Mother’s Day is now well underway (in fact, it’s over already if you live in Asia), so it’s too late to send flowers. You’re just a terrible child.

But I found something that might make you feel a bit better today. It’s a touching message from the folks at Things I Did Last Night.

(cross posted at appletree and This Old Brit)

Also, it turns out that McCain has been careful to put almost all of his assets into his wife’s name. And no, he’s not going to release her tax returns. We’ll just have to trust the McCains when they tell us that none of their $100 million fortune is invested in companies that McCain has helped, and that McCain has never engaged in insider trading.

Now, it’s really over. Obama is well ahead in pledged delegates, and now leads in the superdelegate count as well. Sources inside the Obama camp say that he will claim victory on May 20, and Clinton’s campaign chairman indicated that she will concede in June. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if the race officially comes to a close within the next week.

Here’s what I think Obama has to do now: make it up to Clinton’s supporters by finding a qualified woman to serve as running mate. Here’s the one I like:

Anna Eshoo

Anna Eshoo of California has served more than 10 years in the House, and her experience on the Intelligence Committee would help make up for Obama’s perceived lack of experience (link). She’s been a staunch defender of civil liberties and she voted against the Iraq War resolution. A technology expert who serves on the Energy and Commerce Committee, so she should be able to help Obama craft a response to soaring energy prices. Finally, she co-chairs the House Medical Technology Caucus, so she’d be able to work with Obama to help address the health care issue, which is sure to be a big challenge for him when he takes office.

As of now, Eshoo is a real longshot, because she’s a relative unknown. But I think that when he selects a running mate, Obama should do so with an eye toward keeping the party together.

(cross posted at appletree and This Old Brit)

On May 2 the news broke that Marc Dann, Ohio’s Democratic attorney general, admitted to an extramarital affair. On May 3, frequent Liberal Avenger Dana Pico accused Pandagon’s Amanda Marcotte and Pam Spaulding of having a double standard, since they’d failed to pick up on the story:

When it was revealed that Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) was busted for disorderly conduct for cruising a men’s public restroom for sex, our friends on the left were all over it. When Senator David Vitter (R-LA) was revealed to have been a customer of a prostitution ring in the District of Columbia, our friends on the left howled with outrage. Yet when Governor Eliot Spitzer (D-NY) was busted for patronizing high-end (pun intended) call girls, there was some defense of him from the left.

So, I wonder how much play this story will get on Pandagon and Think Progress?

…

I’ll bet that they’d have been all over it if the Attorney General of Ohio was a Republican.

Or perhaps they wouldn’t have mentioned it. As US senators, Craig and Vitter are among the most powerful people in the United States, so it’s natural that their scandals would get play in a national political blog. But you wouldn’t expect every scandal involving state officials to be discussed on a site like Pandagon.

There’s another problem with Dana’s analysis: Amanda didn’t defend Spitzer’s affairs. In fact, Amanda attacked conservative talk show host Laura Schlessinger for defending Spitzer. And Dana readily admits that Amanda covered allegations of sexual harassment brought against one of Dann’s aides.

Is it really so hard to see why Amanda would cover sex scandals involving national political figures, and not those involving state officials? Wouldn’t you expect a feminist blog to be more interested in sexual harassment than in consensual sex?

Hypermoralist Laura Schlessinger is even more of a hypocrite than Dana

Another factor that Dana overlooks is the hypocrisy angle. When a person who’s not known for being sanctimonious is caught cheating on her spouse, it’s less newsworthy than a sex scandal involving, say, Dr. Laura Schlessinger. Eliot Spitzer prosecuted prostitution rings while serving as New York’s Attorney General, and he was caught with prostitutes. Before he was caught soliciting sex in a men’s room, Larry Craig said that Bill Clinton should be removed from office for having an affair. When Clinton was caught cheating, David Vitter said that he should resign, and Vitter’s wife suggested that if she were Hillary Clinton, she would have cut off Bill’s penis. Both were singing a different tune when Vitter’s name appeared in the appointment book of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the D.C. Madam. So far, it doesn’t appear that Marc Dann engaged in that sort of hypocrisy, which helps explain why blogs covering national events didn’t see any reason to offer commentary when he was caught cheating.

