Can the blind guide the blind? Won't they both fall into a pit? A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher. Why do you see the speck of chaff that is in your brother's eye, but don't consider the beam that is in your own eye? Or how can you tell your brother, 'Brother, let me remove the speck of chaff that is in your eye,' when you yourself don't see the beam that is in your own eye? You hypocrite! First remove the beam from your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck of chaff that is in your brother's eye. For there is no good tree that brings forth rotten fruit; nor again a rotten tree that brings forth good fruit. For each tree is known by its own fruit. For people don't gather figs from thorns, nor do they gather grapes from a bramble bush. The good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings out that which is good, and the evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart brings out that which is evil, for out of the abundance of the heart, his mouth speaks.

Josh Marshall explains that it’s the Appalachian geographical region where Obama does poorly, and notes that West Virginia, in particular, was anti-slave:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/194870.php

In comments to his column, Brent Budowsky explains that Hillary Clinton’s big ‘win’ in West Virginia actually will hurt her: http://pundits.thehill.com/2008/05/13/strong-superdelegate-backlash-growing-against-clinton/

Related: The Clinton camp says ‘pledged’ (non-super) delegates are fair game. Okay. A ‘pledged’ Maryland delegate has switched from Clinton to Obama.

If you like your humor hyperbolic and cruel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6Lstkiexhc

My original and main reason for supporting Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton, when no one else was remaining, was the expectation that Clintons would damage the party, though at the time I was thinking more of the further selling out to oligarchs, which Hillary Clinton was in the process of doing, and not of race-baiting sore-loserhood in team with Richard Mellon Scaife, which she ended up doing. (I was going to mention Faux News after Scaife, but then I remembered that Rupert Murdoch was already one of the oligarchs that had purchased Hillary Clinton’s presidential services.)

Surprisingly, it turns out that Bill Clinton actually has been advertising his own contributions to the destruction of the Democratic Party:

Idaho Dems miffed at Bill Clinton's comments

Idaho Democrats sounded off Wednesday against former President Bill Clinton and his campaign comments about Gem State politics.

Clinton, while campaigning in Indiana for his wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton, was quoted in national media as saying she would "bag" No Child Left Behind laws.

"Every time I say this, it's a guaranteed applause line," he said. "You can drop me in the middle of Idaho where there's not a Democrat in 200 miles and an elk would applaud me on that."

Idaho Democrats called Clinton's comments an insult. They said the state party is making a comeback - after suffering setbacks during Clinton's two terms in office.

"If Bill Clinton had done for elk in Idaho everything he did for Democrats, we'd have far fewer elk," said Idaho Democratic Party Chairman Keith Roark - an uncommitted superdelegate - Wednesday morning....

Mind you, I figure Bill doesn’t realize how badly he has blown his post-presidential stature, or how precarious was his reputation within the post-DLC Democratic Party.

See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/opinion/10herbert.html

So, Rutgers is a ‘Public Ivy’:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Ivy#The_Public_Ivies_according_to_Greenes.27_Guides

Okay, that’s not a shocker, although the EE department wasn’t exactly educational nirvana when I was there, especially during my undergraduate years, in which we had an embarrassing shortage of both teachers and facilities.

What makes this interesting to me, though, is that Rutgers also was an original ‘Ivy League’ school, though the athletic grouping was less formal in those days and Rutgers later drifted in a completely different direction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_league

I can’t say I favor the athletic direction that Rutgers has taken, although it does help keep the school in the news (not always in a good way, thanks to Imus), but if I had my own university to steer I would take it in a Rutgers direction rather than a Princeton one. In fact, I say we build some missile silos on campus in Piscataway and use them to nuke Princeton.

There seems to be a robin building a nest on the window ledge above the next-door neighbors’ door. I think it might be taking advantage of a light rain. Will the neighbors tape a picture of a kitten to the window, as I did many years ago on our equivalent?

I did it in reaction to sparrows or the like. I like birds but they should go stand in the shrubs and trees rather than on my door.

An American Robin is a fairly large bird, however, so I didn’t expect to see one on anyone’s window ledge, whether building or not.

Mallards do like to stand on the peaks of our roofs in the development, but when I see one on a window ledge I’ll have seen everything there is possible to see, and more. :)

I haven’t managed to drag my butt to a game yet (and I don’t know whether anyone has bought any of my tickets that I put up for resale), but I have bothered to find out the name of this year’s porcine mascot. The little pig is called Boarack Ohama.

Hillary Clinton has made it so that Peggy Noonan’s fictitious fantasy world actually coincides with the Earth we all live on, if only for this one article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121027865275678423.html

BTW Peggy talks about something I had noticed:

In case you didn't get what was behind that exchange, Mrs. Clinton spent this week making it clear. In a jaw-dropping interview in USA Today on Thursday, she said, "I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on." As evidence she cited an Associated Press report that, she said, "found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

White Americans? Hard-working white Americans? "Even Richard Nixon didn't say white," an Obama supporter said, "even with the Southern strategy."

