House Speaker Nancy Pelosi decided on February 13th, 2008, that she and her trial lawyer lobby knew more about national security than the Bush administration, all of the United States intelligence agencies, over half of the state Attorneys General, Democrat and Republican, the United States Senate, Democrat and Republican, and an overwhelming majority of House members, Democrat and Republican, and let the patch to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act expire.  As of Midnight the following Sunday, any foreign to foreign communications that happen to go through American company switching can no longer be listened to without a court order, blinding our intelligence and military agencies from acting to prevent future terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. 

What has Speaker Pelosi done with her time since she single-handedly put the country at greater risk by intentionally weakening the national defense?   On February 14th, the House considered 8 suspension bills, and 2 motions to adjourn, about five hours work.  They then broke for ten days to celebrate President's Day. On the 25th, they took up 3 suspension bills.  On the 26th, they started to work on the public housing bill, but withdrew it before final consideration.  On the 27th, Pelosi actually passed something - the energy tax bill. On the 28th, 3 more suspension bills.  Total work week? 15 hours and 5 minutes.

This week, there were three more suspension bills on the 4th, six more suspension bills and the mental health bill on the 5th.  And then we saw today's antics.

The House scheduled amendments and debate to reauthorize Americorps for five more years.  After tediously working through a couple of amendments, former California Attorney General and current Congressman, Dan Lungren, took to the floor and tried to hijack the Americorps bill by instead demanding the House take up the Senate version of the FISA bill.  Even blue dog Democrats want to get this thing done before something bad happens and Nancy Pelosi politically ruins the party.  But no, leadership can't have this discussion now, not when there's lawsuits to be had against the telcos for cooperating with the U.S. government to catch terrorists. George Miller, acting as the chief stooge for Nancy Pelosi, sought and achieved a ruling from the chair that Lungren's amendment was not germane, and therefore out of order.  Lungren and the Republicans appealed the ruling, and forced a vote.  It was narrowly defeated. 

Next Amendment to the Americorps bill was another Republican-drafted amendment to recommit the bill unless all Americorps candidates would have to subject themselves to a background check.  On the surface, that doesn't seem like such a bad idea - we would typically not want to see criminals flooding the ranks of Americorps volunteers.  This amendment sent the House leadership into a frenzy, not wanting to see a vote on this amendment.  After a brief delay in the action, Pelosi and her gang ended up pulling the overall Americorps bill from consideration, and abruptly adjourned for the week.  Another ten hour work week, and foreign terrorists know that for at least one more week, we are bound to an arcane law that is 20 years behind our current technology, providing a loophole for them to plot and scheme.

It will have been 23 days of blinding intelligence to foreign terrorist communications before the House reconvenes next week.  And there is literally one person on which to lay the liability  - Nancy Pelosi.  But she is not the only person who should take the heat.  There are a lot of House Democrats who would vote for this bill in a second, because despite policy differences, they do recognize the importance of getting national security right.  But while many of them have quietly complained to Pelosi since the FISA patch expired, they have not twisted her arm enough.  House Democrats should demonstrate that they put the national security of the country ahead of their party's politics.  They should take the long walk to Speaker Pelosi's office and tell her this is not what they signed up for.  

Our intelligence service has a hard enough time trying to detect and prevent attacks without having to do it blindfolded, deafened and with one arm tied behind their back by one of Nancy Pelosi's trial lawyers.

In case you missed it, John King on CNN's Situation Room explained very clearly why Democratic party officials are not sleeping real well these days.



If Hillary sweeps the remaining twelve states with an average margin of 55-45, she can't win without superdelegates flooding the zone, or cheating to include Florida and Michigan, which were uncontested wins for her. 

If Obama doesn't end up on the stand in the Ratso-Rizzo-Rezko trial and sweeps the remaining twelve states by an average margin of 65-35, he can't get to the nomination without superdelegates flooding the zone. 

What has Howard Dean been doing this week?  We have an exclusive peek into his office at the DNC:

Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats wrapped up another busy three-day work week Thursday morning with a flurry of legislative action.  She passed five bills naming post offices, created the official inaugural committee, and authorized the use of the Capitol Rotunda for the 2009 Inaugural.  With that workload behind her, it was time to call it a week and break for four days until next Tuesday. 

