“God’s Rottweiler” is visiting the U.S.. NBC News has a little history on Benedict and the views that earned him the name “God’s Rottweiler”:

George W Bush and family rolled out the red carpet for the Pope at Andrews Air Force base today:

I left the Catholic Church in my youth, but I recognize this is a big deal for American Catholics and of course the Bush administration who sees the conservative Pope as an ally in some regards. Let’s hope Bush read NPR this morning to get some tips: What to Do If You Meet the Pontiff.

Hillary Clinton said in a statement today:

We are blessed to receive a visit from His Holiness, Pope Benedict, to the United States this week.  Not only is he the spiritual leader of America’s great Catholic community, he is a strong and effective voice for the cause of peace, freedom, and justice as well as the fight against poverty and disease. His visit to the United States this week should be a very impactful one. I particularly appreciate his going to Ground Zero with some of the families who lost loved ones there. I hope that his message about economic justice and global development will get an appropriate hearing both in our country and in the government. I also applaud Pope Benedict’s example and leadership on addressing global warming making the Vatican a model in conservation for all to emulate.

“His apostolic journey is built on the theme of Christian hope, and as he has said, the Gospel message is ‘deeply rooted’ in our country.  We all pray that he will have a safe and successful visit to America, and that everyone will find inspiration in his presence and his words.

The NY Times reports “Benedict is scheduled to make a series of appearances between his arrival and departure on April 20, including a mass at Yankee Stadium and an address before the United Nations General Assembly in New York.”

The pope began his visit by addressing an issue that has wounded the Catholic Church in the United States, telling reporters on his aircraft that the sexual abuse of children has caused “great suffering” for the church and “me personally.” The scandal has produced thousands of sexual abuse victims and about 5,000 accused priests since it erupted in 2002 and has cost the church more than $2 billion in settlements.

“It is a great suffering for the church in the United States and for the church in general and for me personally that this could happen,” he said. “As I read the histories of those victims, it is difficult for me to understand how it was possible that priests betrayed in this way. Their mission was to give healing, to give the love of God to these children. We are deeply ashamed and we will do what is possible that this cannot happen in the future.”

There’s more on the Pope’s visit at ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES and TBogg.

In reference to the hearings Maureen Dowd got off the Obama train long enough to write an insightful article. Here’s her take on Senator Boxers comment. It’s part of a good analysis.

You know you’re in trouble when Barbara Boxer is the voice of reason.

“Why is it,” she asked, “after all we have given — 4,024 American lives, gone; more than half-a-billion dollars spent; all this for the Iraqi people, but it’s the Iranian president who is greeted with kisses and flowers?”

She warmed to: “He got a red-carpet treatment, and we are losing our sons and daughters every single day for the Iraqis to be free. It is irritating is my point.”

Ambassador Crocker dryly assured the senator from California that he believed that Dick Cheney had also gotten kissed on his visit to Iraq.

In this informative video, Sen. Clinton talks with Kevin Sack of the New York Times about her health care plan.

Sean Wilentz has written a piece for TNR on the Orlando Patterson OP/ED in the NYT yesterday that JoAnne posted about saying, “I was stunned by this article.” I was stunned too.

Wilentz responds to Patterson saying, “Hold On–’3 A.M.’ Wasn’t Racist,” and in his piece he points out the obvious, on the eve of the Mississippi primary, the Obama camp was at it again:

Reading Orlando Patterson’s op-ed in the New York Times, “The Red Phone in Black and White,” is a depressing experience.  Not only does the piece scurrilously accuse Hillary Clinton’s campaign of cutting an ad that borrows from the filmmaker D.W. Griffith’s glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. Not only is this attack based on a Clinton advertisement about national security, not domestic policy (let alone race), that required a singularly tortured and biased “close reading” by Patterson to reach its conclusions. What is truly depressing is that the essay fits what has become a troubling and familiar pattern by the Obama campaign and its fervent supporters to inject racial politics on the eve of yet another Democratic primary in a Southern state, in this case Mississippi, where African-American voters are expected to vote in large numbers.

