Jesse Helms - His Greatest Hits

In no particular order:

1. "To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn't have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing." — Helms responding in 1956 to criticism that a fictional black character in his newspaper column was offensive.
2. "The destruction of this country can be pinpointed in terms of its beginnings to the time that our political leadership turned to socialism. They didn't call it socialism, of course. It was given deceptive names and adorned with fancy slogans. We heard about New Deals, and Fair Deals and New Frontiers and the Great Society." — From a Helms editorial at WRAL-TV in Raleigh.
3. In 1993 sang "Dixie" in an elevator to Carol Moseley-Braun, the first African-American woman elected to the Senate, bragging, "I'm going to make her cry. I'm going to sing Dixie until she cries." (Chicago Sun-Times, 8/5/93)
4. As an aide to the 1950 Senate campaign of North Carolina Republican candidate Willis Smith, Helms reportedly helped create attack ads against Smith's opponent, including one which read: "White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races." Another ad featured photographs Helms himself had doctored to illustrate the allegation that Graham's wife had danced with a black man. (The News and Observer, 8/26/01; The New Republic, 6/19/95; The Observer, 5/5/96; Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms, by Ernest B. Furgurson, Norton, 1986)
5. "The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that's thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men's rights." (WRAL-TV commentary, 1963) He also wrote, "Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced." (New York Times, 2/8/81)
6. A year before the election, when public polls showed Helms trailing by 20 points, he launched a Senate filibuster against the bill making the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. a national holiday. (David Broder, Washington Post, Aug, 29, 2001)
7. Over the years Helms has declared homosexuality "degenerate," and homosexuals "weak, morally sick wretches." (Newsweek, 12/5/94)
   
8. Helms lashed out at the Kennedy-Hatch AIDS bill in 1988: "There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy." (States News Service, 5/17/88)
9. "We've got to have some common sense about a disease transmitted by people deliberately engaging in unnatural acts," (New York Times, 7/5/95)
10. When he made an appearance on CNN’s Larry King Live in Sept. 1995, a caller praised him “for everything you’ve done to help keep down the niggers.”
    Helms looked in the camera and replied, “Well thank you, I think.”
11. The infamous "Hands" ad against Harvey Gantt in the '92 Senate race:
    
    

(Sources: NYT, AP, Americablog, Slog)

Good riddance you racist, hateful piece of shit (to paraphrase Dan Savage).

Think different.

An amusing, but apt analogy that emerged from the race for the Democratic nomination was that Hillary was like a PC, Obama a Mac (see here and here). To take it a bit further, I've heard someone refer to McCain as a Unix mainframe. I'd say more like an old IBM running MS-DOS (and, as it turns out, maybe more like a dictaphone).

Still, it seemed more likely as a US Senator, that Obama would use some government issue Dell laptop, probably running Windows XP, or even worse, Vista. But, lo and behold, Obama does carry around a Mac. (I'm envisioning one of those snazzy black MacBooks).

A PowerBook, a MacBook, an i-Mac, 2 iPods, and an iPhone populate our home. So, I'm definitely one of these people who believe that creative people who care less about the machine and more about what they can do with it use Macs and other Apple products. And, in government, PCs are pretty ubiquitous, so you kind have to go out of your way to be a Mac user, especially when the technical support people refuse to help you set it up (but, then again, after the initial network set-up, you don't really need technical support with a Mac). So, hearing that Obama is a Mac guy only further completes the picture for me of Obama as something different than the typical politician. Then again, all the credit for Obama being a Mac guy seems to go to Michelle who bought him Mac.

Too little highway... or too few options?

Via Sightline

An Obama for Washington state governor?

The über-sleazy special interest group, Building Industry Association of Washington (BIAW), is already pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into an independent expenditure campaign against incumbent Washington Governor Chris Gregoire. Check out this new ad from their "It's Time for a Change" PAC:



The ad, using footage from Obama's Key Arena appearance in Seattle last February, is laughable. Of course, Obama was talking about change from the ways of George W. Bush. However, Dino Rossi is every bit a politician cast from the same mold as George W. Rossi is an affable fellow who seems non-threatening in his ads but in reality is not very smart, would surround himself with right-wing ideologues in his administration and would use the powers of the executive branch to move the state as far to the right as he could get away with. His views on big issues like reproductive rights, environmental protection, transportation policy, and education clash significantly with the majority of Washingtonians. Gregoire may not be Washington's answer to Obama (more like Washington's version of Hillary - super competent and experienced, but not necessarily inspiring), but Dino Rossi would certainly be our state's answer to George W. Bush.

What He Said...

From Kos @ Daily Kos:

Ugh.

Mrs. Feinstein said she did not need to urge Mrs. Clinton to hold a meeting. "I didn’t urge anybody to do anything. I know it’s a natural instinct. People, particularly in this case because Hillary represents a very large block of voters — the largest ever for anybody that has come in No. 2, and has the popular vote. She is I think desirous of protecting the issues that she cares about to the extent she can, seeing that the people are represented in this administration and certainly in the convention. And also to help with the ticket, and I know she feels that way because we have talked about this."

I know that this is all posturing for Clinton's VP hopes, but I wish Clinton surrogates would stop with the dishonest talking points. It really is time to move on.

