According to Steve Stark in this week's Boston Phoenix...

it is game over for campaign '08, and yes John McCain won.

Good Ghod you just know Steve has wanted to write that column since January first. There is no cliche so loved by today's columnists than the whole "democrats in disarray" meme, once they write it their frontal lobes can shut down for good thus they can sit back, relax and let history wash over them like a burst sewer pipe.
Ah but this time, the shifting fortunes of democratic politics have defied Herr Stark's powers of prediction
, hence we don't get the "all Hope is Lost" column til now.
So if it is really game over, then will the Phoenix simply stop running Steve Stark's column?
No we would never get that lucky.

Which means we will have to read THIS particular column of his some twenty eight more times between now and the first Tuesday in November.
And to think, on each and every iteration, Steve gets paid as well, it fairly boggles the mind.
Honest to Ghod, if tomorrow congress passed a law outlawing the use of cliches by the punditariat, Steve Stark would be the first to dry up and blow away.
The man is a tedious and inane batherskite, the "Jack Van Impe" of local editorialists addicted to announcing impending doom in tones stentorian.
Ah but what of it, don't they all have do this at one time or another? Actually, Steve's worst sin is a simple one, he is a very bad writer. Pompous, boring, repetitive and addicted to predicting the past, that is the Steve Stark style in precis' form.
Writing is like currency policy, bad copy drives out good copy. How else to explain the persistent literary hangover that is Steve Stark?

Good for Foley's down in NYC

They've banned "Danny Boy" for the entire month of March in a desperate if doomed attempt to elevate the tone of Saint Patrick's Day.

Too bad there are no bars the Commonwealth with similar increment of courage.

Unfortunately if that ever happened the State Legislature would probably pass a law forcing ALL saloon's to pay "Danny Boy" all day in continuous loop on March 15th.

Now if they would only ban those dumb-ass green plastic bowlers and any singing on the part of elected officials. That would be cool.

I wonder how much money the brewery's spend to pimp the raw vulgar festival of false consciousness that is Saint Patrick's day as we know it?
I'll bet quite a bit but it pays I'm sure.

The Moron Season is upon us...

with several long news-light weeks before the Pennsylvania primary, the news media has already gone ape-shit with all sorts of speculation and rumor. As of today the usual suspects are pimpin' hard for a Hillary-Barack ticket (note the sequence mah frenz). I can't say either configuration brings strength to the ticket and the people pushing this seem to have no great interest in electing a democrat to the White House this fall.
No this is a bad idea, Hillary needs someone outside the beltway with some props in New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado (dropping Blue-trending Virginia into the swag-bag will be Senator Clinton's problem).
Barack needs, if you can believe it, some who can do much the same, pull together our emerging strength in the South West and hopefully imspire Senator Clinton's followers to stick with the ticket...a little seasoning wouldn't hurt either.
Whatever happens, this is no dream ticket...the people pushing the dream ticket do not have our best interests in mind.

Besides if yer gonna mark out hard for a crazy idea, then why not a real dark horse candidate?
Like maybe, ohhhh I dunno AL GORE!
Gore has "been there, done that", he is agin the war and his many many policy pronouncements look like prophecy these days. He is tanned rested and ready, and hopefully hungry for revenge.

Either Senators Clinton or Obama make the perfect VP for him.

If this crazy.
Yes.
But trust Humble Elias you will hear and read ineffably crazier ideas in the weeks to come.

Every time the punditariat screams

that Hillary Clinton needs to get out of the Presidential Race, she gets off her stool and boxes a good round.
This points out the catastrophic weakness in having the presidential contest and the political debate (two very different things) remorselessly referee'd but the same class of jaded and corrupt news media freaks.
That has to come to an end and soon my friends...because we might-might-might be heading into another Al Smith-William Gibbs McAdoo lash up and reporting that kind of affair accurately and fairly is beyond the capacities of today's punditariat.

It is important to remember...

that John McCain is an honorable man, he suffered in extremis on behalf of the Republic in North Viet Nam's prison camps.

That was the best part of Senator McCain.

The WORST part of John McCain goes whoring after the endorsement of bigoted sky-grifters like Pastor John Hagee who rules his congregation with an iron fist and promises that they all will soon have infidels to flog.

And then there is McCain's love hate relationship with the medieval practice of waterboarding, used to hate it, now he seems to think it is dandy.

And then there are the Bush tax cuts, which McCain once decried and has now embraced like a drunk who has found Jesus.

And let us not forget a campaign staff loaded up to the max with lobbyists, influence peddlers and groveling pecksniffs...all on behalf of a candidate who claims to wanna toss the lobbyists into the Potomac.

And what about McCain's in and out and then in again approach to taking federal matching funds? Can't he just man up and make up his damn mind??

Yup...the best part of John McCain and it may still be languishing in Southeast Asia.

Joan Vennochi has apparently discovered that

Michelle Obama is an African American, an attorney and is married to the Junior Senator from Illinois, one Barack H. Obama.

What Joanie will do with this knowledge in the weeks and months to come should give any sensible citizen the screeching bed spins.

Cold war nostalgia

Jeff Jacoby takes time out of his busy schedule to revisit the glory days of movement conservatism by railing against the New York Philharmonic's visit to North Korea.
He notes (rightly) that the audience for the concert was filled with Comrade Kim's lackeys and sundry partei hacks, not much there in the way of public outreach I'd say.
On the other hand, if Comrade Kim wanted to reach out to the west then a sort of harmless cultural event might be as good a start as any. The USA reapproachment with the PRC commenced with nothing more than a visit of the US Table Tennis Team to China.
No doubt the Jeff Jacoby's of 1970 howled about this sellout to Comrade Mao and his cut-throat band of slave drivers.
Dunno if any of this means that Comrade Kim is about to see reason, given his record to date I doubt it, but then again bigger more malevolent dopes than he have come to terms with us.
Of course where was all this outrage when Pinochet was torturing college co-eds and the Argentinian Junta was executing citizens seemingly at random?
Where indeed.