MOE: oh here you are...

MEGAN: As always, right here, just multitasking and reading crap on the internet

MOE: I just remembered it was my afternoon off which is really fucking good because I am totally out of ADD drugs again and um, I had to get really wasted last night.

MEGAN: Yeah, I'm taking the afternoon off as well, but mostly so that I can drive back to D.C.

MEGAN: So, want to see the shittiest ads of the Presidential race so far?

MOE: Oh Jesus. Oh fucking Jesus. Okay, let's play a game: what's more depressing?You knew we were holding Saudis, Yemenis and Pakistanis without evidence in Gitmo, but did you know about the Chinese???

MOE: There are 16 Uighurs there, picked up mostly in Afghanistan after they got sick of the Chinese oppressing them.

MEGAN: Aw, dude, we have 16 Uighurs? Great. How much you want to bet that the Chinese got their intel on the Uighur terrorist threat against the Olympics that they used to justify further oppression from us?

MEGAN: Oh, wait, that was easy. Here's an article about it from the Voice of America, which is America's radio station abroad.

MOE: Yeah aren't we not allowed to listen to VOA in America because it's propaganda? And yes the Chinese assistance in the war on terror is very invaluable to our struggle against Muslim extremism which is the worst problem a country has ever faced in the history of modern statehood!

MEGAN: "They" will destabilize our government if we let "them," so we must protect the most important parts from destabilization, and the Bill of Rights is only, like, the 3rd most important document, definitely.

MEGAN: It doesn't say anything about the pursuit of happiness or executive privilege.

MOE: I love this headline: Judges Cite Need for Reliable Evidence To Hold Detainees …

MOE: it's like something you'd read in the daily newspaper of some fledgling democracy!

MOE: here

MEGAN: Judges Ask Administration To Stick To Principles On Which Country Founded, Not Dismantle Democracy In The Name Of Security

MEGAN: Well, if we want to stick to depressing news, how about a Biblical justification for attacking Michelle Obama (and, basically, every Jezebel) for defying God himself by not being subservient and thereby attacking Barack for not being godly enough to appropriately control his wife?

MOE: Dude apropos of absolutely nothing while I try to slog through the Gail Sheehy piece on Hillaryland and the Sy Hersh piece on Iran under the influence of absolutely no drugs check.out. this outfit. It looks like something Huma Abedin might recommend!

MEGAN: Dude, don't slog, I can break that shit down for you.

MEGAN: 1: Hillary and Bill hired a bunch of people who didn't get along, thinking that was a great campaign strategy. Like her Senate office and, frankly, the Bush Administration, it was a insular group of people used to defending the hordes.

MEGAN: 2. Mark Penn sucks and blames everyone else for his failing.

MEGAN: 3. Everyone hates Mark Penn, who used to privately call Bill Clinton when he couldn't convince Hillary or the other staff to do what he wanted because he's a tattle-taling bitch.

MOE: Also there was this

He sounded giddy, recalls Congressman Altmire. "'We’re going to win Ohio for sure, and Texas looks good, and we’re coming to Pennsylvania 'he said. ‘Keep your powder dry. Don’t endorse anybody—just wait it out.’?"The flattered first-term congressman said he was concerned that Senator Clinton might not play well on the top of the ticket. "President Bush won my district twice … "

Clinton interrupted him. "How well did I do in your district?"

"You won it twice."

"Well, there you go," Clinton said, gloating."

There was silence for a while, and Clinton assumed he had won his case."

"With all due respect," Altmire finally said, "you’re not on the ballot this year."

MOE: NEITHER IS ROSS PEROT!

MEGAN: 4. Ickes is pissed that Mark Penn made $20 million dollars, sucked, ran roughshod over him and still went out of his way to take politically untouchable clients (i.e., the Colombian government).

MEGAN: 5. The chunky Chicos necklaces and jewel-toned pantsuits were all the fault of Huma Abedin who is herself impeccably dressed, so she's now the world's biggest underminer.

MEGAN: 6. Hillary's make-up artist matched her eyeshadow to her suit jackets.

MEGAN: 7. Mark Penn railed against Hillary every showing emotion because he is at his core a sexist pig who doesn't believe women can be women and still President EVEN THOUGH that's the times when she connected best with voters.

