Big win in NY State Senate

It's been decades since the Democrats have controlled the New York State Senate. Decades. But, tonight, they moved within one vote of control. With a Democratic Governor, a Democratic Assembly, the State is on the verge of becoming the blue bastion it should be:

Democrat Darrel Aubertine has upset Republican Will Barclay in the special election for New York State's 48th Senate District – slicing the Republican majority in the State Senate to just one.

With 99 percent of the precincts reporting, the Associated Press projected the victory. Aubertine has 27,532 votes, or 52 percent, to 25,001 votes for Barclay, 48 percent.

A New York politico tells me this win is HUGE: "it is a bellwether race - in a district that has nearly twice as many republicans as dems."

State legislatures matter. A lot. Control of state legislatures matters. A lot. Read the rest of this post...

Democratic Debate Wrap-Up

Okay, the last debate is over. There was no knock-out punch. And, Hillary Clinton needed one, badly.

For the most part, Obama was steady on a broad range of issues. Clinton was good...had a few rough moments. The Saturday Night Live line was pathetic.

I thought the question about Farrakhan was weird. And, Russert just kept pushing it.

Overall, great substance from both candidates. And, watching this debate, what Obama and Clinton said about each other at the end is true. Both are worthy, both will be so much better than John McCain. No doubt about that.

In my view, the win goes to Obama. A clean win. And a win that sets him on the road to the nomination. We'll know next week at this time.

One last thing: Watching the post-debate analysis, it's hard to understand how Olbermann can sit on the same panel with that buffoon Chris Matthews. Read the rest of this post...

Democratic Debate Open Thread

10:34 PM: Williams asks a stupid final question trying to get Obama and Clinton to diss each other. Obama won't take the bait...she is worthy..and turns to bashing McCain. She doesn't have to answer the question of whether she can be the standard bearer. I just think I'm better. Clinton says they both feel strongly about the country. It's an honor to campaign -- and she intends to do everything she can to win. Either one of us will make history. The question is who can change the country and she thinks she can.

10:29 PM: Clinton would take back her vote on Iraq. Obama upset he didn't stop the Schiavo fiasco. It was his inaction that bothered him. Obama does a nice wrap up. He's right. Both of them want to deliver for the American people. We do have two terrific candidates and either of them will kick McCain's ass.

10:22 PM: Russia question. Long answers, both good answers.

10:14 PM: Okay, reject and denounce. Are we happy now? That was a weird and uncomfortable exchange.

10:10 PM: Russert is doing a damn good job. I wish he'd be this tough on his Sunday show, where I think he talks tough but doesn't always really dog the people he has on the show. He's hitting Hillary and Obama both with the really tough stuff, good for him.

10:07 PM: Not sure I care whether Hillary releases her tax returns, but in general, I've always found it rather voyeuristic, the tax return thing. Maybe I don't get it.

10:04 PM: Campaign finance. Here's the answer -- listen, Tim -- McCain is on the verge of breaking the campaign finance laws. He could go to jail for 5 years as a result. Why do I care what McCain thinks about this issue, he's lost all credibility. As for Obama, Russert got it wrong. Obama didn't promise to take public funding, he said he'd sit down the GOP nominee and try to work out a deal. Big difference.

10:01 PM: Two film clips...both Clinton and Obama say she was having fun with her clip about the sky opening up. Then a clip of Barack talking about Clinton being co-President. He did have a good line about her vote on a credit card bill...said if you oppose bills, you vote against them.

9:48 PM: A break. Brian Williams had to work had to get it, but he did.

9:41 PM: Hillary: I won't get bin Laden. Not a real winning argument. Basically, she criticized Obama for saying that if we had Osama in our sights in Pakistan and the Pakistanis refused to take him out, we would. Hillary just criticized him for saying that. So, she wouldn't go after Osama if the Pakistanis refused to?

9:39 PM: Hillary uses a John McCain talking point on Pakistan. Obama goes back to Iraq -- a huge strategic blunder. She was ready to give into George Bush on Day One. She facilitated and enabled George Bush. He corrects her on Pakistan.

