Rules and Bylaws Commitee Public Meeting

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Bill Kristol vs Reality

Hillary could well lose in Iowa. Then Hillary could well lose the nomination. And a Republican would then win the presidency. He probably will anyway.

--William Kristol

Bill Kristol holds forth over at weeklystandard.com that it is 2:1 odds FOR that the Republican nominee will win next fall. On the other hand, the polling numbers that I see over at Real Clear Politics show every single top tier Democrat beating every single top tier Republican.

Let me see which I should think is more likely to reflect reality... hmmmmmmm

Not a Hillary Fan but This is correct

To let you know about the sexism that's inevitably coming, Dowd passes along some charming misogyny from Leon Wieseltier: "Others do not underestimate her relentlessness. As Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, once told me: “She’s never going to get out of our faces. ... She’s like some hellish housewife who has seen something that she really, really wants and won’t stop nagging you about it until finally you say, fine, take it, be the damn president, just leave me alone." Question: can someone identify a male Republican presidential candidate being criticized for the crime -- highly unusual among people who want to be president! -- of being ambitious?

Personally, I always thought that it was best to assume that anyone that professed a desire to be President (or any other high political office) was an incredibly ambitious person. I do not think that Hillary Clinton is the best of the Democratic candidates but this BS of tarring her as "too ambitious" is just stupid.

Hillary Clinton and Gender Politics

But there's another aspect to this -- the moral question. And Hillary Clinton is on the wrong side of one of the most important moral issues of our time. For reasons of ambition and political expedience, she made the wrong call.

Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis have died in a war she helped start. Thousands of American soldiers have been sacrificed, tens of thousands more maimed.

The congressional vote, of which she was a part, helped lead to the biggest strategic disaster in the modern history of U.S. foreign policy.

Despite all of that, millions of Americans are going to support her, simply because they feel it's time America had a woman president.

I feel that it is time that America had a woman president too but not enough to be a supporter of Hillary.

I feel that it is time that America had an African-American president too. But not enough to support Obama.

I find myself in the weird position, at the moment, of thinking that Chris Dodd is the best of the current Democratic candidates for the simple reason that he is actually leading on some issues(Cuba, Iraq to name two) instead of trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing.

Please Al .. Please .. Please run

Read the rest at the Huffington Post

"Coverage" of Hillary's laugh

All of this does seem like a no-win for a candidate who has so often been accused of coming off as a scold. And does it really tell us anything about what kind of President she would be?

From Swampland comes a short piece on the stupidity surrounding the fact that Hillary is actually starting to act a little like a person and less like a humourless crank.

I still do not like her as a candidate, although I think she is better than anyone that the GOP could put up, but this BS about her laugh has to stop. I think she has a terrific laugh and I think that it is a great weapon for her. When someone asks a stupid question she should just laugh that lovely laugh and say "next serious question please"

joe klein on hillary on fox

Joe takes the opportunity in a 2 paragraph post supposedly on how HRC did on Chris Wallace to say

She handled the MoveOn.Org "Betrayus" ad well, putting it in the same category as the Swift Boat ads in 2004, and those comparing Max Cleland to Osama Bin Laden in 2002...but this is still a terrible weight for Democrats to carry and it is time for MoveOn to apologize for its boneheaded move.

Joe, repeat after me...

"Petraeus DID betray the public trust and more of his troops are going to die for no reason other than his desire to be president someday"

So .. in my humble opinion .. Joe Klein needs some of this ...