MEGAN: 8. Both Clinton's undertook a concerted effort to pressure Obama into taking her as VP to the horror of most other Democrats who found it unseemly

MEGAN: 9. Patti Solis Doyle was ousted because they were out of money, not that they were out of money, per se, they were just out of primary money because donors can give $2300 to the primaries and $2300 to the general election campaign.

MEGAN: 10. Reporters were all drunk on the plane between Iowa and New Hampshire.

MEGAN: 11. Mark Penn sucks some more and is insufferably arrogant.

MEGAN: The end!

MOE: Okay so far on this. 1. Bush wants "regime change" and he's paid $400 million to fund it so far but that doesn't get you so far.

MOE: 2. There's some group called the Baluchis who are going to help us out because, you know, they're SUNNI.

MEGAN: !. Not in a country with oil it doesn't. In Cuba maybe.

MOE: 3. Some Democrats have gone along with this TREASON

MEGAN: 2. Not that McCain knows the difference between that and Shi'ites

MEGAN: 3. Um, they totally did, like they always do. Bush gives good belly rubs!

MOE: 4. The Joint Chiefs are not fans of this plan.

MOE: 5. Admiral William Fallon: I want to have his babies.

MEGAN: 4. The Joint Chiefs don't want their military legacies to be tons more soldiers dying in a pointless war.

MEGAN: 5. I'll leave that one to you. I wouldn't want to quit drinking for 9 months.

MOE: You don't have to completely quit, and definitely not for the whole nine months! Also you don't keep it down very well in the first few months of pregnancy anyway.

MEGAN: Yeah, I've heard that, though it reportedly depends on the woman. Also, with my personal history of (probably but not definitely developmental) birth defects, I probably would have to be way stricter than average.

MOE: But also I was not actually saying that literally just in response to:

Too many people believe you have to be either for or against the Iranians,” he told me. “Let’s get serious. Eighty million people live there, and everyone’s an individual. The idea that they’re only one way or another is nonsense.”

When it came to the Iraq war, Fallon said, “Did I bitch about some of the things that were being proposed? You bet. Some of them were very stupid.”

MEGAN: Yeah, that is pretty fucking sexy. I'd hit it.

MOE: 6. There are some laws, about how Congress needs to hear about it if the CIA declares war on The Iran, because Congress is where the CIA would get money to do such a thing, but the Bush Administration maybe doesn't know about those laws, because they are still operating from the rule book that they were using when United Fruit chipped in most of the $$ for regime changes andsuch, only instead of United Fruit they are maybe finding another source for the money. (Bernanke?)

MOE:

"The agency says we’re not going to get in the position of helping to kill people without a Finding," the former senior intelligence official told me. He was referring to the legal threat confronting some agency operatives for their involvement in the rendition and alleged torture of suspects in the war on terror. "This drove t"the over-all authorization includes killing, but it’s not as though that’s what they’re setting out to do. It’s about gathering information, enlisting support."

And how are you going to enlist support if you don't kill a few evildoers here and there???

MEGAN: More likely Chevron.

MEGAN: And, obviously, if you didn't mean to kill them, it's, like, totally ok. Casualties of an undeclared war, man.

MOE: 7. There is some group called the Gang of Eight that includes Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and John Rockefeller and it occurred to me that I forgot the members of the Gang of Four besides Jiang Qing. You always remember the girl involved in something like that. BTW God bless YouTube!

MEGAN: I mean, the problem with getting a declaration of war is that no President has really ever bothered. They get an authorization to do whatever the fuck they want to do and then use it, bypassing Congress's constitutional powers in that regard.

MEGAN: His hip thrusting is kind of freaking me out, man.

MOE: Ew yeah I know…if cheap wine is doing that to him…btw Admiral Fallon's nickname is "Fox". Silver fox!

MOE:

"Fox said that there’s a lot of strange stuff going on in Special Ops, and I told him he had to figure out what they were really doing," Fallon’s colleague said. "The Special Ops guys eventually figured out they needed Fox, and so they began to talk to him. Fox would have won his fight with Special Ops but for Cheney."

The Pentagon consultant said, "Fallon went down because, in his own way, he was trying to prevent a war with Iran, and you have to admire him for that."

MEGAN: He really just does get foxier the more you read.

