There I was, sitting at a bus stop bench on Santa Monica Boulevard and minding my own business, when a woman sat down beside me.  I didn’t recognize her at first because of all the Barack Obama literature she had clutched to her chest.  I saw bumper stickers and campaign buttons and brochures.

Ohmigod it's her.

I wasn’t surprised at seeing Ann Coulter, nor that she was perhaps scouting out the opposition for some timely political snark, but I was surprised she’d be taking public transportation.  I introduced myself, told her I recognized her, and asked her about that.  

"I suppose it’s going to come out pretty soon anyway," she sighed, "so I guess I might as well get in some practice for my unrehearsed responses."

Up until last night, I figured Hillary Clinton had at least a shot at winning enough delegates and popular votes, and convincing enough super delegates of a more than reasonable argument that Florida and Michigan should be counted into the mix.  She needed to win handily in Indiana and keep it very close in North Carolina.  Neither happened.

Up until last night, I was prepared to write Hillary (another) $25 check to help with her momentum.  I don’t have enough disposable income to keep that up any longer.

Up until last night, I figured that most every Hillary supporter would, when the chips are down, support Barack Obama.  A look at a CNN graphic showed that most would, but about a third wouldn’t (20% of Obama supporters wouldn’t support Clinton).  But it’s early in the game as far as that goes, so I’m sure there will be changes as people realize what a McCain presidency would look like – a mirror image of George Bush.

And finally, up until last night, I figured that if it comes down to Obama-McCain, Obama might very well have an uphill battle convincing enough democrats and independents to vote for him.

In his own words, Barrack Obama has just committed a huge political blunder by having his campaign put out the word that Republican Sentator Chuck Hagel is in position to be President Obama's Secretary of Defense.

And they put out the word not to the NY Times or Washington Post, but to the Sunday Times U.K.  

Senior advisers confirmed that Hagel, a highly decorated Vietnam war veteran and one of McCain’s closest friends in the Senate, was considered an ideal candidate for defence secretary.

Asked about his choice of cabinet last week, Obama told The Sunday Times: "Chuck Hagel is a great friend of mine and I respect him very much," although he was wary of appearing as though he was already choosing the White House curtains.

Why go outside the box on this one and piss off a lot of progressives?

I am sincerely hoping for a win in the Bush column this week, namely destruction of the satellite about to fall to Earth that would, if allowed to hit land, probably contaminate a populated area with some really nasty rocket fuel named hydrazine.  

Bush’s presidential nod to a highly technical plan devised by others will be the best use of his nod since counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke pointed to Afghanistan on 9/ll, and Bush said, "Yeah, I guess that Presidential Daily Brief was right after all, Dickums.  Go ahead and draw me up some plans to invade Iraq."

Now, I’m not saying Bush will screw this one up.  He has a chance here to add to his rather sparse positive legacy, so he’s setting his sights on winning the bronze medal.  It’s another low threshold of achievement, for sure, but a win is a win.

But what if physics gets in the way of legacy aspirations?

More on the flip side.

Well, you know every candidate is now going to be asked about Terry Bradshaw dropping the F-bomb in the pre-game show on Fox.

Polls will be taken, candidates' responses compared and parsed.  It's going to get ugly.

It happened when Howie Long put on a Boston Red Sox cap, and off camera it was clearly heard from Bradshaw, "...that big fucking head."  I rewound the tape to make sure, and there it was.

Oh, well.  I gues we need a distraction from real issues.

Three men are injured on the street following a horrific car accident.  The first is sitting up, conscious, with a severely cut arm; arterial blood spurts out on the ground.  The second is semi-conscious and has a deep laceration to his chest; air bubbles from his lung rising up out of the blood.  And the third man is unconscious but alive, breathing, but missing the front portion of his skull, and his eyes are fixed and dilated.

What is the order of treatment here?  What triage strategy will you employ to try and save all three men?

George Bush is now, like it or not, our Triage President.  He is charged with the sorting and handling of policy casualties, including such things as the extension of tax cuts for the wealthy, or exempting the U.S. Navy from exercising due care when testing sonar in the vicinity of whales, and most importantly the political/cultural devastation in Iraq that has cost so many American lives.  Other examples are, as they say in the blood lab, TNTC (too numerous to count).

More below the fold.

Sheesh, what a moron!  I knew eleven years ago that the official policy on gays in the military was several brain cells short of a good idea.  I should have written something back then, as perhaps it might have had some effect!  Now I'm hoping there's nothing like heaping scorn and ridicule, laced with good humor, to help end that knuckle-headed policy.  

