This has been making the rounds today, I’ve seen versions both on blogs and in e-mail, so I am not sure which one is the original:

Presidential Milkshakes 2008

I support your milkshake, even though I opposed drinking your milkshake four years ago. -Mitt Romney

I’ll drink your milkshake, but only if the Bible says it’s allowed. -Mike Huckabee

I will drink your milkshake for another 100 years, if that’s what it takes. -John McCain

I drank a milkshake on 9/11. -Rudy Giuliani

I’ll drink your milkshake a few months after everyone else does. -Fred
Thompson

I will drink your milkshake, but only if I can bring back the gold standard before paying for it. -Ron Paul

America deserves a new milkshake, a milkshake with a change. -Barack Obama

I will fight the corporations so that you can drink your own milkshake. -John Edwards

We have 35 years of milkshake-drinking experience. *sob* -Hillary Clinton

I will peacefully drink your milkshake. -Dennis Kucinich

Global warming is melting your milkshake. -Al Gore

It depends on what your definition of “milkshake” is. -Bill Clinton

We’re making good progress in the war on milkshakes, and make no mistake: we will prevail. -George W. Bush

My favorite? The Gore one.

I’m a bit hesitant to link to The Raw Story but if this is for real … it’s a little disconcerting, to say the least:

“I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution,” Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. “But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.”

When Willie Geist reported Huckabee’s opinion on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, co-host Mika Brzezinski was almost speechless, and even Joe Scarborough couldn’t immediately find much to say beyond calling it “interesting”

Someone needs to ask Huckabee exactly what he means by that comment.

If he means we should add stuff about loving your neighbor as yourself, or about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and healing the sick … well, maybe he’s got a point. But if it’s the parts about killing homosexuals and making women into chattel, well, that’s another story.

Regarding this particular piece of news …. both McCain and Lieberman are increasingly irrelevant, so to some degree, who cares whether or not he is endorsing a Republican?

Sen. John McCain, trying to build momentum toward a reprise of his 2000 New Hampshire primary victory, is piling up high-profile endorsements, including one from another political maverick, Sen. Joseph Lieberman.

The Connecticut senator, an independent who was the Democrats’ 2000 vice presidential nominee, was scheduled to announce his support for McCain at a town hall meeting Monday morning in Hillsborough.

A Lieberman adviser said the senator decided to back McCain despite being a Republican because he believes his colleague from Arizona “has the best chance of uniting the country in its fight against Islamic terrorism.”

I have to add, though — of all the reasons he could have given for crossing party lines to make his endorsement, that’s the best he can do?

Pathetic.

Barack Obama is getting support for a lot of reasons, but his new set of proposals for integrating technology into government is another good reason for folks in this neck of the woods to pay attention to his candidacy.

VentureBeat has a rundown on Obama’s “technology platform”. Here’s a few takeaways:

• Obama wants to open more of the governmental process. For example, the public should able to comment on the White House website before legislation is signed.
• He calls more aggressive government support of broadband access.
• He supports network neutrality.
• He want to open the wireless spectrum so that winners of the 700 MHz band auction don’t just camp the spectrum in a bid to lock out competition.

Slightly less praiseworthy is his proposal to raise sanctions against companies offering “indecent” content. Fining networks $250,000 for dropping an f-bomb on TV is not going to make a more child-friendly society. Still, on balance, it’s a solid plan.

It’s a rare day that I get to say something like this, but I think Barry Ritholtz missed the point a little in his smackdown of the WSJ Doctor the Dollar? article today:

When a currency falls as precipitously as ours has, it is, in no small part, a referendum by foreign governments (and their private investors/traders) on a country and its government. We know that the current administration is not particularly popular overseas. Its no coincidence that since they took office on January 20, 2001, the dollar has fallen ~35%.

The dollar has not fallen because foreign governments don’t like George W Bush (although he’s undoubtedly unpopular). It’s the policies this administration has implemented that have caused the dollar to weaken.

After reading this USA Today piece, the phrase “needle in a haystack” comes to mind:

The [US] government’s terrorist watch list has swelled to more than 755,000 names, according to a new government report that has raised worries about the list’s effectiveness.

The size of the list, typically used to check people entering the country through land border crossings, airports and sea ports, has been growing by 200,000 names a year since 2004.

[snip]
Leonard Boyle, director of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, which maintains the list, says in testimony to be given today that 269 foreigners were denied entry in fiscal 2006.

then I’d really like to know what “aiding the enemy” looks like. Just as with Valerie Plame, the Bush administration doesn’t seem to care how much intelligence work they compromise as long as they can get off a cheap shot at Democrats or a spot of fear mongering on Fox News.

Here’s the lede from the Washington Post:

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company’s Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group’s communications network

How much more pathetic can this administration get?

It’s bad enough that the US is involved in a massive, costly and ultimately unwinnable war. It’s even worse that, despite the lessons learned from Vietnam, we don’t take good care of the ones who pay a fearful price when fighting that war.

Read this rundown on returning vets.

“Your broke it, you pay for it” is the rule at Pottery Barn, shouldn’t it be the rule for the Army too?

It’s amazing that in a world with ever-increasing amounts of available information, people can still fall prey to flat-out incorrect conspiracy theories, but they do. This article in the Nation about the so-called NAFTA Superhighway is a prime example.

I particularly liked this graf, which attempts to explain why so many people are willing to accept rumor over reality:

The myth of the NAFTA Superhighway persists and grows because it taps into deeply felt anxieties about the dizzying dislocations of twenty-first-century global capitalism: a nativist suspicion of Mexico’s designs on US sovereignty, a longing for national identity, the fear of terrorism and porous borders, a growing distrust of the privatizing agenda of a government happy to sell off the people’s assets to the highest bidder and a contempt for the postnational agenda of Davos-style neoliberalism. Indeed, the image of the highway, with its Chinese goods whizzing across the border borne by Mexican truckers on a privatized, foreign-operated road, is almost mundane in its plausibility.

Although apparently there is an effort underway in Texas to build a bunch of new highways there.

I don’t read Andrew Sullivan regularly, but Ezra called this piece on Clinton and Obama to my attention today, and it’s quite interesting, especially this bit:

Clinton has internalized to her bones the 1990s sense that conservatism is ascendant, that what she really believes is unpopular, that the Republicans have structural, latent power of having a majority of Americans on their side. Hence the fact that she reeks of fear, of calculation, of focus groups, of triangulation. She might once have had ideals keenly felt; she might once have actually relished fighting for them and arguing in their defense. But she has not been like that for a very long time. She has political post-traumatic stress disorder. She saw her view of feminism gutted in the 1992 campaign; she saw her healthcare plan destroyed by what she saw as a VRWC; she remains among the most risk-averse of Democrats on foreign policy and in the culture wars.

It’s an insightful take on Clinton and who know, Sullivan might even be right. He goes on to compare her with Obama:

The traumatized Democrats fear the majority of Americans are bigoted, know-nothing, racist rubes from whom they need to conceal their true feelings and views. The non-traumatized Democrats are able to say what they think, make their case to potential supporters and act, well, like Republicans acted in the 1980s and 1990s. The choice between Clinton and Obama is the choice between a defensive crouch and a confident engagement. It is the choice between someone who lost their beliefs in a welter of fear; and someone who has faith that his worldview can persuade a majority.

Traumatic events will have an impact, that’s a given. The real question is, what lessons do you learn from the past, and how do you choose to respond to it as you move on in life? I understand Clinton’s risk-aversion, but given that significant repair job that the next President is going to have on their hands, I’m not sure that someone whose impulse response is to be cautious is necessarily the right person for the job at this point in time.