I described this pattern on February 27, accounting for how the Obama campaign has cleverly played what I called the “race-baiter card”–and yet blamed Hillary Clinton.  These efforts, undertaken both by Obama’s own campaign and its boosters in the press, escalated after Clinton’s surprising win in New Hampshire and in the build-up to the South Carolina primary.  To recount the ugliness: Obama–through his national co-chair, Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr.–accused Clinton of studied callousness toward the victims of Hurricane Katrina; his press supporters falsely ascribed her victory to racism among New Hampshire’s Democratic voters; the Obama campaign then went on to seize upon non-controversial and historically accurate statements by Bill and Hillary Clinton (as in the notorious Martin Luther King-Lyndon Johnson episode, fully discredited by Bill Moyers and others) and called them inflammatory race-baiting.

Now, in anticipation of the Mississippi primary, it’s happening again.

Wilentz points to a pattern set up by the Obama camp that trends back to the New Hampshire primary:

In Texas, Ohio, and Rhode Island on March 4, as earlier in New Hampshire, the Obama campaign did not achieve the knock-out blow it expected and predicted. Indeed, just before those primaries and since, Obama’s camp started to receive serious criticism and scrutiny for the first time, over the candidate’s connections to indicted Chicago fixer Tony Rezko, and over the amateurish and revealing actions of senior advisers Austan Goolsbee, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power. The campaign has turned to double-talk and to stonewalling the press. And once again, it has lashed out by playing racial politics while accusing the Clinton campaign of playing the very same game.

Interpreting the Clinton 3 A.M. phone ad on preparedness and national security as a hidden appeal to white racism takes a remarkable bit of bad faith on the part of Professor Patterson. But the bad faith is not restricted to him alone. Earlier in the campaign, in speeches to black audiences, Obama mouthed lines generally believed to come from Malcolm X about how African Americans were being “bamboozled” and “hoodwinked” by white oppressors and Uncle Toms–except that the lines were not actually Malcolm’s but were scripted for Denzel Washington playing Malcolm X in Spike Lee’s movie. Now, in Mississippi, Obama is talking about blacks being bamboozled and hoodwinked again.

And he points to the fact that Obama himself dredged up the patently false “costumegate” charges against Clinton, although he himself said he knew her campaign was not responsible:

Then, after Obama conceded that Clinton had nothing to do with the ridiculous posting on the disreputable Drudge Report of a picture of Obama in ceremonial Somali dress–supposedly an appeal to racial and religious fears–he now is telling the voters of Mississippi that in fact she was responsible for the photo’s appearance, and that she did it in order to scare people–a charge he well knows to be untrue.  In the televised debate in Ohio on February 26, Obama said that “I take Senator Clinton at her word that she knew nothing about the photo.  So I think that’s something that we can set aside.”

But on March 10 in Jackson, Mississippi, he declared, “When in the midst of a campaign you decide to throw the kitchen sink at your opponent because you’re behind, and your campaign starts leaking photographs of me when I’m traveling overseas wearing the native clothes of those folks to make people afraid … that’s not real change.”

So Obama has flip-flopped and as we all know “the press corps does not always report it” when Obama pulls a fast one. The bottom line Wlientz points out is the fact that “the cynical race politics by Obama and his passionate followers, is toxic, not just for this campaign but for American political life.”

It is toxic. And downright depressing. I say this not as a Clinton supporter, but as a Democrat and an American. I’ll note with irony that Wilentz’s tag line, which I used as the headline here, was a thought that had crossed my mind. The Obama camp has cried wolf on some of the most innocuous statements made by Clinton surrogates and called them racist, that we’re all getting whiplash. As I told some today outside of the blogosphere in this election depending on who you are supporting in the Democratic race, you are either a racist or a sexist. And that readers is a sad statement on the identity politics that have overshadowed the issues in this election cycle.  

Everybody’s talking about it… And at least one savvy blogger is asking pertinent questions.

N.Y. Gov. Eliot Spitzer has been “caught on a federal wiretap arranging to meet with a high-priced prostitute at a Washington hotel last month, according to a law enforcement official and a person briefed on the investigation.” Spitzer gained “national prominence relentlessly pursuing Wall Street wrongdoing” and now he’s been caught in an ethics mess of his own.