On the bad side, she and her Democratic colleagues couldn't seem to find time on the calendar to bring up the permanent patch to the FISA law, the bill that already passed the Senate in bipartisan fashion and would pass overwhelmingly in the House, the bill that allows our intelligence officials to continue monitoring and tracking the movements of enemy terrorists abroad, and actually helps prevent future terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.  So for almost the last two weeks, one foreign jihadist could make a 30 second sat phone call from one Middle Eastern country to another foreign jihadist in another Middle Eastern country, and because the communication technology routes a lot of this traffic through U.S. switching, our intelligence agencies would have to get a court order to be able to act on this 30 second phone call.  

But then again, on the good side, at least the trial lawyer lobby can continue to safely sue the telcoms if they cooperate with the U.S. government to try and thwart further attacks here.  

Meanwhile, over on the other end of the Capitol, Republican leader Mitch McConnell played another game of Lucy and the Football, with Harry Reid playing the role of Charlie Brown.  Early this week, Harry Reid wanted to bring up, for approaching the 70th time since he's become majority leader of the Senate, another couple of bills authored by Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold that would require immediate steps to withdraw our troops from Iraq.

Reid had figured that he would bring them up for consideration, that McConnell would immediately rally the Republicans to defeat the bill's 60 vote requirement to proceed to open floor debate, and then go out and hold a press conference before moving onto something else.  McConnell, toying with Reid as he's done since the Democrats took the majority in January '07, didn't knock the bills down, allowing them to proceed to the floor for debate, throwing the feckless Reid into a scheduling disaster.

Here's a still shot that is a common sight since Harry Reid's been in charge.



Standing, that would be Reid, Christopher Dodd, Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin, also known as the Larry, Moe, Curly and Shemp of the United States Senate. 

They weren't planning on spending any serious Senate floor time on this issue, but now they had to scramble and start scheduling Senators to come to the floor and rehash the same old tired rhetoric about how disastrous the war in Iraq is, an even harder argument to make when the situation all over Iraq is better than it was two months ago, the last time the Democrats tried to declare defeat.  And two months ago, the situation had significantly improved as well.  

After a couple of days of on and off debate, and very little else going on, Reid began to see the writing on the wall, meaning he wasn't going to get anywhere near the 60 votes he needed to cut off debate and proceed to final votes on Feingold's bills.  So he withdrew them from consideration, and vowed he would live to try and surrender another day, probably in a month when the next war appropriation bills come up.  

On the eve of entering 15 months in charge of the Congress, one chamber is committing malfeasance in dealing with the national security of the country, and in the other chamber, the Democrats have demonstrated all the originality and effectiveness of the Los Angeles Raiders' playbook.
 
If the Republican Party and its conservative supporters would simply put their internal quest for ideological purity aside for a moment, they'd recognize how inept, dangerous and utterly beatable this bunch is at all levels.  It's time to use the window that's been provided to us by Mitt Romney's gracious and strategic exit from the campaign, along with the bloodletting going on between Senators Obama and Clinton, and come together once more as the coalition Bill Buckley built.  There is no reason why issues and substance shouldn't beat false hope and empty change rhetoric every time out.

Leap year day means we have one extra day to stop squabbling about who is or isn't conservative enough to support, and start focusing on the task in front of us. Use your day wisely.

Last week, the New York Times ran a debacle of a story about John McCain that lacked credible sourcing and any hard facts to back up whispered, third-party allegations. It was a story that was deemed unworthy for publication by the Boston Globe, the Seattle Post Intelligencer and Beltway insiders like Morton Kondracke, and even the Times' own ombudsman, Clark Hoyt.  As Hugh cites below, there is a Rasmussen report that of the roughly two thirds of people polled that say they followed the Times story fairly closely last week, two-thirds of them believe it was a hatchet job by the Times to hurt McCain. 

So after their credibility took a huge hit, how do they follow up this week?  Carl Hulse runs a story with the headline, "McCain’s Canal Zone Birth Prompts Queries About Whether That Rules Him Out."  John McCain, it's true, was born on a military base in the Panama Canal Zone to a serving military dad and mom.  But the problem with the Times story is they do not cite anyone who is politically questioning McCain's eligibility. Part of reporting is explaining the who, what, when, where and why.  Mr. Hulse and his editors forgot the who.  He gets comments from a few legal scholars as to what they think the term natural born citizen means, and whether or not these experts think McCain might have a problem, but doesn't get into who's making the allegations, and more important, what the impact of those allegations will have on military families. 