The ONLY way Clinton can claim a popular vote victory is to 1) count the Soviet-style Michigan election results, 2) give Obama zero votes in the state, and 3) ignore the caucus states.

It was a close count, no doubt. Of course, if popular vote was the measure of victory, Obama would've run a different race. For one, he wouldn't have gone into "general election mode" a month ago, leaving votes on the table in the last few contests. But it wasn't, and Obama's team executed and won by every measure.

So can they please stop it?

Viewed live by over 12 million Americans

Long time, no blog. Barack Obama is now the nominee, undisputed. Obama now gets to reintroduce himself to American voters and to the tens of millions who did not participate int the nomination process but will vote in November. Tuesday night's speech and all the history making that surrounded it was a nice way to launch that general election campaign. At least 12 million Americans watched it live - an astonishing number for a political speech. Obama did not disappoint:



But John McCain sure did:

5 Days, 5 Contests

Finally! The end is upon us. By the middle of next week, Obama should be able to declare victory in the race for the Democratic nomination (at the site of the Republican Convention - nice move, Obama). Based more than anything on the outcome of the first contest, today's Democratic Party Rules and By-laws Committee meeting, Hillary should be ready to acknowledge that by conceding, hopefully on Tuesday night.

Contest 1: Rules & Bylaws Committee
With DNC lawyers taking Hillary's favored solution off the table, Michigan and Florida delegates will almost certainly be awarded at half value. Since both Obama and Hillary were on the Florida ballot, that means that the pledged delegate split for Florida should break out to 34.5 for Obama, 52.5 for Hillary.

The big question is how the RBC will deal with Michigan since Obama was not on the ballot there. The state party organization proposes splitting the delegates 69-59 in Clinton's favor. This is characterized as a compromise between Hillary's position of seating all the delegates and the initial Obama position of seating the delegates 50-50. Obama has agreed to this compromise, but Hillary is rejecting it, arguing that she should get no fewer pledged delegates than awarded in the tainted primary. She is also arguing that Obama should get no delegates, that the minority batch of delegates should go to the convention "uncommitted" as they were defined in the illegal Jan. 15 primary ballot. However, Poblano, the brilliant and anonymous statistician at FiveThirtyEight.com has shown that in a competitive race, by now with the other candidates dropping out, the primary election and subsequent delegate selection process would have awared Obama a majority of 65 delegates to Hillary's 63. But, even if you simply assume that most of the 40% of the votes for "uncommitted" in Florida were for Obama, with some for Edwards, plus add in the 5% of votes that were write-ins for Obama but never counted, and work that through the Congressional District proportional system by which delegates are awarded, the delegate split would end up close to the 69-59 proposed by the Michigan Democratic Party.

Even if this scenario is adopted by the RBC, it would likely need to be halved according to DNC rules. In other words, a net gain of only 5 full delegates for Hillary. This would be accompanied by an 18 vote margin for Hillary in Florida. That's for pledged delegates, the apportionment of superdelegates in both states is a separate issue. In all likelihood those would also be halved as well, in part to avoid creating two classes of delegate within the same state delegation.

Contest 2: Puerto Rico (Sunday)
It's absurd that a territory that can't even vote for president in November is apportioned significantly more delegates than Montana and South Dakota combined - 55 pledged delegates, plus 7 supers. There's a common misconception that because Hillary has done so well with Hispanic voters in other parts of the country. That's not going to help her in Puerto Rico, where the high mixed-race population feels more affinity with Obama than Hispanics in California or Texas. What does help Hillary is that she's the Senator from New York where most Puerto Ricans in America reside. Bill Clinton was popular in Puerto Rico, and Hillary as First Lady played a major role in helping with a big hurricane recovery effort there in the late 90s. The one recent poll (conducted May 8-20) shows Hillary with a 13-point lead - 51-38. Her winning margin may well fall under 10 points. By the way, Puerto Rico falls into the Eastern time zone at this time of year and polls are open from 8am-3pm. So, we should have results by 1 or 2pm Pacific Time.

Contests 3 and 4: South Dakota and Montana (Tuesday)
The polling in both South Dakota (15 pledged delegates/8 super) and Montana (16 pledged/9 super) is kind of stale (another sure sign that the nomination fight is over). But, all indications are that Obama will win by big margins of 15-20 points in each state. The real importance of these states will come in allowing Obama to finish out the primary season with two big wins in one night as he declares victory in the whole process and then starts rolling out big numbers of superdelegates the next day.

And that brings us to Contest 5, Superdelegates. Hillary may or may not concede on Tuesday night, but even if she doesn't, by Wednesday morning the remaining 190 or so superdelegates will start rolling out en masse for Obama. And our long national nightmare will be over. We can only hope.

Update (7:00Pm Saturday): Contest 1 goes to... Obama! The outcome was pretty much as predicted below. Harold Ickes and other HRC supporters on the committee were gracious on the Florida decision but got all pissy about Michigan. They felt that a 73-56 was more accurate an apportionment than the 69-59 proposed by Michigan Democrats. They reserved the right to appeal the decision to the Credentials Committee meeting in July. The magic number is now 2117 and Obama only needs 64 more to reach that magic number. He should reach it by Tuesday night, Wednesday morning at the latest.