Gary Don’t. Please, Just Don’t.

by matttbastard

I have no clue who I’m going to endorse for the NDP leadership — but I sure as shit know which potential candidate will never, ever receive a vote from yours truly: sellout 3rd way posterchild Gary Doer, who has apparently sold his soul to rock & roll Ethical Oil™, that filthiest of filthy lucre.

The G&M:

Since becoming Canada’s ambassador to the United States in late 2009, the former Manitoba premier has travelled from the Carolinas to California, and to most points in between, to make the case for the oil sands.

[...]

Calgary-based TransCanada’s $7-billion Keystone XL pipeline fits into Mr. Doer’s economic pitch as a major infrastructure project that would create 20,000 unionized construction jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in tax and other revenues in the six states through which it would pass.

The pipeline would almost double the capacity of Alberta crude that TransCanada can ship south, to 1.1 million barrels a day, and provide a direct line to Gulf of Mexico refineries on the Texas coast.

The U.S. State Department must approve the project since the pipeline crosses an international boundary and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has promised a decision by year-end.

[...]

Mr. Doer, who was a highly-popular New Democratic premier and whose name has been raised as a future federal party leader, is hardly taking the pipeline’s approval for granted.

To everyone he meets these days, he insists the 2,700-kilometre Keystone XL would adhere to far tougher safety standards than any of the 235,000 kilometres of oil pipelines already built in the United States.

And he counters the reputation of oil sands crude as “dirty” owing to the greater amounts of freshwater depletion, greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation it causes compared with conventional oil production.

“We believe that when somebody claims something that’s 10 years old about water utilization or [carbon] emissions, we have to put the facts on the table,” he said, noting that it now takes far less water to produce a barrel of oil sands oil than it does to produce the same amount of ethanol.

“There have been major improvements made. We’re not saying to anyone that they’re complete. We’ve got to keep using innovations to improve water utilization and emissions per barrel.”

Yeah, no offense to those who get giddy imagining Doer at the NDP helm going into 2015, but come the fuck on. Handing the party over to the Harper Government’s hand-picked agent of environmental destruction would be the ultimate desecration of Layton’s pragmatic, progressive legacy. And that is attendant reality Dippers will also have to face.

Really.

Clinton Coverage & Media “Anecdrama”

by matttbastard

(photo by NYCArthur, used under a Creative Commons license)

Great post @ Foreign Policy’s FP Passport Blog from Annie Lowrey:

Seven months ago, Hillary Rodham Clinton — the powerful New York Senator, former First Lady, and runner-up in the brutally long Democratic primary competition — became U.S. President Barack Obama’s secretary of state. Since then, she’s chastened North Korea, advocated on behalf of Burma, and rallied against Israeli settlement building. She’s logged nearly 100,000 air miles. She’s tirelessly pursued Obama’s diplomatic agenda around the world.

And she’s done it while fostering or demonstrating little friction with the White House she once hoped to occupy. Being secretary of state doesn’t just require being a diplomat abroad. It requires being a diplomat in Washington. For, foreign policy is not and has never been the purview of State alone — Clinton overlaps and dovetails and supports and creates policy with Obama, a spate of diplomatic envoys, the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense, the national security advisers, Vice President Joe Biden, et cetera. By all accounts, she’s done well at that as well.

Not that you’d know it reading the paper. Too often, coverage of Clinton neglects the fact that the secretary of state has never been the sole creator of U.S. foreign policy. It also, far too often, focuses hyper-intently on the perceived narrative of how Clinton feels about her relationship with the White House — rather than the actual relationship between Clinton and Obama or how she’s doing her job.

As they say, read the whole damn thing — Lowrey goes on to name ‘em and shame ‘em.  It (still) ain’t pretty.

Sigh.

h/t The Kicker

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This Just in: Nancy Pelosi is the New Hillary Clinton (ie, Flypaper for Misogynists)

by matttbastard

Fair. And. Fucking. Balanced.