The left loves to tell Americans how much they love and support the military despite being against the war, as was on display once again in the Senate this week, where Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and his friends on the Democratic side of the aisle unsuccessfully tried once again to cut and run in Iraq in the face of increasing progress on all fronts.

But the question should not be about whether McCain is or isn't eligible to run on a potential technicality the left wants to interpret from the writings of the founders.  The U.S. base where McCain was born at the time was U.S. territory. The real question is are the Democrats really anti-military enough to essentially indicate to thousand of families sacrificing for and serving this country abroad, at the request of the United States, that part of their sacrifice includes banning their children from aspiring to run for the top job in the land, the same land they are fighting and dying to protect?

Americans may be split on the issue of Iraq.  Americans may have differing views of what role our military should have in foreign policy.  That's a fair debate.  But Americans will not tolerate a political party that penalizes American citizens' future political ambitions because of their parents' active duty military service.  And the Times' attempt to sling mud stories week after week is going to eventually sound like the paper that cried wolf.

Last week, Hillary Clinton waited until well into her debate with Barack Obama to utter the line of the night that cost her the debate.  She had a scripted line to use about Barack Obama's change as being something you can Xerox, which fell flat and drew boos from the audience. 

Tonight in Ohio, Hillary didn't waste nearly as much time before uttering a gaffe which will probably seal the deal with many of her supporters as the final straw on the back of her candidacy. 

 

The first sixteen minutes were a ponderous back and forth over who's health care plan was more socialistic than the other's.  After Brian Williams tried to wrestle back control several times, he finally stepped in and changed topics to whether NAFTA should continued.  He started with Hillary Clinton, who inexplicably was appalled that she was asked the question first. 

Usually, in a debate, you like it when you get more time.  Just ask Christopher Dodd, Joe Biden, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, John Edwards and Bill Richardson, who many times in the earlier debated looked a collection of Maytag repairmen instead of presidential candidates while the focus was on Hillary and Obama.

Hillary should have relished the opportunity to go first.  Explaining her position wouldn't even have been as important as using the opportunity of going first and framing the views of her opponent, since Barack Obama doesn't give views on anything except the war.  He's a change guy. He's a hope guy.  He's a big picture/concept guy.  Obama doesn't get into specificity, so Hillary could easily have put him on the defensive.  

She didn't.  Hillary Clinton said she was curious about the media in the last few debates always going to her first, citing Saturday Night Live and offering to give an extra pillow to Obama to make him more comfortable.  Groans and boos immediately erupted from the crowd.  Want to know another signal that a campaign has come completely apart at the seams?  Look at the debate prep.  Hillary Clinton didn't just walk into the auditorium in Cleveland tonight and throw caution to the wind.  She prepared for this debate. She had people coaching her on what to say.  The 'change is something you can Xerox' line was scripted.  It laid an egg.  A week later, she tries again to make another sarcastic joke about the media's love afair with Obama. Again, it was an awkward egg laid by Mrs. Clinton.   If I were a campaign manager, and my candidate flopped like that in two consecutive debates, whoever was prepping her wouldn't just be fired, but probably sued for oratory malpractice.

You can tell that Hillary is frustrated that Obama is skating his way through the primary season without any significant scrutiny by the press.  But as vast and skilled as Team Hillary is, there seems to be no one on the payroll that has any idea how to combat it.  She doesn't possess the debate skills to put her opponent on the defensive, and when she's speaking at campaign rallies, whatever legitimate point she makes about the media's messianic complex with Obama gets lost in her shrill delivery.   

She may want to be the first woman in the White House, but she's never going to win by whining.  Because of the charisma chasm between her and Obama, she is being treated as a conservative by what she considered to be her allies in the mainstream media, and she clearly doesn't like it.  

What Hillary has not yet realized is that you can whine your way out of contention all you want.  Lord knows the Republican Party has enough experience with that. But if you want to actually win, you have to do it on issues and ideas, not sarcasm and excuses.   

Anybody out there have any idea whether any foreign radical Islamists contacted any of their allies today to discuss another terror attack on U.S. soil today? Thanks to Nancy Pelosi, as of last night, we legally cannot eavesdrop on these types of communications any longer without a prior court order. 

