MoDo:

Hillary Clinton has fought for women’s rights around the world. But who would have dreamed that she would have to fight for them at home? “Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me,” she told an adoring crowd at the Women in the World Summit at Lincoln Center on Saturday. “But they all seem to. It doesn’t matter what country they’re in or what religion they claim. They want to control women. They want to control how we dress. They want to control how we act. They even want to control the decisions we make about our own health and bodies. “Yes,” she continued to applause, “it is hard to believe that even here at home, we have to stand up for women’s rights and reject efforts to marginalize any one of us, because America needs to set an example for the entire world.”

MoDo muses that the GOP War on Women will lead to a Hillary in 2016 campaign. I already predict that (and believe it will be extremely beneficial to the Dem Party), but if this is the rationale necessary for that, I'm good with that.

Speaking for me only

So David Axelrod won't appear on Bill Maher's show. Ann Althouse chortles:

Rush Limbaugh is a media genius, but I don't think he's enough of a genius to have laid this trap. It has worked as a trap. By going too far, on one well-chosen occasion — picking on a young woman about sex — he got an immense reaction from Rush haters, who smelled blood and imagined that they could use this incident to drive Rush off the air. In making their strong argument, Rush's opponents articulated a rule demonizing those who use offensive language to describe a woman. [...] In this Fluke incident, many left-liberals have committed to a rule that can now be used to take out some of their most valuable speakers and media outlets.

(Emphasis supplied.) Weird. I thought she was talking about Bill Maher. Oh noooo! Bill Maher!! Is Althouse serious? Who cares about Bill Maher?

Speaking for me only

It's afternoon in New York, but still morning in Denver.

Ed Kilgore, who's been killing it at Political Animal, on pearl clutching.

Open Thread.

Rod Blagojevich begins his 14 year prison sentence on Thursday. At 5 pm CST today, he will hold a press conference at his home. The next morning he will fly to Colorado with his attorney, and surrender at FCI Englewood, a low security level prison outside of Denver.

There will be many saying Blagojevich got his due. I think the sentence is too harsh. He's neither violent nor a safety threat, the conviction ended his public career and ostracized him. He's broke. His daughters will grow up without a father. One day he's here, next day he's not.

FCI Englewood is pretty decent for a prison. But it's still a prison and I doubt anything can prepare him for the lack of privacy, boredom and the strict regimentation he's about to experience.[More...]

U.K. Home Secretary Teresa May has approved the extradition of 23 year old British student Richard O'Dwyer to the U.S for criminal copyright infringement.

O'Dwyer has never set foot in the U.S., never run a server in the U.S., and didn't host copyrighted material on his website, TV Shack.net. What he did: He ran a website from his basement which included links to sites that had pirated material and his site generated advertising revenue.

His site was shut down as part of ICE's Operation in Our Sites, and the U.S. sought his extradition. In January, a U.K. court ruled he could be extradited to the U.S.. The connection to the U.S. is simply that he bought the domain name (.net) from Verisign, which is in the U.S. [More...]

At the meeting of the UN Commmission on Narcotic Drugs that opened today in Vienna, Bolivian President Evo Morales held up a coca leaf and defended -- to applause -- the right of Bolivians to grow and chew the plant:

Morales said that chewing coca leaves was an "ancestral right" for Bolivians. "We are not drug addicts when we consume the coca leaf. The coca leaf is not cocaine, we have to get rid of this misconception," he said in a speech that ended with applause from the hall.

"This is a millennia-old tradition in Bolivia and we would hope that you will understand that coca leaf producers are not drug dealers."

[More...]

Drudge has Romney leading in both according to the 5 pm exits. That is hard to square with the actual reporting on the exits - 80% evangelical vote:

Around 8 in 10 Mississippians participating in Tuesday's contest were white evangelical or born-again Christians, the largest share measured in any state so far. Those same voters accounted for nearly three-quarters of those surveyed in Alabama, a proportion reached previously only in Tennessee and Oklahoma.