Fer srs:

One bone of contention, Antonia: saying that anything spawned by the gliberati who rule USian cable NOOZ networks and talk radio even remotely constitutes ‘news commentary’ is akin to earnestly declaring that Barack Obama is an unreconstructed Marxist.

Er, ok–never mind. If America didn’t already exist The Onion would have to invent it.

Yeesh.

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Sec. Clinton 1, Rep. Christopher Smith (R-Douchebag) 0.

by matttbastard

Oh, SNAP!

h/t Impolitical (by way of Shakesville, which also has the transcript).

Update: Antonia FTW:

This is what happens when women get some power. The world becomes a better place.

This.

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Jane Says

by matttbastard

Like Atrios, I’m not at all thrilled at the prospect of a legacy appointment to the Senate, especially  someone who has never run for elected office. But Jane Hamsher’s recent irony-free HuffPo missive is a classic example of doin it rong:

It seems Caroline Kennedy has decided she’d rather have a US Senate seat than a pony for Christmas[...] Really? She’s “making calls this morning to alert political figures to her interest?” I guess it was either that or get her nails done.

Yes, because the only way one could possibly express opposition to dynastic appointments and elitism in Congress is to blow sexist dogwhistles.  Unless your name is Glenn Greenwald, of course.  Or Chris Bowers.

Well, I’m sure they’ll both make sure to include crude gender-based stereotypes in  future posts.

Jeff Fecke makes an obvious but important point:

If this were Jim Kennedy, would you suggest he was getting a manicure, asking for a pony? Of course not. You might pick out other symbols of idleness, but those quintessentially feminine grace notes would be left out. It’s not enough to suggest Kennedy isn’t a good pick for the seat — she has to be derided as idle and, most damningly, an idle woman.

Bint goes one step further, noting the lack of self-awareness in Hamsher’s chosen line of criticism:

I just love when privileged, white Americans like Hamsher try to pretend as if they have any idea what it’s like to be a part of the world’s “unwashed masses”.

Isn’t it funny that this article was written by the same person who also once wrote:

“No shit. Why is it the women are taking crap for this — from other women? One need look no further than the cracks about blond hair and tits from self-described “feminists” to see the reason for the sad state of feminism in this country today.”

We should all be grateful she didn’t put Kennedy in blackface.

Related: Louise Slaughter for Senate!

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Dear Ron Fournier

This may come as a shock to you, but despite conventional wisdom and what Hollywood might have you believe, women–especially professional women–actually get along with each other. So, until you come up with some actual, y’know, proof of acrimony between Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton, as opposed to speculation and conjecture, tell your staff to stop phoning in lazy Page Six-style hit pieces in lieu of purportedly ‘serious’ political reporting. Also, please go see somebody about the ongoing Clinton Derangement Syndrome festering within the ranks of AP’s Washington Bureau; at this point, it’s borderline pathological.

love and napalm,

matttbastard

h/t Ta-Nehisi Coates

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On Favreau’s Facebook Fail (and Clinton’s Clever Comeback)

by matttbastard

(click image for more from the Washington Post)

What Campbell Brown said.

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1998 to Infinity

by matttbastard

Shorter Maureen Dowd:

“It’s still all about The Clenis.”

*headdesk*

MoDo + Clinton = burning stoopid yanked from her backside (pass the Preparation-H.) Seriously, by now the question is largely rhetorical (if ubiquitous), but still bears repeating: Why the fuck does this worthless, (hetero)sexist hack still have a job at The Gray Lady? She stopped being funny and ‘edgy’ (let alone relevant) when Technotronic was topping the pop charts.

As Jesse Taylor bitterly noted in June:

I no longer wonder why the New York Times lacks the respect for their history necessary to fire Dowd and put in anyone or anything – the obituary editor, some classifieds, random pictures of squirrels in Central Park – that would restore a modicum of relevance to the space she occupies. I just wonder why Dowd lacks the self-respect to use the great gift she’s been given to do anything worthwhile.

