Quick Points of Interest

I know it's been a long time since the event, but as promised, here's a full table of contents to Leonard Pierce's dance with the devils at CPAC. Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13.

• Hillary can't get her act together in Pennsylvania: she's 10 delegates short of a full slate. (No, that is not a euphemism for insanity.)
  
  
• Your tax dollars at work, explaining your tax dollars to you. But this time, briefly and concisely, unlike the tax code itself.
  
  
• Sadly, No reacts to the idea that candidates should be down-to-earth: "I honestly don’t give two shits if either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama wants to have a beer with me. I just want them to do their best to not destroy the universe. Needless to say, George W. Bush has failed in this regard."
  
  
• Curious George and the 19% approval rating. It looks like The Man in the Yellow Hat has some 'splainin' to do.
  
  
• Sadly, No again, this time juxtaposing Barack Obama's lack of foreign policy experience with the "foreign policy dream team" that came into the White House . . . in 2001.
  
  
• George W. Bush went to Rwanda to talk about having learned the lessons of ignoring a genocide. Meanwhile . . .
  
  
• Andrew Sullivan's crush on Barack Obama comes in handy, since he can actually list Obama's accomplishments.
  
  
• If Barack Obama wants to be more lenient on meeting with foreign dignitaries we may not like as much, it's because he acknowledges that we've got a lot of PR to do as far as fixing our image abroad.
  
  
• Barack Obama isn't beating Hillary Clinton because he's more hopeful than she is, it's because he's got one of the best political organizations you could, well, hope for.
  
  
• God help the GOP when Dick Armey is the one calling for moderation on the immigration issue.
  
  
• Apparently the fastest growing religious group in America are those who don't have, want, or need a religious group. My take on this is that the Christian Right is stigmatizing Christianity as a whole for a lot of people, but that's just speculation. Personally, I know three people in Chicago who attend a church -- a couple and their infant daughter -- and they're Unitarians.
  
  
• Barack Obama being reasonable about Israel and Palestine. It is not, nor has it ever been, an all-or-nothing scenario. It is possible for both groups to be run by racist warmongers blinded to reason by their own nationalism.
  
  
• John McCain explains that the war will basically be over soon, despite the fact that we'll still have a troop presence in the six figures and insurgents will still be blowing things up. It's all a part his plan for building a global American empire. It's seeming more and more to me like McCain is a single-issue candidate (that issue being war), and it's seeming to me more and more that he's one of the people I would least like responsible for dealing with that issue.
  
  
• Your paycheck is getting worse every time, you just don't know it.