From theSpoof.com

Facing certain defeat due to Barack Obama’s insurmountable lead and his refusal to look for sex in public bathrooms, Senator Hillary Clinton resigned from the race for the Democratic presidential nomination on Tuesday night.

She then immediately accepted the Libertarian Party nomination, which was offered to her outright in a shocking and unprecedented move by a political party long believed by casual observers to identify more closely with Republicans than with Democrats.

Former Libertarian Party frontrunner and Johnny-come-lately Bob Barr could not be satisfactorily sedated for comment.

“I offer the Libertarian Party a revitalized vision,” Clinton told a small but enthusiastic crowd of party insiders. “Henceforth, let our motto be, ‘What about the children?’”

“She’s our man,” said Libertarian Party spokesman Will Cave. “She’s privatizing her health care model. Everyone will have to pay fifty cents to see a doctor or have brain surgery.

“She will order Homeland Security to eliminate some domestic spying programs that can be turned over to local police or voluntarily managed by busybody sheep with cell phone cameras.

“She also will not allow her vice president to run roughshod over the rest of the world. That’s her job, and he’ll just be her paid lackey,” Cave concluded.

I love satire.

OK, in truth, I don’t know if this is factual but it is terrifyingly possible, since the price of crude went up $5 a barrel yesterday alone. Over at Random Mumblings, Jack Lail quotes from a Fast Company interview of T. Boone Pickens, the Texas oilman.

Fast Company: What will happen in the next five years?

Pickens: Demand will go up, and price will go up.

Fast Company: Take a stab at what we’ll be paying at the pump in five years.

Pickens: Oh hell, that’s so far out. Maybe $6 to $8 a gallon.

Pickens is a walking contradiction. He was the principal funding behind the Swift Boat attack ads on John Kerry and he believes in global warming to the point that he’s spending $10 billion to create the country’s biggest wind farm with 2,000 turbines. He may be controversial, but he does know oil and he’s probably not far off. Will the possibility of doubling your gasoline bill over the next presidential term affect votes? You know, issues, over personality or race or sex or age.

Thanks to a somewhat unrelated post of Southern Beale’s, I realized that unsuccessfully asking for more oil pumping wasn’t the only reason President Bush went to Saudi Arabia. He also went there to broker a deal to help the kingdom develop nuclear fuel sources for reactors. At face value (and it is not worth much in this case), that’s the same sorts of uses that Iran says they want for their nuclear fuel which we oppose giving them. The differences are that Iran admittedly hates us (remember, we’re the Great Satan to them) and Saudi Arabia was the birthplace of Osama bin Laden and most of the 9/11 hijackers.

I heard about getting turned down for more oil again, but nothing about the nukes on the news.

From CNN.com:

Sen. Ted Kennedy’s doctors have diagnosed him as having a malignant brain tumor after he suffered a seizure on Saturday.

More information to come…

“I don’t know how many people are converted to a particular religion at the mere sight of a cross. We’re dealing with kids here, not vampires, and so long as they aren’t being handed religious literature, or being preached to about biblical texts, I really don’t see the big deal.”

–Sean Braisted regarding the use of church facilities for public school graduation ceremonies.   Read more of his thoughts on the matter here.

From Saturday Night Live

Tim Chavez has a lengthy post this morning about observations he’s made about the presidential race singling out political maneuvering from Jim Cooper, Marsha Blackburn and Lamar Alexander as well as their stance on immigration.

But Republicans like Sen. Lamar Alexander and Rep. Marsha Blackburn have chosen to advance their political careers at the expense of the party by embracing and pushing the anti-immigrant agenda of talk show hosts and nativists. The 287(g) deportation program in Nashville has produced some of the most inhumane treatment of people in this nation since the Civil Rights days and the internment of Japanese-American families during World War II.

Alexander and Blackburn were part of a recent press confernece to celebrate the deportation of 3,000 immigrants. (What was Rep. Jim Cooper, a Democrat, doing on that stage for that political farce? It’s time to recruit and finance a tough primary opponent for Cooper in 2010. Cooper is about as dynamic as lint on a sticky roller.)

We Hispanic voters and their advocates will not forget. The only decent person on that stage who spoke was Metro Police Chief Serpas, who criticized the inaction of lawmakers like Alexander, Blackburn and Cooper on resolving immigration issues. It is a federal matter, not something that good Metro police officiers should have to deal with.

There is no joy for me in writing this piece about the GOP. This country needs a strong two party system. Actually, it needs three strong parties. Hispanics should be pursued by both parties so that our issues for a better America will be addressed. The almost blind allegiance African-Americans have paid to the Democratic Party has not served their needs well. They’ve been taken for granted. Yes, this nation is on the cusp of electing its first black — or more accurately “bi-racial” — president. But the steps that have been taken by some Democrats to stop that advancement in favor of Sen. Hillary Clinton have been disillusioning and shocking.