Regardless of whether or not the country still believes we're in a war against a virulent strain of Islamic jihadists, it should be and is up to the Commander-In-Chief to decide how best to pretect and defend the homeland.  Last Thursday, Ms. Pelosi, using her power as Speaker of the House of Representatives, let her opinion supercede that of the 534 other members of the United States Legislative Branch.  She refused to bring up the permanent fix to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, passed by a bipartisan majority in the Senate, and one which would have won bipartisan approval in the House. Now the House is on vacation for a week, as is one of the most effective tools of surveillance our country's intelligence community uses.  Why would she purposefully blind America to potential terror attacks that could otherwise be thwarted? She says the President took his eye of the real war on terror by going into Iraq, something which is demonstrably silly on many levels.

How can she have taken her eyes off the war on terror by tying the hands of our intelligence operatives?  Partisan politics.  Part of the patch on the FISA bill includes immunity from lawsuits against telecommunication companies that cooperate with the federal government on foreign surveillance.  Nancy Pelosi's acts as though her loyalites lie more with protecting the interests of the trial lawyer lobby than they do with the successful prosecution of the war on terror.

So if she wields the power as Speaker to scuttle a bill that weakens the country's defenses, as of Midnight last night, she and her Democratic Party must be held accountable for the consequences of that action.  When the jihadists try to attack us again, as they have shown every indication that this is their fervent desire, it must be the Democrats that have to answer for why, in a time of war, they intentionally made our intelligence agencies' job harder. 

Day one, Ms. Pelosi.  How many free days are you willing to give the enemy a chance to plot, plan and organize against us before you allow all of your other colleagues in Congress the chance to do their job, and therefore, giving our intelligence community the tools to do their job? 

Tick. Tick. Tick.    

As heard earlier on the radio show today, here is First Lady hopeful, Michelle Obama, unplugged.

Michelleobama.mp3

A good conservative, retired Col. Allen West, is running in South Florida for the Clay Shaw seat.  You can learn more about his campaign here.

On the negative side, very sad news this afternoon that John Shaddegg of Arizona, one of the brightest conservative stars in the House of Representatives, suddenly announced this evening that he is resigning from the House at the end of this term.  He will be missed. 

I was ten years old when Ronald Reagan gave his Fight On speech in 1976.  I'm sure my parents had it on, but of course there was no way I could have appreciated it for what it was - a signal to conservatives not to give up on their principles, not to give up fighting for what they believe to be best for their country, and to press on with good cheer.  After watching Mitt Romney's CPAC speech today, I have to believe the Gipper is smiling.

After a long and robust primary season, Mitt Romney looked at the map and the delegate math, and came to the respectable conclusion that the odds were too long to overcome.  He is a patriot, and realizes what four years or more of a Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama presidency could do to the country, and that a continued fight in the primary is going to continue to weaken McCain in the general.  Added to that, there is still too much reluctance, especially in the Bible Belt South, for Evangelical conservatives to pull the lever for a Mormon. 

The Democrats, on the other hand, aren't saddled with a base that is fractured over ideological grounds in this election cycle.  They want to win, whoever the candidate is. And that's exactly what they're going to do unless the GOP remembers that there's no winning when you lose.  

The war against radical jihadists is a concept that Barack Obama has articulated no knowledge about. He wants to talk unconditionally.  He wants to negotiate.  He wants to unite.  The jihadists don't want to talk. They want us dead. 

Hillary Clinton has more of an understanding of what we're up against, but she wants to return to the White House.  Issues are secondary to her. They're props. They're tools to be used to get her back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  She wants power. What she does when she gets it remains to be seen, but both of them will work to negate the gains we've made in Iraq, and will return America to being reactionary rather than proactive when it comes to dealing with foreign threats.  

John McCain does understand the war.  He understands how reckless it would be for Iran to become a nuclear state.  He knows the complexities of Pakistan and the other hot spots around the Middle East.  America would be safer with John McCain than either of the two Democrats. 

Many conservatives view John McCain's positions on several issues as being no different than liberals, causing them to question why they should even bother this November, given their choice.  Erwin Chemerinsky, a man of the left who knows the American judiciary like few others, compared the possible Supreme Court justices of a President John McCain versus a President Hillary or Obama. He is going to be voting in November, because he knows what the Supreme Court would look like if either Hillary or Obama would get to replace up to six justices.  I hope conservatives come to that conclusion, too.  Remember, Ted Olson is on board with the McCain camp, and would have a seat at the table if and when a Court vacancy opened up. 