Oh, well.  Better late than never.

My 10-minute stage comedy, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was just selected (among 200+ submissions) for one of seven productions at the internationally recognized ShowOff! playwriting festival in San Juan Capistrano, CA, at The El Camino Playhouse.  There will be seven performances on weekends in January.

I find it no mere coincidence that the final play selections were made on or about the widely reported 11th anniversary of our D.A.D.T. policy.  Right place at the right time, I guess.

Those of my fellow Kossacks, straight or gay, who live in the area should check it out HERE.

Hmmm ... I wonder if they ever stage any plays in the White House....?

Let the scorn and ridicule continue.  

Wouldn’t you know it?  The thought of Ted Olsen as Attorney General sent the tingle of bad memories down my spine.  The seed man for the Arkansas Project who sleazily hounded President Clinton from his first day in office didn’t seem to be the right choice for AG. – I mean, a partisan hack to oversee eternal AG scandal?  Scandals ripping at the heart of our constitutional rights and privileges?  I don’t think so.  I’m entitled to my opinion.   Thankfully, Harry Reid doomed the man’s nomination by saying publicly fuhgedaboudit.

And then along comes retired judge Michael Mukasey, a tough but articulate and well-grounded legal conservative.  He comes into limited Progressive embrace by giving Bush the legal finger at times on the Padilla case...

I could just hurl.   About 10 trillion times.  Actually, 8,971,155,622,797.25 as of 10:25 PDT on August 18, 2007 according to the  National Debt Clock.  That’s one hurl for each dollar they’ve blown on Iraq, on enriching the rich even more richly than there are riches to dole out, and on themselves.  And of course on political payoffs to ensure a permanent Republican monarchy until the Earth cools off again.

But there is an up side.  Republicans and their Fox News payrollees won’t be running the show come January 20, 2009.  And the sole purpose of a Democratic congress is to make sure George Bush does as little damage as possible in the interim.  The man is determined to wreck the country if he doesn’t get his way, so it might be a tough row to hoe.

So, excuse me,  (fill in the blank – Mr. President, Senator Gasbag, Congressman Enabler), if we tell you just to Shut The Fuck Up!

You’d think Tiger Woods would know how to play a round of golf by now without letting his nerves get to him.  Sure, the man talks and plays a good game, but a deep-seated aberration waits just beneath the surface to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

At least that’s my prediction prior to the final round today at the Firestone Colonial.

Coming to the first tee behind by a stroke, anyone with a functioning retina can see that Tiger is haunted by the venue.  Yes, the venue.  Not the 3 straight amateur wins, mind you, nor his fifty tournament wins in the past 11 years, nor even that he’s won every major at least twice, except the PGA Championship, which he could win again next week.   I’m talking about Tiger being haunted by the current venue -- in Ohio -- the state of stolen votes, and stolen dreams.

You just know Tiger was thinking about voter fraud and other election irregularities when he teed off on the first hole.  Okay, he birdied that one, but the principle still stands.  Yes, he birdied the next one, too, but it was on the third hole that he makes my point for me.

Somebody from O'Reilly's staff who lurks on this post might be interested in getting this to Billo ASAP.  Seems he may be helping more than hurting.
On the Kos convention in Chicago, Dionne writes:  

Democratic candidates know they owe a debt to Moulitsas. They're paying homage to him because he has started to beat Limbaugh and O'Reilly at their own game. No wonder O'Reilly is so annoyed.

In a feature article Dionne gets it right about Markos -- he started a wave, and it's getting bigger every day.

Update [2007-8-3 1:55:45 by MoronMike]:  Thanks to tips on this diary, I have my TU status back.  So watch out, trolls, I have my finger poised...

Thanks to General David H. Patraeus, we have a new collective term for competing assessments in Iraq come September, called a snapshot of trends.  Since it takes a certain familiarity with military/bureaucratic labeling to understand my logic leading up to our S.H.I.T. Moment in Iraq, please bear with me.

We all know that a snapshot is a photograph.  No motion.  Nothing before it, nothing after.  Just what you see. But a trend is something in motion – what came before is predictive of what is to come. Timing is involved here.  September is fast approaching when we fish or cut fate in Iraq, so, the question becomes, how does one view a Snapshot Having Important Timing, or what I refer to as a SHIT moment?