9:34 PM: Barack gets asked about Hillary's foreign policy criticism of him. He doesn't equate experience with longevity in Washington, but Hillary does. Then he pivots into Iraq, Pakistan and other issues where he thinks he's been right -- and she's been wrong.

9:23 Russert just called Hillary on NAFTA. Said she supported it repeatedly. "Your record is pretty clear."

9:18 Holy shit. Hillary just asked if Barack needed another pillow. Jesus Christ. The audience just went "oohhhhh" on that one. My God. We've invoked Matt Drudge and Saturday Night Live tonight. That was just pathetic.

9:16 PM: Good God, shut up already. I'm sorry, but Hillary won't shut up. It's like debating one of those Republicans on TV who just won't stop. Come on, already. She's been doing this the past several debates.

9:11 PM: Still on health care. Clinton gives good arguments. Obama comes right back.

9:07 PM: Brian Williams actually cited Matt Drudge in a question to Hillary Clinton about the now infamous phote. Barack brings it back to health care. NBC showed the photo on the air, not sure that's appropriate.

9:04 PM: Wow, they started by showing videos of Hillary being conciliatory at the end of the last debate, and then the video of Hillary kind of losing it over Obama's recent mailings. She's giving a pretty good answer - sane, level-headed, not angry. I still think "angry" is only minutes away.

Game on. This could be the final debate of the primary season. We've watched and liveblogged almost all of them. John and I are both writing the live blog in this thread.

As in the past, we'll look for the high and low points. Hopefully, more high points. Read the rest of this post...

Democratic Debate minutes away

It starts in ten minutes. Hillary has two choices. Well, three actually.

1. Stick to the issues.
2. Go massively negative.
3. Start nice, go negative about halfway through, then get nice again for the last half.

I suspect Hillary will take option 3, which she's done before (including the last debate). Hillary has to rattle Obama, or the nomination is over - he's won. It is unlikely that she'll get 65% of the vote in Ohio and Texas, which she needs to get the nomination, so she has to get Obama to screw up. And the best way to do that is to rattle him, by going negative. But, if Hillary goes negative, then she looks bad - she doesn't do negative well. So, she may choose to start positive, go negative halfway through, to see if she can provoke a reaction, then go positive again for the last part so people lose any ill-will that may have been generated by her turning negative.

The thing is, Obama knows this. I'm sure his people have told him that under no circumstances is he to take the bait. If he doesn't take the bait, he wins. What option will Hillary choose? We'll find out in a few minutes. Read the rest of this post...

SEIU is on the air for Obama

The big dog weighs in. SEIU's Committee On Political Education started running three ads today for Obama in Ohio and Texas -- including this one in Spanish:
Read the rest of this post...

GOP Senator: Democrats want to put "a bullet right in the hearts of our troops"

The more the Democrats let the Republicans say things like this, the more they deserve what they get. And the more they make it okay for Republicans to launch such attacks against our presidential candidate this fall, calling the Dem nominee unpatriotic, etc. The Democrats ought to introduce a censure resolution condemning GOP Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas). It's what the Republicans would do to ensure that this never happens again. But we're too nice. And that's why our patriotism keeps being attacked, because we never want to defend ourselves, and only feed the notion that we aren't willing to defend anything, even our country. Read the rest of this post...

5500 year old plaza re-discovered in Peru

Fascinating. Can you imagine how many other cool sites are still buried and unknown to the modern world? Read the rest of this post...

The GOP's Senate candidate in South Dakota funded company that "scraped skin of cadavers for profit"

Ok. You think that headline is something out of National Enquirer. It's not. This is true. The Republican's are pushing Steve Kirby as their candidate for U.S. Senate in South Dakota. You have to read Kirby's story to believe it -- and there is a direct connection to the skin of dead people.

Markos has the grisly details on "the ghouls who scraped skin of cadavers for big profit" here and here. Read the rest of this post...

