FoxNews just reported that the Obama campaign has picked up three superdelegates and now has more superdelegates than the Clinton campaign. The latest tally from Fox: Obama 275, Clinton 272.

ABC News estimated late yesterday that Obama had claimed the superdelegate lead. Some liberal blogs are reporting the same and will be joined by a flurry of similar reporting as various media outlets come to the same conclusion as ABC and Fox.

The fat lady is singing. Does Hillary Clinton have her fingers in her ears?

Newsprism

What’s in a name? In a word, everything. To call a person a name, or out of their name, is to deny them something essential, something sacrosanct.

The nation the media call “Myanmar” has gone by two names for centuries: Burma, and Myanmar. It was known to the UN and the West as the Union of Burma until 1989, a year after a military dictatorship seized power and renamed it the Union of Myanmar.

For twenty years that military dictatorship has run a repressive police state where mass murder, torture, and forced labor are routine. The current typhoon aid debacle shows how little regard the Burmese regime has for human life.

Most of the world has adopted “Myanmar,” but the UK and the US Department of State haven’t. Burmese groups opposed to the regime prefer “Burma” and consider the use of ”Myanmar” as acquiescing to the regime.

The media in the UK generally use the name “Burma” while the media in the US, both left and right—FoxNews is a notable exception—generally use “Myanmar.”

The British media exercise admirable discipline and decorum in denying the regime in Burma its legitimacy. The American media display ignorance and weakness by failing to do the same.

Newsprism

What was the intent when Hillary Clinton said this to USA Today on Wednesday:

I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on…Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and whites in both states who (have) not completed college (are) supporting me…There’s a pattern emerging here.

Pundits left and right inferred the obvious: Clinton was questioning the ability of a black candidate to win the White House without the white working-class vote. She presumes much. While most of the growing criticism of Clinton’s comments focuses on her dismissive attitude towards black voters, her presumptuous attitude towards working-class whites is equally damning. Both the dismissing and the dissing come from a deep-seated belief in racial and class-based stereotypes and a longstanding reliance on inherently divisive identity politics.

Peggy Noonan reports what Democratic insiders are saying off the record about Hillary Clinton:

She has unleashed the gates of hell. She’s saying, ‘He’s not one of us.’

And,

It’s not math anymore, it’s psychodrama. If she can’t have it, no one can have it. If she has to tear the party apart, she will.

Joe Conason wears kid gloves and pulls his punches writing for Salon today, but his jab still lands squarely on Clinton’s jaw:

She violated the rhetorical rules, no doubt by mistake. It was her offhand reference to ‘working, hard-working Americans, white Americans’ that raises the specter of old Dixie demagogues like Wallace and Lester Maddox. Was she dog-whistling to the voters of Kentucky and West Virginia?

In The Washington Post today, Eugene Robinson tells the unvarnished truth:

Here’s what she’s really saying to party leaders: There’s no way that white people are going to vote for the black guy. Come November, you’ll be sorry.

And the upshot, according to Robinson:

Assuming that Obama is the eventual nominee, he will have some work to do in reuniting the party. But there’s no reason to think he won’t succeed — unless Clinton drives a wedge between important elements of the party’s historical coalition.

The bottom line is that Hillary Clinton has finally found a formula that can defeat Barack Obama, namely, exploiting deep psychological divisions between races and classes. The problem for Clinton is that, as Charles Krauthammer lucidly explains, she found the formula too late.

Why, then, does she persist in pursuing a strategy that can only divide her party and weaken its nominee?

Isn’t that Rush Limbaugh’s job?

Newsprism

In the latest salvo from his “Operation Chaos,” Rush Limbaugh insisted today that Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee for one reason and one reason only: because he’s black.

Limbaugh left no wiggle room in his assertion that Obama’s main qualification is his “skin color,” claiming that white guilt over past racism compelled the Democrats to nominate their first viable black candidate.