Before anyone goes off message here, the SHIT Moment should not to be confused with a Friedman Unit (6 months), or a Friedman Invisible Boundary (FIB).  As a mathematical equation, a FIB can be written as follows:  FIB=(FUx2)/2, and is the imaginary instant in time between getting over the previous FU just as the next FU arrives via a series of tubes.  Just so we’re clear on that.

More clarity on the flip side.

Just when I thought that the Dems were going to be above smearing the character of their primary opponents, along comes Barack Obama in what turns out to be an intentional and rather odious smear, picked up by Drudge and the GOP, that attacks Bill Clinton (and by proxy Hillary, too.).

"We've just obtained an email that shows that the Obama campaign yesterday circulated a negative, and ultimately false, story about Bill Clinton -- that he allegedly made money giving a speech on September 11, 2006." -- Greg Sergent, TPM Cafe

This isn't right. Excuses can be made as to the exact wording of the Clintons' financial disclosure form, but the fact remains that he gave the speech on September 10, not September 11.  Obama should have checked that.  More importantly, so what if Bill did give a speech on that day, and was paid for it?  Did you or anyone else you know quit working on September 11 this past year?  Sheesh!  

Obama, take responsibility for this odious act, and swear to Democrats everywhere that this type of politics-as-usual is not what you're about.

Memo links on the flip side.

Put aside your Common Wisdom for a moment, fellow Kossacks, because there appears to be an opportunity to increase the Democratic hold on the U.S. Senate by one vote.  

Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat, seems to have the legal authority, but perhaps not the cajones, to do the country a favor and follow the letter of the U.S. Constitution, namely Article 17, by 1) naming a Democrat of his choosing to fill the U.S. Senate vacancy, 2) naming a GOP-named candidate not on the list of three to be provided him, or 3) to not make any appointment at all.

"When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct."

According a legal analysis by Vikram Amar over at FindLaw, the key here is "may empower."    More on the flip side.

The al-Qaeda bombing of the Shia al-Askari Mosque in Samarra that destroyed its golden dome caused a spike in casualties to 3,500 in September, 2006.  Before that, it averaged about 800 per month.  

The British Telegraph is reporting today that when the casualties drop to pre-Samarra levels, this may be cause for the U.S. to claim we have met a critical benchmark for claiming victory -- namely, a successful surge, as defined by BushCo -- via a reduction in violence.

More on the Magic 800 after the break...

In a debate we'd all like to see, Michael Moore sent a letter to Fred Thompson (printed in full, after the break) challenging him to debate health care issues, the issue of Mr. Thompson's proclivity for Cuban cigars, and other topics.

Let's all send Thompson a letter telling him how he'd wipe the floor with Michael Moore in such a debate (ha ha).  

I'd suggest Fox News as the host.  

Update [2007-5-15 16:18:18 by MoronMike]:  Thanks to bumblebums, we have this video response by Fred Thompson to Michael Moore's debate challenge (note the Cuban cigar)<a</p>

In the law, there is an exception to the Hearsay Rule referred to as an "excited utterance."  That is, people say things in the heat of the moment with no time to reflect or calculate a response.  The law says its probably what you were really thinking about at the time, not what you say you meant later.

In Thursday’s Republican debate on MSNBC Debate Video Here even Rudy Giuliani knew the difference between Shia and Sunni, and who the terrorists are.  

But they all must look alike to former Massachusetts Governor and now presidential contender Mitt Romney. I think a lot of people apparently missed Romney’s gaffe here, provided again and in context after the jump.

We’ll move everything to get (bin-Laden), but I don’t want to buy into the Democratic pitch that this is all about one person, Osama bin Laden, because after we get him there’s going be another and another -- this is about Shia and Sunni, this is about Hezbollah and Hamas and al-Qai’da and the Muslim Brotherhood...

"Excited utterances" under a magnifying glass after the jump.

In fairness to all, I have just changed the title of my diary. However, a cursory glance at a photo currently on RedState told me something wasn't quite right about the GI giving the photographer the finger.  So I downloaded it and took a closer look.

Sure enough, where the knuckle meets the finger is an obvious splice, plus a little extra doctoring...but not enough.  Take a look at the enlargement.  Does that look real to you?  Hardly.

Running these kinds of pictures, and getting them widely disseminated, is an affront to every American soldier.  Not to mention insulting to the AP photographer.

The RedState "photo description" is after the fold.

What say you, RedState?