So is it sexist when MoDo says it?

Or is she just being a humongous asshole as usual? (I think I have answered my own question...)

At the Portsmouth cafe on Monday, talking to a group of mostly women, she blinked back her misty dread of where Obama’s “false hopes” will lead us — “I just don’t want to see us fall backwards,” she said tremulously — in time to smack her rival: “But some of us are right and some of us are wrong. Some of us are ready and some of us are not.”

There was a poignancy about the moment, seeing Hillary crack with exhaustion from decades of yearning to be the principal rather than the plus-one. But there was a whiff of Nixonian self-pity about her choking up. What was moving her so deeply was her recognition that the country was failing to grasp how much it needs her. In a weirdly narcissistic way, she was crying for us. But it was grimly typical of her that what finally made her break down was the prospect of losing.

As Spencer Tracy said to Katharine Hepburn in “Adam’s Rib,” “Here we go again, the old juice. Guaranteed heart melter. A few female tears, stronger than any acid.”

Is it sexist only if a man says something like this? Is this sorta similar to when black people call each other the n-word?

I just want to clearly understand the distinctions. Where the line is, so I won't step on it again.

Or is it sexist not to call Hillary out for a little whining because she was asked "how do you go on" (on the premise that treating men and women differently in similar circumstances is the very definition of sexism)? The incident would not have gone unremarked upon had it been any of the men on either side of the aisle. And it is ridiculous to suggest so.

Or ... was New Hampshire a little payback for all the times women have been put down, pushed down, passed over, held back, paid less, called "little lady", patted on the ass, whistled at, groped, etc.

See, I heard the tremolo (see tremulous for the best definition here) in her voice as well, and described it as "whimpering". But -- I have been appropriately chastened -- that's considered a sexist remark coming from a man. For the record I would call it 'whimpering' had Edwards done it.

The Clintons once more wriggled out of a tight spot at the last minute. Bill churlishly dismissed the Obama phenom as “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen,” but for the last few days, it was Hillary who seemed in danger of being Cinderella. She became emotional because she feared that she had reached her political midnight, when she would suddenly revert to the school girl with geeky glasses and frizzy hair, smart but not the favorite. All those years in the shadow of one Natural, only to face the prospect of being eclipsed by another Natural?

How humiliating to have a moderator of the New Hampshire debate ask her to explain why she was not as popular as the handsome young prince from Chicago. How demeaning to have Obama rather ungraciously chime in: “You’re likable enough.” And how exasperating to be pushed into an angry rebuttal when John Edwards played wingman, attacking her on Obama’s behalf.

More of this:

Gloria Steinem wrote in The Times yesterday that one of the reasons she is supporting Hillary is that she had “no masculinity to prove.” But Hillary did feel she needed to prove her masculinity. That was why she voted to enable W. to invade Iraq without even reading the National Intelligence Estimate and backed the White House’s bellicosity on Iran.

Yet, in the end, she had to fend off calamity by playing the female victim, both of Obama and of the press. Hillary has barely talked to the press throughout her race even though the Clintons this week whined mightily that the press prefers Obama.

So Dowd contradicts Steinem regarding Hillary's testosterone level. Hm.

To play level on this field, I also dismiss a rather incessant carp on the part of my camp about Edwards being ignored in the media; "this is now a two-horse race", etc. (By the way, is it sexist or racist or something else-ist to refer to Clinton and Obama as thoroughbreds? Just checking. My sensitivity meter may be giving me false readings.)

Bill Clinton, campaigning in Henniker on Monday, also played the poor-little-woman card in a less-than-flattering way. “I can’t make her younger, taller or change her gender,” he said.

I think the Big Dog forgot to say "black".

And I don't think I like the turn this campaign has taken. Is it too late to turn around?

Oh wait, here's Andy Borowitz. He'll lighten things up for me:

Hillary Schedules Official Crying Jag for South Carolina

Launches ‘Sniffling Tour’ Before SuperDuper Tuesday

Saying that she has learned valuable lessons from her victory in the New Hampshire primary, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) today announced that she was scheduling an official crying jag for the eve of the South Carolina primary on January 26.

Speaking to reporters in Las Vegas this morning, her eyes noticeably watery, Mrs. Clinton said that her election eve crying jag would be scheduled for 4 PM EST on January 25.

