Here's Gov. Sibelius's posted comment there condescending to HRC supporters and notebook bearing Sweeties covering the campaign.

"There are still constituencies who are going to need a little time to embrace Sen. Obama's candidacy," she told reporters after the event, noting women in particular.

emoted me to add:

... and in unison the women reporters ran out of the briefing to deliver this intel to the Giant Chick Brain that women everywhere use to find direction.

Unable to get my ass out of the deck lounger and careen up the seven steps of grief as directed, I b!tchily wondered what history would look like if Obama and his campaign's POV of women always held sway, so I added the following to the dead thread.

Local smartypants, please revise or append so it can be transmitted to the Giant Chick Brain:

Apparently Obama's rise to power is inevitable and the victors write (and revise) history.

As a practical effort more suitable than Rahm's suggestion of knitting we should helpfully tweak that emotively driven Ladies' Section of HIStory that honors Obama's own and Club Obama's world view of women.

(1) Out of sheer spite, Anne Frank began keeping a creepy diary on the Nazis ...

(2) Her old boyfriend watched in horror as she calmly disjointed a rabbit and, staring out from the screen with steady eyes, put the creature in a stewing pot and added herbs and garlic. It was then the man suddenly knew that his family would never be safe from the wrath of Julia Child ...

(3) "No I will NOT 'take a moment to get over it,'" Joan of Arc hissed and spat in display of feminine pique as she marshalled her armies and went to liberate Orléans from British occupation.

Sweet

I was among the first on his bandwagon--back when there was lots of room and everyone thought Hillary was the inevitable nominee. My allegiance began to shift during the very first debate, when Hillary kicked everyone's butt. With every debate, I read more of her policy positions. I'd go to Obama's site to read his and there really was not much there. This bothered me. Over time his "issues" section grew, much of it seemingly cribbed from Hillary's with a few differences sprinkled in for minor contrast. Clearly, the difference between the two candidates seemed to me to be style rather than substance. Obama won points for style. Hillary won hands down on substance. I like substance in a president, so by the fall I was in Hillary's camp. My last donation to Obama was one week before the Donnie McClurkin mess in October.

Having fallen off the bandwagon myself when I realized that Obama was not the candidate I thought he was, I started worrying about this back in January/February: what if he's the nominee but more people have the sort of WTF moments I had--moments that caused me to look back and reconsider all the goodwill I had had toward his campaign previously?

In particular, how do progressives deal with the fact that Obama is far less committed to progressive principles and more to winning?

His support of Hoyer's and Pelosi's FISA capitulation seemed to be a big bump that caused more than a few progressives to fall off the bandwagon and hit the ground, hard. I truly sympathize. And now many are off the Obamite bandwagon but in the same boat with a lot of Hillary supporters, the U.S.S What the Hell Else Can We Do Now?, grimly rowing atop their tepid support because they cannot choose to vote for or enable McCain--or ANY Republican presidential candidate.

In the past couple of days, former fervent Obama supporters have sounded a lot like some Hillary supporters: I'll vote for him, but that's it. I'm not busting my butt nor my piggy bank for him. He is not who I thought he was. He is not interested in fighting for the principles I thought he held.

It's an exasperating place, and I feel for them.

And for more evidence of how he is not a progressive despite their fondest hopes, take a look at this.

It's all about building a winning machine, even if it means running over progressives to do it. He's "trainin' up" the party. Want his support? Support him. Want to get smacked down? Don't support him. The principles you advocate are meaningless. Ideas and policy goals are meaningless. All that matters is your support of him.

As more and more people realize this, I wonder how  well his support will hold up in November....

1. He should wait about 15 years and give it another shot.  I say this because he seems to believe that he's lost his bias and is now on the side of truth and integrity . . . he surely has burst out of the bubble, and yet every other paragraph demonstrates how deeply enmeshed he remains.

2. He's a self-absorbed, privileged, oblivious person.  Far too many pages are devoted to how much pain he suffered at the old podium once it became public knowledge that his co-workers had lied to his face and sent him out to repeat those lies.  Yes, that was disgusting behavior from Rove and Libby, but jeebus, mayo, and jofus!  Clue in, Scott.  Those of us struggling to hang on to our health and our homes in the face of your boss's stupid arrogance have news about what constitutes personal anguish.  Hint: looking like a dupe on the t.v. does not qualify.

