Of course Hillary didn’t concede. How could she? Anyone who’s invested this much time, energy and cash is not going to walk away quietly. Well, hang on. Mitt Romney did just that–he conceded almost prematurely, and the common wisdom was that he was gunning for the VP spot with McCain. Thankfully, we’ve moved past that.

Hillary is doing the same. Her husband has been going on for a couple weeks about how she should be VP, and now the news media is gushing about a “unifying ticket” that would bring Democrats together. It sounds nice, but Barack, don’t do it.

The first Clinton administration was notoriously divisive. Not in a partisan sense; I mean it was rife with internecine power struggles. The common wisdom is that an Obama/Clinton ticket would unify the Democrats, and maybe that’s true. But it would divide the administration between two camps that have fought a razor-sharp campaign against each other, and still see each other as rivals across a generational gap.

Obama won’t have much problem unifying Democrats. Sure, there may be some who are still willing to tell exit pollers that “race was a factor in the decision to vote for Hillary” (read: “I don’t trust black men”). And some of those voters might not mobilize, or even (gasp!) vote Republican. But he doesn’t need them anyways.

Obama has enough clout with young voters (who have already shown they can mobilize very well) and with centrists (as long as he steps back from this anti-trade stuff) that if West Virgina wants to walk, they can walk. He doesn’t need Hillary Clinton in the White House for the next four years, nipping at his heels and playing as active a role in shaping policy as Dick Cheney has done for the last eight.

Don’t do it, man. You can do better. If the Dems really want a “unifying ticket”, how about unifying Hispanic voters? They’re fuming at the Republican party over the nativists’ victory in the immigration battle. Does anyone have Bill Richardson’s phone number?

Do we really need another war? This is in South America, of all places, where economies are still struggling to recover from decades of mismanagement. (Or, in the case of Venezuela, where economies are actively being mismanaged.)

Hugo Chávez seems to think we do, and President Bush is mincing no words in his support for Alvaro Uribe. But the Secretary of Defense doesn’t think a war is likely, and if it is, he doesn’t see us getting involved. I myself am unsure that our narco-fighting ally has much legal ground to stand on.

Colombia’s official stance is that they were in hot pursuit of Raúl Reyes. Now they’re also trotting out the weapons of mass destruction excuse. Can someone in Washington call and let them know it doesn’t work anymore? Even the U.S. isn’t buying it this time.

But why does Colombia get to have all the fun? We’ve been in hot (tepid?) pursuit of Osama bin Laden for years, and we pretty much know he’s hiding in Pakistan. That doesn’t mean we can start bombing around Quetta. If the Bush Administration isn’t able to solve the problem of striking Osama across an ally’s border, why should Colombia get a pass when the other country hates them?

In the end, it’s hard to side with the FARC guerrillas on this one. They are a vicious lot and present a serious threat to Colombian stability. Reyes deserved what he got. Besides, if we could put a guided missile on top of Osama bin Laden while he’s in his pajamas, we’d probably do it–better to ask forgiveness than seek permission. But if the cost of Colombia’s strike is a regional war with Venezuela, where the U.S. lacks the resources (or political will) to lend any real support, I question the cost/benefit of taking out a handful of Marxists.

Exciting news from the primaries this week. John McCain is about guaranteed the Republican nomination (though Huckabee still made a brilliant appearance on The Colbert Report.) Clinton and Obama are about tied for the number of states they’ve carried, but Clinton is winning more delegates.

I’m still pulling for Obama to come out ahead on this one. The last thing I want to see is “Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton” for 24 years. It’s time to set aside the culture wars of the 1960s. I am ready for a new generation to start taking over Washington.

I’m far more excited, though, about John McCain trouncing Mitt Romney. I have admired McCain in the Senate for years, and there is nobody more qualified to clean up the mess that his 2000 rival has left for us. Romney is too packaged and too opportunistic for me to ever trust him as a solid leader in a time of national crisis. McCain is a libertarian rock star.

If the general election comes down to Obama vs McCain, I will have some soul-searching to do; I’ll also pay close attention to whom they choose for their running mates and what campaign promises they make loudly. But if the Democrats want to make this a really easy choice for me, they’ll elect Hillary. If she’s the nominee, I know exactly which way this independent vote will swing.

To Congress and the White House:

I am not afraid of terrorism, and I want you to stop being afraid on my behalf. Please start scaling back the official government war on terror. Please replace it with a smaller, more focused anti-terrorist police effort in keeping with the rule of law. Please stop overreacting. I understand that it will not be possible to stop all terrorist acts. I am not afraid.

From the I Am Not Afraid petition at Downsize DC.

