We're dealing with some pretty challenging stuff right now. I won't repeat all of it here, but you can check out this diary, where you can see not only the original story, but the responses we have gotten, and my updates in the comments.

In a nutshell, this started while I was working on a project out of town, and our son (who is nearly 16 and has Asperger's Syndrome) received a 9-day suspension for what the school called "assault". Then on Friday, we suddenly get this summons for a court date. It's a huge mess, and I can't begin to tell you how far behind I'm getting in work I'm supposed to be doing, and the end of the quarter is nearing, so I really do need to find some way to turn my attention back to that. But I thought before doing so, I'd put out a few feelers to see what other resources people might know about.

Also posted at the Independent Bloggers' Alliance.

I saw the most recent offering from the McCain Girls yesterday, thanks to a tweet (Twitter posting) from 23/6.com. And I've decided something. The McCain Girls are "supporting" John McCain in much the same way Stephen Colbert supported George Bush at the White House Correspondents' Dinner a few years back.

Some of the lyrics:

Just an Arizona senator
Lookin' for the fight of his life
The Democrats don't see him as strong
They all say he's crazy

Keep in mind now, that "they", presumably the Democrats, "say he's crazy". One would assume that McCain's supporters would beg to differ. Yet they go on to give us this...

In today's gospel reading, the high ranking religious muckety-mucks of Jesus' day wonder aloud how much cred Jesus can have as a holy man, given that he is seen eating with "sinners and tax-collectors".

That always makes me smile...not for any deep theological reasons, but because of the childhood memory it evokes.

The very first definition I "fast mapped" for tax collector was "one who mooches a bite of your dessert".  I learned this because those were the words my father routinely uttered while engaging in that practice. "Tax collector!"

Mind you, I had no idea what taxes actually were back then. I hadn't yet heard the expression about "death and taxes" being inevitable. I did know that "Tax collector!" was inevitable. And mostly harmless, as far as I could tell.

That is, until I learned that tax collectors were singled out as unsavories in the bible. "Sure, it's a little annoying," I (probably) thought, "but it can't be that bad!"

Hat tip to Jed Report for reminding us of Hillary's "tea and cookies" remark.

"Those of us who have tried to have a career, tried to have an independent life, certainly somebody like myself...you know, I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life."

Via Oliver Willis, I found this post on Salon.com. I recommend going to Oliver's site for the commentary, but you don't want to miss the title of the pro-Hillary piece in Salon. It's classic Hillary-think:

Why Hillary Clinton should be winning

You see, while Hillary is not actually winning, she really should be. But reality is well-known for having a pro-Obama bias.

And the subhead reads: Under a winner-take-all primary system, Hillary Clinton would have a wide lead over Barack Obama -- and enough delegates to clinch the nomination by June.

As Oliver points out, "If Senator Clinton wished to run for the nomination of a party with a winner-take-all nomination process, she would be well within her legal rights to do so - she simply needed to have changed her party affiliation to Republican."

When I saw the "It's raining McCain" video, I initially thought it was a joke. So, it seems, did a lot of other people in the blogoverse. Lead McCain Girl was not amused, and issued a curt, profanity laced 30 second statement to that effect on YouTube. In it, she promised to be back with more McCainy goodness set to music.

And she was true to her word, because here they are again.

I'm beginning to think maybe I judged "Hillary for you and me" too harshly.

Hillary Clinton, with no plausible chance of catching up to Barack Obama by getting the most votes, continues to push the notion of poaching his pledged delegates. Because, you know, there really is no such thing as a pledged delegate:

Pledged delegates are "misnomer. The whole point is for delegates, however they are chosen, to really ask themselves who would be the best president and who would be our best nominee against Senator McCain," Clinton said. "And I think that process goes all the way to the convention."

Party leaders need to come together and make it clear that the process will not go all the way to the convention. And, given Hillary's repeated displays of willingness to trash the party to get what she wants, we're well past the point that they can be "delicate" in their dealings with her.

Originally posted at Howard-Empowered People

The latest from Hillary Clinton...

"You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend."

(Shakes head)

Oh, Hillary, what are we going to do with you? You have been saying for months that you're "ready on day one". But, you remember that saying about how "everything I needed to know, I learned in kindergarten"? I think maybe you were absent for a pretty important lesson...

Here is the church, and here is the steeple
Open the door and see all the people.

All the people, Hillary. Not just the pastor. Setting aside for a moment the concepts of forgiveness and redemption, and, oh, I don't know, choosing to stay with someone who's made a mistake of some sort, disagreeing with one's pastor is not necessarily reason enough to leave one's church home.

From the Columbus Dispatch's "Pimp My Peep" contest, I give you "Operation Peep Freedom".

Actually, the one that made me laugh out loud was the one called Peeps: The Exhibition. But I don't know if everyone else is familiar with the Bodies exhibition. It was in Columbus not too long ago, and while I never actually went to see it, I had to look at that poster and its sanitized gore for a couple of months.

I've seen some discussion about how much of white America just doesn't "get" the African American church experience. But I haven't seen much mention of how Jesus himself could have easily become the subject of a Fox News-style hit job. Consider, just for starters, his encounter with the Syrophoenician woman:

Jesus left that place and went to the vicinity of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know it; yet he could not keep his presence secret. In fact, as soon as she heard about him, a woman whose little daughter was possessed by an evil spirit came and fell at his feet. The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter.

"First let the children eat all they want," he told her, "for it is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to their dogs."

Also posted at the Independent Bloggers' Alliance

I had a bit of an "Aha!" moment this morning, while reading yet another commentary about whether or not Geraldine Ferraro's remarks were racist. My thought, by the way, has been that, racist or not, what she said was certainly demeaning and condescending. In other words, pretty much Standard Operating Procedure for Hillary Clinton and her surrogates. Case in point, Hillary's absurd reduction of Barack Obama's accomplishments to one speech he gave in 2002.

Anyway, I don't know why this didn't occur to me sooner, given that I'm actually teaching the social psychology section of my intro psych class right now. But this is a classic example of the self-serving bias.

This is our tendency to take credit for success (self-enhancing bias) and deny any responsibility for failure (self-protective bias).

This is too good not to pass along. Remember that "who do you want answering the phone at 3 a.m. ad"? Remember this sleeping girl?

According to a report on KING5, an NBC affiliate station in Seattle, Washington:

The first girl in the ad is young Casey Knowles. It's stock footage from 8 years ago when she worked as a TV extra - footage owned now by Getty Images and used by the Clinton campaign.

Via AMERICAblog

"I think that I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002," Clinton says.

Er, no. The correct response, as we saw during any one of the earlier debates, is, "Of course any one of us here on this stage would be a better president than John McCain."

This is just wrong. To use Hillary's own words, shame on you, Hillary Clinton.

"So many women around Texas and America are saying, `Wish Ann was here, for us and for Hillary,'" a female voiceover says on the video.

"Today Ann would be asking all of us to make a statement. She would be traveling to every small town and big city in Texas, urging us all to take a stand, be counted, to make a difference, to make history," it says while a picture of Richards and Clinton appears on the screen. "This one's for Texas. This one's for our country. This one's for Ann."

Click here for more. Richards' two sons, Dan and Clark Richards, have asked the Clinton campaign not to use the video.

Update: via Brilliant at Breakfast, here's the video



By way of clarification, Richards' daughter gave permission (which is, of course, clear to anyone who clicks the link that I provided, so it's not as though I was "hiding" anything.) But since the sons asked the campaign not to run the ad, the classy thing to do would be to honor that.