The strategery behind Rush’s rhetoric is clear: cast Obama as the “black affirmative action candidate” in order to maximize the anti-black vote in November. In effect, Limbaugh is calling on whites in both parties to vote against Obama for the very reason Limbaugh presumes the Democrats nominated Obama—because he’s black.

Limbaugh is practicing classic reactionary politics, justifying racism by invoking reverse racism.

As Obama tries to transcend what he calls ”racial resentments,” Limbaugh exacerbates and exploits those resentments. One tries to heal a national wound, the other picks at the scab.

Newsprism

Below are the results of the primaries in Indiana and North Carolina as reported by their Secretaries of State.

Indiana usually announces results quickly; North Carolina allows you to follow results county-by-county.

Indiana Presidential Primary Results

North Carolina Presidential Primary Results

Newsprism

Forget Jeremiah Wright, the man. What does Jeremiah Wright, the icon or persona created in the media based on that man, really, really mean?

The reason the Wright story, or rather, the persona, resonated so loudly in the media is that it taps into two deeply emotional divisions simultaneously, one racial, the other political.

Wright isn’t just black, he identifies himself as black and, more to the point, fundamentally separates himself from the dominant white culture. He’s a black nationalist, a Christian version of Farrakhan who rejects America in favor of a radical racial vision of “nation.”

His nation is not ours—that’s at the root of black nationalism, and it strikes the American people as something utterly alien and antagonistic and irreconcilable, like communism or anarchism, or the Marxist liberation theology that underpins Reverend Wright’s philosophy. It’s a threat to the very center, the very core, of American society, a threat to its moral authority.

But the threat is also a racial one, which is why having the radical, black, and radically black persona of Jeremiah Wright associated with Obama has damaged his candidacy so badly. Wright, the black Marxist, was once described as Obama’s spiritual mentor; people are left to wonder if one’s spirituality can be so glibly divorced from one’s political philosophy, and, once again, why Obama doesn’t wear a neon flag pin.

What’s more interesting than this darkening of Obama’s roots is the fact that it was not orchestrated by Clinton or McCain so much as imposed on the nation by a two-week obsession with Wright in the mainstream media, especially the content-starved cable news networks. Nor was it the conservative FoxNews that ran this story into the ground so much as the liberal MSNBC and, to a lesser degree, the liberal CNN.

It was as if the liberal media that anointed Obama were having second thoughts. If even they can have second thoughts about Obama, who can guess the depth of suspicion he evokes among the “less enlightened” white working class voter?

Newsprism

After the success of its “Top 100 Liberals” and “Top 100 Conservatives,” the UK’s Telegraph has now unveiled its “Top 50 Political Pundits.” All three lists have had many in the media buzzing (like flies around a fresh, steaming cow patty.)

Before you check the lists out, a warning: they’re broken down into mini-lists of 10 or 20, so that to peruse them all, you’ll wind up clicking on 17 separate web pages—a cynical ploy aimed at maximizing the Telegraph’s web traffic to drive up advertising rates.

So never mind the Telegraph’s gimmicky lists, which confuse popularity with influence. Influence is a poor measure in the first place, especially when the news media have become more oriented towards entertainment than analysis. By what criteria are comics like Bill Maher, Keith Olbermann and Rush Limbaugh, or a superficial confrontationalist like Hack Hannity, or Glenn Beck, considered alongside the best journalists and political pundits of our time?

For what it’s worth, here are Newsprism’s Ten of the Best Political Pundits in America, all on the same page and commercialism free:

10. Michael Kinsley—while he occasionally veers off into liberal la-la land, Kinsley is thoughtful, lucid, and incisive. He’s the most reasonable voice from the far left, idealistic yet practical in a Pat Moynihan sort of way.

9. Charles Krauthammer—a solid bedrock conservative with unmatched acumen in foreign policy, Krauthammer’s analysis of the Middle East is spot-on. He’s as hard-nosed as Bush is hard-headed, staunchly nationalistic without succombing to the naive idealism of the neocons.

