Finally...

Rumors swirl....this poster claims a Clinton superdelegate got a call from her today saying she was dropping out tomorrow.

It ends.

More on the Rachel Ray-Michelle Malkin Thing

Agree with everything Quinn said below. See Olbermann for the smackdown:



[PS - Once you really start reading blogs Quinn, you'll finally get up to speed. I know Benaiah and I have been following this unfolding for a week or more]

Vanity Fair Bill Clinton Piece: Hatchet Job or Final Dagger?

So the interesting political discussion of the day has centered on this riveting Vanity Fair article here billed as an expose on Bill Clinton's wild side. Very good stuff even if you're as done with the Clintons and this interminable nomination process as I am.

If you're too lazy to read it all, here are some juicy bits:

No former president of the United States has ever traveled with such a fast crowd, and most 61-year-old American men of Clinton’s generation don’t, either. “I just think those guys are radioactive,” one former aide to Clinton who is still in occasional affectionate touch with him told me recently, referring to Burkle and (to a lesser extent) Bing. “I stay far away from them.”

or this bit:

Over the last few years, aides have winced at repeated tabloid reports about Clinton’s episodic friendship and occasional dinners out with Belinda Stronach, a twice-divorced billionaire auto-parts heiress and member of the Canadian Parliament 20 years his junior, or at more recent high-end Hollywood dinner-party gossip that Clinton has been seen visiting with the actress Gina Gershon in California. There has been talk of a female friend in Chappaqua, a woman in a bar at a meeting of the Aspen Institute, and a public sighting of Clinton, Bing, and a ravishing entourage in a New York elevator that, a former Clinton aide told me, led a business leader who saw them to say: I don’t know what the guy was doing, but it was so clear that it was just no good.

Some of my favorite bloggers are all over the place on this. Sullivan, relentless in his pure hatred of the Clintons, gloats. The Moderate Voice buys all of it....Ross Douthat at the Atlantic has some fun speculation about why this story only dropped now. My favorite:

or it could suggest a conspiracy of silence on the part of the media, based on the fear that pulling the trigger on such stories could get them accused of gossip-mongering or invading the Clintons' privacy. (If the third possibility is the correct one, it's a pretty remarkable testament to the MSM's ability to keep the lid on a story, even in the age of Drudge and TMZ and Gawker Stalker ...)

At TNR Michael Crowley sees a more banal and cynical reason. I'm not to sure what to think of this story, other than it makes a for rip-roaring read. Personally, 6 months ago I could have told you that I appreciated what Bill Clinton had done for the country, and was probably a decent and honorably man at heart despite obvious personal foibles. Womanizing is a time-honored characteristic of many great statesman, but selling out this far is something else:

Even more troubling is Clinton’s relationship with the Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra. This winter, a lengthy investigative report in The New York Times disclosed that, in 2005, Clinton flew to the Central Asian country of Kazakhstan on Giustra’s MD-87 jet for what was billed as a philanthropic three-country tour. The two men had dinner with President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has held the country in a vise-like grip for nearly two decades. At their meeting, Clinton expressed support for Nazarbayev’s bid to head the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which monitors elections and promotes democracy. That position was sharply at odds with official American foreign policy and came in the face of stinging criticism of Kazakhstan’s record on human rights from many sources, including the junior senator from New York, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Within two days, Giustra’s company signed preliminary agreements allowing it to buy into three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium agency. And months after that the Clinton Foundation received a $31.3 million donation from Giustra that remained secret until a Giustra representative acknowledged it late last year. (Giustra has separately pledged another $100 million to the foundation.)