But the newly lachrymose junior senator from New York indicated that her South Carolinian waterworks would only be one stop on an ambitious tear-drenched campaign schedule leading up to SuperDuper Tuesday on February 5, an itinerary which she and her aides are calling her “Sniffling Tour.”

“I’m going to be crying so much you’re going to think I’m Anderson Cooper,” she wept.

But even as Mrs. Clinton said that “this election is a crying game, and I’m in it to win it,” some political observers wondered if the New York senator would be able to cry at will as often as her punishing schedule demands.

According to strategist Mark Penn, a trusted group of campaign aides would have the job of inducing tears from Mrs. Clinton by “saying mean things to her” before every appearance.

Additionally, Mr. Penn says, Mrs. Clinton has a secret weapon in her latest endeavor, former president Bill Clinton: “No one can make Hillary cry like Bill can.”

More Rosenthal scandal, anyone? No thank you, I'm full.

Let's just go to the story:

New e-mails released Tuesday show District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal sent and received racist jokes and strategized with political consultants and colleagues about his re-election campaign on his county e-mail account.

Also within the correspondence obtained Tuesday by the Houston Chronicle were numerous sexually explicit images. It was unclear, however, if Rosenthal ever forwarded those files.

The latest batch of 730 e-mails was met with concern by Harris County GOP leaders, who had already successfully pressured him to abandon his re-election bid.

"It's time for Chuck Rosenthal to pack his bags and leave," said county GOP Chairman Jared Woodfill.

Rosenthal declined to comment late Tuesday.

Rosenthal has hit Bush's trifecta. The only way anyone will ever be able to feel sorry for him now is if he shoots himself.

The scandal is blowing back to assistant DA -- (and filed candidate for Chuck's job) Kelly Siegler, whose husband sent much of the naughty e-mail in question:

Also included within the e-mails is heavy traffic between Rosenthal and Sam Siegler, Rosenthal's physician and the husband of Kelly Siegler, who is running for district attorney.

In one e-mail from Sam Siegler to Rosenthal, an attached video shows women having their breasts exposed after men forcibly pulled down their blouses in public. The video called the act "sharking."

And the story goes on. And on.

Now let's be clear: we've all gotten nasty crap like this in our inboxes. Some of us have even forwarded -- and originated -- some of it. I just got this howler (VNSFW) over the holidays, to use myself as an example. But I'm not the Harris County district attorney, either. In fact I won't ever be able to be a candidate for public office, having blogged many of my coarser opinions under my birth name.

No great loss to public service, you're thinking. And hey, you're right.

Of course this isn't about me. This is about elected officials who use their taxpayer-funded time and computers in the most unprofessional of circumstances, to say nothing of the hypocrisy demonstrated in the self-righteousness they proclaim publicly by wearing WWJD bracelets and standing up in Second Baptist Church to declare their close relationship with the Almighty.

And it's also now about candidates for the same public office who haughtily dismiss the hijinks:

"He cusses like a sailor and his sense of humor is crude, to put it mildly," (Siegler) said. "It's his computer and what he does at work is his business. He's the boss."

She declined to comment on whether Rosenthal should resign but said the revelations wouldn't affect her campaign.

"I would hope the voters are more concerned about qualifications of their DA than some inappropriate e-mails."

Oh trust me, Kelly; we are.

Rhymes with Right calls for Rosenthal's immediate departure and not because of nasty e-mail but because the DA was also using his work computer for campaign-related activities, which of course is a violation of election law.

Whatever. It's long past time for Rosenthal to move out -- of his office, of the newspaper headlines, and probably out of town.

The FairTax and other right-wing populist scams

I came home late last night to the New Hampshire returns because I was on the program (along with David Mincberg, Michael Skelly, and Steven Kirkland) at the meeting of Galleria Democrats to debate the Fair Tax.

Well, 'debate' isn't the right word. It was more like a beatdown of the poor guy advocating in its favor.

Anyway, on the news that Kuffner posts regarding the alliance of former Houston mayor Bob Lanier and FairTax founder Leo Linbeck Jr. and others to camouflage their latest elitist-welfare scheme as grassroots populism, it's worth pausing to note the various "citizen activist" efforts Linbeck is involved in, such as Texans for Lawsuit Reform.