Romney's policy differences with John McCain remain, as they do with the majority of the conservative electorate out there.  But the war and the Court are too important to throw away on the silly notion of trying to teach the party a lesson by not participating this time.  

I've screened the phone calls on the show from conservatives who have said they can't look themselves in the mirror and ever vote for John McCain.  I've received e-mails saying the same thing. But consider this - Justice John Paul Stevens, a hard left justice who is well into his 80's, is in all likelihood not going to continue serving until the end of the next presidency. You could have voted for John McCain, and helped to replace Justice Stevens with a conservative who later viewed Roe V. Wade as bad law and helped to overturn it. But you didn't vote because you thought McCain wasn't conservative enough, and enough other Republicans followed your lead. Instead, Hillary or Barack replaced Justice Stevens with someone of the same liberal ideology, but far younger, essentially ensuring that abortion continues along as a federally guaranteed right. Now how do you look at yourself in the mirror? And that's just one example.  The Court is the prize. The left knows it. The right needs to realize it, too.

Mitt Romney very eloquently stated why he is now putting his policy differences with John McCain aside and standing down.  He did it with grace and class, and he did it for the greater good of the country.  Let's hope that over the course of the next few months, the rest of the conservatives in the Republican party follow Mitt Romney's example. 

This was from Fox News Channel with Brit Hume hosting, about an hour ago.  Watch how fast Fox cuts out of John McCain's anemic 'we will bring the party together' speech and goes to Prince Barack.  And this is supposed to be the conservatives' network.  The funny thing is I don't blame them for making the switch.  I would have, too.

Also notice the optics here.  John McCain, flanked by his mother, his wife, grey-haired Charlie Crist, and Democrat Joe Lieberman.  The cumulative age of all five in the shot is 332 years old.

Now go to the Barack shot.  There is 13 people behind Barack.  Average mien age?  Twentysomething. If you add up the ages of all of them, it's still less than the five people in the John McCain shot. 

Our side looked like a 60th high school reunion, and their side looks like the Peace Corps. 

It's going to be a long nine months.

Thank God in Heaven above that we don't have to hear anything about a Boston sports dynasty for a while.  Congrats to Eli and the Super Bowl Champion New York Giants.

PS: Sorry, Dean.

So according to this story, NASA is going to broadcast "Across The Universe" by the Beatles across the galaxy to the North Star, Polaris. 

Two questions:  What exactly is the going rate for ASCAP and BMI for intergalactic licensing?  And have our friends at NASA considered the implications if General Zod doesn't care for the Beatles?

Takin' McCain on CNN about an hour ago with Wolf Blitzer:

From CNN's The Situation Room Wednesday afternoon:



A few highlights:

I never, ever heard a word of public complaint when Mr. Obama said Hillary was not truthful, and how character was poll driven, when he had more pollsters than she did. When he put out a hit job on me, at the same time, he called her the Senator from Punjab, I never said a word. And I don’t care about it today. I’m not upset about it.

No, of course he's not upset about it.  'In fact, let me describe everything they did to me that I didn't like, just to show you how not upset about it I am.'  I'm not a psychologist, but Bill appears to be a little upset about it.

The only thing I pointed out was that there was substantially no difference in her record than his on Iraq, and that he had said in 2004 there was no difference between his position and President Bush. And he said that was somehow dishonest, but he never answers how it’s not accurate. So this is crazy. This rhetoric is getting a little carried away here.

Wasn't it Bill Clinton that said, "Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen," in describing Barack Obama and his supposed stance on the war in 2004?  Who made Bill Clinton the rhetoric judge, especially when it's usually Bill who initiates the ramping up of the rhetoric in the first place?  

And let me remind you, my ultimate answer is this. There are still two people around her who marched with Martin Luther King, and risked their lives – John Lewis and Reverend Andrew Young. They both said that Hillary was right, and the people who attacked her were wrong, and that she did not play the race card, but they did. So I don’t have to defend myself from Dick Harpootlian.

This is classic Bill Clinton.  He's being accused of playing the race card, a la Lee Atwater, by Dick Harpootlian.  So Bill responds with appropriate disdain by playing the race card, citing John Lewis and Andrew Young, two high profile African-American civil rights activists and Congressmen, as if to say those from the Obama camp who have attacked Hillary of playing the race card were wrong, so says my two African-American friends who would know.  

