AddieStan

Forgive your blogstress, mes amis , for having neglected you for so long. Your cybertrix, of course, was off doing worthy things, such as attending the National Conference on Media Reform (thanks to a scholarship from the outstanding organization, Free Press, Inc.), getting marooned in the Atlanta airport for a day on her way back to DC from Minneapolis, and then doing a lot of sweating in her 100-plus-degree oppo factory, which happened to lose its air conditioning on the hottest day of the year. But now -- rejoice -- your Webwench returns with a new collaboration in The Huffington Post. In answer to Linda Hirshman's instruction to the feminist movement (something of a white woman's manifesto) that ran in the Outlook section of Sunday's Washington Post , Shireen Mitchell and your ecrivaine today responded with our defense of what has become known as "intersectionality." (Kinda sexy, non ?) To find out what that means, check us out in HuffPo: CLICK HERE TO RE...

Check out your blogstress's debut on The Huffington Post as a featured blogger commenting on why it would be such a bad idea for Barack Obama to name Hillary Clinton as his running mate -- especially bad for women. CLICK HERE TO READ "HILLARY AS VEEP A BAD MOVE FOR WOMEN"

It may have taken place last month, but this discussion on GritTV about the phenomenon that is Barack Obama and the movement he leads is particulary timely now, the day after Barack clinches the nomination. This segment features the force of nature that is Laura Flanders moderating a roundtable featuring three of your blogstress's favorite men: The New Yorker 's Hendrik Hertzberg , Afro-Netizen founder Chris Rabb and the brilliant novelist Walter Mosely . CLICK HERE TO WATCH FLANDERS WITH RABB, HERTZBERG & MOSELY

And so Barack Obama continues his Taoist path to the presidency, delivering a speech tonight that failed to note the obvious: for the first time, an African-American has clinched a major-party nomination. After Hillary Clinton refused to graciously concede -- delivering a speech that sought to hang her 18 million voters as a sword over the head of Barack -- Obama could, perhaps, be forgiven for beginning his valedictory with a sourpuss. Nonetheless, his response of praise for the former first lady only advanced his own cause. I do think that all the hysteria among pundits and journalists about the fact that she did not concede tonight is just that: hysteria. They're all frantic over the fact that she used that opportunity to ask her supporters to write to her via her Web site to tell her whether or not to quit. Oh, come on, people. What do campaign Web sites primarily exist for? The collection of dough. Her campaign is in debt. She needs more, and luring in her most dedicat...

Tom McDermott , the white mayor of Hammond, Indiana , used his star turn on CNN last night to accuse Rudy Clay , the black mayor of Gary, Indiana, of something that smells "corrupt" in the slow pace of election returns coming out of that urban center in last night's presidential primary. The accusation came just around midnight, central daylight time, when the Indiana race, quite surprisingly, remained too close to call. McDermott is a Hillary Clinton supporter, and Clay, a Barack Obama supporter. Still awaiting transcript; will post tonight. (Your blogstress will be travelling much of the day.) UPDATE: Here's the transcript . Excerpt below. MCDERMOTT: I'm not going to pick on where I'm from. I'm proud to be from Lake County. And there is hanky-panky in politics all across the state of Indiana, all across the United States. I'm not going to dig into Lake County's past. But I can tell you that this is -- it looks improper, what's happenin...

Harold Ickes is known as Hillary Clinton 's arm-twister , the guy who's leaning on uncommitted superdelegates to move his candidate's way. Ickes is also the force behind a for-profit data aggregating firm , Catalist, mentioned in a recent TAP piece by Holly Yeager . Catalist provided the data used by Women Voices Women Vote (WVWV), the non-profit group behind troubling robo-calls received by North Carolina voters in the run-up to tomorrow today's primary. (Both the Clinton and Barack Obama campaigns are also using Catalist data to target voters.) The WVWV calls are under suspicion as possible voter suppression tactics and, just days ahead of the North Carolina presidential primary, may have targeted registered African-American voters in that state. (Read Dana Goldstein 's TAPPED post here .) Critics contend that the WVWV calls to voters already registered to vote in the primary -- and the general election -- were seemingly designed to cause confusion, sin...

Today sister Pam Spaulding has a thing or two to say about North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley's gay-baiting endorsement of Hillary Clinton , a week ahead of his state's presidential primary. Quoting the reporting of Eloise Harper of ABC News, Pam tells us: The Governor formally expressed his support saying that there was "nothing I love more than a strong powerful woman." Easley concluded his remarks saying Clinton -- "makes Rocky Balboa look like a pansy". Sez Pam: Note that Hillary, who was right there with the NC gov, said nothing about his remark. Of course Easley infamously received the endorsement of Equality NC in his re-election bid, then in a debate said he'd sign a marriage amendment if it hit his desk, so why should we be surprised. And who is Hillary trying to court here -- the "traditional Southern conservative." Take the homo money and run, as it were. CLICK HERE TO READ "N.C. GOV. EASLEY BACKS CLINTON WITH TACKY GAY-BAITING...

A friend calls your blogstress's attention to a rather striking development in Democratic campaign portraiture: social realist or constructivist posters officially sanctioned by the campaigns. According to l'amie de ton écrivane , it appears as if Obama's going for the Leninist aesthetic, while Hillary's down with Mao. Is this really a good idea?