(Recall that one of Karl Rove and Grover Norquist's fundamental strategies for starving the Democratic Party has been to starve plaintiff's attorneys by reforming tort laws; in Texas, with Republicans controlling every statewide office including all nine seats on the Texas Supreme Court as well as most of the Texas Legislature, they managed to push through damages caps on lawsuits like medical malpractice, for example. This article details the effects of that on the local legal community -- and the injured patients wounded a second time by tort reform.)

Linbeck is simply another stinking-rich conservative Republican who doesn't have enough yachts to water-ski behind. His activism consists of his actively looking for ways to hoodwink uninformed suburbanites who have mindlessly cast their straight GOP tickets for self-devastating causes like these before. And he's almost as successful at that as he is at making millions in his core businesses.

FairTax, Texans for Lawsuit Reform, and now Houstonians for Responsible Growth. Orwellian truthspeak in name, nefarious welfare-for-the-wealthy in intent.

Let's not get fooled again, shall we?

Well, well. We got a race.

Clinton 39, Obama 37, Edwards 17 (81% in).

On the Republican side, not so much surprise: McCain 37, Romney 32, Huckabee 11, 9iu11ani 9, Paul 8 (78%). Thompson 1%. LMAO

OK, back to the presidential race (emphasis mine):

After Iowa, Clinton and her aides seemed resigned to a second straight setback. But polling place interviews showed that female voters — who deserted her last week — were solidly in her New Hampshire column.

She also was winning handily among registered Democrats. Obama led her by an even larger margin among independents, but he suffered from a falloff in turnout among young voters compared with Iowa.

Word of Clinton's triumph set off a raucous celebration among supporters at a hotel in Nashua — gathered there to celebrate a first-in-the-nation primary every bit as surprising as the one 16 years ago that allowed a young Bill Clinton to proclaim himself "the comeback kid."

Ah, the Comeback Gal will be the story for the next few weeks. More on that girl thing:

So there's a huge gender gap. Massive. Apparently, women didn't take kindly to people beating up on Hillary for -- gasp! -- tearing up. Can you believe it? In a way, this is a nice middle finger to that bullshit double standard.

Had a nice lively conversation today about whether that statement by Edwards was sexist or not. I thought it wasn't, but maybe obviously I was wrong.

Update (1/9): Two different yet similar opinions on why Clinton snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. Not how. Why.

FOX News: now even conservatives know it sucks

After Ron Paul was denied the opportunity to participate in a debate of Republican presidential candidates carried by FOX, he held his own forum in New Hampshire. The local Paulistas took the Chron's bait and posted diatribes against the Fairly Unbalanced news network, calling them "traitors" and "scumbags" -- epithets usually reserved for capital criminals, victims of Joe Horn, and Democrats. Some of the 'nicer' comments:

Torque wrote:

Fox, Fox News, their supporters, and sponsors just earned a LIFELONG boycott from me! I suggest all Ron Paul supporters do the same. They should have let him debate, them neo-facist Nazi War MONGERS pretending to be fair media! Lies.

Kind-of sucks for me too because COPS was one of my favorite shows.

Clearspeak wrote:

According to the numbers, Mr. Paul had a right to be included. Fox is trying to put in a "fix", blatantly manipulating the contest, and should have their license pulled by the FCC.

Josey2006 wrote:

If you're upset with Fox News, do like I've done: Buy a share of their stock and crash their stockholder meeting in October.

Hankskool wrote:

Why would Fox want to invite a true fiscal conservative to rain on their reckless parade? Somehow they've already bamboozled millions into believing they provide a conservative "balance" to the rest of the "liberal" news coverage despite the fact that their idea of fiscal conservativism , both for the individual and the nation, is to borrow as much money as you can and blow it all. How many ads a day did they run on behalf of the subprime frauds anyway? So much for conservative having anything to do with "conserve". Most of their pundits have already endorsed Rudy G.. A smaller government conservative ? No, actually if he had his way the U.S. would be a full blown police state with one cop for every citizen, hardly smaller government from the free individual's standpoint.
FAUX NEWS-- We've taken the conserve out of conservative!

So then the Paulites decided to protest outside the Faux News building in New York, where they ambushed Sean Hannity as he was leaving (you have to watch the video).



This on top of Bill O'Reilly's meltdown at an Obama campaign event, where he screamed at, grabbed and shoved an Obama staffer. Secret Service agents actually surrounded the guy. Yes, there's a YouTube of it also, though it isn't as embarrassing to O'Reilly as it could have been:



Boycotts, protests, embarrassing actions by their anchors videotaped -- how long before FOX's core audience really does put down the Kool-Aid, sober up and start deserting them?