8.  Christopher Hitchens—an exceptional writer, Hitchens is also stubbornly independent. He defies categorization in an era marked by polarization; he’s loyal only to his own judgment, never taking sides or pulling his punches, lefts or rights.

7. Dick Morris—he’s as sleazy as the Clintons, and as brilliant, a Karl Rove without the charm (or loyalty.) His cynicism is matched by his insightfulness. A mean streak and his hatred for his former employers make him fun to follow.

6. David Brooks—while the market rewards extremism, especially on the right, Brooks is a moderate conservative devoted to what’s best for the country rather than winning an argument. Brooks is highly intelligent and knowledgeable, and his columns range across critical social and political issues.

5. Frank Rich—a writer on par with Hitchens, Rich anchors the New York Times opinion pages and has the ear of journalists left and right. His background as a critic of culture adds depth and dimension to his political analysis.

4. Karl Rove—the man got George Bush elected. Twice. George Bush. He’s been demonized by the left and stained by his association with the policies of his most famous client, but Rove understands American politics as well as anyone. He’s been outthinking the pack for nearly thirty years.

3. Peggy Noonan—both the woman and her writing are graceful and wise. Never pretentious, she has a way of making profound points effortlessly. Her wit is elegant, simple but never simplistic. Noonan may seem as soft as a feather, but that feather cuts like a scalpel. Her criticisms of George Bush, for example, go right to the heart of a presidency with no moral or philosophical foundation.

2. Pat Buchanan—with the best grasp of history in the business, Buchanan puts contemporary issues into a sweeping historical context. His perspective spans the breadth of Western civilization in an era whose memory barely reaches beyond the 24-hour news cycle. To “get” Buchanan, you should read his books and columns; his appearances on MSNBC don’t do him justice.

1. George Will—nobody connects the dots like Will. His commentary reflects attention to the highest principles while at the same time being grounded firmly in contemporary American culture and history. Will compares favorably with William F. Buckley and Walter Lippmann. His wit isn’t dry, it’s arid, a droll sarcasm befitting his bemusement at our increasingly uncivil society. A collection of his columns like The Leveling Wind transcends punditry; he’s a philosopher who happens to write columns.

Newsprism

Like Babe Ruth’s home run record, Bill Clinton’s “shot heard ’round the world” looked certain to remain the Most Embarrassing Moment in Presidential History for a long, long time. Then came George W. Bush.

Five years ago today, Bush, codpiece and all, landed a fighter jet onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared victory in Iraq. Not only was his declaration premature, he made it beneath an enormous banner reading, “Mission Accomplished.”

Like Clinton’s moment of infamy, Bush’s was truly revealing. If Clinton is an egomanaical self-absorbed sex addict with the morals of a (one-eyed trouser) snake, Bush is a deeply insecure arrested adolescent who’s used the US military as a prop for his own self-aggrandizement. The very idea of using fighter jets, an aircraft carrier, and an entire crew of sailors as backdrops in a swaggering draft dodger’s PR stunt is as pathetic as it is ludicrous.

Just as Clinton denied his boner, saying “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” while he wagged his finger at the nation, Bush now denies the “Mission Accomplished” banner referred to the war in Iraq. The Bush administration claims the banner referred to the mission of the USS Lincoln itself; White House spokesperson Dana Perino continued that farce yesterday, saying

President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said ‘mission accomplished’ for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission.

A banner with those words on it would have been as long as a Babe Ruth homerun.

Sometimes it’s the biggest egos, and sometimes the smallest, that require the most stroking.

Newsprism

Televangelists Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker demonstrated how Christianity can’t be forced into the “logic” of commercial broadcasting without being perverted in the process.

Telegogues Bill O’Reilly and Sean “Hack” Hannity—the Swaggart and Bakker of pop culture conservatism—demonstrate how conservatism can’t be forced into that “logic” without being perverted, either.

Both O’Reilly and Hannity have roundly condemned Barack Obama for remaining a member of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ despite the anti-American ravings of its former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, from the pulpit. Obama should have left his church of twenty years, they say, because Jeremiah Wright is too radical.