MOE: 8. Were we speaking of cheap wine? Because there was an explosion someplace in The Iran called "Shiraz."

MEGAN: Which the Australians pronounce Shur-azz instead of Shur-ahz

MOE: 9. Oh yeah, remember Mossadegh? Weird how you can't spell that name without "Mossad." Anyway he's briefly mentioned, not by name but I always wondered what happened to him and turns out he stayed under house arrest until 1967. He was TIME's Man of the Year in 1951. Dude old Timestyle was soooo trippy.

MOE:

For all its power, the West in 1951 failed to cope with a weeping, fainting leader of a helpless country; the West had not yet developed the moral muscle to define its own goals and responsibilities in the Middle East. Until the West did develop that moral muscle, it had no chance with the millions represented by Mossadegh.

Hahahah they sure found some growth hormones for that whole "moral muscle" problem!

MEGAN: But, like steroids, it kind of rots your brain and shrinks your testes and makes you pissed off and gives you unsightly acne. Or whatever the foreign policy equivalent of those things are.

MOE: 9. We are overestimating the amount of ethnic tension we can stir up in Iran because the Baluchis really hate the government but actually, the "Baluchis" according to Robert Baer, is just a more Italian family restaurant chain sounding name for Al Qaeda, and they are bad dudes who cut people's heads off and shit, no lie, KLS is a Baluchi, and so is Ramzi Yousef.

MEGAN: Oh, but, like usual, we'll just pay them now and depose them later!

MOE: 10. Then there is some Tufts professor who tells us about a violent Al Qaeda funded resistance movement called the Iranian People's Resistance Movement and wouldn't it just figure with a name like that they are supposedly connected to the "drug culture."

MEGAN: Wait, so there are two al Qaeda's in Iran? Nice.

MOE: 11. Probably more, but then there are some Kurdish groups too, and they all get shitloads of money from the CIA for doing absolutely nothing, and I think I just decided what to do with my life or at least the next year of it. "My Year In The Iranian Resistance." How about it Megan? We'd totes get famous. Angie and I were going to try to get a defense contract a la Efraim Diveroli but her boyfriend said it was probably too late for that. Her boyfriend who works, in the Pentagon, for a defense contractor. I wonder how much money the most highly remunerated person in the Pentagon makes. Anyway. Also I forgot to mention it but

MEGAN: Dude, I'm all up for going on the government cheese, especially if it's someplace cool like Iran and we could get a book deal out of it!

MOE: 12. Al Qaeda has money too and they're sending it to Algeria, maybe because it's the home of Zacarias Moussaoui and he was a hoot.

MEGAN: Well, if you're not talking defense contractors, the most highly remunerated person at the Pentagon is the SecDef.

MEGAN: Well, I guess that means al Qaeda doesn't like Sarko. If they're spending money their they must be recruiting there, and if they're recruiting there, I'm thinking Paris. They haven't had an attack yet, but we have, the UK has and Spain has.

MOE: No I am talking defense contractors. Also Pastor Pfleger I forgot to mention his appearance on GMA but he appeared on GMA.

MEGAN: Oh, well, then it's got to be, like, the CEO of Boeing or something. That's my guess.

MOE: Yeah but the CEO of Boeing ... not Mullally.. shit, I dunno, anyway, it's not important, his OFFICE is not in the Pentagon. See what I'm saying?

MEGAN: Ah, ok, I see what you're saying. I'll be the grunts who have to work in offices there still don't make more than the SecDef. I can't find his pay, but the highest guy below him makes $200,000, so I'm guessing it's about that or a little more.

• For those of you who don't recognize the people Obama is embracing, that's Debbie Dingell to the left and Senator Carl Levin to the right. They were two of the four Michiganders who led the fight to get Michigan's full delegate seated at the convention. [Kalamazoo Gazette]
• Which is a roundabout way of illustrating that Democrats are all kissing and making up and coming to the fold and John McCain may be feeling lonely without the ladies he was expecting to come over. [LA Times]
• Except for with Joe Lieberman, he's really pissing the Dems off. He might speak at the Republican convention, by the way, a la Zell Miller. [HuffPo]
• Obama confirmed the month-long rumors today that Patti Solis Doyle, Clinton's former campaign manager, will be joining his campaign. That's gonna be interesting. [Fox News]
• Gore endorsing Obama? Prolly gonna be less exciting unless he shows up with pictures of Manbearpig. Why won't anyone take him serially? [Washington Post]