If John McCain said, "I got the white vote, baby!" his candidacy would be over. And rising in highest indignation against him would be the old Democratic Party.

To play the race card as Mrs. Clinton has, to highlight and encourage a sense that we are crudely divided as a nation, to make your argument a brute and cynical "the black guy can't win but the white girl can" is -- well, so vulgar, so cynical, so cold, that once again a Clinton is making us turn off the television in case the children walk by.

Richard Nixon—who probably indeed never expressed himself so bluntly—was an especially bright bulb. He may have been an ethical moron, but he had brains squeezed into his big head so tightly that they stuck out of his ear holes. Bill Clinton also has big brains, and you may notice how subtly he speaks; ‘Jesse Jackson won here twice’ was a slip into crudity for him, and he paid the price. Hillary Clinton doesn’t have such a command of language; that is what I had noticed about her.

Well, Obama is going to be the nominee, and he has his own language problem, a lack of terseness. Maybe Wes Clark, now that he is free of supporting Hillary, and who in 2004 sometimes answered questions in one word, can give Obama some lessons in terseness. :)

Ted Kennedy:

"I don't think it's possible," [Ted Kennedy] told Hunt of the joint ticket, continuing that:

Obama should choose a running mate who "is in tune with his appeal for the nobler aspirations of the American people," Kennedy said. "If we had real leadership — as we do with Barack Obama — in the No. 2 spot as well, it'd be enormously helpful."

And Brent Budowsky’s column in The Hill: http://pundits.thehill.com/2008/05/09/pathetic-hillary-plays-the-white-voter-card

... something about Ted Kennedy telling why Hillary Clinton is no good for the vice presidency. I didn’t catch the details.

Brent Budowsky just called Hillary Clinton ‘preternaturally divisive and polarizing’ and said that she can’t help herself from doing that even when it is in her interest to do the opposite.

He also predicts she’ll suspend her campaign by May 21 or thereabouts.

Brent Budowski on the Randi Rhodes Show is explaining who Big Dog and Paul Begala have been going around race-baiting, too, so Hillary is clumsily trying the same. (Begala’s methods have been clumsy, too, while Bill’s have of course been subtle innuendo.)

The gas tax backfired with voters and the race-baiting is backfiring now with superdelegates.

I wish media outfits would quit participating in the ‘Myanmarization’ of Burma. I hear that the Washington Post is calling it Burma, at least, as is Laura Bush (because ‘Burma’ is the name recognized by the US), but I also hear that the New York Times is calling it by that other name.

Hillary Clinton’s cloddish recitation of fantasies about demographic groups, in terms of such sort as ‘hard-working whites’, seem to me just the latest version of ‘If you look at it sideways with your head in a bowl of cottage cheese, then I win!’ I think she is not articulate enough to be tactful. I am getting really annoyed that people treat her as some kind of ‘genius’ being misled by advisers or gone totally mad with powerlust. She’s not as generally ‘smart’ as you think she is! So many mysteries are built on the assumption that, just because she is some kind of policy-point nerd who can pull a sort of rabbit out of a sort of hat, Hillary Clinton must be as capable generally as Barack Obama or Al Gore or any other such brainiac. No, she’s not! Everything becomes much clearer when you come to accept that.

You can’t turn left or right now without seeing ‘Hillary’s playing the race card’. The New York Times editorial page included. But this isn’t playing the race card, I think, like she was doing when her surrogates were speaking mostly in code, nasty innuendo. Instead, it seems to me, Hillary Clinton is just not sophisticated enough to keep the demographics talk internal to the campaign, while getting the desired message to superdelegates and voters by indirect means (by which I do not mean innuendo, nor do I mean imbibing whiskey while skinning a deer).

I think there are a lot of people who could use a trip to the ice cream shop, including the editorial page people at the New York Times. From here on out it’s really mostly arranging (I think and hope) for Oregon or whoever to put Obama’s total delegate count past the finish line. For that to happen, Hillary Clinton must stay in the race, and the benefits will include getting out more and more new voters, more and more crossovers from the Bushist Party, more and more turnout, etc. Also, Obama-supporting superdelegates have to announce their support at the right times.

... although so is Satan.

Pro-Felonious Five PBS opinion giver Douglas Kmiec has endorsed Barack Obama and apparently takes his code of ethics seriously: http://syndicated.livejournal.com/greenwaldsalon/151753.html

His fellow pro-Give-it-to-Bush-even-though-he-lost PBS opinion giver John Yoo: not as ethical as Kmiec. Or as Satan.

It is interesting how often I come upon Esperanto in the comments accompanying images in the Wikimedia Commons. It seems to be one of the most commonly used languages—well behind English, but nevertheless pretty common.

Recently I also came across a few that were in, I believe, Romanian. What other interesting languages have people encountered?

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Titan2.jpg

Watch at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9qd-P2bIiY