Would O’Reilly and Hannity, both of whom are Catholics, agree that Wright’s rants pale in comparison to the sexual molestation of thousands of children in the Catholic Church? Since when is criticizing America more deserving of censure and apostasy than serial child molestation?

Besides, have O’Reilly and Hannity heard of the scathing condemnations of American culture and media made by Pope Benedict and Pope John Paul II?

What O’Reilly and Hannity are completely ignorant of is that Liberation Theology, the Marxist doctrine Wright was advocating when he cursed America, was developed in and disseminated from the Catholic Church. Exactly what Reverend Wright was preaching, though repudiated by John Paul II, has been preached in Catholic churches for thirty-five years.

Which do these telegogues worship first—the cross, the flag, or the Neilson ratings? If the cross, then by their own logic they should probably renounce and leave the Catholic Church (which would, of course, be absurd.) If the flag, they should temper their demogoguery and be less divisive. If the Neilson ratings, they should keep doing exactly what they’ve been doing.

Wright addressed O’Reilly and Hannity’s perverse conflation of politics and religion during an April 12 eulogy for a friend (yet another example of his narcissism and lack of boundaries) when he criticized their

jingoistic, chauvinistic ‘you’re either with us or against us’ demonizing kind of faith…O’Reilly will never get that. Sean Hannity’s stupid fantasy will keep him forever stuck on stupid when it comes to comprehending how you can love a brother who does not believe what you believe.

O’Reilly and Hannity quickly replied to Wright, as the “logic” of commercialism demands, capitalizing on a rift in the church in a way no genuinely catholic Christian would. It’s one thing to judge the words of a man, another to judge the man himself, and something else altogether to judge an entire denomination.

Wright, O’Reilly, and Hannity are three hypocritical, self-aggrandizing egomaniacs caught between the perverse logic of commercialism and the straightjacket of theological and ideological rigidity. They deserve each other.

American conservatism and a truly catholic (as in “universal”) church deserve better.

Newsprism

Here’s the Random House dictionary’s definition of catholic (small “c”): 1. broad or wide-ranging in tastes, interests, or the like; having sympathies with all; broad-minded; liberal. 2. universal in extent; involving all; of interest to all. 3. pertaining to the whole Christian body or church.

On the issue of suspending federal gas taxes over the summer, Barack Obama is the only “conservative” in the presidential race.

John McCain first proposed the tax holiday but didn’t specify how he’d pay for it. That was some pretty transparent pandering (let’s call it translucent) coming from an alleged fiscal conservative.

Hillary Clinton then began advocating the same tax holiday and added that she’d pay for it by taxing the windfall profits of the oil companies. Vintage Clinton; she panders transparently while acting fiscally conservative.

Barack Obama says the tax holiday isn’t necessary or even useful. Considering the fiscal pickle we’re in, his position is wise. If nothing else, Obama knows how to create the appearance of a new politics.

Based on average driving, most Americans would receive a benefit of about $30 over the summer, and that’s assuming that every penny of the tax will wind up in consumers’ pockets. It won’t.

How many Americans would sell their vote to a pandering politician  less than $30? Clinton and McCain intend to find out.

Newsprism

The old joke goes like this: What do you call a liberal who’s been mugged?

A conservative.

After seven years of big-spending government and eroding civil liberties under allegedly conservative Republicans, the joke needs an update: What do you call a conservative who’s been mugged by government?

A libertarian.

Independent voters tend to decide national elections, and the largest bloc of independents are libertarian in outlook: fiscally conservative and socially liberal, in effect straddling the two major parties—which leaves them vulnerable to getting kicked in the crotch no matter whom they vote for.

This country was founded on libertarian principles—limited government, property rights, civil liberties, individual responsibility—that have been significantly eroded under both Democratic and Republican administrations. The designers of our democracy wouldn’t recognize what’s become of their experiment today; somehow a design intended to limit government has been twisted into a government with no intention of limiting its designs.