• In more interesting news, many people are using the web to learn things about the candidates! You know, like, instead of just getting it from the news. [Washington Post]
• Unfortunately, John McCain is not one of those people. He doesn't even know what his own climate change bill is about. [Gristmill]
• And he didn't use it to find out that he was about to hold a fundraiser with a guy who suggested rape victims "lie back and enjoy it" if it's inevitable. Of course, everyone else did. [CNN]

MEGAN: Hey, you stupid emotional fucking dyke.
MOE: Hi. Good morning. The opinion editors of the Washington Post did our work for us today by publishing the demented ravings of some lady named Charlotte Allen in a piece called We Scream, We Swoon, How Dumb Can We Get?. The headline on the website initially "Women Aren't Very Bright," has been changed to read "Why Must Women Act So Dumb?" I think there is something somewhat "meta" going on here! But let's not dismiss her like the feminist drones we are! Let's take it paragraph by paragraph. Drink in the contrarian genius of her well-constructed arguments, provide an abridged version that our feebleminded readers will find easier to follow.
Her inspiration appears to have come from watching women at a political rally for Barack Obama. Women tend to get very emotional and irrational over such affairs, in stark contrast to men with their clever little public statements of dissent i.e. "Iron My Shirt", or that guy who shot his brother-in-law after the Democratic debate...

Here's Agence France-Presse reporting on a rally for Sen. Barack Obama at the University of Maryland on Feb. 11: "He did not flinch when women screamed as he was in mid-sentence, and even broke off once to answer a female's cry of 'I love you, Obama!' with a reassuring 'I love you back.' " Women screamed? What was this, the Beatles tour of 1964? And when they weren't screaming, the fair-sex Obama fans who dominated the rally of 16,000 were saying things like: "Every time I hear him speak, I become more hopeful." Huh?

I can't help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women — I should say, "we women," of course — aren't the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial. Women "are only children of a larger growth," wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been right?

MEGAN: 1. Some guy in the 1700s had teh wimmins all figured out.
MEGAN: 2. It's not women's faults that they're overly emotional and easily distracted because they'd simply designed that way.
MEGAN: 3. OMG, the Olsen twins are, like, soooo thin.
MOE:

I'm not the only woman who's dumbfounded (as it were) by our sex, or rather, as we prefer to put it, by other members of our sex besides us. It's a frequent topic of lunch, phone and water-cooler conversations; even some feminists can't believe that there's this thing called "The Oprah Winfrey Show" or that Celine Dion actually sells CDs. A female friend of mine plans to write a horror novel titled "Office of Women," in which nothing ever gets done and everyone spends the day talking about Botox.

We exaggerate, of course. And obviously men do dumb things, too, although my husband has perfectly good explanations for why he eats standing up at the stove (when I'm not around) or pulls down all the blinds so the house looks like a cave (also when I'm not around): It has to do with the aggressive male nature and an instinctive fear of danger from other aggressive men. When men do dumb things, though, they tend to be catastrophically dumb, such as blowing the paycheck on booze or much, much worse (think "postal"). Women's foolishness is usually harmless. But it can be so . . . embarrassing.

Take Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign. By all measures, she has run one of the worst — and, yes, stupidest — presidential races in recent history, marred by every stereotypical flaw of the female sex. As far as I'm concerned, she has proved that she can't debate — viz. her televised one-on-one against Obama last Tuesday, which consisted largely of complaining that she had to answer questions first and putting the audience to sleep with minutiae about her health-coverage mandate. She has whined (via her aides) like the teacher's pet in grade school that the boys are ganging up on her when she's bested by male rivals. She has wept on the campaign trail, even though everyone knows that tears are the last refuge of losers. And she is tellingly dependent on her husband.

Then there's Clinton's nearly all-female staff, chosen for loyalty rather than, say, brains or political savvy. Clinton finally fired her daytime-soap-watching, self-styled "Latina queena" campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, known for burning through campaign money and for her open contempt for the "white boys" in the Clinton camp. But stupidly, she did it just in time to alienate the Hispanic voters she now desperately needs to win in Texas or Ohio to have any shot at the Democratic nomination.

