Kick up your heels and take a quick break. This week’s camp from the musical, Oliver! I’d Do Anything. And I’d do anything for Hilllary, except vote for Barack Obama, so perhaps it’s I’d do almost anything, anything for Hillary.

Fagin, played by Ron Moody, prancing and twirling at the end of this scene is priceless. The musical is by Lionel Bart and it’s a camp classic. Lionel Bart was born in East London in 1930, the youngest of seven children. His parents were Galician Jews who escaped the pogroms in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and split between Poland and the Ukraine. His real name was Lionel Begleiter. Amazingly, Lionel Bart never learned to read nor write musical notation. Oliver! was by far his biggest hit and at one point, it was earning Bart £16 a minute! He never married and was presumed to be gay though he was at one point romantically linked to Judy Garland, a gay match made in heaven.

I have often wondered why gay men just adore musicals. I think it affords us the opportunity to just be silly in public, something we can’t normally do. Oliver! is by far my favourite musical. The camp factor is high. I guess we also just love to tap our toes, and not just at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

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Isn’t this something? Debra Bartoshevich, a pledged Clinton from Racine, Wisconsin, is defecting to John McCain come November. What does this tell you? From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

As an avid supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries, Debra Bartoshevich is not alone in her frustration over Clinton’s defeat.

She’s not alone in refusing to support Barack Obama. And she’s not entirely alone in saying she’ll vote this fall for Republican John McCain instead. But what makes her unusual is that she holds these views as an elected delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Denver this summer.

“I’m sure people are going to be upset with me. I don’t want to lose my national delegate status,” says Bartoshevich, a 41-year-old emergency room nurse who is a convention delegate, pledged to Clinton, from Waterford in Racine County.

Joe Wineke, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, reacted with disbelief when first told Friday afternoon that one of his state party delegates is now a McCain supporter.

“Not a delegate? To the national convention?” asked Wineke, who was getting ready for the start of the state party convention Friday in Stevens Point.

“We have a Clinton national (convention) delegate who says she’s voting for John McCain?” Wineke repeated, for clarification. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

Well, Joe Wineke there’s never been such an unqualified candidate to be nominated by a major US political party. Perhaps that should be your disbelief because it is certainly mine. Kudos to Debra Bartoshevich. She sounds like quite the PUMA.

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In yet another blow by the voters to the bureaucrats and political class that run Europe, Irish voters rejected on Thursday the Lisbon Treaty by a 7.8% margin. The turnout was low which was expected to boost chances for passage but it didn’t turn out that way. From the New York Times:

Europe was thrown into political turmoil on Friday by Ireland’s rejection of the Lisbon Treaty, a painstakingly negotiated blueprint for consolidating the European Union’s power and streamlining its increasingly unwieldy bureaucracy. The defeat of the treaty, by a margin of 53.4 percent to 46.6 percent, was the result of a highly organized “no” campaign that had played to Irish voters’ deepest visceral fears about the European Union. For all its benefits, many people in Ireland and in Europe feel that the union is remote, undemocratic and ever more inclined to strip its smaller members of the right to make their own laws and decide their own futures.

The repercussions of Friday’s vote are enormous. To take effect, the treaty must be ratified by all 27 members of the European Union. So the defeat by a single country, even one as small as Ireland, has the potential effect of stopping the whole thing cold.

Video on the Irish vote from the UK Guardian.

More on this, including reaction from Europe, over the weekend.

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What a dramatic day in Switzerland. First the Italians avoid elimination by tying Romania 1-1. Italy gains its first point but they can still qualify for the second round by beating France and hoping that Romania doesn’t beat the Netherlands. It certainly doesn’t look like anyone can beat the Oranje who simply demolished France, the World Cup runner-up. The final score was 4-1. The Dutch are certainly making a case for their first European championship since 1988. As for the World Champion Italian team, they were fortunate to tie. Italy goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon superbly saved Adrian Mutu’s penalty with nine minutes remaining to keep the world champions’ UEFA EURO 2008™ hopes alive as the Azzurri and Romania battled out a breathless draw in Zurich. So far the Group of Death has been deadly to all but the Dutch.

