Remember how yesterday I said something like this about Senator Hillary Clinton's campaign?

If Clinton were running a campaign that did not consistently appeal to lowest common denominator Republican talking points and to the worst aspects of American racism, I'd happily encourage her to carry on. As it is, it's become a ginormous headache.

How nice of Clinton to provide us with a fresh example.

“There was just an AP article posted that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.

Em-phas-sis mine. I heard it on the radio this morning, driving along with a kind of drop-jaw stupor, so I'm surprised that I'm not wrapped around a tree right now. But Barry's excellent round-up of outrage, annoyance and analysis reminded me of it, so I thought it best to pass it on. It's actually really good reading, quite informative, and amusing - all necessary antidotes to the poison.

Narrowly squeaking by in Indiana last night, Senator Hillary Clinton has donated another $6.4 million of her own moolah to a campaign that her own spokespeople admit will not reach the necessary number of delegates to secure the nomination, even if they succeed in seating the delegates from Michigan and Florida.

Earlier in the call, Clinton officials were asked to lay out the math by which seating the delegates from Michigan and Florida would get Mrs. Clinton significantly closer to the nomination. The reporter asking the question, from the Detroit News, said that it appeared, based on estimates of pledged delegates, that even if those delegations were fully counted, “it’s likely you’ll come up behind.”

Mr. Singer said that even if the delegates were counted, the campaign would still be about 100 delegates shy of the number needed. The implication was that the gap could not be made up, even if she wins more delegates in the remaining contests, as she is expected to do. He also said he expected the Democratic National Committee’s rules and bylaws committee to seat the delegates from Michigan and Florida to ensure that all voters are represented.
Asked again if it was correct that the Clinton campaign would still not reach the full number of delegates, Mr. Singer said, “That is correct.”

Howard Wolfson and Singer argue that "the process must play itself out" to ensure all votes are counted, no one is disenfranchised and democratic values are upheld. Or something like that. Hot air. This has become a vanity campaign, a multi-million dollar venture in self-aggrandizement. As my friend Amanda commented to me this morning, "She's turning into Mitt Romney." Given Clinton's tendency to echo whatever Republican talking point she can use against her Democratic rival, that characterization ain't much of a stretch.

The only compelling argument I have heard for Clinton to remain in the race is the history-making aspect of her status as a woman coming within an hair's-breadth of winning a major party nomination. I have a great deal of sympathy for this argument, because a) who knows when a chance like this will emerge again, b) were the tables reversed, Senator Barack Obama would be in a similar situation and faced with similar calls to drop out prematurely, and c) Clinton and Obama both have been handed the tricky task of blazing trails for their respective identities as a woman and as an African-American, so that (to extend this much extended metaphor) they are both operating without a map of defined trails. Women of all ages deserve a pioneering candidate who will provide an example to emulate, someone whose history will demonstrate the political power of competent and hard-working women. Women deserve someone who will speak directly to issues that affect them, something Clinton has done significantly better than Obama.

Yet at some point Clinton's value as a history maker has been undermined by Clinton the typical pandering Democrat, Clinton the Neo-Liberal who runs to the Right when its convenient, Clinton the Neo-Con Dupe, Clinton the bourgeois white feminist willing to exploit racial divisions to her advantage. If Clinton were running a campaign that did not consistently appeal to lowest common denominator Republican talking points and to the worst aspects of American racism, I'd happily encourage her to carry on. As it is, it's become a ginormous headache.

I have nothing original to add to the discussion of the police murder of Sean Bell and the judge's decision to let the guilty cops go free. Maybe because I'm too pissed off, or nauseated, or both by the loss of life, the criminal murder of an innocent man, the inherent racism of the police state, the loss to the man's wife and young daughter and the rest of his family - I could go on. But others are writing more eloquently than I can muster today, so I link with approval to them.

Holly writes at Feministe that the police murder of black men is a feminist issue. She makes a strong, eloquent case.

The problem is that this disproportionately affects communities of color. The black men who are most often slaughtered by such violence, and all the women and children in their lives too, their loved ones, friends and relatives. A system that is all too eager to exonerate “the thin blue line” and continue business as usual. All of these are feminist issues. Racism must be a feminist issue, for any kind of feminism that counts. Police brutality must be; the biases of the criminal justice system must be.

The SuperSpade is rightly flabbergasted and bitter:

I know there will be rallies held in New York to protest this miscarriage of justice and if you are in the area, you should go. After the marches though, Bell’s story like Amadou Diallo and others will be filed in the Black consciousness as the continuing saga of injustice that has plagued Black folk since we were kidnapped from Africa. Surely this is worth Black folk being bitter right?

Mikhael B. Reid expresses her outrage and posts links to cartoons she has done on this case and on police brutality.

I'll post more when I find it.

Oh, And: Barack Obama registered the predictable "we are a nation of laws so don't go crazy in the streets" admonishment. Not that I expected him (or think he should) advocate rioting, but it would be refreshing to hear a prominent politician say something like, "We are a nation of laws, sure, but I don't see how the police can be allowed to gun down a person in cold blood and get away with it. Something is wrong with our justice system. Cases like this make the law seem like a sham to protect the power of the state against the rights - the very lives - of the people."

NOTE: I'll be posting updates as I find them at the entry on my WordPress blog.