What is it about us women? Why do we always fall for the hysterical, the superficial and the gooily sentimental? Take a look at the New York Times bestseller list. At the top of the paperback nonfiction chart and pitched to an exclusively female readership is Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love." Here's the book's autobiographical plot: Gilbert gets bored with her perfectly okay husband, so she has an affair behind his back. Then, when that doesn't pan out, she goes to Italy and gains 23 pounds forking pasta so she has to buy a whole new wardrobe, goes to India to meditate (that's the snooze part), and finally, at an Indonesian beach, finds fulfillment by — get this — picking up a Latin lover!

This is the kind of literature that countless women soak up like biscotti in a latte cup: food, clothes, sex, "relationships" and gummy, feel-good "spirituality." This female taste for first-person romantic nuttiness, spiced with a soup¿on of soft-core porn, has made for centuries of bestsellers — including Samuel Richardson's 1740 novel "Pamela," in which a handsome young lord tries to seduce a virtuous serving maid for hundreds of pages and then proposes, as well as Erica Jong's 1973 "Fear of Flying."

Then there's the chick doctor television show "Grey's Anatomy" (reportedly one of Hillary Clinton's favorites). Want to be a surgeon? Here's what your life will be like at the hospital, according to "Grey's": sex in the linen-supply room, catfights with your sister in front of the patients, sex in the on-call room, a "prom" in the recovery room so you can wear your strapless evening gown to work, and sex with the married attending physician in an office. Oh, and some surgery. When was the last time you were in a hospital and spotted two doctors going at it in an empty bed?

I swear no man watches "Grey's Anatomy" unless his girlfriend forces him to. No man bakes cookies for his dog. No man feels blue and takes off work to spend the day in bed with a copy of "The Friday Night Knitting Club." No man contracts nebulous diseases whose existence is disputed by many if not all doctors, such as Morgellons (where you feel bugs crawling around under your skin). At least no man I know. Of course, not all women do these things, either — although enough do to make one wonder whether there isn't some genetic aspect of the female brain, something evolutionarily connected to the fact that we live longer than men or go through childbirth, that turns the pre-frontal cortex into Cream of Wheat.

Depressing as it is, several of the supposed misogynist myths about female inferiority have been proven true. Women really are worse drivers than men, for example. A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men's 5.1, even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women. The only good news was that women tended to take fewer driving risks than men, so their crashes were only a third as likely to be fatal. Those statistics were reinforced by a study released by the University of London in January showing that women and gay men perform more poorly than heterosexual men at tasks involving navigation and spatial awareness, both crucial to good driving.

The theory that women are the dumber sex — or at least the sex that gets into more car accidents — is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence. Men's and women's brains not only look different, but men's brains are bigger than women's (even adjusting for men's generally bigger body size). The important difference is in the parietal cortex, which is associated with space perception. Visuospatial skills, the capacity to rotate three-dimensional objects in the mind, at which men tend to excel over women, are in turn related to a capacity for abstract thinking and reasoning, the grounding for mathematics, science and philosophy. While the two sexes seem to have the same IQ on average (although even here, at least one recent study gives males a slight edge), there are proportionally more men than women at the extremes of very, very smart and very, very stupid.

I am perfectly willing to admit that I myself am a classic case of female mental deficiencies. I can't add 2 and 2 (well, I can, but then what?). I don't even know how many pairs of shoes I own. I have coasted through life and academia on the basis of an excellent memory and superior verbal skills, two areas where, researchers agree, women consistently outpace men. (An evolutionary just-so story explains this facility of ours: Back in hunter-gatherer days, men were the hunters and needed to calculate spear trajectories, while women were the gatherers and needed to remember where the berries were.) I don't mind recognizing and accepting that the women in history I admire most — Sappho, Hildegard of Bingen, Elizabeth I, George Eliot, Margaret Thatcher — were brilliant outliers.

The same goes for female fighter pilots, architects, tax accountants, chemical engineers, Supreme Court justices and brain surgeons. Yes, they can do their jobs and do them well, and I don't think anyone should put obstacles in their paths. I predict that over the long run, however, even with all the special mentoring and role-modeling the 21st century can provide, the number of women in these fields will always lag behind the number of men, for good reason.

So I don't understand why more women don't relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my Bronx Irish paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was to throw a blanket over it, can make a house a home.) Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts' content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim.