Tomorrow’s Matches
Winners of their first game, Sweden and Spain square off tomorrow in Innsbruck while the two losers of their first game, Greece and Russia meet in Salzburg.

For more on the matches and the tourney, please visit Euro2008.

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Chicago Rules For Stealing Elections

Chicago’s election get-out-the-vote effort was pioneered by Mayor Richard Daley in 1960 when he stole the election from Richard Nixon. His motto was “Vote Early and Vote Often”. Mayor Daley also codified the handbook of special constituencies unique to Chicago.

1. Cemetery Voters: Read the obituaries every day. One must keep track of everyone who dies, so that they can be registered in the appropriate cemetery precinct. We have voters in the Mt. Olive Cemetery who have been voting for 100 years. Relatives will often assist as keeping the dead voter on the rolls also keeps the Social Security checks coming in. If you know of someone who used to live in Chicago and who died, they are still eligible to vote.

2. Homeless Voters: Register the homeless at the Cook County Courthouse instead of General Delivery. All they have to do is hang out at the courthouse one day a year to claim residency. Then round them up and give them free cigarettes to vote. We used to give them bottles of wine, but they couldn’t remember to vote our way.

3. Nursing Home Voters: Early (or absentee) voting has greatly expanded our capabilities of increasing the turnout. Take bags full of early ballots to nursing homes, and get everyone in the home to vote…especially the Alzheimer’s cases.

4. College Students: College kids like to screw the system, and they’ll vote more than once just for the sheer pleasure of it, especially kids at Catholic universities.

5. Voters Who Have Moved: Voters who have moved often can vote in the precinct where they used to live, and then in their new precinct. They will not be on the rolls in the new precinct, so they’ll vote a “Questioned Ballot”. Not to worry. When the ballot is questioned after the election, we will have our political hacks permit the votes to be counted.

6. Voters Passing Through O’Hare: Many votes can be obtained by soliciting voter registration at our airports. They are legally residents of Chicago, at least for a few minutes.

7. Motor Voters: Take license plate numbers of out-of-state cars passing through on the freeways, run them through DMV to get their addresses, and automatically register them in Chicago. Then vote them. They won’t know, since they actually live in Wyoming.

8. Illegal Aliens: Some of our most reliable voters are the thousands of illegal aliens we have in the city. In exchange for not telling INS where they live or work, one can get a solid block of votes.

9. Newborns: Our children are more and more precocious, so we register them at birth. Maternity wards are some of our best precincts.

Okay, the above while accurate is more of an exception than a rule. The below is not. It comes from an actual memo from the old Richard Daley machine:

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Katie Couric is taking aim at the media and the executives who run the media for allowing a pervasive sexism to permeate their coverage of the Democratic race. For her efforts, she got this:

It’s time to take Keith Olbermann off the air and it’s time to hold General Electric, NBC and MSNBC accountable for the overt sexism and frankly for allowing Keith Olbermann’s tirades that have become a disservice to the national discourse and a national embarrassment. If you want to talk about a polarizing figure, start with Keith Olbermann. In reporting on the growing controversy today, the New York Times finds that:

many in the news media — with a few exceptions, including Katie Couric, the anchor of the “CBS Evening News” — see little need for reconsidering their coverage or changing their approach going forward. Rather, they say, as the Clinton campaign fell behind, it exploited a few glaring examples of sexist coverage to whip up a backlash and to try to create momentum for Mrs. Clinton.

Right, to deflect attention, blame the victim. These men must be fired and sent off to their Neanderthal caves, with my apologies for offending Neanderthals who were surely more enlightened than the executives at NBC, the Neanderthal Broadcasting Corporation, or at MSNBC, the Misogynistic & Sexist Neanderthal Broadcasting Corporation.

Phil Griffin, senior vice president of NBC News and the executive in charge of MSNBC, a particular target of criticism, said that although a few mistakes had been made, that they had been corrected quickly and that the network’s overall coverage was fair.

