a downturn in the latest NBC/WSJ poll, but it’s not the candidate that you think. Hillary Clinton is sporting the lowest personal ratings of the campaign. Moreover, her 37 percent positive rating is the lowest the NBC/WSJ poll has recorded since March 2001, two months after she was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York.

Here’s one of the most basic rules of campaigning.  Negative campaigning hurts your opponent, but it also hurts you.  Your hope is that it hurts your opponent more, but there is one big problem for some candidates. If your unfavorability is already higher, your unfavorability might drop enough so the other candidate still stays on top.  I e-mailed this to a friend probably a month ago in saying how she couldn’t go too negative. Of course, she can go that negative, it’s just not going to help her win.

Congratulations Clinton camp–you screwed yourselves and the party.

For those ranting about new polling showing Obama falling in some states, both are falling and will continue to fall as long as this crap continues.

Feeling Kind of Used

What’s stunning to me is that as many of us have spent time trying to point out that a big portion of the right wing noise machine is not credible and shouldn’t set the agenda after watching the Clinton’s get cut up by it for 8 years, Clinton is now embracing those sources as reasonable sources to work though:

Phil Singer cites the American Spectator 

Hillary dumps on Wright in front of….Richard Mellon Scaiffe 

Next she’ll go watermelon hunting with Dan Burton.

Un-American My Ass

Martin Marty on Wright:

In the early 1960s, at a time when many young people were being radicalized by the Vietnam War, Wright left college and volunteered to join the United States Marine Corps. After three years as a marine, he chose to serve three more as a naval medical technician, during which time he received several White House commendations. He came to Chicago to study not long after Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder in 1968, the U.S. bombing campaign in Cambodia in 1969, and the shooting of students at Kent State University in 1970.

Read the whole thing as they say. I understand white fear of angry black men, but I don’t understand the refusal to look more deeply at ministry of a man who is so well regarded within the religious community.

Fine Moments in Advocacy

Hillaryis44 compares Reverend Wright to Tawana Brawley.

That’s special.

According to Taylor Marsh, it’s horrible to talk about lynching on Easter.

Because a day that celebrates the resurrection of Christ who was put to death by bleeding him to death with the giant stakes driven through his hands and feet is a day that shouldn’t include any talk about persecution.

Until the last couple of years, which now finds me meditating on Easter Sunday, I never in my entire life have heard anyone mention “lynching” on Easter Sunday. I’ve spent a few Easters inside a Baptist church as well.

Yeah, because lynching is so seldom mentioned in sermons at black churches.  I know people are pretty clueless about black churches—okay African-Americans in general, but this is perhaps the stupidest fucking complaint ever.

It strikes me that Easter is a perfect day to talk about lynching if one thinks that Jesus was sacrificed for our sins.

Of course, Marsh and most disappointingly Jerome Armstrong continue the claim that Wright was anti-American.

Despite the years of criticism of the mainstream media, they fall into the trap of accepting sound bites over context.   When one listens to the comments in context, one finds Wright is not Anti-American, he is anti-Bush and anti-Conservative. I thought Jerome and Taylor were of similar mind.  And Wright argues that violence begets violence in context.  That is certainly a message one should hear in their Church.

If the Right Choice Wasn’t Clear Yet

It should be now with the Clinton Campaign fundraisers threatening Nancy Pelosi that they will withhold donations to the DCCC if she doesn’t change her view on the SuperDelegates.

It’s not theoretical whether the Clintons will burn down the party if Clinton doesn’t get the nomination, her supporters just said they would destroy the party if she doesn’t get the nomination.

The Party is not the Clintons and that they and their supporters confuse the party’s and their interests as being the same is exactly the reason they must be defeated.