I Could Be Mayor

That’s right people, its Wednesday. And to celebrate, I’m writing a blog entry. My life is really sad.

Actually, I’m celebrating the end (hopefully) of Democratic primary debate season. Last night, Senators Clinton and Obama held their twentieth pre-nomination debate on MSNBC from Cleveland State University. Again, I’m a little confused as to why Senator Clinton continues to agree to debate Obama on college campuses, where polling seems to indicate a vast majority of students favor the senator from Illinois. But at this point that no longer matters. What matters now is that, more likely than not, these exercises in futility are over – at least until the general election. If voters haven’t figured out by now where Clinton and Obama stand on the issues, they either haven’t been paying attention, or simply don’t want to know. Next Tuesday Texas, Ohio, Vermont and Rhode Island will get their chance to narrow the field, and by Wednesday morning we’ll have a really good idea of whether this race is over, or just gearing up for six more weeks of madness.

During his warm-up speech at a rally for John McCain in Cincinnati yesterday, local radio talk-show host Bill Cunningham repeatedly referred to McCain's possible general election opponent as “Barack Hussein Obama”, and called him a political “hack” from Chicago who had received “sweetheart deals” while serving there. His remarks may have gone over well with the crowd, but he utterly failed to impress McCain. When informed of the comments after his address, McCain repudiated them saying, “My entire campaign I have treated Senator Obama and Senator Clinton with respect. I will continue to do that throughout this campaign.” Not to be outdone, upon hearing of McCain’s repudiation, Cunningham renounced McCain, proclaiming he would now be throwing his support to Hillary Clinton. He then accused the candidate of “throwing him under the bus.” Note to Bill Cunningham. If you don’t want to end up under the bus, don’t lie down in front of it. John McCain has been on the wrong end of too many of those types of attacks to condone their use by anyone affiliated with him. Cunningham should have known that – and I’m sure he did. He just couldn’t help himself. That’s just the kind of person he is. He even tried to play it off in an interview with NPR Wednesday afternoon saying he regularly refers to people by their full names – even though he did not mention anyone else’s full legal name during his time on stage. From what I understand, those big black bias-ply tread marks are pretty hard to scrub off.

As an aside, the following are the names of some radio talk-show hosts: rush Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt, Lars Larson, Michael Savage, Mancow Muller. Who names these people? Seriously. Mancow?

Disgraced Idaho Senator Larry Craig is looking for pages to serve on his staff for the remainder of his term. I think this writes it’s own jokes.

The mayor of Arlington, Oregon, was recalled from office by her constituents after she posted a photo of herself posing in lingerie with a fire truck on her MySpace page. There is some reason to believe that the removal of two employees from the local golf course also contributed to her fate, but the picture seems to be the primary point of contention. I guess my first question is what is a forty-two year old woman doing with a MySpace page? Silly rabbit, the Internet is for kids! And tell me if this makes sense to you. Posing non-suggestively in your underwear next to an inanimate object gets you fired, but smoking crack in a hotel room with an ex-girlfriend gets you re-elected? God bless America.

If you went to your local Starbucks looking for a frappuccino fix yesterday evening you probably returned home disappointed. The Seattle-based coffee chain close nearly all of it’s 7,100 stores for three hours to re-educate staff on how to brew coffee. Barista training. Remember the old days when you packed some grounds into the filter, ran the hot water through it and poured the stuff into a paper cup? Yeah, I don’t either. Now it comes with warm milk, foam, whipped cream, sprinkles, something called a java jacket, and costs seven dollars. I guess if people are going to pay that much for anything, they want to know it’s been made by a professional.

Finally, two 18 year-old girls were escorted off of a Southwest Airlines flight in Los Angeles. They claim they were discriminated against for being too pretty. (Insert uproarious laughter here.) Of course, Southwest has a different – and I’m guessing more accurate - version of events, which includes the teens confrontational behavior and use of profanity toward passengers and crew. Now I think I understand wanting to have some kind of cover story for getting thrown off an airplane, but you have to come up with something better than you were too pretty and other passengers were jealous. Obviously no one’s going to buy that. This is Southwest, not Morlock Air. They may not welcome passengers trying pass off belts as miniskirts, but no one in the history of flight has been thrown off an airplane for being too pretty. Too stupid? Yes. Too pretty? No.