“I get it, that in this 24-hour media world, you’ve got to be on your game and there’s very little room for mistakes,” Mr. Griffin said. “But the Clinton campaign saw an opportunity to use it for their advantage. They were trying to rally a certain demographic, and women were behind it.”

I am at a loss for words. That’s a rather offensive accusation. You obviously don’t get it.

His views were echoed by other news media figures. “She got some tough coverage at times, but she brought that on herself, whether it was the Bosnian snipers or not conceding on the night of the final primaries,” said Rem Rieder, editor of American Journalism Review. “She had a long track record in public life as a serious person and a tough politician, and she was covered that way.”

Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, said: “I have not had a lot of regretful conversations with high-ranking media types and political reporters about how unfair their coverage of the Hillary Clinton campaign was.”

If they were corrected why are Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, Tucker Carlson and Mike Barnicle still on the air? In fact, I just finished watching MSNBC’s Morning Joe where Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist asked Mike Barnicle his reaction to this story and the fact that he stands being accused of sexism for comparing Hillary Clinton to “everyone’s first wife standing outside of probate court.” His response:

Bring it on.

Well then, allow me to bring it on.

MSNBC
letters@msnbc.com
MSNBC/Microsoft-NBC
30 Rockefeller Plz
3rd Fl
New York, NY 10112
(212) 664-4444

Mike Barnicle
mikebarniclenews@aol.com

And until Mike Barnicle is fired (again), I will bring it on.

The Media Hall of Shame

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From the Times of London:

The crackdown on the Opposition in Zimbabwe intensified yesterday with the arrest of its deputy leader on the charge of treason, as he arrived back in the country from a week-long trip to South Africa.

Tendai Biti, the secretary-general of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), was met at Harare airport by five plainclothes officers who handcuffed him and led him to an unknown police station.

The police said that Mr Biti was to be charged with publishing a “treasonous document” outlining MDC plans to return all land seized from white farmers and to dismiss all members of the military and police service if it won the presidential election at the end of this month. If found guilty, he could be sentenced to death.

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“He’s almost like a revival.” Really? You’re a cult of personality.

All fine and good to have noble aspirations but have Obama’s supporters looked at his lack of accomplishments? There is no there. Have you thought about the how? Change is hard work. It is not a series of platitudes. As Joel Stein of the Los Angeles Times noted, “we know that we are being fooled, but we kind of like it.” Funny stuff. Your enjoyment of deception risks my world.

When I see a video like this that touts a messianic “We Are The Ones” message, I worry because I yet to see a messiah deliver. To me, I see a cult of wanna-be day dream believers, not tempered by the reality of the world as it exists. If only you ever visited the trenches, you would see that it takes hard work and experience, a knowledge of policy alternatives, a dedication to see a project through its completion through pratfalls and disappointments. You are asking to me to take a chance a something “new and different”. Frankly, I have seen this all before.

Politics has real life consequences and for Obama supporters to project the change they want to see on a man who has yet to deliver an ounce of change is frankly delusional. Have you asked yourselves why radicals like Jody Evans and William Ayers find cause to hope in Obama? How does that vision of America square with yours? Are they compatible? Like you, they see what they want to see in Obama. So do Rashid Khalid and Congressman Robert Wexler. One of them is bound to be disappointed because their agendas are radically different. Again, that’s cult-like behaivour to see only your projections, an innocence that tomorrow belongs to you when the reality might be far different than your starry eyed empty glazes of adoration. The question they should be asking is how is he going to do this? And what point do his flaws become self-evident?

Obama has been very coy in trying to be all things to all people and in the first video, people hold noble visions without ever thinking that Obama has not exactly been an agent of change. His record is sparse but there are some indications. Please tell me how voting for the Bush-Cheney Energy Policy is something “new and different.” Please tell me how telling the voting public that he doesn’t accept contributions from Washington lobbyist and then takes contributions from others in the same firms who either are not registered lobbyists or work in a state capital is “new and different.” And then there are questions of judgment galore. The Reverend Wright is not off the table. But you insist on seeing what you want to see. We see a different Obama.