Up until the turn of the millenium, it was Democrats who considered the Constitution a “quaint document.” Now the Republican Party has betrayed its most fundamental animating principle. It is no longer a conservative party.

PJ O’Rourke puts it like this: “It’s going to be hard to do a worse job running America than the Republicans have, but if anybody can do it, it’s the Democrats.”

With a socialist Hillary Clinton or a very liberal Barack Obama set to face off against a big government Republican like John McCain, McCain would seem to be the lesser of two evils. Maybe the late great Molly Ivans had it right: for the third presidential election in a row, we’re faced with “the evil of two lessers.” The only genuine libertarian in the race is Ron Paul, and he’s way too principled, too shrill, too rough around the edges, and too ugly to win the American Idol contest we call a presidential election.

At the end of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked what kind of nation had been created. His answer: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Newsprism

Mistakes are inevitable in the 24-hour pressure cooker of cable news. Misspelled words, mispronounced names, technical glitches—these are to be expected.

But confusing Stephen Douglas and Frederick Douglass in a story about the Lincoln-Douglas debates?

That’s exactly what happened this morning when FoxNews mistakenly aired a graphic showing President Lincoln and former slave Frederick Douglass (video).

The fact that three news personalities didn’t catch the mistake is bad enough. News broadcasts involve more than on-air talent, however. Editors, directors, fact checkers, technicians, and graphic artists all have a hand in what goes out over the air.

No one at FoxNews managed to figure out that an African-American like Frederick Douglass was unlikely to have been running for office in 1858, when African-Americans couldn’t even vote.

As HL Mencken noted, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

Certainly not FoxNews’s owner, billionaire Rupert Murdoch.

Newsprism

FoxNews’s vapid cheerleading for the worst president in American history reminds Newsprism of another quote from Mencken: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Under mounting pressure, Barack Obama today “clearly and unequivocally denounc(ed)” the colorful rants of Jeremiah Wright at the National Press Club yesterday (video). Obama made the statements at a press conference in North Carolina, saying he was “outraged and saddened” by Wright’s behavior. CNN, MSNBC, and FoxNews all ran the press conference live.

Obama made clear that the relationship between the two men has been significantly damaged, saying it will “never be the same” and that the two hadn’t talked lately. Obama said yesterday’s performance left him “appalled,” “outraged,” and ”angry” and contradicted “everything I’ve done in my life.”

In particular, Obama called Wright’s statement that the government spread the AIDS virus to harm blacks “ridiculous” and questioned Wright’s praise of Louis Farrakhan.

Obama also said that Wright has been enjoying being “center stage,” suggesting a motive for the increasingly unbalanced and provocative remarks of the Reverend. Many observers are convinced that Wright is purposefully undermining Obama’s campaign.

Wright’s behavior has deteriorated into self-absorbed clowning lately, and he’s been more openly racist in his comments about whites and more openly radical in his conspiratorial condemnations of America.

What Wright will do now that the gloves are off is anybody’s guess. One thing is certain: the media will give it more coverage than it deserves.

Newsprism

What’s the appropriate response to fifteen-year-old role model Mylee Cyrus, also known as the star of the Disney Channel’s Hannah Montana, posing topless for Vanity Fair (photos)?

Free advertising on the evening news. Brian Williams saw fit to give the Vanity Fair photos by Annie Leibovitz a tease and a story on NBC’s Nightly News.

Cyrus feigned embarrassment over the photos while the Disney Channel feigned outrage, accusing the magazine of “deliberately manipulat(ing) a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines.”

Newsprism wonders who’s manipulating whom. Cyrus and her father, Billy Ray, have proven adept at playing the media manipulation game as they parlay her marginal talents into a multi-million dollar empire of near Olsen Twins proportions (and who’s more talented than the Olsen twins?)

Sexually suggestive photos by the world’s leading celebrity photographer in the sophisticated Vanity Fair are no accident—more like a cynical attempt to manipulate the mainstream media into publicizing an image makeover just in time for the next, more mature phase in Cyrus’s career.

