CNN is reporting rumors that Senator Clinton will be making a surprise appearance tonight on Saturday Night Live.

Days before a crucial set of primaries, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is expected to make a surprise appearance on Saturday Night Live tonight, an entertainment industry source tells CNN.

A spokesman for Saturday Night Live would not confirm the appearance, saying only, “It’s a live show, anything can happen”

Clinton did not arrive for a campaign charter flight from Dallas to Columbus, Ohio Saturday evening. The campaign would not say where she was.

Democratic candidate Barack Obama appeared on Saturday Night Live unannounced around Halloween, and GOP candidate Mike Huckabee did a bit on the show’s Weekend Update last Saturday. Clinton is also scheduled to appear on John Stewart’s “Daily Show” Monday, on the eve of voting in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island and Vermont.

America’s favorite old coot Ralph Nader’s exploratory committee released the following e-mail:

As you know, we’ve been exploring the possibilities in recent weeks.

And here’s one question that keeps coming up:

What’s been pulled off the table by the corporatized political machines in this momentous election year?

Answer:

Cutting the huge, bloated and wasteful military budget, adopting a single payer Canadian-style national health insurance system, impeaching Bush/Cheney, opposing nuclear power - among many others.

Who will pick up these issues and put them back on the table?

Hope you get a chance to tune in to watch Ralph Nader this Sunday on Meet the Press.

In a new piece sure to be the talk of the airwaves tonight and tomorrow the New York Times suggests that McCain may have had a romantic affair with 40-year-old lobbyist Vicki Iseman eight years ago. Both deny that an affair had taken place.

From the piece:

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s client, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.

For more information on Vicki Iseman check out this piece at Huffington Post. Mark Halperin also looks at the questions this piece raises.

The NYT piece also goes after McCain’s history of being a foe of corporate lobbyists, pointing to what it sees as a long trail of contradictions that have often given McCain “cozy ties” with the very kinds of people he is known for fighting against.

Read the rest of this entry »

“As you know, Fidel Castro announced that he is stepping down as Cuba’s leader after nearly 50 years of one-man rule. The new leadership in Cuba will face a stark choice — continue with the failed policies of the past that have stifled democratic freedoms and stunted economic growth — or take a historic step to bring Cuba into the community of democratic nations. The people of Cuba want to seize this opportunity for real change and so must we.

“I would say to the new leadership, the people of the United States are ready to meet you if you move forward towards the path of democracy, with real, substantial reforms. The people of Cuba yearn for the opportunity to get out from under the weight of this authoritarian regime, which has held back 11 million talented and hardworking citizens of the Americas. The new government should take this opportunity to release political prisoners and to take serious steps towards democracy that give their people a real voice in their government.

“The American people have been on the side in the Cuban people’s struggle for freedom and democracy in the past and we will be on their side for democracy in the future.

“As President, I will engage our partners in Latin America and Europe who have a strong stake in seeing a peaceful transition to democracy in Cuba, and who want very much for the United States to play a constructive role to that end. The United States must pursue an active policy that does everything possible to advance the cause of freedom, democracy and opportunity in Cuba.

“The events of the past three days, including elections in Pakistan and Kosovo’s declaration of independence, are a vivid illustration of people around the world yearning for democracy and opportunity. We need a President with the experience to recognize and seize these opportunities to advance America’s values and interests around the world. I will be that President.”

Today should mark the end of a dark era in Cuba’s history. Fidel Castro’s stepping down is an essential first step, but it is sadly insufficient in bringing freedom to Cuba.

Cuba’s future should be determined by the Cuban people and not by an anti-democratic successor regime. The prompt release of all prisoners of conscience wrongly jailed for standing up for the basic freedoms too long denied to the Cuban people would mark an important break with the past. It’s time for these heroes to be released.

If the Cuban leadership begins opening Cuba to meaningful democratic change, the United States must be prepared to begin taking steps to normalize relations and to ease the embargo of the last five decades. The freedom of the Cuban people is a cause that should bring the Americans together.

It seems like the resignation of Fidel Castro is the main news for the morning with very little happening aside from the Clinton-Obama-he-said-she-said campaign talk. I guess everyone is gearing up for the vote tonight.

Meanwhile it is my hope that by saying nothing is happening there will now be a flood of interesting things to prove me completely wrong. That seems to be the way things work so lets hope.