Foreign policy in campaigns

My friend and colleague Michael Signer had a great WaPo op-ed this weekend, fresh off a ten month stint as a senior foreign policy advisor to the Edwards campaign, about the dearth of media coverage on foreign affairs in the primaries. Signer rightly notes that the meaty foreign policy discussions are far more often carried out on blogs than in newspapers, and with a few notable exceptions, foreign policy issues have never really gained traction in either primary. This is especially weird considering the president has far more unilateral power on foreign policy than domestic issues, which are hugely shaped by Congress. It's partly due to general intra-party agreement on foreign policy -- obviously the general will feature much stronger disagreement about, say, Iraq -- but also partly because of media failures.

It's also, though, partly the fault of campaigns, or at least some Democratic foreign policy professionals who continue to see politics as icky or beneath them. Matt Stoller elaborates:

Look, if you want foreign policy to become a political issue, you have to make it a political issue. That's an organizing problem. I didn't see any attacks from any Democratic candidates against each other on North Korea or Russia, any attempts to draw distinctions, though I saw a lot of high-minded 'major serious policy addresses'. Of course those are going to be discussed on elite foreign policy focused blogs and nowhere else. If you want to get into the fray, you have to get in the fray.

And it's true: my favorite way to talk about foreign policy is to chat in a wonky way with other wonks. But I do things like write for this blog and write a book and attend YearlyKos because there's huge value in making these issues accessible and, dare I say, interesting to people who aren't professionals. So Signer rightly elaborates on the media aspect of the problem, and the best way to influence that -- rather than simply hoping the media does a better job all on its own -- is to connect the policy with the political. It's an effort that is, I should say, *vastly* improved from two or four years ago, with excellent groups popping up to do it, but there's always more room for us to get better, and it's vital that we do. Read the rest of this post...

Is Democratic Congresswoman using House Web site to campaign for Hillary?

It sure is odd that outspoken Hillary surrogate, Democratic Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH) - the person who launched a racist attack on Obama today - has a picture of herself and Hillary on her House congressional office Web site home page. The picture is from an event a year ago. Yet it still remains on Tubbs Jones' House home page as news 12 months later. Perhaps Tubbs Jone's staff is so incompetent that they haven't changed their home page in a year so that it just happens to be promoting Hillary one week before the crucial do-or-die primary in Tubbs Jones' own state, Ohio. Perhaps.

You decide. (Note, it would be a violation of House rules for Tubbs Jones to use her congressional Web site to campaign for anyone.)

Tubbs Jones' House Web site home page today:



The event took place on March 7, 2007 - almost one year ago to the date:

Read the rest of this post...

FOX's Geraldo channels Time Magazine's Mark Halperin

As John noted below, Mark Halperin from TIME Magazine thinks McCain's surrogates should "Allow some supporters to risk being accused of using the race card when criticizing Obama." What better group of supporters to risk racism than McCain's friends at Fox News. If you've ever read Halperin or seen any of his ubiquitous t.v. appearances, it's pretty clear the guy thinks he single-handedly determines the political conventional wisdom in American politics. So his "analysis" (as he calls it) seeming to condone the idea that a racist strategy can be part of McCain's strategy is especially insidious. But maybe he should be concerned that Geraldo was a step ahead of him -- or maybe Halperin is taking direction Geraldo. Eugene Robinson has the story:

On "Fox and Friends" last week, the mustachioed infotainer gave his take on Barack Obama's borrowing of his campaign chairman's words: "When I saw that they were the same words that Deval Patrick, the black guy who won as Massachusetts mayor -- as Massachusetts governor -- had used, I said to myself, it seems so premeditated. It's almost as if they went to a camp where these black geniuses got together and figured out how to beat the political system. . . . What's the other formula that they're going to use?"

Ridiculous? Of course -- this is Geraldo, remember.

Ridiculous, of course. But, it's the play book proffered by Time Magazine's political guru, Mark Halperin.