As with the rest of the crumbling Republican monolith, are we watching the beginning of the end of Faux News' media "dominance"?

Pop the corn.

Update: Robert Greenwald's video is a more thorough report on the flap between FOX and Obama that O'Reilly apparently is exacerbating.

2008's first Weekly Wrangle

And they're off!

TXsharon burned despair's chair. See Bluedaze for an inspirational New Year's message of hope.

Off the Kuff asked a variety of interesting people to write a post named Looking Forward to 2008. Topics ranged from music and television to local, state, and national politics. The entire series, which wrapped up last week, can be found here.

Barfly at McBlogger says thank you to our neighbor to the north for giving us some of our most cherished celebrities. Like Celine Dion.

John Coby at Bay Area Houston lists who is running for officeand who is not in Clear Lake.

Gary at Easter Lemming Liberal News saw the Iowa results as a progressive sweep and picked out the winners and losers.

winding road in urban area declared that of all the undignified events surrounding the Harris County District Attorney's office, the announcement regarding assistant district attorney Kelly Seigler's run for her boss' job has taken the proverbial cake. It is just charming that Ms. Seigler said on camera, that aspects of being district attorney "sucks." Nothing says "get to know me" the first time a voter may see a candidate like saying the job I want, "sucks!"

nytexan at BlueBloggin points out the newest GOP stunt to block the Senate and screw up another presidential election. With the primary season underway for the presidential race the Federal Election Commission has shut its doors.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme notes James 'Rick' Perry ignored ceremony for fallen Texas military hero. That's how Republicans support and honor our troops!

It was a bad start to 2008 (if you happened to be a Republican), no matter if your name was Vicki Truitt, or Chuck Rosenthal, or Jared Woodfill, or Mitt Romney. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs has more on the conservative misery.

To kick off the new year for Texas Kaos, Lightseeker takes a look at some of The Big Texas Issues we'll be talking about in the coming year.

WCNews at Eye on Williamson opines about the death of Ric Williamson and who will be the next leader of TxDOT.

Muse is only now able to get her bulls---t detector to quiet down after Harris County DA, Chuck "Romancethal" Rosenthal, told the Houston Chronicle that he was only sending romantic emails to his secretary because she had personal problems. Right (wink, wink, former FBI agent wife). What else happened? Pity sex?

Phillip at Burnt Orange Report takes a preliminary look at some numbers on filings for the Texas House, including the large number of Republicans that are facing both a primary and general election opponent.

Texas Toad at North Texas Liberal introduces the new slate of Denton County Democratic candidates, as revealed at a press conference promoting the strength of the local party with high hopes for 2008.

The Texas Cloverleaf cautions you to smoke 'em if ya got 'em, but you still might go to jail. DFW area law enforcement is ignoring the new option to give citations to pot smokers.

On The Texas Blue this week, contributor David Gurney explains that he doesn't really buy this business of a "war on Christmas."

Devastating account of e-voting's flaws

Is anybody in Texas who can do anything about this paying attention?

The earliest critiques of digital voting booths came from the fringe — disgruntled citizens and scared-senseless computer geeks — but the fears have now risen to the highest levels of government. One by one, states are renouncing the use of touch-screen voting machines. California and Florida decided to get rid of their electronic voting machines last spring, and last month, Colorado decertified about half of its touch-screen devices. Also last month, Jennifer Brunner, the Ohio secretary of state, released a report in the wake of the Cuyahoga crashes arguing that touch-screens “may jeopardize the integrity of the voting process.” She was so worried she is now forcing Cuyahoga to scrap its touch-screen machines and go back to paper-based voting — before the Ohio primary, scheduled for March 4. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat of Florida, and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, have even sponsored a bill that would ban the use of touch-screen machines across the country by 2012.

Gotta love that first sentence: "the fringe" are "disgruntled citizens".

Anyway, there's plenty to be appreciative of in this report...

If the machines are tested and officials are able to examine the source code, you might wonder why machines with so many flaws and bugs have gotten through. It is, critics insist, because the testing is nowhere near dilligent enough, and the federal regulators are too sympathetic and cozy with the vendors. The 2002 federal guidelines, the latest under which machines currently in use were qualified, were vague about how much security testing the labs ought to do. The labs were also not required to test any machine’s underlying operating system, like Windows, for weaknesses.

