Air America talker Randi Rhodes, a longtime hero of mine, has flipped from rabid Hillary Clinton supporter to even more rabid Clinton-basher in recent months. The network has suspended her because, as shown in the clip above, she called Hillary Clinton a “fucking whore” at a private, non-Air America event in San Francisco on March 22.

What the clip shows, more than anything, is that news people should avoid attempting stand-up comedy. Which is not to say she didn’t have the crowd laughing as she called Geraldine Ferraro a whore; Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Dick Cheney racists and anti-Semites; and then dropped a combo f-bomb/’ho-bomb on Hillary.

Here’s the official statement from Air America:

[…]

Former Gen. Wesley Clark, a top Hillary Clinton adviser, critized Sen. John McCain yesterday for failing to enlist his support in the Senate for a bipartisan bill that would expand benefits to veterans, especially including troops who have served in Iraq:

An e-mail sent from Clark’s political action committee WesPAC, and co-signed by the former general, takes aim at the GOP senator, asking “Why Won’t McCain Support Our Vets?”

The message urges individuals to sign a petition calling on McCain to back a veterans benefit bill co-sponsored by Democratic Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia and Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, and criticizes him for not yet pledging his support for the measure.

“So far, John McCain has refused. The same McCain who insists he supports our troops. The same McCain who is voting lockstep with the Bush administration (who has also resisted this bill),” reads the e-mail.

It adds that a young Iraq and Afghanistan vet “thinks John McCain ought to stand in his shoes to know how difficult it is to be a vet and have to pay staggering education costs. THIS is your call to arms. …”

McCain has advocated deploying U.S. forces in Iraq for the next 100 years and longer.

He was a little cagey about it but former Pres. Jimmy Carter used the name “Obama” four times when asked who’s getting his super delegate vote.

Speaking with a Nigerian paper while in Abuja, Carter noted several reasons why he might be leaning toward the Illinois senator.

“Don’t forget that Obama won in my state of Georgia,” Carter said. “My town, which is home to 625 people, is for Obama, my children and their spouses are pro-Obama. My grandchildren are also pro-Obama.”

“As a superdelegate, I would not disclose who I am rooting for but I leave you to make that guess,” Carter added.

The Carter Center confirmed to CNN the newspaper did quote Carter accurately.

Perhaps the best way to tell if Carter was saying he’s voting for Obama was the reaction of the Clinton campaign. Can you say, “frosty?”

Clinton campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson said Thursday, “Both Senator Clinton and President Clinton have a great deal of respect for President Carter and have enjoyed their relationship with him over the years, and obviously he is free to make whatever decision he thinks is appropriate with regard to presidential choice.”

When Bill Clinton was asked on MTV during the 1992 presidential campaign whether he wore boxers or briefs, he could have done the world a favor by answering, “None of your business.”
If there ever was a question that deserved to be ducked, it’s “What do you think about your dad’s extramarital affair?”
In the 2008 campaign, Clinton’s daughter Chelsea, now 27, has now been asked twice to provide a justification for her father’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, and has been widely criticized for answering, “None of your business.”

Critics, including my colleague Trish, say that because Chelsea is out on the hustings as a surrogate for her mother, she should have had an answer prepared for this humiliating question. Knowing the Clintons, it’s likely that “none of your business” was the answer the focus groups liked best.

But why should any philanderer’s daughter be asked to answer for her old man’s inability to keep his zipper shut? If there ever was a question that deserved to be ducked, it’s “What do you think about your dad’s extramarital affair?”

If we’re going to adopt this new level of accountability, it ought to be applied fairly. So it has to be fair game to ask John McCain’s daughter, Meghan, who also campaigns for her father, about his long-ago adulteries and more recent relationship with lobbyist Vicki Iseman; her mother Cindy McCain’s drug problem, which drove her to steal opoids from the medical charity she established; and the involvement of both her parents in the Keating Five Scandal back in 1989.

Right. Don’t hold your breath.

And now, for something completely different: Gov. Phil Bredesen (D-Tenn.) has thought up a way to end the Democratic primary race. According to Politico, he wants the super delegates to hold their own convention after the state primaries are over but before the regular convention in August. Huh?

He was in Washington this week to promote his idea for holding a “superdelegate primary” in June, in which the 795 party bigwigs would gather to hear one last time from Clinton and Obama before casting a final vote.

Rather than allow the horse-trading and bloodletting go on all summer, he’d get it over with during a two-day business meeting in a neutral, easily reached city like Dallas.

“Invite the candidates to come and talk if they want, and then literally call the roll,” he explained. “We should not go through the summer and have a divided and exhausted Democratic Party. The inescapable conclusion is: OK, you’ve got to find some way to bookend and bring it to closure earlier. How do you do that? Do it in June rather than August.”

The idea is gaining traction, the site says. If it happens, people in the other 48 states can find out what it feels like to vote in Florida and Michigan: ignored.

What exactly is the point of the August convention?

Oops, she did it again. The once and possibly future first daughter still hasn’t come up with anything less lame than, “None of your business” in response to people who bring up Monica Lewinsky.

The depressing part of the whole thing is reliving the disappointment we all felt with Bill Clinton, whom we defended — and still do — but who we know really blew it. So to speak.

It also appears evident that none of the Clintons will ever totally emerge from the shadow the episode cast over all their efforts, even the really good ones, going forward.

