"Hillary bled all over the carpets"

Booman has observations. I'll jump to the end:

So, where do we stand? The one thing that needed to happen, happened. Hillary bled all over the carpets from beginning to especially the end. If there is any movement in the polls from this debate it will be away from her. Yet, no one set themselves up to be the main recipient of her loss of support.

As for the issue of drivers licenses for illegal immigrants: regardless of the merits, it will now be used against Hillary with a breathtaking relentlessness not seen since they found out that her husband let his peter out of his pocket. Clinton, if she supports this initiative, needed to stand tall on it, be aggressive, and explain the rationale...which is certainly a hard one to explain in a sound byte. Instead, she said she was for it even though it is a really bad idea, but she is not for it, but it is a gotcha question, but what the hell else can we do, but she doesn't endorse it. It was the worst of all worlds. And it will make Kerry's flip-flop look like peanuts.

If I were advising Hillary, and I'm not, I'd get her out front tomorrow to give a speech about the urgent need to give driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, because there is no going back now. Either she convinces people she is right, or she is going to get destroyed on that issue in the general election.

That sounds about right to me.

Update (11/1):

A day after she appeared to struggle to give her views on the subject, Hillary Rodham Clinton offered support today for Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s effort to award New York driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, as her campaign sought to contain potentially damaging fallout from what her own supporters saw as a tense and listless debate performance.

Nooses in the news in Houston

I just have to wonder what these people have displayed at home, if this is what they think is OK for work:

Four contract workers were banned from FMC Technologies after they hung nooses at one of the firm's Houston facilities, the company announced Tuesday.

The three men and one woman also were fired from their jobs with the contractors for FMC, an oil-field services equipment manufacturer, said Maryann Seaman, FMC spokeswoman.

"FMC has zero tolerance for workplace harassment," Seaman said.

Seaman said about a month ago an employee notified company officials that he had seen a noose hanging in the FMC's Gears Road facility.

Three workers were banned from FMC after they were discovered to have been involved in placing the noose, she said.

Last week, another noose was seen hanging in the same facility, Seaman said, and another person was banned from the firm because she was involved in placing that noose.

And on and on it goes. But hey, there's some good news:

The number of lawsuits the EEOC filed related to nooses has dropped steadily from 10 in 2001 to two so far this year, said James Ryan, EEOC spokesman.

The EEOC recently won settlements in three harassment cases related to nooses, including one in the Houston area, Ryan said.

In May, the EEOC reached a $390,000 racial harassment litigation settlement with Pemco Aeroplex of Birmingham on behalf of a class of black employees who were subjected to racist graffiti, slurs and the display of nooses, Ryan said.

The EEOC settled a racial harassment suit in January for $600,000 against AK Steel Corp. of Butler, Pa., Ryan added, after nooses were displayed and Klu Klux Klan videos were shown in employee lounges.

In March 2006, Ryan said, the EEOC obtained more than $1 million in a case against Commercial Coating Service, Inc. of Conroe, Texas, in which a black worker was racially harassed and choked with a noose by his coworkers in a company bathroom.

Read the comments from a few enlightened locals who just still don't see anything wrong with this sort of thing.

Spooo-ooky Toons