Vendors paid for the tests themselves, and the results were considered proprietary, so the public couldn’t find out how they were conducted. The nation’s largest tester of voting machines, Ciber Inc., was temporarily suspended after federal officials found that the company could not properly document the tests it claimed to have performed.

“The types of malfunctions we’re seeing would be caught in a first-year computer science course,” says Lillie Coney, an associate director with the Electronic Privacy Information Commission, which is releasing a study later this month critical of the federal tests.

In any case, the federal testing is not, strictly speaking, mandatory. The vast majority of states “certify” their machines as roadworthy. But since testing is extremely expensive, many states, particularly smaller ones, simply accept whatever passes through a federal lab. And while it’s true that state and local elections officials can generally keep a copy of the source code, critics say they rarely employ computer programmers sophisticated enough to understand it. Quite the contrary: When a county buys touch-screen voting machines, its elections director becomes, as Warren Parish, a voting activist in Florida, told me, “the head of the largest I.T. department in their entire government, in charge of hundreds or thousands of new computer systems, without any training at all.” Many elections directors I spoke with have been in the job for years or even decades, working mostly with paper elections or lever machines. Few seemed very computer-literate.

The upshot is a regulatory environment in which, effectively, no one assumes final responsibility for whether the machines function reliably. The vendors point to the federal and state governments, the federal agency points to the states, the states rely on the federal testing lab and the local officials are frequently hapless.

This has created an environment, critics maintain, in which the people who make and sell machines are now central to running elections. Elections officials simply do not know enough about how the machines work to maintain or fix them. When a machine crashes or behaves erratically on Election Day, many county elections officials must rely on the vendors — accepting their assurances that the problem is fixed and, crucially, that no votes were altered.

In essence, elections now face a similar outsourcing issue to that seen in the Iraq war, where the government has ceded so many core military responsibilities to firms like Halliburton and Blackwater that Washington can no longer fire the contractor. Vendors do not merely sell machines to elections departments. In many cases, they are also paid to train poll workers, design ballots and repair broken machines, for years on end.

“This is a crazy world,” complained Ion Sancho, the elections supervisor of Leon County in Florida. “The process is so under control by the vendor. The primary source of information comes only from the vendor, and the vendor has a conflict of interest in telling you the truth. The vendor isn’t going to tell me that his buggy software is why I can’t get the right time on my audit logs.”

Ugh. More bad news for democracy. Is there a solution? Sancho in Florida may have one:

Optical scanning is used in what many elections experts regard as the “perfect elections” of Leon County in Florida, where Ion Sancho is the supervisor of elections. In the late ’80s, when the county was replacing its lever machines, Sancho investigated touch-screens. But he didn’t think they were user-friendly, didn’t believe they would provide a reliable recount and didn’t want to be beholden to a private-sector vendor. So he bought the optical-scanning devices from Unisys and trained his staff to be able to repair problems when the machines broke or malfunctioned. His error rate — how often his system miscounts a ballot — is three-quarters of a percent at its highest, and has dipped as low as three-thousandths of a percent.

More important, his paper trail prevents endless fighting over the results of tight elections. In one recent contest, a candidate claimed that his name had not appeared on the ballot in one precinct. So Sancho went into the Leon County storage, broke the security seals on the records, and pulled out the ballots. The name was there; the candidate was wrong. “He apologized to me,” Sancho recalls. “And that’s what you can’t do with touch-screen technology. You never could have proven to that person’s satisfaction that the screen didn’t show his name. I like that certainty. The paper ends the discussion.” Sancho has never had a legal fight over a disputed election result. “The losers have admitted they lost, which is what you want,” he adds. “You have to be able to convince the loser they lost.”

That, in a nutshell, is what people crave in the highly partisan arena of modern American politics: an election that can be extremely close and yet regarded by all as fair. Not only must the losing candidate believe in the loss; the public has to believe in it, too.

The article makes the most cogent point possible, that the greatest concern isn't about the integrity of voting officials or hackers, but the vast potential for unintentional errors -- by the programmers, by the administrators, and by the voters themselves.

Can we take preventative action before next November to avoid the possibility of a catastrophic failure similar to 2000 in Florida, and 2004 in Cuyahoga County, Ohio? The only tool at our disposal is the continued agitation of those responsible for the decision-making. At every level of influence.