Finally, Dana overlooks the fact that while Vitter and Craig are Republicans, Spitzer and Dann’s aide are Democrats. So half of the figures covered by Pandagon’s dynamic duo are Democrats, and half are Republicans. That sounds pretty even-handed to me. Honestly, I don’t see how Dana keeps a straight face while he accuses Pam and Amanda of partisan double standards.

***

Vito Fossella (L), and fellow adulterers Nancy Reagan and Rudy Giuliani

When Dana posted his attack on Pandagon and other allegedly partisan liberal sites, I decided to file it away for future reference, knowing that the ever-vigilant Dana would contract a temporary case of blindness when, inevitably, another sex scandal involving a Republican came to light. But I thought I’d have to wait more than a week for this to happen.

As it turns out, though, a Republican sex scandal was already in the works. On May 1, Republican U.S. congressman Vito Fossella was arrested for driving while extremely drunk. Curiously, he didn’t call his wife to bail him out of jail, but Lt. Col. Laura Fay. Fay is a retired Air Force officer and the single mother of a 3-year-old girl. By May 6, it was obvious to most observers that Fossella was having an affair with Fay, and had fathered her daughter. This morning, Fossella confessed to the affair.

So how is it that Dana missed this story? Was it because Fossella isn’t a national politician? No, he’s a member of the US House of Representatives. Was is because Fossella isn’t a hypocrite? No, Fossella had this to say about the resolution to impeach Bill Clinton:

I don’t want to be here today, like so many of my colleagues. But the generations of Americans yet unborn must look back on this day in this matter, in this situation, and see this as our finest hour. . . . Reluctantly, I am here. I proudly, though, support this resolution.

So did Dana miss the story because Fossella is a Republican, or did he miss it because he was reading Pandagon again, and those hopelessly partisan Democrats over at Pandagon completely missed the story?

***

So what was Dana writing about instead of the Fossella scandal? He was criticizing Hillary Clinton for her latest racially-tinged attack on Obama. And yes, Dana got the story from Pam Spaulding, one of those hyperpartisan Democrats over at Pandagon, the ones who never criticize fellow Democrats.

But while Dana was launching his attack on Clinton, he engaged in a little race baiting of his own, when he criticizes Spaulding for suggesting that Obama’s race was not the only reason that blacks turned out overwhelmingly for him:

Mr Obama is winning more than 90% of the black vote in the Democratic primaries. That, to Miss Spaulding, is perfectly fine, though she denies that it is “solely” because of his race. That’s just plain bovine feces, and she knows it. But while it’s apparently OK for blacks to vote for a black candidate specifically because he’s black, only “scared white people” would choose to vote for a white candidate over a black one because of his race.

This is nothing more than Dana once again expressing his belief that it’s perfectly fine for white people to vote on the basis of race. To justify this, Dana pretends that Pam, a black woman, thinks that it’s perfectly fine for blacks to vote on the basis of race, and that she’s lying when she denies this.

But Pam has often decried identity politics, and Dana is wrong when he says that African-Americans favor Obama “solely” because of his race. Black voters are generally liberal, and they’ve shown a willingness to vote for white liberals over black conservatives, as they did when they helped elect Ben Cardin to the US Senate in 2006. Black voters mostly favored Clinton early in the campaign, gradually drifting toward Obama as his views became better known. They didn’t start to favor Obama overwhelmingly until a series of Clinton surrogates made racially polarizing statements. My guess is that Dana is just assuming that blacks vote on the basis of race because it fits a common stereotype of blacks, that of the irrational, race-obsessed Negro.

Now, when the McCain campaign begins to use racially-charged attacks against Obama — and they will use racially-charged attacks against Obama — what are the odds that Dana will admit that they’re using the same tactics that he finds so offensive when they’re used by Clinton?

(cross posted at appletree)

The article also lists several other examples of thieves stealing trifling amounts of metal to be sold as scrap for a few dollars, including shades from traffic lights and 90-year-old brass plaques from the Shakespeare Garden in Golden Gate Park.