I heard a great commentary on the radio today on Public Radio’s Marketplace: A good candidate connects the dots. It’s short and quick to read, but very powerful.

Robert Reich advises voters against treating today’s hot issues as individual checkboxes, to be ticked off for each candidate in a list of pros and cons. A good president will see the connections between all of these, and will have the intelligence to understand how solutions to one problem could affect the others.

I couldn’t agree more. I think this also applies to people who are hyper-focused on a single issue, and plan to vote for a candidate because of a single policy stance. And regardless of where you stand on the issues, you have to be willing to ask yourself if the candidate you support is really going to be able to make hard decisions when a policy he promised turns out to be unachievable.

Everyone should read this. Salon has an exclusive interview (Inside the CIA’s notorious “black sites”, via Boing Boing) with a Yemeni citizen who suffered 19 months of psychological torture at the hands of the CIA. He had no links to al-Qaeda, and provided no actionable intelligence. His offense was having a new passport and having traveled to Afghanistan in 2000. His father died while he was imprisoned.

As we go about our boring daily routines, insulated from the roiling violence by the navel-gazing media and a duplicitous White House, innocent men and women are being tortured by our government. This torture is terrifying, dehumanizing and real. It destroys psyches, separates families, and ruins lives. And it’s done in our name, in the inexplicable belief that it will somehow stop the terrorists, not recruit more unto their cause.

This is not my America. This is not how a democracy protects itself from the inevitably rising surge of religious extremism in a world that is tightly networked by technology. This is how nations rot, and if we do not raise our voices to oppose this inhumanity, we will fall apart.

Telecom companies have broken the law. They’ve disclosed your phone records to the NSA, without a warrant, so that the NSA can profile you. They’ve allowed the government to listen to your phone calls without justification. They want to know who you’ve called, and who those people have called, and they don’t want to answer to anyone. No checks and balances, no restraint, no judicial oversight. Just spooks with computers, listening to your phone calls.

This is illegal. It’s that simple. Companies like AT&T have violated the privacy of millions of Americans, and We The People deserve justice. Instead, our Senate is prepared to pass a law granting them immunity from prosecution or civil lawsuits. Our elected representatives are about to sell us out, and sign away our right to redress of grievances, so that they don’t look weak on terrorism.

This is how the surveillance state is built, and that is how dictatorships are fed. Everyone who lives in the USA should take a minute, go to EFF’s Action Center, and send a message to your Senators opposing immunity for telecoms.

ABC’s Blotter is reporting that the CIA has been authorized for covert ops against Iran. Neo-cons across the country are probably salivating just a little bit, but I’m curious about the nature of this press release. It has a lot of complicated implications for the way our country handles other hostile nations; it, and the response, also says a lot about us as a people.

Sixty years ago, loose lips sunk ships. Today, we leak anything we can get our hands on; more often than not, it goes on the Internet first. Why do we have a vested interest in making sure Iran knows what our government is planning? Are we that confident in our own abilities that we don’t think forewarning them is an impediment to success? Or are we, as a nation, so suspicious of our own government’s motives that we feel the need to install an ankle bracelet?

Mitt Romney has one answer for us: “The media has a responsibility to police itself.” I’m not sure I’m really comfortable with the imagery of the media being policed at all, because that sets a precedent of dangerous restraint at a time when the government is playing fast and loose with civil liberties. I’m certainly not interested in hearing it from someone like Romney, who’s just using this issue to rally the base and get his name back into the papers. But it’s a typical response: the ABC site has been flooded with negative comments, either accusing them of being “un-American”, “treasonous”, or “helping our enemies”.

I don’t see the problem in that light. To start, the idea that a news report this vague will actually jeopardize future missions is ludicrous. You have to give the CIA more credit than that. But there are still plenty in this country who think the administration has shown total incompetence in its dealings with Iran. Don’t those people have a vested interest in knowing what Bush is up to? If we’d known about the Iran-Contra project in the 1980’s, would we have let it continue?

So maybe there’s another question: if we, as a nation, show such damning outrage when ABC reports on something this vague, what does that say about our trust in the government? Do we really believe, after all the scandals and failures, after the meltdown over WMDs in Iraq, that our covert agencies can be trusted to do whatever they want without some degree of media oversight? Do we have any reason to believe they’ll exercise that trust responsibly?

Either way, this definitely shows that Cheney’s losing the Iran policy battle within the White House. He’s been a fierce advocate of war against Iran right now, and I think he’s one of a handful of people left in today’s intelligentsia who cling to the illusion that our armed forces can handle another conflict without a meltdown. I’m glad to see that their “Persian project” isn’t going to be realized, even if it means they think they can sneak their way into an Iranian nuclear plant.