And, of course, we all know that anyone who knows Mark Halperin will tell us he's not a racist. Okay, fine. But he has a very powerful voice and he basically said that one of the "things McCain can do" is have supporters play the "race card." Read the rest of this post...

Clinton surrogate says Obama is really from Somalia

I actually don't have a problem with Hillary comparing Obama to Bush (see quotes at the end of this post). Meaning, I don't have an ethical problem with it, I'm not going to complain that it's "negative." Some negative campaigning is fine, in my eyes. Saying your opponent is divisive, lacks credibility, or in this case, will return us to the policies of the previous president, or is just as incompetent as the previous president, are fair game in my book.

What I don't think is legit is "going over the top" negative. It's hard to define "over the top," but using racism comes to mind (such as sending around pictures of your opponent wearing traditional Somali clothing that makes people think he's a Muslim since we all know that all Muslims are radical terrorists) - even worse, being caught using racism again and again and again. To wit, this from Clinton surrogate, Democratic Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, referring today to Somalia as Obama's "country" and Obama's "nation."



Transcript:

BUCHANAN: You saw that lovely photograph on Drudge yesterday and Drudge said initially that Clintonites gave it to her. If Clinton, the Clintonite did that, would you consider that first a dirty trick and secondly, would you think the individual that did it should be fired if they could find him or her.

JONES: Understand this: The Clinton campaign does not condone people putting out pictures that they seem to believe are inappropriate. But let me say this: I have no shame or no problem with people looking at Barack Obama in his native clothing, in the clothing of his country.

This is a diverse country and people across America recognize that. I would not personally have done it and we can't attribute it to anybody in our campaign, but the Clinton campaign does not condone the conduct and we would hope that America is going to have an opportunity or begin to see if we're supporting a woman or an African-American for President, we ought to be able to support their ability to wear the clothing of their nation.

That is flat-out racist. Tubbs Jones is saying this in order to accomplish several Republican messaging goals:

1. Suggest that Obama is un-American (he's from "over there," and a very black over there to boot).
2. Remind people that Obama is black.
3. Reinforce the hate emails alleging, falsely, that Obama is Mulsim.
4. Remind people that Obama is from a country that viciously killed American troops in the 1990s.

This is the sixth time, at least, I believe, that the Clinton's and their surrogates have launched racist attacks on Obama. It's not just abominable on its face, it's absolutely astounding that the Clinton campaign is now using Republican hate-emails to create their talking points about Obama. The Clinton campaign simply doesn't care if they permanently damage Obama for the general election by feeding the GOP Swift Boat attacks on the man who is very likely going to be our nominee. Call Rep. Tubbs Jones and let her know how you feel about her, and the Clinton campaign's, serial race-baiting:

Washignton Office: (202) 225-7032
Ohio Office: Telephone: (216) 522-4900

Race-baiting simply isn't the same thing as saying your opponent is divisive and lacks credibility. What would be the same thing is were Obama and company publicly talking about Bill Clinton's sex life past and present. That would be inappropriate, disgusting, and damaging to Hillary and her run for the presidency were she to get the nomination - it would be the same thing as talking about Obama's race and ethnic origins. And in spite of how negative both sides have gotten, you don't see Obama's people, or even their surrogates, touching Bill Clinton's sex life, even though, frankly, it would be one hell of a bombshell to drop on Hillary. There IS a difference in how negative each campaign has gotten.

Moving away from racism for a moment, my problem with Hillary's attack below is that 3 months ago she swore off such attacks, and now she's using them the same week that she's complaining about Obama going negative. Both sides have gone negative, but there's a difference between negative and vicious. The stuff below is not vicious, but

Clinton campaign in December:

"If you want to talk about tactical political maneuvering, it's about one Democrat comparing another Democrat to George Bush," Wolfson told the AP. "That's the worst kind of tactical political maneuvering."

Hillary yesterday:

Read the rest of this post...

Inflation soared in January

More evidence of stagflation, not to mention incompetence by Bernanke.