He goes on and talks more about several different issues including a quote from conservative columnist Peggy Noonan who asks the question in the headline.

LeBlanc wrote Arlen Specter a letter regarding Spygate.

Here’s a snippet and what he got back.

I am not sure if you will actually read this or not. This is the first time I have ever taken the time to send anything to a Senator. I realize that you are not from my home state of Tennessee but I felt compelled to write. With all of the important issues facing Americans today including housing, gasoline, the war, and not to mention the economy and upcoming election, why would tax payer money and government time be wasted with continuing an investigation into the NFL’s New England Patriots and the league itself? It is time to move on and focus on things that are truly important to the country. I am a huge sports fan myself and appreciate getting to the bottom of an important issue such as cheating but please it is time to focus on the issues.

I was quite proud of myself. There was nothing fancy in it. I wasn’t rude, just to the point. I waited with baited breath to read the form email that I expected to receive. I didn’t expect this:

I receive a large volume of E-mails, phone calls, faxes and letters every week from concerned citizens like yourself.
Unfortunately, due to the high volume of mail, I can only respond if you’re a resident of Pennsylvania.

LeBlanc isn’t happy with Specter. Not in the least. 

Unbelievable.


h/t: Coyote Chronicles & Chez Coma

Barry is asking a question he wants and honest, and civil, answer to. Why did you specifically choose your candidate?

Not the best president, maybe not even the best choice of the three - I would just like to see what people think are the primary reasons or indications they’ve seen that the candidate they support has the qualifications, potential and vision to be the President of the United States.

One major rule. No rebuttals. You don’t get to argue against a previous commenter’s reasonings. I want to hear your personal opinions on why you feel your candidate will make a good president.

Go tell him what you think. 

The blogger formerly known as South Knox Bubba has been given the nod to go to Denver for the Democratic convention in August.

Congratulations!

From CNN:

Former Democratic presidential nominee John Edwards will endorse Sen. Barack Obama Wednesday at a campaign event in Grand Rapids, Michigan, according to Obama’s campaign.

I smell Obama/Edwards ‘08, although if you’ll remember, I predicted Edwards/Obama ‘08…I suppose I was just having a day of dyslexia…

So what do you think?  Will this solidify Obama’s support from the working class?

Monday I took my brother to the Army recruiting station in Murfreesboro. The plan was for him to spend the night in Nashville courtesy of the army, and then travel with others to Fort Bragg North Carolina for basic training and then advanced training.

With pictures at This is Smyrna 

Tim Chavez writes this about Bredesen’s proposed cuts of TennCare.

One cannot begin to fathom the heartache and stress from such an upheaval, and I can write from personal experience tied to my ongoing battle with leukemia and the devastating impact upon my family and its finances. Much to our shame, we’ve been forced to file for financial assistance with Vanderbilt University Medical Center for our bills tied to my leukemia and related maladies like diabetes and broken bones from a quadruple drop in my bone density. While chemo can save a life for the moment, it can also devastate other parts of the body.

So far, I’ve broken both my arms at the elbow and my left collarbone. Unbeknownst to my wife, I let a broken bone in my hand go untreated because of the cost of visiting a orthopedic specialist, $40, and accompanying X-rays. The broken bone was not out of line, so the pain was all that I had to endure.

I don’t write this to elicit any sympathy but to show how much every dollar means to families crushed under medical expenses. Household finance fortunes can reverse so quickly. And the stress from not knowing how you’re going to pay your bills, keep your home and educate your children is worse than the most nauseous chemo reaction or piercing bone pain.

People will say that folks like us could just sell our homes to pay bills. But two houses on our street have been for sale for a year now. The subprime mortgage mess has screwed up the real estate market.

Bredesen doesn’t like TennCare. His business background is in making money off health care, not primarily helping those in need. He promised to fix TennCare when he ran for office. Then he gutted it when he got into office. And in keeping with his bizarre view of value in the world, he proposes in his budget to keep $100 million in an economic development fund while cutting TennCare.

Chavez used to write for the Tennessean.

What he’s saying people are going through every single day in this country.

An MTSU sophomore, Danielle Ross, was quoted on MSNBC in an article on racism in the current political primary process. She too off from college to campaign for Barack Obama and was in Muncie, IN, working the people on street corners and at a Wal-Mart.

“The first person I encountered was like, ‘I’ll never vote for a black person,’ ” recalled Ross, who is white and just turned 20. “People just weren’t receptive.”

The article goes on to discuss other examples where name-calling was the most pleasant aspect.

