Politics and other nightmares

Want to proclaim your belief in the Obama campaign to the world? Get the Barack Obama tattoo! It was done by Ryan Hadley at Studio 13 Creative Skin Design in Fort Wayne and e-mailed to a few of us in the press.  It's a nice-looking tat, but I dunno. What if he loses?

Who needs to study the issues when we can learn all we need to know from the candidates' handwriting?

"Obama is very much his writing -- fluid, graceful. McCain's is angular and intense; he's a pit bull. And look at the perfectionism in Hillary's -- straight up, precise. She is persistent and is not going to give up until she absolutely has to," said Imberman, a court-certified graphologist based in New York.

Not sure how I feel about this:

Congressional Democrats are pushing what could become the most dramatic expansion of college aid for military veterans since World War II, with a bill they hope will buoy them this election season and become an albatross for Republicans.

Any bets? My guess is no, but it's a close call:

Woodrow Wilson did it. So did Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.

All three Democrats bucked the trend and won the hearts and minds of the majority of Hoosiers voting in presidential elections.

I've never been able to work up much outrage over human cloning, so this sure doesn't bother me much:

News that scientists have for the first time genetically altered a human embryo is drawing fire from some watchdog groups that say it's a step toward creating "designer babies."

But an author of the study says the work was focused on stem cells. He notes that the researchers used an abnormal embryo that could never have developed into a baby anyway.

Any of you know what "effete" really means? I searched Google News for a hint that anybody writing about politics today has a clue:

•  "As an issue it's nothing, but it shows him as the effete, academic liberal." Nope. That's Charles Krauthammer, for pete's sake, and he seems to think it means aloof and elitist.

I usually avoid commenting of "family values hypocrites," because the left does such a good job of bashing them, and there are plenty of hypocrites out there of all political persuasions. But this guy is just beyond the pale:

Vito Fossella built a career as a staunch "family values" pol, polishing his image in his predominantly Catholic district with a string of anti-gay votes.

If Hoosier voters were so smart in "seeing through" Hillary Clinton's federal gas-tax holiday, why didn't they similarly turn on Jill Long Thompson and her similar cap on the state sales tax on gas?

Hoosier voters showed in last week's primary that they're smarter than the pundits thought.

[. . .]

Not enirely accurate:

It's over now. And Indiana, in the national spotlight in presidential politics for the first time in four decades, cast the telling votes in the final, decisive contest.

Barack Obama now is the almost certain Democratic nominee for president. Hillary Clinton cannot catch him without something as unexpected and startling as discovery that Obama is a secret Rush Limbaugh agent.

Our place in history is secure:

History will record the Indiana and North Carolina primaries as the events that secured the 2008 Democratic nomination for Barack Obama—and put the final nails in the coffin of Hillary Clinton's campaign.

This article and a lot like it try to figure out "what went wrong" for Clinton. Most of them overlook the two most obvious: 1. A lot of people intensely dislike Clinton. 2. Obama ain't Clinton.