We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get? [Washington Post]

• UPDATE: The Northern Illinois University shooter killed five people, including himself. [WSJ]
  
• "I will be haunted to the end of my days by what my child has done." That's the mother of Latina Williams, who killed herself and two classmates Louisiana Technical College last week.
  
• And in other senseless death news: 82 middle school-aged kids have died playing a "choking game" whereby, uh...[CBS]
  
• Aaaaaaaah! CALLING THE FEMINAZI BONERKILLER SQUAD: A woman referee was walked off a Kansas high school basketball game and barred from officiating. Because she was a woman. Fun irony: The school is named St. Mary's. [Kansas City Star]
  
• New Mexico finally finished counting its caucus votes: Hillary Clinton won by 1,700. [Wonkette]
  
• But her campaign is fucked: Mark Penn is to blame! [Time]

• Or maybe it's Patti Solis Doyle. Her chief advantages were "loyalty and discipline" (and "little else"); and the fact that Hillary supporters expected a few phone calls from Bill to quell all influential black peoples' interest in Obama; or that Solis Doyle fibbed brazenly about the sorry state of campaign coffers; or that Obama's team knew better how to raise money from non-gazillionaires; or something about Doritos... [Atlantic]
• Britney Spears has a 30-year-old brother, and he's been named a trustee to her trust. [TMZ]
• "More Than A Feeling" writer Tom Scholz says Mike Huckabee's persistent covering of the songs at political events has caused him "damage." [Rolling Stone]
• Mitt Romney is endorsing McCain! Yeah who cares. Mitt Romney's Catholic spiritual adviser is telling our whole fucked up guilty flock of sinful sinners to vote Obama. [Slate]
• Tonight is going to be fucking depressing if I end up watching Lipstick Jungle.