Cyrus, NBC, Disney,Vanity Fair and Leibovitz will all profit from this ”titillation” and all the free publicity it generates.

American culture, however, just sank a little bit deeper into the sewer.

Newsprism

By a vote of 6-3, the Supreme Court today upheld an Indiana law requiring a photo ID in order to vote, opening the way for similar laws to be enforced in other states.

Civil rights groups and many liberal Democrats had opposed the law on the grounds that some voters might effectively be disenfranchised if required to produce a photo ID. Indiana offers free photo IDs to voters and allows those without IDs to vote and then produce one within 10 days.

Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and David Souter voted in the minority.

Newsprism agrees that exactly one voting bloc will be disenfranchised by the new laws: practitioners of voodoo who believe that photographs steal their souls.

Newsprism

Barack Obama’s now infamous pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, is milking his fifteen-minute flash of fame for all it’s worth. This weekend he spoke with Bill Moyers in a televised interview, delivered a televised sermon in Dallas, gave a televised speech to the NAACP, and this morning he’s speaking (you guessed it—televised!) to the National Press Club.

The Reverend understands the mass media marketplace at least as well as he understands racial division. Controversy sells. Give the media controversy, and you can expect significant media coverage. If that controversy is timely, so much the better, and if it fits into the ideological template of the journalistic pack, you’re as good as gold.

No issue generates as much controversy in the US as race. Liberals in the media love to shine a spotlight on racism, real or imagined, in order to bask in the afterglow of their moral superiority. Conservatives in the media love to shine a spotlight on reverse racism, real or imagined, in order to further their political agenda.

 During his speech to the NAACP on Sunday, Reverend Wright invoked John Kennedy’s famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” and mocked JFK’s pronunciation of “ahsk.” The idea was to “ahsk” why it’s okay for JFK to pronounce a word so oddly, but not for black children to pronounce it, “aks.” That’s a valid, if utterly petty, point.

What should be clear to all is that Wright is no longer furthering a philosophy. He’s furthering his career; a book deal is surely in the works. Mocking a liberal icon like Kennedy is straight out of the playbook of Ann Coulter, who says outrageous things just to keep herself in the media spotlight. A similar dynamic drives Britney Spears and Paris Hilton to do outrageous things. (Paris’s favorite fashion accessory, her chihuahua Tinkerbell, actually had a book published. Ka-ching!)

Give the media something to cover, no matter how trivial, perverse, or cynically self-serving, and they will. Give the publishing industry a low-risk title, and they’ll publish it. With cable news, talk radio, and the Internet lowering editorial standards, and with the demands of a 24-hour news cycle, a critical institution in our society has been dragged down into the cultural gutter alongside Jerry Springer and Geraldo Rivera.

Jeremiah Wright may have some important ideas to contribute to our national discourse. He holds two master’s degrees and a doctorate, and he served this country in the Marine Corps and the Navy. The cartoon version of the Reverend that’s being bandied about in the media doesn’t do him justice.

The fact that he’s so hard at work capitalizing on that cartoon doesn’t do the rest of us justice.

Newsprism

How many Americans can correctly spell “ignorance”? How many teachers and bureaucrats?

Two excellent columns by Bob Herbert and George Will came out this week bemoaning the declining state of American education.

At least three root causes account for the sad decline in education in this country.

First, parents have abdicated responsibility for their children’s education to cold, monolithic government institutions that facilitate mediocrity and stifle innovation. Take President “childrens do learn” Bush’s failed No Child Left Behind program. Administered by the pathetically underqualified Secretary of Education, Bush croney Margaret Spellings, NCLB imposes an asinine amount of testing on schools without addressing the underlying problems—as if measuring academic failure enough will turn it into academic success. Heckuva job, Spellie.

Second, the erosion of the nuclear family has left more and more of our children adrift without adequate supervision or an understanding of the value of education. The best predictor of academic performance isn’t social class or school quality; it’s the presence of a solid family structure that inculcates the right values and enforces their pursuit. No amount of government intervention can fix the decline of the American family, though government intervention has surely been a major factor in causing it.