Setting realistic expectations is the first responsibility of responsible leadership. And when one witnesses before one’s very eyes an usurpation of power in an unyielding quest for more and more control, I worry. Now he wants to nominated by acclamation. What is he an Emperor? Is this a Greek tragedy or a Roman farce? I have seen this all before. History is littered with Obama. Authoritarianism has many faces and even well-meaning autocrats trample their opposition. I don’t do benevolent dictators. That’s not the American way. Sorry I must JUST SAY NO DEAL.

There are more of us than you think. And while you wax poetic notions, we will be exposing Obama for who he really is, a danger and a fraud.

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Here is the Friday, June 13th, 2008 edition of interesting reads from around the world.

Nepalese Monarchy Gone, But No Consensus On What’s Next
Nepal continues to teether on the brink of long-term instability. As Nepal’s last King, Gyanendra, leaves the Narayanhiti Royal Palace in Kathmandu, ending a 240-year-old dynasty and paving the way for the emergence of a republic, Nepal’s political parties have fallen on each other in a squabble for power. The Asia Sentinel reports from Kathmandu. And a Nepalese view on events there from the The Rising Nepal.

107 Days in Power, Korean President Lee Myung-bak Alone At the Top
The political paralysis in Korea over the government’s decision to restart imports of American beef is moving to a new crisis point, with the resignation en masse of the cabinet headed by the Prime Minister, Han Seung Soo. At the same time, the entire policy support staff at the presidential executive office has tendered resignations, leaving President Lee Myung-bak practically alone at the top of the government. Full coverage of Korea’s slide from the Asia Sentinel and the Korea Herald. To add the pressure on President Lee, truckers in Korea have gone on strike. With Korea’s exports likely to be disrupted, the implications could be felt worldwide. The events in Korea are now being described as the “Korean Crisis”.

Irish Referendum on the Lisbon Treaty
Ireland voted in a referendum on the European Community’s vision for the future, the Lisbon Treaty, on Thursday. From the Irish Times two stories. While Ireland counts the votes starting today, Europe anxiously awaits the results.

Karzai wins $20bn aid for Afghanistan
My worry is that President Karzai has lost control of Afghanistan. Granted it can be argued that the Bush Administration (nor Obama for that matter) has paid enough attention to the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. Still, the US, Britain and other donor countries yesterday pledged more than $20bn (£10.3bn) in aid for Afghanistan over the next five years in an attempt to shore up President Hamid Karzai’s embattled government. The story from the UK Guardian.

BP CEO Op-Ed on the World Energy Crisis
The CEO of British Petroleum has written an op-ed piece in the Financial Times, entitled Let The Markets Solve The Energy Crisis. While BP has done more than most to invest in alternative energy development, most of the American oil & gas sector has taken to acting as cash cows and using their cash to buy back their stock and take their companies private. At current rates of stock buybacks, ExxonMobil will be privately-held by 2025.

US Supreme Court Ruling on Guantanamo Detainees
Due process is a cornerstone of Western civilization. We lead by example and we must show our enemies that their attacks will not weaken our inalienable rights nor the bedrock of our legal system. More on this story from the Los Angeles Times plus analysis from the New York Times.

Riot at An Immigrant Relief Centre in Turkey
A Somali man died of a gunshot wound and four people, among them two police officers, were injured during a riot at a Turkish centre for illegal immigrants. More from the Anatolian News Agency.

European Car Sales Slump 7.8% in May
Demand for new cars in Europe shrank 7.8% on the year in May to 1.33 million registrations due to one working day less and a massive increase in fuel prices, the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, or ACEA, said Friday. In the first five months of the year, new car registrations were down 0.7% compared with the same period last year at 6.92 million vehicles. The Western European car market decreased by 8% to 1.24 million vehicles in May. “Looking at the major markets, France was the only one to post growth both in its monthly results (+7%) and in its cumulative figures (+5.2%),” ACEA said in a statement.

The Friendlier Skies Between Taiwan and China
Representatives of China and Taiwan agreed Friday to start weekend charter flights next month between the two sides, taking the first step toward establishing regular transportation links that could ease relations. The report from the New York Times.

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