The Carter Gilson Report

Damn, Bill can light up a room. This speech may well be better than Hillary’s last night. Happening earlier, it may get a bigger audience as well.

The audience at the Pepsi Center is eating out of the palm of his hand. Once he got them to stop cheering so he could speak, anyway.

Also, Bill mentioned Torture in Prime Time! Finally!

“Yes he can, but first we have to elect him.” Best ad-lib of the convention?

If Hillary hit a Grand Slam, what the hell is this? Game seven of the World Series?

Yeah, that was phenomenal.

It’s official, Barack Obama is the first black nominee of a major party. These are pretty amazing times to be an American. Finally.

Hillary Clinton is about to give her speech. Should at least be better than Mark Warner’s.

Liveblogging the speech in 3… 2… 1…

10:40–Bright orange pantsuit–coded message? (just kidding)

10:43–Bill is beaming. Just read his lips–”I love you.”

10:44–Too loud for Hillary to begin.

10:46–”A proud American. A proud support of Barack Obama.”

10:48–”Are you listening, you crazy PUMA bitches?” That’s Mary Ellen, not Hillary.

10:50–”No way, no how, no McCain!” “Barack Obama is my candidate and he must be our President.”

10:53–Memories from the campaign and the people she met…

10:55–Memorial for Bill Gwatney and Stephanie Tubbs Jones

10:56–I I I. I hope this is leading back to the opening points.

10:58–There we go. “Those are the reasons I ran for President, and those are the reasons I support Barack Obama for President.”

11:00–”Were you in it for me or were you in it for the Marine, the mom, etc.” That’s what we need.

11:02–”Government must be about we the people and not we the favored few.”

11:03–Healthcare is still huge for HRC.

11:04–Praise for Michelle and Biden.

11:05–Don’t need 4 more years of the last 8 years.

11:06–HRC was sorely disserved by her campaign staff. This Hillary could well have won and had my support.

11:06–Keep Going! This is one of the best speeches I’ve seen any Clinton give.

11:07–I was right. Orange is a coded message. Hillary is on fire tonight. If this doesn’t end the PUMA craziness, then it truly is craziness.

Thoughts…

Mary Ellen says that all the respect she lost for Hillary over the course of the campaign is back tenfold. I have to agree. Keith Olbermann called it a Grand Slam, I think I have to agree with both of them.

Bill Clinton was beside himself with pride. Now I’m really looking forward to Bill’s speech tomorrow night.

John McCain doesn’t know how many houses he owns.

“I think — I’ll have my staff get to you,” McCain told Politico in Las Cruces, N.M. “It’s condominiums where — I’ll have them get to you.”

And yet, somehow Obama worrying about the price of Arugula make him an elitist. WTF?

Following Dana Milbank’s excrable column of July 30 and his (far worse, in my opinion) webchat mocking of those rightfully pointing out the issues in the column, I noticed that the WaPo columnist hadn’t been on Countdown, where he pretty much is every night.

Well, tonight, in his ironically titled “Best Persons” segment, Keith Olbermann publicly burned one of his longest regular commentators.

Best Timing:
Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, who notified us today that after four years appearing with us, he had accepted another television offer.
This saved your crack Countdown staff an increasingly difficult decision.
For nearly a week we’d been waiting for him to offer a correction or an explanation for his column from last week in which he apparently reported an Obama quote without a full context turned the meaning of the quote inside-out.
Then he called criticisms of his column “whines” even though the dispute was over whether Obama said the self-deprecating: “It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign — that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It’s about America. I have just become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions” — or only the part about “I have just become a symbol…”
We had decided not to have Dana on this news-hour again until this was cleared up, and, sadly after some very happy years, he’s apparently chosen to make that cloud permanent.
Good luck, Dana.

John McCain made big noises about wanting to run a clean campaign. We knew it was crap, but we weren’t expecting it to be shown quite this clearly and stupidly.

Barack Obama never held a single Senate hearing on Afghanistan. He hadn’t been to Iraq in years. He voted against funding our troops. And now, he made time to go to the gym, but cancelled a visit with wounded troops. Seems the Pentagon wouldn’t allow him to bring cameras. John McCain is always there for our troops. McCain. Country first.

Well, not quite.  The Pentagon told the Obama campaign at the last minute that he could visit if he had his Senate staff with him, his campaign staff would not be allowed.  This is consistent with the stated policy of not using troops for political purposes, but hadn’t been explicitly communicated to the campaign before that point.  Since after leaving the Middle East Obama’s Senate staff had gone home, the campaign was not going to risk the appearance that the visit to Landstuhl was a political stunt and didn’t press the issue with the Pentago.

Oh, and the cameras?  They weren’t going to be allowed no matter who was with Obama.  It was planned as a no-press event.

Update (from Carpetbagger):

First, in terms of the substance, the ad the demonstrably ridiculous and the most fundamentally dishonest campaign commercial of the cycle thus far. The claim about Senate hearings is wildly misleading. The attack about voting against funding the troops is ridiculous. The argument about Obama not spending time in Iraq is disingenuous. The notion that Obama would rather go to the gym than visit wounded troops is insane. The claim that Obama would only visit troops if he could bring cameras is an inflammatory, transparent lie. The notion that McCain is “always there for our troops” is demonstrably false.

This was a fantastic speech. About the only thing that would have made it better is if she had given it on Tuesday, but we’ll take it.

One thing I noticed, right off the bat, is that Hillary Clinton looks more relaxed than I have seen her in well over two years. Her campaign is over, and no matter where the chips fall, that’s a huge weight off her shoulders. As someone who has run for office and been forced (due to a lack of funds and a lack of time) to bow out, I have some idea of the relief she is feeling.