National Journal’s Charlie Cook rarely pulls punches in his “On Politics” column, but in last week’s piece, he really lambasted the Florida Democratic Party “leadership” for incompetence and alleged that Barack Obama was manipulating the situation to his advantage.

It is truly astonishing that a state and one of its major parties have opted to declare the political equivalent of Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Cook pointed out that in the past five years 16 congressional districts nationwide had unexpected vacancies to fill due to resignation, death or incarceration, and they all managed to mount special elections, often with primaries, to fill those House seats. But not Florida. Since it was stripped of its delegates last fall, the Florida Democratic Party has wrung its hands and kvetched about its mistreatment, but has done little to develop a viable plan for a re-vote, except for a half-assed suggestion of a mail-in primary that was dead on arrival.

Meanwhile, unlike California, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, South Dakota, Texas, and Virginia — states that have held hurry-up special elections in recent years because of House vacancies — Florida can’t seem to find a way to conduct a statewide election between now and the scheduled end of the nomination season. That is in early June, 70-odd days from today and about half a year after Florida knew it needed a Plan B if it didn’t want its Democratic delegation to be shut out of the national convention.

Florida Democrats lamely blame their Republican governor and GOP-controlled state Legislature for this mess, but to most observers their opposition to the nonsanctioned January date seemed to be posturing more than anything else, and it still doesn’t explain why nothing constructive has happened since then. What we’ve seen is a monumental failure of leadership on the part of state Democratic Chairman Karen Thurman and other party officials. For those who don’t buy the incompetence argument, the alternative view is that the state party officials simply capitulated to the Obama campaign, which didn’t want a re-vote lest it give Hillary Rodham Clinton a chance to close the delegate gap. Either way, Florida’s Democratic voters deserve better than what they’ve gotten.

Florida could have opted for an ordinary primary, a caucus, a “firehouse” primary, or even a vote-by-mail primary. Instead, the Sunshine State decided to punt. Barack Obama, who lost both Florida and Michigan, has chimed in to suggest that he and Clinton just split the states’ delegates down the middle, an idea that raises the question of why we bother to hold elections at all.

It is truly astonishing that a state and one of its major parties have opted to declare the political equivalent of Chapter 11 bankruptcy, claiming they are incapable of fulfilling their electoral and democratic obligations.

I know Trish and I do go on a bit about the travails of the FlaDems, and some commenters are getting a little restive with the topic. But it really is disappointing that it got screwed up again for the third presdiential race in a row.

When I saw Obama speak in Miami last August, I actually got kind of jazzed by what appeared to be a very active, energized and well-organized Democratic Party. It made me feel, well, hopeful for the Dems.

However, apparently the energy and organization went no higher up the party hierarchy than the South Florida region. Indeed, the local party has made some significant inroads in getting Dems elected at the city and county government levels.

Meanwhile, state Democratic Party Chair Karen Thurman and her gang have managed to create a state-level microcosm of what the bitter Clinton-Obama race is doing to the party nationally — rendering the Democratic Party irrelevant in the presidential election.

Democratic party strategist and super delegate Donna Brazile sent a message to Hillary Clinton on ABC’s This Week: Your campaign ends with the primaries. Here’s a transcript from the Roundtable segment, with Brazile, George Will, Paul Krugman, and Robert Reich.

Donna Brazile: I think we have an exit strategy in the Democratic party to end the primary season on June 10th and sometime before, I think, before —

George Stephanopoulous: Why June 10th?

Brazile: “The problem is simple. Sen. Clinton was supposed to win this. She was supposed to have finished up the contest on Feb. 5th. They had no post Super Tuesday strategy. There’s no reason to demonize and to disgrace the Democratic party to prolong this race longer than June.”

D.B. Well that’s the end of the primary season based on the rules, and after all, this is about the rules…This notion of bringing this fight on to the convention is not a wise idea and I think whoever is coming up with this new strategy is not looking at the math again…Do the math. This is not healthy.

…G.S. You’re saying the credentials committee, unless there is some dramatic change, some dramatic Obama collapse, that Sen. Clinton can’t win at the credentials committee.

…D.B. You know the problem? The problem is simple. Sen. Clinton was supposed to win this. She was supposed to have finished up the contest on Feb. 5th. They had no post Super Tuesday strategy. They ran out of money. She came back from behind, she won Flori—, I mean she won Texas,* she won Ohio. There’s no reason to demonize and to disgrace the Democratic party to prolong this race longer than June.

…G.S. Here’s the fundamental problem for the Clinton campaign. There is just, there’s no reasonable possibility that by June 10th, she is going to be ahead in the pledged delegates and I believe, and I want to put this question to Donna — I just think the majority of super delegates who are remaining out there simply can’t in their gut vote to overturn the super delegates,** given the Florida [in 2000] history.

D.B. That’s true. I mean, that’s just the gospel truth. On the other hand…nobody’s telling her to get out. I would like to see her —

Paul Krugman: [Laughs]

D.B. But the party itself is not saying, you know, “Get out.” The party is not saying get out. I have stood behind Sen. Clinton’s efforts to restart her campaign, change her voice, get herself back in groove. But it ends in June. I think this notion that we go on to August is a bad idea.

* Editor’s Note: Texas is not a Clinton win.

** It appeared George meant to say “overturn the voters.”