Oh Doo Da Day

From Mark Halperin's blog via my brother (of course):

Hillary Clinton enthusiastically picked a filly named Eight Belles to win the Kentucky Derby and compared herself to the horse. Eight Belles finished second. The winner was the
favorite, Big Brown. Eight Belles collapsed immediately after crossing the finish line, and was euthanized shortly thereafter.

From First Lady to Lady Macbeth

From an article in The Nation entitled "Why Hillary Makes My Wife Scream":

It is as if Hillary Clinton is engaged in a toxic transmission onto Barack Obama of every outrageous insult and accusation ever inflicted on her by the American Right over the decades. She is running against what she might have become. Too much politics dries the soul of the idealist.

Go Obama!

From my brother: Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's first Secretary of Labor, is going to formally announce his endorsement of Barack Obama later today. "She's an old friend," Reich told New York magazine (on the subject of Hillary Clinton), "I've known her 40 years. I was absolutely dead set against getting into the whole endorsement thing. I've struggled with it. I've not wanted to do it. Out of loyalty to her, I just felt it would be inappropriate." What pushed Reich over the edge was the Clinton campaign's ad response to Obama's "small town" comments:

We have three terrible traditions that we've developed in American campaigns. One is outright meanness and negativity. The second is taking out of context something your opponent said, maybe inartfully, and blowing it up into something your opponent doesn't possibly believe and doesn't possibly represent. And third is a kind of tradition of distraction, of getting off the big subject with sideshows that have nothing to do with what matters. And these three aspects of the old politics I've seen growing in Hillary's campaign. And I've come to the point, after seeing those ads, where I can't in good conscience not say out loud what I believe about who should be president. Those ads are nothing but Republicanism. They're lending legitimacy to a Republican message that's wrong to begin with, and they harken back to the past 20 years of demagoguery on guns and religion. It's old politics at its worst — and old Republican politics, not even old Democratic politics. It's just so deeply cynical.

The AXE Effect

Says Ana Marie Cox (of the very similar Obama version), "Lazy, not funny and AXE smells like whale puke, anyway."

Carpeting

On newsstands tomorrow! Hillary Clinton deconstructs her worst outfits in Us Weekly! I'm not making this up!

The Democratic presidential hopeful backed out of a Vogue fashion shoot (earning criticism from editor Anna Wintour) — but was game when it came to spoofing her style in the Fashion Police section of the new issue of Us Weekly, on stands tomorrow.

Of a tropical-colored, ankle length coat at a Feed the Children event in 2000, Clinton quipped: “I’m a big believer in recycling — even carpets!”

She also mocks her own wedding dress, joking, “They got the idea for the Seinfeld ‘puffy shirt’ from me.”

A Rorschach Test

Leah emailed me this article about NOW and Feministing squaring off over presidential endorsements. Putting aside larger questions about recurring rifts between feminists young and old, I've been struck by how shallow much of the "feminist" discussion (NOW's endorsement included) on this election has been. I think this passage from the New York Observer's review of Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary says it well:

Let’s imagine this book’s concept—30 well-known women writers talk about how they “feel” about Hillary Clinton—applied to 30 male writers and a male presidential candidate. Adjusting for gender, the essay titles would now read: “Barack’s Underpants,” “Elect Brother Frigidaire,” “Mephistopheles for President,” “The Road to Codpiece-Gate,” and so on. Inside, we would find ruminations on the male candidate’s doggy looks and flabby pectorals; musings on such “revealing” traits as the candidate’s lack of interest in backyard grilling, industrial arts and pets; and mocking remarks about his lack of popularity with the cool boys on the playground (i.e., the writers and their “friends”). We would hear a great deal of speculation about whether the candidate was really manly or just “faking it.” We would hear a great deal about how the candidate made them feel about themselves as men and whether they could see their manhood reflected in the politician’s testosterone displays. … And we would hear virtually nothing about the candidate’s stand on political issues.

Odd Couples

This short video from The New Yorker shows cartoonist Steve Brodner riffing on the idea that there's an adversarial partnership -- a cartoonish coupling, even -- in Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's rivalry. "They're not just competitors," says Brodner. "There's a kind of antagonism, there's a kind of tension between these two." Felix and Oscar? Homer and Marge? Ricky and Lucy? Convincing or not, it's a fresh train of thought (with countless possibilities). I for one think I'd like to sketch them as Calvin and Susie. Other ideas?