Show Me The Paper

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Now that Hillary Clinton claims bragging rights for her wins in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island, isn't it about time she shows us the paper? Her tax returns. Her White House papers while First Lady—to back up that experience she's been proffering?

She's artfully dodged and stalled on that, but the time for stallin' and weavin' is over.

Will the press start pressin' her on this? Now that even Imus has smacked down Russet for the "gotcha" grabs as the bullshit they are, isn't it time the press shape up and wipe the barbeque sauce from their chins and throw away the spin machine press releases and The Village conventional wisdom cocktail weinies and quail wings and start acting like journalists for a change?

We're in a damned serious situation in this country. Important choices must be made, especially in November. So let's see who's up to the job, who's up to chicanery, and stop makin' a bloody horserace out of the mess we're in.

She Wore Brown

Maybe Hillary caught a bit of CBS Sunday Morning's pre-Oscar discussion of movie costuming. The bit about Indiana Jones wearing brown while all the villains wore black. She certainly did borrow the Indy motif with her continued assertion "I am a fighter."

Yes, and ordinarily I'd say if you are a fighter you don't have to tell anyone. They know.

But these are not ordinary times, and thanks to BushCo and the corporate media's American Idol-ized dumbing down of the public discourse, yeah, you do have to do a Mr. Whipple [please don't squeeze...] a bazillion times before it registers in the lizard brains of those asleep.

Plenty of people aren't asleep this time around, and more and more are waking up. Unfortunately for Hillary, Obama's the one waking them.

And let's lose the assertion that media have a pro-Obama bias. Tim Russert's sleazy questioning of Obama regarding Farrakhan was Karl-Rovian in its reach. Prairie wasn't the only one to take notice. As blogger Attaturk over at Firedoglake notes this morning,

After all, Louis Farrakhan is black -- Barack Obama is black -- therefore anything Farrakhan says must be automatically what Obama thinks because apparently to Tim Russert all black men have an intellectual osmosis that links them....

Maybe Michael Kinsley can opine about that one as he did about the NYTimes article on McCain and the lobbyist. Or not. As Digby points out, until we change the Russert culture, nothing's gonna change.

In the meantime, last night, Hillary wore brown, a somber color, not yet mourning, but not the vivid hey look at me colors she's worn on other occasions. She stayed late after the debate, hugging her daughter, then signing autographs, lingering... while Obama signed autographs for a short time but then moved purposefully on.

A sign of the times.

UPDATE: It's official, Georgia Congressman and civil rights era icon John Lewis has changed his superdelegate support from Clinton to Obama. First Dodd, now Lewis...the party greybeards are speaking out.

UPDATE 2: Prairie's own homestate Senator, Byron Dorgan, part of the Senate leadership team, endorses Obama. The true tide of inevitability?