Spitzer made a “brief public appearance during which he apologized for his behavior, and described it as a “private matter” and he ”did not address his political future”:

“I have acted in a way that violates my obligation to my family and violates my or any sense of right or wrong,” said Mr. Spitzer, who appeared with his wife Silda at his Manhattan office. “I apologize first and most importantly to my family. I apologize to the public to whom I promised better.”

“I have disappointed and failed to live up to the standard I expected of myself. I must now dedicate some time to regain the trust of my family.”

There’s speculation that Spitzer will resign tonight.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer was not expected to continue as governor and may resign as soon as Monday night, sources told CBS 2 shortly after it was reported that he was linked to a prostitution ring.
Reliable sources initially told CBS 2 Political Reporter Marcia Kramer that Lt. Gov. David Paterson could be handed the job as early as Monday night, though other sources say the process could take up to 48 hours.

I’m inclined to think he shouldn’t act to rashly. As Mark Silva says on The Swamp, “There is nothing quite like a sex scandal to stop a successful politician in his tracks.”

Politicians have survived sex scandals, of course. [...]

But so much of Spitzer’s persona is invested in his own enforcement of the law – combatting white-collar crime and securities fraud as a state attorney general and organized crime as a prosecutor in New York City – that the admission of involvement in prostitution leaves little room for movement in a political arena unforgiving of hypocrisy.

This is very sad news about Spitzer. Very sad, indeed. Apparently the Feds were looking at money transfers from Spitzer and “suspicious financial activity” which led to the prostitution ring.

The blogosphere is abuzz. Stay tuned…

“They were the two competing elements in Barack Obama’s time in the Senate: his megawatt celebrity and the realities of the job he was elected to do. He went to the Senate intent on learning the ways of the institution, telling reporters he would be “looking for the washroom and trying to figure out how the phones work.” But frustrated by his lack of influence and what he called the “glacial pace,” he soon opted to exploit his star power. He was running for president even as he was still getting lost in the Capitol’s corridors.”

Outside Washington, Mr. Obama was a multimedia sensation — people offered free tickets to his book readings for $125 on eBay and contributed thousands of dollars each to his political action committee to watch him on stage questioning policy experts.

But inside the Senate, Mr. Obama, the junior senator from Illinois, was 99th in seniority and in the minority party his first two years. In committee hearings, he had to wait his turn until every other senator had asked questions. He once telephoned reporters himself to draw attention to his amendments. And some senior colleagues were cool to the newcomer, whom they considered naïve.

Opposition hit piece? No, it’s an early paragraph in today’s New York Times lead story about Barack Obama, star power and reality on Capitol Hill. “He was running for president even as he was still getting lost in the Capitol’s corridors.” What a sad, sad statement.

In his column today, David Brooks weighs the in’s and out’s of whether the Obama campaign should go negative and attack Hillary Clinton and thus play by “The Clinton Rules.” Has he not been paying attention? Because the Obama campaign has certainly not been above the fray all these months, as I have pointed out time and time again.

Obama stepping up and attacking Clinton, Brooks claims, is “supposed to show that Obama can’t be pushed around.”

But, of course, what it really suggests is that Obama’s big theory is bankrupt. You can’t really win with the new style of politics. Sooner or later, you have to play by the conventional rules.

So what effect will it have if Obama goes more negative that some of us already see he has? As Brooks explains, Clinton “never promised to purify America,” as Obama has. Which means that Obama supporters may wake up and start to become disillusioned.

As the trench warfare stretches on through the spring, the excitement of Obama-mania will seem like a distant, childish mirage. People will wonder if Obama ever believed any of that stuff himself.

Furthermore, if Obama does go on to win the nomination, indeed “he won’t represent anything new,” he will instead ”just be a one-term senator running for president.” Ah, but some of us have seen through the veneer of Obama’s “new politics”. Brooks says:

In short, a candidate should never betray the core theory of his campaign, or head down a road that leads to that betrayal. Barack Obama doesn’t have an impressive record of experience or a unique policy profile. New politics is all he’s got. He loses that, and he loses everything. Every day that he looks conventional is a bad day for him.

Besides, the real softness of the campaign is not that Obama is a wimp. It’s that he has never explained how this new politics would actually produce bread-and-butter benefits to people in places like Youngstown and Altoona.