In South Carolina, Newt and Santorum carried 2/3 of the evangelical vote. Assuming an even split, Romney has to carry 2/3 of non- evangelicals to win. Seems far fetched.

Ezra with the rote "there is no bully pulpit" stuff. Drum with a bit more thought. Digby nailing it:

Of course presidents can't really "persuade" people of the opposing party in a polarized environment, for all the reasons Ezra lays out in his piece. But I feel as if this whole argument is about doing something that nobody but President Obama, op-ed writers and some of his more fervent followers ever thought was possible in the first place. They're the only ones who believed that the Republicans were going to fall at his feet and work together in bipartisan harmony --- or that his magical powers of persuasion would create a groundswell of support among Independents and rank and file Republicans.

When progressives called for President Obama to make speeches it wasn't with the goal that he lift his poll numbers or get Mitch McConnell to sign on. Indeed, that's the opposite of what they wanted --- the "Grand Bargains" required to get such a deal are worse than nothing at all from their perspective. The reason they wanted him to make speeches was to mobilize his followers to help "persuade" their representatives to pass progressive legislation --- or even just reaffirm his commitment to shared goals and educate the public about what those goals are. The administration abandoned any notions of doing this shortly after the election[. . . .] But Ezra's piece reaffirms that this is the way major change happens in this environment, so you can't really blame the progressives for pushing it. That's what they wanted --- major change. And in a bit of an ironic surprise, Ezra demonstrated that in this case, the progressives were the pragmatic sorts calling for "what works" --- not the president.

See also my 8 million posts on the PPUS and the "Theory of Change."

Speaking for me only

Back in 2006, then Senator Obama decided to hand out advice to Democrats and liberals on "how to talk about religion". It was a textbook example of triangulation repackaged as the "post partisan unity schtick." It didn't work:

President Obama warned against "using religion as a bludgeon in politics," pushing back against critics who have accused him of waging a "war on religion" through recent policy decisions.

[. . .] "When we start using religion as a bludgeon in politics, we start questioning other people's faith, we start using religion to divide, instead of bring the country together, then I think we've got a problem," Obama told Des Moines's local NBC affiliate, Who TV. [. . .] Obama was responding to recent accusations that he is engaged in a "war on religion" through recent actions such as the contraception mandate.

No magic bullet for Obama on dealing with the Radical Right. It makes his 2006 speech all the more ridiculous now:

Been out of pocket. But back now. I'll find something to write about.

Open Thread.

Swamped here, sorry for the lack of posting today. And I have more than 300 emails to get through before I get back to blogging.

I see there is fear and loathing in Afghanistan.

Kim DotCom says U.S. Government officials, including those from the Department of Justice and U.S. Senate, were among the biggest users of MegaUpload:

I hope we will soon have permission to give them and the rest of our users access to their files," Dotcom told the website.

The lamest season yet of The Bachelor finally ends tonight. There's also The Voice and Smash.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

Harry's Law is back from hiatus. There's a new episode of Shameless and The Good Wife.

Bravo launches a new reality show tonight about rich young Iranian-Americans in Los Angeles called "Shahs of Sunset." It's being compared to Jersey Shore and Real Housewives. Whose dumb idea was this? Ryan Seacrest Productions. Who recently acquired a $300 million stake in Seacrest Productions? Clear Channel. Sorry, Ryan, I'm not watching, no matter how many tweets you send out about it.

The stars of “Shahs,” which begins on Sunday on Bravo, are members of the reality tribe, defined not by ethnicity, nationality or religion, but by preening, boastfulness, obsession with appearances, crassness, conformism, thin skin and a tendency to violence.

...The one really unfortunate thing about “Shahs of Sunset” is the way it exploits, and will in turn amplify, a previously localized phenomenon: the longstanding stereotyping of Los Angeles’s Iranian-Americans as vulgar, materialistic show-offs who don’t fit in among the city’s supposedly more cultured elites.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.