Click the image to see the full scale cartoon.

By now everyone is familiar with the idiotic questions ABCNooziz Georges Gibson and Stephanopoulos asked of both Senators Obama and Clinton during last week's debate. But I focus on Stephanopoulos, because he seems to have a knack for asking Obama utterly moronic questions.

For instance, the question about Obama's "cool style" comes from a one-on-one interview back in May, 2007.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You have a very cool style when you're doing those town meetings, when you're out on the campaign trail. And I wonder, how much of that is tied to your race?
OBAMA: That's interesting.

Following that interview Charlton McIlwain and Stephen Maynard Caliendo co-blog their dismay:

We LOVE the response. “It’s interesting,” which means, “what the hell is THAT supposed to mean?! All black people are ‘cool?’”

Lastly, Think Progress has the audio clip making the Hannity-Stephanopoulos connection.

HANNITY: There are two questions that I don’t think anybody has asked Barack Obama, and I don’t know if this is going to be on your list tomorrow. One is – the only time he’s ever been asked about his association with Bill Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist from the Weather Underground who on 9/11 of all days in the New York Times was saying “I don’t regret setting bombs. I don’t think we did enough.” When asked about it by the Politico, David Axelrod said that they have a friendly relationship, and that they had done a number of speeches together and that they sat on a board together. Is that a question you might ask?

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, I’m taking notes right now.

So the Shiny Librarian gets me hip to infodoodads, which means I learn about all kindsa nifty sites, widgets and whatnot to play with, including silobreaker, a news and information gathering portal that will replace whatever love I have for googlenews, especially because it offers this addictive little toy: News Trends.

News Trends is a search engine that graphs media attention trends on a given subject. For fun, I thought I would compare media coverage for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan over the past 12 months. I'm cynical. I think Spears and Lohan will trounce Obama and Clinton. After all, neither Clinton nor Obama have flashed their genitals at paparazzi, at least not in the time period in which this data has been gathered.

I am wrong.

Well, wrong about media attention, not genitalia exposure. It turns out the media finds Obama and Clinton far more interesting than Spears and Lohan. I realize I am setting the bar pretty low, but I am happily surprised.

What's really cool about silobreaker in general and this graph generating tool in particular is that it offers some handy research tools students can use for class projects. No, the shit ain't peer-reviewed, and you might want to issue the usual caveats about research methodology (for instance, the developers claim to use "relational analysis" but do not explain how that is actually designed in their search algorithms.) But I think it's a good introduction to research for beginners, a way to get them thinking about information, how to display it visually, and how to manipulate it. It may also stimulate them to draw unusual connections. Or, as in my case, subvert a priori assumptions.

Click the image to see the full cartoon.

Despite a vow to myself to avoid all articles or blog posts with the words "Hillary" or "Obama" in them, I have failed spectacularly. Shoot, I just posted on Hillary Clinton's tenacity the other day. It's what Britney Spears is to most people; I can't look away.

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Cross-posted from mooretoons.

Cross-posted at my Wordpress blog.

Every time I think Hillary Clinton or her campaign has done something to destroy her bid for the Democratic nomination, I get surprised by the persistence - stubbornness? - of her supporters. Even if Republican mischief-makers drove Clinton toward a dubious victory in Texas, she still had solid backing from traditional Democratic voters.

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If you had read Robin Morgan's Goodbye to All That (#2) and felt both alienated and emotionally blackmailed, Kimberle Crenshaw and Eve Ensler write an excellent response to the kind of "either/or" feminism Morgan's essay typifies:

Because we believe that feminism can be expressed by a broader range of choices than this "either/or" proposition entails, we again find ourselves compelled to say "no"--this time to a brand of feminism that betrays its inclusive and global commitments. We believe we stand in unity with many feminists who will say, "Not in Our Name" will this feminism be deployed.

Young feminists have been vocal and strong in critiquing the claim that a vote for Obama represents some form of youthful naiveté, a desire to win the approval of men, or a belief that sexism no longer factors into their lives. While paying respect to those women who carried the banner for so many years, these young women have reminded us that feminism is not static but evolutionary, changing in content, scope and tenor as new generations elevate their concerns and aspirations. And while we agree that this "either/or" brand of feminism fails to capture the imagination and hopes of countless numbers of women who refuse to entrust this capital into the hands of a candidate just because she is a woman, we think it important to add that this is not simply an intergenerational difference at work here. At issue is a profound difference in seeing feminism as intersectional and global rather than essentialist and insular. Women have grappled with these questions in every feminist wave, struggling to see feminism as something other than a "me too" bid for power whether it be in the family, the party, the race or the state.

For many of us, feminism is not separate from the struggle against violence, war, racism and economic injustice. Gender hierarchy and race hierarchy are not separate and parallel dynamics. The empowerment of women is contingent upon all these things. Despite the fact that we know that identity does not equal politics--especially an antiwar, social equity and global justice politics--we are led to believe that having a woman in power is the penultimate accomplishment. And even when the "either/or" feminists back off this claim in general, we are told, it is true in the case of the particular, Hillary Clinton. Experience and judgment go hand in hand, we are told, but one has to wonder how is it that so many ordinary citizens who were outside the beltway instinctively sensed what would come with the war, but the female candidate running for President did not?