Third, we’re increasingly mesmerized by electronic media, which force us into the role of passive, isolated consumers of what nowadays passes for culture. Today’s American child is lost in an amoral popular culture that priviliges physical beauty over mental acuity and appetite over intellect. Reading is becoming a lost art, one that requires thoughtful deliberation as opposed to passive consumption. Market considerations have all but replaced moral ones, and all too often, mind-numbing gadgets take the place of parenting.

Education is ultimately and essentially the responsibility of each individual citizen, and that requires citizens raised in strong families that value knowledge and wisdom. No teacher, school or government program can provide that.

Henry David Thoreau, America’s philosopher laureate, wrote, “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” Two organizations hacking at the root of our education woes are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the America’s Promise Alliance, run by Colin and Alma Powell (not coincidentally, two devoted couples presiding over strong nuclear families.)

The gravest threat to American democracy isn’t terrorism or global warming. It’s ignorance.

And ignorance can only be cured from within.

Newsprism

According to the Tax Foundation, the average working American pays 31% of his or her income in direct federal, state, and local taxes. That’s more than is spent on food, clothing, and shelter combined.

If that tax burden visualized as a percentage of one year, the average working American spends the first 113 days of the year to pay direct taxes.

According to the Foundation, that means today, April 23, is Tax Freedom Day—the day of the year on which the average working American has finally worked enough to pay his or her taxes.

Congratulations!

As you celebrate the end of this year’s servitude to government, you should ask yourself these questions:

1. What do I get for my 113 days of labor? (You probably don’t want to know the answer, but if you do, check out this, this, and this.)

2. Who are the non-working Americans I’m supporting, and why the hell aren’t they working? (Some are retired or disabled—God bless them—but then there are the millions of parasites, scammers, lazybones, bureaucrats, corporations and assorted criminals we support thanks to misguided government largesse.)

To ease the burden and help you laugh through the tears, watch this witty Tax Freedom Day video courtesy of YouTube.

Newsprism

In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Black Knight fights King Arthur to prevent him from crossing a small bridge. After having an arm cut off by the King, the Knight insists, “‘Tis but a scratch” and refuses to concede. After the other arm is cut off, the Black Knight still refuses to concede, insisting it’s “just a flesh wound.” The unarmed knight then loses both legs, at which point he finally agrees to “call it a draw.”

With virtually no chance of catching Barack Obama in either delegates or the popular vote, Hillary Clinton continues to insist on dragging the Democratic Party through a bloody and needless fight to the convention in August. She needs to win around 80% of the remaining popular vote, for example, but is down by 8% in the latest Gallup tracking poll.

Disarmed and without a leg to stand on, Clinton is now asking the question, “Why can’t (Obama) close the deal?“

The answer is simple: because a black knight with no chance of victory is blocking his way.

Newsprism

Asked about his comments during the South Carolina primary comparing Barack Obama’s performance there with Jesse Jackson’s—a comment many took as injecting race into the contest between Obama and Hillary Clinton—Bill Clinton told WHYY 91FM’s Susan Phillips (audio),

I think that (the Obama campaign) played the race card on me. We now know, from memos from the campaign that they planned to do it along.

Asked about the comment today, a snippy and defensive Clinton denied saying what he said (video.) The former president also dodged a question about the alleged memos he denied referring to. (Here’s the whole story from ABC News.)

Later in the WHYY interview, Clinton said his South Carolina comments were “used out of context and twisted for political purposes by the Obama campaign.” Then, off mic, using his genuine voice and vocabulary, he adds, “I don’t think I should take any shit from anybody on that, do you?”

This is vintage Bill Clinton—cynically spinning and twisting beneath that slick, golly-gee persona of his, then lying and denying about it.

Is Bill Clinton a serial liar? It depends on where your definition of “lies” lies.

Newsprism

Those Arkansaw Bumkins, or, A Gremlin In His Goober (satire)