The Labor Department said Tuesday that wholesale prices rose 1 percent last month, more than double the 0.4 percent increase that economists had been expecting.

The January surge left wholesale prices rising by 7.5 percent over the past 12 months, the fastest pace in more than 26 years, since prices had risen at a 7.5 percent pace in the 12 months ending in October 1981.

In his desire to help out Wall Street his policies are brutalizing average Americans who can't keep up with rising costs. This troubled economy is still in the beginning phase of unraveling and Washington is doing its best to drag it out.

This isn't like the S&L; crisis of John McCain's 1980s where a few billion could patch things up. We are looking at hundreds of billions of dollars of bad business that were allowed because of GOP policies. It's not as easy as writing a few checks and hoping it will work out. Specific policy by Republicans brought us here and it's going to take a few years to get past this. We now need to decide if we are going to throw good money after bad to Wall Street or help minimize inflation for the general population. At the moment, it's all for Wall Street. Read the rest of this post...

TIME's MARK HALPERIN: McCain should consider racist attacks on Obama

Nothing is off-limits when the media wants to attack Democrats:

Things McCain can do when running against Obama that Clinton has been unable to do well or at all:

....Allow some supporters to risk being accused of using the race card when criticizing Obama....

Emphasize Barack Hussein Obama’s unusual name and exotic background through a Manchurian Candidate prism.

Who needs the Swift Boat Veterans when you have TIME's Mark Halperin and AP's Nedra Pickler to do their dirty work for them? Read the rest of this post...

Tuesday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

Big debate tonight. We now know the Clinton campaign's strategy is to throw the "kitchen sink" at Obama. After over a year on the campaign trail, it's come to this. How inspiring.

Has John McCain broken the campaign finance laws yet? If his campaign spent over $54 million while he's in the public financing system, he has. We'll know from the FEC reports filed for February (unless McCain decides that part of the law doesn't matter either). At the end of January, McCain had over $5 million in debt. Paying his debts and his February expenses could break the cap -- a criminal offense. Be tough to run for president from a federal prison facility. No wonder Romney is thinking of getting back in.

Okay, let's get it started. Read the rest of this post...

New study says Prozac does not work

Considering the widespread use of anti-depressants this is big news. As a person who tries to do just about anything to avoid pharmaceuticals (I don't react well to them) I wonder if the medical community will start promoting alternative treatments such as diet change and other natural remedies. The problem, according to the pharma industry, is that it is difficult to run tests on alternative treatments and have mathematical results as you can with modern medicine. Perhaps. I also believe that all too often Big Pharma cherry picks data or entire studies, as this new report suggests. One could easily view this as falsely overcharging insurance companies and consumers and another reason why health care is so expensive.

Prozac, the bestselling antidepressant taken by 40 million people worldwide, does not work and nor do similar drugs in the same class, according to a major review released today.

The study examined all available data on the drugs, including results from clinical trials that the manufacturers chose not to publish at the time. The trials compared the effect on patients taking the drugs with those given a placebo or sugar pill.

When all the data was pulled together, it appeared that patients had improved - but those on placebo improved just as much as those on the drugs.

Read the rest of this post...

Banks unable to prove they own mortgages in foreclosure courts

But remember, they are the professionals. Just because they are unable to locate the documents for 20% of the mortgages they theoretically own doesn't mean they should be held accountable, according to the banks. They argue that it's all the fault of the homeowners who are calling them out who are the problem. They are the ones preventing others from receiving new loans.

It's no wonder the Qatar Sovereign Wealth Fund ($60 billion in assets) is avoiding investments in US banks. They know it's going to get worse because the banks ignored common sense and have fallen into a hole. Keep in mind as well that McCain's "economic brain" Phil Gramm helped set up the financial industry for this fall by forcing through the bankers dream legislation, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999. Banking regulations were thrown out the window because of course, banks can self-regulate. Just look at how well they've done. In a McCain administration we could expect more of the same in banking as well as health care. Just imagine the possibilities... Read the rest of this post...