Couple this latest waste of broadsheet with Camille Paglia’s ignoble return to the public spotlight (hooray for reflexively contrarian attention seeking!), and you have two of the worst practitioners of cynical mid-90s opinion-shillery once again asserting undeserved prominence in the dreaded Em Ess Em.

Wake me up when we finally hit the new millennium (and blowjobs stop being issue #1 in The Village.)

h/t Sylvia/M via IM

Flashback: NYT public editor Clark Hoyt provides a laundry list of reasons why MoDo should never, ever be published in a paying market again.

And yet…

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A Novel Concept: Make Them Work For Our Votes

by matttbastard

Must-read post from KathyG on how to make Barack Obama–and politicians in general–better:

Over this past election season, on websites and listservs and in conversations, I’ve seen an awful lot of cheap, hacktacular electioneering in favor of one candidate or another. But at the end of the day, I don’t think there was ever all that much of a difference between Hillary and Barack. Or between those two and Edwards, for that manner. Hillary and Barack had voting records and positions on the issues that were closet to identical. They’ve both taken shitloads of money from Wall Street, and it’s pretty clear to me that each of them is captive to corporate special interests. Indeed, I interpret Obama’s recent rightward shift — Furman, Messina, the remarks about NAFTA, the FISA compromise — as saying to the corporate interests, “Never fear — we’ll be playing ball as usual with you folks.”

As president, either Barack or Hillary, or Edwards, would be infinitely better than any Republican, but from a progressive point of view, each of them would also far short in some pretty profound and powerful ways.

But you know what? Ultimately, I don’t think that they as individuals are to blame for that. I don’t think Barack, or Hillary, or Edwards, are bad people. I don’t think that Barack Obama, for example, went into politics so he could sell civil liberties down the river in favor of giveaways for the telecom industry. But the incentive structure in politics these days is such that he decided he had more to gain by supporting the FISA “compromise” than by opposing it.

This is where we, as liberals, progressives, lefties, activists, whatever-you-want-to-call-us, come in. I do not believe that our interests are best served by the kind of cheap electioneering we saw over the primary campaign. What would be far more effective would be an independent movement that makes strategic alliances with various political candidates but is also distinctly separate from them.

Instead of shilling for Barack, or Hillary, or whoever, we should have been pressuring the candidates to work for our votes. We should have been pressing them to take firm, non-negotiable positions in favor of things like no immunity for the telecoms, or immediate withdrawal from Iraq with no residual troops. Instead, we were really cheap dates. And when you act like suckers, don’t be surprised when something like Obama’s support for the FISA compromise comes back and bites you in the ass.

If we want real change in this country, the place to look for it is not in our so-called leaders, but in ourselves. What we need, in short, is a movement. Without such a movement, President Obama is not going to be able to achieve a whole lot more than President Clinton or President Carter did. But with such a movement, we may actually get somewhere. FDR was able to achieve great things because he had the strong support of a powerful labor movement. Similarly, the civil rights movement was the wind at LBJ’s back. But I ask you, what will President Obama have?

Huh.  An independent movement pressuring candidates to “work for our votes”.   Kinda sounds like the pre-Netroots blogosphere, until Chairman Kos decreed that it was now the sworn duty of DFHs to make sure Democrats (even the dreaded DINOs) get elected, regardless of how progressive they may (or may not) actually be.

You sucker MC, you just ain’t right.

PS-read the whole damn thing.

h/t Hysperia

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The Speech

by matttbastard

My favourite part of Clinton’s concession speech:

You can be so proud that, from now on, it will be unremarkable for a woman to win primary state victories…unremarkable to have a woman in a close race to be our nominee, unremarkable to think that a woman can be the president of the United States. And that is truly remarkable, my friends.

Also, what Dana Goldstein said:

Clinton has single-handedly changed the contours of our public debate about gender and politics, and even the roster of that debate’s contributors. That’s good for women, good for democracy, and good for progressivism. So Hillary Clinton, thank you.

Of course, I’ll be really poppin’ champagne corks when it becomes unremarkable for a woman of colour to win primary states, be in a close Democratic party nomination race, become POTUS (Michelle Obama in 2016!)

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