If he can’t explain that, he’s going to lose at some point anyway.

While the Obama camp feels that people are “hungry for a different kind of politics,” in truth people are really hungry for a strong leader that can and will make the changes necessary and clean up the mess that BushCo has made. Change is coming regardless, as I have said here many times, but to really make that change a reality, we’re going to need a leader that has more experience than a “one-term senator” running on “hope”.

The economy is the issue that people are clamouring for change on. But, Barack Obama hasn’t made that his focus, as Brooks points out — he hasn’t really “explained how this new politics would actually produce bread-and-butter benefits.” Hillary Clinton has and it’s been her focus for some time now, because unlike Barack Obama, Hillary actually listens to the voters. 

Scandalous… The N.Y. Times has a hit piece on John McCain that is a doozy. It’s all the buzz and of course everyone is talking about it in the blogosphere and the media.

The problem for McCain is the piece hits him right smack in his ethics zone, as it implicates that McCain was perhaps a bit too cozy with a female lobbyist. Whether or not is will blow his campaign off course remains to be seen.

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s client, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.

Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.

Both John McCain and Vicki Iseman deny any impropriety. Iseman told the WaPo by email that “she never received special treatment from the senator from Arizona or his office.” But, as the WaPo notes:

Three telecom lobbyists and a former McCain aide, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Iseman spoke up regularly at meetings of telecom lobbyists in Washington, extolling her connections to McCain and his office. She would regularly volunteer at those meetings to be the point person for the telecom industry in dealing with McCain’s office.

Concern about Iseman’s presence around McCain at one point led to her being banned from his Senate office, according to sources close to McCain. Senior McCain aide Mark Salter, in an e-mail, denied that Iseman was ever barred from the office or was even a frequent presence there.

Iseman’s bio on her lobbying firm’s Web site notes, “She has extensive experience in telecommunications, representing corporations before the House and Senate Commerce Committees.”

Radar has the scoop on the other media outlets scrambling to make headlines with the story as well, and The New Republic says they’ll have more on the scandalous (or not so scandalous) McCain story tomorrow.

What a helluva weekend Barack Obama had, sweeping Louisiana, Washington, Nebraska and the Maine caucuses, and besting Bill Clinton for a Grammy Award last night (spoken word). With news that Hillary Clinton “swung the ax,” firing her campaign chair and replacing her with a longtime aide, it would seem Obama was on his way to a big victory this Tuesday (expected to sweep Virginia, Maryland and D.C.) and a seeming lock on the lead in delegates.

And while I’m excited, I’m also troubled by the seeming “cult of personality” that seems to be springing up around Obama’s supporters, particularly those in the MSM as they jump on the Obama bandwagon and do what they can to slam the Clintons.

I’ve already noted MSNBC and its long-running thread of “white man’s burden”. Now you can add the former drama queen, er, critic Frank Rich to the mix, as he slips whatever credibility he had in Sunday’s op-ed with this laughable assertion regarding Democrats’ “civil war”:

“Last month a Hispanic pollster employed by the Clinton campaign pitted the two groups against each other by telling The New Yorker that Hispanic voters have “not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” Mrs. Clinton then seconded the motion by telling Tim Russert in a debate that her pollster was “making a historical statement.” It wasn’t an accurate statement, historical or otherwise. It was a lie, and a bigoted lie at that, given that it branded Hispanics, a group as heterogeneous as any other, as monolithic racists.”

He then provides flimsy “evidence” showing rare instances where Latino voters have supported black candidates, none of which refutes the assertion made by the Clinton camp, and backed up by about 150 years of evidence, that African-Americans and Latino-Americans don’t like one another very much, and have a high degree of suspicion towards one another.

Carrying water for the “white man’s burden” crowd, Rich falls into the same trap that the other over-paid, white media dilettantes do: if we can over come our racism and vote for a black guy, what’s wrong with these brown people? Doesn’t being a minority automatically make you blood brothers with other oppressed minorities?