I’ll just refer you to John Lewis and Andrew Young, and let him go get in an argument with them about it. Let him go get in an argument with Dolores Huerta, one of the founders of the Farm Workers, against what happened in Nevada.

Bill is not just playing a race card, he's playing several.  In fact, he's working on an inside straight.  Not only should you go talk to my two African-American friends who say we're not playing the race card, but go talk to my Latino migrant farmworker union friend, Dolores Huerta. 

And the final thing I’d like to say is you’re asking me about this, and you sat through this whole meeting. Not one, single, solitary soul asked about any of this, and they never do. They’re feeding you this because they know this is what you want to cover. This is what you live for.

Ah, well, the resurrection of the vast right wing conspiracy, the Bill and Hillary Clinton Borg, which has now taken hold with ultra-liberal Barack Obama, and is sucking in the gullibly secretive, conservative news outlet, CNN.  If people knew of Richard Nixon's level of paranoia going in, it's hard to imagine him getting elected in the first place, let alone being re-elected.  Bill and Hillary have put paranoia on display several times from within the White House in the 90's, during her Senatorial career, and on the current campaign trail.  Why in the world would we want another four years of this? 

But this hurts the people of South Carolina, because the people of South Carolina are coming to these meetings, and asking questions about what they care about. And what they care about is not going to be in the news coverage tonight, because you don’t care about it. What you care about is this. And the Obama people know that. So they just spin you up on this, and you happily go along. The people don’t care about this. They never ask about it. And you are determined to take this election away from them, and that’s not right. That is not right. This election ought to belong to those people who are out here asking questions about their lives.

Alas, he lied again.  It wasn't his final word.  He shifted seamlessly into the 'I feel your pain' section.  It's hard to remember a bigger narcissist that ever occupied the Oval Office.  Is there seriously anyone out there who believes that Bill Clinton cares one whit about what South Carolinians care about?  He doesn't.  He's expertly trying to manipulate the media by accusing them of allowing themselves to be manipulated by his opponent.  And make no mistake about it.  Barack Obama is his opponent every bit as much as Hillary's.  

Harpootlian calls me Lee Atwater? I spent all my life fighting those people? And he wasn’t in Nevada. So he’s having a fight not with me, but with Dolores Huerta, who founded the Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez. He should ask her. She was there. He doesn’t care what happened. He just knows he can call you a name, and you guys’ll cover it. They did not ask about this, and you don’t care what your own people care about. They care about what happens to the American people. That’s one thing John Edwards was right about in the debate.

So I'm confused. Bill is either saying he spent all his life fighting Lee Atwater, or people who play the race card as political dirty tricks.  In either case, he's wrong.  Lee Atwater's biggest claim to fame had nothing to do with Bill Clinton's Arkansas career, or his eight years in the White House.  In fact,  Atwater was ill and repented of his political actions in 1990, almost two years before he would become president.

He could also be implying that all Republican politicos and Lee Atwater are one and the same, that they all use dirty tricks, which is another dangerous thing for Clinton to say, especially with people like Harold Ickes, Bob Shrum, James Carville and Paul Begala around.  

As Christopher Hitchens said so well on Hugh's show Wednesday, 

And it’s interesting, too, because it shows he is completely out of control. In other words, he has a lot of good friends who keep telling him, ‘Bill, you must stop with this. You can’t just ramble and rant on in this mad way like some tenth rate huckster instead of behaving like a former president and chief executive of the United States.’ And he knows that they’re right, but he can’t not help himself. And it’s the same with everything else.  

He’s just a prisoner of his terrible appetites and his egomania. 

Kudos to CNN for airing this exchange.  Bill Clinton continues to prove himself to be a beacon of hope to the Republican Party that despite a bruising primary on our side, the Clintons will remain one of, if not the, single biggest unifying factor in American politics, leading to continued Republican control of the White House for the foreseeable future.

John Edwards on the Late Show last night with David Letterman, waiting for rigor mortis to set in on his presidential campaign.




Letterman: Could I just mess up your hair a little bit?

JE: You want to? Go ahead.

DL: You don't mind?

JE: I don't mind.



Uh, something tells me he minded. Suppose Letterman would try to muss up the hair of Hillary or Barack?  Nope.  Edwards is polling roughly half of the numbers Hillary is in South Carolina, his native state.  And that's the battle for second place.  Edwards is polling roughly a third of what Obama is.  In Monty Python terms, his campaign is the dead parrot.