Brendan Loy, however, doesn’t think that if West Virginia goes heavily for Clinton that racism is necessarily the reason for it. I agree with Brendan. I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve wondered how reporters seem to find so many people to interview that sound so yokel and have more fingers than teeth.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that, if you’re a reporter, and you conduct enough man-on-the-street interviews, you can find some idiot to say “Obama’s a Muslim” — or even “Obama’s a n***er” — anywhere. You can find racists and xenophobes and conspiratorial crazies in California, New York, Texas, Illinois; you can find ‘em all over the damn country.

Can you find them more easily in West Virginia? Perhaps. But you’re also much more likely to publish their quotes in a story about West Virginia, because it fits the storyline perfectly. Indeed, such a quote is precisely what these reporters are looking forwhen they start conducting the interviews in West Virginia. Whereas in California or New York, they’d probably ignore the random racist quote, in West Virginia they go out, they turn on the yokel-detecting radar, they hold up a microphone to the redneckiest-lookin’ redneck they can find, and — voila! — journalistic magic happens.

David Scobey, former Vice Mayor of Nashville and political figure, has died. From the Tennessean:

David Scobey, who had a reputation as the tough but fair vice mayor of Nashville for nearly a quarter-century, died Sunday night at Baptist Hospital after a short illness. He was 85.

A charter member of the Metro Council, Mr. Scobey served as Nashville’s elected vice mayor — the council’s leader — from 1971 until 1995, working with four mayors. He helped push through major projects including the construction of Interstate 440 and the Nashville Convention Center and bringing professional football to Nashville.

Yes, we are talking about Tennessee’s budget woes.

Gov. Phil Bredesen says the state will have to cut back as well:

The state should cut from TennCare spending, higher education and employees’ salaries to respond to its deepening economic downturn, Gov. Phil Bredesen told lawmakers Monday, saying the state must act “decisively and conservatively” to weather its financial crisis.

Bredesen presented the General Assembly with a broad outline for $468 million in cuts from the 2008-09 budget plan he presented in January, before revenues began to drop sharply. His budget amendments also include plans to close the state’s $315 million budget gap this fiscal year.

Blogging legislator Stacey Campfield wrote this yesterday:

Well the word has come out that we are going to offer buy out packages to 2,011 “non essential employees” of the state. The package is most likely going to include one years pay and free college education for new hires and one year pay for retirees.

Progressive Nashville focuses on education:

Gov. Bredesen’s budget speech last night was a disappointment, but it was one to be expected.

One of the greatest disappointments was his decision not to expand the pre-K program. He tried to put a good face on it saying, “every classroom and every teacher we pay for today is again paid for, with inflation, in this budget.” That’s little comfort to the students who won’t get the benefits of pre-K and the school districts who won’t see graduation rates increase.

Nashville’s public school district is waiting to hear how the cuts will trickle down.

Nashville’s public school district is still waiting to learn the exact ramifications of Gov. Phil Bredesen’s revised budget, according to Metro Nashville Public Schools Acting Director Chris Henson.

Henson said Monday evening that he knows the district will be receiving less money than anticipated. But he doesn’t yet know how much.

“They’ve not given us any hard numbers,” Henson said. “We’re waiting to see what the new state BEP revenue number might look like without the BEP 2.0 enhancements, … with just the inflationary increase. … We just know that there’s not going to be as much state revenue as initially projected and estimated, so we’ll have to make adjustments and revisions to our budget accordingly.”

Hobbs is here:

Tom Humphrey points out that while Bredesen seeks to cut $80 million out of a planned $100 million expansion of TennCare to cover thousands of medically needy Tennesseans, he didn’t let the budget woes preclude him from proposing to stash $100 million in an “economic development contingency fund.”

Left Wing Cracker alerts state employees about this.

If you have a relative or a friend that is a state employee, you may want to direct them to this site so that they can see and hear the presentation of Finance Commissioner Dave Goetz regarding the state budget.

The fallout has just begun.

But Chez Bez is weighing in with calm reason.

After the 2000 and 2004 losses, I heard many folks talk disgustedly about moving to Canada. Didn’t happen. There’s a lot of emotion in statements like these, but I don’t worry about a bunch of fellow Democrats getting all Canuck on me. Surely I can’t imagine, after some time has passed between the upcoming Democratic nomination and the general election, that most Democrats who currently support Hillary won’t be casting their vote for Obama. (Or Obama supporters voting for Hillary, for that matter.)

He calls himself the 3-minute pundit. But what a very good three minutes it is.

No, I didn’t spell that wrong. It represents Michigan and Florida, the two states where the primary process was thwarted. Now that the Democrats are down to the wire and there’s not a final decision, what about those two states?