At this point, your blogstress no longer really cares who wins the Democratic nomination for president; she just wants the race to end. Le fin, s'il vous plait.

At least according to the New York Times 's resident conservative commentator, David Brooks . After saying that he understood the likely complaints to come from viewers that the questions nearly all focused on the campaign's hot buttons, such as Barack Obama 's pastor and Hillary Clinton 's false memory of her own heroic trip to Bosnia, Brooks went on to laud ABC hosts George Stephanopolous and Charles Gibson for asking "stupendous" questions, which included a challenge to pledge not to raise taxes on a certain income group of voters. Herewith your blogstress's favorite passage from a blog post from Mr. Brooks, posted after last night's awful debate: Both promised to not raise taxes on those making less than $200,000 or $250,000 a year. They both just emasculated their domestic programs. Just for the record, your blogstress is all for the "emasculation" of domestic programs. We would all benefit from their feminization.

Hillary : I'll tell the superdelegates that I'm a fighter. That's how, dammit! Barack : Defining moment in history. People lost trust in gov't -- not just Dems, but indies and Repubs, too. Change happens from the bottom up. That's why we don't take PAC money. Woman, 74, never voted before, says she's voting for me. (Gotta call that round for Hill, huh?) All right; shake hands; go home.

Hillary Clinton just said that we should stop putting oil in the strategic petroleum reserve, and "sell some of it off"? How strategic is that? Great. We have depleted armed forces and then we'll have depleted oil reserves. I barely heard what Barack Obama said, because it just sounded like the same old. Nobody mentioned public transportation. Our rail system, if you can call it that, is the embarrassment of the industrialized world. We have very little in the way of viable public transportation in the suburbs, never mind rural areas. People need to get out of their damn cars. (How does your blogstress maintain her girlish figure? Her bicyclette, mes amis .)

Charlie Gibson : "We're running short on time."

That Jeremiah Wright -- he just won't go away. Charlie Gibson just asked why Barack Obama disinvited Pastor Wright from the launch of his campaign, if he did not indeed know of Wright's comments about 9/11. Obama explained that he was responding to different comments by Wright that had been published in Rolling Stone . For her part, Hillary Clinton sounded very defensive when asked to defend her assertion that she would have left the church if Wright had been her pastor. Later, she said that Obama's explanation "is something that deserves further exploration." Then she went on to assert that Wright had "given over the church bulletin" for a message the leader of Hamas.

Obama just invoked the furor Clinton 's famous cookie-baking comment to say that she was doing the same thing to him -- in light of his "bitter" comment -- as was done to her in 1992.

Moderator George Stephanopolous earned a steely look from Hillary Clinton when he ask her not to respond to his assertion that she had told Bill Richardson that Barack Obama cannot win the presidency. Then Stephanopolous framed a question in such a way that Clinton and had to say that Obama could win the presidency.

Obama seems to be doing okay explaining his apparently condescending comments about why regular people turn to guns and religion when they're frustrated, saying that it wasn't the first time he had "mangled up" a statement. Thing is, he didn't mangle this one. What he said made sense, and was rather eloquent.

In case you didn't know, mes amis , Patrick J. Buchanan appears to be a racist. And it seems to be perfectly fine with his bosses at MSNBC. Your blogstress has a piece up at The Guardian's lively bloggish site, Comment Is Free, that looks at the boorishness with which Buchanan is permitted to get away, such as this little critique of Barack Obama speech about race and his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright : It is the same old con, the same old shakedown that black hustlers have been running since the Kerner Commission blamed the riots in Harlem, Watts, Newark, Detroit and a hundred other cities on, as Nixon put it, 'everybody but the rioters themselves.' Hat-tip to guitar-god David B. Cole for passing the Buchanan screed along to your Webwench. For more on Buchanan, read sister Pam Spaulding at Pam's House Blend.

From our guest blogger, Catherine Kozub , comes a word on March Madness: You may recall that it's almost one year since Don Imus uttered his idiotic comments . (Editor's note: Imus is back on the air, free to slur again from the studios of WABC in New York.) The Rutgers'women's team will be playing tomorrow night for a spot in the Final Four. Once again, like most women's college hoops, the game can only be seen if you have cable television. (It will be aired on ESPN.) I suppose the good thing about women not having the same opportunity as men for earning a lot of dollars in basketball is that they are more likely to stay in college and earn their degrees than the top male players. I'll admit that early in the NCAA tournament many of the women's games are kind of boring compared to the men's games because scores are more uneven; I think that this is because there are not as many women competing in the sport as men. Nonetheless, as each stage of the...

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson has endorsed Barack Obama , according to Bil Browning of the Bilerico Project . Most interesting in the text of the endorsement letter, I think, is Richardson's reference to the groundbreaking speech about race delivered earlier this week by Obama, and how, as an hispanic, Richardson was moved by Obama's words. Earlier this week, Senator Barack Obama gave an historic speech. that addressed the issue of race with the eloquence, sincerity, and optimism we have come to expect of him... As a Hispanic, I was particularly touched by his words. I have been troubled by the demonization of immigrants--specifically Hispanics-- by too many in this country. Hate crimes against Hispanics are rising as a direct result and now, in tough economic times, people look for scapegoats and I fear that people will continue to exploit our racial differences--and place blame on others not like them. Going into Pennsylvania -- widely seen as Clinton territory -- Ob...