With that said what do you think this Castro news will do on the campaign trail? We’ve now spent so many decades waiting for this moment, for Cuba to no longer be under the rule of Fidel. It’s here, now what? For now it seems the embargo will remain. Should be interesting to see if any candidates go out on a limb in the coming weeks/months. Obama said he would talk to Castro, so I guess that means he will also talk to his successor. Undoubtedly the topic will come up in the next debate.

New York Magazine writer John Hellemann looks at the potential reasons why Obama has come under so little scrutiny in Election 2008 while Clinton has received nothing but. The author looks at the current state, potential causes, long-term effects and more.

From the article:

Divergence in tone is one thing, double standards are another. And it’s the latter that most galls the former advisers to the other, now-departed, Democratic candidates. “Obama has been able to get away with a stunning amount of hypocrisy that would get called on her,” says one such operative. “They’ve run the nastiest, most deceptive pieces of paid media: the mailer they did lying about her health-care plan, with the Harry and Louise look-alikes. The idea that it took Hillary growling Tony Rezko’s name in a debate to get any national coverage. How he complained in Iowa about 527s and then had them supporting him like crazy in Nevada and California. And nobody says a peep about it. It’s fu^&ing comical!”

There are countless other examples of this syndrome, both large and small. The way that Clinton’s famous fumbling of a question about whether illegal immigrants should be allowed to have driver’s licenses in a debate last fall was hammered on for weeks—whereas Obama’s flubbing of the same question in the next debate was essentially let slide. The way that Obama’s evisceration of his rival in his stump speeches was applauded by the media—whereas Clinton’s plunge into negative territory was widely condemned. The way that Clinton was roundly criticized for being inaccessible, and thus unaccountable, to the press—when Obama has since January been even less available for questioning than she.

The article largely comes to the conclusion that it is the meta-narrative of each candidate that is responsible for this disparity. Obama is a new commodity who is surging up, Clinton is a known commodity that has no room to go but down and all the stuff inbetween that fits into both camps just writes itself. The PR, the message crafting played into the coverage. Rather than reporters looking for the answers, they went with the spin to help build pre-existing notions. Obama rising up from nothing, Clinton stagnating from the top.

I call it all terrible reporting, bias and a sign of just how indiscernible this nations Fourth Estate is from the three branches of government, corporate America, and the Liberal sections of the Entertainment Industry and Academia. But that is just my take.

OK so this is kind of election related but I wanted to go off on a rant here for a moment. Right now the Republicans in Congress are walking out after spending a day disrupting procedures in the House including a memorial service apparently over Intelligence legislation. It is all kind of confusing but there is one central point I want to make here. Can Congress get off its butt and do something for once?

We had a do-nothing Congress which was overturned in 2006 and it was replaced with, wait for it, a do-nothing Congress. Wonderful. While your Congress spent yesterday watching a real live baseball player talk about the past our economy continued heading toward recession. While half of your House of Representatives walks out on their job today, our nation is fighting two Wars.

How does either party expect to run on their record this fall when it hasn’t done anything? Congress passed a stimulus bill which many people believe is too little, too late and that is about it this year. Meanwhile the top three candidates for president are part of this mess. So basically in November we get to elect these people back into their jobs and potentially raise one of them to the presidency. Wow, what a change.

Is it just me or does that thought kind of make your skin crawl?

Three contests

D.C., Maryland, Virginia

District of Columbia primaries – Delegates: 37 Dems/19 GOP — polls open 7 am to 8 pm ET
Maryland primaries — Delegates: 99 Dems/37 GOP — polls open 7 am to 8pm ET
Virginia primaries – Delegates: 101 Dems/63 GOP — polls open 6 am to 7 pm ET

From ABC News:

But not many 21-year-olds start their Monday with a personal breakfast with Chelsea Clinton, as Rae did this morning at the student union at the nearby University of Milwaukee.

Jason Rae got the one-on-one treatment from the former — and possibly future — first daughter because he is a Democratic National Committee member from Wisconsin and thus a “super delegate,” one of the 796 free agents who can back any candidate in the race for the Democratic nomination.

Rae said he and Chelsea Clinton talked about electability and mobilizing young people to get involved in politics. He said she spoke about what states her mother can carry in the general election and what demographics favor her candidacy. The two talked about how the campaign’s operations were going in the states and what she is seeing on the ground.

Rae has been called on his cell phone by former President Clinton and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who tried to woo him to the Clinton side and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who was pushing for Rae to endorse Obama.

Obviously this meeting doesn’t justify MSNBC commentator David Schuster’s suspension leading comment that the Clinton camp is “pimping out” Chelsea to the superdelegates, with that said the news doesn’t exactly come at the best time.