MOE: PATTI SOLIS DOYLE. I wish I knew more about her other than she looks like Rachel Ray and according to Drudge is Latina. I guess he's saying she's outlived her usefulness since all Latins were already too racist to vote for the black? I know I read once in More magazine I think about the travails of being Patti Solis Doyle and ... how it's tough to be a working mom etc. etc. Other than that I'm drawing a blank. Always more distracted by the sight of Huma Abedin. What do you have?
MEGAN: I got nothin'. I guess I had sort of assumed that, given the incestuous nature of politics in DC, that she was related to Congresswoman Hilda Solis, but wikipedia tells me I'm wrong. She's actually from Chicago AND worked for Mayor Daley's campaign... and Michelle Obama used to work for Mayor Daley. And her strategy has definitely been kind of hit-or-miss this campaign. But, stupid to fire her 2 days before tomorrow's primaries, I think. Your campaign manager should never be the story.
MOE: Oh, my brother came up with an interesting theory he just emailed to me. It just started to make sense now. He thinks Romney helped Obama by "making McCain the sure-thing for Republicans." Now, independents who would have gone to the Republican primaries to vote for McCain are instead going to the Democratic primaries to vote for Obama. He said this is what is happening with his friend's dads — all Virginia guys.
It's the faith of my fathers/dreams from my father thing. I'm telling you, this campaign will turn out to be about Manhood yet!
Oh yeah and I guess we should also discuss whether it was, like, "expected" that Obama would win all those states by those insane margins? And was Nebraska the biggest surprise? I always thought of Nebraska as being pretty much like Oklahoma.
MEGAN: Well, but Nebraska and Maine were both closed primaries/caucuses, as is Maryland's and DC. It might make a difference in VA tomorrow, though.
Nebraska's a weird state anyway. It has a unicameral nonpartisan legislature.
MOE: Who's favored in Maryland? I imagine that a huge percentage of MD Dems have worked w. the Clintons but that's not necessarily an advantage for their campaign.
MEGAN: As for Washington state, a friend from Seattle told me this weekend that Barack's events attracted at least 3 times the people's as Hillary's events last week.
The last 3 polls in Maryland show Obama leading by an average of 21 points.
According to The Sun, it's because of the strength of black voters in the state, but Governor Martin O'Malley (whose doesn't think superdelegate vote is currently committed to the Hills) doesn't think it's an issue for the Democratic party to put forward a candidate that a majority of African-American voters in his state (and many others) didn't support because they'll still vote Democratic in November.
MOE: Okay so I actually just read one of those Solis Doyle stories. They are blaming it on the cash crunch; Patti didn't tell Hillary she was running out of cash etc. etc. ... sounds like some sort of spin. But on the other hand, who was letting them ride around in private jets if they were burning through dough that way? Have you seen any stories on, you know, places the Clinton campaign might have saved $$$ ?? In other news she apparently clashed with Bill. I dunno, I realize this strategy worked for McCain, but that was last summer...
And dude?! Mark Penn got FOUR MILLION DOLLARS??!
MEGAN: Oooh, I guess we know who walked Patti out, eh?
All those campaign consultants are bigger blood-suckers than lobbyists, imho
MOE: Srsly! And I mean, honestly, for what? So that fucking Terry McAuliffe can go on teevee and say "Are you suggesting we DISENFRANCHISE THE VOTERS OF FLORIDA Keith? Surely you don't suggest we DISENFRANCHISE THOSE VOTERS!!!"
MEGAN: Penn is getting paid twice as much as Axelrod is getting paid by Obama, who's raking in way more cash right now.
But she did jump on the flat fees for media consultants bandwagon ahead of Obama, which was probably a money saver, since those people bilked Kerry for $9 million last time. They get paid a fee per ad, btw, for how many ads air. They're the ones I blame.
MOE: It's funny. I vaguely remember the Cinton administration seeming like an old diesel powered station wagon, or like Pig Pen, w. like, a big cloud of internal strife and dissent wherever it went, in stark contrast to Bush and his sorta hard shiny coat of loyalty and mind control, where the only option for a rank-breaker would be to go unload to Ron Suskind.
Anyway HAPPY MEDIUM. THERE'S GOTTA BE A HAPPY MEDIUM RIGHT?
MEGAN: There are no mediums in politics!
Happy or otherwise.
They pay shitty, whether it's for a campaign or in the government, so they only attract the TRULY COMMITTED who aren't really the types of people who swim happily in the grey areas.
MOE: It also seems like maybe Patti failed to wrest an endorsement out of John Edwards and that did it?
MEGAN: If Hillary herself couldn't do it, how was Patti going to?
MOE: She has such a nice face! She seems so breezy and approachable! Maybe they got along!
But not well enough. When is Edwards supposed to come out + endorse somebody?
He is "said to be torn."
MEGAN: I think having not yet done so, he's not really going to until he absolutely has to. Why would he? He probs isn't a superdelegate, so it's his only real vote.
MOE: Okay and just in case you forgot about the Bush administration still like running things and all, six lucky Guantanamo detainees are finally going to get their day in "court." The Pentagon seeks to kill them all. But what of the rest of the guys in Guantanamo? That's for the next administration to deal with!
And Mike Huckabee...persists.
MEGAN: Because The Jesus will help him prevail against that McCain guy.

• "Prayers can help and so can the government." That's Bush on the tornadoes that have killed 50 people throughout the south. Oh right he's still president! I think that means you're better off with "prayer." [Washington Post]
  
• Total votes cast in Dem primaries last night: 7,347,971 for Clinton, 7,294,851 for Obama. [Time]
  
• Hillary Clinton loaned $5 million to the Hillary Clinton campaign. We hope she negotiated some good terms...[Politico]
  
• That $5 million will not be used to actually pay her staff...[Time]
  
• Justice for tainted pet food peddlers from China... [WSJ]

• American Apparel sent a memo to its employees instructing them to vote for Obama or McCain in yesterday's primaries BECAUSE THEY HATE WOMEN. Except illegal alien women. [Politico]
  
• And speaking of illegal, that whole American Apparel stunt was... [Politico]
  
• Not that it matters bc no one in California voted for Obama anyway. [Time]
  
• But the unprecedented under-30 vote in Missouri carried Obama...and Huckabee (?!) to victory. [MTV News]
  
• It's actually a good thing Bush was such a distinctly horrible president bc if he wasn't his brother or that "macaca" guy might have the nomination...[Wash Times]
  
• "Michelle Obama looks good in anything, and Cindy McCain looks scary in everything." [XX Factor]
  
• "Wish I looked that scary..." [XX Factor]
  
• Vladimir Putin's love story: now a heartwarming rom com. [Yahoo! News]