This is the sort of thing that happens in third world countries, where wages are low, jobs are scarce, and the falling value of the local currency makes theft of semiprecious metals like brass and copper profitable. Now, thanks to Bushonomics, we have all three conditions, right here in the good ol’ U.S. of A.

Know why? Favorable mutations were preserved through a process known as natural selection, that’s why.

And I would definitely be saying the same thing about Obama if the shoe were on the other foot.

Here’s the latest atrocity from the Clinton camp:

One of the foremost principles of our party is that citizens be allowed to vote and that those votes be counted. That principle is not currently being applied to the nearly 2.5 million people who voted in primaries in Florida and Michigan. Whoever emerges as the Democratic nominee will be hamstrung in the general election if a fair and quick resolution is not reached that ensures that the voices of these voters are heard. Our commitment now to this goal could be the difference between winning and losing in November.

I have consistently said that the votes cast in Florida and Michigan in January should be counted. We cannot ignore the fact that the people in those states took the time to be a part of this process and to make their preferences known…

In 2000, the Republicans won an election by successfully opposing a fair counting of votes in Florida. As Democrats, we must reject any proposals that would do the same.

Your commitment to the voters of these states must be clearly stated and your support for a fair and quick resolution must be clearly demonstrated.

Shorter Clinton:

“If you don’t change the rules in the middle of the race and count a bunch of delegates who were selected when my name was the only one on the ballot, you hate the people of Michigan and Florida.”

The Democrats in the state legislatures of both Michigan and Florida overwhelmingly supported early primaries, with the enthusiastic support of their constituents. Not content with having a grossly disproportionate influence over the general election, the people of these swing states decided that they should be allowed to determine the nominees of both parties as well. They gambled that Howard Dean would allow them to turn the country into the United States of Florida and Michigan, but Dean chose principle and fairness over pandering. The people of Florida and Michigan tried to hijack the nomination process, but they screwed up. And since there’s no practical way of allowing them to undo their mistake without cheating Obama (because Clinton is certainly NOT going to pay for a special primary election in those states), the people of Florida and Michigan will just have to live with the fact that their selfishness cost them their first chance in decades to cast meaningful ballots in a primary election.

But instead of acknowledging this fact and accepting the reality of her own defeat, Clinton is sabotaging Obama in two states that he may need to win in November. She’s pretending that she’s just concerned for the people of Michigan and Florida, but every reasonably objective person can see that if the situation were reversed, she’d be arguing that these delegations should be excluded.

She’s not acting out of love for the people of Michigan and Florida. She’s acting out of love for Hillary Clinton. And if she cares at all about what happens to this country over the next four years, she’ll start supporting Barack Obama and the rest of the Democrats standing for election this year.

17 year-old Maria Merziotis won Canada’s national science fair by inventing a new method of identifying and treating flu infections:

It’s not the long-sought cure for the common cold but a 17-year-old Ottawa high school student won a national science competition today by developing a novel way of identifying and perhaps even fighting flu infections. Maria Merziotis, a Grade 12 student at Hillcrest High School, won a $5,000 first prize and a chance to take her discovery to an international competition in San Diego next month.

The flu virus attacks human cells by binding to a compound called sialic acid, or sialyllactose, on the cell surface. Merziotis synthesized a floating form of the acid, which dupes the virus with an alternative attachment site.

A team of three Toronto Grade 10 students, Jonathan Schneider, Josh Alman and Norman Yau from the University of Toronto School, won the $4,000 second prize for identifying genes that help a plant thrive in salty soil. Vandana Rawal, a 15-year-old from Montreal’s Centennial Regional High School, won third place and $3,000 for discovering a human gene variation that may help in dealing with bipolar disorder.

Health Canada is already looking at Merziotis’s work, which offers a new way of identifying, and perhaps even fighting different influenza strains.

So one Canadian teen invented a new way of fighting the flu, another discovered a possible genetic cause of bipolar disorder, and a team of high school sophomores identified genes for thriving in salty soil.

Meanwhile, more Creation Science Fairs are held every year across the United States.

(cross posted at appletree and This Old Brit)