3.  Yes, the Bush administration policies really always were driven by the Rove estimation of what the politics du jour required.  In my family, this has meant that paralysis due to the spinal cord injury my husband suffered in March of 2001 will last 8 years longer than it needed to . . . because Rove decreed that forbidding the NIH to use embryonic stem cells in cure research  was good politics.  Scott seems not to understand that such a decision made for such a reason might, in some enlightened time, make certain readers angry.  Like me.

Obama's current lead also reflects the large party-identification advantage the Democrats now enjoy--55 percent of all voters call themselves Democrats or say they lean toward the party while just 36 percent call themselves Republicans or lean that way. Even as McCain seeks to gain voters by distancing himself from the unpopular Bush and emphasizing his maverick image, he is suffering from the GOP's poor reputation among many voters.

But if you think about it, there are only two logical explanations for why--two and a half years after Larry Franklin pled guilty to sharing defense information--he is still "awaiting direction from DOJ to report to prison." Either someone high up in the Administration intervened to keep Franklin out of the pokey (OVP is named in the SSCI report, and we know Dick Cheney has prevented allies from going to prison before), or Franklin has been cooperating with investigators for two and a half years. (His docket just shows a "delayed reporting date."

Obama's plan of trying to stop speculation is silly because of the ways the markets operate (they are international and the USA doesn't have very much say in them).  At most, he can require participants in the USA to put up a higher amount of dollars to play -- but the world is awash in dollars.  Everytime we (the USA) create more debt, we create more dollars, so there are gazillions of dollars to absorb into the system.  They were going into real estate but now they are going towards other things -- like commodities.      

McCain's plan of announcing drilling, even if we won't get oil until much later, was smarter because the "peak oil" communities don't expect us to drill at all and they are part of the group driving the cost of oil up.  They figure all the oil is going to dry up eventually and oil will be worth a gazillion dollars a barrel.  

On top of all of this, you have the currency fluctuations that we are facing.  US dollars have been dropping in value for quite a long time compared to other currencies.  

The guys who own the oil in Saudi Arabia don't feel like they should be losing money just because our dollar is dropping in value (because they like to buy things in Europe) so they try to keep the value of their oil close to the value of what it can buy in Europe or London.  In other words, if 100 barrels of oil bought a Rolls Royce in 1980, they feel 100 barrels of oil should be able to buy a Rolls Royce now.

One of the problems with all of this is that the Saudis agreed to price oil in US dollars.  That is why our dollar is frequently called the "petro dollar."  You need to have US dollars to buy oil from the Saudis.  This makes our currency the "reserve currency" for the world.  All was great with this until some smaller countries decided it would be smart to start new oil exchanges (like our commodity exchanges) and only accept payment in Euros.  

Once they started accepting payment in Euros, you no longer needed US dollars to buy oil because you could buy oil in Euros.  The Saudis don't accept Euros but Iran does.  Iran is the second largest producer of oil in the world.  

Anyway, this is all highly complicated but Obama is way off when he thinks he can control the markets.  He can't do a darn thing by playing with the markets except for minor things.  The most he can do is cause trouble for traders in the USA which might lead to lower profits for Pension plans, IRAs and others who might be heavily invested in foreign markets.  Yeah, he might also be able to close a loophole but I guarantee you that that has very little to do with the price of oil.  This isn't like Enron and the state of California.  The USA isn't the only force playing on the worldwide commodity markets.  I'm not even sure it's a major force anymore because London and Hong Kong seem to be able to do incredible amounts of damage in the hours our markets aren't even open.  

On top of all that, what if Obama "jaw-boning" caused more countries (like the Saudis) to only want Euros for oil?  Our dollar would be absolutely worthless!!  No country would need to have those dollars to buy oil.  They would need Euros instead -- and all those dollars would come flooding back to the USA.  

This is a very interesting (and potentially devasting) predicament.