On one side of the issue, the Democratic party leadership told each state government that if they moved their primary to such and such a date, the result would be that their votes wouldn’t count and the candidates would be told to not campaign there. They were warned ahead of time, and the result was exactly what they were told it would be. From this point of view, these two states should have gone by the rules. They’re whiny crybabies who got their hands (or votes) smacked by daddy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Aunt B. writes about a statement that Sen. Hillary Clinton made in an interview with USA Today. She breaks it down in a lengthy post and says this:

I don’t think the next President is going to be some miracle worker.  We sat by for eight years and let George Bush strip from us a whole lot of what it means to be an American.  And a lot of the power he consolidated for himself is going to be incredibly tempting for the next President to keep.  We have gone far off course and the next president is not going to be able to fix it all.  He or she may not even be inclined to fix it all.

I’m not trying to elect a perfect savior.

Read the rest here.

Gov. Phil Bredesen announced today that he will ask lawmakers to approve a voluntary buyout program for state employees with a goal of cutting 2,011 positions by the end of July. The 5 percent cut in executive branch positions would save $64 million toward the $468 million in additional cuts in the budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1 that he said is needed to balance the state budget

More at the Commercial Appeal. 

Yawn. About the most exciting part of the whole thing was the primary where everything is decided, the Republicans. It seems that Republicans are doing a Hillary and refusing to give up, even though their candidates have. As Southern Beale put it:

Last night was also the Republican primary in Indiana and North Carolina. John McCain won of course, but Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul and Mitt Romney still collected a large percent of votes –large considering two out of those three aren’t even running anymore.

In Indiana, Huckabee collected 10%, Paul 8% and Romney 5%. In North Carolina Huckabee received 12%, Paul 8% and “No Preference” 4%.

What this tells me is that 25% of Republican voters are dissatisfied with John McCain as their candidate and wanted to “make a statement” with their primary vote.

As Newscoma reported last night, Sharon Cobb thinks it’s the beginning of the end and seems to feel that her squeaker victory in Indiana was courtesy of Rush Linbaugh. Meanwhile, in important news, “it’s the economy, stupid” doesn’t seem to be percolating through the political discussions the way our wallets wish it was.

Barack Obama won North Carolina by 14 points, Hillary took Indiana by two. Here’s what Tennessee bloggers said as we slept.

Overnight, Sharon Cobb wrote:

Today she’ll be meeting with her closest advisers planning her exit strategy. She will most likely stay in the race through May 20 or June 3, but will start winding down and start uniting the party.

Goldnl compares the emails from the candidates after last night’s primary and breaks what she believes is said between the lines.

The Irish Trojan pontificates while Left Wing Cracker and he both have a video of Tim Russert calling Obama the new nominee.

Of course, Kleinheider was on it last night.

Nuns denied the opportunity to vote? 
Also from Liberadio

I hear a bit of South Knox Bubba in R. Neal’s two word post on the race. Some of his commenters don’t buy that it’s over.

Also:

Tennessee Free

William Howard Hobbs 

Vibinc live blogged last night, with cookies.

I’m skeptical that would happen but there is some talk about it.

What if the presidential primary worked more like a lottery with all the states having a chance at the ultimate prize of being first to vote in the nominating schedule, ending the coveted tradition of New Hampshire and Iowa leading the pack?

According to Stateline.org that’s a simplified version of one of several ideas being considered by top party and state officials, who aim to prevent a repeat of states’ helter-skelter scramble for early presidential primary dates in 2008.

While voters in Indiana and North Carolina go to the polls today (May 6) to help Democrats pick Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama as their nominee and Republicans rally behind John McCain, party insiders and state election officials are in informal talks to improve the presidential nominating contests for 2012 and beyond.

I guess the question is what would be the best way to improve the primary process?

In today’s Tennessean, Bredesen is talking about cutting the budget citing that personnel costs are the single largest expense in the budget.

But he looks at other cost-cutting measure as well while trying to maintain .

He says that education will not be impacted although it will be paid for by existing revenues.

• School funding: While Bredesen has pledged to cover the annual growth in the state’s school funding formula, he hasn’t said whether he will still dedicate an additional $87 million in cigarette tax money to schools.

The legislature last year approved a 42-cent tax hike on every pack of cigarettes mostly to boost funding for schools. But the tax money isn’t legally bound to education programs, so it might be one area where Bredesen could find extra dollars.

• Pre-kindergarten: Bredesen has acknowledged that it’s unlikely he will be able to add another $25 million to the pre-K program this year. Senate Republicans — who have been cool to the pre-K program to begin with — are unlikely to want to go along with even a slight increase.

• Higher education: The state is mandated to pay for K-12 education in Tennessee. Not so for higher education. Given that leeway, the state’s public colleges and universities are likely to have to make do without any increased funding — and could even face a reduction in state money.

There’s more here.