Uh, no, Frank, it doesn’t. African-Americans have a long history of suspicion and discrimination against Latinos (not to mention gays and Asian-Americans) going back to pre-Emancipation and the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), when “conquered” Mexicans on our side of the newly drawn border were granted full citizenship, while slaves continued to toil in the fields. And from there, with 150 years of immigration (legal or illegal), the “jobs war” and so forth, the two groups have loathed one another since.

Moreover, Rich doesn’t seem to even read his own newspaper, which a few weeks ago ran this article citing the “history of often uneasy and competitive relations between blacks and Hispanics.” As I’ve said repeatedly on this blog, Obama has really got to reach out, over 150 years of history, to win the Latino vote if he expects to beat Clinton and win the presidency. But having morons like Frank Rich use the term “civil war” to describe their fight for the nomination, in that sense, is itself a “racist and bigoted lie.”

As Paul Krugman points out today, this “hate springs eternal” coming from Obama supporters like Frank Rich, the entire crew at MSNBC, and other MSM sycophants (see Bill Kristol’s extolling of Obama today as well) makes one want to puke. In fact, when Rich and Kristol are “pimping” for the same candidate, you know the four horsemen are on their way.

Take a breath, Obama people. I want dude to win too, but there is no “civil war”, nor “dirty racist tactics,” nor any of the other hysterical pablum coming out of the “death to the Clinton’s” MSM quarter.

It’s a race between two fine candidates, both of whom are fighting like hell for the nomination. Yes, it might get dirty, but that’s hardball politics. Stop acting like such full-diaper toddlers every time someone dares to slam our guy. If he can’t beat the “Clinton machine” ultimately, wtf do you think is gonna happen to him when he goes up against the Republican smear army?

Let’s take our victory, keep hope alive, and stop acting like such sore winners.

Cross Posted From AoF 

Patrick Healy has a piece in the N.Y. Times blog The Caucus about a press conference on the Clinton campaign plane over Arizona on Saturday night. Healy notes “one interesting comment” from the presser:

She noted that at a conversation with a small group of voters in Los Angeles Saturday morning, no one brought up the Iraq war with her.

“Voters don’t mention it to me anymore,” she said. “People have still the same level of concern and outrage about President Bush’s policy in Iraq, but there seems to be an awareness that we have to wait to have a Democrat in the White House.”

I think Clinton is right on this. When I talk to people these days, the level of bemoaning the Iraq War that was prevalent a few months ago has faded.

What seems to be on everyone’s minds instead is the economy. Folks are worried about rising gas prices and the effect they have had on the price of consumer goods. Folks are worried about the foreclosure crisis and the fact that in January “the economy lost 17,000 jobs.”

Todd Beeton has a post up on MYDD about the large rally that Hillary Clinton held here in Los Angeles yesterday. Beeton notes:

Between her rally in San Diego yesterday and then the one here in Los Angeles today, Clinton seems to be sending one very distinct message: Southern California is Clinton country. Gotta tell you, it sure felt like it today. As I drove onto the campus of Cal State Los Angeles in East LA, I was followed by what looked like a neverending stream of cars. Once on campus, as I approached the gym where the rally was being held I found a ridiculously long line, again, seemingly neverending (see video below.) I’ve not seen anything like this at any Clinton event I’ve been to, these are the kinds of crowds Barack Obama gets, not Hillary Clinton.

And Beeton also noted:

And the excitement in that room was, as cliche as it sounds, electric. People like to chalk Clinton’s popularity in the polls up to her name recognition and her status as the “establishment” candidate but, as I’ve said before, her opponents underestimate the passion people have for her at their peril.

Check out this video of the “electric” response to Hillary:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Rep. Maxine Waters was there speaking on behalf of Hillary, she reiterated the point about the economy:

“My constituents have trouble keeping their homes and feeding their kids. They wake up every morning with all the hope in the world that things will get better; they don’t need anymore hope, what they need is help!”

The “Unions were out in force for Hillary” says Beeton, ”AFSCME members in their trademark green shirts and signs and United Farm Workers in red, chanting Si Se Puede at various times before and during the event.”

In fact, all throughout the event the crowd, which was largely hispanic but my no means predominantly so, would continue the chant, alternating between “Si Se Puede,” “Yes We Can” and then, and this seemed to spring up spontaneously from the crowd, “Yes She Can!”

“Yes She Can!“