It’s not that she wasn’t successful; she ran a campaign that in any other year probably would have won. She knows that, and it’s why she took so much bad advice at the end. But when it becomes obvious that you’re not going to win, when you give in to that, it’s a huge relief.

This is quite possibly the strangest bit of World Series memorabilia that I’ve seen. I saw it for sale at the local Shaws.

I’m watching Obama’s victory speech right now. He’s spent a good deal of time thanking Hillary Clinton for helping to make him a better candidate and thanking her and the other candidates for helping him in the upcoming general election race.

And now he’s contrasting himself with McCain. I’ll have more on the differences later, but he’s hitting on the economy, on Iraq, on civil rights, on security (including diplomacy). This is an acceptance speech, not just a victory speech. This is a speech we should expect on November 4th, not just in Denver. This is the Barack Obama that we saw four years ago at the Democratic Convention in Boston.

And I love that he is giving this speech in the very venue where the Republicans will be having their convention.

In very little time, hours in fact, the Democratic Primaries will finally be over. (Yay.)

I’ve been keeping out of the fray for the most part.  My first choice was Chris Dodd, but that didn’t go so well.  After Dodd, I defaulted to Obama.

And Obama is going to be the nominee.  I am ready to take on the general election full bore.

It’s time to bring the Carter Gilson Report podcast back.  I’m looking at formats, but right now, I think once a week in a long format would be best for the show.  As always, we’ll see how it goes.

I was looking at the Fellsway in Medford on Google Maps Street View, and they seem to have caught the portal to another dimension.

View Larger Map

Now I’m going to be terrified when I need to get bedding for the guinea pigs.

In case you’ve been living in a media bubble, you may not know this, but as the latest in a long string of reasons to not drop out of the race despite the lack of a mathematical route to the nomination, Hillary Clinton invoked the assassination of Bobby Kennedy.

In a filmed meeting with editors of a newspaper in South Dakota, which holds the final primary of the Democratic race on June 3, Clinton hinted that she might not concede the nomination to Obama until the August nominating convention.

“My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right?” Clinton said. “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it.”

Oh, but wait, it gets better worse:

Clinton released a statement attributing her Kennedy reference to this week’s brain cancer diagnosis of Democratic senator Edward Kennedy, the youngest of the US dynasty’s three iconic brothers.

“The Kennedys have been much on my mind the last days because of Senator Kennedy and I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation, and particularly for the Kennedy family, was in any way offensive,” Clinton said. “I certainly had no intention of that whatsoever.”

I’m so tired of the non-apology apology. I’m sorry if you were offended, but there was nothing actually wrong with what I said.

I’m not the first to call bullshit on that, but there’s no way that she didn’t know what she was saying.

There is only one reason that Hillary Clinton can claim to still be in the running for the Democratic nomination. It has nothing to do with the numbers or the amount of money she is raising, both of which should be pushing her out.  No, it is the media treating Clinton as though she still has a chance of being the nominee that is fueling her staying power.

The Media loves a horse race.  If there is a confirmed nominee for both sides in May, they have nothing to report on until August.  They love drama because drama sells.  That’s why they try to manufacture drama if none actually exists.

Thus, we have Hillary Clinton being treated at this late date as a still viable candidate.  She was viable after Super Tuesday, but the eleven straight losses after then should have set the story of a superstar’s meteoric rise and the establishment’s diminishing chances.  Instead, the press kept the horserace going through to last night.

Last night, Sen. Clinton needed a big win in Indiana and a close loss or an upset in North Carolina to continue to pretend to be viable.  Instead, she had a big loss in North Carolina (14%) and a close victory in Indiana (2%).

This should be enough for the media to stop treating Clinton as a candidate and start treating her as an also-ran.  Barack Obama is the nominee.  It’s time to focus on November.

WordPress, the engine that allows this blog to be, has released a major upgrade, so I’m just testing it out.

There is no question that the convenience of Wal-Mart has led even the staunchest of Robert Greenwald fans darken their doorstep on occasion.  It’s only because Target is far closer that Mary Ellen and I have not been to a Wal-Mart in months, if not more than a year.

Wal-Mart has done many despicable things over the years.  Whether Sam Walton himself would have condoned what his company is doing we may never know.  However, the poor environmental record, anti-union practices and bad health care plans for employees are just the sort of banal evil that large corporations are prone to as a way to keep the bottom line in the black.

But Deborah Shank is another ball park entirely.

Deborah Shank worked for Wal-Mart in Missouri in 2000 when she was struck by a tractor trailer.  The crash and the resulting injuries have left her unable to take care of herself.  She has difficulty remembering new events.

After the accident, her Wal-Mart based insurance paid for her medical expenses as you would expect.  The Shanks’ auto insurance successfully sued the trucker’s insurance and received $417,000 which was put into a trust fund to help pay for Deborah’s ongoing care.

However, Wal-Mart, whose profits are measured in the billions of dollars per quarter, decided that it needed to recoup the expenses it had incurred in taking care of Deborah Shank.  Those expenses ended up being $469,000.  $50,000 more than she had received in the settlement.

This story is bad enough, but Wal-Mart adds so much value to everything, even this story has a twist. Deborah Shank’s son Jeremy, a US Army Corporal, was killed in Iraq on September 6, 2006.  Because of her condition, Deborah does not remember his death, or attending his funeral.  A year and a half later, the news of her son’s death hits her just as hard as it did the first time.

But as long as the half-million bucks that was spent on this woman’s care is recouped by the gigantic corporation, all’s well in the United States of fucked-up.